The Vergecast - Samsung shows off Galaxy Note 10, Disney announces streaming bundle, and Apple's Siri recordings controversy

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Stories this week: Samsung Galaxy Note 10: two sizes, new S Pen, and DeX on your …Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Unpacked event: the biggest ... Samsung didn't mention Bixby once during its entire Galaxy ...Note 10 …Samsung confirms its long-delayed Galaxy Home smart speaker is still in the worksSamsung isn’t going it alone in the fight against Apple and GoogleSamsung's new Galaxy Book S is a Qualcomm-powered laptop with …Pixel 4 will reportedly feature a screen with a 90Hz 'Smooth Display …Google releases final beta for Android Q and changes the back …Android Q’s back gesture controversy, explained Samsung's Galaxy Watch Active 2 brings back the bezel controlDisney announces $12.99 bundle for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ Disney has made $8 billion at the box office, but its ambitions are …Disney is drastically changing Fox’s future after a number of flopsJuul launches a Bluetooth e-cigarette that tracks how much you vapeApple stops letting contractors listen to Siri voice recordingsDeleting your Siri voice recordings from Apple's servers is confusing …Microsoft contractors are listening to select Skype calls and Cortana recordingsThe Apple Card starts rolling out today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This week on the Vergecast, we talked about the Galaxy Note 10. It's in two sizes. It's going on with Android's back gesture. Juliet Alexander joins us to talk about Disney and the streaming wars. And we get into it with Siri listening to you. It's always listening to you. That's the Vergecast. It's coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool.
Starting point is 00:00:17 Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.
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Starting point is 00:01:01 And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast. The Verge podcasting ecosystem. An ecosystem that is now in partnership with Microsoft to combat.
Starting point is 00:01:31 That's true. Hi, I'm Nealai. I'm your friend. It's not actually, we'll get to it. I'll explain it to you. But I'm Neely. Deider Bone is in New York with me. I'm in New York with you. Because of the Note 10 event. That's right. Which I couldn't personally attend it turned out. That came for it anyway. At which Samsung and Microsoft announced a partnership. Paul Miller is here. Hello. How's it gone, Paul? I'm very well. Thank you. Do you, did you remove your headphone jack for an additional battery? No, but I would like to announce that I will never partner with Microsoft. They can never pay me and they can never own me. Wow. That's the year of Linux on the desktop, everybody. That's right. Here we go.
Starting point is 00:02:09 All right. That's the big news. The note 10. Yeah. It's here. Two sizes. It's a lot going on. Dieter, tell us about it.
Starting point is 00:02:15 There's two sizes. There's a small note. Everyone says, don't call it small because it's big. It's 6.3 inches. That's big, but there's no bezels. So, I don't know. It's like not that much bigger than a Galaxy S-10. I'm very excited about the small one.
Starting point is 00:02:27 Yeah. I actually really like it. Then there's the full-on note note, the note. The note, noty note. Yeah. Notorama. The Note 10 plus, which I think should just be the note, but whatever. It's got a 6.8-inch screen.
Starting point is 00:02:39 It's about the same size as last year's note. So the thing about the note is it comes in the back half of the year, just like the pixel does. And that is off cycle to when Qualcomm makes its newest Android chips available to Android manufacturers. That's earlier in the year, and the S-10 usually gets right in that first rev of it, right? So the note historically in your head is the phone that just has every feature and is the most powerful and the biggest and the most Samsung. And they can't do that with the processor anymore. Huh. And increasingly, it's getting hard for them to do it with like the screen because this thing doesn't have a 90 hertz refresh rate like the 1.7 Pro.
Starting point is 00:03:22 It's not bigger than other Android phones. But it is a very, very, very nice screen. Like it looks like a Samsung quality screen. Yeah. And so I'm not really freaked out about the 90 hertz thing or whatever. But what do you buy a note for? Like, what is it that you want out of it? Iterations on the technology packed into the stylus.
Starting point is 00:03:42 Well, you can now wave the stylus like a wand. It's a unibody stylus now. It's a single piece of metal. I'm sorry. I'm just stating facts, man. I know that you are. I mean, it's like you have to do something. If there was an IR sensor in this, it would have, it would exceed the functionality of the original window.
Starting point is 00:04:04 Here's my question. When does this stylus become a tiny little phone on its own? Yeah. That's what you got to get to. Like, what is the stylus? A little phone. And you just hold it up to your head and take calls with the stylist. It could be awesome.
Starting point is 00:04:16 Yeah, you can wave it on. It's got an accelerometer and a gyroscope in it. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I saw a video of Dieter, like, flipping through a camera roll. Yeah, it's not with a 65% accuracy rate. Well, I didn't realize that you have to hold the button down while you wave it. Once I figured that out, then I got up to like 65, 70%.
Starting point is 00:04:34 Before it was zero. So improvement. This is the big thing for me is Dex will run on a Mac or a PC. Dex is, you know, no one uses it or maybe people do. Like there's like the four people that bought a USBC monitor and a Bluetooth keyboard and like, I'm living that Dex life. But really, I mean, come on. Yeah. But the ability to have an Android window on your computer.
Starting point is 00:04:57 that is just your phone is actually kind of compelling because it's a way easier way to get at your messaging, for example. You can do some of this with like your phone stuff on Microsoft, but getting WhatsApp or signal on your computer, you got to like scan the QR code and make sure blah, and it's just there. It's just there. Yeah. Open it up at the window and go to town. Try to move files from Android to a PC has always sort of been terrible. Yeah. Wait, so to use decks, I just want to be clear on this. So, Dex, with the Note 9, for example, or the S-10, you plug in a monitor, you plug in a keyboard. Yep. You get, like, a windowed operating system that's like a riff on Android.
Starting point is 00:05:36 It's running Android apps that made Windows out of them. Yes. It has worked iteratively better over the years. Yep. You used to have to have a dock, and then they made it, you just need a cable. And now they've made it, you just need a USBC cable to plug it into a computer. Okay. So you have to plug it into your computer.
Starting point is 00:05:51 Yeah. So you don't have to. You can still plug it into a monitor if you want. No, but I'm saying to run it on a Mac. Oh, yeah. You get a USBC cable. Yep. You plug one end into your Mac and the other end into your Note 10.
Starting point is 00:06:01 Yep. By the way, same plug on both ends of that cable. There you go. Yeah. The promise of USBC is alive. Then, just to be clear, phone starts charging off your laptop, presumably. And then an app on your laptop opens up. One of the assumes it can just open up.
Starting point is 00:06:20 You might have to click a button, I don't know. Yeah, something happens. You do some application stuff. Yep. The Dex app opens. Yep. And then you see a windowed operating system inside that window. Yep.
Starting point is 00:06:29 You don't see like a note 10. Right. That's correct. You see a windowed operating system inside a window like you're VNCing into your note. That's super weird. Yeah. Like it's all, it's so close and so far. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:40 It's super weird. Does it feel like a VNC? Like what is the, the, I'm guessing it doesn't feel perfectly native or does it? No, it feels like a VNC. It totally does. Like there's a little bit, there's like it's a little bit slower. You remember when it's a little bit slower. It's plugged into the phone directly.
Starting point is 00:06:55 Then, like, you know, you can run a monitor over USBC without, uh, it's so weird. Yeah. It's slower because it's also like, you know, Android, like, decks, you know, like, I'm not touching that one. No, no, no, no, no. It's slower because it's Android, Dieterbone, he's at back poisoned. Wow, that's a deep cut. It's almost like, I'm guessing it's probably kind of like running a capture card. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:22 Right? Except you're just not recording it to your hard drive. you're taking basically a video signal over USBC and then showing it in a window and then also sending mouse events. Yep. And also apparently drag and drop events. Exactly. That's exactly what's happening. Okay.
Starting point is 00:07:36 And that's why I think there's like it feels like a little bit of lag. I've only used it for about like five minutes. So it could just be I remember badly. Yeah. I mean, I love this idea. Yeah. That you're going to sit down and then you can like kind of operate your phone on your computer. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:51 It's a great idea. This sounds like nuts. You just, you want, you want the, like, the vertical, like, phone. Especially on a Windows computer, I think, having it so that you can just see your phone and, like, use your phone on that same screen. Yeah. Makes perfect sense. Why don't just do that? That could be version, version two, you, like, narrow the window and switch.
Starting point is 00:08:10 Yeah. It's like, responsive design. And it's like a phone, a phone, a phone. Oh, my God, it's a weird VNC. Yeah. Okay. You remember parallels for Mac? You could, like, set the thing where it doesn't put all the window stuff inside a desktop,
Starting point is 00:08:24 inside a window, you can just break it out and have Windows windows in your Mac. They should do that. I think parallelists for Mac still exists because it's just some weird hardware compartmentalization stuff. Okay. Do that.
Starting point is 00:08:37 That's what I want. I want random floating Android windows across. Mix and match operating systems. This doesn't seem exactly like the future, but it rhymes with the future. They're just something that it just feels right about it. If I had this phone, I think I would use this more than I would have used
Starting point is 00:08:54 Dex before. Like, like, I'm working on a software project. I want to test the Linux build of something, right? Yeah. So I just like open up this, that I open up the Linux app inside of Dex and then I run the Linux app to test it out and then I, you know, unplug it when I'm done. And it's, instead of having to like, like, boot, you know, plug a whole monitor and keyboard in just to get this experience. Feel the raw power of virtualized Linux inside of Dex running on VNC over a cable on a Mac. And then also, it's going to be the dream machine for an Android developer. Yeah, maybe.
Starting point is 00:09:31 Why? Because you can test your Android app on the same computer that you're developed, you can test your Android app on an Android phone on your computer that you're developing the Android app. Without having to use an emulator or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Inside of decks.
Starting point is 00:09:49 That's the maybe. That's the one part where it's like, My app works great on decks. Yeah. I didn't test it anywhere else. That's a virtuous cycle. I was talking to Becca YouTube star, Becca Forsachi. She is interested in it for video because they did a bunch of video stuff for the Note 10.
Starting point is 00:10:08 It has like, it's paying the accelerometer and the gyroscope more for steady shooting. Yeah. And it could do bocah in the background, whatever. And it's doing that Zoom mic thing. So in theory, you might be shooting more video on this thing. And so getting files off through decks might be nicer because you could just plug it in and then use the big file browser inside decks
Starting point is 00:10:29 to go find the stuff that you want instead of poking at it in the gallery and then hitting a share button and then praying that somehow you'll get it to your computer. Okay. That could be. That's a thing. Maybe. What else? It's got three cameras.
Starting point is 00:10:40 It's got a little Infiniti-O display. It's got three cameras. The big one has a time-of-flight camera, which they are using for AR stuff, which I didn't see, but they showed it on stage. and it actually looks like really cool. Nobody will ever use it, but you can do the thing
Starting point is 00:10:55 where you like draw in space, you know? Yeah. And you can like draw a mustache on somebody's face and it stays on their face when they move around. Truly the best use of this technology. The coolest thing that it can do, though,
Starting point is 00:11:04 is you can do a 3D scan of a thing. You can just like walk around the thing in a circle and then it creates a 3D version of that object. And, you know, it looks pretty bad, but it's close. And then you can take that thing and like use it as like an AR sticker
Starting point is 00:11:17 in some other scene. Or hell, you could like throw it to a 3D printer. You want it. Great for intellectual property theft. Yeah. I feel like this will be, once that sort of 3D scanning stuff becomes more ubiquitous, like this will be a great, like, user-generated content video game.
Starting point is 00:11:34 Yeah. Like if I had a skateboard game, but then I could ollie over Dieter's head that I scanned with my phone, you know, and then I make a YouTube video of it, and now I'm famous. Yeah. That's good. Truly living the Samsung game. Like, what's my full, like, Samsung lifestyle? It's like I used this weird Samsung.
Starting point is 00:11:50 Samsung feature to make a weird game on Android and I put it on YouTube and I'm sponsored by Samsung. It's like just complete that loop. I'm saying there needs to be a game that is a good video game. Like you ever watch people like Maud, Grand Theft Island? Oh, I see what you're saying. Like a good actual game that people actually play that accepts weird proprietary Samsung 3D scanning property. I'm so into it. There's a bunch of other stuff we can talk about.
Starting point is 00:12:17 Like it's got the beam forming for the Zoom mic. Which is cool. The thing that I keep coming back to, though, is it's just nice. Yeah. It's 950. The plus, it starts at 1100, and then it's 200 bucks more, or 100 bucks more to get the 512 storage. But the one plus seven pro costs $450 less or something, $350 less, depending on which model you're looking at. And it has, in theory, like, comparable screen, perhaps even better to some people if they really care about refresh rate.
Starting point is 00:12:46 Cameras are, like, close. It's like, it's really close in, like, every camera. category, but it's just not as nice of an object. Like, one of the things you're paying for when you get this thing is, like, I'm going to take notes and now it'll do OCR and I'm going to, the dream of using the stylus. But you're also just buying, like, a really nice phone. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:07 How's they, that Infinity O situation? Like, looking good? It's just a little bit smaller than it is on the S-10. Yeah. And, you know, it's a hole in the middle of your screen. They centered it instead of putting it off to the side. I'm done having angst and feelings about bezels and notches and stuff. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:25 Super done. It's amazing that there's literally no bezel on the city. Like you can see it. It's there, but like it is minuscule. And that's why they can have these giant screens. So like, again, like the regular note 10 is 6.3 inches, but it's more squarish than most phones because it's a note. And since it goes edge to edge and there's virtually no bezel, it does not feel like a 6.3 inches. inch phone used to feel. It feels like a much smaller phone. And so that's the one you're really
Starting point is 00:13:53 into. I'm trading my S-10 in for it. Wow. I'm sad about the headphone jack. We should talk about that for a minute. That's where I was going. But Samsung is offering a $600 rebate for the S-10, which is like pretty good. It's still a pretty new phone. It's still a pretty new phone. But yeah. And then they're giving you $150 to like a store credit to buy like cases. Yeah. Which I didn't spend. It's pure margin. That's how you know, like, Samsung cases and wireless chargers. Like, cost four cents to make and they sell them for $70. Like, yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:24 Speaking of dongles, the USBC headphone dongle, not in the box. $9.99. That's separate. I think is actually technically a crime. Oh, so I want to, I will... It comes with headphones. I would like to say that I was extremely wrong about something and I kind of disappointed wrong
Starting point is 00:14:40 about something. So we, I think last week before, we were talking about 10 coming out. I said they're going to take out the headphone jack. We're just minutes away from proprietary Bixby Buds. Right? Because that's the thing that you do. You take out the headphone jack and you're like, but you still need to listen to stuff. Have you tried our $120 headphones, right?
Starting point is 00:14:58 You know that, but I was going to run about Galaxy Buds and have Bixby integration, but I let it go. Right. Because they didn't mention Bixby once on the stage. Right? Like, Samsung, this is your moment, right? We took out the headphone jack. We know you're sad. Have you thought about Galaxy Buds?
Starting point is 00:15:16 they've got Bixby integration. Bixby, there's not the Bixby button anymore. It's integrated into the power button, which is amazing. Like, how far are you demoted? The button that activates use also the button that turns the phone off. Well, Siri's on the sleep wake button. Yeah, but like, yeah. Yeah, okay.
Starting point is 00:15:38 Siri's also just like constantly activating out of the blue all the time. Yeah, and then it gets recorded and listened to by contractors. We'll get to that later. Do you guys think Cortana and Bixby hang out? No. No. I think Cortana, they're doing the Alexa thing. Bigsby has just been alone this whole time.
Starting point is 00:15:55 And now Samsung, when it's launching the phone that literally has all the features in the Samsung way it does. Yeah. Like every, Samsung is the only company that still does this as far as you can tell. Every little feature has like a wacky brand name. Yeah. Right? They're like, Wave Force Limiter. and it's like, that's the volume button.
Starting point is 00:16:16 Like, I don't, that's all that is, right? The volume button? Just a flurry of these features and names, and you can wave the pen around, like, and Bixby nowhere. I think that's a sign. Do I feel like a sign to you? Well, but also, if you hold the button down, it's Bixby, and it's not Google Assistant,
Starting point is 00:16:34 and apparently you can't change it. Yeah, you can't. So that's a sign, whatever that means. Yeah, you can set the long press to Bixby, and then you can set the double press. to camera or like swap them I think but you can't set out any of those presses to Google Assistant. If they had just natively let you choose Google Assistant, that would be a huge sign. But they're not quite there.
Starting point is 00:16:57 Yeah. I think they should probably go there, but they're not quite there. Can I say this, though? The first ever Bixby capsule of value was released recently. Oh my God. This is your time. You made the promise. I did.
Starting point is 00:17:07 So I said if anybody makes Bixby, they're called capsules for some. Ridiculous reason. There's the skills. It's the app in the Bixby or whatever. That shows you a robot or a Butler dog. A dog, Butler with shoes. Yeah. That I would mention your name for a month as like the catch, the word that I say at the end of the show.
Starting point is 00:17:29 And it has happened. You can go. It's not called Bixby because they probably wouldn't have allowed that. But it's called Dog Butler. It's incredible. By Kessney. And in order to like get the skill to work, you know how like Amazon to like, guests that you're trying to talk to Phillips or whatever, Google does the same thing.
Starting point is 00:17:48 Bixby is still at the place where you have to specifically invoke the capsule. And then you have to give the capsule a command. You can't just like run a thing. You have to invoke the thing and then tell the thing what to do. Wait, can you explain invoke the capsule? I think you should be invoke capsule. So yeah, it's right here. So you do.
Starting point is 00:18:07 You have to like say like. Just do it. Everyone will understand what you're trying to say as soon as you do it. And dog butler, show me a dog butler. And I'm looking at a picture of a dog butler. It's really good. And it says, we're a good boy? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:24 I just want everyone to know that for the past two days, Deeter's been wandering on the office saying, dog butler, show me dog butler. And like, it's not that he won't explain to you what's happening. It's just that keeps happening. Yeah. It's great. It's the one true great use of Bixby. If you have a Samsung phone with Bixby,
Starting point is 00:18:41 and you haven't explored the capsule store. please, please make this the most popular capsule. If you can find the Bixby capsule store without Googling it, you deserve a lot of money because it is impossible. It's so confusing. Anyway, I think it would be great if the Vergecast audience, the people of Samsung phones, made Doc Butler by far the most popular, highest rated.
Starting point is 00:19:03 Yes, please capsule. I think that's a power that we have. Yeah, go read it. Pull over in your car. Get your Samsung phone out. Yeah. Figure out where the capsule store is. Make this happen for it.
Starting point is 00:19:13 Last thing about Bixby, we had to publish a story today whose headline was basically, yeah, Samsung hasn't canceled the Bixby home. No, actually, I have it in front of me. Samsung, I read this headline, I started crack up. Samsung confirms its long-delayed Galaxy Home smart speaker is still in the works. What a confirmation. What an amazing confirmation. Yes, we have not given up on our barbecue grill of a smart speaker. I wasn't going to mention this, but Altice, which is a cable company.
Starting point is 00:19:43 has announced a smart speaker in the time that Samsung has announced the Galaxy Home to now. Yeah. It's a $500 smart speaker with Alexa integration that can control your cable box. If that thing beats the Galaxy Home to market, the cable company, then there's a real problem. Yeah. All right. So there's this picture that I saw that I think speaks volumes about what's going on with Android and Windows and Samsung and Microsoft. Okay.
Starting point is 00:20:08 I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I'm staying with you. So Samsung had like a billion partners on stage. Under Armour is doing a watch. Microsoft is doing a... LinkedIn is preloaded on the Note 10. That's what you want. The Node.10's for business. Discord's on the Note 10.
Starting point is 00:20:25 All right. All of Microsoft is loaded on the Note 10. You've got Outlook pre-installed. You got LinkedIn. You got the earphone compatibility with Windows 10 built into the quick settings. Yeah. So that's where I'm getting at. So there's a photo where they're showing this off.
Starting point is 00:20:39 The photo is someone holding a... a Note 10 with the messages app open, and then someone with the Windows, that's the person who has a Windows laptop in front of them, it's got your phone, and it's showing them the messages in that app. Yeah. The reason you make that photo
Starting point is 00:20:52 and put it out in the world as a press image is to be like, this can do the thing IMessage can do. Yeah. Which is like a thing people love, right? IMessage syncs to your computer, it syncs your phone. Okay, now with your phone,
Starting point is 00:21:03 we've brought them together. I think Microsoft's game is, well, we can't go partner with Google directly, but Samsung makes the most phones. Samsung will sign literally any deal. Let's buddy up with Samsung. We'll make it so that if you have a Windows laptop, the thing that you want is a Samsung phone.
Starting point is 00:21:23 And that will be full of Microsoft services. Right. It seems like that is a big game. Samsung is Microsoft's phone. Yeah. That's what they're going for. Windows phone failed. So now they're going for Samsung Windows.
Starting point is 00:21:35 And we're going to preload a bunch of stuff on Samsung. I will tell you, Bill Gates was on the show. Bill Gates has a Samsung phone. Is that what you see? That's kind of a vibe. That's completely reasonable to me. The thing that I thought of when I saw all these partnerships is the holiday season is coming. Samsung traditionally has a huge marketing budget.
Starting point is 00:21:53 No one's buying phones as fast as not often as it used to. The phones are more expensive. Samsung needs every ounce of like marketing support that it can get, promotional support that it can get. And so hugging Microsoft in real close. will convince Microsoft that it should promote Samsung and it's good for both of them to sell some stuff. I think you're right that it makes a lot more sense that Microsoft wants to push people to Android
Starting point is 00:22:20 because the thing about Android is it's open and you could do shit to it. And sometimes that's the problem, but it means that Microsoft can get its hooks in in a way it never will be able to on the iPhone. And so it's better for Microsoft to have Android users than it is to have iPhone users. Oh, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:22:37 And if they ever do a surfaced, phone, right? They've got like a lot of experience of this integration. Yeah. And then poor Samsung, once again, we'll be like, but we'll do Tyson. Like it's the ever, the ever-moving thread of Atlas Samsung shipping the Tyson. Do you think a surface phone is really probable? This seems really far-fetched to me. It is a thing that Tom talks about a lot. Like, we hear about it a lot. Like, there's, I think when I've asked, like, Panos about it, he's always like, he does that Panis is, like, a lot of energy. So he, like, says no with, like, a lot of energy. But he's like, but, you know, we got to, like, we got to, like, look at stuff. Right. Right. Like, that's, like,
Starting point is 00:23:18 that's sort of, like, the vibe. It's like, it's always on the back burner. Someone at Microsoft is always like, what about a surface phone? Like, every, every other month somebody delivers a clay prototype to his desk just in case you're interesting. Yeah, he's like, this took you a month? It's just a rectangle. It's like, what would a clay prototype of a phone? USBC, we're not ready for USBC. I will tell you that Microsoft, better than any other company, at making hinges.
Starting point is 00:23:46 You know, who's not so good at making hinges at Samsung? Do they talk about the fold at all in this? No, they pre-announced that they were actually going to ship it ahead of this so it wouldn't come up at the event. Oh, yeah. All right, well, they did announce some other stuff. There's a Galaxy Book S, which has a Qualcomm chip in it. Yeah, it's that Qualcomm 8cx, which is the most promising of the arm chips for Windows devices.
Starting point is 00:24:11 And a Qualcomm window, an arm Windows device, you know, you're supposed to get 23 hours of video playback and, you know, LTE is built in and that's not complicated and like stuff, you know, but you know it'll be like pokey. Heim tried it. He said that it like felt okay. Yeah. We got to review it, of course. It actually doesn't look so much like a, it's like a hybrid between like a surface book and a Macbook. It's like a weird middle zone between those in terms of its like industrial feel and look. Okay.
Starting point is 00:24:41 I'm excited to see it. I think it's $1,000, which is pretty expensive to take a risk on the arm processor being enough for you. Where's the webcam located? That I, I don't know. It's on the top. It's on the top. I'm looking at it. Okay.
Starting point is 00:24:55 I took a Zoom call on an XPS 15 today with a nose cam. And I was like literally embarrassed the whole. whole time. Yeah. Like, I apologize to the other person. Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 00:25:03 That's like, that's my new check-in. The new X-P S-13 has the tiny little cam of the top that puts Apple's webcam to shame because it's like a tenth of the size and three times the quality. Yeah. Is there going to be a Chrome? Obviously, it's, it's hoping too much for one of these mainstream companies to come out with a Linux 8 CX laptop.
Starting point is 00:25:20 But when are we going to get a Chromebook at 8CX? I have no idea. I actually don't know if that's viable if they are even bothering to try. Oh, really? Because they're so dependent on Intel for their high-end stuff? Well, no, you can get a bunch of arm-based Chromebooks. They're still out there, but most of them are like media tech. Not the premium.
Starting point is 00:25:41 Well, I don't know if the ATS is specifically tuned for Windows. We're going to get a bunch of email telling me I'm dumb and wrong. So just send it in. Yeah. I don't know the answer. You might remember that earlier in the show Dieter said Android was slow. So go ahead and get all those ideas out at Deeter. That would be great.
Starting point is 00:25:57 I'm going to make the Android people even angrier later. Well, we should get into it. So that's the 010. You're going to have a review, presumably. It's going to happen. I'm excited about the small one, too. I like a compact big phone. It's a thing.
Starting point is 00:26:11 No, you don't. You only like surfboards. I mean, I've got the big phone. Yeah, okay. It's like, I like a big screen. I mean, phones are just getting bigger. That's what's happening. The dream of the small phone is over.
Starting point is 00:26:20 Okay. But there's, like, other Android controversy in the world. So, first thing. By the way, you are dry. Yeah. That's your fault. Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 00:26:32 So the last public developer beta for Android Q came out, beta 6. And like they have for the past several betas, Google tweaked the way that the back gesture works or like added some stuff. And it was super confusing. And no one knew what it meant. Like people that run Android sites full time for their job didn't know. what the heck Google is doing. So here's like the fundamental problem. There's this app drawer on the left and the back gesture means that the app drawer thing doesn't
Starting point is 00:27:07 work because you can't slide it in. And Google had two choices at this moment. Choice number one, well, they had three choices. Choice number one, all right, figure out another way for the back gesture. Save the app drawer. Just only do it on the right hand side or something. Choice number two. Yeah, sorry.
Starting point is 00:27:24 The app drawer, you can't slide in for the app drawer anymore. that's like that's just the way it goes tap the hamburger button turns out that uh that's what 96% it was like three to seven percent people have ever used that slide to like yeah because it's not like particularly discoverable right so like they could have just said yep sorry and we all would have went uh okay right
Starting point is 00:27:46 but instead what they did is like what if we what if we give you some we hear you we're gonna fix it we'll figure it out and they're trying to figure out a way to have swiping in from the left side of the screen do two completely different things. And their solution is you like, hold your finger down, and then the drawer kind of peeks out, and then you can slide in, and they'll slide the drawer in. Right. And this is all a problem because everybody that made an Android app made an Android app with a drawer,
Starting point is 00:28:11 because Matias Duarte said, that's the way to make Android apps. You tell Matias this, and he retcons it, and says, no, no, no, I just said that you should like, blah, blah, blah, blah, and do your own thing. And everyone was too slated. Do your own thing. No head designer anywhere has ever said, do your own thing. It was like complicated. So this is like a, to get this drawer, which I will be honest, I'm one of that like 93-ish percent of people who did not know how to open drawers before now.
Starting point is 00:28:37 Yeah. Yeah. Is it like a hesitant swipe? No, it's that you hold your finger down and then the drawer kind of peeks out and then you can slide it in. So it's a press then swipe. Yeah, it's a long press, then swipe. Yeah. Totally intuitive.
Starting point is 00:28:50 Yeah. I mean, no one's ever. not discovered a long press action. So here's the problem that actually compounds all of this, is Google is introducing a setting to change the sensitivity of the back gesture. And what the hell does they even mean? It means how far in, how many pixels in from the edge of the screen will it detect your finger swiping?
Starting point is 00:29:13 And I'm like, oh, you did that because your people are mad about the thing and blah, blah, blah, and that's what everybody assumed. And they're like, no, that back gesture thing is there because there's so many different kinds of Android phones, a lot of them just aren't good at detecting the edge, touches at the edge of the screen. They all have different, like, you know, sensitivities there. And so sometimes you're going to need to crank it up. And I said, well, why are you giving the user a setting?
Starting point is 00:29:36 You shouldn't do that. You should just figure out what the sensitivity is in the phone ahead of time and set it to that. And they're like, yeah, except, have you ever seen anybody with a phone? They put cases on them. And so if you're going to make the entire side of the screen, like the core navigation feature of the phone, which, by the way, the back button is the core navigation feature of Android. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:56 People hit the back button 50% more than they hit the home button. That's nuts. Yeah. Because the back button has never been beloved. It was always like... I've always loved it. Yeah. Except that it's broken because it takes you out of the app instead of just going up in the hierarchy.
Starting point is 00:30:11 But still, I deeply love it. Okay. So yeah, so they need to put that little sensitivity thing on in case you put a big-ass case on it, and then you can't hit the edge just right. That is the most Android thing I've ever heard. Yeah. In all of the best in worst ways. Like there's a part of me that loves it because only Google and only Android comes up with that solution.
Starting point is 00:30:34 Yep. And there's a part of me that's like this is the whole problem with Android. In a weird way, Android is more consistent than the iPhone when it comes to swiping in from the left side of the screen, even with that weird peak thing, which I should get rid of. Because on an iPhone, sometimes swiping in goes back and sometimes. it opens up a drawer. You never know. When does it open up a drawer? Slack. Or a bunch of apps that have drawers, Gmail. Like a bunch of apps, if you swipe in from the left, sometimes you go up in the hierarchy,
Starting point is 00:31:01 and sometimes you open up a drawer over on the left-hand side. You never know. And Google just swiping in goes back at the end. Okay. So in Twitter, you get a thing? See? A whole bunch of apps. Oh, no, this is like all over the place. Yeah, this is what I'm saying. Even in the Twitter app, it's like, all right. Yeah, you never really know.
Starting point is 00:31:16 No, I know. I figured it out. Yeah. I'm not going to tell you. Oh, okay. It's a secret. No, it goes back in the hierarchy until you get to home and then it opens the drawer. Yes. Which is sure. It does something different depending on the context, which is exactly what you want in a user design, user interface design.
Starting point is 00:31:35 Especially for an undiscoverable gesture. Also, Deeter, I haven't seen as much about this. I just got the beta on my phone just before the Vergecast. So I'm now an expert. The corners, if you swipe back on the bottom left or bottom right corner, if you swipe back, that's not a back. That's Google Assistant. The Google Assistant is a diagonal swipe in from either of the bottom corners.
Starting point is 00:32:00 That is correct. And they are constantly changing the animation to try and figure out how to make it visible and understandable and not annoying as hell. Yeah, I feel like I'm being tricked. And a little tidbit there, I think they can change it without having to push an entire Android update. Like they could be like, no one's using this. Let's like tweak a setting on the server. And it'll like. So they're like AB testing.
Starting point is 00:32:22 the beta is without the beta's updating. Wow. All right. When is Q coming out for real? A few weeks, quote unquote. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this is it. This is like, this is what we're getting. And everyone's very mad. And I think they're very mad because Google, like, negotiated with terrorists. They tried to, like, give everybody what they wanted, and they should have just said no. This is how it is now. We're taking over and we're doing it. That's, like, the least Google way to do it.
Starting point is 00:32:49 Right. The most Google way to do it is, like, now we made a session. the changes the number of pixels that are active for a back gesture. But that doesn't even affect the thing that people are unhappy about. Yeah. But that's why it's the most Google thing. It's like all of you are mad about Google Reader going away, but here's a number of options in YouTube. Not that that is the same.
Starting point is 00:33:10 Also, 9 to 5 Mac got a huge pixel scoop. They've got like a whole bunch of specs, and most of which are like basically what you would expect them to be. The two interesting things are, It sounds like they're going to go for a 90 hertz refresh rate screen, so it'll be way smoother. And there is a quote-unquote DSLR-like attachment for the cameras on the back. What? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:33 Like a lens? That's hard to say. DSLR-like is like lenses. Also, the guy in charge of pixel, Mario Coraz, just got like ascended up like a deity to Sundar's office. And Rick Osterlo is taking over, taking charge of pixel directly for the time. being. Huh. Yeah. Okay. Right before, like weeks before the pixel four is going to lunch. Like, she anders like, look, Rick, you've been tweeting about it nonstop for weeks. You might as well just like run it. Like, what are we doing here? Okay. Yeah. All right. We got to
Starting point is 00:34:05 take a break. Julia Alexander is going to join us. Talk about the streaming wars. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure. will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there.
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Starting point is 00:36:17 That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. Julia Alexander is here. Welcome, Julia. Thank you. I'd like to begin this discussion. Why is your voice so deep? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:36:40 I was trying to do like the stream wars have begun. Oh, yeah. War has never changed. It's like your Chancellor Palpatine boys. Yeah. I don't know what. All right. Julia.
Starting point is 00:36:52 It just hit me that Disney owns the IP for Palpatine. Yeah. Okay. I knew that. If you had asked me, I would have told you that was true, but it wasn't emotionally real until just now. You know, like, we do a lot of disclosures on this show, and I feel very strongly that I should just start, like,
Starting point is 00:37:08 pre-disclosing a Disney disclosure. Like, disclosure, Disney will soon own us. As you know, soon there will be one company, Disney. We'd like to welcome our new overlords disclosure. We will be a good subject. Anyway, it was Disney earnings this week. Yes. Julie, you cover the hell out of them.
Starting point is 00:37:27 I think it is wild that Disney has gone from a company whose earnings like The Verge did not really pay attention to to now like we got to be on it. And you wrote like three or four pieces about them because they implicate so much of what's going on in the streaming wars and consumer stuff. So give us the rundown. Yeah. So there's so much to talk about with Disney. But there's two stories, right? So there's the story that Disney missed their earnings guess like that. They thought they were going to do way better than they did.
Starting point is 00:37:55 And they blamed Fox for that. specifically they blamed Dark Phoenix which was an X-Men movie which CEO Bob Iger was like it just didn't do what we thought it was going to do which like everyone could have told them that but they basically said you know we bought this company this was our first quarter where we've really owned them and so we're seeing is kind of what we assumed was going to happen because it cost so much and they weren't producing it as much as we thought they were going to do that's one story that's like the financial story but on the other side of the other side of it, you've got the more interesting one, which is that Disney crossed $8 billion at the
Starting point is 00:38:31 box office already this year, which is insane, based off of like six movies. And Disney is ramping up entirely stock to do streaming and just streaming. Like, that is their number one focus. Can you put the $8 billion box office in context? Because like we have like tech earnings and like Apple just sneezes and $8 billion in cash falls out. So like how big a deal is it for $8 billion in the box office? Yeah, I mean, it's huge because it's not even, we're eight months in, not even, eight months into the year. They did $7 billion last year total. Okay.
Starting point is 00:39:04 And so they've done $8 billion already, and they still have two major movies, which is Frozen 2, and Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker, come out, which will both cross a billion. So they're going to make more than $10 billion this year, which is the biggest record, your biggest year on record for any studio in the history of cinema. But I just, it's not fair. because they bought all the other studios. They bought, yeah. It's like, I don't know, if Ford and GM merged, and then they bought Nissan,
Starting point is 00:39:33 and they're like, we sold more cars than anyone. It's like, you didn't. All right. It's just like inherently a bad comparison. Well, the interesting thing is, if you look back far enough, what they did with movies, they're doing with streaming,
Starting point is 00:39:46 which is extremely smart, right? So when you look back, Disney realized, crap, we're not making any good, we're not making movies people want to see. There was a period after the 90s up until about 2006, 2007, when Disney was making a lot of garbage. What was the bear movie? The country bears, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even remember that.
Starting point is 00:40:07 It fell off the radar. Yeah, I remember country bears. But then Bob Iger comes in a CEO, and he decides to do a bunch of things. He buys a bunch of companies where he thinks he can make tiny networks out of. So he buys Lucasfilm. He buys Marvel. He buys Pixar. And you buy someone else.
Starting point is 00:40:22 I can't remember. Oh, Fox. Fox. And his whole thing is like, we can make networks that create franchises that will then power us through. So what we've seen happen is Marvel Studios become one of the biggest properties in the world in terms of IP. Then you've got the same thing with Pixar and their sequels. And then Disney was just like, screw it, let's just make live action remakes of all of our popular 90s movies, which have all crossed like a billion dollars to the box office.
Starting point is 00:40:50 So what Disney is doing now with streaming is the exact same thing. They bought Fox so that they could have a huge back catalog to propel Disney Plus and Hulu. And then they bundled that with ESPN Plus, and now suddenly they have all these little micro networks that they can sell at a very good price for and basically beat out the competition. So that was the other big kind of announcement. Right. Was that you can get Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus for $12.99 a month. Right. And so it's Hulu's ad-supported version. So it's not ad-free. The number one thing people ask me in Twitter was, why can't I pay $20 a month and not have ads?
Starting point is 00:41:29 Yeah, I also got, can I pay $12 and just get Hulu without ads and Disney Plus and no ESPN Plus? The ESPN Plus, to be clear, it doesn't have Sports Center. No. So it might as well be the Ocho. Yeah. Okay. There's not a lot of live major league sports. But Disney genetically has to prop up ESPN.
Starting point is 00:41:48 Like they don't, for so long, every, the thing that Disney made money on was, like, forcing you to have ESPN. Yeah. They can't not. Like, they don't know how. The other thing about ESPN is, like, once they go international, which is the whole game plan, they can just start working with international sports teams to sell that to international markets, sports leagues. And that's a huge, like, growth market for them. So, wait, just to be clear, the answers to both of those questions is no, correct? Yeah, so no.
Starting point is 00:42:18 You can't get at least not right now. My guess is that there eventually will be different options because streaming is going to become cable, which means you're going to have tiers that you can subscribe to and choose. Also, there's just nothing smarter than putting out the thing, having everyone ask for something slightly different and then delivering slightly different. Yeah, that's like a great place to be. We've been listening to you carefully. Exactly. I mean, I said this on Twitter. Like right now it's super, super smart because they have three revenue options for like.
Starting point is 00:42:48 one product, which is insane. No matter what you want to go in on, they're going to make revenue off of it. So it works out to their benefit really well right now. Could you go back and connect the dot on Disney buying all the other studios for streaming?
Starting point is 00:43:04 It's not just about the back catalog, right? It's about they want to be able to make new shows based on that old IP because they know they'll be hits, right? Yeah, so there's two so in order for a streaming network to work a streaming service, there's a formula, right? So you have to have tent pole features, which bring people in. But you need snackable content.
Starting point is 00:43:21 When snackable content is friends, it's the office. It's like, I'm going to pay $8 a month or whatever Netflix is now. $12 a month. I'm going to pay $12 a month because I want to watch Stranger Things. But then I'm going to keep paying because I just want to fall asleep to Futurama or the office. Disney has that better than anyone else going forward. Maybe HBO Max from Warner Media, which I know you. I know you like.
Starting point is 00:43:45 But in terms of IP, Disney is well situated. So Disney goes, okay, come to our streaming service, and you're going to get a new Star Wars show, a new Captain America show, kind of. You're going to get this. Plus, you're going to get 7,000 hours of all of our old TV shows and all of our old movies, almost all of our old movies. That's something that Netflix can't offer.
Starting point is 00:44:12 Netflix is losing all of their important license content. So they're going, come for Stranger Things and stay for... Stranger Things. Yeah, stay for Stranger Things. Which is essentially why Netflix is kind of faced in this moment of like, you know, collar pulling. Like, geez, we are now a corner. I just remembered Adam Sandler's murder mystery. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:44:34 Which did very well for Netflix, according to Netflix. That movie, which is like not good, was exactly perfect for how to Netflix. my in-laws over. I was like, you know what we're going to do? Extremely safe, Adam Sandler, rom-com. Did it end up being extremely safe? Yeah. I mean, it is exactly the thing that you think.
Starting point is 00:44:54 It's like, are there pratfalls? There are pratt-falls. I've had this thinking lately that Netflix seems to be heavily investing in stuff that's sort of like store brand content. Like around here, my local grocery store has flavorite. And flavorite peanut butter is almost exactly like Jiff peanut butter, but it isn't Jif peanut butter. And it's $2 cheaper. No, so I, Julie's been writing about this for a long time.
Starting point is 00:45:19 Like, Netflix just makes a bunch of stuff, right? And, like, that's the snackable stuff. Like, the algorithm is, like, you sort of like shows, you like HGTV. Like, here's some Australian HGTV nonsense that we license. And, like, maybe you'll just, like, watch it for a while. Well, and that's the issue that, that's the biggest issue right now that people are facing. So there is the beginnings of a backlash on that we're seeing on Twitter and Instagram of all these creators, all these showrunners being like
Starting point is 00:45:46 Netflix screwed us over and they're continuously screwing us over and it's because the algorithm. So there's a show called Tuka and Bertie which is like a great show similar to BoJack Horseman. It was recommended to like no one. It wasn't on the front page. It was never on the homepage. It wasn't recommended to anyone. I'm someone
Starting point is 00:46:04 who watches BoJack religiously because it's a sad show and it's my friend and it was not recommended to me and like I'm the ideal target for it. So when the show canceled after one season, and Netflix basically said the way Netflix weighs whether to renew something is whether or not you can bring in new subscribers or retain subscribers who are likely to cancel, like those are two major metrics. When it couldn't do that, the showrunner, at least they handle what went on Twitter and
Starting point is 00:46:30 basically said the, we can't beat the algorithm. And then all these other showrunners were like, yep, this is an issue we bring up with Netflix all the time. We don't know how your platform works. No matter what you do, there's always an opaque algorithm that means. makes you sad. Well, that's the thing. That's just like the story of the internet.
Starting point is 00:46:48 Well, it's like I've tweeted about it. I was like, I've been covering YouTube for so long that from people to see showrunners who once had to just deal with Nielsen ratings and having a bad time slot on like Friday at 8 p.m. Now they're doing, they have the exact same complaints that YouTube creators have, which is like, we don't know how to do this and we're going to have to start creating shows forgetting about content actually figure out how to game an algorithm that we don't understand. Right.
Starting point is 00:47:12 Which is like fascinating. So I knew that this like, oh no, there was another show that they canceled after like two years. The OA. Well, so I was getting to that. Oh. Because I heard the a way it was good and I knew that there was like this ambient fear that Netflix would cancel shows. And I needed something to watch when I came to New York this week. And I needed something I could download.
Starting point is 00:47:31 And so I'm like, oh, you know, people like the OA. There's somebody who I won't say who in case anybody loves it who told me that it was a huge mistake. It was a terrible show, but whatever. And so I watched it for the first time. I like went through three episodes and then the very next day, canceled. And now what do I do? Because I'm like into the show. You want to stress to it. I know it ends after two seasons and they don't finish the
Starting point is 00:47:49 narrative. What do I do? Well, the other thing about so the Netflix cancellation, right? So the whole, there was a report that was like Netflix canceled shows after two seasons if they don't deal what they needed to do. And a big part of that, which I'm running about right now, is that Netflix doesn't have a big thing that cable relies on a lot,
Starting point is 00:48:05 which is one, ads, but two, syndication. And if they can't, they can't keep a show going for seven seasons, then hopefully TBS picks it up. and they're like, cool, we'll just make money off friends for the rest of our lives. Netflix doesn't have that. So Netflix, like HBO, really needs you to be invested in there. Like, they really need you to be turning in.
Starting point is 00:48:24 And whereas HBO can look at, okay, well, this many people tuned in linearly, this many people tuned in on HBO now afterwards, this many people watch HBO go. We know there's an audience. Netflix is reliant on an algorithm to, like, hopefully maybe people saw it, but if they didn't, then we're not going to give it a chance to be discovered. So I want to just back up to Disney for one second. I mean, it's impossible to not talk about Netflix on this conference because it is the only product that exists. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:48:50 Like Disney Plus is this looming specter that's coming. I believe it is a five on the Go-90 scale of Doom streaming services. Not like 50, but five. Five. Yeah. Like going to succeed. Yeah, the only reason it's a five is because it hasn't launched and thus by definition could fail. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:49:08 Right. Like they could light it up and they'd be like, oh my God, we forgot. to write a user interface. Like, who knows what's going to happen between now and at launching? But it feels very much like it will succeed. Right? It's Disney.
Starting point is 00:49:20 They've got their library. They've got their commitment to never having a new idea. Yeah. Right. Like, what are new characters? Heaven's now. Have you heard of the Lion King?
Starting point is 00:49:32 Sure. But like, that's very safe. Literally, I mean, Bob Eager seems to know what he's doing. Yeah. Which is like the most dangerous thing you can say to Julia. Now two hours above Iger, definitely no use. Anyway, but they're going to win. Like, that's the specter over the industry.
Starting point is 00:49:49 Then there is all the stuff that's leaving Netflix, which we're talking about. Some stuff is going back to HBO Max. AT&T TV, now, TV, now please, AT&T, Mac, Go TV Plus 5G. Like, that's happening over there. That's not a joke, by the way. That's the actual name of the service. That's what it is. A bunch of stuff is going to revert to,
Starting point is 00:50:10 Disney, like right now Netflix is like really providing a lot of Marvel movies, which is wild because they're all going away. It's like, get them while you can. Netflix just changed their movies tab. They just added it back to their like Apple TV app. Oh, they finally added movies. Hooray. Now they only give you like three rows and then it's back to TV shows in the movies tab. That's hilarious.
Starting point is 00:50:31 But again, you want to watch a Pixar movie on Netflix? Like, now's your chance. It's never going to happen for you again. But none of it's here yet. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. So like the wars, there's a term. that we've used, like Neil has used it a lot right now, is like the streaming wars.
Starting point is 00:50:43 The wars don't really kick off for another two years, and because of digital rights. Like, all the rights are still tied up in various things. So, for example, when Disney Plus launches, it will only have four Marvel movies. And then by the first year, it will have eight Marvel movies. There are currently 23 Marvel movies. But because of...
Starting point is 00:51:02 Which is the best one? Iron Man 2. Because... So there is... Iron Man 2. whose rights are tied up in a deep, are so tied up in, uh, with a company called Epics because of a deal made in 2010. And what that shows is that all these companies didn't realize streaming was going to be a thing. Netflix did very early on. Uh, and now they're all scrambling to get their
Starting point is 00:51:27 stuff back. So that's why NBC paid a lot of money for the office and will probably pay a lot of money for Seinfeld. Warner Media paid a lot of money for friends. So there's, there's all these things happening. So streaming wars, we don't really know what's going to happen until the rights go back. And then when Warner Media can say, we have, we have. have the Harry Potter collection, we have friends, we have all this stuff that we use to own. That's when we'll start seeing like, will people want to pay $16 a month for HBO Max? So what I'm confused about, what I'd love to like figure out is Netflix, before it has lost all the content, before it is facing the competitors, is losing subscribers.
Starting point is 00:52:02 In the United States. In the United States. And they're like focused on international expansion, which is crazy. for a variety of reasons, you can only unlock so many more people. Like a good, I think, comparison of this is Apple, which every year, for years and years, like every quarter's record quarter,
Starting point is 00:52:20 why? Because the iPhone launched in like two more countries. And then they literally ran out of countries. Like, now iPhone sales are flat to down because there's nowhere else to go. They're like, Elon... And now they're launching a streaming service. I guess you gotta do that. It's like, I hope Elon gets to Mars soon
Starting point is 00:52:36 because Apple sales are flat. That's where they're at with that cycle. That's the same path. Netflix is on. And Disney. Disney is also betting huge. Iger said in the last earnings call that they want to scale extremely quick. He called like Disney Plus the most important product he's launched in his tenure at Disney.
Starting point is 00:52:55 He's stepping down in 2021. And so like that's a huge proclamation to make. Like Disney's betting super on streaming and they're betting super hard on international. And they're also betting hard. Everyone kind of forgets Disney owns Hulu. So they're also betting really hard on making Hulu their HBO. They want FX to be HBO. FX wants to be HBO.
Starting point is 00:53:15 And they're like, cool, that's what you guys will be. We're going to have our own HBO that we are going to sell the people. What is having your own HBO? Because I would remind you that AT&T is aggressively diluting the idea of HBO right now. It's actually very funny. So there is an event that's going on right now called the Television Critics Association Conference and John Landgraf, who is the chief of FX, who is. a brilliant man does an annual state of the union address. And he basically said the issue facing
Starting point is 00:53:43 streaming platforms is that none of it is curated. There's no identity to any of these streaming services, which is true. Disney comes the closest because they have recognizable IPs. So what they want to do with FX is basically say, we're going to increase your staff, we're going to increase your oversight, and then we're going to increase your output. And the difference that I can see from 18 HBO, based on what I'm reading, I don't actually, based on what I've read, AT&T wants to amp up production on HBO but doesn't want to give them the oversight. So which means you're going to get a lot of garbage because it's like, we're just greenlighting things. Versus FX wants to take over what HBO has.
Starting point is 00:54:19 And if they have the right staff, if they have, if they have the right people that amp up production and actually look over and make sure it's good, they could do that. And that makes Hulu very, very exciting for Disney. So why is Netflix losing subscribers in the United States now before they're even facing this competition or they've lost? the content they have they don't they don't have anything they have so that when they spoke about when they spoke about the loss of subscribers they said that the big issue was one price increase they had a price increase and two they had no spectacular content like they were like mm we don't really we don't have anything literally they were like next quarter will be great because we have
Starting point is 00:54:59 stranger things but they very explicitly were like there was nothing super exciting, which is 100% true, and that's the issue that Netflix is running into. That's why they've become a lot more somber. If you read a lot of trade reports, the meetings they're having, people have gone from being like the arrogant kids, like arrogant Wall Street kids to being like,
Starting point is 00:55:18 we are now a cable network, and that means that we have to figure out our rising debt. We have to figure out how to bring in new shows that people are actually interested in, which is why they're signing massive deals, right? That's why they just gave the Game of Thrones creators $200 million for a total exclusivity. I think that deal is going to back by spectacularly.
Starting point is 00:55:36 I'm just going to point that they're not any good without the books. Exactly. Proven again and again and again. Like, yeah, okay. You wonder why? HBO let them go. I guess I saw a lot of tweets like, why would you let them go? And it's like, HBO watched the fucking show.
Starting point is 00:55:49 That's what they were like, bye. It's super interesting because like Netflix is basically facing what Disney is about to face, which Disney has told investors, 2020 is going to be bad. It's not going to be a 2019. and you should be prepared for this because we don't have anything really. We don't have any major Marvel movies. We don't have any major really Disney movies.
Starting point is 00:56:11 But the focus of that, I think I wrote this, was Disney wants you, you're going to go to the movies theaters no matter what because it's Disney, but they would much rather you spend $8 a month, $7 a month at home. Like they want to grow, they want to grow to 12 million subscribers by December,
Starting point is 00:56:28 which to put that in context is 20% of Netflix's current US market. Like that's a that's fast That's like we're going to scale very quickly and hopefully I think they could totally do it I think so too yeah I mean because they're gonna have at least their own Disney movies right yeah and they're also really they've also changed a bunch of theatrical releases to make them exclusive Disney Plus releases Fox is now making exclusive Disney Plus things
Starting point is 00:56:49 they're rebooting a bunch of stuff for Disney Plus so they like they basically said streaming to us is just as important as film I mean Bob Iger's Prodigy is now overseeing streaming. Like, it's, like, the wistful note there was, I wish I was Bob Iger's prodigy. Like, it's very clear
Starting point is 00:57:10 what you're trying to say here. Like, Bob Iger, do you need a new prodigy? The old one is busy. Like, give me a call. But yeah, so it's exciting, but it's interesting because we're about to see a drought. And then in two or three years, we're about to see more television than anyone
Starting point is 00:57:25 has seen in a very long time. So we only got you for a few more minutes. Where does HBO Max plus Max, HBO AT&T go? So, Neil and I have this conversation. I think HBO Max is, well, you have to go 90 scale? I think it's at like a 10. Okay. Because I think what is going to happen, all the HBO now subscribers will get looped into HBO Max.
Starting point is 00:57:46 So they start off pretty strong. But I think what HBO has going for it is that it is HBO. So they're bringing in people on that. But plus, they have the exclusive rights to a lot of CW series, which is a huge thing that Netflix lost. because the CW shows are some of the most watched shows on Netflix. So you have people tuning in for that. They also want to do family content. So you have people who are like,
Starting point is 00:58:07 I would like to watch HBO with my kids around, and I would like to give them shows. There's two things. But I think there's enough with HBO Max going into it on both the movie side and the TV side that people... What's on the movie side? Anything Warner Brothers. That makes sense.
Starting point is 00:58:23 Anything Warner Brothers. So hopefully... Right, because it's Warner Media. Yeah. Yeah. That's the ever-poppy. DCU will be available to you. Listen, this is where they're releasing the Snyder cut.
Starting point is 00:58:34 I was going to say it. It's how they get people on board. If you sign up for HBO Max, Zach Snyder will personally come to your house and depress you. He's got nothing else to do. He'll message you on Vero and tell you about how great he's doing. Yeah, no, he'll message you on like 18Ts proprietary, not encrypted chat app that's pre-installed on your phone. I don't think it's going to be as successful as Netflix or successful as Disney.
Starting point is 00:58:56 It's also not going international. but I think it will be way better than NBC Unis streaming service, which their whole strategy is we have the office, which is a bad strategy. Yeah, and if you don't have cable, it's like definitely still worse. Yeah, it's not great. Disclosure, podcast is an investor in Fox Media, which owns The Verge.
Starting point is 00:59:20 Sooner or later, we'll just be owned by Disney. We welcome our insect overlords. It's hard to imagine people getting bored of watching. amazing TV. But do you think there will be a tail off in people watching OK television? Yeah. So there's a really great quote by John Langraf, which is that there's never been more television than there is right now. And all that means is that great TV is being overlooked and more mediocre TV is being produced. And his whole thing is like there are, the last count is 530 scripted series. So right now, and that doesn't account for reality. And so it's interesting
Starting point is 00:59:54 to think about like the amount doesn't account for Quibi. witch my gross oversight passion project but I love watching but I think people will
Starting point is 01:00:07 they'll watch I don't even you didn't even have like the self-respect to finish the thought you're like Quibi my passion project I lost it
Starting point is 01:00:18 I'm pretty sure Julia has adopted position that Quibi will be successful just to troll me Jeffrey Katsenberg is a very interesting man Quibi is the Iron Man 2 of streaming services.
Starting point is 01:00:30 Quibi remains at 85 and the Go 90skeled in the streaming series. But it's also interesting to think about the fact that both Disney and Netflix didn't call out each other on recent calls. They didn't call out HBO Max. They called out YouTube. They said, we want YouTube. That's what we want, which is an insane thing to want because it's free. And it's user-generated content. So it's not anything comparable.
Starting point is 01:00:50 But that's what they're thinking size-wise. Like, that's what they want. They want to be the size of YouTube. They want to be the size of YouTube. which is... Are they aware that YouTube scales cause YouTube enormous problems? I mean, clearly I haven't learned
Starting point is 01:01:01 from my algorithm issue, so I don't think they're paying attention. Okay. Well, I think you should write this story. Netflix creators have the same problems as YouTube creators. I think I tweeted it. That's the problem.
Starting point is 01:01:14 Yeah, that's the issue. She tweeted it. I got on Slack, DM'd her and said, you should put that on the site. And she said, yeah, but something, something. And I said, I referred to you to my previous statement. She said, you make a good argument.
Starting point is 01:01:24 All right. She's busy. It truly is very busy. Well, I just think it's fascinating that it appears as though there's already this collateral damage from the streaming wars to these companies. Like they're rethinking how they work. Their subscribers are moving around. Their earnings aren't where they think they should be. Like Disney's missing its own guidance because of Dark Phoenix.
Starting point is 01:01:48 Dark Phoenix is the, like, even watching the trailer, I was like the only time I'm going to watch this movie is on an airplane. Yeah. It's a good airplane movie. Like, I've always thought, and no one will agree. This is a bad idea, that we should have a movie rating scale, and the movie rating scale should just be where will you watch this? Yes. Like, is this a theater movie?
Starting point is 01:02:06 Is this a pay for it in the first window? Is it wait the extra annoying week for it to be a rental? Is it sooner or later it'll be, like, syndicated somewhere? Or is it, like, just wait for it to hit the seat back? Somewhere in there, you need to put, like, playing nonstop on, like, TNT. Yeah. You will always watch the, like, you will always watch the movie. the middle third of this movie.
Starting point is 01:02:26 Yeah. You will never really know what happened in the first half an hour of this movie. I wrote a whole opinion piece and to date it is probably one of the pieces that made people the angriest. It was just that the boss baby is the best airplane movie because it's a great movie. Well, Julia, it's great having you on the Verge cast. I watched a boss baby on an airplane. It's not wrong.
Starting point is 01:02:46 So not. Yes. What happens next? What should people be looking out for in the stream wars? Because there's like a flood of news, but what's the key thing you should watch? Look out between November and April because we've got one, two, three, four services launching. Including Quibi. Including Quivvy.
Starting point is 01:03:02 In April 6th. I have the date in my head. Julia, you remain a zero on the go 90 scales of doom streaming services. Oh, thank you. A clear success. Where's your money going? Disney Plus. See?
Starting point is 01:03:18 Once they get Iron Man 2. All right. That's enough, Julia. Goodbye. show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.
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Starting point is 01:04:42 comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move.
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Starting point is 01:05:58 Mm-hmm. Every week, my man. That's right. Consistency embodied. Personified. What's it called? It's called, sorry, I can't pass the Jewel because of cybersecurity. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:06:13 Oh, good. I wanted to talk about this. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so obviously because I talked about this concept on the Vergecast a year ago or so, Jewel is launching a Bluetooth e-cigarette that tracks how much you vape. Yeah. And I think this is really important in. good for these vaping products to tell you how much nicotine you're getting in, especially
Starting point is 01:06:34 if you want to taper off, but even if you don't, so you're not increasing your addiction. So that's cool. I'm very excited about that. That's wild. Also, it has some security features that you can basically lock your vape, right? Yeah. That's really cool. And that got me thinking.
Starting point is 01:06:50 So from watching TikTok, I have discovered that all of the teens, all of the teens are vaping. And they're vaping because it's really easy to pass a jewel around. So even if you don't own the jewel, and this is the meme on TikTok is can you pass the jewel? And so what I'm saying is add biometric security or just a fingerprint sensor so that you have to actively have your fingerprint on the jewel, right? And so when your friend who is high school, by the way, neither of you should be vaping. I'm just saying this. I'm just trying to solve the problem that we are faced with right now. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:07:29 Your friend wants the jewel and you say, sorry, I can't because of cybersecurity and because you, you'd have to like hold it up to their mouth with the fingerprint. I assure you this will not stop nicotine adult teens. No, that's a great idea because it'll be, you know, like you can't have the sweet moment where you like share earbuds with somebody anymore. Now you can have the sweet moment where you hold the jewel for them. Oh, this is bad. Right.
Starting point is 01:07:51 Look, the nicotine's are the greatest threat to American democracy. Your, your SO might get, this might, yes. Yes, you're right. This might be romantic. Are you saying S.O. on my show right now? You're watching too much TikTok, homie? This might be romantic, but for any of your friends who are asking you to pass the jewel and they're not even your best friends, you might have a good excuse now to not pass the jewel.
Starting point is 01:08:16 You're like, this complicated technology stack is keeping me away. It's like, sorry, I have a blue bubble. You're agreed out. I think God. Smart vapes are here. The thing about the smart jewel in particular is the problem they are trying to solve is kids are addicted to nicotine. Yeah. Right?
Starting point is 01:08:36 And they keep denying that, like, a major part of their business is selling jewels to teenagers. Right. They're like, we would never do that. Never. And then they've released this product that's like, it's a Bluetooth vape that parents can lock from their teens. It'll show you all this stuff. And it's like, all of that is to get you to buy another jewel so that your kids will, stop using the jewel.
Starting point is 01:09:00 And the way they could really solve it is by stop selling the jewels to teenagers. I love it. It's like the perfect evil corporation move where they're like, oh, this car might hurt you. The solution is to buy a new car. Not, we should have never designed the bad car in the first place. The thing that I love is they need to solve the kid problem.
Starting point is 01:09:23 So they've created a connected Bluetooth app that collects a bunch of data. And that's what I want is a company that's funded primarily by big tobacco and is big tobacco at this point. No, here's what I'm saying. We were just talking about the stream wars. I would pay $12.99 a month for a real-time map of teens vaping.
Starting point is 01:09:39 Just like, and you know, like, you know those videos of like the sun over the earth? Yeah. And you can see what parts of Earth are, it's day and night. It's moving. It's beautiful. Just imagine that, but it's like
Starting point is 01:09:51 vape clouds spreading over America. Like, I would pay $12.99 a month for that that screensaver. Okay. I mean, that's like the purest. dystopian screen saver. Okay. Speaking of dystopia,
Starting point is 01:10:02 Apple's listening to you. Everybody is listening to you. You know what? It occurs to me. I haven't asked Samsung about Bixby yet. No one's talking to Bixby. There's nothing to listen to.
Starting point is 01:10:12 It's like one guy in a warehouse being like, I don't know, he keeps asking for the dog butler. They record everything and then they give it to contractors, but the contractors are dogs. Did we learn anything from the Bixby grading data? Well, there's the one dude who's been asking for the dog butler picture for like two days straight.
Starting point is 01:10:38 And then the rest of the room is like, whoop. And it's like, what's going on in a series? This is a thing. This is a real thing. All of the digital assistants are recording your voice, storing recorded versions of your voice on their servers, and allowing human contractors to occasionally listen to those recordings so that they can tell whether or not thing worked. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:11:00 So Amazon got caught first, and Amazon's deal was like a bunch of people inside Amazon who shouldn't have access had access. And they heard some stuff that seemed bad. So Amazon, but they created a whole new portal for seeing what all the stuff is that you've said and like deleting it. And you can even now ask Alexa to stop recording you or delete your last day's recordings or whatever. Then it happened to Google.
Starting point is 01:11:23 Google also has a portal where you could go and just delete stuff. and it also happened to then Apple. Apple does not have such a thing. Yeah. Apple has a blind spot, in my opinion, because they think everything happens on device and it's totally secure. And so it doesn't occur to them
Starting point is 01:11:42 that they would need to provide you like a privacy dashboard. Because like, why would we need to give you privacy dashboard? We don't know shit. There's nothing to manage. Yeah, except there is because they're saving recordings of your voice. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:11:52 Now, you can now go and like say, I don't want to, like, Amazon has the option, don't be created by humans. Google, I believe, has that option now. Yes, it does. And Siri is just, they just stopped doing it. They just put it on pause, probably because they don't know how to make a button to give you the option, turn it off. In order to turn off Siri, what you have to do is, like, turn off the way you turn on Siri.
Starting point is 01:12:14 So you have to turn off the, hey, Siri. And then you need to go into the keyboard settings and turn off dictation. And then as you do that, it pops up a warning saying, hey, you're going to lose. a bunch of stuff now and then it deletes your data in there now when you upload your stuff gets uploaded to Apple's cloud it's anonymized from you so I think it keeps like voice recognition data to maybe get connected to you I don't fully know the whole story here but my understanding is you know with hashes or something my hands are waving you can see that if you delete all the series stuff it can get rid of
Starting point is 01:12:46 the stuff that's on the server even though it was anonymized from you in the first place somehow that could happen so I just want to be clear there's reason they're doing this is well-intentioned. Yeah. They want to make sure their shit works. Right. So you say Alexa, Hornemoa, and Alexa makes some guess. Yep. And you got it wrong. You say it again. And at some point, some human reviewer gets a random assortment of Alexa commands. That didn't work. That didn't work. Yeah. And it tries to figure out it. She, they try to figure out what went wrong and fix Alexa. Yep. Right. And that training process is important to how the model works, blah, blah, blah. And that training process, you know, it's like, it's not the best job, so it ends up going to contractors,
Starting point is 01:13:28 and then you start having, like, levels of remove of control and oversight over who's listening to Good Voices. And by the way, the way that this got discovered is literally a contractor leaking the stuff. Yeah. To, I believe it was a Dutch newspaper. Yeah, right? Yeah. So, like, that's the nightmare scenario. Yep.
Starting point is 01:13:47 Is the contractor took the voice recordings away. Yep. And showed them to somebody else. But contrary to Amazon and Google's position is that, yes, we love spying on you and we are working on being better at, not spying on you as much. Therefore, we're offering you some controls. Apple seems to not want anybody to know that. This feels like a big betrayal to me because Apple has positioned itself as the privacy company. They're advertising as the privacy company.
Starting point is 01:14:15 And if they don't put a button, like Dieter said, like maybe they're just waiting until they have the software. But if they just say, we'll just never tell our customers that this happen. Because what the button says is, if you don't uncheck this, then we will listen to recordings of you. Right. So that would involve admitting to their customers. They all have very fuzzy ways of defining what this human grading is because there's two levels of it. There's, you will you allow humans to listen to it or not in order to improve our services and whatever? Amazon actually played some word games initially
Starting point is 01:14:49 where they're like, it will be, do you want to use your voice to help us improve new services? And you're like, no, don't. And they're like, cool, then it'll be done. But did you hear what I said? Do you want to use your voice to help us improve new services? Unchecking the button only turned off human review to optimize for new things they made.
Starting point is 01:15:07 It didn't turn off human review for other stuff. Oh, my God. So that's the human review side of it, the human grading side. The second part is, is your voice being stored on their servers full stop. Can you like delete it or can you tell it never to get uploaded in the first place? Between Apple, Amazon, and Google, only one of those companies gives you the option to never have your voice saved on its servers. Which one do you think it is? Google. Google. I picked the one that seemed the least likely. Yeah. I don't, so I'm the other two, you can delete your stuff,
Starting point is 01:15:42 but once you turn on the assistant, it records. So I'm going to just take this in a different direction. Like, okay, all this stuff leaked. Every company is doing it. It all got found out because journalists asked. I think Apple rushed out its announcement because a bunch of journalists, including us, we're asking over and over and over again, and these policies didn't really add up. But here's my thing, and I'm just going to keep coming back to this. Nobody knows.
Starting point is 01:16:05 Right? Like, we're doing this is buried in a terms of service agreement that you, like, bang through when you set up a phone or you buy a Google Home. No one reads the terms of service agreement. even if you do, they're worded in such a way that they collect consent. I'm like air quoting here. They collect consent from you and they say everyone's consenting to this practice. But like it's impossible to understand what the practice actually is.
Starting point is 01:16:30 Don't play my voice to strangers. It just seems like if you phrased it that way, maybe more people would say no, but they need some people to say yes to make it better. This is all buried. Like there's no way that people are actually consenting to this. And the concept that it's anonymous is obviously pseudonymous, really. Yeah, it's your voice. It's people's voices.
Starting point is 01:16:51 It clearly can be correlated with your device ID because there's a way to delete it. So I just, to me, the issue is sort of less, are they all doing it? What are the, what are the granular? Like, that's important. We're going to keep covering the story. They're obviously, they're feeling some pressure to get better. But if they are feeling that pressure, if the reveal of the thing makes them stop doing it, right? Like, that's the pattern that we're in.
Starting point is 01:17:14 Revealing that it's happening makes them, like, stop. Then they should know. Like, then it should be obvious that you should ask way more directly and make it way more obvious if simply saying, hey, this thing you're doing is happening. And they're like, no, we'll stop it. Apple asks if, or I think all these companies ask, do you want to send this crash report, right? Yeah. Yeah. How is that any less sensitive than a recording of, like, a transatlantic?
Starting point is 01:17:42 transcription of a text message I'm sending. Yeah, I think that, honestly, because with a computer and a crash report, like, there's a UI, right? Yeah, there's a UI, but there's also like, what's in the log? Am I going to read the log? Like, what if I don't know?
Starting point is 01:17:56 The crash report is actually recording your voice. Yeah. Screaming. Oh, it crashed again. I just think there's something about these in particular where the surveillance potential is so high. Yeah. The user fear of that surveillance is high.
Starting point is 01:18:09 Yeah. It doesn't yet outweigh the convenient of having a smart speaker, right? Because that's pretty fun. But the sort of like underlying the FBI is listening to me meme is like there. Yeah. Facebook is listening to me all the time, right? Like everyone believes it whether or not it's true.
Starting point is 01:18:26 Yeah. If you can accidentally back into it with a contractor leaking to a newspaper, a bunch of recordings of people, like you should maybe rethink that and maybe ask. I mean, this is like the Steve Jobs Code about privacy. What is privacy? say you ask, and you ask again, and you ask again. And you just keep asking because you cannot collect that consent once.
Starting point is 01:18:47 Right? Like people change, their lives, like, it's a fluid idea of what privacy is. Yeah. And none of them are good at asking, and all of them rely on extremely opaque terms of service agreements that I'm going to tell you right now, I think should be illegal. Wow. I think they should be illegal. What's the alternative
Starting point is 01:19:04 to a terms of service? Privacy regulations? Right. I mean, it's just like, and I don't mean to say that because I think my answer for everything as a government. Sure. I don't think our government is like that great.
Starting point is 01:19:16 Do I want to turn that power over to this government? I do not. But I just mean in a very abstract way, an individual user does not have a meaningful way to differentiate between different products as terms of service
Starting point is 01:19:28 at the point of purchase. You're in a Best Buy. There's no like information in front of an Alexa and Google Home that's like, here are the settings for Amazon not storing your voice. You don't have the information.
Starting point is 01:19:41 You don't even think. see the thing until you get the thing home and plug it in. So you don't have like the market information to make that decision. And then no one's a lawyer and no one reads a shit anyway. Yeah. So like who how do you how do you express the like the will of the people? It's like well we're just going to negotiate as a group with these companies. And like that looks like here's what we will accept and here's what we won't accept.
Starting point is 01:20:05 And we've just codified and a law. And here's what you can do and what you can't do. What if like? So I mean that in a very abstract way. I do not think like Donald Trump should write a privacy regulation. Why do you think that ULA's in terms of service exist? Because they need to collect those consents. Why do they need to collect those consents?
Starting point is 01:20:21 Because they want to do stuff. Because they don't want to get sued. It's like fundamentally they don't want to get sued. Well, no, like there's a very, there's like, most of the internet cannot exist without some amount of copyright licensing. Right. Right. So if you take a photo on your phone and you want ICloud to back it up inherently, and that you haven't even published. You have to put it in the world.
Starting point is 01:20:41 Inherently, Apple's got to make a copy. It's got to go to an iCloud server. Then they've got to make another copy of that photo to back it up redundantly. Then if they want to ship it to your, if they want to put it in iMessage, they want to ship it to somebody else in your iMessage chain. They've inherently made yet another 50 copies of the thing.
Starting point is 01:20:58 Right. So like, just to operate that, I'm going to take a photo, it's going to get automatically backed up to my iCloud, and I'm going to text it to someone. Apple needs like 55 copyright licenses from you or a blanket copy. copyright license. So is that like normal? Like every service and then consider Instagram, which has to like
Starting point is 01:21:15 take far more permissions from you. So like, okay, like I kind of buy it. Like in order to do that, like should we have started with a government copyright law and licensing scheme or should these services have developed, right? Right. But I think now they're like exist. We understand them. It's one thing to say, hey, you're putting your personal information into LinkedIn. LinkedIn might share it or repromote it. And you can be like, I don't screw it. I don't want to use LinkedIn. And like the features are somewhat apparent to you.
Starting point is 01:21:44 Yeah. So there's a relationship there. With privacy, like, it is just absolutely opaque. And you have no idea what's going on. Yeah. And their motivation is to hide it and it doesn't turn into a feature. Like privacy isn't a feature. That's why Apple has to market it all the time.
Starting point is 01:21:59 Right? The phones operate the same whether or not Google is watching everything you do on Android. Yeah. Or whether Apple is like making its claims. I mean, there's also. Also, like, the tough edge cases are like, I was listening to an interview with a developer who interviewed Facebook. And so it's like, okay, well, play around with their APIs and see what I can do before I get this
Starting point is 01:22:19 interview. And he realized that Facebook Messenger showed nearby and that that information, while not saying specifically where people are, could be correlated with other information relatively easy to say exactly where people are when and create a map of where all your friends are. which is obviously like and so Facebook got mad at him and they didn't give him the job and they fixed that but that was a that was a flaw right and so that's the sort of thing that um maybe the yula indemnifies is that the right word like yeah protects Facebook from me suing them for being bad at their job when Facebook was like in front of Congress the many times they've been in front of Congress
Starting point is 01:23:05 one of the things that they got asked was like how many times have you changed you change your terms of service agreement. Right? And it's like hundreds, if not thousands of times, they make little tweaks to that, and you just click yes. Like the iTunes terms of service became a meet. Like late night comedians are talking about it
Starting point is 01:23:20 because Apple is constantly tweaking it around the edges. Now, do any of those specific tweets mean anything to you? Like, no. Are you effectively signing a new contract every time you do that? Absolutely you are. That's like, to me, like we're just at a point, particularly when we're talking about things like
Starting point is 01:23:38 they retain the right to take recordings of your voice and let other people listen to them. Even if the intention is good and the outcome makes the service better, you shouldn't be able to just hide that in one of these agreements. Right. Like absolutely, that should just be illegal.
Starting point is 01:23:53 Right? Like, the market cannot speak to that enough because next month Apple might change its agreement back and like it's on us and it's our job. I'm happy to do it. It's on us to like scan the agreement and write the headline and generate the outrage cycle and they change. Like that's a, I think that's just a bad cycle. That's a bad process for protecting people's privacy versus, hey, we've made some rules and we understand that. Do you think there could be something like the Creative Commons license where like I have like an alternative Yula? Like if if a company presents me with a Yula, like actually I would prefer this Yula and it's like a, you know, so what are you what are you funding? What are you funding? You're describing a negotiation. Yeah. And like, you are not allowed to negotiate.
Starting point is 01:24:41 Like, who signs a contract? Like, everyone does it and they shouldn't. But like, you're not supposed to sign a contract without a lawyer reading it and like making sure it's appropriate. You know what I mean? Like, you're supposed to negotiate. You're not supposed to take the first offer. You're supposed to like fight for yourself.
Starting point is 01:24:56 I mean, that's how I feel with these cookies. If they say, do you want cookies? I want to say absolutely no unless I am deep into the process. of logging in or buying something from you. Yeah. Well, I mean, like, that's what I mean. Like, I think we can argue a lot about the GDPR. Like, it is an open question about how effective it's been and, like, whether it's actually
Starting point is 01:25:18 stopping some of the stuff, whether it's benefiting the incumbents or whether it's opening up some markets, like good arguments on both sides there. But at least it's there, right? Like, there's now a framework in the European Union for, like, how they should talk about your privacy, what they should offer you. To your point, websites in the European Union, when they say, do you want cookies or not? If you say no, they are required to still provide you a service. They can't block you because you don't want their cookies. That's great. You can't get that
Starting point is 01:25:45 from like a collective action market solution. You have to just say it's the law. So like I think that stuff is coming. We talk about it a lot. Every time I hear this stuff about Syria and Alexa, all I think about is there's no way anybody knew this was happening. And the second they found out, The second was revealed, all these companies scrambled to change it. That's an indication they knew they were doing something stupid, right? It wasn't, we're going to write 50 blog posts justifying it, and there's more and more hype, and eventually, like, you know, the celebrity tweets about how they hate it, and like, now Taylor Swift is Matt, and, like, then, you know what I mean?
Starting point is 01:26:22 Like, there's that version of this story, but then there's what actually happened, which is the second anyone found out about, they're like, who are bad. And I think that these are the biggest companies in the world. Like they shouldn't get off that easy Anyhow have you turned off Siri? No Google Assistant No Alexa I don't have Alexa anymore I have Google Assistant
Starting point is 01:26:41 Okay me neither I will say that I have set all of my Google stuff To their auto delete settings Yeah Whatever the strictest one is like three months I feel zero guilt about that Yeah I turned everything I could off on Google Except I guess I haven't turned off assistant
Starting point is 01:26:56 But so like I never use Siri So there's no danger in them listening to me The weird thing is like the The companies that probably are the worst at doing stuff with their data have the best controls for... Because they keep getting caught. Yeah. That's exactly right. Maybe that's the solution.
Starting point is 01:27:11 We'll just keep catching them. And eventually they'll be respectful. No, the solution is to abandon them and allow them to whither away. Yeah. I mean, that's the market solution. The problem is that they're giant monopolies that control like 80% of all advertising dollars in America. Like open source software, open hardware, stuff that you can audit, stuff that it, doesn't send telemetry back to a centralized server, decentralized service as much as possible.
Starting point is 01:27:38 Like, I think it's one of those things. Like, no matter what laws are added to this situation, I think it's something that it's going to ultimately be on us to try to protect ourselves from. It's true. You should also build your own car and turn your own butter. But the problem is, like, people are busy. It's true. I mean, I agree with you.
Starting point is 01:27:56 I absolutely agree with you. I'm a computer nerd. I did all those things for a long time. That's not why they got popular. Like, I wish there was some market dynamic that made this better. Obviously, right? What do I want? I want competition.
Starting point is 01:28:09 But there is competition. The three biggest companies in the world are like four. Cortana got caught doing this stuff too. Yeah. Like the four biggest companies in the world are competing. Cortana got caught doing this stuff on Skype Translate, which is like direct actual conversations people are having. Right. Which is like a whole other thing.
Starting point is 01:28:27 They're competing on every metric except privacy. And that's wild to me. Anyhow, I don't mean to keep ranting about it. It's just, after we got through the things that were actually happening, to me, the bigger issues, no one is giving meaningful consent to this kind of crap. Okay, I'm going to say it because it's true. I have the Apple card. It's a credit card. That's a nice app.
Starting point is 01:28:47 Apple really wants it to be the default. Yeah. That's it. I'm going to try to review it. Does it make you feel richer? It makes you feel like I have another credit card. Like, I was definitely raised to not have very many credit cards to, like, always pay that on time. Like to never, right?
Starting point is 01:29:03 Like, that is, I hear my dad's voice in my head. So I know there are people out there who love their credit card shuffle who, like, do all the point stuff. It's not me. Although, like, I wish I did. Like, it feels like I don't know how to do a scam, you know? Right. Yeah. I kind of wish I did it.
Starting point is 01:29:18 I also wish I knew how to juggle. Like, there's a lot of stuff I wish I knew I did. Just fact, like, um. Does it keep you up at night? Every now and again, I try to juggle. It doesn't, I'm like, yep, still don't know how to do this. Wow. You know how to learn to,
Starting point is 01:29:32 juggle is you do it with the racket balls because they bounce so you don't have to bend over and pick up all the juggling balls. All right, let me get some racket balls. Max and I are going to learn how to juggle. That's a good with the kid, right? She's only like one and a half. She's not going to be any good at it. But one day, that's my
Starting point is 01:29:48 new parenting goals. It's right out there with good at math. Juggling ability. I will say the one thing that makes me sad about the Apple card is there's more than one thing. The main thing is that it definitely ties you to an iPhone. Like, you're now, you're an iPhone customer forever and ever until you get rid of the credit card.
Starting point is 01:30:07 Or IMessage. The card in particular is like, but like all the stuff that they do that makes easy to pay and like the app and the budgeting is so much better than Mint. Yeah. It's like a beautiful thing. Yeah. And the fact that that's only limited to Apple card purchases is like, oh, well, maybe someday they'll just, Apple should just take over all in finance. No, I disagree. Absolutely disagree.
Starting point is 01:30:30 Here's what I want. I'm mentioning it. I wrote about it. You can read the post. We have to figure out how to review it. I don't think the verge is in the business of reviewing credit cards. We're not going to review an MX card next. But it's interesting.
Starting point is 01:30:44 It is fundamentally technology product. Just tweet me and let me know what you want to know with the Apple cards. So I can figure out what to do with it next. Besides like gazing at it. Like I don't know. Yeah. It could get two gems. You should buy the thing and then like reverse the charges.
Starting point is 01:30:58 You know, like MX is really. good. Like, I didn't buy this and like, okay, sure. So fraud. I should do credit card fraud. The company, the store won't let me return this. And they're like, yeah, that sucks. We'll handle it. And then, you know, okay. Don't fraud. Don't do fraud. Don't do crimes.
Starting point is 01:31:14 All right. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll be, okay, please suggest what you want me to do, except for crimes like Dieter. I'm interested in what you want to know from, from like the Verge perspective. I'm sure the credit card. We know a bunch of people worth the points guy. I'm sure they're going to do a great job reviewing the card as a credit card.
Starting point is 01:31:30 I'm much more interested in what you want to know about the text out of it. Okay, we're way over time. Would it be a Verge cast if you didn't say it. I really wanted to be short this week, and we weren't. Season of Family, why'd you push that button is here? It's great. You should go listen to it. Ashley and Caitlin did a great job.
Starting point is 01:31:46 Their producer, Andrew, is our producer. He did a great job, too. Recode Media is also great this week with Peter. He's got Taylor Lawrence on the show. Taylor's like a friend of the Verge cast, a friend of the Verge. Excited about that. Go listen to it's really fun. You can tweet at me.
Starting point is 01:31:59 I'm Reckless Dieter. It's backlon. He thinks Android is slow. Oh, God. Paul. The future Paul tweeted us. We love your feedback. We'll see you next week.
Starting point is 01:32:07 Rock and roll. Paul. Kesney.

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