The Vergecast - Sonos loses to Google, and Threads takes on Twitter

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Meta Quest 3 review, Google gadgets, and Threads continuing to compete with X. Chris Welch joins the show to discuss the result of Sonos' legal battle with Google. Further reading: Google Pixel Watch 2 review: better battery, better watch Pixel 8 and 8 Pro review: in Google we trust? WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub  Threads is getting an edit button — and you don’t have to pay for it @mosseri • We’re not anti-news At US v. Google antitrust trial, the Apple search deal takes center stage  Judge blasts Sonos for abusing patent system and throws out $32.5 million win against Google Google is already bringing back the software features it removed because of Sonos’ lawsuit  Sonos vows to keep fighting Google for the benefit of smaller companies – and its own revenue Ruling pdf: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/znpnznkjgpl/GOOGLE%20SONOS%20TRIAL%20ruling.pdf Google has fixed its recent history of terrible speakers with the Pixel 8 Pro  Alameda’s paper trail leads straight to Sam Bankman-Fried Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple  Sony’s new PS5 with a removable disc drive launches in November Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello to welcome to the Ritchcast, the flagship podcast of CSS elements. Top, bottom, left, right. We've got them all here in the Ritchcast. It's good. I promise you that will be relevant. I'm your friend Nila. David Pierce is here.

Hi, I should confess that I don't know the difference between margin and padding in CSS, and if someone would please email and explain that to me, that would really help a lot. You just opened a door, my friend. They create more space. They both do that. Very differently. I'm confident it is different. You have to, okay, here are the two rules.

You have to limit yourself to 500 words and you can't use chat, GPT. But then you can email David the difference between margin and padding in CSS. And I will recite several of those emails on this podcast. Sounds good. Alex Tran's is here. I have a confession to make in that I thought the phrase Big Naturals came from a Gandalf. Alex already? Wait, did you just say Gandalf?

I thought it was a Gandalf meme. That's all I'm going to say about it. I just want to get that out there. I thought it was a Gandalf meme. I realize now that you've opened this horrible door. This is the most Vurchase that's ever happened. We've gone from CSS. But I realized now last week I said I had this bad idea of an example because of a meme and I didn't say what the meme was.

Was it also the Gandalf thing? It was Kevin James. Similar, very similar. And you can just go back and listen to what I was talking about contextually to understand why that is a horrifying idea. You can find it. Casey posted it and Platformer. I'm just saying it's out there. Just DM me. I'll send it.

Don't do that. All right, here's why I was talking about CSS. This is a thing that just got fixed on our website, I think is one of the funniest things that has ever been fixed on our website. We have a lot to talk about. There's some threads news. David reviewed the Meta Quest 3.

Sonos got just blasted by a federal judge for patent abuse. Chris Welch is going to join us. Talk about that. Maybe lightning around. But there's a thing that happened on our website that is so silly. It is my favorite bug that we have ever fixed. So we had published articles

in like one of our fancy layouts. And we get all these comments that we're like, how dare you have black text on an orange background? And we'd like, what are you talking about? Like, that's just the headline. That's fine. And after a while, it's like, there's no way this many people are this mad

about the headlines being on an orange background. Yeah, we should say the way it's supposed to look is there's like a colored banner at the top. Yeah. Right behind like the image and the headline and the subhead and the author's name. And it's like a banner that says like big important story. And then it ends. And then you read the story, which is black text on a white background.

And we were getting all these comments that were like, how dare you? And I was like, that's weird. But you know, it's a redesign. Everyone's mad about everything in the redesign. So for a while we're just like people are just mad that we pick this color or any color at all, which is a real thing that happens when you make a website. How dare you use a color? Fine. We use some color.

I promise we ran the accessibility checkers. But after a while, the sustained anger that there was black text. on an orange background. We were just like, there has to be something going on here. And we finally figured it out. It is the silliest bug in the entire world. All of those people, as best as we can tell, we're using the Brave browser, which has a number of tracking blockers. And it is implemented in the most shotgun way you can imagine.

They just block all instances of the word bot, which in their implementation just means the string, BOT gets blocked, which means CSS-bott got blocked on our page. By the way, the fact that that works for Brave is deeply hysterical. So all these users, just like imagine trying to debug this so that all these users were, in fact, seeing a full page of an orange black ground with black text.

We couldn't tell, but it was because of this approach to tracking prevention, which is just brute. force enforcement. Wait, let me just make sure I'm understanding this correctly because this is amazing. So Brave is just going in and anything that it's, anytime it sees the letters BOT is just like, nah, kill it. That's a bot. Get rid of it.

And we had a thing meant to define the bottom of the red. It was breaking our CSS because it was blocking the word bottom somewhere. Yeah. Both our product manager and our senior engineer are both named Tara. And I demanded just now in a meeting that they write about this because it's so silly because they had to fix it. So good. So we fixed it. This is what running a website in 2020.

It's like, it's great. Please keep visiting your website, no matter what browser you're on. But if you are seeing something completely bananas, it might be that your browser is doing something. Just maybe is what I've learned. Check another browser always. Yeah, that's a good. That's a web design thing. That's why a safari's there on your computer.

I never use it. But everyone's for a while. To see if it's broken. There's nothing more powerful you can say in a product meeting than it's broken in Safari. too. That's real. Done. All right, let's talk about some things.

David, you just did a bunch of reviews on a Wednesday show, and then you just reviewed the meta-questor. You want to talk about those quickly? Yeah, well, I'm mostly curious from the pixel perspective, kind of what you guys think of all of this. We've been tracking this a lot. Neelai, you've now had a week to sit with your what is the photo feelings. I talked to Allison a bunch about how she feels about this.

She's a lot more, I would say, normal human than you are about this. She's just like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, this. this stuff is complicated and weird and it doesn't always work all that well. And I'm very aware every time I've edited these images. That was one of the questions I asked her that I've actually gotten a surprising amount of people responding to. Is this like, she was like, yeah, my images look like normal images, but I know that I did something to them. And it sort of changes my relationship with it. And I thought that was really interesting.

And a bunch of people have reached out and said, not only do I feel that way with this stuff, but like, it has changed the way that I've edited all of my family photos forever. because even when I put the better face on, I remember, and it changes my relationship to that image when I change it. So I've just been thinking about that for, like, days now. But I said on this show last week that I was sort of disappointed in what the Pixel 8 seemed to be, and I feel like I have changed my tune now, seeing Allison's review and other people's reaction to it. People seem to be into this phone. Like, it seems like they, Google, like, did a good thing.

I thought her framing of the review is really interesting, and I encourage people to read it. It's about whether or not you can trust Google. which is where Google is. I think the seven years of updates that they promised, we got a bunch of notes. Why don't you talk about the seven years of updates? I think people are excited about it. You can be of two minds about that. One, you can be excited about it.

Google's finally going to commit to a supporting a thing for seven years. Or you can say, when will they break my heart? And I think we got a bunch of notes on either side of that debate. And it's a strange place for Google to be in. People don't trust them to support their products over the long term. I mean, and with good reason. Why would they? It provided abundant evidence.

So you make a promise, like, we'll support it for seven years. And then you get a 50-50 reaction to it, which is, I think, fascinating. And that's, you know, the pixel 8, I think, is just in that lineage of things. Like, are they going to stay committed to all of these ideas? Are they going to walk away from some of them? The assistant seems better and faster on this phone. Will it work like that next year? Will Google flip the table and Android 15?

Like, there's just a lot of that embedded in this phone alongside, oh, some ideas did iterate themselves to completion, and it's pretty good. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the AI stuff is so tied up in that, right? Because the promise Google has been making about this push to AI is you're going to be able to buy a piece of hardware, and as long as it is sufficiently capable, it is going to get better over time.

Like, actually get better over time, which is a thing we've been saying for years, never buy a product based on future promises. But the promise of AI is that it will get better over time, literally as you use it, it will get better. And that's compelling, but I think the pixel seven didn't really do that. And I think Allison wrote that piece like six months after the pixel seven came out being like, yeah, this phone, so pretty good. It's really not any better.

Like Google does the feature drops. It adds new stuff. The models get better, whatever. But there hasn't been anything that sort of changed the game there. And I, like, the reason to worry about this phone is to worry that it is going to be exactly what it is right now, seven years from now. And that is so not the promise Google wants you to believe in. And yeah, I'm very torn between the two, but like Google at least seems to have made a bunch of good decisions about where it could go. It's just about whether it chooses to keep going that way.

When do we trust Google? Like, I think that's the thing I keep thinking about is it feels like I'm in like when you're in a relationship and somebody breaks your trust and you're like, how do I go back to trusting you, right? Like in real life, it's a long journey. It's not like you need to start doing these things. that's usually when we talk about companies. We want to trust them again. We're like, you need to do this, this, and this. But Google can't do that because it keeps breaking promises.

It's like a real- Google killed pixel pass six weeks ago. Right? Like, how do I trust Google again? Because I kind of like, this phone seems really cool. Like, part of me wants to. It's just like that best friend where I'm like, I want to trust you. How?

I think the answer is really narrow. I think it's kind of what David is saying. You're going to buy this phone on the same. same cadence, especially the pro. People who buy pro phones, I think, are on two year cycles, maybe shorter. I think I know a lot of pro phone people who are on a one year cycle. I'm on a three year. But that's reasonable.

I think it's the seven years where people are like, really? Like, it's hard to think of a Google product except for search and YouTube that has lasted for seven years. Yeah. Gmail. That's basically true. Like, that's kind of what we're working with here. Yeah.

Even we got a note today about Decoder being in YouTube. music and it's like oh because they shut down the podcast thing and moved it all like even that like even what you would think of is like basic stuff they just move around on so the idea that this phone is going to stay fixed and relevant for seven years I think it's really important it's google saying okay the pixel program is going to be around for seven years but like david said they canceled the pixel past six weeks before this so yeah who knows so it really is just it is that waiting game then it is like that best friend i just thought that was like in allison's entire review like that was the framing that got me, like, it's the right framing. Like, here's a bunch of bets Google is taking.

Some of these thoughts are finished. That's really remarkable. Google doesn't finish a lot of thoughts. And some of the thoughts on the phone are finished. But the fact that it's like a vessel of Google services and Google AI means you have to believe that that stuff will persist for quite a long time. You have to believe that this ecosystem is going to get richer and richer and richer for a long time. In a way that even the Samsung ecosystem is, now that I have a long train commute. I got to say I'm getting Seafurt pilled. I'm like, what if I don't bring a laptop, and I have a galaxy

fold, and then I use decks at the office. And I've thought, like, I'm like, that ecosystem is, they just kept at it. What if you bring in? And now it's just waiting for me. You do an iPad. Every time I get on this, no, no, no, no, no. It's got to be decks. It's got to be decks. No, because what I want is to not carry a backpack.

Okay. I just want to roll onto the train, like a ninja. You know, like an assassin. No backpack, no bag, nothing. Like, who is this guy in the morning commuting to New York City with nothing? Coffee, at least. Maybe. Maybe. Even that, just like, who,

what? Because that is a power, especially when it's warmer and you're not even wearing a coat. You just flip the phone out as dramatically as possible. Except for me. I've got a folding phone. Would you like to see my tablet? It used to be my phone. And then I get to the office. I still have nothing.

You're the only person in the elevator at our building without a bag. And he's like confidently walked to one are like weird, rotating desk and you sit down, you're like, boop, boop, I have a computer now. It's not a great computer. It's not super functional. The Slack experience is probably better. Probably.

Yeah, because Slack hasn't been updated for decks. Yeah, that's good. We will now spend the rest of the show complaining about the Slack redesign. Get excited. But yeah, all I'm saying is Samsung, like, kept chipping away at that ecosystem such that even if it's a bad idea, it feels like a good idea now, right? You're not like an early adopter of this. You're like down the road with it

and you can read all the blog posts about how to make it work for you or talk to Dan. Two choices. With the pixel, it's like everything is new all the time. Yeah. So that's the thing that really got me. It does seem like the camera

sort of divorced from the AI editing stuff. The camera is good. I think Allison said it's a pixel camera. When it's great, it's great. And then when it fails, it's very predictable how it fails. I think these cameras, year over year are almost like imperceptibly different. I didn't review the iPhone 15 this year,

so I tried to do a thing where I tried to not pay attention to what was new for my 14 just to see what jumped out. And it's nothing. It's nothing. And when I go look, I mean, I obviously know there's stuff I'm excited about. USBC, very cool. I had to buy only cables. Very cool.

But it's like, it's so imperceptibly different. The zoom lens is really nice. In low light, it's a little bit, you know, sweaters are a little more sweater-mody. Yeah. So soft. But I think it's the same way at the pixel too. Both of these phones

I think are imperceptibly better year over year. I just come back to the AI thing and I know I was like ranting and raving last week and I received a lot of feedback and the feedback is uniformly in two camps.

This is the end of all trusted information and we should be more careful or you couldn't trust the information anyway. Why do you care now? Yeah. That's it. There's like almost no gray area.

Those aren't that different. Like those might actually be on one side of the story. And I just think that's really interesting. Again, you can say, a lot of people are like, he hates Google. It's like, no, I'm just saying if you can ship photos that demonstrably did not happen, and no one knows except for you.

And as David pointed out, like a lot of the feedback is like, but I know. When you have that feeling that something important is happening there, right? The feeling is, oh, I'm lying to everyone. That's the feeling. That's, there's not anything else. You're not being totally honest and you know. That's all I'm saying. Like, something along the way should quell that feeling.

Just so you can communicate, oh, this photo is in the metadata in a way they can't be stripped. Or don't do this is another choice. I will say that I took on my Instagram, I took a photo of Max and I eating ice cream. You can go look at it. And there's people in the background. And I thought to myself, boy, I'd like to delete those people. But you'd know. I didn't do it.

Because I can't then come back on the show. I boxed myself into a non-AI generative corner. What if you'd heel brush them out? Yeah. Or just replace them fully. Yeah. Just stick a tree in front of them. For some reason, David and Alex are in the background of all of my photos. All right, tell me about the Quest 3 real quick. That's the thing I really wanted to hear about. So I had this really interesting experience with the Quest 3, which is like it's two different headsets in one headset.

On the one hand, it is like the third quest, right? It's a VR headset that does VR headset things. and it does them like shockingly well. I had this experience the first time I put on the headset of things looked right. I didn't have to spend half an hour like dialing in the little things. I didn't have to move it around a bunch of my head. It just like looked good. And it's crazy how much that upgrade in display quality, which it has. It's the best looking quest by a mile ever, including the Quest Pro.

And just like changes everything. It's more fun to do things. It's more fun to look at menus. I find myself like using the headset longer. It has more games. It has more processing power. So, like, it's a better VR headset in all the ways you would want it to be our VR headset. But then, on the other hand, meta is out here being like, this is the first mainstream mixed reality headset.

And I just found myself the whole time doing this review of being like, what does that mean? It has new pass-through. It uses these cameras and a depth sensor to, like, better map the world around you and see what's going on and you can interact with the world through your headset. That's all true and all cool. And there is precisely one good mixed reality experience I had on the whole thing. and it's the demo app that shows you how to use mixed reality. Like, it's called First Encounter

and it's sick. It's so fun. There's like, like I played it mostly down here and it starts with coming from your ceiling, there's a little alien craft and it actually makes a thing

that looks like a hole in your ceiling and then aliens just blow holes in all your walls and you have to fight them. It's so fun. It lasts like eight minutes and then it's like, go have fun on your headset.

And I'm like, what else? What do I do here? So I landed in this really weird place of like, And I argued about this a bunch with Adi and Dan, who have done a lot of these headset for us too. Like, on the one hand, it's a $500 very good VR headset.

Cool. Big upgrade over the Quest 2, a lot more expensive than the Quest 2. On the other hand, it has this, like, amazing new functionality that is essentially not for anything. Don't know what to do with that. And that's how they're marketing the product. Yeah. That was the same thing we saw with the PS5, right?

Like, PS5 comes out. Astros Playroom. really, really cool, great demos. You're like, oh, wow, the controller's so cool. Every other game's just like, yep, that's a controller. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah.

But this is like, I feel like a bigger deal because mixed reality is bigger than haptic feedbacks. Probably not a lot of people were buying the PS5. They made the entire PS5 for a metal gig game that never came. Yeah. And like, dude left, you know, and like, Kojima's gone. And like, no one's ever going to use this controller again. Haptic.

Only Nintendo gets to pull the controller trick. Yeah. By the way, I'm sure they're cool haptic PS5 games. I only pay Madden in Grand Tresmo in that. Fine. All right? Just be fine with that. Horizon is lovely. I get what I want out of this console. It's awesome.

Grand Tresemo, let's just talk about racing seats the rest of the show. We're pivoting. No, I think there's that, like the chicken egg problem. Like you need a cheap, good mixed reality headset. Yeah. For developers to want to come and develop for it. Fine. And the Vision Pro is coming and presumably some of these concepts will grow in

market will grow. I guess my question is that's what everyone wants, right? Everyone wants to do augmented reality. I can't tell if we made the best VR headset ever, but we want to talk about it as though it is not a VR headset means the VR market has come to its logical conclusion. I think it has. I kind of think so, too. I don't know if it's come to its logical conclusion. I think it's very clear that it has a ceiling and that that ceiling is fairly low. Like I don't think this headset, as much better as it is, is going to make people who never wanted headsets want headsets. Right?

And like, if you take the diagram of headset people and all people, it's headset people is like a teeny tiny sliver, right? It's like people who had smartphones in like 2002. I was one of those people and it ruled and my smartphone was a piece of junk and I had it because like I am that kind of person. but it took a long time for like the world to become smartphone people and then we're there with headsets right where there's like there's this much market share for people who want headsets to do VR things right it's like it's a gaming thing and it is harder to use and access than a lot of gaming things so it it's a small group if you believe as a lot of people in tech do that the future is glasses that we are all eventually going to wear something on our face you are never going to be to get anywhere close to that with mostly a VR product. I think you're right that Meta is just out here saying, like, this is the start of it.

Like, this is what the Oculus Dev kit was, you know, 11 years ago. This is now that. Except they want you very badly to buy it. But the thing that really confuses me is that at the very beginning when Meta decided it was all in on VR back when it was Oculus and Facebook was Facebook, the company went way out of its way to like juice this ecosystem. It bought every company it could think of. It had this, like, crazy flood of content. It, like, single-handedly made the VR ecosystem an ecosystem.

I don't see any of that happening in mixed reality now. Even all the cool stuff coming, there's a bunch of cool games coming. There's an Assassin's Creed game coming. If there's no game console shall exist without Assassin's Creed. It's illegal. Yeah. If you don't get it in six months, just throw in the track. If I'd say it's not stabbing you, nothing is happening.

But all the stuff that's coming is VR games. Addie kept making the case to me that maybe the problem here is that even meta is not sure what mixed reality is for, especially in a headset you're not likely to wear out into the world. And I think she's probably right about that. So it's like this is like a very cool VR headset with a tech demo on top of it. And that tech demo was also like, wasn't that a magic leap tech demo years ago? Or it was like it was part of their. Oh, the aliens? Yeah, the aliens.

But it was an office. And you're like, ah, in the office. And I was like, that's cool. So it's exciting. I can do that now, not with like a guy. in a little backpack, but... It's something. Like, it's fun. The first encounter thing is, like, legit fun.

Would you say that it hacked the GPU of your brain, which is what Magic Leap used to say? About the teeny tiny, like, sliver of field of view that you would get in the Magic Leap headset? Yeah. I was just never, ever forget... I believe this was, like, a wired-covered story, right? Uh-huh.

Kevin Kelly wrote about it. It was like, we used the Magic Leap, and they were just a line in it, where they refused to describe how their technology worked. Badge. Like the poor Y reporter is like, we asked how the technology worked, and they wouldn't say, they just kept saying things like,

it hacks the GPU of your brain. It was just incredible. Like, if only I could say things like that more consistently, right? You know, it would be great. I mean, meta-3. Diverge. It hacks the GPU of your brain. That's pretty good, honestly.

So I agree with you about this VR thing. Every compelling demo, even of the Vision Pro, Every compelling idea for these products is virtual reality. There just isn't one. You know, the videos of the Vision Pro or the Quest Pro before it, where you're at a table and you've put five giant monitors in front of you on the table. It's like, you know that requires an empty table? Why would you have, like inside your house is a bad mixed reality environment because it is likely that you don't just have like empty rooms. I got the idea.

The dystopian vision of Mark Zucker being like, here's what's going to happen in the future. People will live in gigantic empty homes. And my virtual objects will fill those homes. And to move around your house and do anything, you will wear my headset. And buy my NFTs. But that's just like, is that, is that right? Is that why we're all chasing it so you can buy TVs from the Facebook store? I don't know.

Like that, you've got to give me some reason I want to wear this thing in my house. And all the reasons in the house are virtual reality reasons. I got one. I got a mixed reality. And Esmo and Supernatural. They haven't released yet, but they got to. Like, car and computer repair mixed reality. Like, you just put it on and you look down and it's like, oh, yeah.

No, I fix it. Yeah, you messed that up. Do that. Yeah. It's all it's going to say is, boy, those screws are smaller than you thought, huh? Yeah. You don't have a bowl, do you? You forgot a bowl.

You're just hoping they don't roll away. And it's just like a little thing up at the top showing you what actually you need to do versus whatever the instructions say. Like, I would buy a headset. in a heartbeat, if it did that for IKEA furniture, plumbing, I don't know how to plumb. Alex, I have such good news for you. I'd like to tell you about a product called Google Glass, which exists. Still in this world, today exists to do exactly the thing you're describing.

It's not for you. It's for, like, people who repair airplanes and stuff. It's not for people who put together IKEA furniture, which, to be fair, would be sick. I want it for my house. No, wait, hold on. Hold on. Excuse me. I'm sorry.

my Google clock dinged. You are wrong. Google Glass has been discontinued. March 15, 2020, 23, Google Enterprises stopped being sold. That was their market. They pivoted in. Okay, but people are still using it. Sure, I'm sure.

Somewhere there's a mechanic being like, man, I hope this airplane database is up to date. Can you imagine you roll into Jiffy Loop? And the guy's like, let me take a look and just flips his Google Glass down all his head. I will say the first ever HoloLens demo I took at Microsoft. They made me wear a HoloLens. and I replaced a spark plug in an ATV by walking around a room. I fixed some plumbing issue. My question to them, which in retrospect was not as rude as it should have been,

was if you are a mechanic and you have a shop full of tools and someone has brought you their ATV, wouldn't you already know how to fix the spark plug? But that's why this is perfect for consumers, because I would not. I have a vague understanding. But you wouldn't be in a position where, like, you were perfectly ready to replace a spark plug, and your face computer was like, now walk 30 steps to the left and get this wrench. Like, if all of that is ready to go and you spent the time to set that up, like, and you don't know how to fix the spark plug, like your priorities are just upside down. But that is exactly what I would do in real life. That's true.

It's like 100%. Yeah, I've got everything ready. I googled that. I doesn't Google how to actually do the thing. I just googled the prep. But luckily YouTube exists, and I'm sure there is a middle-aged man with boots on who will teach you how to do anything you can think of.

Yeah, but I want him in mixed reality showing me and then be like, Alex, that's terrible. What are you doing? The other direction. This is like the true promise of AI. It's synthesizing YouTube fix-it guy to look through your eyes. And he should be played by T-Pain.

Never hire an A-C-C-C-SP. repair guy. And you say we don't have ideas in the Vergecast. This is how you hack the GPU of the brain. We did it, guys. T-Pain generative AI plumber just being like, that's not how you fix a toilet Alex. Perfect. It's true, by the way, that those enterprise products

existed. They thought that would be a huge market. Right? You've got a, you're a baby mechanic for Delta. You got to fix a thing. That's what they thought. And none of them worked out. I just say, I keep coming back to this basic idea. The thing they all

to build as glasses. And the thing they keep trying to sell is virtual reality, and glasses and virtual reality are not compatible. Correct. That's true. And so it's, when I say, like, is this the end of the VR market? Like, you have to make the turn. You have to stop doing VR games.

You have to stop supernatural is entirely VR. You have to stop telling people that you're going to get on an airplane with your $3,500 vision pro and a battery pack in your back pocket, and you're going to watch a movie in VR. Because if your eventual goal is to ship glasses, you won't be able to do it. that anymore because you won't be able to block out the world around you. And I, I don't, I, it just seems like everyone knows this problem is there. It's not like a secret problem. This is not some grand insight that they got to sell. VR requires you to block out the world around you. But like, how are you going to do it? Yeah, they just got to move headsets for for the holidays. So, so let's

talk about the VR part because that's what kids can actually use right now. Yeah. And sell it. And then I think that's always the plan is like VR, VR, VR, VR, and then one day they'll be like, Okay, the glasses are ready. VR's over there if you want it. You can get that. Or you can spend $4,000 on these glasses and T-Pain will be in your ear. And, like, completely. Finally, someone has a killer out that does not require face roll recognition.

See, we did it. It's angry T-Pain, the plumber. We fixed it. By the way, I say this for maybe the hundredth time of our chest. T-Pain rules, and if he ever wants to come on the show, he's more than welcome. Just putting that out there. We should talk about threads really quickly just before we move to a break. There's just Twitter and Twitter and Facebook.

threads news in the world. There's a war going on between Israel and Hamas. Twitter did not do great in that circumstance. Every time Twitter does not do great, a flood of people comes to threads. And then we all have to contend with Adam Misery talking about news on threads, which he should just stop doing. That's just my free advice to Adam Sari. Because he keeps saying things like, it's not that we don't want news. It's that we're going to prioritize everything else. anything but news is my priority. Does that make sense to you? It's not that we don't want it, even though you keep asking for it and doing it.

And boy, do you keep doing it? It's just that I don't want to prioritize it in any way, shape, or form. And it's like, you know, silence is good. It's not that I don't want to turn up the volume on this channel. It's that I'm going to turn up all the other channels as loud as I can so that this channel is effectively zero. Like, that's what that looks like. Yeah, he needs to just stop talking about news and tell, actually has some news about this.

So I think he's sincere. I like Adam. He's been on Decoder before. I think he's even been on The Vergecast before. I think he's sincere. I think Meta got burned by what you might call the great Facebook news experiment. And also like burned the world. It's useful to remember that asking Meta to do more news has not historically been a good idea for like the Earth.

Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of wreckage in what you might call the millennial media ravine. Let's name some brands that don't exist. BuzzFeed News. Mike.com, like generally vice in its previous incarnation. It's just true. I mean, those are all huge bets on Facebook news distribution or Facebook video distribution.

You can just go look at the Wikipedia page for the words pivot to video. We all live through it. And that was Facebook sent floods of traffic, web traffic to publishers. And then they stopped and they started saying the future of the internet is video, which I will grant them broadly true. That was true. People like watching video. Who knew? You can get it from a streaming service.

You can get it from Alex's Plex server. Or you can get it from a social platform. Most people pick social platforms. So that's fine. But Facebook's like led a bunch of companies off a cliff, basically, in terms of revenue. And I think Adam doesn't want to do that again. And he keeps saying, I don't want to over promise and under deliver. Cynically, what you might respond to that with is, then don't break your promises.

That's just a thing you could say. Well, I think it's important to remember what people are asking for is it like give us algorithms that control the news, which leads to all the things that happened when Facebook did that. And they're not asking for pivoting to video or any of the other things. They're just saying like, give us better hashtag support. So if I want to follow something breaking in the world, I can. And it doesn't have to be bad. It can be sports. And so like that's the really interesting thing that's happening here to me is just concluding.

completely rolling all of that in together. And I'm like, Adam, I promise you, whatever's happening in Marvel or NFL is not the same as whatever's happening in the larger world with conflicts and stuff like that. Like those are different types of news. People just want a way to be like, oh, something happening. What? Yeah. And I, but again, I think they've been burned by the city in the past. Right.

And I think, again, in no way is criticism of X, the company, praise for. criticism of the previous administration of Twitter the company. But I think you can look at it and say maybe that horrible clown car was the best it could ever be. Then we don't want to do that. We want to build something bigger. I think they're sincere about that. All that said, I don't think that they're ever going to do news. I think that Adam isary says that they're not going to do news over and over again because they don't want to do it.

And again, he's not saying they want to do it or they're going to block it, although they have some very restrictive moderation policies that seem like they don't want to do. Like you can't talk about COVID on threads really. It's just like not a thing you're allowed to do. Right. You know, I think they're going to prioritize sports coverage and fashion and culture and whatever, and they will accidentally build tools that are reasonably good for news. But the idea that the way that Twitter was just sort of the assignment editor for the media in the Trump era, I think they would prefer threads to not be that thing.

That I'm okay with. Like, that's the kind of thing where I'm like, okay, yeah, we don't need that. There are other ways to get this. And frankly, having all of your really good reports appearing in like 140 characters on a website is not. the best way to deliver a lot of news and we need to move past that. That seems fine. Let's do that. This is the time in the broadcast where I start talking about activity pub.

This is the point. Everyone's making them a huge mistake. You don't want Twitter again. It wasn't great. It just wasn't good. Yeah. Like just. Fundamentally bad.

It was not a great time for a handful of guys to be in charge of a handful of platforms that dominated our information ecosystem. So the point, and I think that. The better thing to do is hold Instagram and meta to their promises around Federation and Activity Pub, which they continually say they're going to do. Like, their engineers on the platform saying they're going to do it. They're representative to the W3C is on there saying they're going to do it. Messeri says they're going to do it. Zuckerberg said to Alex Heath a couple weeks ago they're going to do it.

They keep saying they're going to do it. They haven't done it. So you've got to hold them to that promise. And then you have to build products that interoperate and allow you to address the threads audience with news products. or allow you to build news products that use content from threads in new and interesting ways. I agree with that. I also think you just made the exact case why meta wants to do this, because meta-federing lets it wash its hands of every complicated thing it doesn't feel like dealing with, right?

And so I think it's just going to be true that threads is the biggest thing in the Fedaverse or the open social web or whatever you want to call it. Like the day it does, it will be the dominant player on activity pub and probably will be for a long time. And so it's still going to have this same set of responsibilities. And I think just to be able to say, it's like Google saying you can use a different search engine, right? It's just like it's not, it's true, but it's not the reality of being alive. Most people are going to be on threads doing this stuff. And like Adam and his team still have incentives and I think responsibilities to get this stuff. right. But I think

what he means when he says we don't want to do news is literally it's like the knob that says news that's on his desk, he is going to keep dialing it down. Right? Like, you know, your thing about turning out the volume is like I think a surprisingly real metaphor. Like I don't think

that's actually that far off from what's actually going on. The question is, do you care more about like evergreen stuff or do you care more about real time stuff, right? And Twitter, a thing it did right, was it found that balance really, really really well. It's really hard to do the thing where you divide between what is good and what is now. And Twitter hit that balance better than I think any other platform ever has, which is why

it was so good at that. You could even go on the algorithmic timeline and it would still show you new stuff. I don't think Threads is ever going to push as far down that real-time road ever as Twitter did. I just don't see it. I have one question about all of this. And it was something I actually saw on Threads. And I think it was maybe from you or maybe a response to Adam or Why are we focused so much on threads and how it handles news and not focused on TikTok, which by all accounts is a much more widely used platform and how it handles news? Because it has a lot of the same kind of like concerns about like what you can and cannot say on the platform, but it also has a much bigger audience.

And it is actually actively algorithmically delivering that news, whatever it is to people, be it accurate or not. And it's kind of an obnoxious I found to like report when stuff is inaccurate on that platform. Like, do I just do a call out TikTok being like everything this man is said is wrong? Like I've thought about it. But like that for me feels almost a bigger concern than what's happening at threads. And it's kind of interesting that I think we all talk about it here. And I know a lot of people in media talk about it threads because Twitter was very much like a media thing.

Everybody on media used it. And then a lot of people have migrated to blue sky. to mastodon, now to threads, and they're very much using it there. And a lot of the discourse, the conversation around news, is driven by the media on that platform. And it is kind of interesting that we're driving it there and we're kind of ignoring TikTok where the people are actually watching the news. I also think there's something about those platforms that make it feel more like everyone is having a similar experience where I think like on TikTok, there's no pretense that what I'm seeing on TikTok is anything like what either of you are seeing on TikTok, right? And so it,

it makes this question of like, what is the quote unquote TikTok experience really hard to talk about in a way that these more like participatory messaging things like Twitter and Blue Sky and now threads. It just feels more like everyone is in one place. Whereas these other things, and I think YouTube falls in this category too, like you don't see on YouTube what I see on YouTube. So it's very hard for us to actually talk about the way YouTube works because everyone's experience of it is so different. But on a place like threads, it feels more like everyone is there just because it moves so fast that even though the experiences are different, it just makes people feel more like they understand it, I think. Yeah. And there was like, there are universal experiences.

We all got the sexy ladies for like a week on threads. And we're like, why are you here? Stop. I was like, why aren't you here more often? He always like, ooh, favorite app. Mine was just the Nugget account. That was the most universal experience of all was the Nugget account for like three weeks on threads. You didn't just actively interact

with the sexy ladies of threads to bring him back more often? You're like, crypto? You want it? I know. Oh, this is happening. It's fine. Nothing but a man.

I'm just, the thing about news is like, here's my other metaphor. You ready? Here's what the media is. The news media is on threads. We're the mandolin players in ACDC. All right? It's not to say there's not a mandolin player at ACDC.

Maybe there is. You don't know. But there's also ACDC. They're not kicking you out. You might be jangling away on that thing. It's in the back. Behind the drum kit. And Adam and Sarah's like, look, we're just not going to amplify the mandolin.

They don't get a mic. Yeah, that's all that's happening there. And it's fine. It's a way to be. But I'm just saying that opportunity, especially when the big player is going to do Federation, again, you got to holden to it. That means you get to rethink all of web distribution. You get to rethink content moderation. And to be like, give me trending topics so I can one-to-one replace Twitter is like, that's just itty-bitty thinking. Yeah. Everyone think bigger. If you want to,

if you're out there building a cool activity hub product, it's like, let us know. We're going to start over covering that stuff just to show people that people are building new interesting products. I mean, it has to be good. It can't just be sexy ladies in crypto. And speaking of activity Pub, we should say the one, the bit of activity pub news this week was that WordPress now officially supports Activity Pub on WordPress.com accounts. And like, what WordPress is is very confusing. WordPress.com is only a subset of WordPress and WordPress the company and WordPress. It's like it's a lot.

But a lot of websites can now with one plug in and checkbox interoperate with activity pub, which means you can actually push your content to these other places. And it's like, that's what this is supposed to look like. Yeah. Right. Like that, I think, is very exciting. Yeah, right. It's a big start in this.

Narrowly, it's, well, threads doesn't do yet. So if you have a blog and you're like running it, someone can follow you on Mastodon and your post to your blog will show up in their Mastodon feed. And if they hit like, it'll come back to you. That's hugely powerful. You could see how, for example, if a large technology website had a quick posting format, it might make use of such a technology, especially who was migrating to WordPress in their future. just an idea that I have.

Just a hypothetical for you all to think about. Okay, we should take a break. I want to get David's perspective on his time in the U.S. versus Google courtroom. And then Chris Walsh is going to join us and talk about another Google case, which is handily winning. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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We should just pivot this show to true crime. Yeah. That's what does the numbers. That is the dream of the people who run this podcast network. We do a tech true crime show. They stole my battery bank, and I spent the next five years tracking them down. Well, Chris Welch is here. Hey, Chris.

Hello. Pleasure to be here. Chris covers, I would say, Sonos, to the closest degree, possible. I think it's kind of interesting you're here and not currently in the vents at SOS. Yeah, I'll take a break here and there. So I want to talk about what's going on with Google and Sonos. There's a big ruling in that patent case. It's like a remarkable ruling. So I want to spend some time there. But first, there's actually another trial that's ongoing, which we keep talking about. United States versus Google. It is a trial claiming that effectively the deals Google makes with other vendors, most notably Apple, provide an illegal benefit to its search monopoly. And those deals are. that. David, you've been in and out of that courtroom. If you've been listening to the Verstackas, you know, this trial is really hard to cover. There's no streams, documents

and transcripts are hard to come by. There's been drama around that stuff. So we've just been, when we can, sending David into the courtroom in D.C. to watch things go down, watch the various witnesses. This last turn, it made it very clear that as goes Apple, goes the search market. And I think it's like under. reported on under notice, that that is like the heart of this whole case. Yeah, and ironically, this turn really started with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who a lot of people give testimony in these things and they're prepared by a lot of lawyers to not really say anything interesting. And there have been a few witnesses so far who I know

have spicy hot takes, some of them I have written about on Theverge.com in stories that I'm happy to send you links to, who clearly were trained to like sort of do the least. in the courtroom. Sotianadella was not one of those people. Like, dude came out swinging and essentially begin to make this case that Bing is bad. It's worse than Google. But the only reason Bing is worse than Google is because of the Apple deal. And that sounds like this like wild,

impossible to navigate thing. But essentially what the argument has come down to, and a number of people have made this argument, and even Google has sort of acknowledged that it understands this in a lot of the evidence that we've seen in the exhibits that are being published, it's essentially that if you can be the default search engine in safari, which Google has been for 20 years, for as long as there has been a safari, you will get such market share so quickly and so many more searches. Like I have learned how things like query flow work and basically the like flywheel of the more searches you get, the better the searches are.

Thus you can make more searches. Thus you do better. Thus you get more certain. Like on and on and on. And if anyone could break in, overwhelmingly the industry seems to think there would be real serious competitors to Google essentially overnight. And that by not getting out of its deal with Google or letting anybody else in, Duck Duck Go apparently was in negotiations to do it for private browsing, which Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO said, would have been absolutely game changing for their business. It would have increased their market share. I think he said multiple times over. but like Apple is the moat for Google right like Google has Chrome and it has Android and it turns out it's not illegal to like have your own products on your own products. So there's really no fight there. But this one deal that Apple has, if it gave it to somebody else, the DOJ's argument is that it would essentially raise up a serious Google competitor out of nothing.

And because Google is so rich, it is preventing that from happening. And that's like that has become the thrust of the argument. And it's really fascinating. What do you think? I think it's true. I mean, it's hard to say counterfactually, right? Like, one of the things that Judge Mehta, who's presiding over this case, asked Satya Nadella, was could a startup in search succeed?

Right. And there's been a bunch of talk about how the search market is considered like a no-fly zone for VCs. They don't even invest in it because it's not worth it. And so he asked him, is like, can a startup win at search? And Nadella, like, thought about it for a second and then just goes, well, there's no evidence. for that. And his point over and over was he was like, we, I'm willing to lose $15 billion a year to Apple just to get the query flow and the market share that comes with it for Bing. Microsoft at one point thought about selling part or all of Bing to Apple in order to fund a

competitor that could actually stand up to Google in a real way because they don't think Google being as powerful is valuable. Like, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Apple could essentially turn that on for somebody else. But also, we have no proof. Google has been the partner for 20 years. Like, it was in the very first press release announcing Safari, which they showed while Eddie Q was on the stand a couple of weeks ago, mentioned Google as a partner and has been a partner ever since. And the terms of that deal have changed. And so we've just never seen it. Like, one of the things that has really blown my mind is we've only ever seen one version of the search market. There's never even been in like the modern internet.

another world. Well, there is if you leave this country, right? Sure. That's also come out, right? In other countries, Apple partners with other search providers in Safari. And those companies are fine. They, like, exist in our competitors. The index is very successful.

Yeah. Yeah. And to be clear, like, one of the reasons that if you put something else on Apple instead, part of it was, okay, everybody's using it on Apple. So that's just automatically they use it. But it would also learn and get better because more people would be using it, right? So that's how it would compete? Or is it just like more people using it because it's on Apple and it's the default search?

Yeah. So the sort of universal truth of search is that the best way to make a search engine is to already have a successful search engine. And the more people use it. Like one way to think about it is a big part of your job as a search engine is to know when somebody spells something wrong what they're actually looking for. Right? Like that's a big job of a search engine. And the way that you do that is by seeing the. the queries that people get wrong

and then where they go. And you can figure out, okay, well, they typed this word, they didn't get what they wanted, and then they typed that word, which looks very similar. We can put those two things together, and the next time somebody searches for this wrongly spelled word, we can get it right the first time. You've just instantly made your search engine better, right? Like,

you just can't do that if you don't have the searches. And everyone acknowledges this. This is not like a secret fact. This is like how the search engine world works, is that the more search queries you get, the better your ranking gets, the better your personalization gets, the better your spell check gets, the better your, they call it, there's a better term for it than this, but it's

essentially query rewriting. So when you type in a query, what do you actually mean? Are you looking for a shopping link? Are you looking for travel? They do this thing where they take the words that you use and then sort of boil it down to a set of words that can also be used in a bunch of noise. All of that you can only do with the data, and the only way to get that data is to get people searching. And so, like, what Nadella was saying is he's like, I don't want any of the money that comes out of an Apple deal because I'm so convinced that the product will get so much better that will make up the rest of the money elsewhere. And that, like, I don't think he's just spouting out of his ass. Like, that is the deal that Microsoft has offered to Apple and

loss. I will say there's a deeply funny Google presentation that has been entered into the exhibits here about iOS 8. Oh, it's so good. I mean, again, this is how long this has been going. Yeah. So in iOS 8 Apple World Out Spotlight, so you could just like pull down and do stuff. And there's a deck and we'll link to it. And it's in David's piece. It's linked there. But the deck is called, it's a Google deck.

It's called iOS 8 Revenue Impact. And the first heading on the first slide, bottom line, it's bad. It's like it's not. They're just like they're doing less searches. It's bad. And then it goes into it and like here's all the searches that Apple. is doing for itself now. Instead of sending people to us, it's the app store and maps and Wikipedia and all

the stuff. Yeah. And they're just like, yeah, we're just losing searches and revenue because any amount of, any amount of loss from Safari is huge. Right. Bottom line, it's bad. It's like so funny. Well, and that has become one of the new stipulations in Google's deal with Apple as of,

I think, 2016 is that Apple can't do more in search than it had been doing in 2016. Right? Like by the terms of this agreement, Apple is not allowed to build a Google competitor or else it sits in violation of this deal. This explains, by the way, several years ago, there was like I.O and WDC were like kind of back to back. And at WWDC, Apple announced like some more search things in some version of iOS. This is post-2016. And then we went to I.O., like several days later. And all the Google people were like, Apple's doing some search stuff. And at the time, I was like, yeah, they should.

But I didn't realize, like, they were like, oh, are they in trouble? Like, are they past the line? And we wouldn't know, right? Because this deal was a secret until this trial. Yeah. I mean, we knew there was a deal, but like the machinations of the deal and both how profitable it is for Apple and how exclusionary it is are definitely. They're coming out in really new ways. It's really interesting.

Just to say it, and we should move on and talk about Sonas, I am aware that people think that Google should be able to pay whatever money to Apple for whatever Apple wants to buy, and that, yes, I'm aware that many retail stores in America have their own products that they put on shelves and they pay for placement, and you can make all kinds of analogies, and I'm just telling you that winning an argument through analogy is like kissing your sister. That's just fine. I don't care. Wait, you don't care? Can I just tell you one very quick courtroom story that summarizes this entire thing very well? at one point during Satina della's testimony, Judge Meta, who I wouldn't say interrupts a lot, but he'll occasionally like follow up on questions or asked to clarify and like he does a lot of sort of drilling down on technical things that either he doesn't understand or he wants in the record or whatever. He at one point looks over at Satya and says, okay, imagine you're Tim Cook. Why would you want to switch to Bing when it's a worse search engine? And that was the whole question. And like you could like Google, you know, they have a table full of lawyers. Like you could just feel the vibe in the. room, everybody at the Google table is just like, yes. Because that's their whole defense.

Is that like Saty Nadella getting up there and saying Bing is not as good as Google is both a case against Google and the entire Google defense, which is that it is not illegal to be the best product. And everyone is acknowledging that it is the best product. It's just, it's a very funny thing where like, DOJ has to do this thing where they're saying Google is really good because no one else is allowed to be. And Google is just going to keep saying, we're good and that's okay.

Yeah. And that's a really, really, really compelling argument. Like being the best is not a problem. And Google is going to spend a lot of time when it turns and becomes Google's chance to really give its argument. It's going to spend a lot of time

telling us how terrific Google is. And I'm very much looking forward to like that second half of this trial. Yeah. I think Google is too, to be perfectly honest. All right. Speaking of Google on a high in the legal system.

Yes. I mean, this is, when it comes to the patent wars, this is his slam, donkey, swagger off the court as it's gotten in a while. Chris, what's going on? Sonos got its ass into it. And in court, had a 32.5 million judgment tossed out by Judge William Alsup, one of the most high-profile judges who's covered who knows how many tech cases. We profiled him. Yeah, we profiled him. Yeah. And so he knows this stuff.

He knows what Sonos is, how long they've been around. And if you read this ruling, it's really like a super deep dive on zones and like different rooms and overlapping zones. And so he knows this stuff. And so it comes down to, he just said that Sonos took too long to really, you know, come up with these complaints and say Google was copying its technology. 13 years is really the time between like their first application. And then when they like said, you know, hey, Google is stealing our ideas and trying to copy multi-room audio. And so the patents that they had included were rule to be said they were now invalid. and also unenforceable.

And so... In like big, bold letters in the ruling. I very much enjoyed that. It was like a different font for the word unenforceable, which I really liked. So he calls Sonos a pretender, and he says Google is the innovator, which is a little harsh, man.

Like, you know, like, Sonos is the company that, like, has made this their whole brand, you know? So I feel like that was a little, little mean. But... What did Google innovate in this space? Yeah.

That's a really good question. Because, honestly, this whole case, the entire time, we've heard about it and we've been covering it and stuff. It'd always seem like Sonos was kind of in the right. Google used... And then that all got thrown out and like... Yeah, this case has a bunch of twists and turns.

The heart of it is like not patents. Yeah. And this has always been... And we had Patrick Spence and at the time Sonos's chief legal counsel on the show and we talked about why you would sue Google. And like, they're using their patents because they're mad about something else.

Yes. Which many people have many feelings about. What are they mad about? They basically went to go work with Google, and then Google immediately undercut them on business terms. They released. Put out cheap speakers. They cost $49. Right.

They like immediately undercut them with cheaper speakers that copied their features. So they did the thing that every big company has always done to small companies forever. They pulled in Amazon. Yeah. You can replace Google with Amazon and Sonos is just as mad, but Amazon lets them use Alexa. It's like their... Sonos is in this weird position where they need access to voice assistance or at the time they did. And they just ended up really upside down with Google.

They felt very strongly that Google had taken advantage of them. So then they said, well, look, we invented a bunch of this technology. We've been around for a long time. We're going to sue Google for patent infringement. That will create some leverage. And Google will inevitably settle because why wouldn't they? And then we can't get along. And that was like more or less the story.

Yeah. Three years later. And then Google did not settle. And Sonos won the judgment. and then Google appealed. And now Alcip is like, what's the quote? It is wrong that our patent system was used in this way. This is one of the ruling.

With its constitutional underpinnings, the system is intended to promote and protect innovation. Here, by contrast, it was used to punish an innovator and enrich a pretender by delay in slight of hand. It has taken a full trial to learn this sad fact, but at long last a measure of justice is done. Like, I mean, it's a good, it's a lot. Yeah. You would think that it was a murder trial. Right? Like, what did Sonos do to this judge?

Yeah. This judge is like, my fucking speakers keep disappearing. Like, that's what he's... He had to do that transition from Sonos version 1 to 2. That S2. He was ready. He was super mad. His play three is just sitting there and he's like, a measure of justice for the

Sonos play three. I don't know, man. Again, for Google, it's 30 million dollars. Google sneezes that money. We're just talking about like a $10 billion dollar. deal with Apple. But anyway, so now Google's won. They put out a statement that is just...

Yeah, I was taking a victory lap and saying the patent system needs reform and this and that. And Sonos came back and said the same thing. Of course. But also, they still want to keep on fighting Google because they're trying to protect their patents and innovations, and they're trying to, like, get royalties, which I think is the main crux of this whole thing. It's like, they want all these tech companies to, like, pay them royalties for their

technology and, like, multi-room audio and whatnot. And that's clearly not something that Google will budge on any time. soon, as we've seen. And so three years later, there's no sign of a settlement. There's no Google Assistant on the new Sonos speakers still, which I think is a worst experience for customers. Yep. Customers always suffer. Yeah. And yeah, I think, I mean, like, Sonos was concerned about these companies putting out cheaper speakers, but I feel like Google and Amazon really don't care about audio as much anymore. You know, like the NEST audio came out three years ago, and, like, Google hasn't put out a new speaker that was good since that. I don't even care about

their voice assistants anymore. There was just that new, it's Marshall, right, that has both assistance on it at the same time. I think it was JBL. JBL, sorry. But yeah, that is both things, which Sonos said once, like, they wouldn't, couldn't do that. By Google's own terms, they weren't allowed to do that. And so now we see it happening on this other speaker. So, you know, I think it's time to hopefully settle because I think Sonos has its, you know. Oh, there's no way. I'm sorry.

Somos has its own place carved down. If you have at long last a measure of justice is done in your back pocket, there's never settling. There's no settling happening here. Yeah, I just feel like Sonos, you know, like they're safe. They have their, you know, you're just walking like any best buyer target and there's like a Sonos section there. Like they're not a small company. Well, compared to Google.

Compared to Google, yes. But like, you know, this like small company like David versus Goliath thing is like, you know, they're a pretty sizable audio company compared to like whim or weem. What's that brand that Chris person loves a lot? Yeah. That's a small company. Wim. Sonos. Wim.

Yeah. Sonos is a bit larger than that. I will say Chris and I earlier this week, we went and visited a studio where Dolby was showing off how they mix in Atmos. and their test product was at an Arrow 300, right? And it was actually really funny because it was a prototype and had the word prototype printed on it. And I was like, Chris had every part of this scoop, except a picture of a prototype with the word prototype on it.

But that's it. The recording industry is like in on Sonos. That is the test product. And Chris was like, do you ever test on a home pod? And they're like, no, no, no, no. No, thank you. No home about that. And it's true.

I don't think the Amazon products are like huge successes. in the audio world that Google products certainly aren't. Right. Yeah, Sonos has like the move too, which like none of these brands really have their own version of. So I feel like Sonos as a business is pretty secure. So like at least, you know, like move towards some kind of resolution here like for the benefit of people and customers who want Google assistant on their Sonos speaker.

And, you know. And when originally sued Google, it was not as secure. Right. As it is now, right? Like at the time, it was very much we were fighting an existential threat from Amazon and from Google and we do not know how our company is going to continue. And if we don't figure that out, we're screwed. So that was a framing.

I mean, if I was a framing, I believe it was at CS. I think we were in Vegas when the lawsuit hit. And it was just before we assumed both companies would announce a bunch of stuff. Yeah. And they announced a bunch of stuff. You know, a theme of this podcast is that like Google products don't last a long time. It's like, looking back, we're like, oh, were they going to stay committed to the Nest audio? Or could you have just waited them out?

Well, I think what that was the curiosity was like, okay, this is probably almost certainly not going to be as good as whatever Sonos does, but is it going to be cheaper and then push Sonos out that way. And so Sonos is shrinks and shrinks. And instead Sonos is like feels like it's kind of turned, doing well, apart from this. Well, I'm curious for Chris to take it. But it seems like they didn't just become a patent troll. They invented a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. Right.

And Patrick Spence has been on the show a bunch of timing, like the pace of innovation, we need to pick it up. You need to go faster. They're on a yearly cadence now. Yeah. Before Patrick showed up, they were on like a one decade cadence. Yes. You know, like, so like I think they did the right thing there for sure. I, this rule, you should read the rule.

It's like a fun read. Yeah. To read this ruling because he's just so mad that any of this happens. I think there's like an equal amount of mad at Google that you could be. Mm-hmm. Because they didn't, like 70, 80s. percent of cases settle. And if you're Google, it is

probably better to settle and move on and also have Google Assistant be available on all kinds of devices for what is peanuts in the scheme of Google. Right. But it's a fun read. And like a measure of justice is done. It's incredible for

a multi-zone audio patent lawsuit. What's going on over there, Bill? You're all right? He's still pissed about the Play 3. Like Air 300's out. It's a replacement. Seems real nice.

It sounds great. Chris loves it. I do. I do like most of their products. You know, Google and Amazon, their speakers are fine. Like the Echo Studio is fine.

It's been sitting there like untouched for like three or four years now. So, but it sounds nice. I just think those companies clearly don't care about audio as much as they want. I think Apple, like if there's one company that someone should be like pretty concerned about, it's Apple. HomePod and like AirPods's,

you know, like headphones, if they ever get in headphones, obviously, that's going to be a hard climb for someone's to do. And I think there will be like some kind of Apple soundbar at some point. It seems like they're super interested in like them theater. You think Apple's going to make a soundbar? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

With the home pods as satellites, right? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I think they're going to come into their territory at some point. No way. It's going to be like the Roku one. It's going to have an Apple TV building. Unless Apple can figure out how to sell you extra iCloud storage, the product, they will never make it. Well, I go with the trouble of like letting you use two home pods as like e-Aric outputs if they're not going to like make a proper sound.

at some point. They did that, like, they did that under duress. They're like, God damn it. You know, like, straight up, like, enough people just annoyed them about this thing. Yeah. And then, like, probably Phil Schiller in his house was like, why do I have other speakers? You know? Yeah.

But actually a sound bar, no way. Zero percent chance. I don't know. They are not interested in that market. 2%. We can have a wager. A wager. Apple will release a cheap Vision Pro before they release a soundbar.

Okay. Wow. You're going to make some money, Chris. I'm really excited for you. Yeah, me too. All right. This is an important prediction on it. You think they're going to make a sound bar?

I mean, what's a cheap vision pro? We should really get into that. $1,000. $1,000. That's cheap. I think that's, I think for a product of vision, that's, it's significantly down. Yeah.

I think I'm still feeling pretty good about some kind of like Apple TV, 4K soundbar, home pod concoction. You know, one of those things all melted together. When I think of Apple, I think of concoctions. It's, I feel it. An important stipulation is you only win if Apple calls it a soundbar, which it never, ever, ever, ever, ever will. Not a single chance. Who knows?

There's a zero percent chance Apple. I just want to be so clear about this. It's never going to happen. I don't know. One thing I've been thinking about a lot with this is it seems like one of the things that happened from when this ruling started, from when this trial started to. today is that the stakes for audio seem like they've gone way down. Like if you rewind a bunch of years to when this all started, we were in this phase where like voice assistants were going to be the next big thing. Everybody was going to use them. They were going to be huge businesses.

Sonos was under pressure to like be part of this because the idea was you were going to have speakers all over your house and you were going to talk to them and that was going to be your main interface with technology. And like that idea is not dead but like not alive anymore. And so now we're back to the speaker business. And Google. Google and Amazon have no interest in being in the speaker business. They're in the business of getting you to use their assistance, but they're even getting out of those businesses. Like Amazon is shedding the Alexa team in a big way.

Google is going to put Bard into assistant, but is already like pretty clearly pivoting the way that it thinks about that as a tool. Like, we're just out of this phase where speakers are going to be the centerpiece of your home and they're back to being speakers. And I think if we're going to go back to being speakers, that's probably good news for Sonos because these other companies just aren't going to care that much about it. Yeah. Right. So then it's like, why keep fighting this battle? You know, like just, you know. I think at some point if you're Google, you're like, we can't go down this road because then we're going to end up paying royalties on everything

every time we screw over a small tech company and we're hosed. Like the fight for them seems like it's on like patent principle rather than the specifics of this case. Right. Whereas Sonos like needed this win a lot more back then. But at this point, I don't know. Like, I don't know how big Sonos loses here. Sonos has got a fight because they got owned so hard in this judgment. Oh, sure. They did.

Yeah. If I got owned that hard, I would fight. Even if I knew I was going to lose, I'd be like, now I'm still going. So, to be clear. So they lost at this court. Okay. They need to appeal to an appeals court, right? Yeah.

And so there's this case, and there's still several others. There's one at the ITC where they've won a few times to ban. and very old Google products that you can't even buy anymore, as is usually the case with those lawsuits. And so, yeah, there's other countersuits from Google and, like, several countries. So it's still just like a very, like, very angry feud that seems to have no sign of cooling down anytime soon, which seems a bit silly at this point. Well, now that a measure of justice has been done. I don't know why I don't say that all. There's a long road.

There's an appeals court. I love the idea of our current Supreme Court being made to deeply consider multi-room audio. That's all I want. David just sitting in the... Oh, my God, a pile of soundbars has arrived at Justice Clarence Thomas's house. And he didn't refuse them. Oh, no. I can't help it if my friends own a jet and love surround sound.

All right, we've got to take a break. We'll do a lightning around and then we'll get out of here. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love.

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Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. Alex, you want to start? Yeah. There's a new piece. By the way, a number of people have told us that we need to change the lightning around

to USBC round. because, you know, it's not as, Papao sounding. It's also, it's not named after the port. I don't know how to. It's just a lightning round. That's just a noun.

This is the PCI round. Get ready, everybody. It's the Thunderbolt 4 round. Okay. Go ahead. Sponsored by Intel. Oh, my God. Sorry.

You got to pay us money for that. Me or Intel? Someone. Someone. If you want to pay us to sponsor the Thunderbolt 4 round, I'm not going to say no. All right, go ahead. There's some journalistic integrity there. This transparent. Disclosure. I will accept money if it's funny. All right. So the Sony PS5, it's got a new Sony PS5. Just like now you can go buy one. And that is the perfect time to be like, no, we got new ones coming. It's been rumored for a while. It's smaller. It's slimmer. It should actually fit in most home theater setups, which the current one doesn't.

Okay, I would like to quibble with that particular assessment. This thing is gigantic. You probably have an ugly home theater set up. This thing went from being preposterously humongous to very slightly less preposterously humongous. Yeah, I think there's a piece on the site actually by Jay Peters that says the slim PS5 is still huge. So it's a chunk. It's smoother now. It's much more like straightforward eye of Sauron Lord of the Rings now than it was.

No, no, but it's 24% lighter, which I think. think is very important. My home theater system will be psyched about that. Yeah. This is the thing that you put down once and never touch again, right? I'm just, look, these are the specs they gave us. This is what they're proud of. Have you seen the stand for horizontal mode?

I didn't know you're supposed to use the current one with the stand. So you just had your current one horizontal the whole time? Yeah. Oh, boy. To fit in my home theater system. I had to clear a whole shelf. I will say that Sony picked and then picked another shape that incompatible with furniture. Yeah. Yes. They're just like, oh, this is for a rectangle? To hell with you.

But the little stand to be horizontal is not a stand. It's just like a little peg. It's like a little peg. It's like a little peg leg. I know. I just like stuck like something under there. There's the stand you can detach the optical drive, which is truly wild. Yeah, yeah. The optical drive I think is most interesting. This is the part like Tom Warren when he was looking at the news. He's like, oh my God, that's so cool. And like, yeah, it is cool. It looks. It seems fairly elegant way to do it because you can now go, same price, 24% lighter, 30% smaller by volume. Hey, those are how people consider game consoles. Yeah. Xbox or PS5, I'm going with 30% smaller by volume. That's what you should have listed on like the Costco website, the Best Buy website.

My water displacement is going to go so far down when I read it. I still feel like physical media is like slowly dying here. Like this is like an optional like optical drive. You can have it if you want it. If you want to watch 4K Blu-ray, like that new Xbox that leaked has like has no more drive in there anymore. So I feel like we're still inching towards like a gaming world where it's like all digital. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting rid of the drives.

But the drives are actually important. They're good if you want to watch DVDs and U.HD Blu-Rays and everything. Like only three people in the world. And they're all in this room. Yeah. Would do. But it's a little cheaper, right? Like it's $450 starting for the digital, the disc-free one.

And previously it was $4.99 for the digital-free one. And then the new, like, model with the drive already installed is going to be $4.99, which was the old price for the disc-free one. So that's kind of nice. And then there's going to be the displayer, which is $80. Additional. And integrates kind of neatly. You can go look at it on the website. It's cool.

There's like a little video. It shows the integration. And it is cool. Yeah. But, like, you should also go look at Jay's store. about how much smaller it is because like 30% volume does not actually track to dimensions.

Yeah. You still don't want to measure your cabinet and make sure it'll fit in it. Again, it is also a shape that is incompatible with most things. You can't stack on it? You just slide off? It's horrible. I think that, yeah. Yeah. All right, Chris, what you got?

My pick of the week is the speakers on the Pixel 8 Pro. If you've owned a pixel over the last few years, you've known that Google for some reason has put terrible loud speakers in their phones. This started with the Pixel 5. They had some weird vibration motor that made sound. And then they went back to standard speakers for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7, but they were tinny and hollow and just sounded like absolute trash.

And so since the Pixel 8 Pro now costs $1,000, you would hope and pray that the speaker is decent. Like, I don't use my speaker a ton, but if I'm in bed and playing a podcast or watching the video, I want it to sound decent. I don't want to spend a grand on a phone and have it sound like absolute garbage. And so finally, Google, I'm happy to say, has a speaker that sounds comparable to the iPhone, not quite the level of it, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but, you know, it's in that ballpark, which was certainly not the case last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. My wife has a pixel six, and, I mean, just by virtue of, like, what I do for a living, I have 400,000 speakers in this house.

She steadfastly refuses to use any of them and just plays everything out of her phone. And the rage it has filled me with in the last two years as she has had this phone of how bad it sounds all the time. She's just like, oh, we're going to like put on some music while we have dinner. And I'm like, there's a sonos. Like you're connected to the sonos. And she's like, no, I'll just, I'll just put it on my phone. It'll be fine. This is podcast through Becky's phone.

I'm like, hey, what's kind of speaker should I get? Should I put speakers on the ceiling in your house? She's like, I don't know. I listen to podcasts on my phone. I'm like, but there's a world of possibilities exist for you. No. No, podcast on my phone. Yeah.

So like, to me, the speaker upgrade might be the speaker upgrade might be the single most important thing about the pixel 8 and I will probably be buying ANO1 as a result. It's very exciting for me. It's a good phone and it doesn't get that hot anymore, which was pretty concerning about the past. That's a real part of this generation of phones is, boy, they get real hot when you first buy them.

Got to be careful that Instagram. It's a heavy resource-intensive app. All right, I'll make mine quick. There's another trial that's happening right now. Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for the FTX, we'll just call fraud. I mean, I think it's fairly obvious what happened here. And Liz Lapato is here.

In New York, she's been at the courthouse filing reports every day. It is some of the funniest coverage we've ever had on the site. It is Liz at full force in terms of being a writer. Just the funniest writing we've had on the site. Her last headline is Tim Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend. I mean, perfect. Just like perfect. Just go read it.

Go read it all. She's doing it basically every day. There's like an army of people waiting, just like waiting for her edits at the end of like the courtroom day. It's all very funny. And the dude did it. I don't want to turn this into too much of a true crime podcast, but after extensive investigation, I can exclusively reveal that FTX was a scam. And it was obvious the entire time in crypto is a fraud. Michael Lewis is going to find you and fight you.

That dude. Do you have another hour? Did he see the thing? Michael Lewis, he wrote The Blind Side, that book, which is now a substantial amount of controversy. But he had a state, I think he gave an interview time. week, he's like, I wrote my book for the jury. They should read my book. And it's like, no, they should do the trial. I think that might be a substantially better use of their life. They should watch Moneyball. Pretty good. Okay. Read Liz's coverage. It's great. It's really fun. All right, that was mine. David,

what's yours? I would just like to very quickly appeal to Samsung and Google to stop being so embarrassing trying to convince Apple to support RCS. Oh, no. Do we have to do? Do we have to do? disclose that Dieter Bone, former host of the Vergecast, regularly tweets at Apple about RCS? Sure. There you go. Done. Disclosed. Deeter is right. To be clear, Google is right. Samsung is right. Apple should support RCS. It is a better system. SMS is like a technological disaster that should no longer exist and we should stop using it. Silly YouTube videos from major competitors are not going to convince Apple to do anything. In fact, I would argue that every time Samsung and Google say to Apple, do RCS or you won't be cool anymore, Tim Cook just like, I don't know, buy your mom an iPhone, throws a cat out the window and like cackles.

I don't know, whatever he does. Throws a cat out the window? I don't know. Bring me another cat. Samsung's at it again. Open the cat room. Yeah, and like now Samsung's whole thing is like, we're bubbles too. And it's just like, it's not going to work.

Go, go pick a fight with carriers. Go try to like covertly destroy SMS from the outside. Like pick any fight you want or just like wait for the EU to make Apple, you know, interoperate with all of the other messaging apps and it'll be fine. It just seems kind of sad. It's like all the teens are leaving our phones. We have to like come up with these ad campaigns to put up a fight. I want this to happen.

And they're doing it wrong. And I would like them to stop. It's real cringe. Here's what Google can do. Have a messaging app that people like to use. And stick with it for longer than six months. You should call it Gchat, an app which people firmly believe that they used and loved, but which Google never made. I don't know.

And I think Al-O was the way that was the... My God. It's all about doing. I'm just saying, and Google hasn't enough money, you just got your $30 million back. Just give everybody five bucks. It's fine. Just do it. You'll get a substantial user base just five bucks at a time.

That's how the VCs did it. Couldn't they just put it into their next search deal with iOS? Just be like, okay, we'll let you use our search, but also. Tim Cook is going to throw so many cats out the window if they bring me a tiger. All right. He's a fit man. Yeah, he is. He can lift a large cat.

That's all I'm saying. He can throw a large tiger. Okay, please send us a note with your thoughts on how large of a cat Tim Cook can lift. Doesn't you go to the gym at like 5 a.m. every day? Yeah, I'm saying, I think it's a larger cat than you expect. It's a big cat. Yeah, I agree. All right, we've got to end it here. I would also accept AI generated images of Tim Cook lifting a large cat.

Just putting out in the world, you got to manifest what you want, you know, and that's what I want. Send him to us at the Vergecast. We love hearing from you. Monday, connectivity miniseries comes back with Beeper Co. Speaking of messaging app, Beeper co-founder, Eric Mijikovsky, who is a long time in front of the verge. That's something really exciting. David's got an installer, which, can I reveal this stat, David? Sure. I don't, sure, maybe. You're just well over 10,000 subscribers now. Oh, yeah.

Zero to 10,000. Amazing. People love it. Subscribe to that. to that. And then I'm not going to tell you what's happening on Decoder, because I don't know. But I think something very exciting is going to happen on Decoder very soon. That's what I got for you. All right, that's it. That's a fresh cast. Rock home. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1.

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