The Vergecast - Samsung’s new folds, flips, and Apple clones

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the announcements from Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, Redbox shutting down, and more tech news from this week. Further reading: Samsung Galaxy Unpacked: all the news on the Galaxy Ring, Fold, Flip, Watch, and AI Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Flip 6 are pricier with minor updates Samsung’s Galaxy Ring could be the one ring to rule an ecosystem Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra hands-on: ultra déjà vu Galaxy Watch 7: price, availability, and how to preorder Samsung’s new Galaxy Buds are blatant AirPod clones in both form and function Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm are, uh, still doing that XR thing. Motorola’s 2024 Razr Plus is a fun and flawed flip phone Redbox shuts down as its parent company declares Chapter 7 bankruptcy Sling TV is the latest streamer to get those pesky pause ads Netflix’s next live event is a Joe Rogan comedy special Spotify is going to let you leave comments on podcast episodes Paramount agrees to sweetened Skydance merger deal Instagram is sticking to short videos, says Adam Mosseri Amazon’s Echo Spot is back with better sound and no camera Nothing’s CMF launches new supercheap earbuds and a smartwatch Nothing’s CMF Phone 1 is proof that gadgets can still be fun Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified Microsoft and Apple ditch OpenAI board seats amid regulatory scrutiny The developers suing over GitHub Copilot got dealt a major blow in court Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome Vergecast, the flagship podcast of saying they don't look like AirPods at all. Not even a little bit.

Nope, those aren't AirPods. That's not what that. Sure, they look like AirPods, but they don't stop it. Anyway, we're going to talk about Samsung unpack today. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi. I feel like we just did talk about Tim.

Like you've ruined the whole thing already. That was so quick. Alex Kranz is here. Hey, Alex. I'm your friend who thinks they're not really AirPods if they've got cool lights on them, right? Like that changes the game. Sure. In the same way that buying knockoff AirPods on Canal Street changes the game. Alex, you're in Texas.

Are you okay? I am totally okay. I am far away from the hurricane. We didn't even get any rain here. Okay. Sucked. Sorry to everybody who doesn't have power. That also sucks.

Stay cool. If you can, if you can, please or, you know, talk to your local elected or official. Yeah. There's a lot to say there. My favorite story of the hurricane, if you can have a favorite story from a giant hurricane has caused a great deal of harm. Bold way to start a story. Yeah. Is the people like the Texas power utilities don't have apps.

So people are using the Wada Burger app to find what areas still have blackouts. because the Waterburgers are offline. It rules. It's a life finds a way. Do you know what I'm saying? Life finds away. All right. Well, hopefully we can be a little ray of sunshine in this time.

If you are stuck down there, there's a lot of gadget you talk about. Samsung did have unpacked a bunch of phones. Motorola has new flip phones, which Allison reviewed. There's a much of streaming news. Alex, today was once again horny for David Zazlov in Slack quite openly. That was a real thing that happened today. It's all days. And we got a lightning round.

Unsponsored as always. I'm trying to sell our soul here, people. We get a lot of increase. I will say this. We get a lot of inquiries at price points that are entirely too low for my soul. Just keep that in mind. Reasonable cost for your soul.

We're trying to buy boats, all right? Not dingies. That's the lighting. Boats, not dingies. That's going on our shirt. I don't know what it's advertising, but we're putting that on the shirt. I can buy my own unicorn.

for my daughter. I don't need your help. All right. Let's get into it. David, tell us about unpacked. It was like a big one. Yeah, I sort of, this is a very weird year. So Samsung, I think, probably tries the hardest of any tech company to have cool events. Which you guys say, that's fair. Like, Apple has the big ones, but they're increasingly, like, at Apple Park in a theater. They make a video. We kind of know how they're doing it. Samsung is like, like, Samsung try so hard, like so hard. So I can explain this because we've been talking about this for a long time. And it's gotten weirder in a weird way.

Like the weirdness of it is getting weirder. Is itself weird? Yeah, okay. Do you know what I mean? Like the mechanism of weirdness is getting weirder. So Apple, for the longest time, had like massive cultural influence. Like Steve Jobs was like, I don't know, here's cold play. They're going to tell you how good the iPod is.

Bono is on stage. One year famously scrubbed from the internet, Kanye West, close. out a WWDC by playing Gold Digger. Is that true? And let me tell you that audience did not scream pre-nup. Dead silence. Like, it is impossible to find this video that is removed. Apple just deleted it.

Wow. But Kanye was like, Hello, we want pre-up. And it was just like, we do not, sir. We're good. One Apple to play just goes, I'm under NDA. Yeah, it was so weird. The weekend has played at a day.

WWC, just straight saying about cocaine at 1030 in the morning. Weird. But Apple is able to do it. Like, their brand has the cultural capacity for these moments. And now they don't, which is weird. Like, they've gotten so corporate, they're making infomercials. They're like, I tried to use these AI tools and I couldn't. Like, you know, it's like, it's weird.

It's like QVC, but they still have the cachet. Samsung has been trying to buy it for years. So they're like, I don't know, here's a. Broadway play about how women can't use phones, which is a real thing they did. Yep. That's a real story. Here's more famous people. Sidney Sweeney was at this event, which we should talk about.

Very odd moment with Sidney Sweney at this event. So they keep trying to buy celebrities and influencers to get to the level of cultural relevance that Apple has long had. But Apple doesn't actually, they're not that company. They're just bigger. They're like a nation state. And I will say to Samsung's credit, I mean, speaking of nation states, Jesus. To Samsung's credit, it is still very invested in doing these things live in a way that Apple

has gone full, let's all sit here and watch a video. Samsung is like trying to create spectacle in a way that I kind of appreciate. I appreciate it, but that's why I mean by the mechanism of the weirdness is getting weird. Like that's been the disconnect. It's like Apple's the cool on an Apple and Samsung's trying to buy the coolness. And now it's like Apple doesn't even try to be cool. Like, whatever. Which, if I know one thing about being cool, that's how to actually be cool.

They're just like over it. And Samsung is like, here's even more stuff. Like more hype, more spectacle. Here's Sidney Sweeney. Here's Sidney Sweeney having, like, being forced to react to like a deep fake for itself. This is truly bizarre about it. Let's come back to that. So, but this one was they did it in Paris, which on the one hand makes a certain kind of sense

because Paris is, it's where the Olympics is happening, the summer, it's a big deal, all this stuff. On the other hand, makes no sense because it's two weeks until the Olympics. It's not like it's the middle of the Olympics. Like, it's this long break Olympics. Like, it's just weird that Samsung picked to do this, but whatever. They did it in Paris. Lots of people went. They seemed to fly in a ton of like creators and influencers and people. Lots of folks in Paris. We didn't have anybody there, but lots of folks were there. And had, what seemed like a giant, like warehouse sized theater thing. It was like the Samsung event and then like a like a really dirty rave was like the vibe

I got from this building. So Paris. Yeah, that's fair. Touche. And it was, the reason I'm so hung up on the Apple comparison here is because Samsung basically got up and launched a bunch of Apple products. Like, like in a very direct real way launched a bunch of Apple products. And they launched phones that I think.

are cool and interesting and we should talk about. And the ring, but there are two in particular where you're like, oh. Thanks, Apple. And it's just, Samsung is like doing a weird thing where it is becoming less Samsung-y all the time. And it's doing Google AI plus Apple hardware and kind of pretending that that is Samsung. And I think that's bizarre. Isn't that what happens when you work on Saturdays? You just say, what if we take these two and smush them together?

If we cut our cost by just firing the design teams entirely. Yeah. I don't know. Let's just do the two Apple ones first. Because the other products are fundamentally more interesting. Right? So it's the Galaxy Buds and the Galaxy Buds Pro, which just fully look like AirPods and AirPods Pro, right? Yeah, they used to look like little beans.

Yeah. And they were kind of cool. Like, I wouldn't buy them, but they were kind of cool. And now they look like AirPods pros, AirPods. They have the stems. They got stems. They're a little bit more angular. They do have LEDs on them

Which has listeners now I appreciate more than it Almost any other thing You can add to a tech product You know what you want is LEDs Right next to your ear canal Where you'll see them all the time It makes perfect sense

Where everyone else can't too Right I think people should be like That dude's listening in tunes You should just know that of them Like pulses with their music Yeah you want like RGB lighting for your ears

Basically Where's the party speaker effects For these headphones So no one else can see them And you can't No one else can hear what you're listening to and you can't see the lights. That's the place for party speaker LEDs. So, you know, we're at this weird place in headphoneville where the best headphones to buy for

your phone are often the one that the phone maker makes. Yes. Because they have all co-opted Bluetooth as a standard and built proprietary features for their own products. We can do this forever. They've all done it. Like whether or not you think that's good or bad. They have all done it. Apple has done it with the AirPods where they use Bluetooth, but then there's a bunch of proprietary features. Samsung has done with the Galaxy Buds. Google has done it with PixelBuds. Just down the line, everyone's approach to this is, if you want the coolest stuff,

you have to buy our proprietary earbuds. And if God help you, if you want to use the Galaxy butts with an iPhone, they're just going to fall back to Bluetooth. So if you're a Galaxy owner, like, if you have a Samsung phone, I think the question is whether you want to advertise it with the stuff in your ears. Well, I think it's slightly differently. I think if you're Samsung, there is a perfectly, reasonable set of decisions you make to land on, we should just make AirPods, which is,

they cited the evidence, and there is some evidence out there that that basic shape is actually more comfortable for more people with the stem. It balances the weight. It also points a microphone towards your mouth instead of the microphone just sort of pointing out to the side of your head, which a lot of these things do. But also, I'm curious if you guys feel this way, but in my circle, at least, there is AirPods and there is knockoff AirPods. And that is the perception of wireless headphones. Everybody knows what AirPods are. And then all the other ones are like, oh, those aren't AirPods. And I feel like if you're Samsung, you're like, okay, well, we want something that integrates. And if it happens to, at a glance, look like AirPods. And so people think they're AirPods, that's

actually not the worst thing in the world. And I think, like, maybe it is that simple. Yeah. No, I think we're saying the same thing in slightly different ways. Like, do you want your headphones to advertise, they're not from Apple, and that means you don't have an iPhone. I think a lot of companies have killed themselves trying to differentiate from Apple. We Are Not Apple. Turns out to be like a pretty bad branding exercise most of the time. I don't think Samsung's ever done that. They've always kind of been like, yeah, we're Apple, but for Android.

Like, oh, you live in any other part of the world where Apple doesn't make sense or it's too expensive or whatever? No, Samsung waxes and wanes on the We are not Apple. There have been times of maximum We Are Not Apple from Samsung And I think this is a low point Yeah Like this is very much a low point in Samsung's

Like are we totally differentiated Like every for years They had bigger phones And they were just like They were making the ads that You know people staying in line for the iPhone And then someone would come by with like a surfboard size Samsung phone

To the point that that That marketing actually worked against Apple It came up in various lawsuits That like Apple executives were saying like Samsung's branding was causing market share loss. Like very famous, like Phil Schuller was like screaming at Apple's ad agency because that was working. And it turned out it was just the screens were bigger and people love big cheap screens.

And then Apple was like, here's the iPhone 6. And it just stopped being a problem. Yeah. I mean, and it's worth pointing out that all of this is incredibly cyclical, right? Like Apple spends most of its time building features into the iPhone that already exist on Android devices. Apple got bigger phones way after the whole Android universe. Like everybody is just perpetually shoving towards each other at all times.

It's just particularly jarring when you see it in something as simple a shape as these headphones. Because it's not just like a slab of glass in the way that all phones are a slab of glass. There are a lot of shapes that headphones can be. And I don't know that there is necessarily like a perfect, correct way for headphones to be. But we've just decided that AirPods are the thing. And it's very clear that Samsung looked at it and said AirPods are the thing. and the best, smartest thing we can do is just make AirPods. I'm just going to point out that the shapes of headphones, the designs of headphones,

the sound cloud of headphones, all much more varied and competitive when the headphone jack was still on phones. Just going to say it out loud. When there was an open interconnect that allowed for high-quality audio to pass from your device to the headphones, the variability in the market, the variability in styles was real, it was big. Also, as someone for whom AirPods don't feel great in my ears, it's a real bummer that this is what we've decided. I did. Yeah. So we'll see.

There's the two sides on the Galaxy Buds. There's the pro which are in ears. And then there's the regular ones, which are more air potty, which are like just shove in. They just hang. They're just like in there, you know. We gotta do the tests. We gotta try them out.

I'm always curious to see if anybody's actually managed to make Bluetooth call audio sound good. Here in New York City, the number of people who use wired headphones all day long, it feels like it's just going up. I think people are just like over it, which is interesting. But that's New York. It's not everywhere. So we'll see. We're going to review the things.

The other major, yep, you just made an Apple product is the Galaxy Watch Ultra. This, I think, is actually the worst offender of the group. It's so bad. Yeah, I mean, it's called, first of all, it's called the Ultra. They've added the icons, like the menu switcher dealy, the home screen is the Apple Watch home screen. They even launched it with an orange band. And a quick button. And a quick button, which is orange.

The colors are the same. Weird, just weird all around. it's yeah it's just like a full-on copy right like the i think the only feels like the only really big difference is the squircle shape which i absolutely hate that word and wanted to die agreed but are and the crown doesn't turn and the crown doesn't well it does but it doesn't scroll yeah which sure like the fact that it doesn't scroll but it turns is just like mind-boggling to me yeah i just i don't know i'm so torn on this yet again because I think on the one hand,

what we've learned in the last couple of years is that Apple got the watch Ultra really right in a lot of ways, right? Like it went super hard on this idea that this is a thing for people who are going to use it aggressively outdoors. So we're going to optimize for battery life. We're going to give you extra information about how you're doing. We're going to

add some like GPSE stuff into it. We're going to make it more rugged for you to do more rugged things. And all of that has, I think, largely proven right, but has also just proven popular. Like there are a lot of people, including a lot of people who don't need

all of that stuff. Here I am. Who wear ultras, right. And so I think if you're, part of me is like, it's a real sort of abdication of like creative responsibility for Samsung to not find something more interesting to do.

But also it looked around and it was like, oh no, Apple maybe just got this one right. And maybe we'll just go do that and build it into Samsung-y stuff. Because ultimately, that's what, people are asking us for, right? Like, the thing you hear all the time is like, where is the Apple Watch for Samsung? And it has like steadily moved towards that. And this just feels like, they just went the whole way and we're like, you know what, screw it. The Apple Watch Alch was pretty good.

Let's do it. But I want to say one thing. There's one very important differentiator here. It is vastly uglier. Yeah, the squircle. It's not even the squircle. It's like got a round face on a squircle body with like a weird, the weird touch ring that they do. It's one too many bezels. It's a chunk. It's a chunk in a way that the ultra is a chunk, but the ultra feels like a singular idea.

And this is just like, yeah, one too many bezels. It's like a case inside of a case inside of a case in a way that just feels tacky. Yeah. I do sort of like some of the color combinations. Like if you, some of the pictures we've seen with, some of the like really aggressive like information dense watch faces you look at them and it's like

okay there's a certain amount of like I could control a smart city from my watch with this and like could I be Batman with this watch on like potentially but it is it is I think it feels it's either over designed or under designed and I genuinely can't tell which one it is does the screen feel like too much screen to you all in a way that the yeah I feel the way but the Apple yeah the Apple I feel doesn't quite scream screen at me as much as this does, but I have neither, so I don't. I think the ultra is too much screen. I think they're both too much screen. Like, anytime I'm around somebody with an ultra, both, dear God, you're right.

Any time I'm around somebody with an Apple Watch Ultra, I'm like, I can just sit here and read your email. Like, you get a text message. It's like, we both got that text message. It's just, it's a lot of screen. And this is, I think, very clearly going to be the same thing. But people seem to be fine with that. Like, I guess that's just a thing we're getting comfortable with.

There is some other Samsung stuff here in that, you know, Samsung is just a weird company with weird ideas. And they like to be ahead of the curve. So they've added, like, new sensors for health stuff. And the best part is that they call it the bioactive sensor. And they're like, what if we just add more colors of LEDs to the sensor and measure more things? And the funniest one here is like, no one can quite. do the blood sugar measurement, which everyone wants to do. Like Apple's struggled with it.

Samsung is obviously struggling with it. But like there's a lot of people out there who would love an ongoing blood sugar measurement. Yeah. For a variety of reasons. So they've just added something called the experimental advanced glycation end products index metric. Which is nothing to do. Hold on. Say that one more time.

One more time. The experimental advanced glycation end products index metric. Yeah. It sounds like a like third. stock exchange. It's an index of everyone's blood sugar is what it is.

It's like, I ate a cookie. The A-G-E-I went down. So it's not it's not supposed to be that. You were not supposed to read that. But Samsung says it looks at your diet and life cycle to reflect your overall biological aging process,

which is worse. It's like, who's the billionaire that's just slowly turning him? himself younger. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the vampire blood guy. Peter Thiel is like, I got to get this Samsung Go on. He wants an ultra- I need this immediately.

But no one else does. This is the differentiation in this market. Like, everyone figured out watches are either you want a big screen because you'll have a big screen like me, or you want all these health and fitness features. Or maybe you just want notifications and two-factor codes. But at the high end, it's all health and fitness. Yep. Like, that's what sells the extra watch features to people.

there's a reason that new health specific features are not coming out at a high rate. Like one, the tech isn't quite there. Two, there's a bunch of regulatory hurdles. Three, they have to make sure they're actually safe and say what they say they're going to do. Great. That means you end up with like fake, like wellness health features, like the advanced experimental, like the experimental advanced classification and products result. And it's fine, but there's always the danger that people take that stuff way more seriously

than they should. Just like 10,000, like, people take 10,000 steps very seriously. And, like, that's just made up. Like, people just made that up. And, like, here we are. And, like, there's a piece of this puzzle where I think these watches are going to end up being more samey. Because the thing that ultimately differentiates them is kind of caught up in a lull of innovation and regulatory behavior and all that stuff. And famously, like, aggressive lawsuits against Apple from other companies.

No, I think that's right. And there's the, what was it, is it the health score? Is that what Samsung calls it? This, this like all in one tracking thing that they're doing with the watches to basically give you sort of an overall picture of your score. But like everybody's doing that right now, right? Yeah, but I think it fits exactly what you're talking about, Nilai, that it's, it's the sort of thing that as a, as a very casual data point is helpful, right?

Where it's like, okay. Like, I was just looking at this weather app. It's called lazy weather. And its whole job is to tell you, is it going to be warmer or colder. than yesterday, right? Like, based on the assumption that, like, that's actually all you really need to know. And that is, to that extent, a health score is useful, right? It's like, am I, am I better or worse?

Like, how am I doing? And that's like, it gives you that answer. But all these things, as we get more of these sensors and more of this data, all you're actually doing is giving people tools they don't understand with which to do things that may or may not be helpful. And it feels like we are so deep down the road of like, here's some numbers without giving people real ability to like do things with them. Well, and this age index in particular feels like it is trying to ride on the, like,

ride the wave of continuous glucose monitors. It's trying to sound like, oh, yeah, we kind of care about glucose monitors and diabetes and all of that. But also, we can't legally do any of that because none of that actual technology exists in a safe way. To be clear, Samsung would not explain what the experimental advanced glycation and products index is. I was reading up on it all. Like as soon as I saw that word, I've been very into continuous glucose monitors right now because I've got a diabetic in the family. And as soon as I saw that,

I was like, what is that metric? That's not the one I talk with the doctors about. Yeah. And just immediately it was like, oh, this is, I want to say bullshit. But like, close to it. Right. All Samsung will say, just to repeat this, all Samsung will say is that it looks at, quote, your diet and lifestyle to reflect your overall biological aging process. Sure. This is why I'm happy to announce a line of Vergecast supplements, which will bring your biological age lower. If I had 10% more grift in my body,

you would have your listening for LightningRounds sponsorships. By the way, we will not allow supplement companies to advertise in Lightning Round. I'm putting that out there, unless the price tag is high enough. unless they're like really good supplements. Unless they rule. Yeah.

But no, I mean, I think even the one of the big things, Samsung announced with these watches is that they have FDA de novo clearance for sleep apnea stuff. Yeah. And that's another really good example, right? Because what that doesn't mean is that this will tell you if you have sleep apnea. It's very hard to not understand it as that, but that is not what this is. What it means is this is a device that will give you data that is not harmful and potentially interesting and that you should take that data and take it to a medical professional who can help

you make sense of it. And that is kind of indicative of like the best of most smart watches. And this is true of Apple and Google and basically everybody in this space right now that they're all so careful to remind you constantly. Like these are not medical devices. This is not medical advice. These things are just indicated as ways to give you information that might be helpful in a certain context. And you should take it to your healthcare provider and consult with them. Like over and over and over, that's the thing. But what it's actually doing is it's going to pop up a thing, being like, you didn't sleep well, what do you think that's about?

And it's like, are we, what problems are we really solving for people here? So I come from a family of doctors, and they all talk about, you know, like, there are laws in most states now that say you have to have access to your medical records right away. And a thing that is real is you go in for tests and then you get the result of your test before the doctor gets it. And then people don't wait. they start furiously googling numbers, and they call the doctors having already formed conclusions. And the doctor's like, hold on.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, apparently I didn't have kidney failure. I just needed to drink more water. Yeah, this is like a real thing that happens all the time. And I think that's fascinating in this context, right? Where you were like, you're just putting on people's wrists for a couple hundred bucks. You know, like, this is good at hikes. Also, it will terrify you.

and I'm saying like the the bleeding edge of these devices is health features and we're just kind of at a place now where they can't make the real claims so they're just making up other ones we'll see how it goes in any case it looks exactly like an Apple Watch Ultra yeah except uglier in like a real way all right so that's the two copies right yeah yeah like the you put in you put the AirPods through chat GPT it's spit back AirPods with LED is like done and done nailed it then there's the other stuff we should talk about the ring because the ring is easily the most interesting product they have. Yes. And it is the one where A, Apple has nothing, although we've heard about some attempts, some research projects at that company. But there are other, you know, the aura ring exists. But it seems like Samsung is, has a shot here. Yeah, I think it does because the aura ring is really like, it's kind of one size. Most of the other ring makers are kind of like, yeah, we do one size. You can get different sizes of the ring, but ultimately the battery, everything else is the same. Samsung is doing what most big tech companies do, which is like, we're going to have multiple sizes.

So like the largest ones have a little bit more battery than the smaller ones because they can put more in it. And that's just cool and smart. But also it just sounds a lot like an aura ring with better integration for Samsung specifically in a way that's like exciting. And they have smaller ones. This is like, I think Victoria Song, our Warhol's writer, said that this might be one of the like smallest available smart rings for people. It still looks gigantic on her hand. It does. But she has, she will be the first to tell you she has small hands and is not a super indicative.

Also, shout out to V, who I believe wore four other rings to the hands on with the Galaxy ring. Like that is, that's some, that's a straight-up mafia. Just like brass knuckles, but it's all smart rings. Like, I, hell yeah. It's so good. I'm either going to a Samsung event or the Jersey Shore. We're going to find out. I might buy the ring sizer because you can just buy.

Samsung's ring sizeer for 10 bucks and you figure out what your ring size is which is useful and then you get a credit when you buy the ring. I think that's really smart. Like compared to the other you have to wear this on your body fitment ideas we've seen like

Apple making you go to the store. Yeah. Like this is actually very clever. It's obviously easier with a ring than a thing that you have to wear in your face and where you know prescription lenses and all that with the Vision Pro. But I think it's very clever that as we kind of go into wearables world fitting stuff to your body

becomes an interesting challenge and it's not solved. So I thought that part is really cool. But the part where it's the same product as everyone else but it's more integrated in the system because Samsung owns the operating system, I can't, I don't know how I feel about that at all.

Yeah. Well, one thing that is better about it is that it also has like an actual case instead of just a little dongle you have to periodically find and stick the ring on and the case looks interesting. Did you guys look at the case for it?

The case is, is it gigantic? I can't tell if this case is gigantic or not. It feels like gigantic and also so much fake crystal. Yes. Yes. It's like a Claire's jewelry case. Yeah. I love it so much.

I don't mean that as an insult. Like, it just is what it is. And it is true that it's better that it is a case than what you get from ORA and others, which is essentially just like a puck that sits on your desk, which is fine for what it is, but is easy to lose. and doesn't travel very well. And I think a case that is properly a case makes a lot of sense. And I think actually the thing I'm most excited about about the Galaxy Ring is that

Samsung seems to have gotten the ring wearing experience closer to right than just about anybody that we've seen. Like the thing is pretty light. It's pretty thin. It's concave, which will make it a little easier to wear and like bang around on a desk and stuff than some of the other sort of convex ones that we've seen. It's, it comes in a bunch of different. different sizes, like the battery life is long. It seems like...

No additional subscription. Right. There are like little bits and pieces of what it's going to be like to own this that I think are going to be really important because we're still very much at a moment where like, unless you are a psycho who wants to track their sleep and no shade to those psychos, there's lots of them out there. Unless you are that person, there are not a lot of compelling reasons to wear a ring. So we have to figure out like, what is this thing for? And the smart thing that Samsung did is be like, this is, can be a nice thing to wear before you really have 100 reasons to use it.

It's just a bunch of sensors, right? Yeah. Yeah. It does heart rate tracking. It does a skin temperature sensor. I've often wondered what my skin temperature is. And then it's got a bunch of sleep feature. Like, the watch, we just had this whole conversation about like they're adding more kinds

of sensors to the watch ahead of their ability to actually tell you what they mean. It feels like, well, we also made a bunch of them smaller. Now we can just put them in a ring. Well, they're also better on a ring, right? Like having that stuff on your finger 24 hours a day is a vastly better data collection system than having it on your wrist sometimes, right? Like if you are the person who wants that data and cares about it and is going to take it to your medical professional, a ring is just a better venue for that in almost every way. Yeah. I want smart rings to work.

Like, I really, I really do. If you had a smart ring, would you give up on your watch? No. And the reason I don't have a smart ring, frankly, is because every time I wear an aura, I wear an aura for three days. and I'm like, what on earth is the point of me having this thing on? Because I'm not like at that. If you're like a nine or ten out of ten on a like how much do I care about tracking my body sensors person, a ring is great. I'm not that.

And so like having it tell me I got bad sleep when I wake up tired is like not interesting to me. So I end up just putting the aura back in a drawer. And the ring is still, the galaxy ring is going to have that same problem. So this brings me to, you know, Patel's theory of wearable bullshit. So if you remember, by the way, this theory still needs a better name I'm in the market for, but if you remember, it's important that has Neely's name in it, though. It's mine. That's how you can buy. I'll sell you naming rights to the theory of wearable bullshit.

This is the Samsung Exxon theory of wearable bullshit presented by Citibank. There you go. So the X axis, right, is value. And then the Y is fiddliness. Like how much you have to care about the thing? Or it's the other way around. It doesn't matter. Those are the two axes.

Well, there's also a Z that you refuse to acknowledge, but it's okay. Many people have sent us many versions of this chart, right? And so the paradigm object on the chart of things you attach to your body is regular glasses. which are a little bit fiddly. You have to clean them. You got to care them. You can't lose them. But they, if you need them,

provide you an immense amount of value. So you're like, I'm going to put these on my face all the time. Yeah. Because they allow me to see. And then I will deal with having to clean them and owning a microfiber cloth and all the rest of the stuff

that you're supposed to do with glasses. You just use your shirt. Right. That's what. Right. Somewhere on that list is like the original Apple Watch, which was too fiddly, required a lot of care and didn't do well as a product.

then there's the current Apple Watch which actually is pretty good bad at your life doesn't require a lot of care and has a lot of value for people like exceeded the line then there's a Vision Pro which is very like anything that goes on your face the fiddliness is off the charts and it can't deliver as

much value. Yeah. Like face computers just can't deliver the value to make this worth worth it. You just keep going down and down the list. The ring has a problem in that it delivers no value to you. It is a totally passive computer that you have to fiddle with and put on your body, and then all the value that's delivered is like,

at some later point, you will look at some data that was collected. Well, and I think if you're the kind of person who has, like a pre-existing thing for which that is useful, great. Like, if you are someone who knows you struggle with sleep

and you're trying things and actually collecting that data on an ongoing basis helps you, great. That makes total sense. A ring is going to be really useful. And the upside of a ring is that the fiddleness score is much, much lower. Like, a thing that you wear

on your index finger and take off once a week to charge while you shower, super low on the fiddleness meter. But the problem is that even its potential to do more stuff is not that high. I don't think it's that low on the fiddliness meter. I wear a ring every day. Yeah. I've never think. I pick it up when I leave the house.

It serves an important function, which is when I'm taken. It's a symbol of my ongoing devotion to my devotion. to my divorce lawyer of a wife. And I just never think about it. I put it on, I take it off. I never think about charging it, whatever. It has obviously important societal, emotional function that it does. It's like symbolic.

But it's zero fit. Like anything over zero is actually the standard. I think that is probably only some of our audience has that issue, because a lot of their audience probably also enjoys to wear a little couple of different rings, replaced rings. But they're also zero. No, because you take, like, I cannot tell you, it's jewelry, right? Like jewelry, you're, you're constantly, a lot of people are constantly fiddling with their jewelry.

Do you think the galaxy watches jewelry? It fundamentally is. It's not jewelry I want to personally wear. Well, but it doesn't have the function. No, it does. It's, it's a ring. It's showing, it's putting that extra bling on your hand. And I think a lot of people do like to have that extra bling.

The aura ring has definitely attained, like, status symbol status over the years. Yeah, it's got like a, it's got like a bling kind of quality to it. And I think the rings in a way, like the Apple Watch quickly became, went from fashion. We all laughed at it being fashion and immediately. It failed as a fashion. Famously failed as a fashion. Famously, we were all like, that's stupid. And we all just stopped treating it like fashion.

And it just became a watch on your wrist. The ring is still, I think, both more capable of it. So if you're someone who doesn't want to have a giant watch on your wrist and you do want those metrics, like, okay, you can put on the ring and you can still wear your right link or your Rolex or whatever, you're going to show that off. And I think that's who this is for. Yeah, this is for like people with $6,000 watches that they don't want to replace it. This is why Silicon Valley billionaires love the order. This is my aspirational ring. I guess when I say is it jewelry, I agree with you that like it's jewelry. I meant does it look like jewelry? The only only, the only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only thing. The only. a ring, actually, they tried very hard to make it look like jewelry.

Yeah. And one of the only reasons that I wouldn't just swap out my wedding ring for it is you can, I think you can only wear it on your index finger, right? Yeah. You're supposed to only wear it on your index. So it's like, it doesn't do the other thing. But there's a world in which you just infuse my existing jewelry with the tech, and it looks good enough and that's fine.

I think the Samsung one doesn't, doesn't. But wait, the, the Neely Patel theory of wearable bullshit does not have a fashion scale. That's the Z axis now. You've, you've, yeah, this is, this is about fiddliness. And those are not the same thing. Do you know what's very fiddly is fashion, Nilai? All right. Looking good as hard work, man.

I need to think about this for like five more seconds and I'll come up with something. But no, but I, I really think the problem is the ceiling for what you can do with a ring right now seems really low. Because like even, even like the next thing you think of is like, oh, maybe it'll vibrate for notifications. Do you know how insane it would feel to have your, the base of your index finger vibrate every time you get a text message? Like, insane. Disaster. You'd go to your doctor. Exactly. And be like, I have all of this medical information. And Samsung is doing a thing where they're like sort of gently pointing at like maybe this is a way to gesture control some stuff. Like they have a little bit of the pinchy pinchy stuff going on. But only if you have a Samsung phone.

Right. And so there's like, but even that is like, like, probably not i just don't think that's the thing yet what if i mean we're hearing a lot more about xr nowadays and and if you just like mixed reality that's just another word for mixed reality and what if that's like the kind of their way of this is how we're going to control it in the future i do think if if you want to like galaxy brain take the galaxy ring i think that's probably that's all i want to do also i just realized if samson comes out with a headset and doesn't call it the galaxy Brain, I'm going to be furious. Or its entire AI service suite should be called Galaxy Brain.

How did we have this idea? David Pierce's Galaxy Brain. You can have one. Yeah. God. All right. We're going to try out the ring. I think V is very excited to get it.

We'll know much more about it soon. The last piece we should talk about are some phones. I just want to point out that we're almost 40 minutes into this segment just now talking about the phones, which actually tells you every single thing you need to know about these new phones. Yeah. They are more expensive. I'm so disappointed in these new phones.

Like, of all the things, like, I can understand why you would copy Apple in making certain things. I can understand why you go all in on AI even before there are a lot of really compelling use cases. But this thing where Samsung was so far ahead in foldable phones and flip phones and seems content to just like squander that in the name of making everything a smidge better and not doing anything new or interesting every year is really starting to bump me out. Well, do they have competition in this space? Like, is there anybody that's actually pushing? Well, so we should talk about the Motorola Razor Plus, which Allison reviewed this week, which she loved. She just loved it. That thing is one very good camera away from maybe being the best Android phone.

Yeah. Also, it's got a weird processor. It's like, who even can describe this Snapdragon 8 S3M or whatever the fuck that's called? Yeah. Wait, let me find it. What is it? I'm trying to find it. It's the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, which is just a weird mid-tier.

processor. It's weird. It's just a weird. It's one of those who's like, well, this phone last two years or five? Like, who knows? Yeah, Alison called it like an entry flagship, which is like, sure. All right. Here we are.

Anyway, she's talking about the Samsung ones first. The flip six is the one that, you know, is sort of more interesting because I think that form factor is more interesting. Also, it's the thing that's changing the most. Like, those are the phones that are changing the most because the cover screens are getting bigger and bigger. Yeah. But it's basically just like a little bit lighter and cost more money.

Yeah. Also a little more rugged, which is meaningful, especially for the flip. They're getting better at making that thing into like an actual phone that you can treat like an actual phone. A little bit more rugged. A little. Yeah. Like it doesn't even have dust resistance. Like don't take this to the desert.

You can drop it in the toilet now. That's a victory. Yeah. You can drop your flip phone in the toilet. It'll probably be fine. And then the fold six. Boy, I couldn't tell you. It's literally, like, one of the main features they talked about is that when it's flat, it's flatter.

Like, what are we doing here? It's just, and again, part of me wonders, like, what, are we several physics miracles away from there being a new thing you can do here? Because Samsung is making little bits of this better. The cover screen, it's a little wider on the outside, which I actually appreciate. It feels less like a TV remote. and more like a phone. It's just the same thing, though.

Like, the, the, Samsung is not even really, like, coming up with really cool new ideas about how the software here could work, which at least Motorola is pushing really hard for how do we make the outer screen useful and the inner screen useful and have them interplay with each other really well. Samsung feels like it is just not pushing that nearly as hard. And so it's like, what, what is the case for why I should buy these things, Samsung? I don't think they care. I mean, presumably they'd like me to buy their phones. Yeah, I think they want us to buy the phones, but I think they are, Samsung often feels driven by external pressures. It often feels driven by the market. And like, it's decisions are based in the market. And like, oh, we do the folding phone because nobody else is doing it. And we get there first. And we get there before Apple. And Apple just hasn't done it. Hasn't even talked about doing it. The rumors are scant. Right. And so, and that's their primary competitor. Like, we want to say boat roller or pixel or whatever. Let's be real. They're primary. They're

primary competitor is Apple. And if Apple's not doing anything in the space, then why should they invest in making the phone better when they can just rest on their laurels? Well, I think also, Alex, you mentioned Saturday Samsung. Their sales are down. They're trying to make more money. Saturday Samsung, man. This is the thing. Their efforts are going to marketing and more dollars from the same. Of course they're not putting tons of money into making, like changing things too much. At the same time, like they still employ the software engineers and designers like make it more interesting as like a totally valid critique here like the phone opens you can you have a little phone that turns into a big phone what happens then right and that that seems to be set aside so that does I think bring us to the Motorola phone where Motorola does seem to have a lot of ideas what happens when you have a little phone that gets even smaller and you have a big cover screen and like there

ideas about how apps even appear on that cover screen and how you might control them, all pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, it's the idea of like, what if you only had to tap on your phone two times to accomplish something on the outside screen is like, I don't know if that is the framework, but that's kind of what it feels like. And there's just little bits and pieces where it's like, okay, this is a screen you're going to have sort of looking at you all the times. We're going to make it fun and cute and animated. And if you want to like do something, you're probably going to open up the phone. So in this case, what we need to do is just give you all the things that are like one or two taps and just put it right in front of you. So it's like, what's next on your calendar?

Get to AI. Stop the music. Like, I love that. And this is like the thing about flip phones that I'm enthusiastic about is it is, sometimes you should only have access to a tiny portion of your phone. And that is how you do it on that outside screen. Like, I think Motorola is getting this really right in a way I find very exciting. Also, it seems like they're, when you unfold it, their screen is less creasy looking than the Samsung one. Yeah, it's only 1080p, and it's like 6.9 inches, so it's like super long and not that high res, and that makes me sound. David's face right now.

You just really enthusiastic. I just, you love a garbage phone. You're single-handedly driving all of the sales of the Buk's palm. Yeah, that's been a wild couple of weeks. But wait, one of the things that I've heard a bunch of people say about this Samsung launch, and I think this might be true for Motorola. stuff too, is that we're now, in Samsung's case, six generations into the flip and fold universe. And anecdotally, at least, and based on, you know, talking to people in what we've seen,

these are not winning in any meaningful way, right? Like, they're not taking market share away from the Galaxy S lines and the iPhone and the other popular candy bar phones. And so you wonder if instead of Samsung and others looking at these phones saying, this is we win, they're increasingly looking at them as just like kind of a side show. And maybe. And if that is the case, of course you slow down and you put less interesting resources into doing it.

And especially for Samsung, which has a gigantic business selling candy bar phones, like, maybe maybe we should be less interested in these because the world is less interested in these. For Motorola, like, they kind of have nothing to lose by swinging big for something new. and the Razor is the best brand Motorola ever had. So I get why they're doing this that way. But for Samsung, like, we've been waiting for this to become Samsung's thing for so long now. And I wonder if Samsung is increasingly convinced with every generation that maybe it's just not going to be.

Is it just too expensive? Is that why it just hasn't become the thing? Like, that's why I haven't gotten one is it's almost $2,000. I think for foldable phones, very much so. I think flip phones you could, like, maybe have. have a debate about whether it is meaningfully more useful to have that. I would argue that it is, but I think you could debate that. But the fold problem is, A, they're huge and B, they're twice the price.

Like, I just, that is going to be so hard to come back from for any of these companies. But you get three times the screens. For twice the price. You do. Yeah. Picks over the dollar ratio is off the charts. That's your Saturday Samsung pitch. Two X the price, three X the screens.

And they'll give you a TV with it. You get that and Cupertino? That's true. You can also get a TV with it. All right, we have talked about everything for too long. We're way over already. We're only halfway through. I think that makes sense.

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All right, we're back. We have this next segment list is streaming lightning round. And I'm just looking for where Alex talks about David Zazlov's outfits. which is a real thing that occurred today. You know, we're not going to talk too much about him. He's at the, is it Sun Valley where he's at with all the other billionaires right now? And he's just layered up. He's got a scarf, a vest, a shirt. Oh my gosh.

Like he had like a bandana at one point. I was like, sir, I love his sartorial choices. But he expressed a lot of enthusiasm this week for the big Paramount Skydance deal. And that's the big deal. So we should tell people what's what we haven't talked about Paramount and Skydads because it's just been like a cloud. Whether you think that cloud is dark or light is up to you, but it has been a cloud that has not reached a resolution. So Paramount, which owns CBS, Alex's favorite broadcast network. I got a story for this.

I got a way to tell, explain this. All right. I'm just going to let you drive. So once upon a time there was a family. And the dad went out and he put together a huge corporate conglombalm. and they called it national amusements. Which is very good. Yeah, great.

They're nationally amusing. And in there was CBS and this big storied century old studio Paramount, all of that in there. And then on the other side, there was another family. And they did something called Oracle. And Larry Ellison made a lot of money from that. And his kids got into films. And they started producing. And his daughter made a lot of good movies and then made some bad ones.

and his son made some really successful movies, like Top Gun. The new Top Gun. The new Top Gun. Yeah, he was a baby when the last – was he even alive when the last one came out? But he did that. We're not going to find out. We're not going to find out. Don't worry about it.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. What matters is that there are Z2 families? And they said, you know what? We should really get together. And the tech family should buy the media conglomerates family's business and just make an even bigger business. And then there was a lot of winging about that. There was a lot of, like, winging about that.

There was a little, ooh, should I do this? I don't know. Sherry Redstone, the current owner of Paramount, was really concerned. She didn't know how she wanted her, she didn't want her dad's legacy ruined. She wanted money. Those are important things. And that's the plot of succession. Yeah. That's what happened. And eventually David Ellison went to his dad and was like, dad, you're a billionaire. Can I borrow a couple of billion? Say six of your money and put it in and sweetened this pot. And Larry said, I got you. son and now his son owns one of the largest film studios in Hollywood. Well, hasn't closed yet. It hasn't closed yet. Yeah, that's true. It hasn't closed. He will potentially own it provided the lawsuits that are already cooking up amongst the

investors who are mad that they're not getting as much of this pot. Those don't screw things up provided. There is Apollo or another investor doesn't come in and say, actually, I can provide even more money than Larry Ellison. I feel like that's probably not going to happen seeing his, Larry Ellison already put $6 billion in. I feel like this is probably David Ellison's company, and we've been seeing that all around Hollywood. We've been seeing that from a lot of the reporters, Variety. Matthew Bellany over at Puck, a lot of folks have been talking about this. Matthew

Bellany had a really good interview with Ellison about this where he was like, yeah, I'm going to do all this tech stuff. And that was really interesting about all of this, as he's pitched this as like tech taking over. And I think we'd argue that tech already took over, given the success of Netflix and even some smaller stuff like Apple, but this is really officially like tech has taken over Hollywood. And he's got big ambitions about using AI for workflows. That's as much as he said. I can just read you the quotes. Yeah, they're great.

The quotes are wild. A slide deck for investors said AI would turbocharge content creation and drive efficiencies in streamlined operations. Terrifying. Ellison said, the art will challenge the technology and the technology challenges the art, which,

okay. And then he also said, we believe that understanding the symbiotic relationship between art and technology is essential to be able to meet this moment. There are a lot of technology companies that are rapidly expanding into media.

We believe it is essential for Paramount to be able to expand its technology prowess to be both media and technology enterprise. Those are quotes that come up when you say, chat GPT, write me some quotes about, Like, do you remember the paper that was like, we found a huge increase in the word delve being used because of chat GPT? Like, that's what that sounds like to me. That's a bunch of nothing.

Like, that's what you say. There are two, there are two things that are real. There are 1,000 percent the things you would expect all of those words to mean. Ellison proposed upgrading the advertising technology to give marketers more information about what audiences they're reaching. So we're doing some data collection and algorithmic ads and that we are working to improve the algorithm of recommendation engines that Paramount Plus uses, hoping subscribers will spend more time on the streaming service and viewer work. So we're doing engagement. Sure. I don't think those are actually the actual tech that they're going to be investing in.

I think the advertising is everybody's investing in that right now. Peacock, if you talk to anybody at NBC right now, they will not hesitate to be like, have you heard about our new ad tech platform? We're really all in on ad tech platforms for streaming. It's great. Can I just read you more words? Yes. I wish you wouldn't. Ellison also said Skydance will work in partnership with Oracle to create a cloud-based animation studio.

Skydance used the studio in the cloud to produce part of Spellbound, which is coming out later on Netflix. We intend to scale that business across all of our production workflows and animation. That's just we're going to buy a bunch of GPUs. Like, what are we talking about? It's also kind of worthless because the guy. who runs Skydance animation right now is John Lassiter, who famously got punted from Pixar because he couldn't keep his hands to himself allegedly. And that's who's running it. They have not had a lot of successes. Most of their other animated properties have not had hit that like. John Lasseter used to have a golden hand, right? Like he'd look at anything and it would make a billion dollars, it felt like. Nowadays, it's like, we barely sold luck to Apple TV. We're making a deal to get this thing sold over at Netflix. That all felt like things he was saying to get Sherry Redstone feeling comfortable to do this deal because Sherry Redstone was holding up the deal in big ways.

And right now, everybody in Hollywood has a lot of anxiety about tech companies and about tech infrastructure and how they can compete with stuff like Netflix, who has, like, for what it's worth, the best algorithms when it comes to streaming and actually getting content in front of people's eyes. And it just felt like, let's alleviate this woman's anxieties. by saying AI a bunch. Sure. And giving her many hundreds of millions more dollars. Yeah. That part seems pretty important. That probably helped.

Yeah. Anyway, I would just remind you, the listener, that these are the things that people say when they buy studios. Famously, it's what 18D said when I bought Warner Brothers. Which, again, provided the world the 4-3 gray scale Justice League. Yeah, we don't know what this is going to look like for. What movies will David Ellison remaster as square in gray scale? I think it's the only question. It's going to be a Mission Impossible movie.

It's going to be six hours long. It's just Tom Cruise running. It's going to be black and white and square. It's going to be nuts. Anyway, so this is like the big story in streaming. We haven't talked a lot about it because it hadn't happened. But now it's happened. If the deal closes and, as Alex said, all these lawsuits get resolved.

I think we're looking at a bunch of tech money. tech ideas coming for the studio that famously owns Top Gun coming for CBS coming for famously owned Star Trek famously owned Star Trek uh it's going to be weird there's there's a real weirdness coming for this zone because this is just a flood of new money but also just the ideas that you would expect for the money to have yeah but dressed up in ever larger ambitions yeah that That is exactly it. I'm curious to see what they do. I'm curious to see if they unload any of these properties and what kind of like movies and shows we actually start seeing if Taylor Sheridan gets the boot.

I have been, by the way, furiously Googling for what studio in the cloud means. And it's just a thing they say. Yeah. It's called a data center. This is the thing. It's like everybody already does it. It's called working remote. This is a rich guy who couldn't build a cool studio buying a cool studio.

Like, if I had the money to do it, I would do it. Skydance is like cool but not that cool. Paramount is cooler. The end. The closest I've come to understanding what Studio in the Cloud means is it's like a square in the deck. It's just a studio in the cloud. And it says Skydance animation is building a studio in the cloud. That's the first bullet.

You turn on slack. The second bullet is transatlantic. transition from on-prem to cloud-based production and hosting infrastructure, which is fine. That's a thing, you know, dentist office across America are switching from on-prem to cloud-based infrastructure. And it feels like Oracle is just going to get its $6 billion back because it turns out they're building it with Oracle. Yeah. Okay.

But does it, it's got to mean something. Listen, Neely, we're like minutes away from you reading the Salesforce website again, and I can't have that in my life. We need to move on. Fine. All right, Alex, you got a lot left in this lightning round. What else? Yeah. I mean, what else do we got?

Well, so Red Box, we had this great story from Yonko last week that was all about, Friend of the Verge about how Red Box was in dire straits and why it was in dire straits. And now it's shutting down. It's parent company, chicken soup for the soul entertainment. Yeah, that's the real name of the company. The second time in several weeks, the chicken soup for the soul has come up. Yeah. You were recall that we looked at the Crackle Well.

website, which is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul. We'll see for how long. For now, yeah. For her now, yeah, they got a new CEO last week, and his job is literally to come in and fix companies that are in dire straits. And for Chicken Soup for the Soul entertainment, that means Red Box is toast. It had already been really bad. A lot of folks, probably if you're listening to this and you tried to go rent out of

Red Box in the last couple of months, would struggle to get anything. A lot of them have been shut down, and now it's done. RIP Redbox. So what's happening to all the DVDs and the red boxes today? You just go and you break the box open and you take it. So looting. So Alex is like, do looting.

The problem is that all of the technicians who, who manage those things have all been grounded because all of their cars are getting repossessed. Because they haven't been paying the bills for the cars that they rent. So like Walgreens 7-11, everybody's just unplugging them. And I think you're just going to start seeing more of these unplugged and just sitting there. And I'm not saying you should loot them, but. That's it.

That's where that ends. There's no but after I'm not saying you should loot them. Just don't do that. I can hear the footsteps of the lawyers coming down the hallway right now. Where is she? So do you think this is just straight up streaming killed Redbox? That's where I'm at. Because when you read Yonko's piece, this all happened.

And the big turning point for Redbox was when in 2021, when everybody said, we're going to stop releasing everything physically and putting it in theaters and we're just going to do it all to streaming. What was the other thing going on in 2021, Chris? You know? Yeah, but see, that's the thing. If they had said, like, there's a lot of the people who were renting these were in places where they don't have streaming.

And they would also like to watch whatever King Kong and Godzilla are getting up to in 2021. And those just weren't coming out. So they couldn't rent anything. So nobody was renting from Redbox because none of the studios were releasing this stuff physically. Well, right. But I think,

I think you can make a extremely compelling argument that COVID killed Redbox more so than you can make one that streaming killed Red Box. No, because how was COVID going to do it? Everybody's at home anyway. These things are outside. We didn't go outside for two years. You still have to go to the grocery store where the Red Box is. Yeah.

There was a Red Box at the CBS in the, in the woods. People gazed at it. And then they thought, I don't have a DVD player. I mean, there is that. Well, and part of Redbox's thing was access for people who didn't have great access to streaming, either because it's expensive or because they lived in places without great connection. Or, like, there was a real, this is a compliment to streaming or like a, this is a

thing you do when you can't do streaming, not this is a real competitor to streaming. And so, Alex, to your. point, I think, as fewer and fewer people didn't have streaming, it's probably true that Red Box didn't fill that need for as many people. But the problem for me is this is also just spectacular corporate mismanagement. This company took on a mountain of debt to buy a company it probably couldn't afford. Chicken suit for this whole, I think it was like $325 million in debt to buy Red Box, banking on, we're going to make a ton of money back one DVD at a time, made a bunch of weird decisions and it all fell apart. So part of me is like maybe,

streaming killed Redbox, but I don't think we ever actually got to see streaming kill Red Box because I think like chicken soup for the soul killed Red Box. Yeah, well, Redbox was like not doing great when when Chicken Soup for the Soul bought it because it had just, it just done a SPAC, it just gone public via SPAC, which, can we just, there's, there's like all of that. This company is called Chicken Soup for the Soul entertainment. Right, like you already know. Like this started as a set of books for live laugh love moms right and they're like we're a media empire now at no point we're like we should change our name like you already know that this is just a bunch of weird like zombie media zombie ideas like

i'm glad you brought this up because this does violate my theory that you can't survive a bad name for your company and chicken soup for the soul is very much a bad name yeah right sorry chicken soup for the soul entertainment. Thank you. When did this book come out? I can't please. The fact that I'm Googling Chicken Soup for the Soul

as a book is going to be so bad for me. So this is technically spun off from Chicken Soup for the Soul for the books because that's like the book and the publishing size. They didn't even have the books yet? They spun that off. This is a whole other company.

Yeah, this is the entertainment company. The books for Chicken Soup for the Soul LLC. I got to, I got to end this. Also, the worst website I've ever seen in my entire life. But just that you can't survive a bad name, especially when you're not even connected to the live, the live, laugh, love books anymore. Yeah.

You just out there buying companies for too much debt that have already been half killed by COVID and streaming and thinking this will work. And it didn't. Can I say that the book company has chicken soup for the soul for kids? That's good. Okay. That's enough. Next lightning round item. If you start a company, don't call a chicken soup for the soul.

Please don't. is the main must be the lesson. And also, if your entire company is distributing physical media, you, you should have a plan B. Well, they did. They had a big, long plan for how to go digital with all of this. And Redbox has been trying to do a streaming service for like 10 plus years. Right, but then you're just, you're just Netflix. Yeah. I mean, that's what Paramount's trying to do, and we didn't yell at them for that. So, well, I can't wait to see what chicken soups plan. Here's a new idea, Nealai. Chicken soup in the cloud for the soul.

Larry Ellison buys Redbox. Do you think we're good? As long as they get off-prem. And I would point out that Redbox, one of the single most on-prem businesses of all time. Redbox in the cloud, Nealai. Think about it. What if a Red Box put in the cloud?

All right, what's next, Alex? The next is, I'd never pause when I'm watching TV I learned because I don't get pause ads. Do you guys get those when you're just watching a show and you're like, I got to go to the bathroom. So you pause it on Hulu. Amazon Prime is the one I noticed it on the most. But I think there are other streaming services. Hulu does it.

Hulu does it. Sling TV is now doing it. That's the big news this week. I was like, what is a pause ad? Oh, I'm watching TV wrong is what I learned from all of this. But basically, pause ads happen when you pause something and then it just decides to display an ad while you're going to the bathroom. Exactly what I wanted. Exactly what you want.

Sling TV is now doing it. But they also have a little thing at the bottom saying you can go turn this off, which prime and for free. You just go to the settings and turn it off, which is different than what Prime and Hulu are doing. So good on you, Slate? Like bad on you, Sling, but also good on you? As more and more of these companies move into like ad tiers, right, pay money but still have ads, which is what they all are now, the desire to get more money is going to result in more and more ads being more and more. You can just see it coming. It's a tsunami of weird ideas.

And they're just out of space. When do you think we get like a right rail of just ads? Dude, you can already get a free TV that has a physical rail of ads on it. That's literally a thing. So I will say I think pause ads are fine. Like in terms of finding ways to show giant ass ads on my TV in a way that is non-interruptive, this is the best one they've ever invented. Because it's like if I'm pausing my TV, who cares?

Like, what do I want to see on the TV? Do I care if it's a frozen, like, moving shot of someone's face? Or if it's like a Toyota ad? I don't care. I think it's like... Fine. I'm getting up to leave the room anyway. Like, that's why I pause the show.

I think it's like when you're having like a phone call, right? Like somebody calls you, you're like, oh, I need a pause. And then it's like, Toyota Chandra. Is it going to play a video? Yeah. There's sound, I feel very. very differently. Yeah.

Most of the Amazon ones at least are just like a static image that it's just like you press pause of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and a thing pops up that's just like Jeep. And then just freezes for as long as you needed to. And I think that's fine. You know what I hate? I'm just going to complain about ads for a minute here and then we can move on. I love this point.

There's now a thing that happens on Hulu and probably some others. But I noticed it the most on Hulu where at the beginning of a show it will ask you to choose your ad experience. It's like, which Charmin ad would you like to watch? And you've gotten to the point now where Anna, my wife, will sit there and yell at the TV. I don't care. And I'm always like, Anna, that doesn't accomplish anything.

And she's like, but I don't care. And it'll like linger there for 10 seconds. Then if you don't do anything, it'll just choose for you and then play the whole ad anyway. I'm like, no, if you're going to make me watch ads, you pick. Don't make me do the work to pick my own ads. I agree with that. Use your damn algorithms and show me the ads. You can't use AI to collect.

more data about you unless you generate more data, David. Apparently. It costs money to go from on-prem to the cloud. It drives me nuts. But if I could choose between like in like dynamic interstitial ads and pause ads, give me pause ads every time. The problem is it's both and it's going to be a bunch of other stuff too. And they're just going to send you that way. It's coming.

All right. One more. Oh. In the streaming lightning round. Do you want to talk about it? Actually, let me do it. I'll do it this way. Okay.

All right. I want to call out one more that isn't technically streaming, but I think is really interesting for our lightning round of video over the internet, which is Adam Messeri, who runs Instagram, put out a video this week where he's like, I just want to make it clear we're not going to do long form video, which is interesting for a number of reasons. One, he was like, the whole point of Instagram is connected you to your friends.

So when you, like, open a friend's video and then you're like in reels by accident, and then you're in reels by accident for two hours. He's like, that's great. That's what we want. Because you are more likely to share a short video with your friend. And then they'll watch it and they'll end up in the wheel's rabbit hole and they'll share some videos. And he's like, that's great. Long videos, you won't watch all the way through and you definitely won't share them.

And they apparently measure this and they know this. And he calls it a symbiotic relationship between connecting your friends and short videos, which is interesting on its face. The second thing is interesting is that Instagram has super tried to do long form video and compete with YouTube before. It was called IGTV. I went to the IGTV launch. It was one of the weirdest days of my entire life.

And this was just the previous administration of Instagram. This is not Messerries Instagram. This is like the previous leaders of Instagram. But they tried. They were like, oh, we'll just be YouTube now. And they utterly failed. And now they, you know, they were like, we'll be TikTok now and they've succeeded. And TikTok is like, we'll be YouTube now.

And I don't know how that's going. But it's interesting to see Instagram be like, huh, no. When, in fact, all of these streamers have to compete with Reels and YouTube. and YouTube is growing fast on TVs actually. So it's interesting to see all this other action happening and then Misery being like,

no, we're gonna, we're staying right here, short form video. I think it's the right call. And I will say, the thing you're describing that that like symbiotic thing makes perfect sense to me.

And anecdotally feels true, right? That like the idea that I'm, A, going to sit here and watch one single 30 minute video on Instagram. And then send it to a friend. Right. It just feels preposterous, right?

And I think, like, I think all the time about, like, when you talk to people about the, the act that you do on TikTok, it's scrolling. It's not viewing. Like, the thing that you do on TikTok is flip channels. That is more important than what is actually on the screen that you're viewing. It's the activity that is the thing, which is what's different from, like, TV or even YouTube, which is less of a scrolling thing, but YouTube is becoming more scrolly with shorts and stuff like that.

Instagram has always been scrolling. And I think trying to undo that and be like, this is now a destination that you're going to spend a half hour at a time without touching your screen, I think it was just never going to happen. It's also like a much harder thing to sell ads against, which is, I think, a reason it makes a lot of sense. It's really easy to sell ads that are a video between two other videos that you're scrolling on. And this just feels, this feels very obvious to me, except that these companies usually can't help themselves from all trying to be each other. So to hear Adam just cabosh it entirely was pretty interesting. It's also funny because it's the money. Like YouTube makes a lot of money.

And they're like, we're not going to make that money, which is super. Like, YouTube just has no competition. It is the place for long form video on the internet, which is weird. Well, it's a place for independent long form video, right? Like, it is effectively the VHS tape of the modern era where it's just like, hey, or cable access. It's just like, hey, I need a platform. I don't want to go make a deal with David Ellison. and this is what I do.

I put it, I just put it on YouTube. Like, functionally, that's what YouTube is becoming. And it's getting more and more like that, even though it's UI and stuff isn't like that. And I think it makes sense.

Well, but a really weird thing is that you can just, like, rent Paramat movies on YouTube. No one does it, but you can just be like, I'm going to rent Mission Impossible. Yeah. You can subscribe to streaming services through YouTube.

Yeah, you could watch movies on cable access in the olden times, too. Like, And I think Instagram to me is more like, now I'm going to go just completely switch up the analogy and say that Instagram is kind of like the drive-through margarita bars. I don't know if you, they're in Texas and they rule. I was going to say that. I got to move to Texas. Yeah, it's like, you see those in Louisiana and Texas.

And it's like, yeah, you drive through, you get your beautiful treat. You drive home. It's like, bam, bam, you're done. And it feels like long form video is like, what if we did fine dining at the drive-thru? margarita bar. So it's like, what if you went to Sonic, but your meal was $100? And it's like, that's not, that's not we're looking for here. Isn't this the plot of the bear?

They still serve the sandwiches out the side window. Just isn't that the bear? People love the bear. Instagram, you could be the bear. All right. That is where we need to end this entire. Look, if you know the people who run chicken soup for the sole entertainment, bring them to us.

I have a number of questions. What kind of zombies are they? All right. That's it. We've got to take a break. We'll be back with the actual lightning round. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast.

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for free at grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. Okay, we're back. We are way over, just like bananas over. It's, you know, it's the summer. Every time we think we have nothing to talk about, we have a lot to talk about. That's how it goes.

But we got to do this lightning round quick. Lightning. You hear what I'm saying? Yeah. All right, David, what's yours? Okay, I have great news. My lightning round is several gadgets and an entire lineup of accessories.

Does that seem good? Are we excited about this? Oh, and it's two different companies involved. Well, it's a company inside of a company. So once upon a time there were smartphones. No, so CMF, which is the sub-brand of nothing, which is an insane sentence to say all that, launched a bunch of stuff this week,

a new set of earbuds, a new smartwatch, and I would say by far most interestingly, a new phone called the CMF Phone 1. it's a $199 Android phone that basically lets you replace the back of the phone with a couple of different accessories

and different colors or add like a lanyard what's the other one, a wallet you can put on and I think there's one that's a kickstand that you can just stick on through an accessory port.

By all accounts, it's kind of a like mid-rangey Android phone, but it looks awesome. It's orange. It's 200 bucks. And this is for some reason the Android phone I have been most excited about in a very long time.

Like, nothing is out there being like, we're going to make tech more fun again. This is the most interesting thing in that mold that I think nothing has ever done. And it's a $200 Android phone. And I'm very excited about it. Like, it rules. Yeah, I just like, what if we tried new things, right? I really, spending all that time with the books, Palma, has gotten me, like, obsessed with this idea that what if you took a phone and just tweaked two things about it?

Like, what, this, if we, if we take this form factor we're all obsessed with and just turned it a little, can you change that? And that one of those is like, what if the screen folded? One of them is like, what if it was the ink? And one of them, like, I've been obsessed with modular phone ideas for forever. And I really continue to think there is something to like, what if you could make your phone several different things over time. And this is such a cool version of that. And they did a really like IKEA-ish thing here where it has some like exposed screws and you can actually open up. the back of your phone and see the inside of your phone. It's just, it just seems fun. And again,

it's like it's $200. Like, yes, more of this, please. It's weird because what you want is, what you would expect is that the phone parts of the phone, 15 years into phones, more, would be a commodity by now, right? Like, an Android phone should just be a commodity. And then the the way it looks and works and feels in your hand, and it just hasn't played out for, for million reasons because of carriers because of competition because Google whatever it is. E-Sims, like whatever you think has restricted this market from being competitive and commodifying the Android part. It's happened with Android parts, like with the other parts of Android phones.

Like cameras that go into Android phones are now everywhere. The sensors are everywhere. Android runs everything. But like the phone thing, that hasn't happened. You're totally right. At least the United States. We're going to have listeners and other kinds. country. It's pretty here like India and China who would be like, no, this is pretty competitive out

here. But this is like one of those things where I was like, oh, if only we had a little competition, we'd have way more ideas like this. It is cool. I'm assuming that it is a very slow phone because it's $200. Yeah. But I, like, I saw a bunch of reactions from people that were like, people were, I got a bunch of people asking me, like, is this a good reading device? Because it has a, it has an OLED screen. It has a, I think, 5,000 million-a-batt battery, which should last a while. It'll run Android apps. And then I saw a bunch of people who are like,

this is going to be a kick-ass gaming handheld. And to me, it's like, this is the stuff, right? Like, we don't, what if we didn't have one device that we demanded to do everything, but instead we could just buy these things that are $200 and actually just like sort of push them towards one use case or another? And instead, it's like an overlapping Venn diagram

of things that look like phones. And I think that's super fun. I like that more. I'm going to buy the hell out of this thing. but also the earbuds and the watch also both look pretty cool and the earbuds in particular the little dial yeah really great like total i love a little pointless fidget spinner of a dial on a case like good job CMF and the ones last year if i remember correctly were better than we expected for something pretty cheap i think these are like these are yeah fifty nine dollars

They're cheap. And for a pair of kind of AirPods-y-looking things, by all accounts, they've sounded pretty good in the past. So I'm pretty optimistic here. I'm very excited. I will say it was surprising to me that this week we got two kind of AirPods knockoffs and nothing was the one that didn't have LEDs in it. That surprised me. You're going to change AirPods.

What's the first thing to do? You had LEDs. Yeah. All right. I'll do mine quick. And then Kranz, we should end with yours because yours. We should end on outrage, basically. Yeah.

So I'll just pick one. I had two, but I'll just pick one. You know, we're paying a lot of attention to AI and copyright. Like, I think it's kind of a hassle cards. And there's lots and lots of lawsuits. Sarah Silverman is suing AI companies. There's the record labels are suing. Sue known Oudio, which are AI companies. The New York Times is suing Open AI.

On and on and on. The one that I thought was really interesting and kind of like a long shot was a bunch of developers sued over GitHub co-pilot. because it can obviously spit out code and this is like the main thing that people have been excited about with AI. Most of their claims got tossed out this week except for the one that said they're violating the open source licenses

which is a really weird circle. So they're like, look, the GitHub copilot can just spit out code. They trained on a bunch of our code. They didn't have the copyright to that code. That code is copyrighted and that's copyright infringement. Like pretty straightforward.

The judge is like, none of that makes any sense. This isn't really happening. interesting precedent. And then they said, but it is true that there were software licenses for that code, open source software licenses. They didn't abide by them because the code they spit out should have those same licenses. That's how open source licenses work. So now we might have a weird open source legal battle over AI and not a copyright legal battle

over AI, which is equally weird because all of those open source licenses absolutely depend on copyright law because that's what they are. They're licenses to copyright law. Right. So there's just this weird knot of, like, copyright law problems happening with this one case. And if you're a really optimistic AI person, you say, look, it was fair use. All these claims got thrown out. If you're very negative, you say, well, that was just a weird one. And the big ones to come are still going to define how this whole industry survives or thrives. Does it feel like that's where all of this is headed that we're starting with kind of a hundred different versions of the same fight and what we're going to.

end up with is like two of the most consequential ones and then that will percolate out because it does feel like I mean we've talked a lot about a lot of these lawsuits and they're all different but they're all also kind of the same and you wonder if we're going to get to a point where everybody decides like okay let's let's figure out what we're actually fighting about and then fight about that instead of fighting about like a hundred variations of that thing well this is America jack like no it's gonna just be chaos. Like, that's, that's the way our system is designed to work is like, there isn't yet a king of America.

I mean, there is now. Yeah. Soon there might be. But the notion that there is just some definitive answer or that everyone will quit their whining so the New York Times can get to, it's not going to happen. So what you're going to get is this like mishmash of precedence until Congress passes a law that unifies all these precedents. into like a regulatory framework, seems unlikely.

Or there's a Supreme Court case that, I know, throws out 50 years of precedent for no reason. That's, they love doing that. And you just have to like work through the process. But in the meantime, everyone's just going to take their shots. And I think one of the things that's interesting is like there are so many shots. And they're all kind of weird, right? They're all just like picking off at the edges. But again, I've been saying it.

Like only one has to like go through for the bottom to fall out and these companies have to pay. And the thing you're saying is they're all kind of the same case. It's all the same argument. You took our stuff without permission. Whether or not you need that permission is like the thing that makes the internet go in like the realest way. And so if you change the boundaries of what you need permission for to use or reuse or remix or sample or whatever, you kind of change the economy. Like the whole economy changes around it, which is why it's kind of wacky that it's just a bunch of shots. Like who knows?

Yeah. But this one in particular is interesting because it's going to end up being an open source contract case. And we haven't had one of those in a very long time. Okay, that was fine. Alex, bring us home with some pure outrage. Yeah, some pure outrage. So do you guys remember the, what is it, the unofficial Apple weblog? Yeah, Tuah.

I used to work. I worked at Engadgett and they were our sister site. They were your sister site. Tuoh was like old school, one of the original Apple blogs, used to love reading it. one of my best friends used to work there. One of my best friends got very upset this week because Christina Warren, former, she works at GitHub now, and she was suddenly writing at Tuah again. She herself wasn't. Her byline was appearing at Tuwa just next to a bunch of like clearly AI written schlock. And she wasn't the only one. A lot of former reporters from Tuwa had their bylines appear

on the site because earlier this year it seems to have been acquired from Apollo. It left the Yahoo land for Apollo and then Apollo seemed to have sold it to someone else. And that's someone else who we still don't entirely know who they are or what they do. We're just filling up, filling up this empty blog with content. And allegedly, like the explanation that they had on their site was on the TWA site was, yeah, we don't have any of this content. So we're replicating it with AI so we don't lose these important archives. That's not how archiving works. It's very good, by the way. It's a very good, like, what if I made some stuff up? Yeah, just full stop. That's not how any of that works. People were very upset. Christina Warren was

among them, and she reached out and they promptly changed the name of her character and changed the headshot, so it was no longer her. And it's just a big bummer in the world. It's just a big bummer in the world. just a bummer that sites are getting picked up and just filled with AI garbage. I think it's particularly a bummer for those of us who've worked at a lot of these smaller sites and stuff, who knows where my byline could appear next. I'm excited to find out. This is like Google did earlier this year a thing Google normally doesn't do, which is come out and basically say aggressively and clearly that it was making changes to its search algorithms.

such that this is no longer a good idea, right? Because the reason you do this is you buy a domain that has real authority in the hopes that it will still rank in Google. You fill it with nonsense. That nonsense ranks well on Google. You sell a bunch of ads. You make some money. It does work.

Like, it is a strategy. It's not necessarily a long-term victory. It is a strategy for like half of media online. Right. And it works. And Google has been saying aggressively that it is trying to prevent this from working, and yet it pretty clearly seems to continue to work. I just don't know when Google's going to be able to do that, because this has been,

like, the only difference here is the scale of crappy content. Like, somebody would have done this without AI as well, right? They would have hired a bunch of people with no name and said, just write a bunch of content, put it on the site. We've seen that happen before. I think IBT was an example of that. And in this case, it happened to be AI. It happened to be this early Apple blog full of, like, well-known tech blog.

and that's just a terrible, terrible move to make in that case. Don't do that. You want to choose, like, better homes and gardens? No, they're still around. They're still around. Yeah, but, you know, you want to choose something maybe not tech adjacent to do this with if you're going to be gross. It was a weird choice to do it on an Apple blog.

I will agree with that. But this is the thing, like Mia Osato on our team wrote this great piece this week about the guy behind, I think the company is called AdVon. I think is the name of the company, which is the one that did a lot of the AI stuff that became a huge mess at Sports Illustrated. Like, this, the internet is so quickly becoming this. And I've been thinking a lot about this,

like after the MTV archives went away and the Comedy Central archives went away, like speaking of two websites that a lot of people know and trust and would believe if someone bought them and filled them with spam nonsense. Like, there's just going to be such a long run of this. And it's going to get weirder before it gets, that's normalized in whatever way it's going to look like.

To be clear, I don't think Google can stop it. Yeah, I don't think they can. And that's not because of antipathy towards Google. I think the problem is so hard. And then the internal philosophical reckoning for Google is even harder. So the problem is you have to say a bunch of AI generated sludge is bad. Yes. Right?

We're going to not rank it. Sludge that you're charging people. $20 a month per person to make. Right. So you're like, okay. You just, there are two wolves. You know, it's like, what are you going to do? Like, you have to say the output of your own models is bad.

At some point, like, that is the task ahead of the search team. And I don't know that they can reckon with it fully. Like, well, and let's be real. Like, what are Google's AI overviews for web searches, if not more or less exactly the same thing? Yeah. We'll see. By the way, have been the overviews have. have been,

some of them are still very bad. They're also moving them around the page. I don't know if you've noticed this. I have not. They're moving all over the page.

Sometimes they're at the top, sometimes they're in the middle, sometimes they're at the bottom. Like, they're still doing them, but they are, they haven't figured out where they go or when they should appear

or how they should look. And then one of them, David Emel from MKBHD's team and Wayform and everything else, he posted that the answer to like, how do you check the, film in your camera is getting much worse. Oh, no.

So it was like, how do you see if there's film in some model of film camera? An AI overview is just like open it up in bright sunlight. Like it said in bright sunlight. Yeah. Oh, my God. And he found it on some Reddit thread. But it's like crazy. I mean, it would work.

What is going on? You would did know afterwards if the film camera, if the camera is exposed. This is what happens when you're like, the future of all intelligence is Reddit? It's like, is it? Yeah. All right, that's it. We're way over. We're way over.

Look, everything's going to look like AirPods, and then the robots are going to tell you to do dumb shit to your cameras. That's the future. I'm excited for it here at the verge. We know what we're going to write a bat. All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast.

Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. See you next week.