The Vergecast - Search as we know it is officially over

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Jake Kastrenakes discuss OpenAI's new SearchGPT product, Amazon's plan to launch a paid version of Alexa, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold review, and whole lot more. Further reading: OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots — except the ones that pay Google had a massive quarter thanks to Search and AI Amazon’s paid Alexa is coming to fill a $25 billion hole dug by Echo devices The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a great phone that’s out of ideas Asus ROG Ally X review: the best Windows gaming handheld by a mile Samsung Galaxy Ring review: keeping you in Samsung’s orbit Apple’s first foldable iPhone could arrive in 2026 Apple Maps launches on the web to take on Google The Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is now available Rivian CEO says CarPlay isn’t going to happen The NBA’s new TV deals put a lot of games on Amazon’s Prime Video starting in 2025 Reddit’s NFL, NBA deals bring more sports highlights — and ads Spotify CEO confirms a ‘deluxe’ version with hi-fi audio is coming soon Sonos CEO apologizes for disastrous rollout of new app Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to the Verchcast, the flagship podcast of being a pilot who emailed David Pierce

about using an iPad and a plane. There's so many of them. So many of them. They're in our YouTube comments. They're in the emails. One of them flew to David's house. The premier tablet of the sky. Yeah.

Last is it, I'm your friend, Eli. Hi, David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Cranes is on vacation this week, and Verge executive editor, Jake Kastrancas is here. Hey, Jake. Hey, thank you for having me. I've prepared my spiciest takes on obscure streaming services so that you won't miss Kranz too much. That's very important.

Jake hasn't been on the show in like five years? Something like that. But you've been at the Verge for like 15? Something like that, yeah. We didn't exist technically 15 years ago, but emotionally I was here. back in those days. It's always been here. Yeah.

Actually, in this office, it was empty. Just waiting. Yeah, the financial district was different back then. Our office used to be the Goldman Sachs building. So this is your fault. I have a lot to apologize for. That's true story. The ghosts of finance bros haunt us every day in this office.

Anyhow, Jake, you don't know this. But last week on the show, we were discussing the iPad. And David, I don't know. nowhere just fired astray and said he didn't believe pilots used iPad minis on planes and I don't know man he was wrong David would you like to defend yourself so first I would just like I'm you to issue a correction here I would like I was miscategorized by nila Patelis just now what I said was this is like the canonical real world use case for iPads that if you if you ask anyone at or around Apple about like what is a thing people do with an iPad

They all just want to tell you about Delta pilots. And so all I- Specifically, I've had mini. Yes, the iPad Mini, which apparently, like, you know, pilots strapped to their leg and do stuff with. Terrific. I simply- Sorry, tell me about the leg. Because you're flying a plane.

So where are you going to put the screen? Right, it's right there. It's a, it's a- They have the entire console of physical buttons. Well, no, those are mostly not screens as well. We're going to. I'm so, my apologies. They're going to come for you to.

No, this is good. This is good. male jake and not me this is why i'm not on the show with a list of every button on a plane that's i would like to apologize the entire aviation community at this time so no i'm on your team and if you can get me into an f-22 i think that would be great so what i actually heard which was very cool is that there is a lot of ipad usage specifically on planes and i heard from commercial pilots i heard from hobbyist pilots like the whole gamut and there are a lot of uses for it but it seems like the number one main one is just that flying involves both a lot of paperwork and a lot of

reference material. And to take it from a giant like binder in a rolling suitcase down to an iPad makes a lot of people very happy. I heard from a few people that they're now like using them in flight school. So when you're training to get your pilot license, you actually like are given an iPad in the way that like kids are given a Chromebook. It's just part of the process now. And a lot of people take it through. So I, uh, I didn't know. And now I know it is apparently, a very real thing. And that's why the iPad Mini exists. They actually, I just took my iPad Mini to an airport and they just gave me a pilot license.

It was the most insane thing. I just fly now. America's skies are no longer safe. All right, there's a lot of news this week beyond David and the pilots. As we sat down in the studio, opening I launched Search GPT. It's a direct competitor to Google. And interestingly, Bing, which runs an opening. It's a lot.

We got to talk about that. There's a bunch of gadgets. There's a lot of news about what Amazon is doing with Alexa to talk about. Boy, that's been a long time that Amazon's been trying to figure out Alexa. And then we got a Lightning Round unsponsored. But Jake is here. So Jake will be the sponsor with Lighting Round. Welcome, Jake.

Thanks for having me. Yeah. All right, let's start with Search TBT. It is the news. It is the big news. It's the thing that everyone saw coming that might actually shake up the search market. There's other stuff happening underneath it that is interesting. like the web is being re-architected,

and we can talk about the deals Google and Reddit are making. But we should just start with SearchGPT. David, what is going on here? I guess the best way to describe SearchGPT is as chat GPT, but instead of returning text that it pulls from the internet, it returns text that it pulls from the internet, but with slightly more citations. We don't know that much.

Open AI basically put out a simple blog post with a couple of pictures. There's a text box that says, what are you looking for? And a search GPT icon. And it will attempt to kind of return links to you when you ask a question, but also kind of make sense of them in the process. So it seems like it's going to do some work on like the order in which they appear and trying to kind of tell a story with the links instead of just returning a bunch of links in a row. Open AI is being very slow about this. I guess it's, I think it's going to be open to, what was it, 10,000. and users at first.

They're calling it a prototype, like, really trying to sort of slow play this thing. But we've been talking about, you know, the media deals that Open AI has been making with our parent company Vox Media and the Atlantic and lots of others. We've been talking about the ways that which OpenAI is, like, crawling the web and taking data and all these fights over, whether that is a copyright. Like, all of that, I think, in so many ways, is actually building up to this. Like, chat GPT, I still believe this. they, Open AI won't say it anymore because it got too popular, but I sincerely believe that

chat GPT was never meant to be the thing. And I think as you look at like the actual products OpenAI wants to build, I think it looks a lot more like search GPT than chat GPT. And I think like we've been building towards this for a very long time. Wait, I disagree with you in the most minor of ways. Okay. What OpenA says it wants to build is a world conquering AGI that will put a solid of work and let Sam Lothman live a life of endless luxury. Sure. And he keeps writing op-ed saying it's super fine. Don't even worry about it.

So that's the goal. Just to be clear, their goal is like, whatever robot did everything. And you lived in a cave running on a treadmill, powering the robot. And like, fine, you know, maybe LLMs will get there. Maybe they won't.

I think they won't. But it's, that's the big goal. Yes. The medium goal is how the hell do we make any money, which they have basically failed to do. There's some reporting out there. They're in a much more tenuous financial position than they let on.

They've obviously taken on a ton of money. They use a ton of Azure compute, all this stuff. And so you've got to make some money. And chat GPD at 20 bucks a month, it just wasn't the thing. So a search product, if you look at the history of companies that make an awful lot of money, the search company seems to be making an awful lot of money. And they're headed towards. So I think this is just like a middle step of like how do we fund our like world-conquering AGI dreams?

Yeah, they're currently spending a lot of money on search GPT. They're paying for publisher deals. They're paying for training these models. They're not making any money off of the people who are going to be using search GPT. That's going to be even more money in the hole as they get there. I think you're right. Like, there's a very clear monetization model for this.

But in the short term, it's rough for them. Yeah. And, you know, the idea that they will capture, I don't know, Google AdSense ads or whatever. that like advertisers will pay for opening eyes search products instead of who knows but I the piece of the puzzle where you might move one user from using Google to using search GPT is the first problem which like Microsoft has not solved in over a decade yeah and like the European union has like tried to legislate a solution to getting people to stop using Google and they can't solve it I mean it's funny because this is like it's day one zero people are currently using this

maybe a few thousand will be by the end of the week. This is a really, really small step. But this is also the sort of explosive moment that everybody's been waiting for, right? Microsoft was so excited by this technology. They aggressively shoehorned it into Bing. Google was so scared of this technology that they put some sort of disastrous AI results directly into the front page of Google. All of the major players are fearful of what,

going to happen with chat GPT. And now we finally see the product and, you know, it's very, very alpha. That's such a good summation of the entirety of the AI product industry right now. Everybody is either super bullish of it or terrified of it, depending on where you fall in the sort of current power stack of the tech industry. And all of the products are just, they're there. There are products. And I think the search thing is so interesting to me because on the one hand,

you can make a pretty compelling argument that Google has never been more fragile than it is right now, right? Like it has had all these own goals in a row with all the AI overviews. There is this wide perception that Google search is getting worse and worse and worse. It's getting overrun by ads. On and on and on. You could argue that the regulation is coming forward in a real way. Like Google search might be more beatable than it has been in 20 years. And yet there is exactly no indication that anyone is making any kind of a dent into Google at all.

In fact, there's the opposite indication. Correct. They just had their financial results. Google just keeps winning. They just made $85 billion for the past three months, a 14% increase over the last year. I do think there's something really interesting in how they've set up the main search GPT screen, though, because Google, I think for the past couple years has been like the way people search is changing. People are using TikTok. They're asking full questions.

And yet Google has not really responded to that. Google search still functions exactly the same way. This is a really small change, but the main search GPT screen, instead of being like a thin little box where you're supposed to type in three keywords, it's a large text box and it says, what are you looking for? And I do think there's like a small turn that they're making there. There's almost this idea of, you know, you're supposed to ask a full question here and expect a full answer.

I do think that is sort of a differentiator. they're sort of playing into this idea that like we are searching in different ways now we do need to build a different product for the moment yeah I don't know if this is the product but their example search is music festivals in Boone North Carolina in August which if you type that into Google today it would just be totally it would be a that the SEO garbage that you're used to but you wouldn't get an actual answer to that query not not even close and so what they're showing and we should talk about the actual product here right it's a big, they're showing the larger context window, and then you ask it a question with multiple

parameters, and it answers it, right? Like the answer, it provides that query is in August, there are several music festivals and events happening in Boone, North Carolina, and it has a list, all the lists, every item in that list has a link, which is really the thing the publishers have asked for. Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic was just on Decoder, and he's like, the thing we wanted in our deal was control over how our links would be displayed and how much of the stuff they would use. So it seems like that's what they're getting here. And then bizarrely, you can click a button on the left rail to open a panel of links, which is a much more traditional search result.

And that you can't even get from Google anymore. Well, it's actually kind of interesting that no one has really rethought search interface as a long time. And in the past week, Bing has deeply rethought its interface because they can just do whatever they want. And then opening eye is like, well, no one has any expectations of us. Here's a totally rethought. Like, what if links were a panel as opposed to,

Google, which has been stuck in the 10 Blue Links paradigm, which they've complained to you about, David. Like, this is everyone's expectation. It's not what anybody wants anymore. But then you change it. Everyone, like, freaks out. Yeah. I mean, it cuts both ways, right?

Like, the great thing about being Google is that you're Google. And the crappy thing about being Google is that anytime you do anything, a gigantic portion of your users are going to hate it and lose their minds. It's why there's still the buttons in Microsoft Word, right? Like, it's the famous thing. Microsoft always says, right? They're like, one percent of people use this, but one percent of people is 10 million people. Like, what are we supposed to do with that? And I think that's real. And when you don't have any market share and don't have anything to lose, it's a lot easier to take

swings like this. That's certainly true. And I think to some extent, like, Jake, what you're talking about about this idea of, you know, asking fuller questions and getting fuller answers is real. It's only one part of search. And it's actually a pretty small part of search. But it is a real part of search in it is, I think, where all these companies sense Google is weakest and most beatable. But like this Boone North Carolina thing is actually a perfect example, right? Because all this stuff exists inside of web pages. It's just a gigantic pain in the ass to find it. And what we've all done for forever is you do that Google search, you open up 10 pages and you sort of collate it yourself. And you like make that list either in your head as you read or in a spreadsheet or a Google

doc or an email or whatever. This is just doing that for you, which I think is super valuable. Like one thing I do almost all the time is sit down and Google like things to do near me this weekend. And holy God, is Google bad at serving an answer to that question? You just hope that there is some like local news website or event bright happens to have something. The potential for this to be good at that is vast and very exciting.

There are a lot of really interesting questions about what it does to, like, publishers, because you even look at some of the links in these things. They're links directly to the venues. They're not links to whoever did the like 10 fun music festivals in Boone this weekend that Open AI might be pulling from. I don't know the source of some of this data. I don't know if it's actually parsing the individual venue websites to get the answers. I don't know that it matters.

I don't know that it's going to make a difference, but all of that is being abstracted completely away, potentially better user experience, but super weird, different way to think about how the internet works. So this is like an interesting puzzle to figure out that I'm sure we're going to hear more about over time because there's only two search indexes.

There's Googles, which no one's allowed to use because they're Google. And then there's the Bing search index, which everyone uses. And all the alternative search engines that we've written about, the David's written about at length, they're all kind of running on the Bing index

and then presenting a new front end to you it is maybe more private or whatever. And so it's pretty obvious that OpenAI is using the big search index, mostly because Microsoft is a huge owner of OpenAI. We asked them, and they just sort of vaguely said, third-party partners are power. Well, so, but then there are other indexes you can use, and then there are these publisher partners that they're paying for. Yep. Right? So if you look at this, it's like, do we think that OpenAI is publishing app summer.com, which is not

the summer of apps for your phone, but the summer of festivals in Appalachia. Right. Right? Like, very different. Like, do we think they might not made that, are they paying Wikipedia? Doubtful. But are they going to pay the Atlantic and Vox Media and everybody? Like, yes, because we know about those deals. So there's

some weirdness here in, well, they're using Bing for the big web, like the majority of what they do. And then they have these like priority partners who weren't getting a revenue share when they appear in their against what revenue, unclear. And he just kind of spiral into complexity here.

And the answer is like, I just want to know what the music vessels are. Are those publishing partners actually to help improve this product, or is that entirely because of copyright? I think it's both. Like fully, I think it's both. And I think that is actually echoed by what Google is doing. Like, we, this is the marker, I think, this week of the next evolution of search

the internet in a huge way. That's right. Because this product launched and it's going to become whatever it is. Bing is redesigned and it is basically just showing you AI answers first. Like you thought people are freaked out at Google AI overviews. If you look at Bing today, it's like there are no links. It's actually structurally pretty similar to search GPT. If you looked at Bing today, send us an email.

Right. So again, the risks of these other ones are doing. And then Google that came out this week, Google obviously has a big deal with Reddit. now they're paying Reddit for results, and Reddit is blocking all of the other search engines. In some ways, I think this is like the craziest news item of the week. Like, this is unheard of. Are there any other major websites that block all search engines as a rule? But they don't block Google.

Right. Well, yeah, but Google's paying. Right. There are lots of big platforms that don't want Google to index them because they want people in their walled garden. but we don't think about the web that way. Right. And this is, I mean, this feels like an explosive moment because of that, right? Reddit has always felt like part of the web in a way that I think Facebook does not.

Maybe that's not a fair assessment, but I think Reddit is at the very least trying to re-contextualize what it is right now. And they see that this is the way they're going to be profitable going forward. And so they're playing a pretty hard ball with search providers right now. Yeah, I mean, even Reddit's statement to us from Tim Rathschmidt said essentially that, right? There was a sense that the denial was that this is about preferencing Google, but very clearly what that means is actually, no, we want to give it to everybody. It's just that everybody has to pay us the way that Google did. And that's, I think, going to be an increasingly common position. And what's a bummer is that it was Google.

Like I think this actually would have been a much more interesting test case if Reddit had blocked everybody, but duck, duck go. Because duck, duck go paid first. You know what I mean? And it's really easy to sort of tow a moral line when the only search engine that matters to your business is the one that's paying you. And so I think to some extent everybody gets to kind of have their cake and eat it too here. But this is the fight you're going to see over and over from these platforms. Right. What I'm saying this is the big week in internet search. What I'm saying is this is the week that paid search. started happening. Yeah. Oh, I agree. All these publishers are paying Open AI

to be in their search product and they are saying to us on the record, Nick Thompson on Decoder, saying loudly, this is all just baby steps towards trying to force Google to pay. Yeah, the like tacit agreement

of search, which was that I'm going to let you crawl my data and an exchange you're going to send people to me, I think is this is the week that broke, right? Like that is no longer the agreement of the internet.

We're definitively on another path now. So you've got the publisher, you've got opening I paying the publishers for search TPT. You've got Google paying Reddit and Reddit blocking all the other search engines. And you're just going to see that continue on. And then you've got perplexity in trouble because they built search TPT without any of these deals and they're getting sued. Just straightforwardly sued. Yeah. Conday Nest, which owns Wired and Vogue and all the other big magazines, is suing perplexity for scraping insights.

Well, there you go. Like, we're in it. We're in the era where accessing a website is going to cost money for robots. And like, I just, where the money comes out on the other end is actually up for grabs, right? Like, only Google is making any money in scale and search, and they're making all the money. Right. And they're making more and more all the time. Yeah.

Despite trying to screw all of that up with the AI overview stuff. And meanwhile, the other thing that's happening is the rage against the AI companies who are doing this without asking permission is just getting louder and louder and louder. Like there was a big kerfuffle around Anthropic this week because Kyle Weens, who runs, I Fixit, said that Anthropics crawler was on IFixit's website. I think it was a million times in a day. And this is like, it's an important thing to understand. Like if you get a million page views, that costs money, like actual real money.

The bandwidth and hosting costs for that stuff is expensive. and to have that happening all the time, which is what these crawlers are trying to do, not only do you have like moral feelings about it and there are copyright questions, it literally just costs money. And so there was a whole thing where they had disallowed anthropic in it, in their terms of service,

but not in their robots at TXT file, which is this thing that has, you know, been very important for a long time and is quickly evaporating as a part of the internet. And so now they put that in and there's a question of like, okay, is that going to stop? But it seems like all of these AI companies just decided a couple of years ago that they can just run roughshod over the internet for as long as they can and as aggressively as they want to and just ask a lot of forgiveness and not permission. And I think the other thing that's happening this week is that is coming back around on them in a pretty serious way.

Two things. One, Condoness sent a ceas and desist to perplexity. They didn't actually see them yet. So there's clarification. And two, I forced David to write a story about robots. TXT and that was the rightest decision I've ever made. You didn't force me to write that story. You fought me.

I cannot believe you were taking credit for that. That is outrageous. That's unreal. Actually, you get half credit because I was telling you about it and you were like, you should just write that story. And then I did write that story. So I'll give you half credit for that. That's usually how these things go.

Yeah, I'll live with that. We should actually re-up that story. We'll put it in the show notes. That deal, right, which was about compute power. Like this file that lives in every website called robots. tx txt is just says what you cannot cannot scrape and who and who cannot scrape the website or read the website or index the website and it was there to manage the amount of server load that websites would have in the beginning is everyone sort of crawling everything and it became very political

and now you're at the place where perplexity CEO is like robots dxty is not a legal agreement and we're crawling you anyway but you don't understand how the web works so it's like a real thing that he has said in response to some of these complaints and it's like well can you explain how you think the web works and why you're scraping these sites that don't want your callers to scrape them and that you're right I think there's a moral argument against AI that is like leaking into the legal argument and the moral argument is like go away and then the hard or the harder part is like well maybe you can pay enough money to overcome morals like that's capitalism yep and no one knows how much money that is yet I mean the Atlantic might they have right like this is what those deals

are right. They're trying. Yeah, candidly, I think our executives were a little jealous that we had neck on a show. But I can't interview my own boss. It's just not how it works. Nobody wants that conversation. So you're real smart. Nobody wants me to do that.

But I think those deals are even only a couple years long and they're all betting on whether the Times wins a lawsuit or someone else wins a lawsuit and they get to renegotiate. But I just think like the bigger picture here is very much people know there should be a next

generation search product. A bunch of companies are trying to build them. It was 18 months ago, right? That there was the Bing launch powered by ChatGBT. And I, you know, I went to Redmond and Nadella was like, I want to make Google dance. That's the quote. I think he did make Google dance.

He succeeded in dancing. Yeah. Dancing occurred. Whether or not that dancing resulted in any additional market share for Bing remains to be seen. Well, what's ironic is I think everybody lost, right? Microsoft poured a lot of money and time and energy into making being more successful to essentially no avail. And Google got so freaked out by it that it is blowing up its own search project.

Like, it's just the worst dance of all time. Yeah. I'm going to want one who's usually got there being a competition is good for consumers. And in this case, I'm like, was that, is this gotten anywhere? I enjoyed the AI overviews. I thought we got a good shuckle before they started hiding them more often. Yes, there's the studies out there that say they don't even show them anymore. Yeah, yeah.

There is, I mean, Google has fought this, but they appear to be reducing the frequency with which they show up. And that feels right from my experience. I feel like I was seeing them on just about everything. And now either I've mentally blocked them out or they're reducing them. And I don't know which it is. So I just did the search for music festivals in Boone, North Carolina. And that is something where you would expect an AI overview, nothing. Just didn't get one.

And yeah, it's random. That's a sample of one that I ran twice. But like, they are, they do see me coming and going and they cost more money than the normal search to execute to run the inference. And so we'll see. But I, this just feels like, oh, the way we think with the internet, which is like you just search for stuff, it's going away. Like, just fully going away. But I, I, I mostly agree with that. But I do think the thing I'm most interested about with search GPT is we are at this place now where,

everyone is assuming this is the future, right? But it is very much not the present. Like, I think the thing that Prabhakaraghan, who runs search at Google said about people going on TikTok is like, you say that because you don't want regulators to yell at you, right? Like, it's everybody invents competition that they don't have.

Like TikTok is not search competition for Google. It just isn't. It might be. It's a really interesting, different way of thinking about the future, but it is it is not i do feel like there is something here though um like to your point earlier david you said you know normally on google you would go and you would read 10 results and you average them in your head and then these tools just average them for you and those are the kinds of things where i have

been trying to use chaty bt to see if i can get that sort of quick summary um and because the Google product has gotten so disastrously messy in recent years, I don't feel like I'm missing out. The accuracy threat is not really a thing I'm unhappy to deal with. So I do think things are changing. They certainly have not changed wholesale yet.

But I think it's coming. No, I agree with that. And I think to Google's credit with things like voice search and land and the multimilist search, Google is actually like a much more sophisticated search product than it probably gets credit for. It's just now trying to blow all of that up with AI overviews. But I think my larger point is we're at this moment where like all of these products are

way out in front of what they're all assuming is this big behavioral shift. And there's really no evidence yet that that behavioral shift is happening. And so all these companies are just flushing money down the toilet being like, the people are coming. This is what everybody wants. And there was like, it's because chat. ChatGPT hit so hard. Everybody's like, if that's going to happen again, we can't miss it again.

And I think what we're learning is that actually chat GPT was really cool and really novel. And we haven't really found the like mainstream consumer use case that goes beyond it's really cool and really novel. And like by all indications, the $20 a month co-pilot stuff and the $20 a month Gemini stuff is like not taking over the universe yet. There's some really interesting AI like IT back end stuff that's happening. there's AI stuff in industry. All of that is cool and interesting, and I think that's going to be where all the interesting stuff is.

But the idea of, like, I as a person in the world am going to use AI all the time, not nearly as proven as all of these companies would like you to believe. Right. Did we overreact and cause

a multi-billion dollar bubble because it seemed like a computer wanted to bang you? Yeah. Like, is Google going to burn down search because it thinks everyone's going to change even though they're not actually going to change? I would say in the history of the world,

it seems like something wants to bang you. has caused many mistakes to happen. But also most technological change, to be fair. So there's that. One thing I just want to end with that seems important here is search GPT is a search product that runs on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, and Bing is a search product that runs on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure

and makes use of OpenAI, which runs in, like, what is going on here? It does not seem like these companies are as tightly linked as they used to be. I don't know. I mean, I feel like if you had to ask Microsoft to pick one, they're going to pick Azure over everything else. It's like. My one true religion.

Right. No, it's like it's the cloud. This is like Hulk Hogan ripping over the American flag to shut the Trump face. It's all Azure. It was always Azure. This is what they care about. They don't care if it's them or somebody else. And it's not like they have a lot to lose with Bing.

It's true. It's just I would say after. the big opening eye coup and, you know, Nadella being like, Sam's my guy, he's back. Then there was Apple might join the board in that went away. Microsoft did this weird aqua hire of inflection where they have a new CEO of AI, which is weird, and they hired an entire AI company's worth of engineers. And then Nadella hasn't really said anything about opening, like every other tweet from Nadella used to be about how cool open AI was.

And Alex Heath has pointed out to me, and Nadella hasn't, not one post about opening I. Do you think he's upset about their product direction or just worried about regulators? Because it feels like regulators to me. I feel like... It's true. There's a lot of investigation of like, do you actually secretly run a bunch of companies? Sure.

But it also, their products are indirectly competitive. Like, they both have search products. Yeah. And I guess the idea is, well, if either one of us takes a percentage of share away from Google, it's still running on Azure. Yeah, I really think that's it. I think Jake's summation is perfect, that Azure wins all the way down. and the enemy is Google,

and whatever you have to do to take away from Google is fine. And I think for Microsoft, we're going to use AI to make Bing work, ship has sailed. And so you use Bing to keep doing weird stuff and keep getting press, and then you hope search GPT really wins. We didn't touch on it, but Google was rumored to make this enormous $23 billion purchase of a cloud security startup just to, you know, boost Google Cloud. which is behind Azure, which is behind AWS.

So I think that is just like a huge opportunity for Microsoft and for all of these companies. And that company spurned Google. So it's not going to happen. But I think that just goes to show how important this market is. Yeah. Or the crowd strike thing happened. And Google is like, what if we aren't responsible for things like this?

Yeah. It is very, by the way, it is very unclear what happens with that deal. It's a little far afield from the very chest, but it seems like some weird, some weirdness there. It wasn't clear to me. I thought that they just were like, oh, we can make more money, just IPOing. Capitalism. All right, we got to take a break. Kylie Robinson wrote the whole story about search DVDs on the website.

Go read it. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about some gadgets. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not. entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your

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there's a lot of gadgets to talk about quite a few we have Sean just in love with the Assuse Rogue ally X we have Allison not so in love with the Galaxy Z Fold 6 but I think we should start NWV

I would say having no feelings at all about the galaxy yeah that's right yeah that's hot cold blue quorum that's how that's going we should start though with what feels like a

pretty huge piece of news. The Wall Street Journal had a big in-depth piece on what is going on with Alexa at Amazon. It's almost 10 years old now, Alexa. I have a vivid memory of the first echo launch when we were in our midtown office, David, and we were sitting next to each other, and you and I were the only people who thought it was a good idea. And everyone else was like, what's this tube? But it was like a very odd moment. I was like, this is all I've ever wanted to talk to a computer. Look how far we've come. But Amazon's been at it. for 10 years, they sent $25 billion on it, and they have not really made any money. The Wall Street Journal goes into some very boring accounting tricks that they've used to prop

up the division, but now Jeff Bezos is gone. Dave Limp, who used to run that whole division, is gone. You got an Andy Jassy, you got a Panos Panay, and they're like, what is this garbage? And they're kind of just shutting it down. It sounds like a paid version of Luxa is coming, and that's the future. A thing that I've learned a bunch of times over the last couple of years, and for whatever reason, this just keeps coming up as I talk to people about products, is that if you work at a big company and you have a product, there has to be someone really high up in the company who cares about it. And without that, if you're not earth-shatteringly successful, your thing will die. And this is true at Google.

Like, if you don't have a sort of executive sponsor who can sit in a media. and talk about why you're still worth the resources, your product dies. If you, it's true at Amazon, like, I think one thing that we're learning about Amazon is that there were a bunch of things that Jeff Bezos in particular really cared about. And we've seen those things start to kind of wither on the vine after Bezos left. And I've heard this about the Kindle. I've heard this about Alexa, that these were things that right or wrong, good business or bad business, like Bezos really believed in as things that matter both to the world and to

Amazon. And without him there, it makes sense that if you're Andy Jassy and you're looking around and you're saying, okay, where are we just hemorrhaging money and or wasting resources, you could look at Kindle as wasting resources. It's a big team that doesn't make that much money in the scheme vote Amazon does. And you look at Alexa and you're like, okay, this thing was supposed to be the future. It's been 10 years. We've lost, not only, Nilai, did they lose $25 billion. They lost $25 billion in five years. Not even the whole run. The journal's very good reporting couldn't find losses earlier than that, but presumably they were very large. Like, this thing is a disaster of a business.

And can I just read you what I think is some like truly great knife twisting writing from the journal? Yeah. Like, I used to work at the Wall Street Journal. They're very careful. They're very meticulous. They are not prone to like grandiose turns of phrase. But what that means is they will just very quietly, subtly, just stab you repeatedly with

a story. So it says, while hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn't take off. Customers actually used to Echo mostly for free apps, such as setting alarms and checking the weather. We're worried we've hired 10,000 people and we've built a smart timer, said a former senior employee.

Brutal. Brutal. But also, yes, correct. That is exactly what it is. Yeah. I can't think of another company that operated a product division, the way that Amazon operated the Echo Division. Right, for 10 years, once a year they would roll out a dozen new echo devices, and there

would just be different shapes and sizes, ever so slightly like weirder variations on the same thing. And if you look back over 10 years, how many echo products would you say are essential? Right. I really can't think of that many different echo products that are not just variations on the original formula they identified 10 years ago. And so we talk about $25 billion being wasted. It's like, I don't know what they got from that.

The product just hasn't gone anywhere. Well, I'll make this comparison, which I think is, it's a little out there, but go with me on this. This week, Meta released the latest version of Lama, which is open source, and Mark Zuckerer put out this whole thing about why he believes in open source and he has this line in there. It's like, one of my formative experiences was building products limited by what Apple would allow on its platforms. And this is why I believe in open source. And you can go read it's great, and I'm sure that will cause its own kind of consternation out there in the world. Amazon thought this was the next platform. If you will recall, they failed at the fire phone, deeply badly failed at the phone.

They are also constrained by what Apple will allow them to do on their devices and meaningful big ways. And they really thought they had it. They really, okay, ambient computing is going to be the thing. We're going to put a... I mean, they got one in every single home. Because they gave them away for free. Yeah. And then they...

This is part of the accounting tricks. that the Wall Street Journal was talking about is they accounted revenue for purchases that were like not made. They call it downstream impact. And like by putting an Alexa device in your home, people will shop this much or they will stay with Prime or whatever it is and they made up some money. And then you're like, it's brilliant. There's no money.

It didn't happen. Have you guys ever bought something directly through your Echo? No. Actually, I moved off the Alexa platform ages ago because I just wanted Google home frames. So I wanted the photo frames on the hubs. And Amazon finally did this, but they never built a good photo service, which is exactly the problem you're talking about, which is the amount of cost and complexity to build a good photo service is not worth anything in the scheme of Amazon. Right. Google accidented into Google photos.

And they have it so they can run Google the Nest hubs, which have the cool photo frame feature. And I know that a lot of devices have that and you can do it. But then you got to use Amazon photos. which is not as good. And it's like, oh, is the money to improve Amazon photos worth it to get even 5% of people to switch away from Google? And you just like run the math inside of Amazon. You're like, what are you talking about?

We run Amazon. Like, figure out how to sell more shoes. Like, stop it. I've been thinking a lot about the conversation we had around that very first demo of the Humane Pin all those months ago when he stood there and he was like, I forget what he's He ordered a book. He, like, took a picture of the book. This is Imran Chowdrey, the CEO.

I think this is right. He was wearing a prototype of the pen, like, took a picture of a book and bought it. And we were just saying there would be like, okay, here's the list of questions I have about what just happened. What credit card did you use? Where is it? Where is it? How much did it cost?

All of that stuff has existed with the Echo forever. And with all of this, you're like Alexa, you know, buy me toilet paper. If I have to then go check my phone to make sure it worked correctly, which I do, we failed. We just accomplished nothing. And that, I think, was just never going to work for Amazon. And they have tried to back their way into people want to do this with the, you know, the subscribe and save thing has some stuff going for it.

And they're like, well, reorder the things and all this stuff. And it just doesn't work. And, God, this has to have been six years ago now. I was in Seattle in a conference room with a bunch of Amazon executives. And I made the joke about like, okay, this thing is for music and timers. What's the third thing? Where's my third thing going to be? And they gave me this long speech about how, oh, there are tens of thousands of things.

Lots of people like to do lots of different things. And I was like, but none of what you just described to me is a killer app that will make you money or any of these developers that you're trying to bring onto this platform. And it is wild to me how many years later precisely nothing has changed. Yeah. Like they just never found another thing. It got very good at the things it was good at. And it never found another thing. It's so funny because there is that subscribe and save stuff, you know, you roll.

out of things in your house and you should be able to be like Alexa I'm out of coffee or whatever and they just couldn't close the loop in that very specific way or do you remember the dash buttons you just like push the button and like laundry detergent would show up and like kids are pushing them too much so they got rid of them they just figure out like automating that stuff and maybe you have a little too much overlap is better and that's how you get to subscribe and save like it doesn't really matter and then anything that you want to buy that isn't something you've already bought a hundred times in a row you probably want to do an infinite amount of product research on, and that's just better. And so, like, I think they're stuck with this product, and the next move is to put an LLM in it,

to charge money for it, and to have it be this thing. But to your point, they thought this was an operating system. They thought it was a platform. They were licensing it out to all kinds of other companies. They thought they had Windows. We've talked about it in the show. I was like, Amazon thinks Alexa's Windows. And you're like, the thing you can do with Windows is look at it.

Like, you can play games on it. Like, the computers need screens, I think is like maybe the end result of all of this. Them planning to charge for an AI powered Alexa feels like a very questionable next step. Like, it feels necessary, right? You need to charge for it because that's what everybody's charging for the premium version of their thing. But it is, you know, after a decade of people being like, Alexa, could be a little bit better. I think the idea that people are like,

you know what? Maybe I will pay and get a slightly better Alexa. Well, just think about the horrible upsells that are coming for all of us with Alexa. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Like even today, like, every one out of 10 times, I ask Google Home to do something. And it's like, you know, I can also do this. I'm like, I don't, I've known that for so long. I don't want you to. With Alexa, it's going to be like, you know you can pay me to tell you even worse bedtime.

That's the thing, right? So like, Jake, to your point, I think to me, the question Amazon is about to ask is, is 50% better Alexa actually meaningful? Because let's assume that it is, right? Like, I think there's some evidence that if you go from the machine learning tech that we've had before to like LLM powered systems, the like the speech to text gets better, the text to speech gets better, the natural language processing gets better, like most of that seems like it'll work.

If Alexa just gets 50% better at every single thing it already does, does it become a better product or a better business for Amazon? Because I don't think so. I can't think of anything that I'm like, if only it were better at this, I'd do it all the time. I think if you put ChatGPT into Alexa, it would get a lot more usage than it does today. I think if you charge $10 a month to access ChatGPT and Alexa,

you're not going to earn that much money. Right. And this is a problem with it being a voice for, assistant. If you could pay $10 a month to get chat chbt everywhere, oh, that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Right, but you can't. You can pay to get it in their app and then that app runs on your phone where Siri is there. Fine. And it's not going to run in these voice assistants in your house because

Google owns them or Amazon and some. And you actually have this problem where we have what is fundamentally an application running into what many, many, many big companies have thought of as an operating system. I mean, this is like the starting point, though, right? The grand AI dreams are that these AI tools can actually functionally do things for you, right? They can make the purchase. They can push the button. They can navigate an app for you. And so I think if we're talking about Alexa as an operating system, 100%, they need to be working on these AI things. They need to make that happen. But the last time somebody tried this, it was the rabbit. And they sort of made up the fact that

they could do any of these things. And so, you know, I would say I don't have high hopes for V1 of this, but it's, I think very clear that they need to do something. This feels like the start. I haven't seen it yet. But it feels like this is going to be very much first steps. Yeah. One thing it's interesting about the journal piece,

which is indeed very well reported and does, like David say, have many fine turns of phrase in it. Panos Panay, who now runs this division, did not speak to them. And we know Panos. He is a forceful personality. I don't think he's just going to let it ride. Like, if he, if anything, he will provide focus to this. And it is unclear what that focus will be.

If they are going to launch a paid tier, maybe, you know, maybe that's his project. Maybe there's a new set of hardware coming. But there's another turn coming for this. It just feels like an entire decades worth of Alexa hardware is about to become like, Huh. So what's funny about that is I think if it weren't for Panos, I would have just asked you just now, do you think it's possible that Amazon is just going to decide to get out of the device's business? Because what this story is about broadly is Amazon's devices business is a disaster.

And there was a period not that long ago where Amazon bought Ring, Amazon bought, what was it, Blink, it bought ERO. It was like it was deep in the we are going to be a hardware company. in a very real way, especially in the smart home. And obviously, Alexa and Echo is the biggest part of that team as Amazon looks at it. But like, there don't seem to be runaway hits here. There is nothing that is like making all of this work. And it's the same for Kindles and Fire TV.

Like all of this is baked into that. And so if I'm Andy Jassy and I'm like, okay, we need to, we need to keep growing. We need to put money inside of the stuff that's really going to matter. It doesn't seem that outlandish to look at devices and say, this is not a game we want to play anymore. But if you're going to do that, you don't hire Pano's Pannes, I don't think. And if you're going to do that, I don't think Panos goes to work for you, which is why all of this is very confusing to me. Right. And there's a lot of early sort of unsourced rumory reporting that he's like, what have you all been doing this whole time? And so we'll see. They need a vision.

Right. The vision, you know, under Dave Limp, and you can listen to Dave on our shows over the years, was your house would become a computer and he was just going to like put microphones and speakers everywhere and then maybe you get some satellite internet and like right because he ran Project Kuiper their satellite internet that competes with SpaceX

this is a real thing and so his idea was that he would just sort of like smarten up your house and that would you would just like add stuff until you like like a black hole

like it collapsed and until it started giving up light and heat and became alive and turned into a computer. Like, I don't know what that metaphor is, but that's what it felt like every time I talk to him. He's like, here's what we're going to do. We'll add some ring cameras, and then Eero will run the networking,

we'll put a mic and a speaker in every room, and then you'll have a fire TV, and then we'll just keep squeezing until it's alive. And I was always like, but when do they talk to each other? Like, that is the part. Like, the vision is like they have to do something that is more than the literal sum of the parts.

And I don't think they ever got there. And importantly, if your Amazon makes money at some point. Like Amazon just keeps giving hardware away, betting that once it's in your house, they'll figure out how to make money off of it. And we are now pretty long into that experiment not working. And you kind of wonder if it's ever going to start to work.

It feels like everyone learned the wrong lesson from Apple, right? Apple turned your phone into a shopping mall and like you blink in an iPhone. And Tim Cook is like, that'll be 30%. But the hardware is still very expensive. Yeah. Amazon's like, this is the cheapest TV we can make. It's full of ads.

And it just did, they didn't get the, they didn't get the second part. All right. There are other gadgets to talk about it. Do you want to start with the Z Fold 6? Yeah. That's about it, right? Yeah, that's my, that's my level of enthusiasm. Yeah, so Jake, I want to know what you think about this.

Neil and I have talked a lot about folding phones, and I always end up sort of defeated and sad, but I want to know what you think. I mean, if I had a lot of extra money to spend, I would only only, in like nine foldable phones. And I would love staring at them. I would love dreaming about how often I'm going to flip them open and use the huge inner screen. And in reality, everybody I talked to you as a foldable phone does not open them all

that often. And it's really interesting reading Allison's review because she's looking at this. She's like, this is, you know, it's a great fun. I think they've like pretty much figured it out. You know, they ironed out all but the literal crease. You know, it folds flat now. The screens, like, touch the edges. It's great.

It's a really nice looking piece of hardware. And I do think, like, we sort of got to, you know, a few years ago, there was this question of, oh, okay, is this going to replace the standard phone? And I think now it's very clearly, you know, this is just like another offering. And they've gotten really good. And I think what Allison is kind of fun here, and this seems right to me for everything I've read, from everybody I've talked to. You have to have a use for it.

You have to specifically want this and buy this. And particularly given that these are like twice the price of another phone, you have to really want it. Yeah. Our old friend Dan Seafurt, who's now at Google, had maybe the funniest reaction to David instigating what I can only describe as the Boog's Palma Wars of 2024. He was like, well, you really want us a folding phone, which is the most dan thing to say. Or screens. It's like the most Dan thing to say I love you Dan

Dan is also one who tried to get me to use Samsung Decks every day which we all know how that went but his point was you want a device for reading what you actually want as a folding phone that is a phone most of the time and then you open it and you have a tablet

and you do this thing and it's still the argument is what you really want as a tablet most of the time but it's just I don't think Android tablets are that compelling yet like to this day

and so Allison's point here is like Samsung kind of has no competition here, and they're coasting on having invented this. Yeah. And these are totally iterative refinements. I think that's true. But I also think if you're Samsung,

you are kind of looking at Android and going like, okay, what are you going to do for me here? And we're now on a pretty long run of Google kind of loudly talking about how it's investing in making stuff better for larger screens. And it has gotten better. Like the basic UI of a larger screen Android device has come a long way. It doesn't feel like somebody just like took the edges of a JPEG and stretched it anymore.

Like it's much better. But it still, it doesn't feel meaningfully different to use the internal screen than it does to use the external screen. And so I think like, Jake, to your point, you get a foldable phone and what you realize is mostly what you bought is just a heavier phone that every once in a while you're going to open up and do something with. It's not like a every time I sit down to do it, I'm going to open up the phone. This is the reason I think flip phones are more interesting because I think to me there is a much more natural divide of what you do wear on a flip phone. And on a fold phone, I think partly just because of the way we've all used phones for so long, you're just going to sit there and use it as a phone most of the time because all of the

operating system, all of the apps, all of our muscle memory has taught us how to use a phone like a phone. And so there's just the case for this larger screen just has not been made super convincingly. And Samsung does not seem to every year invent new reasons to make that case. Like the sketch thing that you can do on there is awesome. You can draw an image and it'll make that image for you with AI. Terrifying for the future. Very cool. You need like a lot of those if you're going to start to sell these things to people in meaningful ways, especially for twice the price of a normal smartphone. Yeah.

Also, it is still too tall and skinny on the outer screen, which I think is why people instinctively sort of open it every time. Yeah, though weirdly, it seems like Google is heading in that direction, too. All the rumors about the Pixel 9 Pro Folds. You did. That's really impressive. Mm. Are that they're going more in this direction?

I think it's crazy. I thought the old kind of wider, more book-like format was going to be a winner. Yeah, but the pixel 8 fold ZEF. That's the one. You can tell Google runs a company where most information is indexed by machines in how they care to name things. But it was like too wide. Like Allison has a photo in review of the one plus open, the pixel fold and the new galaxy Z fold six. And it's like the one plus open is the right shape.

Yeah. It's a phone. Like that's the answer is make it a phone. And then you can open it to a tablet. And every other one is like, it's a book. It's a remote control. And it's like, why don't you just make it the size of a phone? And I get that it's challenging because you have to optimize the tablet on the inside.

And I don't want to reopen the great aspect ratio debates of the Vergecast of Old. But like what is the right aspect ratio for both of these things is kind of an open question. It's 1610. Just going to lock it in. Three, two, baby. Let's go. All right. So that's the Zvold 6.

you should review a sketched image is going to probably end democracy as we know it but it'll be fun while we have it. Can I just say before we move on, if you are a person who already owns a Z-fold and you're upgrading to the six, tell us why. Vergecast at theverge.com. I'm like, I sincerely want to know it because there are a bunch of little hardware things. There are a bunch of little software things. I want to know like what are the new things that make you want to upgrade your foldable phone.

So hit us up. Yeah. Let's talk with the Galaxy Ring real fast. these analysis of this is this is an accessory for the galaxy watch. Not what I expected. Which is kind of fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So basically the ring seems to have gotten the hardware basically right. It's light. It's thin. It lasts a long time. It doesn't have a subscription. The charging case is great because it's a charging case and not just like a weird puck that sits on your desk.

But it's, it is kind of totally ancillary to everything. It doesn't seem to be wildly accurate in the way that you would hope something on your finger could be more accurate than something on your wrist. It does an interesting job, V found, of sort of trading data collection between the watch and the ring. So it'll actually optimize for which device is better at collecting which kind of data through which sensor,

which is very cool and potentially good for battery life. But yeah, it seems like it's fine. Like if you don't have a watch and you want a ring, it'll be fine. It won't be as good as having both. It probably won't even be as useful as the watch, but it'll be fine. but also like people who want smart rings probably also have smart watches i don't know so i i land

on like this seems like a good additive thing but i kind of wanted more out of it it's also extremely samsung dependent yeah i just googled it i can get a galaxy watch six for half the price of the galaxy ring and i think like there's the question this thing does more we already know people like smart watches um galaxy watch six looks pretty good um And in V's findings, right, the ring is supposed to be better at a bunch of different tracking for hell stuff. It just wasn't. So at least for this first version, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, as much as like the discrete form factor could be nice for people who, you know, want to wear other stuff on their wrists.

Yeah. Can I ask if you are deeply in the galaxy ecosystem, can you talk to us? This is like every now and again I ask for people who are like, who buy, gaming Android phones. No one's ever called us. I just want to be clear. Look, not all audiences. As we know, it's a fractured media landscape.

Maybe hardcore Android gamers don't listen to the Vergecast. But I suspect if anyone would have that audience, it would be honest. Reveal yourselves. And if you're hardcore in the galaxy ecosystem, if you're, like, we know about our iOS fanboys, right? There are people who are like, now that iPhone has RCS, I believe in RCS. Yes. Like, we know who you are. But we're talking like deep. Like if you, if you don't have a phone, if you don't, if you didn't buy a galaxy book just for the connection to your phone, like I'm out.

You're not in it enough. If you're not using Dix as your daily driver. I'm sure. I know. And I just want to, I just want to know you. I just want to know you. Just be a friend. So one thing about V's review that really jumped out at me was, uh, we talked about this after the Samsung launch, but the, the whole energy score thing, this idea of like,

collect a bunch of data and it's going to sort of spit back to you, like this overall measure of how you're doing and also some information about how you can do better. Can I just read you a paragraph from her review? Just while I'm reading damning paragraphs about companies, she says, the new energy score is also broadly accurate, though the AI powered insights for her hit or miss.

After a punishing long run in 90 degree heat, my energy score dipped 18 points the next day, victory. I was told I needed to rest. That night I went to bed. My score jumped 16 points, blah, blah, blah. Except I was also told my sleep was compromised. and to stop drinking alcohol or late night eating to ensure quality sleep. I don't drink, and my last meal was at 6.45 p.m.

AI, baby. That's the thing. Like, all of these things that the Samsung and Apple and everybody else is on this path of like, we're going to collect as much data about you as we can on your body, biometrics. We want all this stuff. And we're going to give it. We're going to use AI to give it back to you, right? And the more data you give us, the better the AI will do.

I am so skeptical of the idea that, these tools are going to be good at reading charts and helping me understand what's going on with my body and helping me try to live better. And this is the future of medicine, Dave. Yeah. I also, in some episode in the last couple of weeks, ragged on people who aggressively sleep track. I'm just, I really am like throwing a lot of strays on this show recently. I heard from a bunch of people who were like, you're just firing into the air, just seeing where the bolts come down. I heard from a few people who were like, I sleep track intensely and I look at my score and I care.

very much about it. And I, that's all well and good, but still it's to the point of like, okay, if you're tired, go to bed earlier. Like, that's, that's as sophisticated as most of these tools get. And there is no evidence in a lot of these that AI is going to make that, like, meaningfully better. No, no, no. I use the app sleep cycle on my phone, which is a great alarm clock. I pay the subscription. It's a subscription alarm clock app on my iPhone. It's great. And it will tell you basically, like, astrology level. correlations. All right.

Maybe the real, you know, I just like haven't dug into it. Affecting your sleep. But it's like, it's like here's, first of all, it calculates a sleep score,

which I don't even know what that is. It's because by listening to you, which is terrifying. And then it will just like correlate it to different things. So it's like, you sleep better when it's raining. It's like, do I?

And the craziest one is air pressure. It's like, here's the air pressure. And it, it's a curve with two peaks. and there's like parts of a barometer that apparently I sleep better. And I'm like, I don't know if this is real. You have to optimize.

You're missing out. This is why I have hermetically sealed my room and I adjust the air pressure in my room. Neil just vacuum seals himself every night before bed now. Wirecutter has a great list for hermetically sealing the room. It's very expensive, but it's really worth it. Yeah. I'm saying once you've used this app that is like astrology-level correlations. I do like the idea, I will say, of waking up in the morning and it's like, ah, you didn't get very good sleep. That's Mercury's fault for sure. Like, that would make me feel better. I would actually pay for that. Like, I would like to outsource all of my bad sleep to someone else's problem. Do that. I mean, I guess my, the question I have, though, is like, I don't know how much more like a doctor is going to help you, right? I mean, if you discover that you actually have sleep apnea, that's very serious. That's a really good thing to learn about. If you just find out that you're waking up a few times.

the middle of the night. I don't know. I feel like a quick Google search asking your friend for some advice on if you're partying too much. Look, rainy showers is plus 9% sleep quality for me. Actually, my favorite in this list. Is there a word cloud coming here? It's affected by location.

So it knows where you are. And I will tell you that if I go to bed in Philadelphia, minus 26% people. I don't know what that means. I've often enjoyed my time in Philadelphia. Too much. But the air pressure, I'm just showing Jake. The air pressure. It's crazy.

You have to be careful there. There's a lot of red on the front. Today I am the pilot, and I am telling David he's wrong. All right, we should talk one more gadget, the Assuse Rogue Ally X10, however you want. It's whatever you want. Sean loves this thing. Loves it. It says it's the best Windows gaming handheld.

There is, except Windows is really bad at going to stay. Right. Best Windows handheld is like the most damning with faint praise thing of all time right now. But yeah, it's... By the way, I have to say,

I think we gave all of these products sevens, and I feel like I need to have a stern meeting. Mm-hmm. Because only the Vision Pro gets a seven, right? Is that, is that right? Yeah. Only the Vision Pro deserves a seven. Nothing else.

But... We give one seven a year, and it's the most day. gaming seven we can get. That's my... I love that for us. That's the new rule. But yeah, the rub on most Windows handheld gaming

is that it's bad. Like, the upside is that it's Windows, so it runs everything. The downside is that it's windows, so it ruins everything. Like, that's honestly that simple. This one, kudos to Asus, like the, it's fast. The battery life is pretty good. The fan is not

super loud. It has a variable refresh screen that Sean really liked. the downside is still Windows. It is just not optimized to run well on a screen like this. But I will say, we had a whole conversation two weeks ago on the show with Sean and Cranz because I am like deep in a buying debate with myself about which portable console to buy. And they kind of were like, it's the Steam Deck unless the Rogg Ally X can be great. It kind of seems great.

Like this kind of seems like the one. It's a little finicky because it's Windows, but it'll play all your games and it'll play them all pretty well and it will last a long time. Like as Windows goes, that's it. This is the key. It will play all the games, right? Sean is like the performance can play the most demanding games and the battery life is good. The other thing I'll say here is like this is twice the price of an entry. That's the killer part. It is $800. This is not the price of buying a gaming PC exactly, but this is like a pretty serious console level investment. That is true. It's like more than buying a PlayStation. Right. Yeah, but buying the Steam deck, you're like, oh, it'd be kind of cheeky.

and I think this is this is your serious gaming device. Yeah, this is a commitment. But I think that's okay. Like if it runs as well as it seems to, like Sean is a pretty demanding benchmarker of games. So when he says he's happy, I know I'm going to be like ecstatic because Sean is mad about frame rates

and I'm like, this looks great to me. What are you talking about Sean? So this is why I don't review gaming handhelds. But I think I was very encouraged by how encouraged he was, even playing, was it Alan Wake 2 that he said It's like a bear of a game for any of these systems and seem to be pretty happy with it. Yeah, and as these things get less and less finicky over time slowly, I mean, it's just making this kind of caliber of gaming more accessible to people who do not want to deal with that on a full-fledged PC, which is great. All right, we got to take a break.

Are we not talking about Google's weird Chromecast thing? That's it. That's all I have to say about it. Google has a weird Chromecast thing that hopefully will be more powerful than a Chromecast. Yeah. It's like a wedge. It's like, you know the people who do finger skateboarding? It's made for them.

That's what it is. Like, Belkin is going to make you a finger skateboard for this thing, 10 minutes after it launches. But yeah, we don't need to talk too much about this because all of this stuff is launching in two weeks, basically, and has just been leaked to death. So we'll have many more chances to talk about this between now and then. But weirdly of all the stuff, I think Google is going to launch, if they can launch a very good Google TV-powered set-top box.

that might be the thing I am specifically most excited about it. And I say this is somebody who finally caved and bought an Apple TV to plug into my Roku TV because I'm so tired of crappy streaming software. Just give me something better. Sony Pictures Core. You only watch four movies. Three of them are in the Bad Boys series, but they're 80 megabits per second. And number four is Madam Webb, which exists.

I like to think in the same universe as the Bad Boys movies. I watch. I watched all of Ghostbusters Frozen Empire at 80 megabits per second. I could not tell you what happened in that movie. I could not tell you if it began or ended. Like, it just happened to me. And I was like, these pixels look so good. This movie is so bad.

It's great. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be right back with the lighting round. Still time to sponsor it. Call now. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Jake, you've never done a lightning around with us. No, and, you know, Neil, I want to apologize for that sponsorship not coming in. It really felt like it's going to happen. I have been told, again, this is not my set of house at all, but I have been told that there is interest.

We just got to get it. Jake just couldn't get the money together in time. I had $15. I offered it to Andrew, and he. Yeah, apparently, it priced this thing too high. I'm willing to take any money at this point. but our sales team would like to hit its revenue numbers. Rides on boats.

We're in. All right. Jake, you're our guest. You have the opening lightning round item. That's very kind of you. Yeah, so I want to open with Apple Maps launches on the web.

Revenge of the Web. We open the show with like the Web is dead. We're closing it with like Apple has to do web stuff now. This is either monumental or just does not matter at all. And I am not sure which it is. But there's like a thing happening around Apple Maps where I'm of a generation. My generation believes that Apple Maps is garbage. Because that's how it was when it launched in 2012.

And then we kept using Google Maps because I've used Google Maps since its inception. It's a lovely, mostly good product. But I do think more and more people are using Apple Maps. it's the default on the iPhone. People aren't questioning it. And by all accounts, it's gotten pretty darn good over the past 10 years. Can I caveat that slightly? Yes.

Apple Maps is very good at navigation. It's very, like, if you put in an address and you want it to get you to that address, Apple Maps is very good. It's actually, in a lot of ways, better than Google Maps, which I think has, like, mostly lost its mind as a navigational tool. We can come back to, there are lots of other parts of a Maps app. Apple Maps is trash at most of them but it is very good at

just like A to B directional navigation Especially if you've watched Do you guys ever use the tapy tap things? I really like that not because I remember What the taps do and are supposed to remind me to do But because it makes me look down at the map So that I actually remember where I'm going It's just like hey you have to turn soon

Look at the screen. It's very hidden. The taps, the haptics are like The purest hidden UI of all time Yeah, it's like six in a round row if you're supposed to turn left and like three pairs of two if you're supposed to turn right. Like I really think that's what it is. I cannot figure it out. I just take like my wrist starts making noises at me and I'm like, oh, I'll look at the screen.

It's great. It's like no one cares enough to figure this out. But sorry, Jake, continue. No, so now it's on the web, right? It is on the platform that is accessible to everyone. So before now, it's not that Apple Maps was available on the web in some very limited ways, right? They had an API. developers could pay for it and embed it into their tools.

I believe the infatuation uses it for all of their restaurant maps. Duck, Duck Go Goheds out there know this. It powers DuckDugGo's maps. So it's not like it wasn't available, but there was no Maps.Apple.com. And now there is. Don't go to that address because it might be slightly different. But, you know, it is on the web. You can use it.

And if you're sick and tired of Google Maps, which I'm sure some people are, You can switch to Apple. And I think as they, I think, inevitably try to turn this into a services business, the fact that it is on the web is going to matter. So it's not clear to me that overnight anybody's going to switch their bookmark from Google Maps to Apple Maps on the web. But it feels pretty important that they have brought this to the web eventually, so that it is on, you know, the biggest platform in the world. Can I give you my galaxy brain take on this? Yeah. So Google Maps is fundamentally a search engine, right?

Like it is a local listing of places. That's actually the thing about Google Maps that is the best. It has all the places. It has pictures. It has reviews. As a database of local things, it is pretty much unmatched. Apple is awful at that. It has a Yelp integration that everybody really hates.

It's just Apple is not good at that. But that's where all the money is in Maps, right? Like you can be a data provider, which Apple is, but if you want to really do this and do this well, you want to essentially sell ads in local search. And that's a big business. It's a business in which hardly anybody is doing a good job of competing with Google because you kind of need the mapping product to do it on top of. And if you want to do that, you need it to work on the web because you need it to be everywhere.

Because like if I'm in the car, what I want is navigation. Like I need to get somewhere. But if I'm like planning things or I'm looking for places nearby, like that is a desktop activity that you do on the web. And this is how you get to Chromebooks. This is how you get to Windows. I think like there is a Maps app for Mac that I cannot imagine people open ever on purpose. But this is like this is your way of becoming like a tool for advertising and for place

search way more than it is like mobile web navigation. And so I think in that respect, as a sign that this is something Apple is going to start caring a lot more about as a business is super interesting to me. And probably bad for Yelp because you've got to kick Yelp out if you want to do this well. And bad for Apple Maps. What you're fundamentally describing is they're going to put a bunch of ads in

which is the reason that people like it right now, that it doesn't do that. But that feels like it is the inevitable direction. So use it now while you. can. But yeah, this feels like they're teeing that up. And, you know, being available on a huge platform is... All right. Now, I'm going to Galaxy brand it. This is Apple knowing that there's big court case about Google default search on its products and that search is all going wonky and people search for places all the time, all the time. And the thing, the thing, after all these years, people expect maps to show up and search results on the web.

So you just need to get to a place where you're not kicking people on their MacBooks into a weird map app that you can just display a result. I thought you were going to say, instead of taking Google's money for Safari search, it was going to take Google's money to power all the place data in Apple Maps just as a way to make a deal while sneaking around web defaults. I like that a lot too. But I think you might be right. And this is a hedge in a lot of ways, right?

Like, you have to be good at this if you want to win at any of this stuff. I think that's, I think you're probably right. The web ain't dead. By the way, as we have been speaking, we have a little breaking gadget news. Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, released a letter apologizing for the disastrous rollout. I will point out just some chronology here. He says, we know too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app, which rolled out on May 7th. today is July 25th.

So it's been a minute. And I want to begin, not me. This is, I'm quoting Patrick now. I don't want to apologize to you for anything. Patrick says, I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you. This fixing the app is their number one priority. Since May 7th, we have released new software updates approximately every two weeks, each making significant and meaningful improvements.

And they're going to keep releasing updates every two weeks. And now they have a schedule. So here's all the things are going to fix over the next. every two weeks for the next several months. What a mess. There's only one answer here, and it's that your entire audio chain should be analog.

I agree. We'd have none of these issues. I agree. This is why I have a full vinyl setup in the ass. Every now and again, I play a record. I'm like, no one knows I'm listening to this song. And it is the best. That's not true.

Your phone is listening to it. Mark Zuckerberg and the FBI are like, he's listening to that again. Can we just crisis comm? this one for a second. This makes no sense to me. Because there are two things here that Patrick Spence did that I think are bonkers and nonsensical.

One is 10 weeks later, remind everybody of the stupid thing that you did, which frankly, many Sonos users are reminded of every day because the experience is amassed. But like, Sonos initially came out and talked about how it took courage to do this. like just to what an incredible million years later own goal. And then the other thing that he does is is lay out the roadmap, like you said, for the next few months, which says among other things that the alarms are not going to get better until September. So now what you've said is, oh, we screwed up.

We're so sorry. It's going to take two or three months before really, really, really basic things ever start to work again. And so all I'm going to do is a Sonos customer who came out. of this whole period being like, well, that sucks. Hopefully it'll get better. Now I'm like, oh, now they're just sorry, which helps nothing. And all I know is none of this is actually going to get better anytime soon.

Here's what I'm going to tell you, if you are looking for an alarm clock. You can use this app called Sleep Cycle, which tells me that if I get 6,000 steps, my sleep is green, but if I get 12,000 steps, it's red. But if I get 21,000 steps, it's green again. And you have to pay for the alarm. So you have to exercise none. exercise none or tons. Yeah.

But if you do like a good job disaster. Hey, look, they've never updated the app and made it not work, you know? Does the alarm go off every morning? The alarm, it's terrifying. It's a surveillance alarm clock. It listens to you sleep. It figures out when you're coming out of REM sleep and then it wakes you up. So you actually wake up.

I mean, look, it's terrifying. And sometimes it, it claims to have recorded you talking in your sleep. Look, I'm saying I love it. It's my favorite. It is my astrology. All right. Leave me alone. I'll take that as one of my lightning rounds.

Dave, what did you go? Jake, I forgot to mention that we do a lightning round in which we all pick one thing and then Nilii picks six or seven things. That's just important for you to know. The lightning round is just when Nili talks for a long time. I'm honestly, I was stunned.

I looked down and I'm like, sorry, Nelai doesn't want to complain about the 1080 P limitation on. He will. He will. I'm sure we'll get to that. Yeah. Don't worry. How are you going to let that opportunity go by?

Yeah, I just wanted to fill you in. I know it's been a while since you've been on the show. Okay. No, no, no, no. It's good. Which, oh, which the other part of that means is my lightning round thing only gets to take about 45 seconds because at some point the show has to end. Yeah, it's a lightning round.

That is how, yeah, actually, I'm really confused about the lightning round actually being. It's best not to worry about it. This is, okay. It just, it just helps. Yeah. It's just three things. Jake, when you actually sponsor it, then you can, you can be mad about it, okay?

That's true. The second we get money, the whole lightning round is going to change. We should be talking about these for no longer than 30 seconds. It should be debate policy style. We're just talk really, really fast to get through. Yeah, that's the thing. What we're supposed to do is get through all the things as fast as we can. And somehow we got to, we're just going to I'll pick one and talk about them at length,

just like all the other segments, which might be why it's never been sponsored. Because as fast as we can is four or five hours. Listen, we're going to. Guys, we can do this. No, we can't. It's impossible. I want to be clear. David,

what do you got? I just want to really quickly talk about these new NBA TV deals that just came out. We've talked a lot of the show about how sports deals are like a harbinger of all of what's coming and streaming. The NBA just signed two or three rather new decade-long deals, one with Comcast, one with Disney, which are fairly normal TV deals, some streaming, some TV. But the big new one was with Amazon. And they're now going to be not a ton of. of games, but lots of games,

uh, 66 a year and 20 playoff games a year on prime video. Um, Amazon's paying almost $2 billion a year for this. It is like, this company is dead serious about being a real player in sports. Uh, they are all the way out on gadgets apparently.

Like all the, all the Alexa money is just going to end up getting put into sports rights deals because prime video seems to be the thing they are like deeply committed to winning in some way, shape, or form. And I just find it fascinating. And yet again, the sports watching landscape gets weirder and more confusing. There's going to be TV deals.

ESPN is going to have its own streaming service. It's also going to have this venue sports thing. There's going to be Peacock. There's going to be prime video. Like, God help you if you just want to watch sports in the next day. I don't know a ton about the sports landscape. Before all these streaming deals, was it this fractured and splintered? or could you mostly get one or two channels and find these things?

Now it feels like just to watch one league, you need to split across nine different streaming services depending on the phase of the moon. No, that's right. It never used to be this bad. I think the NFL was probably the most spread out, and basically the way it worked was two channels split Sundays, and then a third channel had Sunday nights,

and a fourth channel had Monday nights. And that was... And that was the best? That was the worst, like the most confusing, complicated version of it. Most of the time, it was split between one and two networks. And then you throw in, like, regional networks for baseball. And it's always been a little weird. But, like, right now, so I'm an Arsenal fan.

That's how I watch soccer. If I want to watch every Arsenal game, I have to have five networks. That's a real number. It is insane. And so, like, it's just all of this is broken. And it's because there's now so much more money in sports, like the rights have gone through the roof. and so these traditional entertainment companies just can't afford the rights anymore because like, I mean, if you total up, so Disney is paying $2.6 billion annually, Comcast is paying $2.45 and Amazon is paying $1.93. So $7-ish billion. Nobody can afford that on their own a year. These rights have gotten so expensive and they're so important that the competition has just gone insane. And the leagues, I think probably correctly, are like, well, we can make more money by selling pieces of it to lots of people. And then we'll let fans.

solve it for themselves somehow. And the solution is going on to internet message boards and staling the store sees. That's what's happening. Like, eventually it's going to get so complicated. The revenues will come down because people will see. But I agree with you that Amazon is betting very highly on sports because it makes prime video stickier. It makes it feel more free. And it gives you, like, other than that, then they have to, what are I going to pay for more?

seasons of reacher. Right. Like, is Homeland going to be even more evil? Well, it all sort of tracks, right? Like,

it is, it does the thing for Amazon that actually Alexa doesn't, where, like, you can sell ads against football that accrue back to Amazon in a very real way, right? Yeah, there's a lot of AWS ads

unless there's an actual case. Exactly. In a way that all of that stuff, they wanted to connect those dots with Alexa and never did. They're actually pretty well connected on Prime Video. Yeah.

But it is getting insane to watch anything. It's, All right, here's my other one. I am going to complain about 1080P streaming. As long as we're on the subject, I'm going to take this opportunity. Disney launched the bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max. Interesting, by the way, the ESPN Plus is not part of it. Just a little swap out there.

Like, no one cares about this sports product because that's moving into the bigger bundle with the other companies. Very weird. There's a lot of weird stuff going on there. None of this really matters except the bundle is, what, $2,99 a month? $6.99 a month with ads, $2,99.99 a month without ads. For ad-free. So that's cheaper. If you were to pay all in just straight up, you'd be paying $48 a month. So it's cheaper. But 1080P2 streams. And the weirdest part about this is that when we ask Disney to clarify that and make it clear, they refuse to answer on the record. It's so bizarre. What are you doing? Like usually when we get a refute.

answer on the record, it's like controversial. You know, it's like... This is controversial. We have like an explosive claim and they're like, no, we're going to see it. And Disney's like, we just won't tell you it's 1080p on the record. No one wants their name attached to a bit rate's that low. So we actually don't know. We know that Max is 1080P.

Yeah. Hulu and Disney Plus, they wouldn't say. So actually, it's the Disney half of this is just stonewalling. The HBO half is like, oh, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Max is like we... You don't have to care that much. It is very hard.

It is very expensive and very hard to get Max in 4K. You just buy Max Ultimate and it's just ridiculously expensive and nobody wants it. It's what I gather. It's the only streaming service I pay for. You pay all the way. If I'm paying for it, I want all the picks. Wait, Jake, be honest. Do you really?

You pay the whatever $700,000 a month that it calls? It's like $17. It's not... Okay. But the reason I ask is we've talked a lot on this show about like price elasticity for 4K because my theory is they're just going to charge everybody who is dumb enough to pay for 4K streaming until you're paying $100 a month per service or you just go down to ads. Like those are going to be the two tiers.

To be completely candid, I meant to cancel months ago. Okay. So you're in the NELA situation where like I pay for this. It's just I'm like I'm probably going to watch something. I'm really not sure. What network is the bear on? Hulu. Yeah, I got to cancel this.

It's not good. I'm just saying the fact that of all of them, Max, which has the best movie catalog, makes it the hardest to get 4K is just kills me. I watched Dune 2 on a plane. It was pretty good. It looked all right. I don't know if they didn't label a new Nintendo.

I still have never done this, but my dream is that when we remove review movies. We don't issue them scores. We issue them where and when to watch. Oh, that's good. Right. So, like, some of them like, go to the theater. We rate it by screen size. Yeah. This is an 85-inch movie. IMAX. This is an IMAX movie. And then you get all the way down to the end and you're like, for free on a plane if there's nothing else. Right. And like in the middle, it's like wait for it to hit Netflix. Like there's all these things and that is the true mark. That's really good. Yeah. It's on cable with ads in your hungover. fine. We need to come up with a scale.

On mute in the dentist waiting room. Yeah, exactly. It's fine. We got to figure out the one for Baywatch, which I've seen go viral on seatbacks. Just the, what's the new Sydney, Sweeney, Glenn Powell? Anyone but you.

I mean, I don't know. Anyone but you. I watched that go viral on seatbacks the last time I was on a plane. Whatever that category is is the most complicated category. Because it's not wait for a seatback. It's when it happens.

It happens to everyone. You know what's tough is... Which is better than wait for a seatback. So I have my new plane gadget is the 13-inch new iPad Pro. Very beautiful, very bright, very large. Nothing like a surprise nudity in a movie on a 13-inch iPad to really make the plane ride awkward for eight minutes. I just do the quick, like, fold the screen down, just sort of keep an eye.

for a couple of minutes. That's worse than watching with your parents. Oh, it's awful. Got Oscar nominated. It's fine. It's for art. That's just sort of yell to the plane as it's happening. Yeah.

Yeah. My parents's like, let's watch Oppenheimer. And I was like, this isn't supposed to be here. I'm 42 years old. Okay. Last quasi lightning round item. We have, David caused the Bookes Palm Award of 2024. Rivian C.

R.J. Scringe caused the great carplay debate. 2024 to light up. It's real. People are writing articles, people are yelling, comments. David and I are holding a formal carplay debate soon on the Vergecast. I'm just letting you know.

We hashed it out. With like rules. Like Liam is a moderator. They got heated. I won. I'm not telling you what side of it. You like called me names and they hurt my feelings. It's a reflection of the current political

in America. That's what I'm saying. All right, I think that's it. There's like a lot of other stuff going on. It's a wild week. We barely even talked about the other thing that happened this week in the world after we received feedback on our political views last time. You mean the Olympics?

I'm going to say that. I'm going to wrap this up differently. All right, that's it. There's a lot going on. We have to, you know, there's a new presidential candidate. She has a lot of tech policy views that we don't know yet. So all that's to come. The Olympics are starting, which also seem very difficult to stream in 4K, unless you have a

specifically a Comcast cable box, in which case you get a low latency, 30 megabits per second stream. Comcast is an investor in box media. They provided me with none of these. You can tell how much they care for me. They did not install Comcast service in my house far outside of their service area to just give me one of these boxes. They're not going on. It's all going to be in the verge.com.

Jake, this was great. Thanks for joining us, man. Of course. That's it. That's where I cast. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11.

The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.