The Vergecast - Snap laying off 20 percent of employees, Twitter starts testing edit button, and Logitech’s cloud gaming handheld leaks

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss this week's gadget news. Casey Newton joins the show to discuss Twitter finally adding the edit button for tweets. Further reading: An iPhone 14 satellite link could depend on Apple cutting a deal with wireless carriers Everything Apple Watch Pro needs to beat Garmin and Samsung Apple’s Lightning cable turns 10, but its time is over Satellite connectivity on the Apple Watch Pro could be a game-changer Logitech’s cloud gaming handheld leaks with Android apps and Switch-like UI JBL’s new earbud charging case has a touchscreen so you can ditch the phone Motorola Edge (2022) review: a passing grade  LG’s first bendable OLED TV lets you pick between flat or curved modes Samsung’s first OLED gaming monitor doesn’t need a PC or console attached Bang & Olufsen’s Beosound Theatre TV stand will turn your TV around, too  Zenbook 17 Fold OLED review: the best foldable yet Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold (2nd-Gen) hands-on HMD claims its latest Nokia smartphone is its most ‘eco-friendly’ yet The new Ring Intercom will help make your apartment intercom smart Twitter starts testing an edit button, but you have to pay for it Snap is canceling several projects and laying off 20 percent of employees Truth Social is strapped for cash and struggling to find new users Elon Musk says whistleblower’s testimony gives him more reasons to dump Twitter deal Starlink suffered a global outage overnight  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. This might have to be your last appearance on the Vergecast. I don't know how we, in good faith, bring you back after this. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of reacting well to change.

That's the theme of this episode. I'm your friend, Neelai. David Pierce is here. Hi, unlike you, I'm at home. Where are you, Neelai? What is happening here? So I'm at my parents' house. I'm in their office.

They're both doctors. Literally got on a call yesterday and someone said, Are you in a doctor's office? Because my mom had this shelving unit put in by the people who did her actual doctor's office. So it very much looks like a doctor. There's a model of a heart behind me. It's going to point out the heart. The listeners can't see this, but I will just say, here's their mouse pad.

It's an emergency helicopter mouse pad with an 800 number to call. In case you need flight for life, that's the kind of swag my parents get. It's good. I'm interesting because I moderated a panel on Foxcon last night. for a group of concerned citizens. It was great. It was very fun. I told as many jokes about being

from Racine as I could to try to diffuse the room. And then at the end, they had questions. I submitted all the questions on pieces of paper. And just a huge stack of questions was about the project manager

of the Foxx. His name is Claude Lois. And literally, questions are, why do we keep paying this guy? It was just like a stack, like a quarter inch thick stack of paper

that all just said, why are we paying this guy? It was good. But it's going to be back in our scene. It's very good. I will say that I'm using a bunch of podcast gear that I just rustled up at Best Buy. Yeah, like every Best Buy is the same, but like your teenage Best Buy is special.

I got to go back to my Teenage Best Buy, and I just bought podcast gear and much to everyone's dismay, I think, including my own. Not my dismay. This is the best moment. It has a built-in soundboard. Beautiful. It came with preloaded sound effects. So like at any time, I can just ruin the show.

Yeah, it's all over now. I really like imagining you going back to your teenage. Best Buy the way that like superstar high school athletes go back to their gymnasium. Like you open the door and everyone is like, oh my God, it's him and starts cheering. There's like a statue of you in the corner somewhere. Like Nilai bought the whole Best Buy one time. I did stand in the middle of the TV aisle. They're like, do you know who I am?

I'm resetting the settings on every one of these demo televisions, sir. By the way, I forgot to introduce Alex. Alex Kranz is here. I'm also here. Yeah, that's true. Play me some. Thank you. I was going to be like, I need some intro music.

Give me some intro music. Oh, wait, no, no, I got that. I have that button, too. It's so long. Alex is here. All right, I promise not to overdo it. This is why they haven't given me a soundboard. Okay, I want to start by just two things in the top.

One, I'm only going to hear for the first segment in the show. The code conferences next week, and I have infinity meetings to go to because the code conference, which, by the way, is happening at the same time as the Apple event. So the next week of my life is, the next week of all of our lives of the verge is bonkers. So sadly, I'm just going to be here for the first segment. But I think Casey is joining you all. Talk about Snap and editable tweets. It's going to be good episode.

It's going to be great. We're excited about it. It's going to be fun. It's finally replaced by Casey, a longstanding dream of mine. It's because of the soundboard. Second, I just want everyone to take a moment and think kind thoughts about Liam, our producer. Like, stop what you're doing, pull over the car, and just think about Liam in a positive way.

because last week I also had a meeting and we had to cut the show short and we actually cut out the explanation because it was just in the middle of a long nonsensical ramble. We cut out a lot of long nonsensical rambles on the show and we were making jokes by the clock because Liam had me on a timer so I could go to my meeting, which forgot to explain it to all of you. And it was fine and we always go over. Our show is supposed to be an hour long. We historically have gone over for five years, which is fine. but the notes were at first very positive and heartwarming.

Yeah. And I think got weird, y'all. Like to the point where I was reading articles about what Harry Styles does when one direction fans get out of control. You know, I was like, all right, we have like, I don't know what's going on here. So I appreciate our fandom, such as it is, a bunch of people resetting the settings and Best Buy. You're my people. I love you. We love you.

But it was me that made the show short last week. And Liam was just keeping me on task. is no easy feat. This man is heroic. So just think kind thoughts about Liam. We'll do a better job of explaining when my schedule makes the show not 90 minutes. But it's still going to be, you know, 60 solid minutes. I think in general, you should assume that if something is wrong with the Vergecast, it's Neely's fault. Like, that feels like generally the right answer. It's like if something bad happened to the 100%. Yes. Case in point. I'm so sorry. I just want to say I feel really uncomfortable right now.

Also, dear listener, I had nothing to do with this soundboard. It was not approved by me. I will do my best to get rid of it. All right, that one's too. Andrew, cut that one out. Push the wrong button.

No, we're leaving that in. I need people to know what you would be like. To not push these four buttons. Do you have a wot-wong one? I sure do. It's buried in the settings of the thing, which I will not go through it this time, but maybe later. Maybe we'll just have a 90-minute verge cast where I play with the settings of my Zoom podtrack P4, and we can just do it. That's our

TikTok strategy. That's it. Anyhow, but people sent weird notes to Liam. I think that's out of bounds. Don't do that. If you're a problem of the show, talk to us. Liam is a part of our show. He makes the show good, along with Andrew, our engineer. So be cool to them. Blame it on me. That's fun. Okay. Let's talk about some news this week. We got an Apple event next week. got a bunch of gadget news this week. Twitter is doing editable tweets. Casey's going on to talk about that. Let's start with Apple.

We've got a big sort of state of Apple special episode coming next week that David made us do quite honestly. He gave us homework. We had to do homework for it. So much homework. It was good. I did all of mine. It was a lot of homework.

So we'll talk about the broader state of Apple next week. But let's talk about the event because it's common. It's called Far Out. By the way, a number of people wrote to us after we said, does anyone want to write about the invites? A lot of people do. And I think Jake actually has assigned that story based on. So it's good.

So the event's called Far Out. We don't know what that means. There's a lot of noise about satellite connectivity and phones lately. What's going on there? Far Out, man. So A, Far Out, you know, hints at satellite is one version of this. And there have been rumors flying around, I think mostly thanks to Mark Gruner at Bloomberg, who is usually right about this stuff. That satellite connectivity is a thing that Apple has been working on.

it may depend on some complicated deals with wireless carriers, how that would work. But satellite connection is potentially a thing that you were going to get on future Apple devices. And the thing that I think is most interesting, and you said this, Neely, and I think I thought you were wrong, and it turns out I think you were right, is that the Apple Watch seems to be like maybe the most interesting thing coming at this event, especially if the new Apple Watch Pro, which is rumored to be bigger and more rugged and industrial and like for people who use big garment smart watches, if that thing gets satellite connectivity, which is one of the things that's now being talked about, would be a huge deal. And there seems to be a lot of excitement about that idea.

Because its competitors already have satellite connectivity, but like in a different way, right? Like the competitors are doing it to kind of like be a backup to GPS, I think. Whereas the rumors like an emergency system for a lot of these. Yeah. And the rumors for the Apple one is that this would help you like stay connected online. and be really good emergency services. But maybe not this year. But maybe this year. There's a few cuts at this, right?

So T-Mobile and Starlink just announced a big deal. T-Mobile phones were able to connect to Starlink, which is cool. Like, just legitimately cool. But, you know, you obviously need to have line of sight to Starlink, which is a Starlink. It's one of those things that, like, sounds really cool in the abstract and will not affect any real person in life very often. It's like, as a T-Mobile subscriber in New York City, like, they, This will affect my life in no way whatsoever.

Right. I mean, the game here is coverage gaps entirely. Like, you're going to make the Apple Watch bigger. You're going to add a big battery. And then you're going to add the radio that will kill that battery as fast as possible. Like, that's part of the game that's being played here. So the Starlink thing is like Starlink. It is on its own bands, has its own communication system.

It does its thing. It's on bands for now. Yeah. So their ongoing fight with Dish Network continues to rage. Then there are a bunch of other companies. There's a company called Link with a Y that we've written about, we just reached out back to them, Mitchell Clark wrote a great story about these other satellite companies that are doing satellite connectivity. They're actually all pretty excited

about the Starlink thing in the way that companies are always excited when the famous company starts to do the thing they're doing. They're like, a rising tide. Everyone will know about us. We'll see how that goes. But Link actually is basically doing cell towers in space. Right. So you've got basically a cell base station on a satellite, sending standard LTE signals, 5G signals, two phones. And so we've covered this before. Lauren Grush read about it. Mitchell just read about it. This is, okay, you're in a place with no service,

and your phone just connects using its standard radio to a satellite, which is different than Starlink, right? It's still using its LTE radio. It's unclear, and then there's a third thing that Apple has been rumored to be doing, which is a totally different satellite system. So it's unclear which of these things will come to the watch. I very much doubt it's Starlink.

The question is whether, you know, most people, most days with their Apple, watch are sitting inside of an LTE or 5G coverage area, right? Like, that's, that's the point of the cell network is to mostly cover everything. It's when you are up on the mountain or in the middle of the ocean or wherever that you don't have a cell network that you'll hit hit the satellite. Like the entire great planes, you just won't have internet connection half the time. It's really bad. Right. I think the question is like, okay, you're in a rural area. You're here in Wisconsin and you drive off the highway for 45 minutes where there's no service.

is your phone slash watch going to flip over to satellite? And that's cool. Open question. Yeah. And I think that would be really cool if they pull it off. I think the question is like, which satellite system are they going to use? Right? Because there are these competing variations of it.

Starlink being one, Link and the other ones being another. Like which system is Apple going to use if they use any of them? And how will they affect the battery life? Yeah. But I do think, I mean, this is why I think there have been rumors about this coming to the iPhone and stuff too. And I think all of that makes some sense. But I think especially for people who are like the,

watch pro potential buyers assuming the watch pro is you know what it's called and what we think it is those are the people who like seek out the kinds of places you're describing right and and are going to be willing to make the kind of trade off where it's like okay this this might be a thing i like have to turn on on purpose but it means i don't have to carry a gigantic satellite phone or one of those big garmin in reach things like it's just as an added extra thing it strikes me as like very niche, but massively meaningful for those kinds of people, even if it's like a somewhat clunky system. I have to say I would not rule out Starlink just because I think it would be a like deeply hilarious Elon Musk thing to be like, he's just like, he's putting it all the weird places

you can think of. And they're like, watch Starlink. We don't know what it's for. It costs $9,000 a month, but it exists. Yeah. I mean, look, he did that Starlink on cruise ships. Starlink perfect for cruise ships. Uh-huh. No trees in the ocean. I mean. told. One day. I just think like the T-Mobile deal is like, it's interesting. T-Mobile is aggressive in that way. They need to expand their coverage map, right? They've got a really good network in the places they are, but they're not everywhere.

That deal makes sense for them. It doesn't get some hype. But I think for Apple and the iPhone, a feature like this cannot be tied to one carrier's availability. Right. It's got to be tied. It's got to work on all the carriers. It's everywhere that, you know, they sell however many iPhones a minute.

It's got to work in all the places. Apple sells all those phones around the world. And so I think they need something more robust than just a Starlink deal. So we'll see. I think the fundamental question is like, what partner are they going to choose? Is it multiple partners? What systems are they going to use? And fundamentally, like, if you are the person that's seeking out the remote area and you're

relying on the satellite connectivity, how much battery are you going to get? Because this is the thing that might save your life, right? Are you going to carry a battery pack with an inductive chart? Like those big honk and garment things, what are also big batteries? Well, I think the idea there is that, like, it doesn't activate unless you need it, too. Like, oh, I'm stuck on a mountain. I'm, like, got way off the trail. I need help. Now I hit the button. Now it activates the satellite. Now it connects me to emergency services so they can confine me. So that's one riff at it. Yeah. And that's like a step above what you're seeing like Garmin and some of these other companies do now, which is like just souped up GPS essentially.

Like it's just using a number of extra satellites and bands to like. Yeah. So we'll see. The question is like what system are they going to use? Yeah. Does it provide like Starlink? Starlink provides broadband data. It doesn't have ancillary services.

It's a broadband data connection. The Garmin thing provides location and like a. beacon. There's a whole universe of things in between those two extremes. Where is Apple going to land? I think is the big question. The Star Lake thing, I just keep going back to, like, I've got a lot of friends who live in rural areas and they're driving all the time, just crisscrossing across like New Mexico and Texas. And I'm like, that whole industry of people is just going to go get T-Mobile phones if it works out that well, right? Like, if you can guarantee all those dead spots. They're going to hold the phone above their car as they drive along the highway. Exactly. And they'll be like,

finally, I got a service. It's wild. You'll be like just driving down a fairly. large highway in like West Texas and like, okay, I just don't have internet now. I guess I just hope this is the right road to get me where I'm going. Goodbye GPS. Yeah. So. Yeah. That's also what I'm hearing is Apple's going to launch a satellite.

That's right. Like an actual satellite dish that you buy and just carry with you at all times. We'll see. So I agree. Like the watch is getting more and more interesting as we learn more and more about it. We have a bunch of stories in the watch. The phone, not much more has leaked out about the phone next week. My new phone.

Yeah, it seems like we have a pretty good idea of what the non-notch-notch is going to look like. And that's kind of all there seems. So one thing we wrote a story about is today, the lightning cable just turned 10. So if Apple is going to switch to USBC, this is actually, regardless of, you know, European regulators walking around the capital cities of Europe being angry at Apple, regardless of what happens there with USBC, this would be the moment to switch over to the next generation. right? They rarely make it more than 10 years with... Do you think we're really going to get a USBC iPhone this year? I feel like 20% chance. It's the sort of thing like if it was going to happen, it would have already leaked, is my feeling.

That would be the news. Yeah, the accessory makers would know, case makers would know, like, it would be huge news. But we'll see, it's, it is possible that this is the last lightning iPhone. It's also, I would say, to a vanishingly smaller percentage possible that this is the USBC iPhone. Yeah, I agree that that's unlikely because it seems like your point about accessories is the right one that they tend to be the ones who Right this stuff ahead of time just because you start to see stuff go through the FCC and everybody's making the models and It's always hard to know because some of that is just them guessing as based on the same news reports that everybody sees But there's like there's no smoke around that at all right now and you would think there would at least be a little bit even if it was going to be like just the pro max is now the USBC model I feel like there would be

there would be more about that out there right now because that would be a gigantic. And you could see them phasing it in that way. That's what they've done with the iPads. We'll see. It's 10 and that means regardless of what it's happening with regulators and antitrust, like 10 years for any connector is a long time.

And this is historically when Apple flips. Did it last longer than that original iPod connector? It did, right? The iPod connector was made it like eight years. Good job. 2001 to 2008. Because they flipped a lightning with the four. No, they didn't.

Hold on. Let me say it all over again. The iPod connector made it nine or ten years. Okay. Because they launched the lightning. No, that's still not right. I'm going to get this right. I'm not going to look.

No, you're right. They started phasing it out at around nine years, but it lasted for 10 years. The iPod connector, the 30 pin. Right, but the first iPod had firewire. RIP Firewire, the greatest connector ever made. The best connector. Absolutely. It was Mac only and all that.

Yeah. And then they switched to... You plug it into your IMac, Bondi Blue. Yeah, they switched to 30 pin when they were going, when they started doing Windows. And then it lasted through the iPhone 4, and the iPhone 5 had lightning. And that was kind of... So it was around for about 10 years. Okay.

Liam is correct. See? Thank you, Liam. But anyway, this is about the time regardless of the regulatory thing. So we'll see because Apple doing another proprietary connector for the phone seems bonkers. And MagSafe is like most weird Apple proprietary connectors, not an ecosystem of value. I'm still on the hunt for a MagSafe car charger that is good. Like there aren't any.

My guess would be Apple is going to have a USBC port and also try really hard to sell you MagSafe accessories. They're going to, like, bury the fact that there's a USBC port at the bottom of every press release and web page and be like, but would you like to charge with MagSafe? And so they're going to like try to convince you to use it, but then actually everyone's just going to use USBC. And Apple will happily sell you a $50 USBC. The idea that they'll ever take the portfolio off the phone to me strike, like Apple will

destroy its own service ability if there's not a wired connection to the phone to do resets and all that stuff and diagnostics. I don't think I would buy one if it didn't have some sort of port that was easily accessible. Oh, so this is your line in a stand. Bluetooth sucks. You're like ports or I leave. At least one port because wires are good. I won't stand for it.

And during theme of the verge. Wired things are better than wireless ones. So that's Apple. I mean, we're expecting two phones, a watch. I think my interest in a watch just continues to rise. I'm ready for a new one. Do you think it'll still be a square or do you think they're going to go a circle? Do you think it'll have like the big shockwre?

ring that like all of the the garments and stuff have, you know. So to protect it, like, is it going to be like a chunky monster like most of them or is it going to be like apple-y? I hope so. I hope so. I mean, I think they have to sell the idea of durability here, which is not a thing Apple traditionally sells. Yeah. Yeah. I hope they go full sports walkman and it's bright yellow and it like has a foldy cover that flips for no reason. Let's do it. Just a little bump bit off. Yeah. Yeah. If you haven't seen a Sony sports walkman from the early 90s. Oh my God, I had one. There's a design language that needs to come back into our lives.

That was like the satisfaction of closing that versus a regular walkman. Like it just like, click in the hinge. Oh, it was great. I can just like feel it. It was good. Go buy one everyone. This whole rest of the show.

Also, every one of those Sony products had the word sports written on it in giant letters. For some reason, just in case the bright yellow wasn't enough of a tip off of what it was. It's like, this is. for sports, you guys. It's a boombox for sports. All right, there's a bunch of other gadgettyers. What's this Logitech thing? I am the most excited about this. I'm very excited about this. So we've known for a while, or at least there have been rumors and leaks for a while that Logitech was going to make something along the lines of the Nintendo Switch and the Steam deck, like where in that spectrum,

it would be nobody knew. But like, as we've talked about on the show, it's basically just a screen with some buttons. Logitex really good at making buttons. Makes a lot of sense that this is a thing Logitec would do. And then the leaks came out and it basically, Alex, it's kind of like it's like a, it's like a Nintendo switch. Yeah. Light. Yeah. But it runs actual Android. It's basically a bunch of companies have already been doing this. I think I.O is how you pronounce it. It's is one of the big ones besides like Steam Deck and Nintendo. And this is like Logitex version where it's not about creating a whole game ecosystem. It's just like, hey, you want cloud gaming. You also, I guess, want to play play store games sometimes. You can do all of that. with this, it'll probably be really cheap compared to a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch. I would hope. It looks cheap.

Like in a good way, though. It does look cheap. Well, and I think there have been a bunch of rumors out there about, like, what the specs are going to be. And it sounds like it's going to be much more, like, phone specs than, like, which is all you need. Steam deck specs in that it's not designed to like. Yeah. Right. And they're going to go all in on game streaming.

They're doing this with Logitech is working with Tencent to do this, like, this idea that, like, I need just enough power to basically run like streaming video apps and then I'll stream games that are harder than that from the cloud. Strikes me as like the perfect medium of this. Like I'm very excited. My favorite bit about this image is like the top image shows you ostensibly a lot of the things you'll be able to play out of the box. Google Play, Xbox, GForce, NVIDIA's cloud service.

It's great. Xbox. Another Xbox logo for some reason. Steam. Chrome. in YouTube. So no Luna and no Stadia. And somebody pointed out that they probably had Stadia in there and realized it was like too many Google things on the page. So instead they just replaced it with an Xbox. Second Xbox. That's what that was the theory in my Twitter. They realized no one cares about Google Stadia. People care. All four of them have been in my, my DMs this week. Yes. Being like how did you make fun of Stadia? And I was like, I just noticed it's not there. But it's so easy. It's so easy. Like, Sadia exists and people are like, I want to kick you. I don't know why.

Alex. That's not the right instinct for anything. Cloud gaming services it is. I want to kick it. It's just like you should. They're in a cloud. In general, you're like, that's not the right. It's fair.

I want to kick the air violently in the direction of Stadia, the Alex Grant story. It's true. Here's my concern about this whole thing, because you said it looks cheap and cheap in a good way. It looks inexpensive. Yes. That's a better way to put it. And we think it's going to have this Qualcomm G3X platform chip in it, reasonably good GPU. Here's why I worry about it.

Cloud gaming is the most latency-dependent thing you can do at a computer. Yes. Right? Like you push the button. It's got to go to the cloud service. Something's got to happen. It's got to render the next frame of the video in response to your button and send it back to you. Right.

That's hard. Like it's just a hard thing. It's hard on Xboxes, which have lots of processing power. Mine is plugged directly into the wall. Not the wall. I mean, it is plugged directly into the wall. That is accurate. Mine's plugged directly into the router.

It has a wired connection to my actual internet service. And it's still like, you know, inexpensive Wi-Fi gadget, having a good cloud gaming experience. I've done enough cloud gaming on the Steam deck and on like a Pixel 3A and stuff that I think for most games, especially like adventure games, you'll be fine. I wouldn't want to go playing like Street Fighter on this or Call of Duty, those really like Twitch intensive games. I would not want to play that in the cloud ever and certainly not on this. But if you're like, you know what, I want to just like bang out some Star Wars, Fallen Jedi Order, whatever it is called. It is a terrible name.

But if you want to play that game or an Assassin Creed, you could do that on this. No, Assassin's Creed is a twitchy game. Is it? You got a stab right at the right time. That whole game is stabbing. Yeah, but it's not like... That whole game is timed stabs. It's not as bad as like having to block someone in Street Fighter.

No, people are trying to stab you in that. Have you played Assassin's Creed? Yes, but I would never... Lots of people try to stab you and have to be able to jump. But I feel like the timing on that's easier to like anticipate versus Street Fighter. All right. The Assassin's Creed people are going to come for you. And unfortunately they are assassins.

I will fight them because Street Fighter. These aren't stadium. We've established a kick. I got kicking. I'm going to just kick in the air in their direction. This has gotten very violent. I'm so sorry. I think this stuff works on, hilariously, it works on PCs.

It works on Steam deck, which is a little PC. It works on consoles to some extent. I'm just like inexpensive Wi-Fi gadget. The most important spec for this Logite thing is the Wi-Fi. fight ship. A hundred percent. Yes. And that's the thing we don't know yet, right? Like, we don't know any of the guts of this thing. So it could still be hot garbage. And also, like, the price on it, like, just looking at it, thinking about the processor and stuff, the phone that you would need to play cloud gaming is going to be, you know, $400, $500. Are they going to drop that price down here? And how are they going to cut costs to get

down to that price for one of these things? Like, is it going to just have the crummiest display of all time or the button's going to be junkie? Like, the first place you cut the cost, they're like, you know what? We're going to do a big cheap screen. Yeah. You see every pixel. Yep. It's going to be like 480P. It's going to be great. What's interesting is this is going to come up against, you know, presumably a rebooted switch at some point.

Yep. And it doesn't seem like Nintendo is going to let Xbox game streaming happen on their platform. Never. So I just think there's going to be an odd set of choices here where instead of having cartridges, you just have a lineup of weird little handhelds. That's what I have now. And he's like pulling out to play a game. Like, which one will I do today? Like, Steam Deck, Switch.

That is definitely where we're headed. The little play date, which is really hard. Oh, you have a play date? I have a play date. I'm terrible at it. Like, there's a game where you surf and you have to do the crank and time with it, and I do not know how people accomplish it. Like, there's no instructions you're just supposed to.

I think what I'm learning from this conversation is that you are not good at games with timing. And in fact, you discount timing so much. You're like, there's no timing in Assassin's Creed. I was really good at Soul caliber, too. Soul caliber two. I was incredible. That's got timing in it, right?

All right, that's a lodging thing. There's like all kinds of bendy screen news going on. Yeah. The screens. I love them. Everybody just looks at screens and goes like, what if this was insane? Would you spend thousands of dollars on that?

You can tell like the, the Bendi OLED like order sheet went out and the prices were low enough. Everybody said, yep. You know, like everyone got the facts. It's like, bendy screens now available. And they were like, Oh, these are cheap now. Sure.

Bendable theater TV stand. Yeah, we've got LG has its first bendable OLED, which is not quite true because they had the one that rolled. And technically, if it's rolling, it's bending. But we'll allow it because this is like an actual. The upside of this one is it lets you choose. I think this is like actually kind of great. Like the more I read about this thing, the more I like it. It basically lets you switch between flat and curved modes.

And so, as we've talked about before, the only use I've ever found for curved screens is to make it feel like you are inside of your Zoom call. And you just like wrap everyone around you. And that is very cool. And so you can use that and then just push it back when you want to like actually watch TV like a regular person and not feel like an idiot for buying a curved screen. That makes total sense to me. I'm very into that. I don't know that I would spend what this thing will cost. But I'm very into that as an idea. I think it's also interesting because for LG in particular, like they're calling it a TV. They're branding it as a. TV, but it's at 42 inch, which is lower than, which is smaller than that 48 inch. And that 48 inch is really where, like, a lot of people started adopting TVs as monitors and saying, actually, like, the pixel density is good enough now that I can just use this as a monitor. And this feels like part of LG kind of continuing to dip its toe into, like, TVs as gaming monitors. LG already has a huge, like, gaming monitor business, but this is a whole new category

of OLEDs that they're selling as TVs. but really are monitors. Like, this thing is just a monitor. All the pictures of it are as a monitor. Like, its big tower is very monitor-based. Oh, yeah. The stand of this TV is ridiculous. Like, if you actually use this as a TV, like, everyone will be like,

what's going on with your TV? Because it has a gigantic. And you should, the GIF that we have in this story is just incredible. I can pull over in your car and read the story about the LG OLED flex TV at EFA that we have on the site because a GIF is beautiful. It looks like it's about to. wrap itself around you and like strangle you to death. It's going to be at EFA and John Porter is there and he's going to go look at this thing.

And it's going to hug him and hug him until he dies. It's just going to embrace him in its liquid electric diodes. So Samsung also has a big OLED gaming monitor, the G8. It guess what? Supports G4 now and Stadia and GamePass right in the display. Great. I have come around on this thing that Samsung is doing, which is basically, like building smart TVs into its monitors.

It took me a while to sort of understand why that's useful because I'm like, well, if I just want to watch Hulu. I'll just go to Hulu.com on my computer and it accomplishes it the same thing. But something like this where it's like, okay, you can just like you can not attach anything and sort of use it as a TV, but then like plug in your laptop when you come home. It's like that kind of makes sense. It's not useless when your laptop is somewhere else or doing something else. Right.

Exactly. I'm, yeah, I like it. It also looks great. 34 inches. What does your home setup look like with this thing? Like, these big ones totally make sense in a dorm room. I can immediately see the big Lobowski poster behind it as soon as you put it in. But what's like in a home, you usually have your, for most people, those of us not in New York, like, you usually have an office and a TV room.

And this puts the two together. I'm sorry. Do you imagine that everyone who doesn't live in New York lives in a gigantic mansion full thousands of rooms with screens? I assume you all have so many rooms in your home. I have three. That's it. I'm in a doctor's office. Yeah, in Wisconsin, that is real.

That's fair. I mean, I think your setup with this kind of looks like you, maybe you're like someone works from home and you've repurposed a room as an office. And then you realize, like, for many hours the day, I could use this room for something else. Or you just want to have another TV in your house. Yeah. And you're going to use this as that TV.

But then you can also use it an office setup. Yeah, this is for all the people whose home office is also. in a corner of their bedroom, which I think is a lot of people. And now it's also your bedrooms. Although having a like a 34 inch ultra wide bedroom TV is a particular kind of flex. I was like, I have a 60 inch bedroom TV. It's important to have a nice TV in your bedroom. Yeah.

Big guy. Other gadget news. So Monica reviewed the Zen book, which folds, the new one, the 17 fold. And she was like, this is really close, but it's a six and don't buy it. And then she wrote. up the new ThinkPad X1 fold, the second gen. And she was like, this could be it, but it might be a six and then buy it. Yeah, it's like, the main thing is like, can we build a laptop with a screen that folds? And the answer is like, starting to be yes. But then in both cases, it's like, oh, no, you forgot to build a good laptop. I kind of love it because all of this was happening. Like, these things have been in development for years. We've all seen these prototypes. Like, when you go to a briefing, somebody would say, hey, come here.

come here, I got something cool for you, and they'll pull it out of a bag, and it's always one of these devices. And for years now, right? And then we all thought it was because Windows, Microsoft was going to do their big, what was it, the Neo? They were going to do the Neo, and it was going to be their big folding laptop thing. And then they just abandoned it. But it wasn't folding. It was dual screen. Microsoft has like the future of everything is two screens.

And these are effectively kind of dual screen because they fold, and then you can use both screens in that weird fold. way that you would never use your Samsung Galaxy Fold. Yes. So I think it's interesting that they're still doing it, despite not really as much support from Microsoft. Because Microsoft was like, yeah, do this. And it's like, telling everybody, yeah, do this, we all should have these. And then everybody made them in Microsoft's like, oh, yeah, you think that's cool?

So the interesting thing about both of these, right, when you think about, okay, it's a folding screen laptop, you think that you would open it, like a regular laptop, and the bottom would be like a touchscreen keyboard on top of the screen, and they could open it all the way and get the big display. Right. And here both companies are like, also we shoved a Bluetooth keyboard in the middle of a sandwich. Because actually typing on a touchscreen is no good. Yeah.

So there's like, both of them have like a little, like a keyboard frisbee that you like stick in it. And you can use it in the big tabl mode with the keyboard in front. Well, that's also to protect the display because these things are so big that you can't fold them flat. Yeah. I just don't think we've hit the form factor of this if you still need physical keys. Yeah. Right, it like undercuts the whole purpose of it, which is like, is it even possible to do like a touchscreen haptic keyboard that feels good? I'm not positive that it is.

But I think, yeah, it's like, can we make a screen that folds that doesn't look like trash? Like these companies are starting to say like, yes, we can. And then it's like, how do we make this like an enjoyable device for you to use in all of the ways that aren't just basically a big tablet with a crappy Bluetooth keyboard? And we have not. Yeah. In many ways, what they have made is like a super surface. Yes. Right.

If you just had a big surface, like a Microsoft Surface tablet, and it was just bigger. Yeah. Like they've accomplished that goal, which is an interesting goal. Which is something. But it, yeah. I think the form factor of folding phones, I think, is settled into two camps, right? Yeah. There's big film that gets smaller and big film that gets bigger.

And I think with laptops, it's like weird laptop that gets weirder? Huh? Is that what he wanted? I think there's a couple more rounds here of figuring out what all the screen is for and how you like working. The think pad one is hilarious because it still has the think pad nub. That's the best part. The track point. So it's like there are so many ways to move the mouse on this.

Yeah. It just to me, it feels like like you know, you see the people at the coffee shop who like set up their laptop and then reach back into their bag and pull out the keyboard and then reach back into their bag and pull out the mouse. And it's like, okay, this to me is what failure looks like. Like, somebody made you a bad product and convinced you to buy it if this is how you're having to use it. And to me, it's like, that's how I feel about the foldables too. It's like I will believe in these things when I start to see people sitting at Starbucks hammering away on the screen without any other attachment. Like, if I need another piece, which do you think is more likely to be seen in a Starbucks in the next year?

People with these are people bringing like a full tower and monitor. Full tower. Yeah. That's already like an existing. Yeah. Right. Like, you can go see that today if you want to see it. Yeah, they're not going to steal that alone.

I've definitely seen somebody. I was just wondering, like, maybe it becomes popular. I've definitely seen somebody to bring a full IMac to a coffee shop. It's incredible. You just watch them, you're like, they're coming in. It's very clear what they're going to do. All right. Yeah, it's not subtle what's about to happen here.

The man has a 27-inch IMac and a determined look on his face. He needs to buy so much coffee. All right. last one, ring intercom. And that's also, the EFA's going on. That's why there's so much gadget news. It's a big gadget show in Europe.

I am so excited about this intercom. I don't quite understand this intercom. Okay. So I personally am excited because I have an intercom in my home and it's got three buttons on it. And one is to yell at people. One is to hear people yell at me. And one is to open the door so they can come up and yell at me.

It's very angry in my neighborhood. Yeah, because you're kicking everybody all the time. I know. I'm just kicking the air. You get what you get, Alex. But this is meant to, like, work with those kind of systems. It's primarily focused in Europe right now because there's a lot more apartments there with intercoms. And so it's kind of like to give you the ability that some of you guys have, maybe, where you can just check on your phone. If somebody buzzes, I have to get up and, like, go and buzz them in.

And this will, like, let you do it from your phone. Or, like, I could do it from the office if somebody was buzzing my house right now. I could be like, yeah, go drop. the deal package off. Or no, I don't let your urine take it to the place next door. Happens so often. I actually, I think this is great. I don't want a camera.

Anna, my wife, is pretty religious about, like, we just don't have, we don't have cameras in or outside of the house. And I've, like, basically agree with that rule. But having a thing that is still a way to communicate with someone at the door is very useful. And also, I just like the idea that it's like, okay, lots of houses have doorbells. Lots of houses have intercoms. All of them are always.

broken. It's just like, it's just true. Like, I have an intercom in my house. My house is built in like the 60s. It doesn't work. It probably never worked. It just sits there and I do nothing with it. And Ring just shows up and they're like, just stick this thing on top of it and pretend it works. This is actually kind of the most interesting trend in smart home stuff right now is just retrofit hacks. Yeah. So Ring actually started this trend a little bit. You can buy the retrofit kit if you have like an old school ADT alarm system. You can just buy a new brain and wire all the existing sensors into it and make it a ring

system, which is like complicated and weird, but I know some people have done it. They love it. You have to spend hours being like, I guess this is the motion detector and like labeling stuff. But if you're a gadget nerd, it's the best. I was like, that sounds like, that's my weekend. Then there's like the touchbot stuff where Jen just read about it. It's like

a smart door lock, but it just like bolts over the top of your existing door lock. and it just turns the handle, right? And then there's a bunch of stuff where, you know, there's just like a little arm comes out and switches the light switch for you. And it, a bunch of that switch spot, that's what's called. Well, there's like, Tato is it,

I think it's Tato is like the thermostat company that's explicitly for like apartment heating systems, radiators and stuff. Yeah. Right. And it's just kind of like bolts onto the physical controls. Yeah, you put it on like the radiator and it like does the radiator thing. Controls it.

Yeah. I mean, it's just funny that we kind of. started with, what if we replace all the things with new things that are smart? We're going to tear it all your own. And now it's like, what if we just did little robots to push the existing buttons? Because that's all we really need to do here. Yeah. And so I just think it's like a really interesting trend that the industry has given up on. We'll replace the intercom in your house with, or the door locks in your house with here's a little tiny motor. It's going to go, it's going to like push the button for you. I just, I think everybody spent a decade like vast

under estimating how hard it is to convince people to like get out a screwdriver and do stuff. And it's just like, like if this is this basically, this ring intercom, you literally, it looks like just shove it over top of the existing thing like you're talking about. And it's like so many of these are just like, oh, your thermostat is basically just like three wires and four screws in the wall. Just pull it out, put in a nest, easy, peasy, no problem. And I think most people look at that and they're like, well, this one, I mean, this one you do have to do. have to do, it's similar to the nest and that you do, you're going to have to do some wiring.

True. If you want to be able to open your door, you do. Yeah. Like, you're still going to have to go in and do wires. But it's also, same thing. It's like two to three wires. And I think the big thing here, and that's something that Jen talked about in her piece, is that this is for renters. There's a lot of people who can't install cool doorbells because their landlord will be like, what are you doing? They can't install a lot of this stuff. And so these smaller, these smaller. things. They're like just robots you stick on on the stuff that already exists. This is really, really useful. It's what, almost 40 percent, I think it's like 36 percent of Americans, American households, are renters. That's a big chunk of people that don't have access to a whole lot of this like smart home, these smart home trends. And this gives them me access to that eventually because it's starting in the UK. It won't come to the U.S. until next year. And it also currently doesn't work with the intercom that I have and like 80% of New Yorkers have that was like put it in the 60s and his absolute garbage.

That's the like, do that one guys. This is why you need three switchbots. Yeah. So that when your door buzzes, you like push the button and it's like, I was like looking into a project of like, could I get a raspberry pie and like wire it into this intercom and do all of this stuff? And then use that to streamplex. Yes.

It would be incredible. Streamplex to anybody who rings the door. Bell, it would be great. All right. This segment has gone over. See, I'm doing it. I'm trying to ease the tension. Yeah. The segment's gone over. I have to get to a meeting. You're going to take a break. And I believe you're coming back with Casey. Yep. That's it. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this

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Welcome back. Neilie's gone. Casey Newton's here. Hi, Casey. Hey, David. Oh, there we go. Hi, Casey. I feel like this is like a tremendous uppermal.

grade. Yeah. Casey, what are your feelings on like soundboards? Like just buttons you can press and make drum rolls? Do you any sound effects you brought us today? I, yeah, I brought a number of drops just based on funny verge quotes over the years and my favorite internet memes. So we should integrate those. Okay, good, perfect. So we've brought you here because I assume today is the greatest day of your life. Is that fair to say? Like, is this, is this the best you've ever felt in your whole life. Tell us what happened today with Twitter. What happened? Oh, well, I mean, yes, I was popping champagne at 8 a.m. And they announced it at like 540 this morning. But yes, and by the way, the verge readers already know this. But Twitter, after 18 years-ish, has finally unveiled a way to let

you edit a tweet for up to 30 minutes after it was posted in the face of enormous opposition from some extremely annoying people. This has been shipped, and I am now dancing on the graves of my haters. I'm so happy for you. I don't want it, though. I don't want the edit. I want everything to live in horror for all to see.

I want like just a testament to my crimes on the internet. I am happy to relitigate all of the stupid arguments against the edit button. I'm just here to tell everyone that you continue to be wrong, and that every other platform that creates a text box enables you to edit it, and democracy ain't dead yet, baby. So look, will it create new problems, I'm sure? But we have cases all the time where, you know, a half a percent of users abuse the feature and we still let people, you know, we still let the 99 and a half percent of people

enjoy the feature. And 99 and a half percent of people are going to really enjoy being able to fix a stupid typo. Yes. Okay. So let me just lay out the like details of how. how this works because the most annoying thing about this announcement to me was I have been staunchly against the edit button this whole time. I have always thought it was a terrible idea, hate it, think it's the worst, bad idea. And then I read it today. And so basically the way that it works,

I'll just read from Twitter's blog post. It says tweets will be able to be edited a few times in the 30 minutes following their publication. A few. Edited tweets will appear with an, yeah, I don't know what a few means, but we'll come back to that in a second. Edited tweets will appear with an icon, timestamp, and label. So it's clear to readers that the original tweet has been modified. The edit label will have a complete edit history, and you'll be able to click into it and see all the past versions of the edited tweet. Oh, then I love this. This sounds great. Never mind. Because I just wanted like, I want all of my horror to be available, like every typo. I want you all to know that I'm bad at typing. And so like, okay, the history is there. I'm fine.

Roll it out. Let's do it. Let's go. So Alex, I would point out you're not required to edit your You don't have to change them. I probably won't. Be real. Because it costs money too, right? Like, Alex, you're an editor at the verge. You're an editor at the verge and you're not going to edit your tweets. What kind of message does that send to your employees? I keep a really good work-life balance. When I'm on Twitter, I'm at home, I'm having a great time. There are 40 typos in the first sentence. It is illegible. That's the way it should be. Nothing says work-life balance, like a lot of tweets as far as I can tell. A lot of illegible tweets at 2 a.m. That's work-life balance right there. Can I share something that happened to me the other day? Please. Yes. Can I share something that speaks to the need for this?

So this week with my colleague Zoe Schiffer at the verge, we wrote this story that was very serious about Twitter and it's a problem with child sexual abuse material. And I wrote a follow-up to it yesterday for my newsletter, platformer about the fact that Apple might have something to say if Twitter went ahead with its plans to build an only fans competitor, which is something that Twitter has been considering. So I tweeted out my newsletter, and I'm going to read to you what I tweeted out. I wrote about another reason left out of the Red Teams report

that Twitter might have hit the brakes on its only fans competitor, fears it would risk a crackdown from Apple over existing poor on the platform. P-O-O-R. And so... No, you keep that. Do not delete. Within three minutes, a bunch of people are tweeting. what do you mean poor? What, poor?

And I'm just like, what's happening? And then I see I've made the typo. But of course, by now the tweet has already started travel. And so I just replied to the tweet with the single all caps word, porn, because obviously I meant porn. And then people started quote tweeting that and just be like, oh, look at what this tech journalist, you know, is tweeting about. So it just became this whole cycle of, in this world, this problem is now solved.

I just go in and I change poor to porn and my life is better. And that is how technology should work. It should be in service of me. I should not be in service of Twitter. Twitter should be in service of me. What I like is that I would still be able to go back, look at your edit history, screenshot that you originally wrote poor, and be like, look at this. Look at this typo he first did. And that's important to me.

Like, I think we get the best of both worlds. You get to correct it. And I can be like, never forget. Yes. It's perfect. I love it. And that's fine. I am totally happy with that tradeoff.

I'm totally happy with that tradeoff. We need that audit trail, right? Because yes, you can imagine ways that this feature could be abused. I'm sure some people will try to abuse it. I just think that the number of times that that happens is going to be smaller than the haters say. And I think the consequences of it happening are going to be much less than people say. Yeah, okay. So let's just play out the worst case scenario of this for a minute.

Because I think this is the thing I've been thinking about a lot because I think... What goes wrong? There is this instinct that I have also had many times that this is like an inherent. bad idea, right? And it's like somebody's going to embed a tweet on a website and then you can change it and oh, no, everything's awful. But like, you've talked to a lot of people who like work at Twitter and think about this stuff, about this stuff, right? Like, what is literally the worst that could happen here, is your sense? Donald Trump could become president again in 2024. And they give him his Twitter back or just, just he's president? Which is worse?

No, that's just like any, any bad platform decision to me, like the worst case scenario is Donald Trump becomes president. Now, I don't think that will probably happen in this case, but, you know, I mean, here's what people, you know, people talk a lot about, like, well, could you use this to change the market somehow? Like if you said, oh, you know, the CEO of a tech giant just died to, like, crash the market. And then it goes viral. But then you change the tweet to like a crypto scam or something. Like, I don't know exactly what people think is going to happen. I think it's important to note that they only have 30 minutes to change it, which means that your tweet can only get so viral in 30 minutes. And yes, tweets do go viral in 30 minutes, but like a manageable number,

right? So if Twitter sees some tweet going crazy bananas numbers in like the first five minutes, they could probably get a set of eyeballs on it and just be like, okay, is this, is this a verified actor? Is this an account that has been taken over? So there will have to be an enforcement layer. But like, these are the kinds of things. Yeah. No, I'm just thinking of the crypto scheme, like really viral tweet and you're like, all right, switch it out. Now I'm going to rake in the dough. Right. I assume that's how those screams work. This is my issue. It's like, oh, you know, well, now that there's this edit feature, it's like, what if people try to do bad things on Twitter? What if they try to promote crypto scams,

you know, or what if they try to like promote hate speed? It's like, it's already happening, you know? And that's not to say that we should necessarily do things to make it worse. It's just that Twitter has policies and enforcement teams in place to manage the bad actors. So look, if your argument against this is you think it's a great idea and the feature seems technologically well designed, but Twitter is a battered shell of its former self and there's no way it can enforce like some new set of features like this. I don't think that's actually that bad of an argument. To me, that's probably the best argument. But is it worth a try to the like 500 people who pay for Twitter blue? Like I think, yes, why don't we just roll it out to 500 people and see how they use it?

Yeah. So I will say I do buy the logic of making it a Twitter blue thing actually, because I think. I think it's a relatively self-selecting group of people who are probably more likely than average to, like, not try to abuse this system. And it's also a group of people who are, like, by definition, going to be paid more attention to by Twitter as a platform. So, like, all the random, you know, I'm going to laugh when, like, a million Russian bots all start getting Twitter blue. It's going to be, like, incredible for Twitter's revenue. It's, like, incredible. Is Elon Musk on Twitter blue?

Like, does he pay $5 a month for the edit button? Not to my knowledge. You pay $10 a month and you get the fire hose is what happens. You will be paying $44 billion soon. Right. But he's going to start paying now. No, like I think my initial concern about this was always that that Tumblr thing where Tumblr was like, yeah, you can edit all of your tumblers, which was a delight because people were just like, I'm going to put hardcore porn in. I'm just going to replace this viral Tumblr post with hardcore porn.

And it was hysterical also like, don't look at Tumblr at work. but this sounds like it really solves a lot of those problems because there is like that that time period there is that like kind of watching it happen like somebody's monitoring this to some extent yeah and Twitter doesn't have to invent the whole wheel here right it's like you can edit a Facebook post you can edit a Slack post you can edit a Discord post like this is not a brand new technology that has like been invented in the deepest recesses of Frankenstein's lap Like, we know how to build editing features. And frankly, I think the reaction against it has legitimately been hysterical.

Like, I feel like I'm, like, listening to a bunch of, like, people in, like, 19-01 reacting against the creation of the telephone. But I will say the thing that's different about that is, like, one thing that is different about Twitter than all the other things you just named is that, like, a lot of people experience Twitter, not on Twitter, right? There's, like, there's the, there's embeds, which is how a lot of people experience Twitter. There's like third party apps. Twitter is like theoretically back to, you know, giving a crap about third party developers for the 11th time. And I'm sure it'll change its mind again. Yeah.

But like it's the kind of thing that I think is like much easier to do when people are coming to your place to do this stuff. But if you are this kind of distributed machine, which is what Twitter is, it's, it's not impossible. It's just a harder thing to propagate in a way that like makes sense, I think. Well, I think this doesn't like solve some of those key. problems of like, people love to trade those screenshots, right? That's like a really popular way to like interact with Twitter is take a screenshot and post it. And this isn't going to necessarily

solve that. Like I will absolutely be able to screenshot Casey's poor tweet and like distribute it to the wide world. But like I think it sounds like they found kind of a nice middle ground. I'm learning all about this on the Vergecast as we speak. This is this is great news for me personally. Thank you, Casey. I mean, I come here to educate. This is what got me excited about podcasts in the first place. So, happy to be here. But yeah, let's give it a shot, people.

Let's be open to the idea that maybe some things can work sometimes. How about that? Is it going to work with DMs? No, Twitter has never, for five consecutive minutes, Twitter has never cared about DMs. I refuse to believe that Twitter even knows DMs exists on its platform. Like, it's not. I don't think to start it is going to work with DMs. I use them so much.

DMs are great. It's the worst messaging app on planet Earth, but everyone's there. So it's fine. It does the job. But I have to say, the thing that is the most annoying about this to me is that it actually seems like Twitter really thought this all the way through, which to be honest, is like a real bummer because Twitter, nobody does product more chaotically than Twitter. They're just like, here's a bunch of stuff.

We're going to test it with 12 people, but we're going to tell everyone about it for some reason. And we're going to leak all of it accidentally to Jane Wong. Everything's going to be insane. Here's some stuff is like the Twitter. way. And this one is like, I read through the blog post and it's like, oh, you like really like did your homework and thought this through. And I wonder if 30 minutes turns out to be the right answer. And like we were saying before, I wonder what a few times is. Like who, that's, that's a, that's a, it's not a number.

Well, just real quick, I just want to say, I've been talking to them about this since 2018. I mean, like, ever since Kavon Bakeport became the product manager, I was like lobbying him in person to think about this. And it was very much on his mind already. This is the number one. This is the number one request from the Twitter user base. Oh, it's such a niche thing. It is literally the number one thing that people ask Twitter to build, okay? So a lot of the haters are asking Twitter to ignore the number one request from its user base, right? But they were thinking about it for four years.

So if it feels thoughtful and polished, it's because this has been like a four-year project. So, like, that was one of the things I did want to ask you is one of the running jokes in the world is that anytime Twitter needs like a get out of jail free card and complete. change the conversation about the company. It can just be the finally like edit button here. And conversation real bad about Twitter this weekend last, partially thanks to great reporting from like you and Zoe. Is this timing coincidental or maybe a little more intentional?

You know, in my experience, most timing related to product is coincidental because it's just too hard to like line up the tracks to like get the thing ready out to be out the door in time to align with a news cycle. That said, I think they are under pressure to show that they can build things. And morale internally is so bad that I think they probably did say, can we get this out the door? Because this would be a win. And we can we can sort of give the team a moment to feel like, look, we're doing some good. We're giving our customers what they want. We still have some life in us yet. So if anything, I imagine this is something they prioritize to sort of rally the troops internally. Well, that's nice. That's a really interesting point because

I think, I mean, what, the last four months now have just been like a, I don't know, shit show seems like underselling what's going on inside of Twitter. And there's been all this stuff about like, you know, getting rid of long-term product stuff and they've fired a bunch of product people, including Kvon, like you were talking about. Like, it, I can imagine somewhere that there has been like a big, big edit button billboard that now somebody gets to like, you know, throw out a windows in a celebratory manner. and this is like the wind that they've been waiting for for a long time. I can absolutely see that being the case.

Have you seen the end of a stranger thing season for, like the most recent season? And I guess this will be a spoiler. So if you don't want to know how it ends, maybe skip forward 30 seconds. You know how the final shot of the season is like all of the good guys are like looking out on the horizon and like a tear has opened in space and time and the upside down is started to invade and take over Hawkins. Like that is that is what the Twitter people have felt like. for the last four months.

It's like a giant rip in space on time called Elon Musk appeared over the horizon and is now just swallowing up the entire reality. And the edit button is like the peanut butter sandwich that you get to eat during the day. It's like, we can't make this all better, but like here's a peanut butter sandwich. Here's a peanut butter sandwich. It's made by Uma Thurman's daughter. It's great. Spoilers.

Sorry. Keep fast forwarding, guys. You're fine. Okay. So before we take a break and get into some of the other stuff going on, on what do you know internally about what took so long here? Like, this is a four-year-long project. To your point, it is the most requested thing,

which I actually think says a lot about how it's going to be used. Like, to your point about there will be people who abuse it, like, most people are not in this to, like, ruin democracy. Most people are in this to fix their dumb tweets. And so in that sense, like, I am willing to give this an actual chance to help regular people fix their regular tweets. Why did this take four years then? This is actually, like, not that complicated a thing.

What the hell's going on here? Well, you know, Twitter was just never built to do this, right? I mean, the original tweets were sent over SMS. You can't edit SMS, right? So it was just built on a system that never anticipated that anything would ever be edited. Yes. And you would be amazed at how many systems at Twitter are 18 years old. But yeah, so they had to sort of, you know, build the basic editing features. They had to build like an audit trail, right? There was visual design. They had to really think through what. is the timer we're going to set on this thing? And then they had to think about, well, how are we going to roll it out? Is this something that we do with a test group? And then, you know, they decided to do Twitter Blue. Twitter Blue didn't even exist until last year, right? Which sort of gave them a sort of audience, you know, that maybe they could test us

out with in a productive way. So there are a lot of things to line up. Now, all that said, do I think this feature should have been available in 2010? Yes, I absolutely do. But that's why it took as long as it did. Fair enough. Well, I look forward to all of us abusing it horrifically. Alex, you have said on the podcast that you're not ever going to change any of your tweets,

so you are not allowed to use the edit. I'm not allowed to use it, but I will be screenshoting all of your edit histories. Just be ready. Also, it's $5 a month. Yeah, it's more expensive now. They're like, oh, you want to edit tweets? Yeah. Give us some money.

Like, no, I mean, unless I do some really egregious ones, my typos are normally legible enough. You can, you can, like, interpret them? It'll be fine. Can I tell you guys my idea for what they should rebrand Twitter Blue As? Yes, go. I think they should just call out the Twitter Legal Defense Fund, and I think they would make 10 times as much money. It would. Yeah.

The Elon Musk blocking situation. I really am excited for the moment he edits a tweet, because he's going to do it. He is going to subscribe, and he's going to edit. And then we're all going to be like, why are you giving them money? You won't give them money, but you'll give them $5 a month? Elon, what the hell? True power move would be to, like, specifically gate out Elon Musk from this test so that he is, like, the last person on Twitter to get access to this. It just, it would just be, like, you know he would complain, like, every single day about now.

And they'd be like, sorry, it's just a test. And he'd be like, what do you mean? 300 million people have this. Twitter doesn't even have that many users. How are you doing this? I'm the only one. They're like. Super random that you were the last person chosen.

I know. What are the odds? So random. Some mathematician could like make that work. If you're that mathematician, please email Nelai. He'll be really excited to learn more about this conversation. There you go. All right, we should take a break.

There's a bunch more social stuff to talk to you. So Casey, stick around. We will be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right. candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring

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episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Welcome back. Like I said, there's a bunch more social news. The biggest. There's a lot more. Yeah, there's like a surprising amount of social stuff going on. This is like the week before Labor Day.

Everybody's supposed to be on vacation. I don't understand why this turned out to be like a shockingly newsy week. But anyway, Snap is probably the next one we should talk about. Alex. What's going on to Snap? So Snap, Alex Heath reported to this. He broke the news for us. But unfortunately, they're going to be laying off 20% of their employees, particularly hit hard is their hardware team, which just had that little cute drone that they immediately canceled, what, four months later? Was it four months? Yeah, I'm very sad about that. It was a little bummer. It launched effectively like yesterday and is now gone. And yeah, so Snap has 6,400 employees. It's laying off 20% of them, which is like an enormous number of people.

That is a lot of people. And it's not just hardware we should say. Like a lot of it is hardware. But Snap is also canceling a bunch of its original Discover shows. It's killing, I think the minis project, which I always thought was nifty. And then a bunch of other projects and is basically saying, like, if it's not directly contributing to how we make money right now, or augmented reality, which is hilarious, we're not interested in it.

Casey, what do you make of all this? What's going on at Snap? I think it's really sad. You know, I feel like yesterday, when all this was announced, basically three quarters of the things that the company had ever briefed me about just went away.

The only thing in there that felt slightly like a vindication was that they got rid of their original shows, which I'm not saying because I wanted them to go away. It's just that the company had always touted how many views they had, oh, you know, 10 million people watch this. And I was just like, if literally tens of millions of people are watching these shows,

they would have some cultural footprint whatsoever. It's like none of these have ever been mentioned anywhere. Right. And so I sort of felt like reality finally caught up with the Snap originals. But like, I thought that drone was freaking cool. I love the Zenly app. And then, of course, you know, just always sucks when a bunch of people lose their job. So, you know, the reason I value Snap as a company,

is that it is very creative compared to its peers, and it tries stuff that other companies don't. And so to see them losing some of those creative links of the company, I just think it's really sad, and I hope they figure out a way to bounce back. Yeah, wait, you mentioned Zenly, which is an app that, if I'm being completely honest, I only discovered on the day that Snap announced it was shutting down Zenly.

And then there was another one, voicey spelled with like an S, which is also getting chatted out. What are these apps? Like, I had no idea Snap had other apps. it was running. Zenly is an app that you would, it was kind of like, like, imagine if find your friends on iOS was created by a bunch of like cool zoomers. Like that, that was Zenly. It was really slick, really well designed, really fun. You could see where your friends were. You'd like get an alert if they left the country or when they came back into the country. You know, it would sort of show you where

your friends were and like what, what the battery life of their phone was and like how long they had been wherever that. So it's like very sort of intimate, invasive stuff that like a company like Facebook could never get away with building. But Snap, because it's sort of limited to your real friends, has a lot more trust with its users, they could build something like that. And this was apparently really popular in Europe, like apparently three million people downloaded it last month alone. So the thing still had some legs. Voicy was like a like a music making app that I don't really understand very well myself and doesn't seem like it was nearly as popular. But like Zenly was something that people legitimately liked a lot. Is this? Yeah, I'm

Go ahead. I was going to say, is this the right move for Snap? Like, to me, it almost feels kind of silly that they're saying, okay, we were branching out into all these other places because we only have, like, so much road ahead of us with our core product. And instead they're like, now we're going to just invest in our core product and kill all these potentially successful things, like, oftentimes before they even had a chance to really, like, even try.

It feels a little goofy to me, but. Yeah, I mean, so the thing about Zenly in particular is that, that snap does have the snap map. If you open up Snapchat, there is a map that shows you where your friends are. And so I think if you're Evan Spiegel and you have, you know, rapidly shrinking revenue and an uncertain outlook for the future and you have two teams building a map, it's probably an easy call to say, we should build one map. So I get it in that, in that sense.

And I hope that they do import a lot of that Zenly DNA into the snap map because Zenly feels like it's, you know, 10 years ahead of where the snap map is right now. So I think that's why they made that decision in particular. But again, it would have been nice that they had figured out something else to do with it. But I feel like more broadly, this feels like, and I say all of this knowing that like the economy is complicated right now, everybody's nervous about what the next couple of years are going to look like and this is a lot easier said than done. But if I were running snap, I would be looking for every excuse right now to like try to zig or dig where others are zagging. and to be the one to really push into stuff right now, right?

Like Snap's whole thing for a decade has been that it is just fast followed by every other company and they all just eat it alive because they have the scale and the ad business. And now all of those other companies, meta in particular, is like retrenching because it cares only about the Metaverse and Reels. And so if I'm Snap, it's like this is the moment to sort of push ahead with everything you can think of to try and differentiate when you have some real runway to differentiate where there's not just a team of 10,000 Instagram engineers ready to build everything you ship the minute that you ship it.

It just seems like, I don't know. I mean, A, 20% is an enormous number of people to lay off at your company. Like, at a company that big, 20% is a huge number of people, which makes me think they are really nervous about what the next few years are going to look like. But it also seems like if ever there was going to be a moment for Snap to really try to play offense when everybody else is playing defense, this should have been it. And it's just a bummer that that is not how it's going to shake out. Yeah. So I think they are playing offense when it comes to

augmented reality, but that's so expensive because it's this like frontier technology where you're trying to solve problems of physics. And so it's just enormously expensive. And snap isn't that big. And so they can only afford to play offense in like one or two places right now. And, um, and they've sort of made their bet. So it's really interesting to think about, like, sort of Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel, obviously Facebook in a much better financial position, but both of them are betting their companies on this AR stuff

in a way that really is risking the future of the company. I mean, these are very bold bets that have significant downside if they don't pay off. And so, like, Zuckerberg and Spiegel are really in pretty serious competition right now. I was going to, like, I keep just thinking about this, Right. Silicon Valley has been obsessed with AR VR for 10, 15 years now. This has been like this big thing. Everybody's chasing it. They want to make it huge. These two companies have bet enormously on it. But the technology is still not actually there for the big gross adoption that they want. They're still like 10 years out. And Facebook can definitely like at least limp along. Even if things go bad, they can limp along to get there. Snap doesn't have that kind of runway. Like Snap's in a much more. precarious position. And so I'm like, that's it. That's, that's your bet. Just like going in on Snap, which is losing users, as far as we know. And also AR, which you've got at least minimum

five years before there's any real like long-term success. Here's just one way to think about the difference in scale there. Like we've done a bunch of reporting on what's going on inside of meta and Facebook on this front too. And meta announced this big hiring slowdown. And they had planned to hire 10,000 developers this year and we're pulling that back to six or seven thousand. And that was framed to the company as like a huge, huge, huge slowdown. Yeah. But essentially what that means is meta is going to hire a snap. In the period of time, Snap is going to be lowering its staff by more than a thousand people.

And both of those companies see that as like a gigantic slowdown in business and what's going on. Like it's these two companies are playing like sort of the same game, but it's, it's like, it's like one is like in the NFL and the other is like my nephew's JV football team. Like it's, it's just wild to see how different these two things are. And, and now we're sort of at a point where like until Snap gets to this augmented reality future where it has, you know, this, this magical AR camera that it can sell to everybody, it's just a messaging app now. Like it is systematically getting rid of everything else that looks like money.

Yeah. To snap, except for the messaging app. And so it's it almost feels like Snap is is like lowering the odds of it being able to get where it's going as things go here. And obviously these are like external forces that are forcing Snap to do this. This is not like Evan Spiegel didn't wake up one morning and be like, you're all fired. But it's like, I mean, you never know. LA is a weird place to live. But it's like it just seems like it hurts much worse at Snap what's happening right now than it seems to even at.

better. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think there's a lot of pain at both companies. You know, I think if there's a silver lining for Snapchat and all this, it's that people still really like Snapchat, like particularly young people really like Snapchat. And that counts for something, right? It's like people under 30 don't care about Facebook. They don't care whether Facebook's around or not. And, you know, Facebook's bad reputation may actually prevent it from having success in this market, even if they are able to, you know, figure out some of the hardware problems that they have to figure out. So there's still a path. Is Snap still like mainly teens? Because the only people I know, like the teens I know are all on TikTok and the only people I know are 40-somethings in rural Texas that use Snapchat. Oh no, you're missing out. The teens are very much on Snapchat. It's them and these 40-year-old farmers in rural Texas. That's a one of my favorite things to do is go on long car trips with my two nephews who are 16 and 15 and just basically see what push notifications they get. And it's like sitting there with with one of them in the passenger seat. it was like a TikTok notification every eight seconds and a Snapchat notification every eight seconds.

I mean, it was unbelievable. I like made him show me his screen time. And he picked up his phone to open a Snapchat notification like 300 times a day. Like it's wild. And the case is exactly right. Like there's no money in my 15 year old nephew for Snapchat. But like people love Snap in a way that they don't love anything that Meta makes with the possible exception of WhatsApp. But like...

Did you show him all of your sweet. Slack notifications where you're like, I get notifications. I check all the time too. Yeah. I was like, I was like, oh, you want to send me an email? And he's like, what is that? And like, no, you're 100,000 years old. And I'm trying to text him and he's like, why are we texting?

Like, just take a picture and send it on Snapchat. Like, it's fine. Very old. Very old. We all are. All right. We should also talk about truth social. Speaking of companies that seem to be falling apart of the teams.

Is it a company? Does it count as a company? I mean, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. I guess if Snap is like the JV football team, Truth Social seems like one guy in jeans throwing a football in a park. It's like, is that anything? I think it's like, I am convinced truth social is run off of like somebody's network attached storage like they bought it Best Buy and they plugged it in and they like they booted up like their bootleg Twitter and they're like, done. This is our whole application. We're here. And it's just like one guy.

Every time they have an outage, it's because, like, Comcast is just having an outage in that one dude's area. And he's like, oh, I'm sorry, man. I keep, I'm on the phone with them. Did I ever tell you guys about the time I got ratioed on True So, oh, what? Are there enough people to ratio you? I post it, oh, yeah, yeah, President Trump has a lot of fans famously.

Yeah, I just posted, vaccines are safe and effective, and I just got roasted to hell. Well, you know, the company's supposed to be doing. It was supposed to do a SPAC, right? It was supposed to be acquired by another company. And that has been delayed because everybody has realized that SPACs are actually probably a terrible way to go public. And if you go public this way, you will lose lots of money and lose your investors lots of money. Don't do it. I mean, do it. Live your life. It's your money. It's not mine. Unless it's in my 401k, which is, please don't add any SPACs to my 401k. But so they still have to do their SEC filings. And that's where we saw that they've lost a lot of. of money this year. Like six, they've lost over $6 million and they've generated absolutely no revenue. This company has made no money. There's one way to read that.

Yeah. Where this is actually like a relatively fiscally responsible startup. Like, oh, they've only lost $6 million this year and they're pre-revenue. Like, yeah. That's pretty good. That's like, that's how you get Andreessen Horowitz to like write you a check for $650 million most of the time. But it also seems like the like every piece of what's going on.

at Truth Social is just like collapsing. Like they owe their hosting company over a million dollars apparently. Yeah, they stopped paying Wright Forge, which is a conservative internet infrastructure company. They stopped paying them. And the guy who's like, right forge CEO, Martin Avila, is like, well, we're going to, we're going to keep servicing it. We're going to keep providing service even though Mr. Trump's company is not paying us

any money, which is not a new thing for a Trump-owned company. They are actually notorious for never paying their bills. So these people should not be shocked in any way, shape, or form. But, yeah, it's not going well. And I think it was earlier last month where, where is it based? It's based in Sarasota, right? Like, True Social is based in Sarasota. And the newspaper in Sarasota, like, went to the offices and was like, oh, nobody's been there in months.

It's just like a ghost town office. It's incredible. It's just this huge house of cards and you walk in. And it doesn't collapse because they're very nice cards. and there's just that network-attached storage, that synology, somebody's unraigned, just sitting in the middle of an office. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I assume. It's a repurposed Plex server. Yeah.

It's great. Runsplex. But also, I just want to say, first of all, that the fact that you just said the phrase conservative internet infrastructure company, and we were all just like, that makes sense, is like bananas. Like, how is this the world that we live in? And yet, that's a thing. There's a conservative phone company in Texas right now that is like, we're a conservative. phone company and we support America. And one, like, oh, okay. Yeah, I definitely care what my GPUs have to say about American politics. Two, they're like funding a bunch of the big

library races in Texas where people are trying to pull books from the library. But, but yeah, there's a lot of these like little spinoff companies who are like, oh, you've made your, your political, like, choices, your identity, and you want to only ascribe to things that also associate with that identity, we will take your money. Will the service be good? Probably not. I just, yeah, my GPU's voting for president is the thing I really have a lot of thoughts about. But the other thing that's happening in the truth social is it keeps getting kicked off of app stores, right? Like, yeah. Hasn't this become like a, like, content moderation is now, like, hilariously truth social's biggest problem?

Well, yeah, because they can't even get their app on the Google Play Store, which like this might be one of the only cases I know about where Apple is letting something onto the app store that Google is not letting on to its app store over reasons of content moderation. So Google has apparently said to them, your content moderation is a good enough, and True Social came back and said, yes, it is, but so far we are where we are. I can, of course, still access True Social on my iOS device, but our Android friends are out of luck. and that's it. What does truth social do here? Like the content moderation thing of truth social has been a weird thing to follow over time

because like in part it launched based on the idea that everybody was moderating content and that that's a huge problem. But then they've started to moderate content because it turns out if you don't, your platform becomes a nightmare hellscape that nobody actually wants to hang out on.

You're our truth social influencer on the podcast. What is true social doing? Have they landed somewhere? Do they have policies? They say that they do. And, you know, for what it's worth, these discussions are not really held out in the open.

So I don't know what Google found or did not, you know, see in terms of moderation that made it feel like it didn't belong in the appstra. But I'll say, like, you just have to be pretty serious, right? Like, because these companies do not want to be in these fights. They don't like drawing attention to how much power they have over the entire internet economy. So my guess is that there's something happening there that really freaked out the Google people. I just, yeah, all of this is like, of course this is going on. I do wonder if there was a gating event like you're talking about, but it seems like this is the kind of thing that either of these platforms could have just picked any moment they felt like to just be like, and no.

And yeah, it just feels like truth social is at this moment of you now discover truth social when you see somebody take a screenshot of a Trump post and posted on Twitter. Like that is the entirety of my interaction with true social is Trump screenshots tweeted by other people, which is like, I'm not sure what we're accomplishing here, but it's it doesn't feel great. I mean, it was like, I do, again, I know a lot of folks who are fairly conservative in rural areas. And truth social was like a big deal for a second there. Like there was a really serious migration of these folks who were getting their news almost exclusively from like conservative memes on Facebook, which is unfortunately more people than it should be. They really think they believe in this thing. They think it's real. They think that like they're helping the country by being on truth social.

and they're helping their president. And there's definitely some, like, it's weird. Man, it's just like a weird app to me. And it's weird that it tried to be a SPAC. And it's weird that the SPAC is collapsing. And it's weird that, like, the primary company is not making money and is losing money and is maybe not going to be able to buy it, which was all just kind of a big money laundering legal.

Let me be clear. Spacks are legal money laundering scheme. Like, this is all just extremely wild to be. I mean, it's certainly an eventful story. And it's an eventful story. And yet, if you had asked me two years ago to predict some likely events in the history of true social, getting kicked off of an app store and going bankrupt would have probably been two of the main things that I predicted. Yeah.

It's not, you know, it's not close to being bankrupt yet. They've declared no bankruptcy. Right. Like, that hasn't happened. but it certainly seems like it could. If somebody kicks over the little Synology server in their empty office, anything could happen. Don't do that.

All right. If we've learned one thing today, though, it's that if they just roll out editing truths, then it's all over. Everything's going to be fine. Yeah, it'll be great. I'm all in. There you go.

All right, we have gone way over, even without Neelai here. It's not all Nealai's fault, but it's mostly Nealai's fault. But we should go, a bunch of really good stuff on the version this week. Casey, you and Zoe had a really great piece, big scoop about Twitter. You want to give us the super quick rundown on that because you're here? Yeah, so the story is that Twitter was planning to release an only fan's competitor. They were going to let the adult creators on the platform begin selling subscriptions to photos and videos that included sexually explicit content.

But before they launched it, they conducted what they call a red team exercise where they convened a bunch of people to try to poke holes in the plan and say, where could this go wrong? and the number one thing that came up was that Twitter does not currently have the tools in place necessary to adequately police the amount of child sexual abuse material on the platform and the amount of non-consensual nudity on the platform. So they identified some really serious problems and then we paired that with another document that we obtained

from last year where researchers sounded the alarm about this and said, this is a real issue. We do not have the tools we need and leadership needs to invest. And our understanding is that for the most part leadership is not invested. It's a really good story. You guys shall read it And I believe we have at least one other Twitter scoop coming that is probably going to be live by the time you hear this podcast. That's correct. So it's all at first.com. Take a look.

It's good stuff. Our homeland series keeps running. We had a great story this week on the humiliating history of the TSA. And Nicole Wetzman wrote a great thing about disaster consultants. It's wild and terrifying. Decoder, which is the other podcast that we never talk about. I would never ever promote Decoder. I cannot believe you're talking about Decoder.

He's not even here. No, but. There's, I would never do it. You know this, except that this week's episode is Alex Heath talking to Tom Allison, the head of Facebook about how it plans to compete with TikTok. So, Neely gets no credit for that. So I will happily, I will happily send people to Alex Heath because it's a good episode. You should go listen to it.

Next week for us is going to be all Apple stuff, big iPhone event next Wednesday. Lots to talk about. Follow us on Twitter. Nelai is reckless, but don't follow him because he's not here. Casey's Casey Newton. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. I'm at Pierce. That's the Vergecast.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino.

This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and box media podcast network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.