The Vergecast - Samsung fans and video apps: they’re everywhere

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss YouTube adding a slew of new TikTok-like features to Shorts, Elon Musk's extravagant 'X' sign, and much more. We also go through this week's emails. The Samsung fans have spoken. Further reading: Elon Musk wants a second chance to fail at X Elon Musk capitulates: Twitter will default to dark mode but still offer a light option Twitter Blue subscribers can now hide their blue checks Elon Musk's extravagant 'X' sign atop the former Twitter HQ has been dismantled  Elon Musk’s X sues anti-hate researchers for allegedly scraping data from Twitter Do you want to buy stocks on X? YouTube is adding a slew of new TikTok-like features to Shorts BBC launches an ‘experimental’ Mastodon server LG 27GR95QE-B review: ushering in a new age for gaming monitors Some details on what Apple needs to ship the Apple Vision Pro developer kits.  Apple’s Vision Pro platform joins Pixar’s bid to standardize 3D content The Excel World Championship esport is coming back to ESPN this week Exclusive: the Sonos Move 2 is coming in September with stereo sound and 24-hour battery life MrBeast is suing his ghost kitchen partner over ‘inedible’ MrBeast Burgers Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Linux on the desktop. It's great. It's going to happen this year. Here's a stat for you. This is the year.

Linux gamers now outnumber Mac gamers on Steam. Because of Steam deck. That is a stat. You're not wrong. That is a stat. It is because of the Steam deck, which is technically not a desktop. We were so close, everybody.

We're going to do it next year. It's the flagship podcast. Podcast of Linux on the desktop. Hello, everybody. I'm your friend, Neely. That was David Pierce. Hey, David. Hi, I have returned from vacation.

I have many new hot takes to share. I'm very excited. And it's Alex Kranz, you heard, going, it's because of the Steam Deck. Hey, Alex. Yeah, I use the Steam Deck and a Mac to game. I do not use Windows to game. I'm sorry.

That is an unholy combination. What are you doing? It's great. I get everything I need. I get my Crusader Kings on Mac. I get everything else on Steam Deck. It's fine. Alex refuses to play any game the way it was intended.

That's really. Alex's thing. It works great. My TikTok feed is entirely Tears of the Kingdom videos. That's all it is. And every now again, and mostly it's like incredible builds. Like that's like the Zonai Engineering Task Force

video. Like it's so cool. Amazing. Yes. And then every now and again, I get the people who are running it emulated on a PC and they're doing mods where everyone's a little too sexy. And it's just the like that in general, I'm pro modding, pro emulation.

pro run whatever code you want, wherever you want, anti-DRM. And then I see those videos, I'm like, all these people should be in jail. Like, I don't know how to get... Too sexy. Too sexy. Don't like it.

I don't need to see a sexy link. He's always sexy. What are you talking about? He's apparently sexy. All right, here's what we're going to do this week. It's a relatively slow news week. But we have been getting just a ton of incredible reader emails lately, which are super fun.

So we're going to do a lightning round, then read a bunch of emails, and then do a lightning round. We'll see how that goes. It's the first time we've tried it on the show. I think it's going to be fun. But before we do that, it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of one Elon Musk, who just continues to dominate the news cycle. I'll let you on some Vergecast inside baseball. We do the show and we look at what stories are the most popular on our site, to be like,

this is what people are interested in. And you people will not stop clicking on the Elon stories. Yep. But we are tired. So to split the difference, here's what we're doing. My friend David Pierce is going to give you the fastest Elon roundup in sports. And I believe we have some music. Andrew, can you run the music?

This is an incredibly rude thing to do to me in my first week back, by the way. Like, David, talk as fast as you can for two minutes about Elon Musk. Ready, go. Go. And to be clear, I'm forcing David to do this. against his will, the face that he made at me when I suggested he'd do this, came through the internet. Imagine the amount of engineering and labor and invention and discovery that was required for David's frown to travel hundreds of thousands of miles through fiber optic cables at the

speed of light and then hit me in the face. Can't buy that for $44 billion. I can't do it. It's very important. Anyhow, I'm still making David do it because a bunch of stuff happened, just none of it's very important. But we should acknowledge it because we know that you, the listeners, even though you send us email selling us not to do it, you keep reading the stories. But we're going to make a game of it. So we can get through it. Andrew, I believe we have some music. You have to start talking. Here is everything you need to know about Elon Musk this week. Twitter is now X, and it's actually called X in the app store, even though it's still not called X. A lot of places, there's X pro, but it's just tweet deck. Twitter is X. X is Twitter. No one

knows what it actually is. There was an X sign on the old Twitter headquarters, which is now the X headquarters. It blinded everybody. It was sandbags. It was dangerous. Now it's gone. The company is now trying to get financial companies like Robin Hood and maybe other kinds of stock trading platforms to bring their content and even do stock trading on X, but won't pay anybody to do it and actually wants the other companies to pay to do it. They're not going to do it. So that's not going anywhere. Twitter slash X is suing a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate over claims that it tried to drive away advertisers by basically acknowledging that bad things happen on the platform and that people do bad things on the platform.

That's not going to work. And then lastly, Twitter, sorry, X, was going to be dark mode only, but now it's not going to be dark mode only. Because the thing you learn about Elon Musk when you leave for a week is that nothing actually happens, a thing just happens and then unhapens a few days later. And that's the story of Elon Musk. Let's let the solo wrap up. I didn't know the music went so long.

It's so good. That was impressive. That was very good. Defeated the music. The royalty-free guitar solo music. Absolutely choice. Second only to the animated Transformers movie, which if you listen to it from the 80s, I watched it again as an adult having only ever watched it as a child.

That movie is one long guitar solo. Like, it just never stops. It breaks into other songs, but then the songs and the solo continues. I'm just saying we should bring that back. Is it a musical? Does it count as a musical, right? if it's just one long guitar solo? I guess it's a very confusing movie and also really heartbreaking in various ways.

Transformers, everybody. That's the Verstcast. Okay. Lightning Round 1. So lots of little news this week. Lots of glimmers of big ideas, but ultimately small news. David, kick us off. Okay, I have two because I was gone for a week.

So I think I get to have two. Fair. My first is a discovery that I made while I was on vacation and feel obligated to come back and tell you about, which is that actually car play is very bad. What? No, David! No! Stop! I regret that I have come to this place. This is not a life I wanted to lead, but I updated my phone at one point over the week, and then it just spent a day and a half deciding not to connect to car play. And when it did, it would crash, and then it would say, David, would you like to start a thing in Google Maps? And I would say, yes, please, Google Maps. That sounds terrific. And it would just do nothing.

and it would just say I was sitting at an intersection when I had driven many miles away from that intersection and then one day, for absolutely no reason, it just started to work again and has worked perfectly ever since. So now I've reached a point where I wish it had been full broken because then at least I would understand what was going on. And I just, CarPlay sucks. The thing that is still true is that everything else is still worse.

So CarPlay is still the best available option, as far as I can tell. I actually think Android Auto is better than CarPlay. My wife is a pixel owner, and I mostly use an iPhone. So we switch back and forth some, and the Android auto experience was substantially better in most cases. But they're all bad, but everything else is worse. It's funny because they're converging. Oh, God. All right.

So I have data to back this up. No. So the first piece of data is that I was right to begin with. I hate this. And now David agrees with me. These are the rules. Carplay is now officially bad. I'm really sorry.

That's the worst. Here's a piece of news from last week. According to J.D. Powers Automotive Performance, Performance, Execution, and Layout, or Appeal study, overall satisfaction on car owners is down, a decrease of two points from a year ago and three points lower than 2021. First time in 28 years of the study, there's a consecutive year-over-year decline in owner satisfaction, and it is because of the infotainment systems. Now, most people are mad at the actual infotainment systems in their cars. Makes sense.

But the finikiness of wireless carplay in particular and wireless Android Auto is absolutely contributing to this. And there is an increase in the Google-powered native infotainment systems that some people are shipping like Volvo and others. So cars that have Android automotive or AAS score higher in the infotainment categories than those with no AAS whatsoever. Okay. But if you have that without Google Play services, you go down. Yeah. So if you have built-in Google Maps, basically, people are happy. Yeah.

Because then they can stream Bluetooth over their phones and look at Google Maps, which is all anybody wants to do in the car. No one's trying to watch a TikTok in a Mercedes. I don't know why they keep doing it. If you go watch the videos of people trying to scroll TikTok in Mercedes, that is the slowest, shittiest TikTok experience I've ever seen my entire life. And also it's like unsafe. Probably shouldn't scroll TikTok while driving.

Yeah, also don't do that is a good, yeah. I definitely got yelled at for watching Gilmore Girls while driving home from college one year. And it was great. I had a wonderful time. But I was told I wasn't. Like in the car while you were driving? Yeah. Rory couldn't wait?

She could not. I had to be up early. I was doing like a 12-hour drive in a day. I needed company. This is some real Texas shit. And this road is going to be perfectly straight for 600 miles. Pretty much. I'm just going to do it.

The speed limit is 230 miles an hour. And I'm going to watch Gilmore Girls the entire time. Wonderful. No regrets. But yeah, I wouldn't probably do it now, most likely. Yeah, only now you can, you know, hit self-driving watch on the center cluster. All I'm saying is there's data, actual data, not just me saying it, that suggests that making the center stack of your car more computer is bad. Yes.

I think that's right. Wireless car play is like a maximally computer. idea. Yes. Like, it's finicky and it doesn't connect and you're trying to meet and you're basically adding a second display to a mobile computer. Like, ugh. Just bolt the phone to the air vent like God intended, open Google Maps and stream

Bluetooth music to the head unit. You'll be fine. You get two screens instead of one. I'm just going to keep putting that up. But you can just plug it in and have car play. And I did that this week. I got my MagSafe like little controller thing. I stuck it in the air event.

It didn't flip down too much. And I had, like, my big screen and my little screen. And one was for, like, text messages that I tried not to look at. And the other was my mouth. Do we need to start disclaiming, like, no one listened to Alex when she describes how she lives her life because it will end in disaster for you? Alex is like, here's what I did. I sparked my laser bong.

I started texting while I was driving. But car play was great. Yeah. We're all good. Anyway, car play is great. All right. In normal circumstance, I would say we should retake the part where Alex admitted to texting and driving. But here, I think it's an important cautionary tale.

Don't text and drive, guys. I looked at it and I went, oh, that's convenient. Let's not look at that. And then I just kept driving. It's good. Good for you. We're all really proud of you, Alex. That's called personal growth.

Thank you. All right. Carplay sucks unless you're Alex, in which case you should throw your phone at the window and have someone else use carplay. But I just want to say, before I get to my actual lightning round thing, Andy Hawkins wrote about that JD Power thing you were just talking about. And his headline was just, people are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars. And I just read that headline and just like started blowing kisses at my computer. Like it's just, yes.

Like what a perfect description of A, this study and B, what is happening in the world. I enjoy that very much. And thank you, Andy, for doing that for me. Actually, the best part of his story is that he notes that happiness with the exterior styling of cars is going down as well. because cars look weird now, and that's beautiful. Yeah, it's bad times for cars right now. It's boring and ugly. Like, Nilai, you keep talking about, like, the dongle stuff,

and we're sort of caught in this awkward middle ground. We're caught in the awkward middle ground in, like, every way imaginable with cars. Yeah, the only two ideas we have for cars are make it look like the 60s or angry robots. The future. Yeah. It's not great.

But, okay, my actual lightning round thing is this new YouTube announcement this week that they're adding a book. bunch of new features to shorts. And the quickest way I can describe them is that they're just TikTok things. So now you can see vertical live previews of videos in shorts. So when you're scrolling through in addition to just see shorts, you'll see live stuff. There's a new tool where you can actually like crop and zoom on a regular horizontal YouTube video and use it as a short, which I actually think is very clever. And is one of the things that makes YouTube unique is that there's this whole other giant library of stuff. And then there's a tool that they call

collab, which is just a straight, complete rip of duet on TikTok. And I think it's very funny that they didn't just call it duet. Like, we're all cool with stories being the thing that everybody does, but YouTube is like collab, not like duet or not. Totally different. But I just, we've talked about this a bunch on this show, but it's like there is just only one app anymore. Yeah. It's just called like video in all caps. And it's TikTok, it's reels, it's YouTube shorts. All these things are the same thing. And it's kind of, it's just making me tired now.

Do you ever find yourself accidentally scrolling the wrong one and not realizing it for more than 30 seconds? Or is that just me? The thing that happens to me frequently is I'll go onto TikTok, scroll a bunch, be like,

why don't I care about any of these videos and then realize I'm actually on Instagram? That's me! That's me! This is the thing that has happened to me several times from like, usually like I kind of know what my TikTok is going to be. It morphs over time, but I have a rough sense of what I'm going to get from TikTok most of the time.

And then I go on Instagram, and it's just like, here's people playing spike ball and, like, random Russian soccer players that you've never heard of. And I'm just, and I, like, I spend three minutes. I'm like, this is boring. And then I'm like, oh, I'm on Instagram. Like, this is where I'm at. It's like, when I see, like, three videos in a row of somebody just cutting sand, I'm like, oh, I think I'm on Instagram.

Okay. Or it's particular if you see the trends from three months ago. Yeah. That's the Reels are your Instagram. But here's the thing about Instagram, which is fascinating. Meta just had earnings. They were boring. Meta's doing great.

Fine. They basically solved the Apple ad tracking transparency issue with AI, so they're making a lot of money. They also revealed that Reels is making money hand over fist now and is on track to be a bigger business than TikTok, which is wild. And kind of a testament to meta's overall scale and expertise in monetizing things. Yet another reminder that meta is the only company that is actually good at this. Like, it's the thing I've been saying about threads all along. Like, everybody can have the same idea and meta will do it better over time, at least from a financial perspective.

It just keeps being true. And it's truly wild. Like, Reels is an objectively worse product than TikTok. Like, I don't think there's anybody who would be like, I prefer Reels to TikTok as a, like, user-consumer experience. But I'm not at all surprised that it's going to end up being the bigger business. So here's the numbers. Reels annual revenue run rate has jumped to $10 billion a year, up from $3 billion last fall

and a billion less summer. That's from Zuckerberg during his analyst call. That means Reels about the size of TikTok's business last year when TikTok pulled in $9.9 billion and we're going to add revenue and Reels what to go. That's the sort of Reader's story that will link. That's crazy, right? They went from not having this product to being deeply threatened. by it to running a bigger and more effective business with it. And maybe this is like cautionary tale

for threads. This is kind of the meta problem now. They run huge businesses with no cultural relevance. I mean, right? That's what you're talking about with reels. You open reels. You like scroll through it. Like this isn't what I want. And you jump to TikTok, which is far more relevant, but they are better at the business. I think it's, it is culturally relevant. And the fact that like all of my online friends send me TikToks, all my normal friends, offline friends, whatever you want to call them, you know what I'm talking about, everybody listening, you've got both sides. They all send me reels. My best friend from college, she sends me reels about Kelmore Girls. My best friend that I worked with at my last company, she sends me TikToks.

And it's just, yeah, and that's a smaller group. Those people that are really online like us, we're a much smaller part of the population. And so the stuff that actually goes out to people and changes the culture is happening on reels, even though it's being incubated and developed on TikTok. Although I think the younger you get, the less that's true. And this is the thing that meta continues to trade on, right? Is that like whenever I come on this show or write about Facebook and say, basically, nobody's on Facebook, nobody cares, I get a bunch of people responding who are like,

no, actually, the thing is everybody's on Facebook, they're just old. And that's true. And there's a lot of money in those people. But as you scale down the age group, like truly nobody is on Facebook. And at least in the sort of limited access I have to the world of 16-year-olds, like they're all on Snapchat and they're all on TikTok and they're all kind of on Instagram and that's it. Like that is the extent of it. What's fascinating at this conversation is it was prompted by you discussing new features being added to YouTube,

which is the most stable, scaled social platform to exist. it's still doing the thing it does, except it's also trying to do the new thing. Shorts alarms me every time I click on it. Like, I get confused and then have to, like, quit the app because I don't know where I am and how to get away from it. Am I the only one? Is it like a feeling like I'm training the wrong algorithm? It's partially that and partially just like the video's big.

And I'm like, the video's not supposed to be big here. It's supposed to be the other way. What's happening? I don't like it. I just get very old as soon as I click the shorts. Who are these kids? and why are they eating hot wings? Yeah, just immediately turn 80.

But this is why, to your point, Eli, this is why YouTube has been so fascinating to me for so long because it is, I think, the single most, like, sprawlingly ambitious platform on the internet. Like, YouTube wants to be, it wants to eat Hollywood, it wants to eat the podcasting business, it wants to eat the music business, it wants to eat the creator business,

it wants to eat the social business. Like YouTube literally wants to be the size of the, like creative entertainment internet. And it's kind of working, and it's really, really fascinating to watch that happen. I think shorts, by all accounts,

seems to be growing really fast and doing really well, but in the way that you would expect it to because it's attached to YouTube. Like, I don't know that it has hit sort of bigger than YouTube escape velocity in the way that,

like, Facebook marketplace is very successful because it's on Facebook, but is not sort of successful on its own. I think that's kind of what shorts is doing. But then even just this week, YouTube is getting some of Google's generative AI stuff to get summaries of videos that are in the, like, in search results and in the video pages. You can see what you're getting. They're adding YouTube videos to the SGE search generative experience AI stuff. Like YouTube is everything to everyone at all times. And then just kind of over here on the side, they're just ruthlessly copying TikTok and paying creators better. And it's just sort of nuts to watch all of that happen simultaneously. YouTube and Google generally are in this very odd moment where all of their incentives have been about patting things out for so long that now all the results are too long.

And like honestly, what TikTok offers you as a search customer is like it'll just tell you the answer like quickly in a way that a web page that's SEO optimized or a YouTube video that's padded out to get two midroles like won't. I will give you one very stupid example. We bought a jar of chili crisp and the lid is too tight. And I was like, how do you do the thing? You know, like, is it cold water or is a hot water? And I had that moment of like, I'm going to ask a search engine for this. And we picked TikTok. And now fully every other video I watch is about opening jars because TikTok

other than stupid. But it like, you know, just a piece. Like someone just told me the answer in like four seconds. Yeah. Whereas like I've watched a 10 minute YouTube video, I would have killed myself. You would have had to watch someone like start the video outside and then like walk into their house and then tell you the history of jars. Exactly. And yeah.

Right. Or you like search the regular Google search engine and you're like, okay, here's 40,000 words about jars. Right. And it's like every other heading is a question about jars. Like what are jars made of? And it's like I just like this is a very simple question. Like is it hot water or cold water? The answer by the way is hot water and it still didn't work.

It doesn't matter. We're going to get that jar up in Sunday. You get a butter knife and you jam it under the lid. Everything you say is so dangerous. I mean, ignore the bandit on my finger. That's a different range. Here's what you do. You start texting and driving while all trying to open a jar with a knife.

I still got my hands. I got my fingers. It's fine. You just put it in the oven. Turn it all the way up, see what happens. It's going to be fine. All I'm saying is, wait. You turn on all the gas on all your ranges.

Light and walk around with a match. The chili will be crisp. All I'm saying is it's kind of interesting to think of the internet as a pendulum between long things and short things. And like we've just been, like YouTube originally started with Charlie bit my finger, right? Like extremely short stupid videos. And the pendulum has swunged these like 10 minute videos. And now that sort of TikToks and reels and shorts are swinging that pendulum back. And basically only meta has figured out how to build a scaled business against it.

Yeah. It's not to say TikTok's $10 billion is not a scaled business. but you know, TikTok rickety for a lot of reasons. Do we ever hit that middle point though where it's just like... Middle videos. I don't think so. I mean, I can't think of a time we've been at that point, right? I mean, you can even look at it like the streaming has done that, right?

Everything got bigger and huger and then got smaller and became, you know, big, big TV shows. And then we got the limited series. Maybe like the limited series is the perfect middle of the actual like TV movie world. And we need the equivalent of. that for TikTok. Only that's the thing that's causing the writer's story. Well, yeah, there's that. There's no series.

There's no money in limited series, it turns out. Like, that's a real problem. This is the worst lightning round of all time. We've done two things. It's been 25 minutes. I'm done. That's it all I have. What's yours?

Okay, mine is, Sean has a really great review of the LG. I'm going to, I got to look at this guys. LG 27G-G-9-5-Q-E-hyphen B. And when people hear that name. It's sex. You want to go to Best Buy and ask for the LG-27G-G-R-95Q-E-E-Hive-B. It's great. Yeah, yeah.

It's a new 27-inch OLED display. And he's tested some of the other ones. There was an Assus one that has like kind of this, pretty much the same panel, but a little bit different. Like how you control it is different. But he really liked this one and feels like we're kind of hitting that point where you can say, yeah, I can go buy an OLED monitor. instead of a traditional monitor. And that's really exciting because OLED is typically better. But a lot of those growing pains OLED have had are still there.

It's got some issues like it's local dimming. You would think it would be really, really good, right? Because it's OLED. And so each pixel is controlled. But the minute things start to get bigger and bigger and wider and wider, it needs to start limiting that so it doesn't blow out all those pixels and create burn in and a lot of other problems. And when it starts to do that, it gets really, really dim and can just be

super unpleasant to look at. It sounds like they've done a good job of fixing that. It's still not perfect, but it's gotten a lot better. And so, I don't know. I have two of the previous really good LG monitors on my desk, and I love them. And now I have total FOMO and I wish I had this OLED, even though it's got some issues. It just seems cool. This piece and another one we're going to talk about about 3D file formats are like the reason the verge exists in my opinion. You read this piece. We talked last week about knowing people's bylines, you read this piece, it's Sean Hollister, just like all the way through,

it's great. And the exasperation that comes through because what these OLED panels, when you use them as monitors do, is they dim the entire panel when you have big fields of white. Right. Because they don't want to, as I was saying, you don't want to blow out or burn in.

So they dim the entire panel. And Sean is like, the problem is, all computer interfaces are mostly white. So you can just feel his exasperation in this review. Yeah. And he talked about babying the screen to not have that happen and not get burn in. And I so felt that, like, the thing you have where you know the potential problem, and every time it does that sort of artificial dim, you can feel yourself getting closer to it.

And so you start to like, you start to just move things around on your computer just to change the pixels. And it's like, I just, this is, I am. thinking about this monitor a lot more than feels necessary. Yeah. There's also a perfect Sean moment in the review where he puts an image slider in. And the image slider is just his desk setup with the old monitor and the new OLED monitor. It's exactly the same. And he's just excited that it's like exactly the same.

It's great. You should just read it. It's great. It's a really good piece. You're going to like you're going to get FOMO reading it because you're going to want it, even though he like points out every single flaw in it. Yeah. And I think it should be like a call-to-arm action for Windows and Apple to, like, fix their shit.

We had another piece this week by Victoria's song about how smartwatches this year are super iterative. And it's actually really interesting to read those things together because the iterative smartwatch is boring. Right. Like here's some minor updates to the Samsung watches. We've made the letters unsettlingly huge and added teeth to the displays. Fine. We think the Apple Watch is going to be super iterative this year. fine.

That's the boring iterative. What Sean's monitor piece is like, this is the best kind of iterative. Like you start with, let's put an OLED TV in your desk, and here's all the problems, and here's like the last step before the next iteration when this idea is complete. And this is almost the most exciting version of a product, right? Like, if you're into gadgets, this one right when you can clearly, okay, it's, and I think Sean lists like, fix these three things. in this category is ready.

Like, there's something really excited about that version of the iterative process versus the sort of like end state of phones that we appear to be in. And it's nice to see it's happened kind of fast, or it feels fast to be. Because we were seeing our first OLA displays, what, 2015, 2016? I think it was like the earliest ones. And it didn't work because when you shrink down big TV technology, it's actually really hard to shrink that down into a monitor that makes sense close to your face. That's why the two technologies aren't in lock,

sink at all times. And they're starting to figure it out. They're starting to invest in it and really sort it out. And people are buying it, which is also good because then the prices will hopefully go down and we can all buy them. Yeah. These are Sean's three things for the way. 100 nits of sustained brightness, which is related to that dimming issue, a warranty update

because the warranty doesn't cover Burnin, which is a decent sale to your point, Alex. Yeah, the hundred debts of extra brightness is going to be like that. That's going to be a real challenge because that's where OLED always falls is on brightness. It's where it struggles. And so I'll be really curious to see how they do that and if they do that and when they do that. But man, I'm excited. Like, Sean got me super hyped for this. I think it's great because we're definitely on this path of convergence between small TVs and computer monitors in a way that I think is really fun, especially because like my assumption is this is driven by people who sit at desks and play video.

video games and want something that looks like a TV and a computer monitor in one screen. And there are more and more of those people all the time. And this is the kind of thing that is sitting right at the middle of that. And I think, like, Samsung's doing all kinds of wild stuff with, like, a smart TV in one input and the other input, it's a computer monitor. I think that's very cool. But, like, OLED is the right answer, right? When we get it right, it's going to be OLED. And it does, it feels like we're just around the corner from that in a very cool way.

It's so close. I'm pumped to have like a 32-inch computer monitor slash television just sitting on my desk. It could be amazing. I cannot wait. And it's going to be the most – I mean, I think there's still going to be some challenges there, particularly around HDR. Because right now, the software side of HDR sucks still. Like Microsoft and Apple just aren't doing it very well. The game companies aren't doing it very well.

Nobody's kind of figured it out and settled on something consistent and pleasing to the eyeballs. And so I think we're still going to – that's where it's going to start to lag for – full TV replacement, but most people probably don't care about HDR as much as I do. So most people will probably be fine. It's just going to be like me and Sean over at a corner being like, ah, HDR's still not up to snuff. And that's okay. We're going to have a great time off around the corner.

All right. Eli, what's yours? I have two on the Vision Pro, which we haven't talked to in a while. So Apple's virtual reality headset, which they really do not want to call a virtuality headset. So one is a little one. They have opened up developer registrations and testing. So Mark German has some screenshots of the process you developers need to go through. Sign up for this.

You pick a headband size. You pick a light steel size. You have to go in physically to their testing centers. You get fitted. You get lenses. And you can try your apps on it. That's a lot. And he also reported, I'm just going to quote, here's Mark German at Bloomberg,

hearing so far the Vision Pro Developer Labs to test apps and actual hardware have been underfilled with small amounts of developers. Some developers are emphasizing company is not offering any East Coast sessions. Cooper Tino is the only. option for the entire United States. This makes sense to me. I just want to be clear about that. This product is so complicated. They have to fit it to you that you, of course, are starting as small as you can before you, like, roll it out at scale. Also, no one knows what to build for this. Yeah. So it just doesn't surprise me that development is starting slow, but that's a note.

And I think it's obvious that it's going to start slow. What's equally interesting to me is that coming up in September is Meta Connect, where they're probably going to announce the Oculus Quest 3, which is a scaled, you know, sells as many units. The Quest line has sold as many units as any game console. So you kind of have the two things happening in parallel. Apple's starting very small with a larger base of developers. It's like pretty excited. Meta already having application and like installed base scale with the quest. I think I know what's going to happen. I think Apple's going to be very successful. with the Vision Pro, you know, compared to the Quest, but who knows?

It's very expensive compared to the Quest, but they're starting really, really small. Do you think there's going to be like a little, like, shadow Apple developer conference around Connect? Because you have all of those developers down there near Cupertino. Do you think something's like that's going to happen? Well, that's also presumably only a couple of weeks after Apple's big fall event, where I suspect it will have a lot to say about things like the Vision Pro. Right. I don't know. I think the fall event for Apple looks like the iPhone.

Sure. Maybe a Mac. And they say nothing about the Vision Pro. It's unreleased headset with no developer support thus far. Maybe. Although, I don't know. I have two competing feelings about this. On the one hand, I think you're exactly right,

that Apple is starting small in every way. It's going to run most iPad apps right out of the box. So in that sense, it's just going to work, and everybody will, like, check the checkbox to make it work on the Vision Pro and do the clicky interface. It's going to work. Like your iPad works with iPhone apps. Yeah, and think about how many apps did that, right?

Like, that's, that will get you through a year or two. And then I think we're going to get to the point where a lot of these folks start to turn and say, okay, what can this thing be? But I was really surprised after the launch, just polling developers I talked to. And the number of them who were like, yeah, we'll probably end up doing something. But at this moment, it doesn't really feel like a priority for us. So I think there's going to be an interesting, like, chicken and egg thing going on over the next six months. And I don't really know how that's going to shake out.

Yeah, I feel like Apple probably needs to be a little, like, they need to be more proactive. I totally get why they're not. That makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, if everybody's looking at your product waringly and like, are like, is this a total boondoggle? This is the Apple boondoggle. You probably do want to be a little aggressive with getting some really cool killer apps on there and in courting those developers who aren't necessarily based in Cooperino or near to Cooper Tener to come out and try it out. I just think they got time.

Yeah, that's true. In order to try this thing out, you need to sit down, have it fitted to your head, and special lenses made for your glass. Like, that is just a slow, expensive process that you are going to try to refine and optimize as much as you can before you, like, put them in every Apple store. And I think that's, like, their first problem. I think this is the inherent problem with every face computer is that you have to wear them on your face. Yeah.

And then I think the bigger problem is that Apple itself, outside of what if we did cool NBA things, has not really demoed a killer app? You know, like the killer app that I hear people talk about is I'm standing at my desk mirroring my Mac. Yeah. On to five gigantic virtual displays. And it's like, that's not good enough. You know, like, that's cool. I mean, that's not nothing, but that's not, that doesn't get Apple where it thinks it's going here. But isn't that why you want to court developers?

It's because maybe one of them has the really good idea. idea that's a killer app. Yeah, but you got to know what you're courting. That's true. Like, you can't just be swiping right on all the developers to take this courtship metaphor in a horrible direction. You can't, you got to have a type. I don't know.

I mean, we had years of fart apps and beer pouring before everybody figured out the iPhone app store. But the difference there was that a lot of people were able to get it and use it and say, oh, I understand new things I can do with this. The challenge that this is going to be that it's really expensive. their biolicons aren't going to be that many of them. It's going to be super complicated to get set up for and start using. And so just the hurdles to getting one in your hands so that you can start to dream about what it might be for are just so much higher than anything Apple has built before.

That I wonder how it will change things. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, that far type era is really instructive, right? Because everyone jokes about it. Remember that app I am rich, read download an app and you can just like... It costs $1,000, right? Wasn't that the thing?

I think it might have been more. I think it might have been like $100. thousand dollars. But there was an app called I'm rich where you can download it and you can hit a button and pay a bunch of money to the developer and it would just put up a badge that said I'm rich. One of the greatest ideas for an application in all of history. Agreed. Like just truly one of the greatest ideas for an application on history. And Apple is like, we can't have this. It's a joke. The fart apps are a joke. And if you just think about where we've come, the two categories that have succeeded and driven the iPhone are social networking

and free to play games. Yeah. And everything else is kind of around it, right? Like the Ubers and lifts of the world are revolutions in their way, but they're just kind of a duopoly that is stagnant. Like all the other stuff pales in comparison the size of free-to-play games and social networking apps. And it's hard to see even what the fart apps look like on the $3,500 Vision Pro. I was going to say, what is the fart app equivalent going to be on a face computer? All right. That's a reader email. Send us your ideas. Yes, let us know. I'm actually very curious. And I'm confident that many of our readers have Oculus quests, they have PSVRs.

Tell us what you think the fart apps are going to be and what you think the TikToks are going to be of the Vision Pro. Love that. Because I truly cannot tell you the answer. And I also have a PSVR too. I don't think Grand Turismo VR is going to be the TikTok of the Vision Pro. As much as I want it to be, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think so either.

Neil, what's your other one? So the other one is my other favorite story of the week. Another just perfect verge story. It's a format war, y'all. Apple announced the Vision Pro platform is going to join the Alliance for OpenUSD, which is a standards body that's developing interoperable 3D tools

and file formats. That's Nvidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Pixar. They're basically developing interoperable 3D tools file formats. Here's the object formats. Here's how they're defined. You can move them between these platforms. You can manipulate them between these platforms.

I love this. It also means that the apps apps you use, like Maya Houdini Autodesk 3Ds, Adobe Substance 3D designers. They can interoperate. They can use the same files. NVIDIA can accelerate these graphics. This is notably one of the first times you see Apple and Nvidia working together, and they obviously have common purpose in doing so, which is surprising. These companies have not historically liked each other.

But what's funny is there's another standards group. There's the Metaverse Standards Forum, which has Epic and meta in it. And, like, they're also working with USDA. They've got working groups to, like, look at this file format. But here we are. We did it. We did HD DVD and Blu-ray again for the Metaverse. I'm so happy.

It seems like I'm guessing USD is going to become the basis of a lot of things, just given the people who are supporting it. But this notion that the 3D Internet, the Metaverse, should have interoperable file formats that sort of every computer can use and all these applications, can manipulate is a big idea. Everyone agrees it's a good idea. They keep calling it like HTML for 3D. It's far from settled.

Like there's a long way from here to there. And so you just see like every other standard, everyone agrees, oh, all these computers should use HTML, all these TV, TV, who's going to be in charge of HTML CEC? And should that work well? And the answer's like, no, no, no. We'll see.

So what, to that point, what is the right meta? afford for this? Because I was trying to figure this out. Like, is it, should we talk about USDA the way we talk about, like, coding languages, like JavaScript or HTML and the fact that that works across lots of apps? Should we talk about it, like PDFs or JPEGs, like file formats that everybody kind of agrees to understand? I was thinking of like video containers, not even codex, containers. Okay. Like, the AVI versus MP4 kind of generation of things. Okay. And that turned into a gigantic mess.

So that's discouraging. Yeah, and then VLC came and saved us all. Here's the description from Nvidia, which is technical but easy to understand. OpenUSD supports the requirements of building virtual worlds like geometry, cameras, lights, and materials. It also includes features necessary for scaling to complex datasets, and it's tremendously extensible, enabling the technology to adapt to workflows beyond visual effects. So you've got a 3D scene. You need to describe some objects in it, the materials and textures of those objects,

where the cameras are, the geometry of the scene itself. Like, that's just a lot of data structures that you can standard. So that sounds like coding language to me. That's more like file. It's like you have a word file, and it has some structured data that describes the font and the line breaks and the whatever, and then the sort of the text is standardized. Dot doc, by the way, or dot. DocX, one of the most controversial file formats of all time, right?

Because it's just text, but until... a while ago, it was a proprietary file format. So, like, you just got this, like, issue where you have these proprietary file formats, people develop in them, and then you've got files that only the application can read, and that creates tremendous lock-in. I think this industry is saying, okay, that's bad. We know that's bad for a huge number of reasons, particularly consumer adoption, right? Like, you want, if you believe the Matthew Balls of the world, that the metaverse will

enable you to drop into the already created 3D world of a Pixar movie and like swing a lightsaber around. The thing that the Pixar animators are working in has to be all the way back compatible to the Vision Pro. Right. Otherwise, you have to go and remake, you have to redo that work in the Vision Pro's format. And that, I think everybody understands that that seems like a huge waste of money. Well, this is the kind of thing you do when the industry is small and you're still in the like rising tide lifts all boats phase of things. And when this gets bigger and there's more money and walling off your walled garden, like for that reason, it's not surprising to me that meta is not part of this, right? Like meta has more reason to say, we don't need to be compatible.

People are already doing our thing than some others. And I would not be shocked if this becomes more contentious over time for that reason. Oh, man. I really hope they become competing file formats and I really hope how they open and are broken for the normal consumer is more like doc than it is like video because video files you try to open it just wouldn't work whereas doc you'd open it you're the weird characters what's happening here and that's what I want but like in a 3D space strapped to my face yeah that just sounds delightful in a weird way oh my god I want it Alex wants to be like lost in a bad trip laser bomb texting while driving yeah it's That's great.

But you know, to that same point, you can see why Pixar is like, okay, we spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars creating the world of cars. And we want to make a video game where you can race around the cars track. I don't want it, but yeah. Well, sure. But then we can just take all of that rendering work, all of that scene modeling work, and put it on the Vision Pro as a video game. And if you don't have some common file formats, like that becomes more costly than it's worth.

Right. And that's just like, that's one vision of the sort of 3D future. But you can see why Pixar or Epic or Unreal, which are deep in Hollywood, are making that push now. Totally. By the way, it's lightning around has taken 45 minutes. We should take a break. But first, I just want to say, Eli, that anything that allows me to drop into a Pixar movie with a lightsaber is a huge technological victory. And we should all be in favor of it.

You got to go listen to the Matthew Ball episode of Decoder. This is like what he was talking about the whole time. It is a fascinating vision of the future. I have no idea if it's a good idea. The good news is all that's owned by Disney. So is it possible? Maybe. We'll see. All right, we have to take a break from this interminable lightning round.

We're going to go back and read some reader emails. We'll get 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,

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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.

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So we've been asking for emails lately. It's been really fun reading them all. Please keep sending us emails. Vergecast at theverge.com. We love it. We asked a couple weeks ago for people who are deep in the Samsung ecosystem to email us. It has been a deluge. And I just want to call this out specifically.

I've been asking for years for people who are hardcore Android games. phone users to email us. We have never gotten one email. I asked for people who use the S-Pen to email us, and we get like five a day. You're going to get four emails tomorrow about the Razor phone. Just get ready. I'm just saying, if you use an Android gaming phone to play games, where are you? Because the S-Pen people are out in force.

And we've just never heard from the gaming phone people. Maybe they don't listen to the Vergecast. Who knows? But there's your data point for today. Okay, let's do some emails. I want to start, I'm not going to read this whole one at all. I'm just going to start with an email from someone named Mo for this reason. They call themselves a Samsung fanboy or, quote, a Samboy.

Yes. And just threw it out there as if that's a thing that everyone knows, which is just perfect. It is now. So thank you for Sam Boy. David, do you want to read Randy's email? Sure. We got an email from Randy that says, I'm one of those Samsung tablet sickos

and wanted to chime in. I really appreciate the extent to which... So Samboys and Sickos. Already from the jump. Incredible emails to receive. They've all really leaned into being sickos, and I really appreciate it. It says, I switched from having surface tablets to using a Samsung Galaxy tab S7 Plus,

and the reason for that is one piece of software. Clip Studio Paint. It went, which is like three words to mean the same thing. But anyway... It went from being a desktop-only app to being available on Galaxy slash Android, and now I could finally have a normal tablet experience and get to be productive and creative

doing illustration on the same slim tablet. Obviously, that means I'm using the S-Pen on it all the time. Thank you, Samsung, for including it with the tablet and not requiring me to purchase it separately, which is a very good Appleburn. Great job, Randy. It's my laptop, really. I take it to work with me

so I can have some videos going while about my desk, pop open clip studio to do an illustration or get a doodle down on paper, open up Kindle to read the newest manga volume, and when you need to prepare a D&D, campaign. I'll snap over to Dex to better multitask at a coffee shop and get it all done. It's the best mobile computer I've ever had and I didn't have to give Apple a penny. This person is 100% either a Samsung employee or should be a Samsung employee.

Because that is the best pitch of all time for Samsung devices. Call Randy now. Or it's Dan Seifert, the only other Dex fan that I know. He just changed his name. His burner account. Dan D. Sefer. This is incredible. So first of all, I just want to start with the end there.

I didn't have to give Apple a penny. This is a real theme in the Samsung emails. Yeah. I don't like Apple, so I'm in the Samsung ecosystem. That motivates more people than you could possibly imagine, at least from our emails. Obviously, this is a self-selecting group. The people who chose to email us about their love of Samsung, but there's a commonality there, which is nobody wants to use Apple stuff, and that's here.

The flip to Dex, that's the turn. It's so good. Oof, yeah, that's beautiful. I love it. We found him. The guy who uses Dex. Thank you, Randy. He's a sicker.

But I also, I'll snap over to Dex to better multitask at a coffee shop and get it all done. Does that imply that you're bringing a monitor and a keyboard and mouse to a coffee shop, plugging it in? I can only hope so. Yeah, that's the correct answer. Or you've got the flippy cover thing. Every tablet is that tablet now. Yeah, true. But I will say this makes the right case for Samsung stuff, right?

like Samsung devices do more stuff than anybody else's devices. Does it do it all super elegantly and beautifully? No. Does it do it all? Yes. Yeah. Somewhere in here it could be like, and then I got home and I mirror cast in an LGTV.

Well, you can do that. Got them options. Yeah. It also has an IRBlaster for when I need to control my mini split. Like, okay. And there's something to that. There is something to that. I will note that there's a killer app involved here.

Right? There's Clip Studio Paint, which if you don't have that killer app and it's only on the iPad or it's only on a Windows computer, this all falls apart for you. So next we have Mark who wrote to us, this is a tale of woe. I'm just going to put this out there. Mark says, I'm a U.X designer. Pen displays are helpful in my work. I realize I'm not typical. Which, Mark, my friend. You're not alone, Mark. Yeah, there's a community of U.X designers using pen displays. We'll hook you up with some subrides. Mark says, I've tried Samsung tablets and phones with S-Pen since the beginning of them. The emoji I think of is the Deter face with, you know, the line. Just the line.

I tried to like them. I use an iPad Pro and a Wacom Sintake 32 Pro daily now. I use a USB flash drive so I'm not stuck in Apple's cloud for my content. I'm done with Samsung Galaxy tabs and notes. Wow. And then he says, I should be able to use any device, not lose content, but the devices don't last. Nothing is on my devices for very long. I want the good pens, which are Apple and Wacom.

I try not to be a prisoner of proprietary clouds. Pretty good. Yes. That's a VergeCash shirt. I want that shirt. Mark, as a designer, if you want to design a I'm not a prisoner of proprietary cloud shirt for us, we'll sell it and we'll throw you a cut. And then I use an iPad to read or sketch comfortably. I use big screen skits.

This is the counter argument, right? The Samsung tablets can do everything. People are really attracted to them. Again, my dream is to edit the entire verse. by circling copy in red. If you could make that happen for me, Google Docs, I'm golden. I'll buy whatever tablet you want. But then you actually do it.

You're like, oh, this is pretty wanky. Alex, I think this is like your E-Inc tablet story every month. Like, this is my dream. I bought the newest one. Ugh. And we like move on. It sucks. I love it.

I also think that model that he describes at the end is kind of a great way to think about a lot of devices. I should be able to drive over any device and not lose content. Love that. I want to use the good pens. Love that. Don't be a prisoner proprietary clouds.

Excellent. And then I use big screens to get stuff done. Should also be a VERS T-shirt. That's a mug. That's like a, you walk into the meeting, you put your mug down. I love it. That's great.

All right. Next, we have an email from a reader named Alexa. I'm going to have my friend, Alex read this email, and you decide who actually sent this email to us. It's not me. I don't like the name Alexa, because it's not my name. And then the smart speaker always confuses us. I got my Samsung Galaxy S-23 Ultra in March, April time, and was very excited for the built-in S-pin.

It felt like a real hark back to the old Samsung champ I had as a young teen with a wee stylist. Again, you decide who Alexa is. is in this story. Not me. But, Alexa, we should be friends. For the first month or two, it was great. Used it often. Reconnected with my creative side and doodled a bit.

Took notes and meetings. The usual stuff. The killer app of the pin, however, lies in a more unconventional use case. Seriously, Alexa, we can be besties. It is the absolute perfect size to poke down joints. Yes. The perfect, and this is bold, the perfect width. Four or five months in, the S-pin is used.

every single day. But I can't remember the last time I touched the screen. A perfectly portable pokey. Everywhere you go, it's there for you. I got to go get a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is what I learned from this. A perfectly portable pokey sounds like a sentence we can't say on this show as very many times. I love this email so much. So good.

I'm such an old man, I read this email and I was like, her elbow hurt? Like, is she just tapping her joints? Very long, long look at it. Listen, Samsung devices do all the things. Yeah. Like, you think this isn't on a spec sheet somewhere in South Korea? Come on. They know.

It's important to get those joints rolled perfectly. All right. My request is we should transition away from the Samsung emails. Can we play LaserBong as a transition song, please? I can't see Andrew's face, but I think it's the Dider emoji right now. All right. So we have a couple more. these are some of my favorite. So we've been asking for consumer wars, like product wars,

fanboy wars. The Rainx versus water versus other brands, windshield washer fluid, continues to rage in our emails. The Rainx people are furious that we've acknowledged anything else. They're very mad at us. RainX bugwash, by far, the fans are out of control. I was in the gas station recently. I needed to buy some windshield washer fluid. I didn't. I just bought. bought whatever was there, and I literally felt bad. That is the weirdest feeling I've ever had as a purchaser of anything. I was like, oh, it's not rain. And it's like, they got to me.

You just vindicated all of them. Well, no, that's just bullying. I don't think they just, I was just like, I felt, I felt weird about wearing the wrong shoes to elementary school. That was exactly that feeling. I do not think it is any more or less significant. My windshield wiper performance. However, if you continue to have feelings, email us, I'm dying to know.

Here's my favorite email of this entire Consumer Wars conversation. It might be one of the best emails we have ever gotten. It vindicates everything I know to be true about the Birch. So good. It's from Zachary. I run a pool cleaning service in Southern California. I have listened every week since the NGadgett podcast days, and I thought I would share the argument about which high-end carbon fiber pool pole is best.

Yes. When you service pools all day long, your pole is your most used tool. Yeah, it is. They have been aluminum for decades, but in the last five years, carbon fiber has hit the scene. This is a huge upgrade causing less back strain during heavy use. And then he lists three categories. There's the wrong. There are those who only care about specs.

and they choose the primate pool pole. They think the only spec that matters is weight. They ignore a harder to use latch, the poorer construction, and the inferior customer service. I just want to say that the primate pool pole is not like a dig. That's the actual name of the product. And that's where you spec monsters.

Then he lists the best. The hyperpole by ultimate pool tools is the vastly superior pole. Yes, it does weigh a few ounces more than the original, but that leaves out so much. The hyper pole has the cleverly named Hyperdrain that allows water collected in the pole to flat out instantly as you removed from the water.

The weight savings from the other pole is quickly outdone by the water weight savings compared with the better latches and the great customer service, easy decision. Yeah. This man is furious about pool poles, and I love it. And then we get to the silly. This is his label.

This is the poll that would have been released by Will I. Incredible. This is the best part of this whole email. That tells you everything you need to know and is also Will I.N.'s legacy. And that makes me so happy. Just wait until you hear this description. The skim light carbon light is needed by no one and solves no problems. Instead of a tried and true circular tube, it is a ten-sided decagon.

preventing you from spinning it in your hand. It also has pre-drilled set points, only allowing it to click into place in certain spots. End of email. Point made. It's silly. End of email. We reached that back to Zachary.

I'm dying to find the forums where this is all being argued out. If you want to write 5,000 words about the introduction of carbon fiber into the pool industry and how it's torn that industry apart, just email me. Anytime. We will commission that story anytime. I love it. I love that this exists. This is the, like, in many ways, the purpose of the internet is allowing people to be their best selves arguing about carbon fiber pool tools.

Oh, my God. These tools are so expensive. It's so good. Read some great surprises out. Okay. So the hyperpole, that's the good one. Yeah. That's 275.

275. That's the one you want. It's 275, and it's great. It's also sold out. Looks like a lightsaber, by the way. Huge fan. I would get no work done with this. The Prime A, 3X, ranges from 25499 to 32499, which is just...

I'm telling you. I think that's the special edition Kevlar weave? No, that's only 299. Is it the teal tiki also 299? It's good. I'm trying to figure out which one is so expensive. I'm saying, if you are a... budding reporter or journalist out there, and you're like, I can nail this feature about the

war that has taken over the pool cleaning industry because of carbon fiber. Hit us out. Send me a note. Send me a pitch. We'll run that story. First slot in the hero. We'll send it to the awards. I will send that story to the Pulitzer Committee.

You just let me know. Alex, I found the most expensive primate pole. It's the psychochimp one. And it means the pole is decorated with what. look like board ape NFTs basically. It's, this is so spectacular. All right, we got to get off pool tools. I'm just saying if you want to write that story,

just hit me up. All right, we got two more. They're both A plus. David, you want to take the next one? Yeah, Neely, this one I think is directed, especially to you. This is from Jonathan. It says there are two big manufacturers

of premium woodworking hand tools in North America. Yes. Lye Nielsen and Lee Valley slash Veritas. You know, those. the big brands. Yeah. Yeah.

Lye Nielsen mostly makes souped up versions of 100-year-old Stanley designs. Lee Valley slash Veritas make more modern takes on traditional tools with adventurous designs and materials. You can instantly tell why there's a huge like holy war between these two companies, by the way. Like cool versions of the old thing or new ideas. Like, mm, those sides never like each other. Anyway, Lianelson is preferred by the well-heeled traditionalist.

Lee Valley Tools could be at home on the robo workbench. in the bat cave. Hand tool specific. When I think of Batman, by the way, I think of premium handcrafted in Woodward King. Yeah, it's amazing. That's how he gets his belt. Jonathan continues.

Please, there's lots more Jonathan to get through. Hand tool specific vaporware bonus. Several years ago, Lymeh's sent, showed a sample of a plow plane they were seeking to manufacture. It was based on a highly collectible Miller patent plow plane. That's a fun phrase to say.

The internet message words went crazy, of course, and nothing. Lyon Nielsen stopped showing the sample. Eventually, if you asked about it at one of their traveling tool shows, the presenter would give you a dirty look and ignore the question. Yes, we are talking about a tool that only makes inset grooves in boards. Yes, this is something you can do with any $99 router with speed and precision. Yes, Lee Valley has since released three different plow pranes,

ranging in price from $160 to $440 before additional cutters or specific attachments. End of email. Amazing. I would absolutely buy one. Yeah. Yeah. Just look at this old thing. It's cool.

Well, you can't get it. It's vaporware. I know, but I would if I could. Okay. I just want to unpack this email for one second. In order to know this information, people have to go out and get it. So, for example, the sentence,

the message boards went crazy and then nothing implies quite a bit of monitoring of message boards. Uh-huh. Just putting that out there. Second, they stopped showing the sample. If you asked about it at one of their traveling tool shows, you would get a dirty look and ignore the question, implies that multiple people at multiple tool shows in multiple locations asked about this tool and received a dirty look

and then collated that information on the internet such that it is now a fact. This is the Snyder cut of hand tools. I'm just saying, that's incredible. The people who do this are Taylor Swift fans waiting to see when not. 1989 Taylor's version will come out and fans of the plow plane from Lee Nelson. I love it. I just love that everyone is the same. If you use a tool long enough,

like this is why the version is obsessed with like mechanical keyboards and OLED screens because that's what we like touch and look at all day. But if you touch and look at plow planes all day, you're going to get this obsessed about plow plans. I love it. Everyone is the same. You are all our people. Do you think the Lai Nelson people are like forum bombing here?

Like we have three of them ranging in price that Batman can use them. All right. One more. When I think of Verge stories, you all know how obsessed I'm with Google and Zelda. The combo platter of Google and Zelda. Alex, you want to take this one? Yeah. So this one's from John.

He loves the show. Hey, John. We love you. And your most recent Friday episode, you were talking about autocorrect and how it's changing in iOS 17. And it reminded me of one of my favorite weird things that I've been seeing happening on Google lately. I've been playing The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom far too much. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and he's not. I think half of this Vergecast does.

How sexy is your link, John? Yeah. That's not where this email is going. Please do not send his emails about sexy link. I'll take your Samsung emails all day. No sexy link. Send them all to David. Being not very good at video games, I've had to look up hints and guides regularly.

And as shorthand, folks are generally. typing T-O-T-K for Tears of the Kingdom, plus whatever Shrine, Quest, boss battle that they're looking for. I can confirm. I do this all the time. So iOS doesn't recognize T-O-T-K as a word because it's not, and auto-completes it as York. So now on Google, if you start to type the name of a shrine or a quest,

one of the autocompletes will inevitably include York at the end because people are hitting search too quickly. This is so good. It's true, by the way. You can start typing Glioc and it'll complete to York. That's amazing. It's incredible. This is like the layered emergent behaviors here are out of control, right?

It's wonderful. So first you have to, iOS, maybe Android 2 doesn't recognize this thing, regardless of how much they're claiming there's machine learning and whatever, they haven't figured out that TOTK is a thing that is happening. So the keyboards are auto completing to York. And then they're sending that information at Google, which is collecting millions and millions of searches for things like, like how to beat the Wind Temple and Tears the Kingdom and saying, okay, it's Wind Temple, York. Google does not understand that that is an iOS auto-complete. And so it's just taking that data as real

and turning that into an autocomplete suggestion for millions of other people to see, not understand at all, and potentially click on this well. It is bonkers. We're like one small step away from there being websites with headings that say, how do you complete the Wind Temple York?

Yeah, Glorbo. Yeah. This is the Glorbo situation. There's going to be AI websites looking at Google trends. I'm going to tell the Polygon people. Like a huge amount of Polygonne traffic right now is here's the Kingdom Guides. And I'm like, you guys got to start sneaking some York stuff. Absolutely.

It's a lovely place. Really nice Anglican choir. It's perfect. By the way, you have gotten a bunch of emails about iOS AutoCorrect in general. I will say that now I'm paying attention to it. It does seem worse. yesterday. I was actually speaking, Dieter. I was texting with Deeter and I said, send it to me. And it just auto-completed it to Messenger.

So it just said, send it to Messenger. Like, it was very confusing. Like, why? But I can't tell if that's, like, I'm noticing it, like, whatever that bias is called. But we have gotten lots of emails from people saying it's much worse. Just don't correct it for a few weeks and see how your friends are noticed in the group chat. I definitely got called out the other day. They're like, Alex, you're auto-corrects going through it right now. It didn't. It just is just like nonsense. Well, we'll see. So we're a month away from the next version of iOS. Maybe it'll get better. Maybe it'll get worse. Who knows what happened? Keep sending us emails about that one. Yeah, please keep sending us emails about, especially

all if you have specific weird autocorrect things that are happening. We're trying to figure out ways to investigate this. This is a weird thing to try and actually pin down an answer on. But one thing we need is lots and lots of bizarre autocorrect examples. So if you get a weird one, send us a screenshot and tell us everything. Also, if you are playing games on your Android gaming phone, send us an email. No one's ever done it. The S-Pen people are out here just smoking it up.

Andrew Gaming people, as far as I can tell it, that's not existing. All right, that's it. We have to take a break. This is really fun. Send us more emails. We're going to read more emails in the show. David's already doing it on the Wednesday show all the time, right? It's great.

It's the best part of the show. Every time. I love it. If all we do for the rest of the show is respond to reader or feedback, we'll be happy. But that said. Or call the hotline. 866, Vorge11. Call the hotline.

Yeah. Hotline and email us. Vergecastleverge.com. Love it. We'll be back. We'll do another. It'll be a quick lightning around this time. We're going to get through it.

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It's going to be an actually fast lighting room. We're going to do it under 45 minutes. It's going to be amazing. Kranz, I think Alex has the best one. Go ahead.

Oh yeah. I am absolutely obsessed with this. My brother is in the food industry. So anytime like food industry and tech converge, I get really,

really excited. Mr. Beast is suing virtual dining concepts because that's the company that kind of arranges Mr. Beast Burger, his Uber Eats, takeout delivery, hamburger joints. And he's suing him because according to the lawsuit, the burgers are, the food is revolting. And likely the worst burger the person had ever had.

Also, not just according to the lawsuit, according to people who ordered those burgers. Yeah. And also inedible. Like, it's just full of insults. And the pictures are absolutely revolting. you'll be totally disgusted. And I just keep thinking about this and wondering why this all happened. And we understand why it happened.

Mr. Beast, it was 2020. Restaurants were in dire straits. Everybody I know was unemployed. Like my brother just didn't work for six months. And so they were like, okay, how can we help restaurants? Well, let's open a lot of ghost kitchens where we can ship food out via seamless, via Uber Eats. And you can get your food. And the restaurants get to stay open.

And everybody wins. And so that's what they did. And these ghost kitchens just proliferated. They were everywhere. And virtual dining concepts was like, okay, cool, we can partner with people and make their brands take off there. Virtual dining concepts was started by one of the guys who did Planet Hollywood. So he, like, knows his way around branding and churning out horrible food to the masses. Yeah, I was going to say, but does he know his way around good food?

And so, of course, when you're thinking, I want to start a really cool business project involving food, I'll go to that guy. And that's what Mr. Beasts, James Donaldson, did. He went to this guy. They were quickly everywhere. I know people who were accidentally ordering them because they'd see like Mr. Beast Burger and they see these gorgeous pictures of burgers. And then they'd get just slop to their houses. Wait, I just want to call out the Twitter thread guys when Mr. Beast Burger launched had a field day. Oh, yeah.

Right? They were like, here's the future of all marketing. Here's why Mr. Beast Burger is poised to take over from McDonald's. One of 945 thread. they've been dead silent since this lawsuit came out. Yeah. Everybody was obsessed with ghost kitchens. Like this was the new thing.

Yeah. Because it's really hard to, like, it's hard for one restaurant to be consistent every night. It's really, really hard for wet restaurant, right? It is virtually impossible. In Wendy's and McDonald's and all of them, the food may sometimes be disgusting. Everybody has their own takes, but it's fairly consistent. Even they struggle with consistency. And Mr. Beast was like, yeah, I'm going to come in with the planet Hollywood guy.

We're also going to be consistent burgers. His pitch in the beginning in that COVID time was really interesting, right? Yeah. It was all these mom and pops are struggling. I'm going to come in with this marketing muscle. Anyone can sign up. We'll send you the kit. Burgers are easy to make relatively.

We'll send you the materials and the stickers and the packaging. And your mom and pop can be turbocharged by my marketing muscle. Right. So anyone can make Beast burgers was the idea. Yeah. Right. A lot of Jimmy's brand is altruism, and there's however much controversy associated with that brand and whatever. But that is the core of his thing, right?

It's like, I'll help a lot of people and I'll get rich along the way. Cool. What's fascinating here is like, it should be relatively easy to make burgers and have them not be raw. And somehow it wasn't. Right? Like, if you just open seamless or grubhub or whatever in the average city, you don't pick Mr. Beast Burger and you just pick some. restaurant and order some cheeseburger, the chances of it being raw are very low.

And somehow, the chances of the Mr. Beast burger being raw were very high. And that's the whole thing here that I just do not understand. So what was happening was ghost kitchens because it's not attached to the restaurant's brand, the restaurant. Oh, they don't have to care as much. Yeah, they don't have to care. And if you don't care, like, quality goes out the window. And so quality...

You get your, like, idiot nephew to make the burgers. Because they're Beast Burger's that doesn't come back on you. Yeah. You're like, oh, you go over to the Beast Burger, like, kitchen and you do all of that. We're going to actually go make money and build our brand and just use that to subsidize ourselves. And we've seen that happen, like, a lot of ghost kitchens. This was the way it was. Like, there was one in my old neighborhood, and you'd walk in, and the food's really good.

And then you'd, like, go try to order from there on, like, seamless. And there were six different restaurants with the exact same address because they were just turning out this slop to keep, like, their actual core really delicious business. We have a great Josh Jezza piece about the Chucky Cheese of It All. What was the name? Hold on. The Chucky Cheese of It All should be the title of somebody's memoir. I don't know who. It should.

So we have a great Josh Jaze's story about chicken wings and ghost kitchens. We'll link to it and how many ghosts chickens to make chicken wings and why chicken wings are proliferate. It's because they're actually easy to make and they're cheap. Yeah. By the way, the chicken wing story, we talked to our background policy before. You know how we don't let press people be on background. They have to use the real names. Chicken wing story is like,

pushed me over the edge. Because, like, one of the big food delivery companies would only talk to Josh, like, in secret. And they would only discuss the popularity of chicken wings. And we were like, why? Why can't we attribute you saying chicken wings are very popular? That was the one that, like, broke me. They've slapped back.

Like, they're telling, they're saying, no, he wanted, like, he's been bullying us. He's trying to renegotiate the deal. He's bullying us. He's being mean to us. And Mr. Beast Burger brand will continue on as long as they hold that contract. We'll never stop. Yeah. We'll never stop using your name and likeness to sell cheese.

Very good. I'll tell you my lawyer brain is this lawsuit inevitably settles. If this lawsuit gets to a jury, the American legal system has completely failed. I say that in the context of the former president of United States being indicted this week. You know, that'll happen, whatever. If Mr. Beast Burgers gets to a trial, the American legal system has failed. Because this thing should completely settle. It should never get to a trial.

Okay. My lightning round, Chris Welch, big scoop this week. Sonos moved two hitting in September of stereo sound, 24-hour battery life, and importantly, USBC audio in. Hell yeah. Which is super cool. We're beginning to see that in more and more places. Also, because it's a portable speaker of big battery, USBC port can charge a phone. Very cool.

But you can charge your phone from your gigantic Bluetooth speaker? Yeah, because it's also a gigantic battery. Oh, that's awesome. That's the first time ever that a Sono speaker being humongous actually feels like a good idea to me. I'm in on this now. It has two tweeters in it, so it's stereo sound. They've re-optimized the controls. It's got automatic true play, all this stuff.

But yeah, it's the battery that I think is particularly cool. And, of course, it can do Bluetooth audio as well. And the big upgrade here is you can do Bluetooth and Wi-Fi simul. simultaneously, which is pretty cool. Chris Welch, as ever, living in the AC events at Sonos HQ. It's a good scoop. That's very good. All right, David, take us home.

Mine is more a recommendation than anything else. I just want to let everybody know that ESPN is doing its The Ocho thing again. The history of this is that it was a joke they made in the Dodge Ball movie in like 2004. And then like 12 years later, ESPN decided, oh, we'll actually do it. And we'll use this as like a one or two day thing to show all the sports. we don't usually show on TV. So it's everything from like spike ball to like musical chairs and all kinds of like insane sports you'd never see on TV. It is the single most fun thing you will ever watch on sports television.

And one of the things that they're doing is the Excel World Championships. And I have found myself deep in the world of competitive Excel over the last few months. Like getting to know some of the folks involved. They're doing a huge season this year. They did this on ESPN last summer. and it was like a big viral hit. People got really excited because you see competitive Excel on TV and you immediately go, what in the world is going on.

So they're having a big season this year. The culmination is going to be this big thing at the esports arena in Las Vegas. It's going to be a whole huge thing. But as you're listening to this on Friday morning, it's airing at 7 a.m. So if you're listening to this very early, you might get a chance to see it live.

But otherwise, it will be on YouTube. It'll be on ESPN. Competitive Excel is significantly more fun than you think. It's basically like puzzle solving using Excel, and if you're the kind of person who likes to solve puzzles, it's extremely fun. And you've just never seen anybody get so excited about Excel ever in your life. And I love it very much. David, in your piece, you call it the Sheeter Bowl.

Is that true? No, God, no, they don't call it that. No. I came up with like 30 or 40 different dumb ideas about what you might call this, but I think merge madness is the one that I have come back to as my favorite. that in the V lookup cup. Yeah. I was very proud of both of those.

These are very good. I was really hoping these were all the actual names. Guys, just take that from David Free. Yeah, you can have it. That is public domain courtesy of David Pierce. Please take that from me. But yeah, it's the Ocho, I think, is running through the weekend, if I'm not mistaken. And there's all kinds of wild stuff going on.

But the ESPN stuff should be up probably as you're hearing this. And it's extremely delightful. Competitive belt sanding. Yeah, dude. This is what I'm saying. It's the same as the tools. Like, imagine anything in the world. And odds are there is somebody who does it for a living and thus has really strong opinions about it.

And there are probably people who do it competitively. And that kicks ass. Mullet championships. Oh, my God. This is what's going to say of ESPN, by the way. I should just do this the whole time. Millet championships all day. The pillow fight championship is on this weekend.

Like, come on. I'm there for it. That's very good. I can't believe we haven't been running the fake ESP music the whole time. We should have started and stopped the show. Andrew, can we get a few more minutes of guitar solo, please? Hard no from Andrew. All right.

That's it. We've gone way over, as always. A bunch of cool stuff on the site. Speaking of Andrew, he's got a great piece on the original Zenith clicker remote, which is ultrasonic. When he pushed the button, it hit an aluminum rod. That's how it controlled the TV. Super cool tech, ancient idea, of course.

go read that really good. We've got a explainer and what's going on with the incandescent light bulb ban, which is like refuses to die, but it's also dead, whatever. And there's some news about Nintendo's next-gen console on the site. You should go read that too.

And then importantly, we are doing Land of the Giants, Tesla, with former Verge transportation reporter Tamara Warren and Patrick George, they are deep in it. They are getting so much access to all kinds of people

who have worked in and around Tesla for years. It is a monster season in that show. The Tesla shockwave, that's what's called. In fact, it's so good. We're going to feed drop it on Wednesday in this feed. You get to check it out. So that's really cool. Look forward to that. All that site looks great. Go listen to it. I promise you. It's the year of the Linux test stuff. It's all happening. That's it. That's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters.

That's it. We'll see you next week.