The Vergecast - The future of the Kindle with Panos Panay

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Nilay and David talk about the week in gadget news, after scoring their predictions on last week's Tesla event. (Spoiler alert: nobody did very well.) They talk about the new iPad Mini, the new Sonos Ace Ultra soundbar, and the new Analogue N64 emulator. Then Amazon's Panos Panay joins the show to discuss this week's big Kindle news, and where he thinks the future of e-readers is headed. Finally, Nilay and David do a lightning round, with a lot of Google org chart news and just a little bit of Trump news. Further reading: The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise The Tesla Cybercab is a cool-looking prototype that needed to be much more than that Tesla’s Robovan is the surprise of the night Apple just announced a new, faster iPad Mini  AMD and Intel are teaming up to fend off ARM chips Sonos announces ‘breakthrough’ Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4  Analogue’s 4K Nintendo 64 launches next year for $249 Amazon’s new Kindle family includes the first color Kindle Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition hands-on: color E Ink looks pretty good Amazon Kindle Scribe 2024: a new design and AI tools for note takers Amazon’s new Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite are faster and brighter Amazon discontinues the last Kindle with physical buttons  Google is replacing the exec in charge of Search and ads Here’s a bunch of bananas shit Trump said today about breaking up Google Trump says Tim Cook called him to complain about the European Union Anthropic’s CEO thinks AI will lead to a utopia — he just needs a few billion dollars first  The New York Times warns AI search engine Perplexity to stop using its content Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar 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. Hello and welcome to Virchcast, the flagship podcast, of knowing that you should just always take the over on Tesla ship dates. I'm not a betting person.

It's not a thing that I do. I spend my money in Vegas on limousines, famous personality trade of mine. But if Fanduel ever offers bet on Tesla ship dates, I might get into it. I'm just putting it out there. Listen, if I've learned one thing about the internet, it's that you can bet on anything.

Somewhere on polymarket, you can bet on, Elon Musk and the cyber cab. I'm confident. Do you think he's just taking the other side of that bet? That's his plan to fund Twitter. He just gets it coming and going, man. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. That's David Pierce.

Hey, David. Hello. We've got a good episode. We're going to go over our bets from last week on the Robotaxy announcement. Apple announced new iPad minis. There's some weird Intel news to talk about. There's a really cute Nintendo 64 emulator that I want to get into. Yeah.

But also, Amazon. Panos Panis is on the show this week. There was a Kindle event. David went to it. Anos came to the studio. We hung out with him for a while. We tried to get him to say what's going on for Alexa. He declined.

And then we got a lightning round. It's going to be amazing. It's the verge cast. It's a good one. Let's start, David, with our bets. So we ran this gimmick last week, where we were recording the show before Tesla's Robotaxi event.

And you and I made a bunch of predictions. And now we can see, if we were correct? You know what's weird is going back through and we'll go through it but I have two regrets that I would like to share

before we get into it. One of my regrets is that I didn't push harder on the I think this is a thing you're going to be able to buy. We talked about it briefly and I asked like, wait, do you think

that this Robotaxy that are about to launch is going to be a thing you can buy? And you were just like absolutely not. That would be insane. Whoops, here we are. That was not one of your predictions.

Carefully not one of your predictions. Yeah. But it should have been one of mine that it was going to be something you can buy. I actually still stand by my prediction. I want to be clear. I mean, fair. The problem is we're going to have to redo who won these predictions, like every three months

for the next 10 years until these things actually launch, and then we'll see who wins. So let me just quickly, like, run through the news, and then we can run through our predictions. And the news, I would say, was basically two things, right? There was the cyber cab and the robo van. There was a bunch of other... I'm sorry, David. It's pronounced rebofin. You think I'm joking.

Listen to Elon pronouncing. No. He says robovin. It's the robovin? Yes. And I'm pretty sure that is yet another horrible Westworld reference. That sounds like... At the event, you could take the robo taxi

between two different spots on the map at Warner Brothers on the lot. And one of them was like New York City and one of them was Westworld. And if you stuck it out long enough, through Westworld, one of the villains is whatever. It doesn't matter. He said Rebovan. Rebovan is just like the last name of a Midwestern door-to-door salesman who is just like, Thomas Rubovin.

How you doing? Or it's the all-seeing AI in Westworld. Or is that. Well, no, it is not Reboven. I will not acknowledge that. It is the robovan. It's fine. It's like when Apple was like, no, it's not the iPhone X.

It's the iPhone 10. They were wrong. It's the iPhone X. And it is the Robovan. Wow. bold. So there was the robofan, the robovan named

Robovin. Robovan. Robovan, that's great. I'll take that. In Europe, it's the robavon. I just want, again, and I just want to underline this, all of these things are fake. Yes.

They launched. The van, perhaps most of all, is not a thing that will occur. Yeah. And one of the things that you said was there might be a whiff of you know, the supposedly autonomous truck that's actually just rolling downhill. I would not say I'm absolved of all of the

maybe this is not real vibes from this event. But anyway, so those were basically the two things, right? The cyber cab was the thing. It has bat wings. It's a two-seater car. Looks neat. It's fine. It is supposedly going to be available in 2027. It's supposedly going to cost less than $30,000.

It's just a bunch of, words that he said out loud and a prototype. Yeah. It's not nothing. Like, I want to be clear. I'm not being dismissive. It's not nothing. But it's not something either.

So I just want to acknowledge us from the start. Our conversation about this is happening in the context of SpaceX catching the starship booster. Which was sick as hell. Which is awesome. Yeah. It is true that sometimes the things happen. Yeah. That is a true thing you can say about Elon Musk companies.

but mostly about one of them, the one that he doesn't run. Elon Musk companies usually accomplish their goals is a thing you can mostly say about the company that Gwen Shotwell runs. That's it. That's that one. Yes. Tesla, on the other hand, has been promising a lot of things for a long time, and most of those things don't arrive. And I think it's possible to split them up. I don't think you can say, well, he landed the rocket or caught the rocket in this case.

so he will ship the cyber cab in full self-driving. Those things are fundamental, like the most deeply unrelated things I can think. Totally. For example, Tesla has furious competition. SpaceX does not. In fact, SpaceX's competition is so shit that there are astronauts in space right now. Yeah. Yeah.

And including like the government has largely just given SpaceX everything. Like that is, that is, that's a whole different. I'm just saying, I just wanted, that's contextually, the people I know and like to read and people I think highly of have conflated these two accomplishments. And I'm just pulling them apart. 100%. And I think that's, it's useful in another way, which is like we always overrate for better and for worse the extent to which a CEO is a company, right? Like the, the, he doesn't deserve all the blame for the mess of Tesla stuff over the years, and he doesn't deserve all of the credit for what SpaceX is doing. Neither of those things is true. I think he probably deserves more blame than credit,

generally speaking. But like, all this is to say, like, I have found it very useful over the years to think of each of his companies as completely separate things run by separate people. Like, X and Tesla increasingly are aligned in ways that are strange and odd. And X-A-I. It's the ones he runs, and Gwen shot one. Well, that's it. I mean, that's fair. Those are the companies. That is fair.

There are the companies that Elon runs. And then there's Gwen Shotwell who runs SpaceX. And she is, by all accounts, trusted and visionary and great. Yeah. Okay. But I just want to separate because the two achievements did, well, achievements. The one achievement and the one launch happened in the same time frame. So everyone thinks one is evidence of the other.

And they're not. So the cyber cab, which is fine. Like, people watch this event. And in real time, they were like, this is. fake. There's a guy controlling the car. I don't know if that's true or not. I do know that a prototype car running around the back lot of a movie set is a thing that we've had for a long time. Yes. But you can go to Universal Studios today and drive around in a car that appears to be driving itself. Yeah. And like a humanoid seeming robot that's being controlled by somebody

else far away. Also a thing we've had for a long time. Also a thing that they try to get people very excited about at this event. This is the thing. I'm so torn between like where on the spectrum of nothing to something this actually is. Because on the one hand, the whole idea of the cyber cab strikes me as completely ridiculous. Like a two-seater car already vastly decreases the number of people who can use it. I saw somebody point out that like, oh, great, you made a cab whose doors can't open in city traffic, which is a really excellent point. Like, this thing just doesn't make any real world sense, but neither does the cyber truck

and like that eventually shipped. So who knows? Oh, I mean, they also announced inductive charging, which doesn't exist for a car of this size yet. That's cool. I would love to have that. It's just not real. And then the math, they didn't announce any of the mathematics.

Like, how will this work? I buy one of these things for $30,000. I put it on the Robotaxi network or the Roboxi network. That one doesn't work nearly as well. And then Tesla just takes some money while this thing drives down, picking up customer. Am I liable if it crashes? Do I have to clean it up if someone pukes in it? It's that Tesla's responsibility?

What are the splits? Like, if I buy a cybercap for $30,000 and put it on the Robotaxy network, how long in a moderately busy city until that investment is paid off and I'm making a profit on it. If you don't have that chart, you actually haven't announced anything in the context of this service. Totally. Or it's a projection of that chart. Well, and that's all the stuff that is the stuff of self-driving, right? Like you said, a car that can drive you around a movie lot without appearing to have a driver.

It's actually like it's a huge technical achievement that we are actually. not near in the real world, but that is only one tiny slice of what is going on here. And Andy Hawkins wrote a great thing just basically like writing the list of things left to solve both by this whole industry and by Tesla in particular. And I think the belief from Elon Musk and Tesla has been that they can just like brute force their way through it and it'll work. And it just hasn't and it won't. And so I think, again, even if you've solved the can this thing drive safely by itself

on the road problem, which we haven't. No one has. Even if you've solved that, you've only solved one tiny slice of the, what does it take to actually roll this out in the world problem? And the cyber cab to me is just like one sort of bad idea about what that car might look like. Yeah. That's as far as I am like willing to grant it.

So two things about that. The promise for a lot of Model 3 and Model Y buyers over the years has been you'll pay the extra money for a full self-driving hardware. And then one day overnight. these things will turn into robotaxies, and they will start making you money while you sleep. This is an explicit promise that Elon Musk and Tesla have made to these buyers, prospective buyers. This is something that people have bought these cars as an investment, spending money they maybe

didn't have, waiting to pay off. It's not here yet. What version of the car will actually get support for this is contested? And when I say contested, I mean, while Elon was speaking, someone was screaming. Hardware 3 support at him. And his response was, let's not get too nuanced. Right. And then later, I think it was Franz von Holhausen, the head of design at Tesla, who was giving

an interview who said hardware 3 would be supported. What's the answer? Like, it's unclear. But if you're buying a cyber cab and you're immediately competing with thousands, if not millions of existing Model 3s, you're in a weird spot. Like, why would you make that investment? because then you're buying a less practical car. Also, presumably Tesla's going to run it down.

Right. So, again, I just think the math doesn't add up. And then the basics of like what Tesla has promised people for a long time still isn't there. Well, and there's this sense at all of those events that Tesla is still the company that has infinite demand, right? That anything they do, people will buy because it's Tesla because it's exciting and because it's cool. and to me the reaction to the event was very telling in the sense that I think Tesla has lost a lot of that shine partly because there's a lot of competition

and partly for like Elon Musk reasons but also people just don't believe Tesla anymore. There was a sense for so long that it was like, okay, don't believe the price, don't believe the ship date, but like this thing is going to happen and it's going to be awesome and that is just not how people react to this anymore. There is no benefit of the doubt that this is a good idea. I just don't see it yet anymore.

And Tesla had that going for it for so long. And it just feels gone. But anyway, the taxi thing is a good segue to our predictions. So let's just do the scoreboard here very quickly. I think, unfortunately, it's going to look very bad for me very quickly. So let's just run through this very fast and then never speak of it again. Your three predictions were won't arrive until 2027. Ding?

Yeah, nailed that one. Again, we'll see. But he said 2027, many. times. I should have said 2029. Only in certain cities. What's our ruling on that? That it, it like, again, this is one we'll see someday, but the pitch was like, you can

buy one and just have it and everything will be like, I kind of want to give you a push on that because he didn't say it is that. He didn't say it won't be that. Yeah, that's, that's a nothing. I feel very confident that that will be true. Okay. You can only like this up in one city at a time. Yeah.

No, I suspect you're right. For example, you have to build your vaporware inductive chargers first. Right. So you have to invent them, which is an important step one. You have to make sure they work at scale, a very important step two. And then you have to put them in cities. Yeah, wait. Can you explain that one to me, actually?

Because didn't Tesla do this once successfully already? And now everyone is adopting the standard that Tesla did and we're actually like headed towards a good place where all of this might work successfully. Why blow this up with a new way of charge? Oh, I thought you meant to they invent an inductive charging standard. I was like, that would be amazing. No, no, I missed it. You meant the NACC standards.

Yeah, like we have the NACS chargers. Like that is the thing that is going to enable these charging systems to work around the world in a standard way. And then Tesla is just like, never mind, we're going to try this other thing that definitely won't work. Like, why? Yeah. Well, I mean, it makes sense in the way that catching the rocket makes sense. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's an absurd idea.

Like, if I can pull up this off, it will be sick. Okay. Right. So you've got taxis. You don't want too many moving parts around the taxis. So to charge them, you don't want to roll up to a bay where a robot arm opens a door and sticks the charger into it. You just want it to roll up and start charging. Sure. So you make it work that there's inductive charging, which has been demoed by a handful of companies and a handful of controlled settings. Tesla, I think at one point demoed like motorized battery changing from the underside of the car. But there's lots of ideas on how to make like battery charging faster.

Sure. Or simpler or smoother, it require less moving cards. The problem is that Elon was also showing off mocks of like, what if we got rid of all the parking lots around the stadiums? And they were just parks. Right. And it's like, well, all the robo taxis are going to drop off the 100,000 people at the stadium. Where are they going to go to charge on these? So you just want fields of inductive charging pads?

that seems like weird. That's a weird thing to want to put somewhere. Every time somebody shows one of those, I just think of the traffic data from New York where Uber and Lyft were like, we'll get everybody off the roads. And actually what it is now is there are just like 50% more cars because it's just Uber and Lyfts driving around waiting

for somebody to get in the car. Like we actually made it worse. And yeah, if we have a bunch of robo taxis, they got to go somewhere. I once tried to explain. the concept of induced demand to my family, which is, that's the concept that if you make the highway wider, more people will take the highway. You're so fun at parties, I bet.

Well, because they were like, we should make the highway bigger. And I was like, well, there's a thing called induced demand. Like, boy, did that not make sense to anyone. And I feel like this tradeoff of, we'll put a park near Soldier Field instead of a parking lot. And then we're going to need to build a field of, like, inductive, charging pads for all the cybercabs to go to to charge while everyone's, that's, I'm just saying one city at a time. Yeah. That's your problem. Yeah. No, I think, I think that's right. So we'll,

we'll give you a push on that, but again, we're going to have to rescore this so many times. And then your third one was existing Teslas will not be able to turn into Robotaxies. And I think you're taking a loss on that way. I think this one's also a push because we don't know about Hardware 3. We don't know if it's only the very newest ones or if the hardware 3, or if the hardware 3 which has the, I mean, they all have like low resolution cameras, but we don't know which ones. So this is also just up in the air. I'm going to give you like a light loss on that one. It's like I'm taking some of your money, but not all, yeah.

I'm not taking all your money, but I'm not happy with you. Yeah, I just want me to be a little bit embarrassed. I got. Yeah. Let me do yours. Yours are worse. Hit me. Mine are worse.

You predicted that the cars would be driven by Optimus robots? It's a push. we don't know. There's two seats in the car. What you were not, what you should have predicted is the optimist robots would be driven by people.

Well, so this is where my second one really hits, which is they were going to do a demo that didn't work. And yep, they. Well, the demo worked in that the people controlling the optimist robots fooled some other people.

That's fair. And like a lot of people are like, optimist is the future. And once again, I will point out that Honda had those robots like a decade ago that could like jump and flip. Yeah. Boston Robotics.

I mean, they will sell you a legally armed robot dog today. And they are desperate for customers. They've been trying to sell themselves for a long time. Yeah. I mean, if you're in the market for a robot dog with a gun on its tail, make the call. You know, you never know what's going to. The lease deals are out of control. And then, you know, Chuckie Cheese exists.

Yeah. I mean, truly, one of the funniest things about this whole event to me was all the people like taking the videos and stuff of the robot. being like, whoa, this is so cool. And my reaction to all of these videos, which are very impressive, like these robots are holding conversations, they're doing really complicated gestures and motions,

like all kinds of really impressive stuff. One's like, I think, running around doing card tricks or something, if the robots were that good, there would be no other story. Like, it would, that would have been the event. They would have been like, oh my God, we fixed robots. Like, we did it. Wait, I need to correct myself.

Boston Dynamics was purchased. They did complete. purchase in 2021, Hyundai Motor Group bought Boston Dynamics. So that means Hyundai and Kia have a more advanced optimist than Tesla. That also makes me, there's a Hyundai dealership literally down the street from me that I would say four years ago was like kind of dingy and gross and they have now expanded to its two full blocks long in our town. And I now assume one of those is for robot dogs with guns. And I fear for my life in this neighborhood now. The headline in I-Triple-E Spectrum, which is a great magazine.

Hyundai buys Boston and then him extra nearly $1 billion, now what? Which is very good. Sounds about right. But yeah, the robots was just like if it had been even remotely close to as good as those robots appeared and they were actually automated an AI, that would have been the most incredible tech demo in ever. So I was like, no, of course there are people on the other side of this. Like, I think where it netted out was they were walking automatically and everything else was human assistant. Which again, Honda pulled off a decade again. Right.

And also, you can just roll up to a Boston Dynamics robot and kick it. And it's like, that's fine. I won't fall down. And no one was touching. Yeah. I get it. You want optimist to exist. You want to prove that it's great.

And the videos I saw, I think Marquez posted one, I saw a few others where they were just talking to the optimist robots. and they were just talking back. They're like, are you an AI? And he's like, yo, dude, I don't know. It's like, that's a guy. Yeah. You've never talked to chat cheap. That's just a guy.

All right. And then your last prediction. So that's two L's. Yeah, that's true L's. And I don't work. I'll take it. I should have gone with, it's a thing you can buy. I really should.

I was sitting there being like, this is a thing you can buy. But then I was like, that doesn't make. any sense that it would be and I should have stuck to my guns. All right. And then existing Teslas are taxis. We basically, we took the opposite side of this bet and I think it's a light L for both of us.

No, it's a light dub for me. It's a light L for you. Let's be honest here. So it's some existing Teslas, but maybe not most. It's like, you know, we're like going into halftime and the score is tied, but like I'm playing much better than you. You know what I mean? Like that's where we are. I have all the momentum, but the score is tied.

That's what's going on right now. You're an optimist robot just shuffling your way towards the bar. Exactly. Fair. I'll give it to you. Just because, you know, I want you to hit the heights so the crash is that much sweeter for. Playing the long game. That's kind of you.

So that's the robo taxi event. Oh, by the way, I just need to say this about the robo van one more time. Sorry, the what? The what? He showed a picture of it. They showed some mocks of the interior of all of the things. this is the one that will not arrive.

The way that it looks and operates and works, it's just not going to happen that way. I mean, we've seen basically this idea in roughly this design a billion times over there. Like in so many ways,

nothing about this concept is new at all. That's where my confidence comes from. Yeah. When they do, when, when Tesla or another Elon company does the bonkers thing, that no one else has tried because it's too hard.

All right. Let's get it. Catch the rocket. You know what I mean? Yeah. When you're like, oh, well, there it is again. Yeah. In every city of the future thing, this is what buses look like.

Every single one of them for 50 years. This is what they look like. And it just... Oh, I figured it out. You know what the difference between SpaceX and Tesla is? What's that? The fucking cyber truck wiper. Like, you have a grand plan to reinvent

event space flight, Gwen Shotwell will get it done. You're like, wipers. Start at the drawing board. There's no idea what to do. Yeah, are there wipers on the rockets? I feel like they probably work. Yeah, the gimbals on the thrusters. A lot of things on the rockets work. That's all doing it. And then over here, we're like, what if one big wiper, let's do it. And it's like that thing does not work at all. It's so floppy. But it's a bad wiper. I'm saying taking the solved problem and trying to re-solve it is very much the Tesla mode right now. And it's like this van is the most solved problem. How do you move six people around a city? It's called an escalate. Just do it. Just make an escalate. It's going to be fucking. I mean, we make fun of Waymo for just getting a bunch of

like Chrysler Pacificas. That's actually like it does, it does work. Yeah, actually a very funny thing. I was looking at a chart of percentage of EV sales by Carmaker and Jaguar has a

like shockingly high percentage of EV sales. Because of Waymo? Because of Waymo. That's so funny. Because Waymo buys so many EV sales. So like they're taking platforms at work and making them autonomous and it's like they're just moving along.

There are Waymo's test. on the streets of New York right now. And they're, you know, they're just adding cities and moving along and making the progress and then there's whatever this is in 2027. Right. And Tesla's whole thing is like, launch the giant thing and then work backwards from it. And that worked enough times that it gave them a lot of confidence. And I think there's very little evidence that's going to work this time or has worked

the last couple. But we should move on. We have other stuff to talk about. By the way, I think we were both one for three. Yeah. No, well, it's a push for me. Yeah. You've won.

Congratulations. It's a provisional. I'll buy you a cyber cab. There's an asterisk by this one. I'll take the 30 grand. No, I'll buy you a cyber cap. Damn it. I'll buy you a Rebovin when it comes out.

All right. There's other news. Actually, quite a lot of other news. Yeah. We should start. There's been a lot of rumors about Apple doing an October event. We're obviously running out of October. a lot of rumors about M4 Max, who knows what's going to happen.

We're waiting on Apple intelligence to hit. That feels very likely will happen this month. But again, we're running out of October. And I think they just needed to announce the new iPad mini with a new chip in it. And then they just did it. They just put out a press release and now there's a new iPad mini. Yeah, at some point I have just given up waiting for Apple to like really care about the iPad mini. and it's not that it's not a good device.

I think it's a very good device and I think the new one is probably also very good, but it is so clearly not interesting to Apple for whatever reason, right? Like there's a subset of people who really like it. The new one even is clearly not impressive. Like, it's fine. It's going to be a very good iPad Mini,

but it has last year's chip. There's a pilot somewhere that just banked the plane super hard angrily while they're listening to this. Listen, I got a lot of posts. I wrote the story and I put every pilot's favorite tablet in the deck of our story. Like, you can't own me harder than I own myself, people. But the, like, it's just a spec upgrade, right?

Which is fine. The last one of these was three years ago. And total redesign, they did a bunch of cool stuff. They squared off the edges. It got touch ID in the power button, like all good stuff. it's a really good device. This one is just purely a spec upgrade. Faster everything, faster connections, faster processors.

But to me, the thing that's the most telling is in a year where Apple upgraded the iPad Air to the M2 and the iPad Pro to the M4 and actually launched the M4 with an iPad. Like that is a, Apple does not do that stuff by accident. That is like a statement of this is what this device means in our lineup. This thing got the A17 Pro, which was in iPhones last year. Do you think they just were like, well, we got all these iPhone 15 pro parts? Jason Snell wrote a really good thing at Six Colors, basically positing that. That it's like, this is a good chip.

It's the least you need to work on Apple Intelligence. So Apple is just trying to pull people along with not quite like garbage bin parts, but like stuff it already had, right? This is the upgrade you can do without trying very hard. And it'll work. Like the, I'm sure this mini will be very good. No one I know had performance issues with the last mini. This one will do fine.

It's all going to be fine. But I every single time one of these comes out, I hold out hope that Apple is going to do something new for it. Like give me a keyboard case. Come up with a new idea about how people are going to use this thing. We got Pencil Pro support, which is nice. But the story of this is just, it is slightly worse and smaller. Slightly worse.

Yeah, it's not the M2. It's not the M4. Oh, I see. Not than before. This thing will feel old much sooner than the other iPads that came out this year. I thought you meant slightly worse in comparison to the old one. Like, it's an iPad mini, but this one will hurt you in some way. Oh, no.

Like the glasses jagged. This one, it's an iPad mini, but it pokes you once every eight minutes and you never know when. No, you mean in comparison to the rest of the iPads. In comparison to the rest of the iPads, right? And like the story, what you would want really is basically to have this one be just as good and slightly smaller, right? Like, this is what people want from the iPhone mini. Like, give me one that is just as good, but slightly smaller.

And Apple is resolutely not doing that with any of its products. I wonder, I wonder if there's thermal issues with sticking an M-series chip in a platform. It's possible. Who knows? The thing that gets me, I believe it was Christopher Mims, your old colleague from the journal, who I think his post was just make it a phone. If you just called this the iPhone Ultra Plus Macs, people would buy it because people love big phones. And it's so funny because even if you wanted to use an iPad mini as your phone, you could not

because it doesn't run iPhone apps. Right. Well, there is a iPad OS is like in this weird tweener zone. There is a real like, what if I had an iPad and an Apple watch and that was my computing setup that I think could in theory be very compelling in the way that you're describing. But Apple just won't do that. You're right. If this was a giant iPhone, I think it was.

would actually be more interesting as a device than as a tiny iPad. Yeah, but it's like, you know what? It doesn't run Instagram. Right. Indefensibly so. It just doesn't run Instagram. Yeah. And it's not so much bigger than my iPhone 16 max.

Yeah. Well, which is, I think, the strange thing, it's at this point, especially as the phones have just continued to get bigger. I mean, the 16 Pro Max is 6.9 inches right now. the iPad Mini is 8.3 inches, which is a difference, but it's not that huge a difference. Like, the only main user interface thing is, A, you can't run iPhone apps, and B, you don't get the pencil support on the iPhone, right?

So that's the train. No, I'm saying the picture, Apple's own press picture of the Mini, is a hand holding it like a phone like this. Yeah. And like the only difference is, the fingers are out. That's a huge hand. I have a big hand.

I'm like, that is a big hand. We're going to get there. It's going to happen one day. And then the ghost of Steve Jobs is going to be very upset with everyone. I was looking at my old iPhone 5, which was like the biggest he would let it get. And he was like,

your thumb has to hit the opposite. iPad mini as a phone. Those are the days. That's the future. All right. Can you explain this next one to me? Because I don't understand what's going on. I was really hoping you.

AMD, Intel and a bunch of tech companies formed an alliance. It's called the X-86 advisory group, Microsoft, Google, meta, Lenovo, and then truly

Intel and AMD, which are ferocious rivals. They formed the X-86 ecosystem advisory group. Pat Gelsinger announced it on stage at Lenovo's Tech World 2024 conference,

the hottest conference of the year. And Gelsinger, said X-80s said, we are alive and well. Yeah, my We're Alive and Well t-shirt is answering a lot of questions raised by my We're Al-Lam-Wel. The only

thing I can read into this is just pure existential fear from these companies, right? Of arm. Of arm. Yeah. And I think, frankly, with good reason, Apple has been sort of has completed its transition

to its own arm-based silicon stuff and is just lapping everybody else in like raw sort of everyday device performance. It is just crushing the competition. Qualcomm, I think for like a decade, made promises that it couldn't keep about its arm performance and how it was going to bring

all the efficiency of mobile and all the power of desktops and put that together and it was going to be magic. And I think Intel and AMD and others watched Qualcomm sort of try and fail to do that and we're like, okay, well, they'll never get there.

It's not going to happen. And I think you could argue with relative success that Qualcomm is there now, and I think it's very clear that Qualcomm is going to get there, right? Whether or not you believe it's a real X-86 competitor now with the Snapdragon Elite and all that stuff in the new Copilot Plus PC and all that stuff, it's either there or it's close. And I think that leap was so big

that all of these other companies is just panicked. I mean, and Intel is obviously like sort of collapsing in on itself like a dying star in so many ways right now.

And AMD is, I think, in a slightly less precarious position. Yeah, but it also would very much like to not have Qualcomm become a dominant player.

And the whole chip industry has just turned, right? Like you have what Apple's doing, you have what Nvidia is doing and you have what Qualcomm is doing. And all these other chip makers are just out there being like, oh my God,

This happened so much faster than we expected. Yeah. I just, I don't know how to read it other than that. On the AI side of things. So actually, I read this as like a data center announcement of all of the things. Interesting. Even though it's a Lenovo conference, X-86 is still doing well in data centers. Sure.

And then, you know, Nvidia, I think, gets a lot of the shine for AI because it's selling so many of its GPUs to AI companies. But like, you know, X-86 processors outperform the N-series in a bunch of, of AI tasks. AMD has a pretty healthy business selling GPUs. There's just a whole thing there, right? Where like you, if that is the big market, you might as well put together the big competitor to Nvidia and say like, here's your other path because all the big companies would like not to be locked into Nvidia.

I don't know about consumer PCs at all. Like I truly don't. I guess they were on stage of the Lenovo event, but they weren't like waving laptops around. That's true. And so, yeah, I just, it's weird. And it's weird that Microsoft is like co-pilot plus PCs and mostly arm chips. And then also over here on this other platform that we are tied to forever. Right.

Well, and I think with a lot of that stuff, there is the arm advancement has just happened so fast. While I think X86, particularly with Intel, has just been like stuck in the mud for a long time. That Intel has kind of gone version after version of its chip. without sort of meaningful progress on some of the stuff that people really care about. And I think in theory, the idea of banding together on this is like, okay, we can sort of rising tide lifts all boats here by meshing together some of the work these companies are doing and saying, okay, we're all going to build better chips, which is actually going to benefit all of us instead of just, you know, sort of running in parallel and all trying to reinvent the wheel on our own, which I think is a good strategy. I just think they are way too late in starting this move.

Let me just read you the list here to support my data center claim. Broadcom, Dell, Google, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, as well as HP. The other one. Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. And then, just for fun, Linus Torvalds and Tim Sweetie. Sure. You know, guys, those are all people that run try and serve. I mean, the picture at the top of the press release is a data center.

Like, it's not unclear what they're doing here. But no, I think you're right. And I think it's, that's all fine, right? Like, many of these companies have big businesses. Like, did you mention Google is in this? And it's because of Google Cloud, right? Like, we run data centers. We kind of need this to work because otherwise we're hosed paying Nvidia every penny we have.

But it's funny because all those companies are also building their own chips in the side. Yeah. Right? Microsoft is building its own chips. They have a lot to say. If you're Microsoft and you want Arm on Windows to work, you get to walk into Qualcomm's office and be like, do what we want. You're it. Yeah. Or we're going back to Intel, which someone has to tell them what to do. So you just see it's...

Google's building TPUs. Like, this is, yeah, everybody is on this. Well, we'll see. I just think something is happening in the world of X86 chips. and this is one of those things. That's what I got for you right now. And I will say that if you are, if you're ever in position to give a keynote

and you're like, make the slide say we are alive and well, just take a beat. Just really, just really think about what that means to everyone. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, like, it's them trying to convince the world. Alison Johnson, who wrote the story,

made the point that this whole thing might have just been to convince investors that, like, yes, we are taking arm seriously. Might have been true. Really would have been a super good idea to do this in like 2017. What if you face down

the ferocious competitive monster of Nvidia with a committee that works as well as the USB and imposterousar storm? Yeah. It's going to be awesome. Give leather jackets to everyone

in the committee. It's game over. A couple more bits of gadget news. Sonos announced a new Arc Ultra Soundbar and sub four. two pieces here, I would say. One, I think they've decided the app is good enough again.

Like, they had paused new releases because the app was so broken, but they, you know, we've talked about this. They've, like, released their plan to fix it. They've mostly fixed it. They're doing the public Trello board with the future updates to come, which is incredible. You know, they're Eddie Lazarus in their C-suite is he has given his media tour about what he found in his report, which was we shouldn't have released a shitty app. Shocking revolution.

But I think they think they're fine. They've gotten to where they need to be, and it's time to start releasing products again. So it's a $1,000 ARC ultra. It's more powerful than the regular ARC. And it's got new transducers from a company called M-A-Y-H-T. I think it's mate, yeah. So I bought this company in 2022.

They're like specialized speakers, basically. They call it sound motion. and the quote is, one of the most significant breakthroughs in audio engineering in nearly 100 years that unlocks greater clarity, depth, and balance

than ever before possible in the sound bar of the sleek. 7-286 midwifers, a built-in wuffer, and you get 9-14 from all from the one sound bar. What do we know about sound motion? I do feel like Sonos is not

typically prone to grandiose lies about its own sound quality. So I'm more, inclined than a lot of companies to believe them when they say this is a big deal. But I also, it just seems like a lot of words. It's definitely a lot of audio processing. Okay. So I tested the original arc a long time ago, and I tested it against my own 514,

with actual speakers in the ceiling. And I thought the arc did a great job, actually. But it was obviously more processed. Yeah. That was the tradeoff. Like very clearly the tradeoff was, boy, there's not as much stuff happening around me when I use my actual system versus the arc. And the arc is like, boy, there's a lot of stuff happening around you. And boy, it just sounds like more audio processing is occurring to make it seem like a bunch of stuff is happening all around you.

I've never been happy with how these things sound for music. I just think music and movies are two different things. Yeah. So I haven't heard this yet. I'm excited to hear it. I know Chris Welch is excited to review it. But, you know, the notable thing is we're getting to the place where 914 out of a soundbar is possible for $1,000, which is, if all that works, that is incredible. That is a system that would, you know, even if you buy cheap speakers, a receiver that can support 914, like you're out for thousands of dollars.

And then you've got to put them on the ceiling. To do it in a soundbar for a thousand bucks is pretty cool. Well, and that's, I think that's been Sonos' thing with soundbars for a minute now. Even what you're describing about the ace, right? It's like it's almost as good or like very good, if not as good, with essentially none of the effort. Like, it's, and that's, I think, the whole pitch of sound bars in general. I have become a big believer in sound bars as somebody who is like just not going to put nine speakers in my house. It's just not going to happen.

I'd love to, but it's not going to happen. But I think the idea that if you can use this processing to get even most of the way there with just a thing I plant in front of my television, that's pretty powerful. Like I think that goes a really long way for an awful lot of people. I just want to clear, 914 is not 9 speakers. It's 13. You're right. I apologize.

And that's bonkers. Like I have a... I'll put in 9. I'm not putting in 13. Right. I have a 514 system, which is 9. And that's a lot of speakers. Like...

Yeah. arguably too many. 914 out of a soundbar is legitimately kind of cool. If it works. So I'm excited for that. By the way, the quote from CEO Patrick Spence

is we have reached a level of quality in the app that gives us the confidence to launch our extraordinary new products. They have 90% of the previous apps features with the fourth coming update and more are on the way. I think that's all fine. I also think at some point

if you're Sonos, you just have to start shipping stuff. Like you can, you can only sort of sit there and apologize so many times. And eventually you have to ship new things and it's about to be the holidays. And I think like, like, we just got to the point where they're like, well, it is what it is. We're just going to ship the thing, which I think is fine, right? Like, how, I don't know how much longer are they're supposed to sit and sort of beat themselves up about the very bad app that they shipped. Yeah.

I'm dying to listen to this thing. I'm dying to review it. I will say one of the, if you have a regular sort of 5.1 system, the, the, the, the, biggest most noticeable upgrade is front height. Oh, interesting. You have your three speakers in front of you. The most immediate upgrade is not over your head. It's in front of you and up.

Because your ears are pointed to the front. Some basic biology. So you put the two speakers above your other speakers and things are coming at you from above there. That's just a huge upgrade. If you can figure out how to get that upgrade today, you should do it. But a soundbar or even the speakers you put on top of your speakers, are sort of necessarily reflecting from the middle

because they can't make the sound come from straight up. So that's always the thing I'm curious about. We'll see, revolutionary new transducers, David. Listen, I still listen to the audio out of my crappy TCL Roku TV. So I am looking forward to the day that one of these feels worth buying. I have my old, like, 5-1 system from college, like sitting in storage.

I'm just going to drive to your house. It's not great. Listen, every time I leave for work, I come home and Anna has like rearranged one room in our house. I think next time she leaves, you should come over and we'll just set up speakers everywhere. It'll be awesome. All right. Last one. It's a 4K N64 from Analogue.

I'm so excited about this thing. So this thing has been a year in the making, maybe. I think like we've been getting teases about this for an incredibly long time. It's called the Analog 3D. It just looks like a Nintendo 64. Actually, the thing kind of looks like a Sega Genentee. but it'll play 64 cartridges. It has a controller. As somebody who grew up with the N64, like the way I would date my childhood is the Nintendo 64. I'm so excited about this thing.

And analog does a really great job of emulating stuff and letting you play old cartridges with these things. I have every confidence that this thing is actually going to work really well. The N64 is notoriously hard to emulate, and analog seems to feel very good about having pulled it off, which I'm excited about. They change the controller to not have the weird third thing in the middle, which I think is. Which is a bummer, to be honest. Like, I love the stupid controller. It never made any sense because you only ever held the middle one and the right one.

Yeah. Because you're not, you don't have three hands. But it does still have the ports on the front for plugging in an N64 controller, which I love. I don't know if it actually even works, but just as the way it looks, I'm into it. Let me ask you a really dumb question. This only takes cartridges or you can play off cards, like SD cards. I think it only takes cartridges. So no, it takes, it has two USB ports and an SD card slot.

So you'll, in theory, you'll be able to put other stuff onto it. But the thing is, and I wonder how true this is. I think there are probably a lot of people out there who still have a box full of N64 cartridges. I mean, I intend to only play on my legally acquired N64 cartridges. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm going to dump them as I always do. and always have, which is how I play Golden Night now. It's totally fine.

I bought one of those Amber Nick Gameboys. The one that just ships with like 6,000 games on it from Amazon. Great. And we have friends over. And someone was like, what's this? And the other, just without missing a beat. They're like, it's a Game Boy. And I was like, well, that's a whole.

That's a PhD thesis in trademarking French. All right. We got to take a break. We're already over. We got to take a break. We'll be back with Panos Panay. this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just

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Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week.

With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn. dot com slash track terms and conditions apply all right we're back so amazon introduced new kindles this week david you were at the event i was which very notably was the first event at amazon for panos pennay who virtual house listeners almost certainly remember from his time at microsoft when he ran windows and surface how was that event really interesting so i think they did it in a very unusual way it was

like a, it was an embargoed event. So the whole existence of the thing was not public. It was basically just like a media briefing, but they framed it in his event and and Panoz, like, got up on stage and gave a whole speech. Very clearly what's going on is whenever they do a big public thing, it is going to have to be the future of Alexa. But they wanted to like give the Kindle its moment, right? And they launched four Kindles at once, which I think has never happened in the history of

the Kindle, that it was like, it's a full line reset. and it was fun. Like, this team loves Kindles. I always forget how many people love Kindles. Like, the traffic to our website on the day at launch suggests that a lot of people really care about Kindles. And the team has been making stuff. Pannos has been there for like almost exactly a year and has done a lot of stuff with

the Kindle team since he's been there. So it was cool to actually just get to like live in Kindle universe for a minute. Normally they just like update the website and it's like, here's some new Kindles. And this was like, this was much bigger. that. So what are the new ones? So there's four. I'll go from cheapest to most expensive. So the cheapest is just the regular Kindle, which has some, you know, spec improvements. It's a little brighter. It comes in a really cool new matcha color that I like a lot. But it's still just the base Kindle. The new paperwhite has a bigger screen, brighter screen, faster processing. They like redesigned it a little bit.

It has some really nice, like, vibrant colors. One thing I heard a bunch from folks at Amazon was the whole sort of book talk movement and the thing where people are like bedazzling their Kindles has really changed the way they think about the device so they're leaning into sort of making it more fun. The paperweight is the Kindle, right? In like a very real way, it is the biggest, most important Kindle in the lineup.

New one seems to be very good. There's the Kindle Scribe, which is the biggest one that you can take notes on. They made lots of changes to that, including some Gen A.I. stuff where you can write your notes and then have the scribe either summarize them or just like neatly format them and fix your handwriting

so you can share them and find them more easily. But that's still the scribe. And then the big announcement was the Kindle Color Soft, which is the first color Kindle. And basically it's a paperwhite with a color display. And they've done some really interesting like display stack work to make that work. It's very expensive, but it is like the one that they were like,

this is sort of the moment for a new Kindle. looks really great. You look at color and it's like, what do I need from color in a reading device? But then just looking at it on a table, seeing the book cover, and now it's in color, it's just instantly like,

oh, this is great. Yeah. I played with the new paper right you had in the office, and it's very fast. Super fast. Yeah. It's a good device.

The only other thing I'll say is I asked back if she wanted to call her Kindle and she just looked at me and said, stop trying to buy me Kindles. This is the problem. You're in here. We're going to talk about it right now with Pano's Penae.

And once we're done with that, we're going to go to an ad and we'll be back with the lighting round. Here's Kindles with Pannes Pannes Penae. Welcome to the Vergecast. It's going on, guys. Have you been on the Vurchase before? Yeah. Okay.

But not in your current iteration. New Pannos. Do you feel like a different person? I don't know. You guys come right out swinging. Unbelievable. We got to do this for 30 minutes. Yeah.

We're just getting started. We got a lot to do. So. I feel like... It's good to see you guys. It's good to see you guys. We've got a lot of news to talk about. You launched several thousand new Kindles that we have to talk about.

It is the most... It is the most Kindles been launched, I think, in history of kingdom. Which is kind of fascinating. And it's part of what we should talk about. But the... Let's just start with you. I think our audience knows you well over the years. You've launched a lot of things.

You've been a product guy for a really long time. Why did you go to Amazon? Tell us the Pana's transition. The audience does know, but you were at Microsoft for the longest time. You did all the surface. stuff there. And then it was kind of a surprise, right? You left Microsoft to go to Amazon. That was a surprise. I think people are very curious. Why the move? I feel like you had a ring camera and you were maybe had a bug and you're like, I'm going to Amazon. There were a few details I wanted to

get. Is it enough of this? Enough. Fix this right now. You know what? I'm just going to go somewhere new to fix it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it was exactly that. But there is a there's a little bit, there's a little bit to that, you know, and you think about the array of products between ring, blink, Euro, fire TV, fire tablets, Alexa, Echo, Kindle, satellites, Zooks. Like, you just look at that and you go, what could you do when this technological pipe, you know,

of AI that's coming, which eventually ends up being a red thread between all these things, how they all connect and you can change people's lives? Like, yeah, it's not a bug. It's just awesome. Like awesome. And so, you know, it energized me. Plus, you know, it's like another chapter is a great thing.

It's a cool thing. Yeah. Is there an underlying AI bet underneath all of that? Like when you came in, because I think you were making this move right kind of at the beginning of the holy crap AI is going to change everything. Yeah. moment. And we've been talking to people now for, you know, two years who are like everything that you can see or touch or imagine. It's a platform shift. Right. It's a platform shift. Like, is that, is that? It's a real one, too. Like, it's very real. Yeah, it's 100% that. And so when you ask

the question, like, why did you go to Amazon? Like, first, it's an amazing company. Um, second, the values are crazy cool, you know. But third. Um, wow. Like, that shift is real. And I think what you can do, especially in the consumer space, what you can do for people in their everyday lives is off the charts. So if you combine it, you know, it gets a pretty easy answer. Not simple, you know, challenging as a human, you know, emotional and on every way. No question.

Let me just ask you this. You said there, you named all the things. Zooks is the autonomous taxis. Kiper robo-taxies. about it that way. Kuiper is the satellites. What is the connection between Kindle and the satellites? You don't need to stretch.

You don't need to stretch everything and pull them together. That's not the goal. Okay. It's just how you impact people's lives is different in those things. Okay. I was just wanting to getting broadband to everybody versus, and let's just think about the impact that has wrong people. Like, and for me, like it's like a dream.

You have, you know, helping people read, learn, create. That's one side. on a Kindle and so game-changing for life to make sure, you know, you're reading, learning, getting into a book, disappearing into it. That's one. That's one way to think about. It's just positive everywhere. And then satellites are distributing broadband to the world where everybody needs it.

Like, same. Like, impact. Both are massive, but very different ways. Very different ways. One of the things that could connect a bunch of these products is Alexa, obviously. You're talking about AI. Yeah. The opportunity for Alexa to be a smarter kind of AI product.

I think a lot of people can see it. Yeah. Is that happening? You working on that? Yeah. We are working on it. You know, I'm not necessarily here to talk about it. I think I'll be back soon to talk about it.

So I'm another way to say it. I mean, if you'll have me back this. We'll see because so far I'm frustrated with both of you. So we'll see how this goes, like how it ends. No, that's right. It'll stay like that. Yeah, that's what we keep doing here. We're going to keep this carefully caliby.

Yeah, it goes fine. Like, right at should I leave? Yeah, like just start right away. I'm sorry. Why did you go to things up? Like what? Come on. I mean, you were the face of products people love for a long time.

I mean, you just had an event. David, I think you were at the Kindle launch event, and I got an immediate text from David that's like, I missed a Panos-Pennai presentation. Did you miss him? I really did. I sent him that text. You did. Yeah.

Yeah. It was a little bit, it was less of a tech presentation yesterday. Yeah. A little bit different. Yeah. And I just, that was Microsoft also has a big platform and has a lot of products so you can connect in different kinds of narratives. You were great at that.

I was just curious. Like the jump from one big company's ecosystem to another big company's ecosystem trying to pull them together. It seems like the same challenge, but it sounds very much like you think of the opportunities as different. They're very different. You know, they are very different. And the way I look at it, Amazon, like the amount of consumers you connect around the world with the technology shift, you know, it seems like buzzword at this point to say AI. I can't. It's so hard for me to do it.

with AI, what we're going to be able to do with Alexa just to connect people. I'm not talking about it in detail today, but man, this is going to be transformative and how it connects throughout your life with all the devices that we just talked about, all the brands that are coming together, both in the home and outside of the home. It's just, it's off the, it's so, it's so energizing. There's another side to it too, though. Like, the leadership principles at Amazon are surreal. they're fully aligned with the way I love running teams, you know, connecting people and what it means to focus on a customer.

All right. Well, before this becomes a full decoder episode that you're going to do at some point, I have lots of questions about leadership principles that you guys will get to some other time. Let's talk about leadership principles all day. Those are, they're just, they're awesome. But if you're not going to let me. That's the other show. That's the other show. There's time for that.

We'll do that. We'll do that somewhere else. But Kindles. So I'm fascinated by just the scope of this. Like you said, it was four Kindles at once, which I think Amazon has never, ever done. And I feel like that's either like an accident of technological development or like a very much on purpose Kindles were so back kind of moment. Which one of those things is?

I mean, seriously, come on. It's not going to be an accident, as you know. Kindles, one of these products that kind of transcended other products in a sense of it's a brand and it's a thing and it's identified as e-readers. It's all about reading. All this connection to it is so powerful, but it all reflects back on the people making it. I joined Amazon about a year ago. One of the first couple of meetings I had was on Kindle.

And then I was inspired to see, like, where are we at? And you had a team with a bunch of stuff in the vault, basically. Like, we're close, we're thinking, what do you think, what do you think? And we sat down, we looked at it all. True story, you know, on the ColorSoft. we looked at and I said if the color is great let's not compromise any experience

there are some limitations with the ink it's challenging you know there's flashing other small challenges and how bright it'll be and you always compare it to an OLED and what that means and you have this team that's just obsessed about the detail and which of course is near and dear to my heart and so about a year ago you know we looked at the full lineup and we made the investment

that said let's get after these products let's launch them all reading has momentum literally i mean the kindle brand product line is growing um and there's a whole new generation of readers i think what was the stat that 60% of people who bought a kindle last year were first time kindle buyer first time i find that that was so surprising to me so awesome because you also have this up into the right reading trend and so um you're when you put those two things together, it basically says people who have always read are still reading and there's a whole new cohort coming in reading. And it's happening right now. I love it because you have Gen Z and

millennials who are diving into the power of like disappearing into a book. And if you on, you know, TikTok, you'll find book talk and there's a lot of energy. People are bedazzling. There are Kindles right now. That's that's always a signal or a sign that's cool. But a year ago when we sat in a room, You mean, these are becoming very personal, passionate. That's why I should close that. But a year ago when we sat in that room, yeah, it was very, let me answer the question, super conscious. Like, next year, Kindle will be the year of Kindle, let's go.

We'll bring color. We'll bring it where it belongs. We'll bring a new level of ink to writing. And then we'll refresh the products that, you know, are just what you would call products that people already love. I'm super fascinated by that moment because I feel like the Kindles are really unusual kind of device in that it just won so long ago that there has been, I think you can perceive Kindle as both like a giant success and as kind of a slow moving product line over time. There was a sense of like

we did the thing, right? Like 10 years ago, just here's the paper white. It's great. You're never going to buy another one again because you're not going to have to. And in a certain way, it was like victory for the Kindle, right? And so I think there were people who were like, that's a great thing. But on the other hand, also, there's other stuff happening. There are other companies out there doing interesting things with e-ink and building new kinds of things. We have people who, like, import weird e-ink devices from China just to, like, try what it looks like to run Android on them.

Like, there's a whole... David's talking about himself. I am talking about myself. My book's Palma is just outside of this room, and I have a lot of questions for you about it. Bring it in here. Let me evaluate it. Let's do that off camera.

Fair enough. Take a look. I'll help you. But I'm curious, like, in that moment. you're like, okay, the Kindle is, in most ways, a gigantic success for what it is, right? Like, it won the thing it was trying to win. How do we move this along? Strikes me as kind of a complicated question.

And it also feels like, especially with something like The Scribe, you have given the Kindle a new job to do for the first time in a really long time. Yeah, but a very focused job. Okay. A very focused job. And I think that's part of what Kindle is. Like, Kendall's all about reading, and now it's about reading and writing, and it's that simple. These are both very innate behaviors in humans And just stay that focus

Distraction free Create while you write Create while you read These are big things for me For the team I'm not sure how to think about it other than When you say it I go Kindle is a fantastic brand

I don't think it's even near its peak Okay Not even close I mean not even close Kindle's also very humble brand I mean maybe that's why you say Oh it had its day No, it's, it's so meaningful to be.

That's where I call it a humble brand. So means a lot to people. For sure. It's made a difference in their lives and still does. But here's a great example. Like, if you had a paper white from four years ago, I mean, you'd love that paperwhite. You do. Yeah.

People love their Kindles. Like love. Yeah. But I think this would, like, my wife loves her Kindle. Yeah. I'm like, do you want a new one? And her answer is basically, why? Right.

Yeah. And on the one hand, you can read that is huge success, but also. Absolutely. It's rad. Like, come on. If people are reading, let's take it. That's a win. And why it means it's a robust and meaningful device and it's doing the job it was meant to do.

However, as an example, I'll challenge, like, do this for me. Go hander the new paperweight. I think if I hander the color one, then we'll have a different conversation. Try both. Yeah. Try both. I think color changes the emotion. Buy two Kindles.

I'm understanding by... Yeah, keep buying Kindles. Can I ask you actually a different variation on that question? Because I think the answer to, I think what you will say will come on the answer to this question. I look at, yeah, I don't think David actually asked a question. I think you just made a bunch of statements there. David has challenged me. The question is, does Kendall have a lot of competition?

And is there an ecosystem of things, other devices using like e-ing screens to drive that technology forward? Because there hasn't been a lot of action, like OLED displays. There's a lot of action in OLED displays. That technology is relentlessly moving forward and you can build new kinds of products around whatever those displays can do. Kindle is like, it's the main product in its category. Do you think it has a bunch of competition

that drives it forward? Do you think that the underlying ecosystem? I think competition is always a great thing. You have to start there, I think. It's always been, it always will be, like, just makes everybody better. It's got to be a good thing. But I would also say, like, yeah, I don't think, you know, the tech is not done. It's not even close. I think there's another level that comes and it's actually purposeful.

I've had several these arguments in the past, but, you know, LCDs have its purpose, OLED has its purpose, that line blurs quite a bit, you know, where the, what that delta might be, what the purpose is between each. And so, it's super close. But when you get down to ink displays

and just the softer feel, softer on the eyes, what you're getting from it, and there is something about it that is just, is romantic. it will they'll stay that delta's critical you know this is for these are noisier this is simple but that simplicity doesn't mean there is an innovation to be had there's a ton of it left you know and you start you can start getting into color you can start getting into ink you can start

getting into speeds all of it is important but it doesn't need Nilai when you're making products You don't need these massive leaps to change people's lives. Sometimes it's like the most subtle difference has the, it's like just massive impact. So let's say, let's go back to, let's just go back to reading. We'll use your wife as the example, since you put it on the table. She loves her paper white. Yeah. Is that right?

Hand her the new paper white. Color is a leap. You know, there's a different level of emotion. So it's easy to understand. hey, this is the book, this is how the author intends you to see the cover, or you like reading comics, or take Trevor's new book or whatever, it's a color book, you just, you know, read through it. It's very cool.

But if you take it just to its most simple level, and you handle the new paperwhite and just have her use it, then you'll experience something. It's just back to this point of it's a very subtle change. It's a massive change, really technically, but it's a subtle change to the user, which is basically speed of page. terms? It's the first thing I noticed when I picked up the one David has. It doesn't, it's crazy.

You hand somebody who had a four-year-old paperweight, the new one. First, they're like, I don't need it. And then they turn a page and they're like, don't touch this. It is mine. Yeah, I believe it. The emotion is, it's not because there was color. It's not because it's huge leap. It's not because you saw it. It's subtle, but you feel it. And when you feel it, you know this, like, it's so critical. Now all of a sudden it's like, this is like, this feel better. And while it's a massive technology shift in the product itself under the covers, and in many ways, it's just totally different display stack. But you're now in this place of, wow, the user just felt it. And I think, I don't think she gives it back. Yeah. Especially because

all your books are there, your content came with you. You didn't lose anything. You're not starting over. It's very seamless. And so now you're just back into the book you're in. Now it's just faster. And it's not like people are going to read faster. You just feel better. And so when you're reading and you feel great, you read, you just, it's better. Well, it goes back to what's so interesting about the Kindle as a product for me is that, like, from the very beginning, the Kindle was always sort of not about itself. Like, the less you spent thinking about your Kindle, the more you... It's like the truth in a product that disappears into the background. No, hold on. I'm just going to disagree with David. That first Kindle really wanted you to think about it. It did. That's fair. That thing was like,

That's remarkable. It had a joystick. It was a whole thing was great. It was a lot going on. It was a lot of going on. It arrived to after that. It was brilliant. First one was a little out of control.

Stick to the facts. Physical keyboard was sick. Stick to the facts, man. Keyboard was awesome. All right, fair enough. Once like split keyboards are one of my favorite things on the play. Once somebody other than Jeff was in charge of the Kindle design, it hit a point where, and, you know, we heard this from people for a decade. the goal is pen and paper, right?

Like, that is, that was the North Star of like it should feel like that. It should crumple like that. It should have all the properties of a thing that you don't think about or worry about as technology. And that's, I think, a good and admirable goal in a lot of ways, but also makes building the product really hard. Because you're like, okay, every cool thing we build calls more attention to this device designed to not call attention to itself. And it's like, if the goal is to just get people reading, anything that you do that, isn't open your book faster and turn the pages faster is both an upgrade and a downgrade in the experience. And that just makes me as a really complicated tension to sort through with a device

like this. Yeah. Here's what it comes down to. Since people love the product so much, you just have to listen to what they love. Like, they love it. Which is different than listening to what they're asking for. Correct. Listen to what they love. And, you know, with paperway, just listen. And at end of the day it is. They don't, this isn't about thinking about the Kindle, it's about thinking about what they're reading and disappearing into it. And then you start getting into the nuance, like, so what do you love? Like, I just like the way it feels. Like the way, how much ways. I like what I can lean in any posture. I like that I can lay by the beach. I like that I could spill my coffee on it. Like they don't say those words, but you start listening. Like, I don't know, but one time I spilled

my coffee and then I just wiped it and I kept reading and I'm like, so you like waterproof. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm laying at the beach. I'm laying at the beach. And I'm laying at the beach, like you know that we test it with salt water. You know that you can drop this thing in the pool. Like, you don't mean I know it, but that's what you love where you can do it. And now, but the real trick is the comfort that the product brings when you're reading, so it's not in your way and then it disappears. Take the new paperwhite. Like the screen just got subtly bigger. It's up to seven inches now, but the footprint of the device just barely grew, which means you still have that perfect center of gravity when you're holding it. You still don't think about the weight. It feels like a feather,

when you're holding it and reading it disappears lighter than a book. And you're like, you get to this point of, you've got, you know, teams given the user more real estate, subtle back to one of those things. And now you just, you see more. Very simple. The page is turning faster. Feels pretty good.

And, but you haven't taken away anything they love. You just added to it. And I think critical. But it is a product that I think disappears into the background. Sans 17 years ago. I'm not going to comment. Bring back the transflective scroll bar on the side of the display. Let's go.

I don't know. I'm not exactly sure, but it's all about reading and it works. It works really well now. So there's two parts of the Kindle. David mentioned the Bukes Palmer, which I believe he caused the highest spike in their sales ever. People like that device, they like other e-ing devices because of what you're talking about, right? Younger people especially know that their phones are distracting. They're drawn to a cheaper e-ink device that offers a more focused.

experience or just a black and white experience to cut down on distraction and noise. There's a dumb phone move in out in the world. There's this idea that we should just not use our phones for everything. I see that. The Hama is a fine piece of hardware. It's like a commodity e-ink screen. The Kindle is like integrated, right? It's hardware software.

There's a service behind it. When I hear people complain the most about the Kindle, it's I'm locked into the Kindle ecosystem. I can't go to other bookstores. PDF on this device is messy. it's hard. And there's not like an app store for Kindles to let you extend the capabilities of the device.

There is a little bit of a back and forth there, right? Where they love this device. It offers one very singular experience that might bring people into an ecosystem. They might love it. And then to make it do all the rest of things you might want to do, like The Scribe, you have to let it go be a computer.

You got to let it be a writing device. Okay. You got to let it be a writing device. I think it's a very slippery slope, though. Like once you try and get kind of too cute with features or go too far, you start getting away from what we really want, which is the analogous moving from the analog to the digital and just writing on paper. It's very dangerous, you know, once you start introducing more.

By the way, you can. It's why, like, we added a couple of Gen AI features to it. But two, very simple. We have a list that we have such a long list. I think I was telling David yesterday, like the amount of features we could. Yeah. But I don't think it's right to confuse this scenario. If you can create some ands, great, but the end of the day, what you need is fundamentally, put your pen down and start writing.

And as if it was paper. And we also introduced writing on a book, as if you were writing on a book. And so that translation is also challenging, but I think we're getting pretty, I think we're there. I think we're close. But you're a unique person to talk about this with because if I was like, who knows the most about running a full operating system with a pen on a piece of custom hardware? I got to find that person. And then it's like, and then you've got this other thing way at the other end of the spectrum where like you can write on a book. Yeah.

Those experiences are kind of headed towards each other. A little bit. I mean. Or the, at least with the Kindle scribe, the more you add capability to it to do anything else, Even if the capability is just as simple as you can access PDFs and write on them and get your notes out, well, now you're like, here's the file system. Which you can, which can right now. Right.

But it's still like within the Kindle world. Absolutely. There's still a bunch of abstractions there. And the feeling you're not going to get the extra distractions. There's nothing better than when you go to attach a file to an email and you're like, oh, but let me check the web right now. Oh, let me see. I'm reading about the verge. Oh, let's see.

And that's my goal, actually. How do I get the version of the Kindle's right? But I think that's... But all the way to a surface with a pen. Yeah. Right? You're on the same spectrum. Somewhere between a device that exists only for reading books and nothing else and...

A computer like a full computer. And Windows. Purpose built matters. Let me just say that. That's what you're saying. It does, man. It does. Do you buy that for Kindle specifically?

Specifically for Kind of. Like, be careful. Like, this is one of the beautiful things. Like, there's so many different things that can come together and make magic. don't get me wrong. And how they come together makes a difference. I agree. But specifically in this space,

like, of course, like don't, of course you can, you should be able to write on your iPad or a PC or a surface or whatever it is. Of course you should. Of course. You know, there's things to accomplish and things to do. There might be a job to be done. This is purpose driven. You don't need your paper to browse the web.

You just don't. As a matter of fact, when you're writing, that's what you need to be doing sometimes, if not all the time. When I'm in a meeting, I take all my notes on my scribe now. It can't imagine trying to do it on. It just don't. It's either that or a notebook. Yeah. But it's definitely not a full functioning computer because it just distracts me right out.

So that part where you take all your notes on the scribe. Yeah. And then. I also do all my morning writing. on the scribe. It's why we brought this summarized feature together. So that's got to go out, right?

I mean, this is the service aspect of it. The scribe is running some Kindle operating system. It's running some set of Gen. AI features that helps you summarize and takes the notes out. Those go up to a cloud service. Yep.

Encrypted, secure, and sends it back. And then they land as text that you can use anywhere else. Yeah. So you, let's say in this case, in the summarized feature, the genii feature, you can, I have, I have,

I don't know, so many notebooks now. But they're named by people, they're named by products, they're named by meetings. You know, they're also, I have my morning notes and generally it falls into one of those buckets unless there's a creation bucket or an invention bucket. You know, I've got a few different ways I laid out. But let's say there's 20 pages in a book, one of my notebooks. Right? Those 20 pages of notes, that's a lot.

And by the way, there's something emotional about writing out because there's recall. I remember I wrote this note right here on this piece of paper. I know how I wrote it. I know why I wrote it. But once you send this to the cloud, my 20 pages, it's going to summarize all 20, send it back into a very simple format. Yeah, I think OCR, handwriting recognition. Sure. Take it, look at the 20 pages, summarize, bring it back in kind of a beautification form, like pick the font you want to put it in. We got a number of them. You can make it longer, shorter, whatever, but in very simplest form, it's two clicks, comes down. Here's the summary of all my notes. I've got a page of notes from 20 pages written,

It's powerful. I'm just getting to, let's say AI is the platform shift. And now, instead of having one converged device in the phone, I have three devices. I've got a paper to write on. I've got, I don't know, one of the many, many microphone pins that David is constantly being forced to review that he can talk to all day long. And maybe I do have a phone that is mostly a camera. At some point, I want all those things to talk to each other.

And the idea that my AI pin does not know about the notes I took on my Amazon scribe does not know about an email I read on my laptop actually creates like the desire for me to have more lock in right so like fine I'm just going to buy it all from one vendor my phone already my the phone company is already selling me everything uh how do you break that like do is it more interoperability is it extending the kindle operating system to do more and more things no I don't think it's that I think there's I think interoperability is a great thing and you you you can find it, you can remove seams between different OSs for sure.

I don't really lose a lot of sleep over it. I also know that within the device family that Amazon builds, that'll all continue because of AI become more seamless back to point one, like the opportunities off the charts. But I don't think you want to lock it all in. I think you still need the interoperability as well.

So I think they both matter. And I think it's different for every person. Like you're going to end up in a place where you love a certain set of devices, I don't think you're going to have five in your bag, but if there's a purpose-built device that you do need, you're going to take it with you, man. Makes a difference.

You're going to need that connectivity, but don't be confused. All your notes on your Kindle today show up on your iPhone. Like, on the Kindle app, it's right there. Seameless. Integration's pretty awesome. And eventually you'll have editing those docs on your iPhone too, I'm sure, but so, like, not to give away the future roadmap.

But I don't think there's a limit to that. So I don't, when you say it, it doesn't resonate as much for me, because we do believe in interoperability. We do want to see it. You know, we see your products on all the other platforms and in a way that's useful for customers where it matters to them,

not just to do it or to check a box, but that it matters. I have one more question, then we actually do need to let you go because you have other things to do. I do, it turns out. You were talking about the sort of dedicated device and the push-shops.

At some point, doesn't our team save me at some point? We're in this moment of like the supposed disintermediate of the smartphone, right? There's like, for years now, companies are like, what is the thing that comes after phones? And, like, digital cameras are making a comeback. Everybody was buying cool fixes from 20 years ago again.

Are they? Big trend. You've been through, like, you've been making products through the whole rise and sort of dominance of the smartphone. And you mentioned, you know, the Kindle is a distraction-free device. It's been that thing for a long time. It's been successful for a long time. Do you buy the, like, big picture trend here that...

We shoved everything into a phone and the next phase is like pulling it all back out again. No, no, I don't buy that at all. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know that was the big picture trend. There are a lot of people who would like you to believe that it is. I'm not sure there. They do?

They do. Yeah, everybody who wants to make it. Are they really important people? Anybody who's not Google and Apple would really like that to be the case because that's a really great way for them to get around app store taxes. Yeah. I mean, I think if you believe AI is a platform shift and you can try. platform shift. There's no question. So then you can control and you kind of use your interface, right? I mean, that's the heart of it. Sure. And then maybe you can get people to stop using your phone.

Yeah, but I don't think the phone's going away. Yeah. Like everything you said was right. I think the and then part was odd. Yeah. I mean, look, the phone's an incredible utility and the product you have in your pocket right now probably is probably a great product. And it has its purpose and form. I do think jobs are going to move off the phone. I mean, I don't think the phone goes away. I think we can make some magical products that have literally nothing to do with the phone. Yeah. And we're going to. I mean, that's why I'm here at Amazon.

Like, go back to your first question, that is why I'm here at Amazon. Like, no question. Like, we can, the opportunity to make magic with the through line of AI, as you said earlier, that's not fake. Yeah.

That is a platform shift. But to get a silly, to say, you know, I remember 12 years ago when 13 so years ago when we had started Surface, just give you an analogy, not that I want to go back there. There were so many people that told me the laptop is dead. I mean, what are you doing? It's over.

The phone has replaced it. That was the meme 13 years ago. And that's not what was happening. Now, what was happening is certain jobs were moving to the phone. Just shopping's great. on the phone. Social media is incredible on the phone. Taking photos off a phone pretty damn good. Texting,

communicating. But then the jobs on the laptop just got stronger, which is interesting. The jobs that had to be done on it. You know, walk into any meeting and everybody opens their laptop. It's just what they do. And in many places. You can do a lot on your phone, but

it's not that the PC was dying and it's analogous. So take that analogy. Same thing now. I think jobs are going to move off the phone. I think there's probably better products, and I know there is that are coming. You know, products that will bring more seamless,

more seamlessly for AI, make it more useful for people. I mean, I might be working on some of those products right now, if it turns out, you know, where we started. I believe that. I don't only believe it. I know it's, and I know it's right for customers. for people. But to say it's going away, come on. That's just, that's silly. I think jobs do move, though. Does that analogy make sense? Like, the phone's not going away. That screen in your pocket.

That's not the point. However, will they, will certain jobs move and be better somewhere else? I think, yeah, for sure. Now, is there a world where everyone has 100 devices in their bag? No, no, no, no. But, you know, some jobs move to your wrist and they're better there. Some jobs stay in your pocket and they're better there. Some jobs will be on your eyes. They're better there. And, you know, once that, back to your seamless operations, like, a lot of things will be ambient devices where voice is powerful. You know, I know a few of those things. We got over 100 million people using them right now. Like, jobs are going to move there and they're going to be awesome.

And by the way, unbelievably powerful jobs. And you're going to see it on devices that my team's building, like literally. I'm not supposed to talk about it. I got to see my team's like, don't talk about it. Don't want you to hold on slow down on your, you know. So let's stop hinting at Echo and Alexa. Stop it. But let's be clear.

Like, there's reality between bringing together all these things. It's why I'm here working with this amazing team in Amazon, man. Like, and I'm telling you that product makers in Amazon are so good. And so you just, there's this opportunity to pull a lot of things together. But then go back to your original point. I'm not, I'm not sitting here as a, you know, as part of this industry saying, yes, and the phone is going away. Like, come on, silly.

Silly. Couldn't get me to say that about technologies that matter every day in our lives. I might be wrong, maybe. Be happy to be proven wrong. It's fine by me. You know, we've got other options, but. Do you think AI represents an opportunity

to rethink the phone? I think so. This is the other thing we hear a lot about. Yeah, I think so. I think that's true. Right. As these jobs move, maybe these form factors change. It's just like anything.

Like, you know, go back to my analogy from 13 years ago, it was a way to rethink the PC too. jobs moved to the phone there was a whole other set of technology that hit the PC that these jobs have to get stronger and you just rethink how those are done. I think the last time you were here, you showed me to Surface Duo.

Is that right? I think that was last time we chatted in the studio. That was a cool product, by the way. Super cool product. Do you think there's an opportunity to enter the phone for you? See, now you're bridging into territory that I'm just, you know.

I figure. You got to end with the big shot. Yeah, nice swing. Nice swing. Where's that? But where's that button I'm not supposed to touch? Pannis, we're going to have you back and you're going to talk about leadership principles

for like several hours. It's going to be awesome. Yeah, I mean, look, you got a lot of passion around it. Love it. Thank you for being here. Yeah, this is right. Thanks, guys. It's a lot of fun.

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Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least. two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is

essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third. That doesn't, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. The Lightning Round. This, this week, I sent Slacks about getting a Lightning Round sponsor. Whoa. Did they accomplish anything? How rich are we now? I will say, there were some very creative ideas that are still not the idea of just having us say the Lightning Round is sponsor. If you've got a company with the word lightning in it, boy, do they want to talk to you.

Sure. Yeah, it's a lot. We're working on it. Again, I have no ability or sophistication or experience in selling ads. So I'm just, my job is to just say it every week. It's just speak advertising into existence. Someone else with some money show up and someone here will figure it out. I hope it's like the Tampa Bay Lightning, the NHL team that eventually.

sponsors the lightning round. That's basically where we're at. And I was like, I don't, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Like, sponsored by George, I think would work at this point. I like that. George, get us. If your name is George and you can write a check, call us up. It's some numb. I don't know how it works. I don't know if you can call us up to buy a net. Anyway, there's kind of a lot in this lightning round. There is. You take the first one. All right. So this happened today, Thursday, as we're recording, uh, Google announced some pretty big org chart shifts. And this is the thing we've kind of been tracking all year. Google has been pretty aggressively changing the way the company works, partly in order to just AIify everything,

but I think partly because Google has changed a lot as a company and you have a lot of people who have been there a long time who maybe don't want to be there anymore or are just tapped out on what they've been doing for a long time. And so like it's just changing a lot. And the new one that happened on Thursday was that Prabhakar Raghavan, who has run search ads, several other things. But mostly he is, I would say, the single most important person in terms of how Google makes money and has been for a very long time is now stepping down from that role and is becoming Google's, I think the title is chief technologist. What's the nice way to say this? The title doesn't mean anything. It's like, this is what, I mean, we went through this with Hiroshi Lockheimer, right?

Who was like, I'm not leaving Google. I'm just going to go take on other roles. And that's all fine and good. They're going to continue to be interesting, important people inside of Google. But like, the way that Google works is if you don't run a thing, you don't run a thing. You know what I mean? And so I think the idea of being chief technologist will be big and interesting and he'll, like, show up at conferences every once in a while. But like, it is super meaningful that he is leaving.

the search team. Which is the team, the most important team, under the most pressure. Right. Both from regulators and Open AI, whatever. Yeah, it is the thing. And to that point, actually, the person who is taking over that job is Nick Fox, who has been at Google for, like, forever. And a thing that I've heard internally over the years is that Nick is one of a very small number

of people who Sundarper Chai believes are like his fixers. He is the person who is tapped to like make a thing work. He had to do with messaging, which I'm David. I would just say your evidence does not support your claim. So yes, except RCS has worked. Google Messages is now everywhere. Like to the extent that Nick Fox had to solve an impossible problem, he actually did a pretty good job. He ran assistant for a long time.

He has, he I think was one of the ones who launched Google Fi. Like hits and misses, but he is a guy who has been tapped to do some of Google's most important, most ambitious things at various times. And so I think it's telling that he is showing up as the one. He's not like a grizzled search executive, right? Like there are lots of people inside of search who have been working inside of search for a long time. He is a guy coming from another part of the company to presumably change the way that search operates, which I think is very interesting. then the other big change is that the whole

Gemini division is now going under Deep Mind. Deep Mind and Demas Asabas who runs DeepMind is just ruthlessly consolidating AI power inside of Google. Demas just won a Nobel Prize which is bananas.

Kudos to them for some of the protein stuff that they've been doing. It's really cool. But like piece by piece every AI thing Google has been doing has come under Demis and deeplined. Except for Google Assistant, which is going to platforms and devices.

Which is, I think, a sign that Google Assistant is dying, right? Like, Google Assistant is going to be how you turn Bluetooth on and off on your phone, and everything else is going to be Gemini. Like, that's so clear where that's going to me. So that's the Rick Australa group. That's the Pixel Group and the Android group. Oh, that's right. That is that group.

So that is just fascinating. I actually think that makes perfect sense, right? That means that becomes a feature of Android, not an AI thing. Or the Home Hub stuff. Sure. It's a way to turn things on and off on your devices, which is fine. You actually don't need AI. Isn't the future of Google Assistant, the future of Gemini?

Aren't they the same thing? No, which is what's super annoying about using Android right now, because Gemini can't do the things on your phone. Oh, yeah, but this is Google. Like, come on. I mean, give it a minute and it'll all get rolled under Demis at this point anyway. So what I take from it is. This is actually no one knows how to organize these companies.

Right? You're announcing a new chief technologist at your company. What is the most important technology in the future of Google? It's AI. Yeah. Is your new chief technologist going to... No, he's going to run right into your CEO of AI, the guy who just want a Nobel Prize. Well, this is the problem with AI, right?

Like, if you believe AI is the future, it AI is everything. It's your infrastructure, it's products. It's the like in-between stuff that enables all this stuff. It's everything. AI is the whole stack. And all these companies are putting someone in charge of AI, which is not the same as making them the CEO of the company, but it's also not that different.

Well, I mean, I was just compare and contrast to Microsoft, which has now largely the same structure. Google has moved itself to the same kind of structure as Microsoft. So Microsoft had Kevin Scott, who's a CTO. Famously, still the person on Microsoft, he told me this on Decoder.

Kevin Scott owns the GPU budget at Microsoft. If you want to buy a GPU, you got to call Kevin. How do you make yourself the most powerful person at the company? It's real. So he was the CTO. He was the one who did a bunch of the opening, like early work to do the opening ideal. He was like figured it out. But then Microsoft, all the opening I had drama happened.

And Microsoft went out and sort of like just acquired the talent from inflection. And Mustafa Suleiman is the CEO of AI at Microsoft. And they have a CTO and Kevin Scott still. that is just a complicated org chart and it looks exactly like this. Yep, 100%. And so you're just ending, these companies are starting to,

they're trying to figure out how to structure themselves to make all this work. And the only difference to me is that Google's business is under such regulatory threat that a bunch of people I think are kind of choosing to bail

instead of taking the next turn. Yeah, I mean, and again, even if you think Google might come out of all this regulatory stuff, unscathed, it's going to take so long. And if I'm Prabhakarov, I'm like, do you want to sit and twiddle your thumbs for the better part of the decade until all this antitrust stuff gets sorted out? Or do you just want to, like, dip and go work on other problems? I kind of get it.

Yeah. They did all that consolidation Android. Android. And Google is filing emergency motions with the court in the epic case today to delay opening up Android to other stores. Do you want to do that or do you just want to wander the earth? Right. Yeah. All right. What's yours? Weird. I actually have more Google stuff. But it's also Trump stuff, and I apologize. It's election season. Trump is talking a lot. And people are mad at us for covering this stuff, but there's a meaningful chance he could win. And I would just point out that we live through the tech policy of a first Trump administration, which was bananas. I've been made to remember it recently, which I'm very upset about. Do you remember when I just counted days since Trump announced Google would build a website for? for current virus testing, like, every week. Like, that's where we're at again. Only this time, he hates the tech companies. Like, J.D. Vance's answer to did Donald Trump lose the election is not yes or no.

It's big tech interfered with the Hunter Biden laptop story, which is not an answer. But they're pro TikTok now. But they're pro. So none of this makes any sense. By the way, that's not an answer. Like, you can be upset that people did or did not have information. That does not mean that their votes don't. Right.

Like, I think a lot of people who voted for Hillary Clinton are pretty mad that the New York Times chose to make the word emails incredibly relevant to everyone such that the verge.com sells a t-shirt that just says emails on it. But that doesn't mean their votes didn't count. Yep. And so that whole Vance line of attack is nonsensical. But what it's pointed out is we're all mad at tech companies. So Trump is on stage at the Economic Club of Chicago. being interviewed by John McElthwaite, who's the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. John McElthwaite is a very proper British man.

He used to be the editor-in-chief of the economist. He is not a guff-taking kind of dude. No. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, he's not a shenanigans kind of guy. Yeah, I, you know, I know a lot of EICs, this isn't the one that is having a party in the boat. You know, I'm just putting out, but there are other ones that are. I'm not going to say who they are.

But if you're on my list, you're on my list. You know what I'm saying? Okay. So John Mickletwey is interviewing Donald Trump. And he says, the Department of Justice wants to break up Google. What do you think? And then Trump just says some stuff. And all of it adds up to I want to do some speech regulations.

I'm just going to read it to you. Trump says, yeah, look, Google's got a lot of power. They're very bad to me. Very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories. In other words, I have 20 to them. stories and 20 bad stories. Everyone's entitled to that. You only see the 20 bad stories. I called

the head of Google the other day and I said, I'm getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don't find them in Google. I think it's a whole rigged deal. I think Google's rigged, just like our government's rigged all over the place. Confusing. So I think what he's talking about is if there are 20 stories about good stuff Trump has done and 20 stories about bad stuff Trump has done and you search for Donald Trump's name in Google News, you only get the negative story. Stories. Presumably that is what that's up to. I believe that is what he's talking about.

And he called up presumably Sundar Pichai and complained about this. That is just core First Amendment activity. Maybe he called Prabhakar and Paraka was like, I'm done with this. I'm out. Never mind. I don't know, man. That is just straightforward First Amendment protected activity. We're going to rank some stories.

You're going to type in a search term and we're going to show you a list of them. And maybe you think Google should be more neutral. But if you want to do something about it, you're going to, you, in this country, will run straight into the First Amendment. And these companies have won multiple cases asserting their First Amendment rights. Yep. So then he pivots this conversation on Google to China. And he says, I do something. But you have to give them a lot of credit.

They've become such a power, such a power. You have to give them credit. How the making of power is really a discussion. Is that an interest argument? I know. And then he says, at the same time, it's a very dangerous thing because we want to have great companies. we don't want China to have these companies. Right now, China is afraid of Google.

And then he says, China is a very powerful, very smart group of people. I'm really glad you read that part. I was going to make you read that part if you didn't otherwise. Which is a great way to describe a country. Yeah. What is a country? So, I don't know, man.

Like, is China afraid of Google a company that doesn't operate in China? Is he talking about, AI. I've, like, been trying to parse this for some time. So then Micklethwaite says, well, if you're afraid of China, you wanted to ban TikTok, and now you're going to let TikTok operate in this country. And I don't know, Trump just kind of just pivoted this conversation. Because Michael Thwait said, is TikTok a threat?

And Trump goes, I think it is a threat. Frankly, I think everything is a threat. There's nothing that's not a threat. We should put that on a T-shirt. But sometimes you fight through the threats. Like Google, I'm not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that?

If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it's more fair. And then he ends with, and it's only bad because of fake news because the news is really fake. That's the one thing we have to straighten out. We have to straighten out the press because we have a corrupt press. All of that is speech regulations. Yeah. I want to make Google more fair.

That's a content moderation law. We're going to pass a law insisting that Google is fair. I don't know how you do that. And then we're going to straighten out the press. How? If you're mad at me for saying those, go ahead. Write the law that straightens out the press. Involve the government in that process.

Just in the course of that, he drills all the way down to actually the problem is not fix Google. It's fix the people who are writing the stories about Google. or about me that get posted on Google. Like, it just, I don't know. If you think too hard about it, your brain sort of explodes. But these are things he said out loud. And apparently he's calling CEO. So then the other story is today he said Tim Cook called him.

So I'm just going to read you this quote. He's on one of the many, many bro podcasts that he's been going on lately. Like, this man's on YouTube. Like, who's on YouTube? It's Mr. B. slogan, Paul. It's Donald Trump. But he's just, you've got a YouTube bro podcast, call him up.

He's ready to go. So he's on one today, the PBD podcast. Please don't get mad at me if you're like some huge YouTube fan of this podcast. I've never heard of it before. This is what I'm telling you. And I'm looking at the thumbnail here and I'm describing it as I'm describing it. He's on this podcast today. And he says two hours ago, three hours ago, he, Cook, called me.

He said the European Union has just fined his $15 billion. On top of that, they got fined by the European Union another $2 billion. Which is true. in March the EU find Apple two billion after finding that Apple is restricting music apps in some way and then they basically said Apple needs to pay

14.4 billion in unpaid taxes. Totally different things. Totally different fines. And then Trump goes on to say Cook said something that was interesting. He said they're using that to run their enterprise meaning Europe is their enterprise. And then he said, that's a lot, Tim, but I have to get elected first, but I won't let them take advantage of our companies. That won't be happening.

What? Okay, first of all, I love the idea that either Tim Cook or Donald Trump thinks that it costs $15 billion to run the EU. Very good. The most efficient government in world history. That would be great. Unclear how any U.S. politician can negotiate tax rates in other countries. That's just a thing. Like if Germany showed up on our doorstep and was like,

we've got some ideas about your chat. Like we wouldn't, we just wouldn't do it. I don't know. I would be like, go away, Germany. American flag like, get out of here. So that's confusing. Maybe there's something the president can do in that case. The weirder thing is he just said it.

He said, you know, in the Google case, he said, I called the head of Google. and I said some outlandish nonsense. Okay, we asked Google. They didn't say anything. But that's Trump's claim that he called, and maybe he's lying. In this one, he says, Cook called him to complain about EU regulations,

which is a very interesting thing for Tim Cook to have done. He put a time frame on it. He said three hours ago, he called me. So we know approximately when. That's today as we're speaking. And so we asked Apple about this. Apple flatly doesn't respond. I will tell you, we talk to Apple a lot.

We send a lot of notes to a lot of companies. Hey, did this happen? Hey, we need a statement. Hey, here's this thing. Hey, I have a lot of thoughts about your iPhone camera. We talk to these companies. Dead silence, I don't know what it means. I'm not going to interpret it.

I'm just saying it is, there's not, I don't have to like go to a magistrate judge and file a form in triplicate to get a comment from a big tech company. This is the thing that we do all the way. So they just didn't respond. I don't know how to interpret this one. I don't either. It's very, it's very odd. I mean, I think to some extent, the idea that a lot of tech CEOs are somewhere between actively rooting for a Trump presidency and hedging their bets in case he wins by, you know, sucking up to him in various ways, that's real. It happened the last time he was president. It seems pretty clearly it's happening now. Tim Cook is not the like jump on state. at a rally. Tim Cook opened a fake factory for Donald Trump. Do you remember this?

This is what I mean. Like this is not. He was like, they're making iPhones and Macs in America again. Tim Cook was like, we've, sure, come to this factory we've been doing it for some time.

This is what I mean, right? So like it wouldn't be completely out of character for Tim Cook to have done that essentially as like a make the man feel good. Right? Like that is the overwhelming advice on how to get things out of Donald Trump

is flatter him. And so to call him and be like Donald WTF, Europe, am I right? I can see why you would make that phone call if you're Tim Cook. I also can see a series of ways in which this story is not true and why Apple would decide

that there is literally no upside to responding at all. So again, I'm in the same place of like I don't know what to make of this all the way on the spectrum from none of this happened to this happened exactly the way that he describes. I don't know how to interpret any of the possible outcomes.

It's bananas. I do love the idea that Tim Cook It's like, they run Europe on my taxes. And it's like, well, first of all, they're mad at you because you haven't paid them. They actually don't. And that's the problem. To be clear. Second of all, I don't think that's enough to run Europe.

You know, I've never run Europe before. I've imagined it as all children in the Midwest do. And it just, my budget was higher. When I was working out in high school in Wisconsin, I was like, I think it's going to take like one or two trill to run Europe. Again, not an economist. I didn't have any formal training at the time. I just think it's more than 14.4. We'll see.

We asked all these companies to respond to this. I will say that the two comments run right into each other, right? If you're Apple and you're mad at Europe, you're probably also mad at the United States Department of Justice for filing an antitrust case against you. And Donald Trump is here saying something has to be done about Google, which just lost its big antitrust case at the United States Department of Justice. The main result of which is that Google is going to stop paying Apple the money to be the default search for. on the iPhone. So it's just kind of all the same problem. And Trump is Trump. And he, I think he likes Tim Cook and is mad at Google search. Yeah. Two easy things to be right now if you're, if you're Donald Trump. You know what I mean?

And really that man is searching for the simplest one. All right. Let's end with, what's end with Anthropic and AI? Because I think we should end with a vision of utopia. What's going on with this one? Okay. So, so Dario. Amade, who is the CEO of Anthropic, wrote, I think it's, it's either 13,000 or 14,000 words. It's so many words. My man wrote like a short book, basically making the case for AI. And I think it's particularly interesting that he's doing this because A, Sam Altman recently wrote his sort of opus about why AI is going to make everything wonderful. And Anthropic in a lot of ways has been kind of a tonal counter to Open AI that they've been much quieter about what they're building.

They've been much less utopian. They've been much more concerned with security. They've talked a much more realistic game about what they're doing. But as Kylie Robison on our team pointed out, they also need to raise astounding amounts of money in order to do any of the stuff that they want to do. And it's much harder to raise money on like a careful case for why this stuff might be interesting than it is to just say out loud, I am building God. Kylie has just been running around the newsroom being like, this is why they're doing this.

And I think she's right. And so what Dario did here, basically, was write a more reasoned but still like wildly, outrageously optimistic vision for what AI can be. And I think a lot of it is about the stuff that doesn't get talked about a lot when we talk about AI, which I actually really appreciate it. People should read this. It's this and Stephen Wolfram's thing about how ChatGPT works from like two years ago are two very instructive primers on what is going on in this space.

And I think everybody should read both of them. They're both incredibly long, but they're very good. And I'll just read you the five things that he says are the categories he's most excited about. It's biology and physical health, neuroscience and mental health, economic development and poverty, peace and governance, work and meaning. First of all, that's everything. It's all the things. That's Europe.

Europe pays for that. You two can run. But he makes a bunch of interesting cases, and I think does a good job of explaining, like, here is what it's going to take to get to this, that we need AI that is sufficiently powerful and has lots of different interfaces. And you can poke holes in all of this,

because none of it exists. Most of it is going to be wildly difficult. And he just says, there's a line where he just says, it has all the interface. is available to a human working virtually, as if that's just like a feature you can ship tomorrow. So I take this less as a real roadmap towards anything

and more just like an actually really thoughtful idea about what AI could be in the absolute best case. And in that way, it's a really good read. He talks a lot about what it could mean for medicine and what it could mean for how we interact with each other and with technology. And we've talked a lot about like the relationships people are building with AI characters. He mentions that kind of stuff. There's a lot of stuff in here. And you get to the end and you're like, hell yeah, AI, let's go. And then it's like, oh, there's other things and also

none of this exists or probably will anytime soon. And that's where we land. And the thing I've seen most people say about this is like even if he's right about all of this, his timelines are off by orders of magnitude. And so I think if you go into it thinking with that perspective, I actually think this is a super fun read. Yeah. It's funny because right next to it is the New York Times warning perplexity to stop using its content. And it's like, kind of all of this is built on just like taking everything. Yeah. Like all of the electricity

and all of the content. All of the money. And it's like, you had, I guess you, in return, you have to promise digital God. I mean, and, and to be clear. Like what is worth all of that taking? What this does promise is digital God. He doesn't say it in as many words.

And he's actually, he's very careful to not say a GI, which is what has become the synonym for Digital God. I think he just calls it powerful AI, which doesn't sound less alarming. It's just different alarming,

I guess. But yeah, it is. This is the size of the promise you have to make if you're one of these companies in order to do

everything you need to do to get there. And like, this is as neat and reasoned a summation of that stance as I've seen yet. Like,

he might be wrong about everything. But it's like, if you want to get inside the rational brain of the AI industry right now, this is about as close as I've seen.

And they have to take everything. Right. And it takes 14,000 words to explain. It's just like, and one lawsuit from Sarah Silverman could bring this all to a grinding. 100%. Yeah, you put this next to, was it Mark Andresen who was like, you can't force us to pay for this because then we won't be able to do it. Like take those two statements next to each other and it becomes very hard to know

where any of this is going to go. Yeah. And that way, by the way, was it Mark Andreessen said that in a filing to the the United States Copyright Office. Perfect. Very good. All right. We are over.

That was a good one. I'm sorry that we, you know, it's like very close to election. We have to talk about it. We're going to actually have a bunch of election coverage coming soon. Just like policy coverage. So you're ready.

It's coming. It's going to be weird because it's going to be like right next to laptop reviews. But that's the verge, maybe. That's correct. That's the thing that we make. We're going straight from 2004 week to election coverage. We got,

we should just mention. David was the editor in 2004 week. Congratulations, David. It's been incredible this week. It turned out awesome. I deserve the least credit of everyone who worked on it, but it turned out awesome.

And everyone should go read every single one of the stories. And even if you don't read them, just click on them. Because the design of everyone is different and they're all so sick and you should just look at them. Don't even read them.

Just look at them. And that's all I ask. Well, you should read them because the reporters did a great job writing them. But it is true that Grahamackeray or engineer, Chris Naraki, our creative director, and Kath Virginia and Air Designer had the time of their lives making this go, and it's very good.

So go click on all the links. We'll put them in there. That's happening. And then thanks to Panis for coming on the show. We're going to happen back when it's Alexa time. Yeah. I think we can say that. All right.

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

And that's it. We'll see you next week.