The Vergecast - RIP Windows phone, net neutrality day of action, and Next Level

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

Welcome back to another week of The Vergecast. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter sit down in the studio to bring you the news that hit our site this week. First off, the net neutrality day of action was on Wednesday, as was Nilay’s piece on the matter. The gang debate the issue in this net neutrality “season” of news. Halfway through the show, senior tech editor Lauren Goode stops by to talk a little bit about her new video series Next Level, which shows the technology that’s being worked on at some of the world’s most innovative companies and research institutions. You can check out the first episode here. Last, but not least, we have what you’ve been waiting for — phone news! We have a mini Verge mobile show to discuss the deaths and births of the mobile world recently. There’s a whole lot in between that, so listen to it all and you’ll get it all.  03:45 - A Microsoft font may have exposed corruption in Pakistan 07:39 - Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T want Congress to make a net neutrality law because they will write it 23:39 - The FCC says net neutrality destroys small ISPs. So has it? 35:47 - Next Level with Lauren Goode 52:13 - iFixit teardown confirms Note 7 Fan Edition is just a Note 7 with a new, smaller battery 53:30 - BlackBerry KeyOne launches on Sprint, the eternal harbor of innovation 54:25 - Death of Windows Phone 59:47 - The new Pixel XL 1:01:54 - Luxury phone maker Vertu is shutting down its UK manufacturing operation 1:03:27 - Andy Rubin’s Essential is staying quiet on the Essential Phone delay 1:06:51 - Paul’s weekly segment “Mag me later” 1:10:31 - Alexa news Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. We're going to start the show in a minute. But as you know, we're down to one podcast and we're trialing. We're piloting all these other new podcasts on a platform called Anchor, which we should listen to you. So before we start the Vergecast this week, we're having Ashley Carmen, our great reporter. She's doing a segment that was on Anchor earlier this week. It's just a couple minutes long. Want you listen to it? Let us know what you think. Take away Ashley. A man boards a subway frantic. He's definitely drunk. I can tell because he's kind of stumbling around and his eyes are missing a sober light behind. them. I assume he came from a work happy hour as evidenced by his cross-bodied black leather bag and business-appropriate loafers. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a box unwrapped, unopened, I beat, wired earbuds. He hoists the box up in the air and stares at it for a second, clearly thinking of the fastest way to get to the buds inside. He bites the box. Nothing happens. His teeth can't get the job done. The box is too tightly seizes. in plastic. He sets it back into his bag and reaches into his pocket. This time he's

got keys. He grabs them and cuts into the box. I've never seen someone more ravenous for earbuds. He tears the box open with a vicious energy and less than five seconds is already pulling the earbuds out and untangling them, even ripping off their zip ties. Without missing a beat, he plugs them into his phone and stuffs them into his ears. He puts music on and closes his eyes. He's at peace. So, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. A lot of things happen this week. Yeah.

But first, let me tell you who I am. I am Neelai Patel. I'm joined by two of my very best friends. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. I'm there. I'm in San Francisco.

Well, you're always with me. That's true. I want you to know that. But no, a huge week on The Verge. Lauren Good launched her new series Next Level. Yes. Which is amazing. I actually just recorded a little segment with her that we'll run in the middle of the show.

So that was big. there was a bunch of net neutrality news. There was a day of action, which I'm still not like a sincere enough person to say without slightly rolling my eyes. The internet like did a thing and we covered the hell out of it. We're going to talk about that a bunch.

There's just phone news. There's a lot of phone news this week. Remember when this show was all phone news? We got phone news for you. I don't even believe it. Oh, it's good phone news too. It's real good. Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff.

I'll have to ask Alexa or Bixby or Google Home if that's true. Well, don't worry. there's Alexa news. Can I tell you a story about Alexa? So I went on CNBC this week on Prime Day, which we are not going to talk about except for this story, because Prime Day is a made-up idea that is bad. But they had me, CNBC is like, come on, you know, Amazon's cutting the price. It's Alexa stuff and Google's cutting the price of the home. The home plus a Chromecast was down to $99, and the Echo Dot was down to 35. So come on and talk about the war of assistance. And I will tell

you, listener, I went on CNBC and I started to answer that. the question and I looked at the camera and I said, Alexa, play the Vergecast. And I hope finance bros around this country started listening to this show. And then I forgot what I was going to say after that, stuttered and the poor host had to ask another question. Anyway, classic financial analysis from Eli Patel. I did it. All right. Let's start with the biggest news. The most important news, the best news, which is the government of Pakistan grind into a halt because of a font. Paul, I know you're in the story. No, I literally have, I was like, I don't care about this font story. There's no gadgets in it.

I saw someone editing a video of you with that font. I had to set, I pirated a font for somebody on our video team today. What? From my computer today. I didn't like download it. They put me in the font story? I don't know what they're doing. I just know. that, oh, is Jake? Jake's in the font story. I do look a lot like Jake. I get that all the time. I think they were using a template. Anyway, can I tell you this story? By the way, in case you're listing Microsoft, I did send a font to someone today. But the font was already in my computer from my legal copy of office. So you file shared? Yeah, it did a little P2P. Yeah. We used Kazad. I sent it right over there. Can I tell you the story? The story is great. It's my favorite story in the longest time. Yes. So in 2016, there was a big leak of papers called the Panama Papers. The prime minister of Pakistan's children were implicated in like an investment scheme, like an offshore investment thing. This is not the important part.

A big piece of it was they had not filed the necessary disclosures on time. So they're like, no, we did. And they sent documents to the investigators. And the investigators noticed the documents were in Calibri, which is the default. font for office products and they said Calibri wasn't available in 2007 oh the documents were dated in 2006 but Calibri wasn't available until later it didn't become the default until later like early January 2017

yeah so obviously 2007 2007 so Clebby became available in 2007 but they had sent documents that were supposed to be dated in 2006 set in Calibri so now literally the government is implicated in this corruption scandal because they forgot to change the defaults on their fake documents. And now their argument is that they were... Their claim is that it technically existed before

but they switched it because it was available even though it was the default. Is what their claim is? Something insane like that? But ultimately their claim was it was in a beta of Windows or like it was available and you could buy it. All of that means that they had to want to use Calibri.

which is not acceptable. I wanted to accept it. If they want to stand by that story that they love Calibri enough, but I'm with them ever still with. This is my favorite font. The second I saw it, I knew it was mine.

I went out and got it from its custom font house before Microsoft. I was in the Calibri before. It was cool. When was the last time you, like, bought a font? Man, like some of those fonts, it's like $50, like, per weight. When we were redesigning the Verge,

we literally thought we would have to hold the launch of the new site because there were such strenuous negotiations about font licensing. Should have used Calibri. Should have just gone with Calibri. If anyone wants to make custom CSS for the Verge that sets the whole site in Calibri, I'm happy to tweet that screenshot. No, just like a Calibri button. There's like, there's blank space on the left and right side of the Alvanner.

Pick your own font. Calibri engage. Calibri engage. The worst grease monkey plugin of all time. All right. That's literally my favorite story in the Virch this week. That's great. I'm glad you told me about it now that I read it.

Good, Paul. What is this Virgast for except for me telling Paul what's on the site? All right. Should we talk about night neutrality? We should do it. We should do a little of it. A little bit. I was on Tinder the other day.

and I'm just swiping along, and it's like the internet. And it was like a weird custom, like, dating profile. Did you swipe right or left on the internet? Swipes left. Okay. I don't know what that means. That means no. No.

But it was weird. You were checking the internet? You couldn't super like. Yeah. They had, like, disabled some of the features of, like, a typical titter profile. What is a super like? super like makes it more likely that the person will see it's one of the ways tinder monetizes you pay for a quantity of super likes but the problem is is that it also happens if you if you swipe up it's a super like but also sometimes you swipe up because you want to change the volume or brightness on your phone

and so like half of all tender profiles have like a disclaimer like super likes are accidents Really? Because someone super late. Oh my gosh. Oh, no. They were just trying to change the volume. Anyway, so you saw the internet. So just to set the context here,

yesterday was a big net neutrality, day of action, where all the internet companies decided to protest in some public way against the FCC and Ajit Pi rolling back Title II protections. So Tinder was one of them, presumably, is where the story is going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, here's Tinder's, this is great podcasting. Oh, yeah. Show me your broken phone.

Looking at a screenshot I took of the internet. It's like, we love the internet and don't want it to die. So, yeah. Like it. Oh, this is one of those like, Today's the Day of Action, do something with your phone. Yeah. So Tinder did that, obviously. Netflix had a banner up.

Reddit had a thing that would, like, take over the site and, like, type slowly at you. Yeah. Amazon had a tiny, tiny, little. little thing in like a random corner of their website for you to buy some net neutrality somehow. You could buy net neutrality? It was like there was like a list of things you could buy like suggested products and then one of them was net neutrality. Oh, that's pretty good.

There was a bunch of other places had things. Okay, Cupid. Wired magazine had a big spinner. We obviously had my big piece. What were you saying to doTER? Okay, Cupid, college humor, go daddy. Pornhub, of course, because Pornhub loves to jump on bad wagons. There's a great piece about the early days of net neutrality when it was like move on in the Christian coalition.

It's like one of the few things they agreed on because a lot of like smaller groups are they think that neutrality is really important because it's kind of ultimately a free speech issue. Yeah. So there's a lot of that going on. And then I wrote a big piece where I kind of I wanted to take a different tack. I saw a lot of other places wrote pieces which are good and you should read them doing the very standard. what is net neutrality? Why is it important? Why you got to write this letter? And I didn't want to do that this time because we've done so much of it. If you listen to this show,

we've done it at length. I'm really interested in the FCC's arguments this time and how they line up with reality. And the thing that just stands out to me the most is the lack of competition. So the FCC's own data says 51% of Americans have only one internet provider

that provides broadband. Broadband is defined as 25 megabits down and up. So 51% of America only have access to one true broadband provider. So basically not DSL. Not DSL. Yeah. And then 38% of Americans have access to two or more. And it's at least one and at least two.

So the people with at least one, some of those people have zero. But if you add it up, it's 89% of Americans at most have access to two internet providers. That to me is it's such a foundational fact that it's hard to move on to any of the other topics without just constantly thinking about it. That if you don't have a choice and you're a provider to something wrong, there's no way for you to react. Like you're just stuck. You need the internet in your life. You can't not have it. Why do these companies advertise then?

I mean, they advertise because they want people to use their services. A lot of people, like I said, those, those, that at least one provider, a lot of people, like, don't have it. They still don't have it. A lot of, even the smaller ones. So that's a choice people can make. Yeah, I just, you can't talk about that and then also be like, the digital divide or, like, rural broadband is important because those things are important. Right. Like, children getting access to educational information on the internet is important, right?

Like, it's just a thing. The Wall Street Journal did a really great story. about a month ago now, where even Republican senators were saying things like, broadband is a bigger issue in my little district than roads and bridges. This is a more important infrastructure issue to us. So to me, it's you just don't, because you don't have choices, the broadband providers probably need to have some rules placed on them based on what they do. Because if you had a lot of choices, the market would actually make a decision.

But in the absence of a market, it's important to preserve the playing field. And I've just thought about that a lot. It's the thing that's been on my mind. It's the thing that is the most important. Because every other issue, the argument boils down to, are they spending a bunch of money to build infrastructure? Or are they, do big companies like Netflix need to care about net neutrality anymore? Because they can pay for deals. But there's never the do consumers have a real choice?

And if you don't have that choice, then what is protecting you? What if there was a requirement that the bright line rules, every provider has to lease offer one plan that follows the net neutrality bright line rules. But they're also allowed to offer different options, like a version with better YouTube or a version with no Netflix or something like that. If they wanted to experiment with some other stuff with, you know, different prices on those different kinds of planes. as long as they still had an option for a plan that followed the rules. So we've entered into what our features editor, Michael Zelenko, is calling a season of net neutrality coverage because we want to talk about it at length while this process is ongoing. So one of Ajit Pi's big things is net neutrality rules hurt investment, and it particularly hurt investment for small Internet providers. So Jay Kastranakis, who's been doing amazing work for us covering net neutrality in the Internet for a while now, actually called a

bunch of smaller internet providers and said, is this hurting you? And as you would expect, many said no, and some said yes. But the most important line from the piece, and I encourage everybody to go read it because it's great, is one of the internet, small internet providers said, look, it's not costly to follow the rules. This is the default state of the internet. So I buy the equipment, I set it up, I turn it on, I start it up. The default is it doesn't block or throttle. But some companies have to prove to the FCC that they are following the risk. Right.

So the cost is compliance. Small internet providers, if you have less than 250,000 customers, you don't have to pay the money to prove your compliance. For now. For now. I mean, but you could, it's a temporary exemption. I assume the FCC is wondering, are we going to get a million complaints? Do we need to impose this cost?

I'm assuming if they don't, they'll just keep renewing the exemption. But for now, they're not paying the cost. I think the interesting thing about an idea like yours is that does impose a cost. If you want to create a new product, you have to provide another product. You have to build a billing system that can handle two kinds of products. You have to do the engineering work to have multiple levels of service. Well, you don't have to add the multiple. You could do, if the default out of the gate, if you unbox the equipment, this is how the internet works.

Yeah. That's just the default. If you want to add another product to it, you can. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that's totally... The question with that sort of solution is, like, how much more expensive would we allow it to be, which it sort of presupposes a level of regulation that's not even in the debate right now. The idea that the FCC could tell an ISP what to do at all is where the level of debate is right now, which to me, like, comes back to this idea of competition that 89% of American consumers don't have more than two options.

it takes this discussion about whether or not the internet is a utility and therefore should be regulated as such out of the realm of philosophical and into the realm of like strictly practical the internet is in fact a utility whether or not you believe that philosophically it should be treated like one the same way that we regulate and like treat electricity and water the practical fact of the matter is that that's the only way that that American consumers can get it. And if it's already, as a practical matter, a utility, you either need to fix that by increasing competition in such a way that it's not. And I don't have much belief that that's going to happen on its own due to, you know, the mystical free will of the market. I think it's much more likely that, like,

it has to be enforced through government regulation in the same way that, you know, that they, make sure that water is relatively safe, hopefully, and so on. We're not great at that either. Yeah. So there's that. But yeah, I mean, that's the main thing is it's, this isn't really like a philosophy debate anymore.

It's a straight up practical debate of how do we get the, how do we get to the goals that everybody claims to want to share? and what's the most effective way to do that. And I'm seeing, here's one effective way to do it, Title II. And I'm seeing a whole bunch of like, or, you know, other stuff. And like the other stuff is incredibly poorly defined. And it's so poorly defined, you have to like basically assume that there's another thing that they're trying to achieve rather than the thing they say they're trying to achieve. So here, well, so first of all, I agree with Deeter on, there's just the,

a practical reality on the ground. And I think ignoring that is just dangerous, right? If you say, we don't need the rules, we can increase competition and increase competition will obviate the rules, which I believe, by the way, like, there are four wireless carriers, and because of competition with just four choices, we've arrived at a bunch of unlimited data plans, right? I mean, like, it's working in its minimal slow way. If there's more competition, you'd probably get even better concerned.

outcomes. But because there's so little competition, you either have to make big investments in ensuring there's more competition, which I don't think this government is particularly eager to do, right? They want the private marketplace to do stuff. Or you have to protect people from monopoly behavior. But I don't see how removing the rules will increase competition. And that mechanism is really unclear. And I think until Pi and the rest of the sort of Republican FCC coalition come around and explain that mechanism, then the burden of proof lies in them. But the other thing I want to say,

I know I want to respond, Paul, but the other thing I want to say is, if you look at how the debate is now being co-opted, it actually reinforces what Deeter's saying about there's some other nefarious thing happening. Yeah. So net neutrality is... We got to get into the co-option thing really deep,

but like that's going to take a minute. We should let Paul say his thing first. Yeah, I just want to respond to what you were saying. Like, I think that makes it really clear, like, where this political, like, divide is. It's basically the idea that all monopolies are always going to harm consumers and that therefore should be regulated in some way. And that government regulation can promote competition successfully and in a monopoly situation without just destroying the company basically. I think that's probably like the big political ideological divide.

Like aside from like the specifics of the situation, if you are in something where there's a kind of a natural monopoly or natural duopoly, obviously it's a huge capital expenditure to create a whole another set of coax cables through every home. Yeah. So it seems very unlikely for someone to come along and try that. And in a lot of cases, they'd have a lot of trouble with the local governments anyways. Is it just obvious that because you have a situation like that? that it must be regulated or consumers will be harmed by that company. So that part about like the local government, I mean, there's just layers and layers here,

but the local governments all gave monopoly access to these. Yeah, I'm not happy with those local governments. Let me tell you. That was, the arguments back then were also like private enterprise arguments. It was the government shouldn't lay the fiber. The private company should lay the fiber.

Well, the government shouldn't grant monopoly access to somebody. Yeah. I mean, that's how we got in the, the trouble in the first place with with the government granting a telecom monopoly to mob bell you can't just let everybody dig up the road they can pay for it yeah i so the the comparison there and i do want to talk about this co-option piece because it's it's the more interesting

and important part at this moment i think but the comparisons of people have been tweeting at me lately are a lot of people who live in europe or around the world are saying how is it so bad in america I pay $20 a month to get $300 down. And the answer, like, pretty simply, is governments in Europe and particularly installed tons and tons of dark fiber to everyone's house, and they let companies lease that fiber back and sell whatever products they want. So there's, like, true consumer competition. So if you live in London, you probably have 10 choices of internet provider, but BT is actually the trunk provider.

And BT is one of the providers you can choose from, but many other companies are able to lease that fiber from BT and sell their own services. That is like a way more interesting approach to this problem than anything that I've seen proposed to the United States. But we're not even close to that, right? And I think until we get to a place where we're talking about that kind of thing, it's we're stuck with, are we going to have monopoly, like regulated monopoly, or are we going to have like chaos?

Because we're not finding ways to increase competition. someone is inevitably going to tweet at me about 5G and I'm just telling you right now that is a long way away I just don't think broadband is that much superior in Europe in fact I think in most cases it's slower and worse I think you are only thinking of our experience

as trying to get on the internet in Barcelona literally every time I leave in the country my internet situation is not as good maybe I'm just going all the wrong places you're going all the wrong places like in London in the Netherlands and all kinds of places in Seoul South Korea the internet fastest than world. It's also among the cheapest.

Well, I know there's like a series of Asian companies that have better internet access than us. But yeah. I don't think it's common in Europe to have better performance. The internet in Barcelona sucks. It is routinely stymied us every time we've ever gone. Which is why I don't go to MWC anymore.

Dieter, let's talk about the co-option thing. You want to get into it? So, AT&T decided to quote unquote join the day of action. And it wasn't really clear what AT&T's participation in the day of action was going to be, other than using the line that everybody uses, which is, you know, we support an open internet, but like that precise language is very dangerous because it's not clear what that means.

And like all the other ISPs, AT&T wants to have this solved by Congress rather than by the FCC or an FC deciding or the FTC. and from one perspective, that makes sense because it doesn't change with every administration. It just gets set. But it also makes sense in a much more defarious way because giant internet companies have more leverage over Congress through lobbying

than they do over the FCC. ATT in particular, one of our nation's biggest lobbyists. Yeah. True fact. So AT&E owns direct TV, your feelings on whether or not it's appropriate to have a TV network, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Leave that aside. I think it's probably fine, but who knows. Put a message up on direct TV boxes saying, hey, check out this thing. We support an open internet. And then you go to the website that they recommend to you. And then the website cycles through a bunch of different, like, suggested things you could email to Congress or to the FCC that, you know, in some cases are, like, completely dissembling. and in some cases are like bald-faced

in what they're purporting to get you to support, all of which is kind of antithetical to what literally every other company participating in the day of action wants. Yeah. So, for example, Paul, we were talking about Tinder earlier. Tinder puts up the screen, they say, we support the internet, do a thing,

swipe right on the internet, and then what they're trying to get you to do is send a letter to your congressperson or the FCC saying, we support Title II net neutrality. What 18T did was they literally put up a message on every direct TV box and then you got through it and they got you to send a letter and the text of the letter was like, we agree with the FCC that these dumb rules are stupid. And it's like that is the opposite of the open internet.

And it's this weird thing that keeps happening. That's the opposite of your definition of the open internet, to be clear. So this is what I'm going to get into. There's this thing that is happening in politics now in particular that I think is infuriating and counterproductive where every each side keeps on trying to steal the other side language. Yeah. If I hear the word,

the double word, nothing burger. Yeah. One more time. It's like, stop that. But this is a classic problem. You guys, you guys have flown too cool to the side. Too cool to the side. That is not a phrase I'm going to steal from you.

You better not. Co-op that. No, when a band gets really popular and super cool, all of a sudden, not very cool people start to get into it, and then now you feel weird. That's not this. Also, a good name for a band is too cool to the sun. It's like a really bad, modest-mouse spin-off band. Like Paul is saying, that's my definition of the open Internet. And what everyone sort of agrees that that means are like the bright line rules of net neutrality. No blocking, no locking. no paid prioritization, no throttling, the net neutrality stuff. And now because, so in 2014, AT&T and Comcast and Verizon all said, no, no, we want that stuff. We want the ability to have paid prioritization. We want what they call the double-sided marketplace where they were selling some services

to consumers. They were selling some services to companies like Netflix, and they were monetizing the pipe at both ends. Now they know that is not a popular idea. Like the, they cannot, they cannot say we want fast lanes. No one wants them to have fast lanes. I, but you might. I want, I want fast lanes.

I'm, I wrote a piece. I'm going to put it out there. I have literally written words on paper that I completed. On paper? Yeah, no. Flying too cool to sun, my friend. Too cool a son, with you. I wrote a piece.

We'll see if it ever gets published because maybe it's bad. But I wrote a piece. basically like what could possibly happen if internet companies violated all the bright line rules? Sure. My point and that's interesting

because I want fast lanes. It's worth fighting over. I'm ready. Evan Rogers, our friend Evan Rogers down in Gadgett told me that he actually loves zero rating because when he was living in Tennessee he was able to consume a lot of things for free because he had zero rating a team mobile. Many arguments to be had.

My point is right now fast lanes extremely unpopular. True. Right? Politically unpopular. the American public does not want them. So now AT&T and Comcast Verizon all saying, no, no, we want these rules. Love the rules. Rules, great idea.

The FCC shouldn't impose the rules. We get Congress to impose the rules. And the phrase they're using for that is open internet. Right. Which is just a weird. It means nothing. The co-option of language there. What would you want them to call it?

Because they had what they wanted. This is the important point. They had what they wanted. They had those rules written under Title I authority for the FCC, not the Title II with all the rate regulation and the 1934 statute and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, they had it. That was Tom Wheeler's original proposal. And they fought it. And they fought it and said, this doesn't give you the authority to use the rules.

And now the FCC responded by saying, okay, you made us do it. So here are the rules under the authority that you don't like. what's a relatively neutral terms that can later be co-opted? Net neutrality. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's what I'm saying. For the internet, the Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast want. Oh, what's a term that we should let them use?

What's a term that you could use that kind of sounds positive, but we know it's negative? I don't know. Is it open internet? Open internet is, it sounds really, free internet. Internet freedom. Like all of these terms, Tim Wu, who invented. I think it should be it should be lazay internet. Ooh.

That's tough. It's too French for America. It's pretty French. Freedom internet. No, but Tim Wu, who invented the term net neutrality is like well on the record saying, I pick the wrong name, it doesn't sound great. What if it's called internet choice? Yeah.

It's going to be stuff like that. Internet choice is actually great, right? We're the party of internet choice. I choose fast lanes. You're crazy. I'm excited to read this piece which you eviscerate your reputation but the co-option is real

like that's it is an element of our politics that is currently driving me crazy and it is an element of this where I mean frankly I feel like 18T is lying to people they're deceiving them to sending letters about a thing they don't believe because no one's reading that text what gets me is

I don't this isn't a fully formed thought But the thing that people are afraid of is the ISP using its power as an ISP to change what you experience on the internet. And the way that AT&T participated in this thing is an ISP using its power as an ISP to send you a message of like dubious truthfulness. They literally use the infrastructure of their network to try and change, like spread the opinions. people have, change opinions of people have, which is a little bit close to what the thing that we're actually genuinely afraid of here. Some people are talking about this as a free speech issue from the other side. Yeah. That why are these specific companies in this specific role of serving last mile home broadband? The only people are not allowed to, you know,

make deals, make decisions, speak. You know, like, I feel like I really hated that Reddit message. I feel like Reddit is lying to me. Reddit is in an incredible sense, like position of power has incredible influence, a very, you know, adoring audience. And it tells that audience, you love what you've got. Well, it's going to go away unless you write this form letter, you know, to come. And so I don't like it when AT&T does it, but I don't like it when Reddit does it either.

like if you're if you're if you're going to write your congressperson write them something that you think right so paul to me the difference is if i don't like when reddit does it i'll go use i don't know dig or something right but when i don't like when at t and t does it i don't have another choice that's the difference right do you personally not have another choice from a t or direct tv uh it is very difficult for me to switch because i live in a big apartment building so i basically don't Yeah. But you can switch. Honestly, I have to look.

I don't know. Well, remember, most people only have, like, duopies isn't that much better. It's very difficult to switch from Reddit. The whole community is there. And despite, like, numerous times of, like, a public outcry against Reddit for this or that, there's been no successful alternative. Yeah. I mean, I think that the specific thing that you're saying is it's these companies who provide this kind of service are restricted in this way. That is appropriate.

Lots of companies who provide specific kinds of services are restricted. restricted in a variety of ways. So, like, conceptually, that doesn't seem wrong. But I think saying every other company depends on that last mile connection being neutral, that does impose some responsibility on you. And I think it's fair to codify that responsibility and say, you can't mess with this because this is you are the connection between the consumer and the marketplace. And if you're collecting taxes on both sides of that, that gets real, real dicey.

Paul and I don't agree about this. But I do think that was a really clear way of saying what you think. Thanks, Paul. I got a letter. I wrote my piece yesterday. I got a really nice email from somebody who said, your piece was clear and provided adequate information. It was like one of the best compliments I've ever gotten in my entire life.

I'm going to set up like an if this than that. But just the email left to you every time you write something. It was great. I was like, yes, I did provide adequate information. And clearly. Yeah, clear. It was great. It was seriously one of the best compliments that ever gotten. Okay, I'm going to read an ad.

We're going to talk to Lauren real quick about her show Next Level, which is amazing, and you should watch it. And I come back and talk about some other stuff. We've got some phone news. Get out of this policy stuff. Talk about what you came here for, which is cell phones. That's right. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Are you hiring?

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But it's Ziprecruiter.com slash verge. You can post jobs for free. One more time. That's supercruiter.com slash verge. Hey, Lauren. Hey, Nelai. How's it going? It's going well.

We're starting your segment. So Lauren is here. Lauren Good, our wonderful senior editor. You have a new series on The Verge called Next Level. What's going on there? That's right. We just launched a new video series. It's on Facebook, YouTube, theverge.com, Twitter.

And as I like to say, streaming directly into your brain because we are the future. Anywhere there's moving images. Right. Exactly. Shot in 4K. And it's called Next Level. And it's funny because the name came from a brainstorm session that Neil you were a part of. We were talking about new video series that we were all working on. And I think

what happened is I came up with like a few disparate different ideas for videos that I thought would be interesting. And we all kept using the phrase in the meeting. We kept saying like this is, let's not talk about wearables. Let's talk about next level wearables or like, oh, have you seen that thing? That's that's next level VR. And we were sort of using it like unironically. And then at some point you said like, why don't you just call your series that? Like why doesn't it just be next level? And I So that's a great idea. But the whole idea behind it is to not look at stuff that's already commercially available. This isn't necessarily about gadgets as much as we do love gadgets at the verge. It's really about the stuff that's in development, going on behind the scenes,

stuff that honestly may never come to fruition, but they're really interesting concepts or prototypes or just innovations that we think have the potential to like have a big impact on what we do with tech in the future. Yeah. What I love about it is so much of what we cover day-to-day is incredibly iterative, even though it's often marketed and packaged like it's not. It usually is. It's the screen got a little bit bigger or the battery got a little bit longer. But your show is about stuff that is absolutely not iterative. That's actually like a little bit crazy, a little bit wild, a little bit impractical, but lots and lots of big ideas.

So your first episode, which I have to say I have to congratulate you on. Oh, thank you. Your first episode, well, I'm congratulating and getting it done because it was a real race to the finish there. but in 24 hours had a million views. So off to a great start. So congratulations there. But your first episode was about Airbus and what Airbus is doing with a project called Transpose. Yes.

So this is not something that we hadn't heard about before. To be clear, we first covered this back in December as well as a few other outlets. Airbus has been working on this for a while. But late last year, they kind of revealed to the public like, hey, we're working on this crazy concept in our Silicon Valley Labs, which they happen to call A-Cubed. And so people had written about it, but no one had really seen it. They did this kind of pop up in San Jose Airport where you could go into this tiny little, you know, mod of a cabin and like ride a Peloton bike. And so some people that like walking through San Jose Airport had tweeted pictures of it and things like that. We got the first kind of really in depth, you know, hands on.

As my idea, it was like hands on with a plane. And like we got in their labs and we talked to multiple executives and we just kind of really, you know, asked them what the heck they're doing with this thing. And the idea is not entirely new in the sense that they're borrowing a lot of the inspiration or they're getting a lot of the inspiration from cargo planes, which are constantly loading things on and off the plane in between trips. But their idea was like, hey, if you can do that with a cargo plane, why can't we do it with consumer experiences and try to improve flying for everybody, but also, of course, give the airlines opportunities to make more money? Yeah. So I'm going to be the

avatar. I mean, you should, if you're listening to this, you should go watch the episode because it's great. But I'm going to be the avatar of some of the commenters because they, I think they raised some questions after watching it. So Airbus said to you, are you going to do different voices? No, I mean, I wasn't prepared for it. But next week when we do this segment, I will do different voices. I'll assign different voices to the different commenters. That'll be a great version. You can just get celebrities to read the comments. Yeah. That would be amazing. But so a lot of people in the comments asked, how on earth is this going to be affordable? And I thought, that's like a really interesting question. I know they said, everybody said to you, we want to price this at economy,

comfort economy premium. But that seems really hard. So they give you any more info on how to make it affordable? Yeah. There's, there's so many things to consider here, which we get into in the piece, but then again, you know, we only had about seven or eight minutes for the episode. There's so many questions to consider here. Of course, there are safety questions. There are regulatory questions. We did reach out to the FAA as we were working on this episode. But the biggest question people had was about pricing, of course, because that's what hits consumers the hardest. And Airbus does say they believe it could be priced at the premium economy price scale, but that all depends on seating density. I mean, right now, seating density is such an important

factor of commercial aircraft because it's literally how many people you can cram on and how many people you can get to pay a certain price for a certain section of the plane. And once you start moving these modular cabins in and out of the plane and maybe there's a restaurant or maybe there's a spa or the spin studio, like I mentioned earlier, one of the mods they showed us was kind of like this daycare type place where families could bring their kids and play with games and stuff like that. The seating definitely did not look like the seating on a standard Airbus A330. So the big question is how do you maintain the same seating density

so you can charge people the price that Airbus thinks you will and it seems a little far-fetched. Yeah, I actually loved that scene in the episode because he's like, and this is where you would play with trucks and the idea of a place in an airline dedicated to playing with trucks. Yeah, there's like a little mobile

hanging from the ceiling of the plane. Like that would normally be above a child's crib and it's like, oh, that's great. I'm not in a metal tube. There's a mobile. Yeah. Well, I mean, all of that seems great. But if there's turbulence and everybody has to rush back to their seats, then you kind of run into all these problems. And it seems like they're trying to figure that stuff out too

and they're not quite there or are they a little bit more buttoned up? There are some ways they're trying to engineer around that. And the ones I saw were actually fairly clever. So, for example, in the bar area, they're kind of these tall stand-up cocktail. Table's not the right word, but like a, I don't know, this standing thing where you might stand around with someone and have a cocktail or a glass of wine or whatever it might be.

And then, oh, look, actually, if there's turbulence, that cocktail stand turns into a seat. So they've thought about little things like that in the family play area of the plane that we saw. The seats kind of fold down so that they're touching the ground and they open up this pathway for people to walk through or play in. But then if you needed to, you would just take the bottom of the seat and pop it up

and then actually sit in it. But that doesn't mean that... I mean, I think there's a whole human element of this that can't be engineered. Because you may put all of the right things in place and the oxygen masks may be figured out and, you know, the lack of windows may be accommodated for somehow. But when it comes to people just kind of roaming freely around a plane and then telling them to suddenly get in their seats in the event of turbulence or some other event, like you have at this point you still have kind of no idea how people are going to react to that sort of thing. Yeah. And there's, I mean, we laugh all the time about, you know, the airline safety briefing at the beginning of flight is a rote.

But there's a value to that repetition, which is everybody kind of knows what to do. And if you don't, presumably someone around you does because they've been flying a long time. This is just like you're going to get on a plane. And depending on how it's configured, it could be a totally different experience from flight to flight. And it seems like that's like a very complicated thing to manage a whole bunch of people through. When you saw this video, were you thinking like you would try this? Would you be into this? I had two thoughts.

And obviously, if you're listening to this, what you should know is I've watched like 90 cuts of this video. Because, you know, we were working on it. It's the first episode, so we spent on it. So the very first time I watched it, I had two thoughts about the specific thing, which was, one, if they do this the way they're saying they're going to do it, it will be really expensive, and it'll be for, like, rock bands that have custom 747s, right? Like, it'll be for that class. Like, you know, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, like Google owns a jet for them, right?

So, like, the next one they'll buy will be the Airbus, and they can customize it, and a couple of years later they'll get sick of it, and later be like, I want a rock climbing wall, and they'll, like, roll rock climbing wall into it. This is how I think billionaires talk. That's a great idea, by the way. You should send that to Airbus. How about the rock climbing wall? And then the other one, which is a lot darker, I think, is one of the dreams of air travel for so long

has been to make the airport experience better. And one of the ways of airlines have always talked about it is, what if you could board your plane in the middle of the city? And then that gets, like, put on the back of a truck, and we drive it to the airport and we like load the back of the truck onto the plane and you take off and fly. And that seems really cool, but given the way that airlines work now, also like a very dark future, where you're going to end up in this like windowless shipping container and you're going to get loaded onto a plane. Yeah, you're in a pod and you never really lose the sense that you're just in this pod.

Yeah, Airbus is what they're promoting is like the middle ground, which is we're going to make economy comfort so much cooler. but I actually saw the other two sides, but what were you saying? Oh, just that some of the commenters made really good points, and I was not at all surprised by these remarks, which would be great if we could just get a little more legroom first, or one of the comments I made to Jason Chua, one of the project executives, who just fun factoid used to work on Motorola's modular phone project,

and now he is running a modular airplane project. One of the things I said to him was it's kind of crazy to think we could get, we could get these pods or these modular experiences in flight before we get consistent working Wi-Fi, because I'm sure what a lot of people would like, like, they don't mind, you know, necessarily, or at this point they're used to being crammed in their seat for several hours, but they might want working Wi-Fi. And we don't really have that yet. It's not very consistent anyway. So, yeah, like, I think that this is, it was perfect for next level because we do want to look at the innovations and the crazy ideas that people have and the stuff they're working on in labs

to say like this could be. But I think like some people were, I don't know, maybe they saw it were a little more entrenched in reality after they saw it. Like I can think of half a dozen other ways I would improve air travel first. Yeah, but I think that goes back to the thing I was saying about most of what we want and what we get is so iterative, right?

Better Wi-Fi on a plane is an iterative improvement. And I think it's a really important iterative improvement and one that I really want. But it's not a big idea, right? or a little bit more leg room or don't treat us like prisoners and literally beat us with bottles. We had drag us off planes, yeah. Exactly. That would be nice.

Yeah, how about I took to the airspace? Yeah, how about I took to the airspace? Like, not being viciously beaten by the staff, I think, is an improvement that we're looking for. But this is a big idea. And I think big ideas, as Verge cast listeners know, as Verge audience people know, like, big ideas come with a lot of doubt. and hearing that doubt, I think, is important, right? It's the thing that makes the idea get better and refined if it ever actually comes out. So what's next?

What's the next level of next level? Like, what's the next episode? Oh, am I allowed to talk about this? Yeah, I mean. I'm going to ask you if I'm allowed to talk about this. Tease it out. Because you're the executive producer as well. All right, let's tease it out.

I just did it to get in the union and get the Oscars. No, no, tease it out. So should I? I say the company name? Say the company. All right. The Verge cast is, look, if you're listening to this, you're now in the bubble, you're in the family, don't tell anyone. Yeah.

Keep it to yourself. All right. But share the video when it comes out next Tuesday morning, first thing in the morning. We are talking to a company that has been around since 1965 and works with, I mean, I said this in the piece, but works with virtually every major Hollywood studio. You've seen their stuff. You've seen their label. And you probably are like vaguely aware of what they do in some capacity. went into their labs and it's Dolby.

So you've inevitably seen on movie theater screens or television programs that something has been remastered, either the color or the sound with Dolby's technology. They've been working on this project in their labs in San Francisco where they are hooking people up with all kinds of biophysical sensors, EEG caps, heart rate sensors, galvanic skin response, things like that. And they're monitoring them as they're watching movies. And they're trying to figure out what people. emotional responses are to different, it's not even the content specifically, it's more like if

Dolby were to use HDR or Dolby were to use surround sound or there's a sort of amplification of the content you're watching, how does that make you react differently? And it's utterly fascinating stuff. I mean, I think on some level, we already kind of know that a lot of the movies and the TV shows we watch are sort of engineer to evoke the strongest emotional response possible from us. But this is like in the lab proof that this is what companies are working on. Yeah, I think the line I've always heard about HDR in particular, and Dolby's version, Dolby Vision, is that when you see an explosion, we can make sure you feel heat and you feel warm. And I think the fact that I'm measuring it is really interesting. I'm not going to give it all away. I'm not going to ask you any questions

about it because people should go watch the episode next week. But I'm really excited about this series. I'm really excited that it's your series because I think Lauren's adventures out in the world of insane high tech are something that I have been able to hear about, just working with you for so long. And now that we get to make a video series and show the adventures you have, it's so cool. And I'm really excited that we're going to do a bunch more of these episodes. It's really fun. Tuesdays. Tuesdays.

Tuesdays. For the month of July and possibly after that. And we're publishing first thing. It's on all the platforms I mentioned earlier. And yeah, it's just, it's really exciting. And one of the things I like about it too, and I hope you do too, is that, you know, gadgets. in some way that the commercially available products that we all know would love and use every day, they're kind of safe in some ways.

I mean, that doesn't mean they're not like listening to us and tracking us in weird ways, too. Exploding from time to time. It makes me like occasionally lighting on fire. But you buy them and you kind of know what you're getting in exchange, you know, to some extent. You know what you're buying and you know what you're using. But some of these innovations that we're looking at, they're a little unsafe. They're a little scary in the ways that they're raising really big questions.

whether it's about VR or AI or transportation, autonomous transportation and things like that. And so we want to raise those questions. That's what we're looking to do. Yeah. I have seen a bunch of these. I won't give it too much away, but they're really cool. So Tuesdays, check it out next level on the verge,

on every platform that exists. And eventually, if Lauren gets her way, beamed directly into your brain. Directly into your brain. Awesome. Thanks so much, Lauren. Thanks, Nilai. This episode of Vergecast, also brings us.

brought to you by parachute, which I'm going to tell you right now is sheets for your bed. They're really nice sheets, I'm told. They're the softest, comfyest sheets. They're made of really great fabrics and materials in Europe's world-renowned factories. They're clean, minimal style, and neutral colors. They're all natural. There's no harmful chemicals or synthetic softener is used. The bedding will only get softer with time. What? It's fact. And when you buy parachute sheets, they'll partner with the United Nations Foundation to donate malaria prevention bed nets. They've already donated 16,000. Oh, she, that's great.

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So if you don't like it, you send it back, no questions asked. I don't know how about that's that for humanity? It's parachute home.com slash verge. Parachute. Oh, sheet. All right, I'm excited for this. Phone news. Yeah.

A lot of phone news. Yeah, kind of a lot. So here's my favorite piece of phone news. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 fan edition has been torn apart by I-Fix-it, and they have confirmed it is just a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 with a different smaller battery.

What did you expect? What do you? They could have added like a reinforcing bar to make it less likely that it would bend, but they didn't. Just they're like, let's put in a different, less sploty battery.

Less sploty. It's great. I'm not offended by this at all. I love it. I love that Samson's like, giving people what they want. That's what they want. Small batteries.

Giant phone, small battery. For the fans. I'm going to buy one of these phones. It is inevitable that I buy one of these phones. A couple of phones kind of, do you want to start with births or deaths? Births. Oh, well. Deaths.

I was going to say deaths. Let's alternate. Let's start with the birth. It's the wheel of time. It's the wheel of reincarnation. Okay. We all know how it's going to end. Let's just go for it.

Let's start with birth. The Blackberry, it's not a great birth. The Blackberry Key, launches on Sprint, July 14th. This will definitely go well. You know, you can just go get one now, right? Yeah, they're already available unlocked. Yeah.

But now Sprint has lent its great credibility. Track record. I mean, come on. They did the Evo. Yeah, this was, I was just joking around in the chat. I was like, BlackBerry Q1 launches on Sprint, the Eternal Harbor of Innovation. And now that's like literally on Theverge.com. That's our headline.

Be careful, Paul. Anything you say in Slack could become a headline. I know, yeah, be careful. Can anyone name a Sprint phone that is, like, torn up the world? Evo. The Evo. Yeah, I was going to say Evo. That's it.

All right, now a death. The Sprint Razor was good. The Sprint iPhone. When they got it third. Windows Phone 8-1 is dead. Yeah, and you should definitely read Tom Awards, because I wasn't aware of all these details. Like,

Microsoft is not updating Windows phone 10. No. So, and like 70 or 80% of the Windows phone phones out there were running 8.1. Yeah. They're no longer supported. So now they're basically running Windows XP on their phone, which is just a great way to get malware in the year 2017.

Yeah. So, yeah, that sucks. It's over. I'm writing a whole story about it, but I'm not going to make you tell it on the verge cast. Typically, tell it on the verge cast. But by the time you'll guarantee that you will...

It will be up. This happens every week if you listen to the show. I make Dieter say what he's threatening to write. And then because I've made him say it, he has to write it. Right. But if I don't make him say it,

will he write it. I don't know. I guess this week we're going to find out. Here's a pop quiz. What killed Windows phone? Lack of apps? That's what I mean. Who murdered Windows phone?

How about that? Oh, it's... You mean in these its final moments? Well, over the course of life. Was it the iPhone or was it Android? Oh, I thought like who, what person was to blame? I would go hard with Android. I'm going super hard.

It's Android. Yeah. I've been spending all morning reading the court transcripts from the Google V. Oracle court case from like five years ago where both Rubin and Schmidt talk about the foundation of Android and why they created it. So that's where my head's at. Wait, wait, wait, wait, but. What if Windows phone was really, really good, though?

No, so I don't want to preempt either. Here's my guess as to what your story is. We'll do it the other way around. Okay. Here's my, I'm going to try to guess what your story is. I'm just going to write whatever you say here, and that I'll just publish it. Well, I mean, you've been reading the stuff. I haven't read that stuff in forever, but here's my guess.

Andy Rubin and Eric Schmidt knew that the next, they saw the iPhone, and they knew the next frontier was mobile. and they decided that Android would be free to undercut Microsoft before it started licensing software for phones. So the fact that Android was first and free in the Touch paradigm is the thing that prevented Microsoft from ever entering the market

because they were charging per-handset license fees to software makers, whereas Google was not. Yeah, you're 100% right, except the iPhone has nothing to do with it other than they were working on it and then they saw the iPhone and they went, oh, shit, and then they switched it to be a touch-first interface. But I'm saying Microsoft.

And the sooner and the dream. And they switched from the sooner being the launch device to the dream, which became the HTCG1. And getting to market ahead of Microsoft as a Premier Touch OS helped them kill off Windows phone. But the key thing is their core strat was to take on Microsoft. That's the thing they were primarily worried about. And that's why they made it. free. And they basically took away the strategy that Microsoft had for making mobile in the first place, which was licensed it to everybody. And that is what enabled them to like basically

beat Microsoft to market. Basically everybody to start making Android phones instead of Windows phones. And that is ultimately what doomed Windows phone. It wasn't so much like versus the iPhone. It was yeah. Well, so my argument there for versus the iPhone is probably narrow and probably not important, but Microsoft failed to react to the free pricing. And they also failed to react to being touched first for a long time. Yeah, Windows 1-7 didn't come out for quite a while.

Yeah. Like the window 6.5 with that weird honeycomb. Yeah. And this piece of garbage. And when we wrote about it, remember we wrote about it and got to and we're like, this is garbage. And we got mad at us. And we're like, no, it's garbage. And now a decade later, told you so. Do you remember how angry everybody got at me

when I pointed out, when we had the source that said that Windows Phone 7 devices were going to get updated to Windows Phone 8 and just people just lost it at us. We were right. We were definitely right. The thing I'm sad about is I think the thing that Windows Phone did

differently that is still not really happened is this idea of you have a few different kind of modes that you're using stuff and then apps kind of feed data into that. I think that's really hard to do. I think it

runs against the grain of what app makers want where they want to have their own very like insular branded you know i mean snapchat would not thrive in that like snapchat is all about having a completely foreign weird ui but i there's lots of times when i just like man why why am i writing this email in this stupid email program in calibri when i would rather be writing it like in my chosen plain text editor you know that has like vim keystroke commands for moving around you know like that kind of stuff just just allowing, like, one interface that you get to really know and apps feed into that. And Windows phone never really pulled it off anyways, but.

They tried. I liked that idea. It was nice. Okay. By the way, I definitely trolled Dieter into saying what his story is, and now he definitely has to write it. It's like a quarter written. All right. But it's talk of a birth.

That's not, I mean, it's not really a birth, I guess. But there are pictures of the pixel XL, the new pixel XL, have moved into the world. Kind of, I don't want to say it looks exciting. Yeah, I believe it's completely real. I don't want to say it looks exciting, but it looks very nice. It looks like a rebranded, like, LGG6 that they just, like, cleaned up a little bit. And as long as I put a new processor in there, totally fine with that. Like super pumped for that, actually.

The rumor, by the way, to give credit to the source, Android police leaked it. And one of the rumors they leaked was that you can squeeze the sides on the HTC phone, which is really kind of a harsh burn because HTC just released it. HTC made the last pixel. Now, they're not making the new pixel, but they ripped off their wall. one feature, which is incredible. So how do you guys feel about squeezables? I just don't get it.

Squeasables. I don't. You know what, you know what's, what's predictable and works and whether you want it to and doesn't work when you don't want it to is a button. Yeah. Interesting. I'm sure that the squeezing will, you know, do the things it's meant to do. I'm sure it will be perfectly good and fine and accurate.

But I have in my 15 years of writing about smartphones used, basically. basically every non-button gimmick and the only non-button gimmick that has worked as a capacitive touch screen. Everything else that I've tried to use on a regular basis has ended up being kind of garbage. I've just, I have zero hope that squeezing your phone is going to be a thing. I think it's interesting because as these phones, as the bezels disappear, which is something I'm 100% into and four, you're starting to run out of like safe spaces on the phone. Yeah. Like places and now you have like, oh, oops, I'm sorry. I hung up on you, I accidentally squeezed my phone.

I was trying to grip it and squeeze it. Like, I think someone as like an art project should just make a phone that is capacitive all around. Every time you touch it anywhere, it just launches a different app. It's just like, we just need to create some emblem of going too far. Yeah. Where there's no safe place to touch your phone. And then we can like, we know we got to walk it back from there.

And watch it on sprint. And watch it on sprint. People, okay, death. Virtue. The bejeweled crown prince of the phone kingdom. Which has had 15 different owners in the past two years. Vlad just said a story. That's probably a year ago.

He went and visited. That was not that long ago. But the businessman who says it is going to resurrect the company. They were bankrupt. This is one of those things. There's, you know, there's all the rumors about Apple moving the phone pricing high-end. You know, they're going to be $1,500 so they can do premium parts. and manage demand.

It's a rumor. No one knows if it's true. I think that's interesting in this context because Virtue was all about making your phone out of crazier stuff and pricing it really high. And it just wasn't a good idea. I was continually surprised that they were in business. Yeah.

That's the surprise to me that they existed for a long time. And people bought their bad phones with crocodile skin on them. but also an old version of Android older processors if they had just made if they, if they, all they did was take apart like Galaxy Node 7s

put in smaller batteries and like wrap them in nice materials like colorways Yeah Is that what the company's called? Color, color shapes color color. No, what's the color wear?

Colorware, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, they're like, Apple makes nice products. We'll paint them for you. Colorware with alligator skin. Yeah. All right.

All right. Is there another birth. No, this is sort of like a, it's not yet born. Actually, dude, I'm curious for your thoughts here. The essential phone is mids, they, it code, they told us it would launch in a month. Yep. You remain one of the few people in the world who have handled this phone. I do. They've missed their ship date. Yep. And they won't, they will not say a word. You've asked them. I think Nick Statt asked them on our team. If you, they don't, they haven't talked to any other publications. Nope. If you go to Twitter and you look at their tweets,

replies, they have been replying to people on Twitter saying that we'll have information soon. That is as close to a statement as we've gotten, that they're promising more information soon. Do you think they're just waiting for their product to not be vaporware? They're just hoping the mist resolves itself. Yeah, I don't know. Because they've got the other stuff too, right? Maybe they're trying to do it all at once. I mean, they have to ship it with that 360 camera, right?

If they don't, it like breaks the fundamental promise of this thing. And actually, especially after seeing the red phone, I've been thinking about like modularity on phones again a little bit. And I'm frustrated that they're all different. And when I look out upon the sea of different ways to connect modules to phones, in theory, the one that I'm most excited about is essentials because it is USB wireless. You just have to charge it. And people can pick their own pogo pins if they want to.

but it's also going to mean that different phones are going to be able to choose different places to stick their modules. But if it's just straightforward USB that anybody can implement and it's wireless, so it's like local, that seems to be the most universal solution. So I don't know. I know that listening to me talking about modular things on portable devices is tiresome. But of everything, in theory, I'm most excited about essentials implementation. I suspect that it is also pretty complicated. Dude, we just did 45 minutes in net neutrality.

I don't think modularity in smartphone takes the cake for boring on this episode. You know, you know, like one, like, like, modularity would have, like, actually served this purpose. So I'm at a bar the other night. Someone asked me to take a picture of them, right? And, of course, their phone isn't as great as my phone. And if, if I had a modular phone and they had a modular phone and I happened to have my fancy $400 camera attachment with me, right, just pull out that attachment.

slap it onto their phone, take a picture for them that looks way better than what they can normally get, then take off the module, put it back in my pocket, hand them their phone back. That would be a pretty cool world. Otherwise, I think they're stupid. Isn't it like the real question, like all these companies are trying it and stumbling over it? It feels like one of those things where eventually Apple's going to do it and get it right. I think it's a mind virus. It's a mind virus?

Yeah, it's a what is it called? Is that a meme? It's like toxoplasmosis? Is that the one with the cats? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like the cat. Like, just people like hang around with like nerd, their nerd buddies and they're like, I wish phones were modular. And then they like do it. It's always bad. Well,

as you just heard from Lauren Good, the guy who's building Airbus's modular plane. Yeah. His last project was Google's modular phone. Like his job is to just make things modular at any scale that you desire. That's great. I want to talk about Alexa, but you've got a segment that you do every week. Every week.

It's called Mag Me Later. Oh, God. No, no. Why do we keep letting you call it that? I don't know. I don't know. That's what the legal team was like, you know. MagSafe.

Yeah. There's all these like MagSafe knockoffs coming to Kickstarter and stuff. Yeah. And I am confused because I really, Apple was pretty serious about having patents on MagSafe. Is it actually? actual magsafe or is just magnetic power connectors? They are magnetic power adapters. The typical model is that you have like a little really slim little piece that has USBC on it and the magnet on the other side.

And you just stick that into your MacBook and it's just there forever. It like basically occupies that port. And now you can use their magsafe style connector. But yeah, they're all proprietary different versions, but they are basically magnetic breakaway power connectors. Yeah, I think the deal is Apple might not be able to enforce any patents on the idea of a magnetic laptop connector. So the surface has got a magnetic connector, right? But it's the specific plug and shape of a MagSafe that you can't just up and copy. Right.

Right. Like fry machines for kitchens have magnetic powered app or as Apple wasn't going after those. Yeah. Anyway, what's your favorite of these Kickstarter? Are they just a trend that's going to fizzle? Well, I don't know how. Himes said that, so that one of these companies is doing like that L-shaped connector. You remember original MagSafe had the L connector?

So USBC goes into this little thingy that then connects magnetically to the little inserted magnetic plug. Dongle, if you will. It's not a dongle because it doesn't hang out. Is that the definition of a dongle? Must a dongle dangle dangle. I think a dongle dangle has a dangle. If the dog would go dangle, it's a plug. That's the Vergecast, everyone.

That was our last episode ever. That's called a MagC. So they're obviously really running away from the comparisons of Apple. Oh, man. All right. Can I say that that L-shaped MacBook plug from back in the day, I hung on to that for years because I hated the new flat connector because you couldn't sit with your legs crossed

and put your laptop in your lap without it disconnecting. Just pops off. Stupid. Yeah. Another thing that I thought of about net neutrality. This is Paul's variety now? What's happening? Did you read that story about that Jake did with all those rural rural rural providers?

Paul. Paul. Maybe it's just the U-Sown. The enemy of the internet is trees. Like we had great internet. We had great internet. in my hometown in Washington State. And then those damn trees came along.

No, no, no, no. That's the thing. My hometown's like a desert. We didn't have a lot of trees. Just sagebrush. So you could just beam internet wirelessly all over the landscape. But all these rural people with their trees. Yeah.

And you're using less paper now so the trees are just out of control. True self-fulfilling prophecy. Trees are the other than it is all I'm saying. Pave the earth. It's just a thought. Solved neutrality by painting the earth. That'd be great. I don't know where that came from.

It's a free idea. All right. Last thing I just want to talk about real quick. So I think it's important. We talked about, well, I told a joke about Alexa at the beginning, but there's a bunch of Alexa news this week that I think all adds up to something really interesting. So I'm just going to read it all. So Westinghouse put out its Amazon Fire TV powered TVs. So they just run Fire OS as the OS.

they respond to Alexa. Sony announced that its Android TVs, its actual Android TVs, are now compatible with Alexa, so you can tell Alexa how to light up its TVs. All other fire devices, like fire OS TV devices,

Amazon has now enabled Alexa to control them. So if you have a fire stick or whatever, you can say Alexa turn on the show. That's the most important thing. So that's like three TV announcements in a row. You can talk to your echo and a show shows up on your TV. That's the key thing.

That's the key thing. And then Logitech today, announced an update to its like harmony integration so you no longer have to say tell harmony to turn on the lights you can just say turn on the lights and your harmony whatever harmony controls can do it so the macros are getting more integrated I think all of that adds up to like the next phase of Alexa being a far superior product to Google Home or the HomePod because if you can just tell it to control screens because that's the dream of the home and Chromecast

but the the lack of the UI and the Chromecast I think is still very off-putting to people So if you have a regular thing, you just like, I turn it on my TV, you say the words and it lights up, but there's still a UI there. That's pretty smart. The thing that's interesting to me about this is the reason that you had to on Alexa and a little bit on Google Home say like, tell so-and-so to do such and such is that first part, talk to so-and-so activates the keyword to turn on that skill. And they're now getting rid of that. And the question is, how are they doing that? and what is the, like, the rules for setting up those keywords? How do I tell Alexa that my non-keyword list turn on my TV is through Logitech

or to maybe Sony or whatever? So Amazon's getting more sophisticated about how keywords work on the Alexa platform. And I understand at a pretty deep level how Google thinks about this stuff. Like they're like, they're choosing the keywords. They're trying to treat them in the same way that the web, treats domain names, you know, down the line, they're all over them picks the best one for you. But with Alexa, when you have these things that short circuit the skill keyword,

is that a deal? Are they going to set up like a customization app? How is all that going to work long term? Is potentially very fascinating because if this does become the primary interface to the crap in your home, you really want to know what enables those things to talk to each other. And, you know, I don't know. I personally want to know if there's deals in the background. But in general, like, the rules for whether or not you have to say a keyword to activate a skill and what that keyword could be and, like, how it goes away when you want it to, are going to be potentially

very confusing. But definitely interesting. Yeah. The idea of the customization app is, like, deeply appealing to me. Yeah. But also insane and bad. Well, you can set up macros. I, I think I'm both, where you can say, when I say this, do these like five things. So it might just be that you customize it by when you like turn on Logitech, it like jumpstarts that customization section. So, but if you do that, then everybody's home operates differently, right? And we get into this insane long settings discussion. I love a settings discussion. Pairs nicely with neutrality and modularity.

I just think that where Amazon. is getting, they're getting to a place where they're going to sell you a cheap TV that is integrated with its service and they're selling you a $35 dot and they're saying this is the beginning of your smart home. They already have bundles. They're doing

them, I think, on Prime Day. Well, they'll sell you a dot in like four power plugs that like connect to Alexa or a dot in like a bunch of light bulbs. Their like ability as a retailer to sell you the kit is just very powerful.

And their ability to get there first right now because this is their only product, whereas Apple is still trying to make Siri work on the phone and on the HomePod and on the Apple TV. And Google is Google. And they have 50 different ways of doing things. And they're still trying to figure out what it's going to be. Amazon is just plowing ahead. And they're making Alexis simpler and smarter at the same time. And I think that's a big deal.

Yeah. I think they're winning. Yeah, I think they're winning. There was a stat, I think, Verto Analytics, one of these many analytics companies. The raw numbers are like not impressive, but Siri usage is down 17% year-over-year to still like tens of millions, like 40 million unique users. Alexa usage is up 345% year-over-year to 2 million. Oh.

But it's up. That's all I'm saying. It's up. Cortano is up to you. Anyway, look, I think that's the show. We're kind of out of time here. We've gone over. There's a bunch of stuff, like housekeeping here at the end. One, Game of Thrones, if you don't, if you're listening to the show and you don't

know Game of Thrones starts on Sunday. It seems like a weird demographic mismatch. But Game of Thrones starts on Sunday, which means Caitlin Tiffany's Game of Game of Thrones starts. You haven't done your league and all that stuff. You can go to our site. You can go to Fantasizer. Play Game Game of Thrones. That's very exciting.

To be clear, that's like a fantasy. Football League, but with Game of Thrones characters. Yes. No one's born. People just die. That's right. Obviously, Lauren's show next level. Please watch it.

It comes out on Tuesdays. Watch it, share it. It's great. Lauren also has a great podcast called To Embarrass to Ask. You can listen to that. Keros Swisher has Recode decode. Peter Kofka has Recode Media. All that's available on iTunes,

except for Lauren's Show Next Level, which is not available on iTunes. But available everywhere else. Just find this stuff. Listen to it, share it, rank it, review it. Tell your friends. Give us that thumbs up on next level. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube on next level. We're doing a bunch of cool experiments on a platform called Anchor with podcasts.

We're going to roll out new Verge podcast soon. So go to anchor.fm. slash verge. Check it out. Tell us what you like, what you don't like. We're still piloting a bunch of ideas. So listen to that. That's really fun.

And you can find us on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. Paul is at Future Paul. Deeter's at Backlon. We love your feedback on the show. our audience is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So if you're new, let us know what you want more of, what you want less of. We are occasionally responsive to your needs.

I think over the years we've done this show, we've proven that to be true. But we're really excited about all of our new listeners, so thank you so much for listening. And we'll be back next week. Rock and roll. Paul, Paul. Rock and roll. Paul.