The Vergecast - The James Bond Cinematic Universe

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

On this episode, we're diving deep into new ideas about old things. First, Framework CEO Nirav Patel joins David and The Verge's Sean Hollister to talk about Framework's new Laptop 12 and Desktop, plus the company's plan to bring its upgradeable, repairable ethos to other gadgets. After that, Daring Fireball's John Gruber joins the show to talk about the future of James Bond, now that Amazon has complete creative control over the 007 franchise. Do we want to live in the James Bond Cinematic Universe? Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline about using smart glasses to replace your computer monitor. Further reading: Framework wants to fix the budget laptop with its first touchscreen machine Mint and pink: a closer look at the backflipping Framework Laptop 12 Framework’s first tiny Desktop beautifully straddles the line between cute and badass Framework Desktop hands-on: a possible new direction for gaming desktops ‘We’re nowhere near done with Framework Laptop 16’ says Framework CEO Amazon now has creative control over the James Bond franchise Amazon buys MGM for $8.45 billion From David Smith: The Talk Show Bond Anthology From Daring Fireball: Amazon MGM Studios Takes Creative Control Over James Bond Franchise Xreal’s new glasses are a surprisingly good TV for your face The smart glasses era is here — I got a first look 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of modular devices. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I have like 1740 miles to walk. So I downloaded this app called Fantasy Hike, which V-Song recommended on the podcast a few weeks ago. It's basically an app that takes all of your motion activity, the steps you take and stuff like that, and converts it to like this long Lord of the Rings-Z journey to take a ring back to, they don't call it Morador for copyright reasons, but that's the answer. idea. The journey is 1780 miles, and it turns out I am surprisingly easily gamified by systems like this. So I have found this very compelling, and I'm now walking way more than I ever have before,

just so that I can get the little way-to-go notifications and see my progress and get somewhere. So at some point, I think I'm going to end up walking almost 1,800 miles, all because of this silly fake Lord of the Rings app. It's great stuff. Anyway, this is a super fun episode we have coming up. We're going to do two things. First, Sean Hollister and I are going to talk to Nirav Patel, the CEO of Framework, about the new desktop and laptop the company last week launched, plus all of the stuff that Framework might do in the future. They have some pretty interesting ideas, and we have a lot of questions about those ideas.

Then John Gruber from Daring Fireball is going to come on and talk about the thing he knows best, James Bond. Super fun episode. We also have a really fun hotline question about glasses on your face for computers. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm going to go get a couple more miles in. I'm on my way to mount fire, I think it's called, which is not Mordor because of Lord of the Rings. This is the Vergecast.

We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients, have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. I don't know if you know the company Framework, but for the last several years, I have thought they are one of the most interesting companies in tech. Basically, Framework's big idea is that all computers, all gadgets, all electronics, really, should be upgradable and repairable, that when your AirPods stop working because the battery stops working,

they shouldn't die and go into a landfill. You should be able to just stick in a new battery and keep moving on with your life. Frameworks products until now have all been laptops. There was a 13-inch laptop and a 16-inch laptop. Both of them super repairable. Like you can unscrew something, pull out a module, stick in a new one,

screw it back in, and you've just upgraded your computer. It's a big, powerful idea, and Framework has actually done a better job of pulling it off really than any other company I've certainly ever seen. And so last week, when Framework announced a new laptop, the Framework Laptop 12, and its first desktop ever, the Framework Desktop, it felt like a big moment, right? Like, this is the time when a company like Framework is really starting to make the case that it matters, that it can keep doing this thing and that it can take its big idea

and extend it out into other products. So I called up both Sean Hollister on our team and Narav Patel, the CEO of Framework, just to dig into all of this. What's going on at Framework, how it's been able to pull off this miraculous thing that no one else has in actually sticking to the plan of having upgradable gadgets,

although it hasn't been perfect and we're going to talk about that. But also, what you can do with this idea about how gadgets should work and how far it really goes. So lots to talk about, let's just get into it. I kind of just want to start with Framework as a company,

because again, it's been a while since you and I have talked, It's been a while since we've talked about Framework stuff on the Vergecast. Catch us up on Framework, the company a little bit. You're kind of a hardware startup, but you're not as startup-y-a-start-start-up as you were. Like, where do you feel like you are at the moment? I think we're not as startup-e-st startup. I'm going to take that as a compliment, meaning I think we're executing relatively smoothly and without a lot of...

I think it is a compliment, yeah. Yeah, without a lot of drama, I think, is the key, which makes it feel maybe less like a startup than many other startups do. But, yeah, we're fine. five years in, we're 60 people. And whenever I say both of those numbers, people are eyes like go wide a bit. Like, wait a second, really? You can do that with 60 people. But really is just a testament to the team that we've been able to put together. We've got just an awesome set of individuals. And we're also just carrying in a ton of collective experience, both from like bigger, mature consumer electronics companies of like how to do hardware smoothly. But then also the startups that

were very startupy, where we got to live. learn from the mistakes very quickly and not at least make those same mistakes again. I also feel like from the beginning, you've been kind of resolutely less chaotic than a lot of hardware startups. Like, Sean and I spent a lot of time with people who have huge ideas about revolutionizing everything and quickly discover that, you know, making one of something is very different from making thousands or millions of those things. And I feel like you were, you were pretty clear-eyed about that stuff from pretty early on. And I think it's still, like, even even just hearing you talk at the event this week about the way that you're thinking about products,

like there's still a sort of cautious approach to all of this, that it's like we're going to be slow and careful and not try to move fast and break things. You even published in a manifesto, I want to say. Early as manifesto, it seems like you had this notion that you need to be very selective. Yeah, it's a move, slow, and fix things approach to startups, I think, which is. I mean, it's fundamentally, we're about longevity. So if we're not building the company around longevity, the team around longevity, the infrastructure, how can we build the products themselves to be long-lived?

Like, how can we reasonably go out there and say we're building a laptop that's going to last longer if we're operating as a company in a chaotic matter? So that's like really what drives very deliberately us making decisions that optimize for what's going to guarantee that 10 years from now we're still able to deliver on the same set of promises. not what's going to mean that we can capture the most hype or the most interests in the next week. So with that way of thinking about it, why are the two things you launched this week? The, as you're, you know, you've had two laptops. Those two make sense together, I would say.

These two things feel slightly further afield than the stuff that you've done before. And I think in particular, I'm curious, why do a desktop at all? But why, why these two is the next two? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think if you look at the framework laptop 12, that's like pretty core and pretty in line with the path that we've been on since day one as a company. I mean, in some ways, like, I actually have even said in the past that, like, if we had the technical capability to have done Framework Laptop 16 before Framework Laptop 13,

we might have done that in the sense that, like, as we think about who the customer base, who the end user is for those products, it is actually like the more enthusiastic earlier adopter persona that's gravitating to the 16 than the 13. And so like as we look at the 12, like as we think about our mission and our product philosophy, it's almost like the ultimate expression of that. Like we took the category that is the most disposable and we want to make it the least disposable. But from a brand perspective and from being able to build up the infrastructure and the trust to be able to go after a less extreme enthusiast user,

which is really what the target user is for framework laptop 12, like that less core enthusiast, more I want a computer that works, and that's going to last me a while. That's where the sequencing comes in of starting with the 13, which we knew we could achieve, we knew we could make like a dent in the market with that thing, with a very small team very quickly, then building the vastly more technically complex framework laptop 16,

and then taking all that brand and infrastructure and team investment and building the product that in many ways, technically is actually a bit simpler by what we're doing with framework laptop 12, but from a brand and a go-to-market perspective is a lot higher of a reach than the 13 of 16 were. But you're not just keeping it simple, right? I mean, I see a lot of budget laptops out there

that don't necessarily have touchscreen and stylus and back flipping and Core I3 and I5 chips, you're adding those things into the mix, too, which I'm guessing impact the price a little bit, right? So it's not going to necessarily replace the most budget laptops out there for people. Why were those things important to get in there? Yeah, I guess when I say simple,

I think one key thing to call out on that is I mean from an invention risk standpoint. Like, as we look at 16, like, we invented a lot to make 16 work. For 12, it was actually in many ways we took, like, little pieces of things that we invented from 13 and 16 and then brought them into 12. But as we went through the development process, I shared like little bits and pieces of this,

but actually I don't think I've shared much publicly yet, that as we started the development process for Framework Laptop 12, like about two years ago, we actually had some like extreme and novel designs and architectures that we were bouncing around, like things like reconfiguring by taking apart modules between like clamshell and tablet and like detachable modes and things like that.

that ended up being like very inventive, ended up being very complex. And it's like, we took a step back and we looked at. We thought like, yes, we can technically do this, but is this actually the right thing for the type of audience we're going after? Like, this is not the framework laptop 16 audience. Like, we want this thing to be simple to understand and simple to use. And in doing so, actually, we can then actually make it more robust and solve for, you know,

some things like making it just generally more accessible as a product. And so like all this really takes. kind of taking a step back to what makes framework a bit less startup-y than many startups, is that we make those terms. We choose those things very clearly, like with eyes wide open, who is this product actually for, and what is actually sensible for that end user as opposed to what can we technically do as a company that builds innovative and interesting products. So let's talk through that with the 12 a little more, actually, because I think, you know,

you talk about the branding and marketing of it. And to me, it sort of seems like the average sort of mid-range mainstream consumer laptop, like, sucks. And it has become a real problem, right? If you want a pretty good Windows computer, that has gotten more and more expensive overtime. And so to some extent, it seems like you're actually perfectly positioned to come in and be like, no, actually what we've done is we've built a good Windows laptop. And to some extent, that should kind of sell it. itself in a certain way. And like that, that makes the case for itself. So I'm curious why you feel

like it's been, what is harder about that market than going into like the Framework 13, which is like a market full of very good computers and trying to make your case. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, in fact, like, so you look at a lot of what we do, there's a certain obviousness about like, hey, why don't you just make a computer that's like kind of a mid-age computer that isn't terrible? And you could like look at every mature consumer electronics brand, every mature pre-C brand, and ask the same question. And the answers will be. I think somebody would have done it by now. It would be very unsatisfying answers.

You're going to get back. And as we've observed the market very closely, like the PC industry very closely, at least the thing that I observe, I'm not going to speak for the entire team necessarily on this specifically, is that the way that PC companies operate typically is that, as you look across that entire organization

for the A team, the best possible designers, engineers, and supply chain people, go to market people, they're all assigned to, the premium top-tier commercial notebook. So like the best and the best suppliers, or your top-tier suppliers, the best teams of the suppliers,

all that goes into premium commercial. And then you take like the next best people and they get assigned to the premium consumer. So the highest-end consumer. And the next team gets assigned to like mid-tier commercial and then like, or like, you know, sub-premium commercial, sub-premium consumer. And then by the time you get down to like

those like core mainstream mid-tier consumer laptops, especially, it's like some guy in a basement somewhere writing a spreadsheet and throwing it over to a supplier and hoping to get a computer back in a few months. And obviously it's like, you know, an extreme exaggeration. But like that's what I mean by the opportunity, like I think I said during our announcement,

like the opportunity that we spotted on framework laptop 12, like the people who need long-lasting computers the most are getting like the most thoughtless computers. And that's like the industry dynamic that results in them being the thoughtless computers. because obviously they're lower margin products. So obviously these companies are going to focus on premium commercial where the highest margins are

and put the least thought and care into their lowest cost products. For us, it's that, you know, we're a small company. We've got four product lines. We're going to put thought and care into every one of them. There's so much margin in the premium commercial maybe. But where is the volume in the market? And is this an opportunity for you to get some volume? Do you have, do you anticipate you're going to sell, you know,

a lot of these? Do you have the capacity to make a lot of these? Is that the thought that there will be a lot of these 12s in the market? Yeah, definitely. This is, yeah, it's a great question. It's very much, it's a volume play. But when we say it's a volume play, it's really a mission play that, like, if we're going to fix consumer electronics, let's go to the places where we can really fix consumer electronics. And we can live with good problems to have, like having more demand than we have capacity. Like, we can go figure out with our suppliers how to scale capacity, and that's where it goes back to like we built a team that knows how to do this. So, yeah, we're very much going for scale with framework laptop 12, maybe even in a way beyond what we're

doing with our other products. Interesting. So, and then make the same case for the desktop, which I feel like is a very different, a very different group of people. I would say it's been very funny to watch the reaction, like, even on just, like, the framework subreddit to the 12 and the desktop, the 12, everybody's like, oh, yeah, cool, makes sense, fine, whatever, good idea. And then the desktop, they're like, I have thoughts about the soldering. Sure. We also had many thoughts around the soldering. I believe that. And we're going to get into those thoughts. But I am curious, like, with that,

that framework reference for the 12 makes sense, what was the thinking for the desktop? Yeah, this is an interesting. One of the realizations we had from, like, basically a brand perspective around, like, what is framework? What are we trying to do with frame, How do we bring framework to more people? Was this idea that do we need to take what we're doing and kind of make it more accessible by diluting it? Like making it look less DIY, making it look less repairability, upgradeability, more about like, is it just like, oh, these are environmentally friendly products? That's like kind of a mainstream statement. It's not like getting people into the technical details.

And the conclusion we came to is actually that's not the right approach to get people into this world, into this world of like owning your products, using your products for longer. The thing that we should do instead, we could do instead is make repair cool. Make upgradeability, cool. Make modularization and customization and personalization cool. Which like in many ways, like as you look at like what you're actually doing with these, they are interesting, like engaging things to do. And especially as we look at younger audiences, people are like eager to jump into these

spaces. And so the thing we need to do is not dumb it down and make it, make it, make it, look and feel like it's simpler and hide away the complexity. I think we want to do is make it fun and interesting, but also make it accessible, make it accessible in a way that maybe traditionally some of these categories or some of these behaviors haven't been accessible. And so the framework desktop, like a big part of that, of course, did just come straight from, wow, Rise and AIMX is super impressive, how can we use this thing? And a big part of it came from, we like PCs. PCs are awesome. Desktop PCs are awesome. DIY.

Ying gaming rigs is awesome. Like all this is great. It's like a bunch of folks, including myself and the team. I've been doing it for many years. It's not the most accessible space. I mean, I'm not saying it's like, you know, totally esoteric knowledge that you can't get into. Obviously, there are millions of us doing it. But we saw an opportunity for us, this framework to like take that culture and take that ethos and open the door a bit wider by building a computer that is just simpler to bring in your life. Like there's less mental overhead required and just simply this less physical space required to have it into your life. But, you know, we did as much as we can to still bring in as many aspects of that same ethos and culture around DIY and PC building into it.

How is this one simpler to bring into your life than any pre-built desktop that comes with modular components in it? There are many of them on the market. I would necessarily recommend any particular company for that, but many exist. Yeah, sure. I mean, one thing that we like to do, is go to the websites of our competitors and attempt to find computers, an attempt to see how are people describing their computers, what's the purchasing experience look like? And it is shockingly bad.

With the exception, I'll say, of actually Apple and maybe Microsoft, and obviously neither of those are in the gaming PC world. But as you look at the website, or actually I'll say there a few others, like NZXT is doing great work too. But for the most part, as you go to like PC brand websites, especially from the big, mature incumbent companies. It's a nightmare even figuring out what they're trying to sell, what the product lines are available, what's new, what's old,

what you should buy at any point in time. And so part of this is even the like figuring out what computer to get. And actually, I think Frank did a great job. Frank Azor, when he was up on stage earlier this week, kind of talking through it, you don't really have to think about it. If you want to take any game that's out there, run it at 1440P, run at reasonable settings or default settings out of the box, it's just going to run.

You don't have to think about like, do I have to pick out a specific configuration make it work. And then for us, from just like a browsing and like learning about the product and purchasing experience aspect of it, like our marketplace team has done great work to actually just make it straightforward. It's not like what of the, you know, hundred different weird pages of computers is the one that I'm supposed to be getting and these confusing specs that are there. So like we try to make it simple, make it transparent. Like we lay out the very detailed specs all the way out to sharing like mechanical. cat of the components if you want to get all the way into like the deepest complexity,

but you don't have to. You can start from the simple page of here's the computer, here's the few most recent games you've probably heard of, here's how fast they'll run. Great, that sounds good. I want to play those games. I'll get this computer and it's pretty straightforward. I know David has more questions about the desktop and I do too, but, but the customizability, the one thing, when you said you're bringing the learnings from the 16 and the 13 into this desktop and this laptop, I thought maybe that meant we would see more of the input modules

and the expansion base, the two new input mechanism, the two new modules types that you introduced on the Framework 16. And why don't we have some LED panels or customization or secondary screen kind of electronic stuff going on the front of the desktop,

replaceable keyboards maybe on the 12? Tell us about what about those made them not a good fit for this, and if we're going to see any more of those in the future. Yeah, this is interesting. Like, you know, you can see on the desktop, well, actually, I'll say specifically on my comment on bringing learnings from 1316, that was repairability learnings for 12. There was maybe less direct knowledge transfer into the desktop just because the category is so different architecturally. But we did bring in the expansion card system.

And it's really as we look at any product we build, especially looking at framework at 12, looking at the desktop, we think both through what makes sense in our ecosystem to try to drive, ecosystem expansion or commonality between products or being able to share modules or share supply chain infrastructure. But then also, if we were building this product from a totally blank slate, what does the project experience actually need to be? And we end up like making sure that the end result actually like logically makes sense in a way that like we don't want to force something that isn't going to be natural just to get cross compatibility or like cross module sharing between products.

But we also want to leverage ecosystems where we built them out. And so basically, as we look at the expansion card system, for example, in a world where we built the framework desktop first, we didn't have laptops, it's very unlikely that we would have invented an expansion card system just to make the front I.O. of the desktop modularized. Like, that's probably not something that would make sense. But we built the expansion card system. We already have that available.

We have, like, you know, a dozen different expansion. cards out there, including things like additional storage, additional Ethernet cards, things like that. So since we had that in our library, we have all that available, it made total sense to plug that rate into the front and bring some of that customization that's helpful in laptops to a place where it's also helpful in a desktop. You've told me before in a prior interview that you actually plan your funding around this. When you get a new chunk of funding, that chunk of funding allows you to build out a new product, which for you, unlike most companies, means a new product category. It means a new size of some kind of device. And that allows there to be a repairable

and modular 12-inch laptop instead of a 13 or 16. It allows there to be a modular repairable desktop all of a sudden. But does it mean that each of those new product lines is going to be upgradeable? We don't know that. I don't think you've said that. And I would love for you to say it here on this podcast. With the 13, a 2021 machine with an old Intel chip can now be upgraded to a 2025 standards with a modern AMD chip. I don't know about any company that's ever done that before. It's amazing that you've done that. I don't know if you said out loud that when you do this for other categories, that you are going to do that, that you were going to make them so that you can put new boards in them in the future and upgrade them. Is that the idea? Yeah, I don't know

if I ever haven't said that. I'm not to double negative it. But yeah, yeah, I can definitely say that. I can commit to we start product lines where we have conviction that will be able to deliver on the upgradeability of it, not just on the longevity of it. And the challenge here, of course,

is that the definition of upgradeability is really broad. And in many cases, because we can't be in full control of the entire world's PC. world's supply chains and roadmaps, we don't want to over-specify what upgradeability means, because that is something that's outside of our control. I think you'd be shocked at how often and how rapidly roadmaps have very large silicon companies change. And so we don't want to even see something that like we see on a roadmap and we see based on our knowledge of that item,

like, oh, yes, that could make a good upgrade for this because we don't know if a year from now, that item will still exist. So when we state what that upgrade is, it's that that thing is something we'll be able to ship. Like, we're deep enough in development. It's close enough to hitting, well, for in our case, it's not a shelf, but hitting our website, that no matter what those silicon vendors decide on the roadmap, that thing's not going to disappear and we'll be able to get it out into the world. Going back to the fundraising question, this idea that we do fundraising to unlock new categories, like very tactically, what? What that means is that when we raise funding, like we did early last year, we actually go and hire and build additional teams within framework.

And we go out into our supply base and we make sure that they're hiring and building additional teams that are dedicated to working with us. So every time we add another category to our roadmap, another long-lived category to our roadmap, that's us building a team inside a framework that owns that product category. Is that in a certain way, like a really inefficient way to do business? One of the reasons, one of the things that makes it really efficient is that the same dynamic exists across other companies, other consumer electronics companies, but in a way that that product is reset either every year or every two years from scratch, meaning a whole new set of tooling, new mechanical design, new electrical design, new set of modules. That's like incredibly wasteful and inefficient. And obviously it results in short-lived products too, because how can you have parts longevity or upgradeability if you're resetting it every two years? So for us, when we invest in that category, that first year, we're paying a lot more. Like the team at our supplier is a lot bigger. We're paying for a lot more tooling. We're paying for new modules that we're tooling up and creating.

And then each time we refresh that product, it's more efficient for us, for our team internally. The teams that the suppliers are working with are a bit smaller and more efficient. And we're not doing a whole new set of tooling each time. So basically, it costs us, let's say, something on the order of five, times more to do the first iteration of a new product category than it does for each subsequent refresh. That's just like a rough approximation. That's interesting. That also feels like it in part answers the question of the caution in launching new things because that's right. That means if you get it wrong the first time, you're just host. Yeah. Yeah, there's no way that we can recoup that. Right.

You spend a lot of money and it's just gone because you're going to have to start over somewhere else. That's exactly right. So let's talk about where you go from here because I think, I think you told Sean at one point that you weren't just a laptop company. We're not. We've got a desktop now. I know. Does that count? Like, have you satisfied the brief now? No, not really. Is that what she meant? Or are you going beyond PCs eventually? No, no, yeah. What I meant is we're going beyond PCs. And part of this, it goes back to the efficiency thing.

It goes in some ways even back to the fundraising thing of like part of what made the framework desktop really obvious for us was that we could identify that mission. and product philosophy and market opportunity for us, but we could also identify that, oh, we can leverage essentially all of our existing supply base and partnerships, including the really strong partnership we have with AMD to do this really quickly and do this really efficiently, whereas if we think about like a total leap into an entire different space,

that's us building an entire new supply base, which then demands a lot of confidence and a lot of investment to basically make that confidence, make sense. As you think through something like a phone, which I know everyone has asked you about. A phone strikes me as a particularly interesting one because as you talk about, you know, repairability and e-waste and upgradeability, there's no place to be more effective than with a smartphone, I think, right now. But that's also like an incredibly mature, incredibly hard market to break. So like, I'm not asking you to say if you're building a phone because I know that you are.

But like how do you think through a market like that one and whether it makes sense for framework to be part of it? Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. I mean, one of the things for really any category that we pick goes back to this idea that that first iteration is such a massive investment that we have to be fairly sure that we're going to be able to succeed and win in that category. And one of the things about phone specifically is that that initial investment is orders of magnet. larger than it is for any category that we've been in to date. And so for us to build a phone, we have to be in a financial position or a fundraising position where if we're not able to win, obviously we want to win, we want to be able to make sure that we're able to win in that category. But if winning takes longer than we anticipated or takes more iterations than we anticipated,

we don't want to put the entire company at risk around that. And so, like, you know, obviously phones are hard from design and engineering perspective, especially as we think about modularization, repairability, and upgradeability, but they're also extremely difficult from a go-to-market standpoint. And so, like, as we look at both ends of that, we want to make sure that we as a company in our position where, no matter what happens on phone, we're going to continue to be able to drive and succeed on our mission across Framework, that's when we're doing a phone. If Framework were to theoretically do a phone, which it is. Which it is. Which it is, according to David Pierce, you've heard it,

on the verge, David Pierce, who is not part of Framework, believes Framework, still like a phone. If Framework were to do phone, we get this comment all the time on any story where we compliment the battery of a phone or we hate on the battery of a phone. People say, I miss those days when you could open a compartment on the back of your phone and remove the battery and put a different battery in there. Should Framework ever do a phone? Is that something that you think would be a feature of a phone? We do have some very. interesting ideas. We have ideas around a lot of different categories. You do have some ideas

specifically around batteries and phones that I'm not going to pre-commit anything around. Given the unknown time in the future at which point there may or may not be a framework phone. Fair enough. So and let's go to like a talk through like a very different category because I think I think about like, uh, I don't know, headsets is probably a good one right now where I think we're at a point now where there's a lot of energy behind it. There are a lot of, people who think this is going to be the next big thing, but nobody has yet agreed on anything, what they're supposed to do,

what they're going to look like, how they're going to work. Like, we don't know any of that yet. And so I think based on what you've said, that strikes me as this is a moment that is just objectively too early for you to want to be in it. That's right.

You just can't, you literally and figuratively can't afford to be wrong four times until we all figure this out. Is that, am I thinking about that the right way? That's right. Yeah. So I guess we look at like VR error, headsets against something like laptops. The reason we did laptops to start our first product was a

laptop is that we saw that for, you know, 10 years running the use cases and the core user experience of laptops had stabilized in a way that we could take what we had there, look at things like Silicon Roadmaps and module roadmaps from different technology providers, and have fairly high confidence so we could build a long-lived upgradable product within a form factor that we hold constant. As we look at ARVR, not only are the form factors like wildly in flux, like the core use case and value proposition is still wide open. And those things, of course, go very, very tightly together, especially in something that has such ergonomic constraints, like a like a headset. And so for us to look at a VR headset and say, you know, with reasonable confidence that

not even 10 years and five years from now that things still going to make sense, we just can't do that. And so it wouldn't make sense for us as a company with our product. philosophy to go and build a VR headset and AR headset until that industry matures and stabilizes. And the interesting thing is like the way our business model works, we want that to happen. And that like as these product categories mature replacement cycles inherently lengthen, which we're even seeing in smartphones already over the last five years, and the companies that in the space invest less in innovation necessarily in a form factor perspective, a use case perspective, because there's nothing, there's no juice left to squeeze out of that lemon.

And instead, you end up with this world, like we're seeing maybe with iPhone stay in the reviews that folks like you at the verge are doing on iPhone's reviews of like, oh, actually, you can skip this year, wait for next year because there isn't a lot worth picking up this year. That's like our signal for like, oh, okay, we see those reviews. That means it's time for us to enter that product category. So, all right, we need to let you go here in a minute. But before we do, I believe Sean has a lightning round of things he must to throw at you. I do.

I'm sure I can anticipate a few of them. It won't have the question that I asked you the other day, though. Oh, okay. So I've already asked it. 240-watt charger. We're starting to see some out in the market, which is great. It actually took much, much longer than we thought it would. We expect, actually we were surprised that we ended up being the first 180 watt out there.

We expected 240s to be out before we even shipped our first 180. So it's great to see that the market is finally like moving and catching up. And that's nice. It's nice for everyone. And obviously, you know, any of our laptops, you don't have to purchase with a power adapter. You can purchase it without and then pick up any, anyone that you'd like. Cam memory. We know it's not going to be in the desktop because it reduced the bandwidth significantly to have it not be soldered on the board for that strict silo chip. But in general,

we're going to get some of that flat memory in the future maybe. Yeah, one of the things to, to like understand about this, I think maybe is lost that we have, maybe haven't communicated

as clearly as we needed to around the framework desktop, but also really around like any product at all, is that for technologies like that, that go deep into signal integrity, that go deep into I.O., that go deep into, like,

even how the processor is packaged and the ballout works of signals. These are things that the silicon vendor has to have planned out and designed for from the start. Like us as the end device maker, we can't like hack around it and like create a thing that wasn't designed for from the silicon to begin with. Like so for let's say cam on something like rise in AIMax, that's something that AMD would have needed to have designed for all the way from, I don't even know how many years ago they started the development of the

architecture and design of that thing as a design goal from the beginning, which actually, based on our understanding of it may not have even been possible, given how wide the memory busts on that thing, even if they had thought that that was the goal from the beginning. But there are technologies like this that just can't work. So for us, it's

not, can we add CAM to something that wasn't designed for CAM? It's, when is there a platform that was designed from the beginning for CAM, that we're then going to intercept one of our products. Gaming handheld. This isn't, I would put this in the category of similarly, but differently,

a mature-ish, maturing-ish category with good products that we also can identify a clear path to making business sense. And part of the challenge there is just Valb is so dominant with Steam Deck. We can't afford to play the kinds of games that maybe a Lenovo or an Asus can. likely not making money for an extended period of time entering a new category. For us, like we have to be able to recoup our investment relatively quickly within the first or second generation of entering a category.

And so that's something where, similarly, like, even though like we know we could build a great gaming handheld, we see the demand from customers to have an upgradable, repairable gaming handheld. It's hard for us to see a path, at least right now, where we can compete with Valve in that space and not get destroyed financially. framework battery bank framework battery bank

meaning for framework laptop 16 or for just generally as a product yeah this is the one that would take one of your existing battery laptop batteries would stick it in a case i think you showed off like a a prototype of a prototype or something yeah we we showed a proof of concept

actually two years ago at the framework next level of that and we show like there are actually a number of proof of concepts that we showed that including an eGPU concept And part of this was showing and flagging to electronics makers, like peripheral makers especially, that these things were technically possible with the goal of then starting to cede some third-party development. We haven't seen a lot.

Actually, we haven't seen those specific things pan out. Instead, actually, we ended up seeing as a third-party risk five main board. We actually didn't anticipate that at all. So we instead ended up getting that. But basically, when we do these types of proofs of concept, it's oftentimes to show technical feasibility to enable third parties to go and run with it, or even enable the community go and run with it. And so for Battery Pack, that is the one that we would love to see a third party or even a community member start to design on their own.

And it's also something that, like, for us in framework, as we have a larger team over time, as we have more resources over time, is the sort of thing that potentially we would also go and start to address. But the reason we showed it so early was more the technical proof of feasibility. e-paper screens. Yeah, this is also an interesting one. It kind of goes back to this idea of, like, us being able to invest and be in control around destiny, display development aside for,

you know, is the second most expensive part of consumer electronics beyond silicon investment doing custom silicon. And so for us, it's being very selective about where we do semi-customization or custom development of displays because of the upfront cost required there. And so to do so,

So to do something like an e-ink display and the proper form factor for any of our laptops would be an enormous sum of money we'd have to pay. So if a display vendor creates something that happens to be close and we can semi-customize that that becomes more feasible, the investment to do a fully custom display is just at least for us today, still pretty far out of reach. The framework Kindle is a thing I want to exist. I just want you to know that. Okay, there we go. That's another. We can put that on the quadrant somewhere. And lastly, Nvidia.

Sure, it's a company. It sure. Sure is. That's a Vergecast. All right. Narav, we've kept you long enough. Thank you for doing this with us. Thanks, David.

Thanks, Sean. Always good to chat. Thanks so much. All right, we've got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about James Bond. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T-com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. Welcome back. A couple of weeks ago, the big news in the entertainment world

was that Amazon had struck a deal to give it full creative control over James Bond. basically for decades the way that James Bond has worked. That whole franchise has been controlled by one family, the Broccoli. You may have heard of these people before. Barbara Broccoli, for many, many years, has been the person overseeing the James Bond franchise. Other people distribute the movies. Other people do a lot of the work to make the movies, obviously.

But no one does anything with James Bond without the Broccoli say so. And they've been, to their credit, very precious about that. But then Amazon bought MGM. for $8.5 billion a couple of years ago, and a big part of what MGM had to offer was James Bond. Since then, there has been no James Bond. So Amazon, by all accounts, made a deal to have the Rockley's relinquished creative control

so that what happens to James Bond now is fully up to Amazon. And that made a lot of people, including really anyone who likes and cares about James Bond stuff and wants James Bond stuff to be good, feel a lot of feelings. I would not say the overall reaction to this was like great enthusiasm for the future of James Bond. It was people worrying about what will happen when Amazon does what Disney did to Marvel or to Star Wars and just floods the zone with stuff because that's what the business demands until it kind of ruins the vibe.

I have been trying to figure out how to sort through all of this myself and figured that the best person to talk to about this is the person I know who, who knows the most about James Bond. And that is John Gruber from Daring Fireball. So he is going to come on and he's going to explain how he feels why James Bond is special and where it goes from here under the control of Amazon. Let's get into it. John Gruber, welcome to the Vergecast. Nice to be here, David.

Okay, so the news, I think at this point is a couple of weeks old, but basically where we are, and you, I think, have more context on this than I do. But basically, the way I understand it is that after a bunch of, interpersonal shenanigans Amazon wrote a very large check, the number which at least I do not know yet, to the Broccoli and now have

creative control over the James Bond franchise for the first time. Is that a reasonable summary of where we are? I think so, yes. I guess the part that I'm still confused on and maybe everybody is other than the Broccoli and Amazon's top executives is exactly

where they were before last week's news that, okay, we're going to write a check and just take control. It was like, you know, like what amount of control did MGM have that gave Amazon power to, you know, that left them at a logger jam? You know, it seemed like basically MGM has the rights to some aspect of the franchise. You know what I mean? Like the broccoli's couldn't make movies without MGM, but MGM couldn't make the movies without the broccoli is having complete control over the creative element, something like that. Yeah, it's a very odd setup.

And I think I was going back and reading some of the coverage of the MGM acquisition in the first place. So Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion. That deal closed, I think, early 2022. And even back then, the read was that, like, the crown jewel of the empire here is James Bond. Right? Like, there's a lot of content. Amazon wants a lot of stuff. They want the studio.

They want the library. but like the thing that you're buying, the IP at the top of all of this, is James Bond. And since then, precisely nothing has happened, which is so strange. And I think just speaks to the weirdness

of all of this. Yeah, other than stories coming out that nothing was happening, right? And that it was sort of conspicuous that nothing was happening. It wasn't just secrecy behind the scenes.

It was, hey, something's broken behind the scenes, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So what was your feeling when this news dropped?

What's your immediate reaction to the change that came out a couple of weeks ago? My heart sunk, I guess, because I think, I don't think it's impossible that in hindsight we can look back and say, you know what, this wasn't so bad, or something good came out of it. And I'll put a pin in that and we can come back to what I think might be the best case scenario. But I think the most likely scenario is that this is, this is. it's just not going to be good. And I'll compare it directly to Disney buying Lucasfilm from George Lucas. Another franchise you care very much about, if I'm not mistaken. I do care.

Well, certainly Star Wars. Yes, definitely. Very, very meaningful and important to me. And similarly, you know, Lucasfilm, there was a lot more than just Star Wars. You know, there was the Indiana Jones franchise. There's the whole industrial lot. Light and Magic, everything else Lucasfilm does. ILM in particular, you know, is just a, you know, Vervege listeners don't need to be told

what they do or their role in the industry. But overall, I just feel like what we've seen Disney do with the Star Wars franchise is what we'll see Amazon do with the James Bond franchise, which is diluted, you know, with spinoffs and shows and cartoons and, you know, for some fans, you know, know, there are, I'm sure you can dig up some fans who think Disney's done nothing but a bang-up job with Star Wars or more positive than negative. But it's definitely a change. It's a definite, you know, and this whole idea of calling it content, you know, or whatever else you want to call it, which is what the major big tech streamer corporations who are making these deals

and writing these checks, the way they tend to look at it, as opposed to an artistic endeavor. And I will compare. One difference with James Bond and Star Wars is that when Disney bought Star Wars, there had only been six movies made. And yes, there were like comic books, and there was somewhat of an expanded empire, but nothing like what we've seen since. And the James Bond franchise is different because it goes back so much further to the 60s. And at this point, there's been, I guess, 25 movies? You'd think I'd know that before I came in the show. But it's just a longer stretch of time. And there was a similarity where the franchises were defined by theatrical major motion pictures that were events, right? Like, holy crap, George Lucas is finally going to

make those prequels that he was, you know, rumored to be working on even when he was working on the original trilogy back in the 70s and 80s. Wow. Or wow, they've announced a new James Bond. It's a guy named Daniel Craig and he's got blonde hair, not dark hair, and people are upset about that and it's a new you know or or here james daniel craig's coming back for a fifth movie and it's definitely going to be the last one you know it it's an event and you know oh here's a series about young money penny here's 10 episode series about uh felix lighter in the CIA here's the young james bond cartoon which i know sort of exists you know but it's going to be more of it So this is the thing I'm sort of torn on.

And I think one of the challenge I have in thinking through all of this is on the one hand, it's not like every James Bond movie ever has been perfect and fabulous. And this is like a beautiful, pristine thing that cannot be touched. Right. Like there have been bad Bond movies. I love them all, if I'm honest, but some of them are very bad. Right. And even there have been sort of spin off.

things over the years like Golden Eye on the N64, obviously a classic iconic video games. But there have been other James Bond video games that I don't remember the name of because they're not any good. And so they've they've experimented with this over time. And I think there is definitely an extent to which I think the broccoli is in this sort of unusual setup where basically a couple of people had creative control over whether things happened or didn't has probably avoided bad things, but it hasn't avoided all of the bad things. Right. And so maybe it's like the part of me that is optimistic is like, okay, maybe nobody's perfect.

And maybe there will be good stuff and maybe I can just watch the good stuff and ignore the bad stuff. But that's also the Star Wars play. And I have basically been run out of the Star Wars franchise by the way. It has run over the last decade. So I don't know. I'm torn between these two feelings. Yeah. And I, you know, I say that as a real big fan of, I mean, that's why I'm here.

And a long time ago in the first run. of my podcast, The Talk Show, when I was co-hosting it with Dan Benjamin, this is like, oh, man, like 2008, 2009, early, I mean, literally like early days of podcasting. We had the idea to, at the tail, you know, the topic was typically Apple and the usual stuff I talk about on the talk show. And we had the idea for, I forget how many movies had been out at that point, but let's say it was like 19 Bond movies had been made to date. let's take the next 19 episodes and in chronological order, we'll talk about each one at the end of the show.

Like the last 20 minutes of each show, we'll talk about each of the Bond movies in order and we'll, you know, we'll watch them in order again. And you listeners following along, you'll know, because we're going in chronological order, your homework, if you don't want this spoiled, we'll be to do it. And it was a lot of fun. But rewatching them all in order. You know, and we talked about it week to week, you know, they're uneven, right? Some of them are not great. Some of them don't hold up. And it's kind of interesting watching them again.

But I don't think it's for lack of effort, right? It's the, and I think that's the difference is that when, like with Disney's current stewardship of Star Wars or the Avengers too, the Marvel universe, right? with the amount that they're putting out, there's no intention to try to make everything great. Right? That's it's like that's the difference is that when you know you're putting out all of these hours of content and they call it content each year, you know that the overall quality is trying to be like, I don't know, good at best. It's not trying to make everything great. And, you know, and we can talk about that a lot of people, especially people of our generation,

have very, a lot of people have very negative feelings about George Lucas' own second trilogy in the Star Wars movie. I personally, I don't love it like I do the first ones, but I actually don't hate it like most people of my generation do. I actually like the movies overall, and I like their weirdness, and I like that they're not just trying to redo what the first trilogy felt like. And I really noticed with my son's generation, my son's 21 now, but he was a little kid when those movies were like new, his generation didn't really see a difference between the old trilogy and the new trilogy. They just loved Star Wars, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So much of that stuff is tied to sort of time and moments in your life in a way that's always really hard to peel apart. That's like whichever part of it you saw when you were 12 is probably your favorite. Yeah, definitely. That's just a hard thing to undo. Well, and that, you know, that just came up recently with SNL's 50, right, the 50th anniversary,

where so many people, and there's so many cool documentaries that came out about that, but over and over again, and I think this is one of those things that we can debate what the best eras of SNL were, but one thing that's almost undebatable is that most people feel that the, quote, unquote, best years and the best cast were the ones when they were, like, a teenager, and they first started getting late-night adult sarcastic. chasm and humor. And so, no matter how old you are, you kind of have this sweet spot in your head. And I think the

James Bond movies are like that, right? Everybody has a sweet spot for the, a sweet place in their heart for the James Bond of their youth of the new movie, you know, whatever were the new Bond movies when they were young and they first fell in love with the franchise. You know, and then you get older and you get more of an appreciation for going back

in time and sort of putting things in perspective. But that, that's, to me, the difference is that the broccoli for 20-some movies were all always trying to make each one a great bond movie. And they fell short sometimes. I think you make 25 movies, you know, and you try to take risks, and you're trying not to repeat yourself.

And you're trying to keep bond. And I think they did this remarkably so, like keep bond current through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. I mean, it's a long time to keep a character current through dramatic changes in culture, history, world geopolitics, things that affect a spy movie. You know, some were great, some not so great, but they were always trying. Yeah. To that end, actually, why do you think this character and this franchise has been this enduring?

Because it's kind of unparalleled in that sense, that like, James Bond is, I think, very different as a character from first movie, to, you know, no time to die. But it's also pretty recognizably the same the whole way through. And for that to happen and still even have the possibility of being any good is pretty unusual with any kind of franchise like that, just the fact that it hasn't run out of steam yet is kind of wild. What is your sense of why that is? How much time do we have, right?

I mean, that's sort of what makes me obsessed with the franchise is trying to answer that question and sort of the impossibility of really buttonholing it very neatly into a very succinct. Ah, yes, that's exactly how they've done it, argument. Like, you're not going to get there. And that's what makes it endlessly fascinating and fun to discuss. If I had to try to encapsulate it, though, I think the things that they did that really made this built to last. And it sounds cynical, but I mean this in an endearing way, that they, you know, that they

they established a brand for James Bond, right? And right out of the gate, they had the theme song in the first one, Dr. No. The theme song was cool when it was new in 1962, and it's sort of timeless now, right? Star Wars got that right, too, right, with the great John Williams score, right? And the logo for Star Wars, the logo for James Bond with the O, oh, and the seven that's shaped like a Luger or something, which isn't even a gun James Bond used, right? And that ties into other aspects of the brand, like the fact that James Bond is persnickety

and very picky about certain things. He wants to use a certain gun. That's his favorite gun, you know, the Walter PPP for most of the run. And he wants his martini famously prepared just right. You know, and that sort of pickiness of the character becomes part of the brand. And I think that they managed it over the years

to sort of keep that fundamental brand timeless and then they could decorate around it with each decade and with each actor as they move it forward. But that that core brand resonates with people. I totally agree with that. And I think part of the reason I'm thinking about this is because I have to assume that if you're Amazon,

that is the big question to try and figure out, Right? Is like what about this can we not change? Because I think what I assume to be true, and I'm curious if you feel differently, but what I assume is true is that every imaginable branch of the James Bond cinematic universe is about to come true. We're going to get more Bond movies.

We're going to get a Q spin-off that's going to be like a tech show. We're going to get a money-penny thing. They're going to do a whole thing about, you know, minor characters. we're going to spin this thing in every single direction. And I feel like if I'm the person in charge of James Bond at Amazon, the question now is, what do you have to have inside of one of these to make it work, to make it James Bond? And in a weird way, the answer to that question seems to both be like scarcity. You actually can't do too much.

That's like a part of the whole James Bond thing that I think if we had done 50 movies by now instead of 25, it might actually be really different. But that also even that thing you're describing is, hard to, you can't just have him say shaken, not stirred once an episode and get away with it being a Bond show. You know what I mean? I feel like that's a hard thing to define with Bond in a way that even Star Wars

you just start with like Galaxy far, far away, permission to kind of do whatever we want. And I think that was the wrong approach, but you can at least see how you start from that. James Bond is harder to define that way. Yeah, and it's because there is no one central character of Star Wars, right? That's different, right? It's not the Luke

Skywalker's cinematic universe. I think they decided it was the force. Right. That was like, they were like, that is the unifying theme, and it just didn't work. Yeah. And, like, what is the greater James Bond cinematic universe? It's just the world, right? It's the modern world, right?

Where that's, and that's where it just seems more worrisome to me, even than Star Wars, right? Like, where, like, the, to me, clearly better parts of the Disney-era Star Wars, Star Wars and or, which itself is sort of a spinoff from my favorite movie they've made since then the Rogue One, you know, which isn't about the main characters. You know, it parlayes into the story of them and it takes place in their era, but it's like, ah, but here's the thing that's happening over on the side. But what's happening in the James Bond universe when we're not paying attention to that, him himself, Agent 007 for M. my six, it's just the world, right?

That's so true. Yeah, they're going to end up having to make a movie about the financial crisis that is like, just James Bond appears one time. And I guess this is a James Bond movie. And so what are the odds when they do a Felix lighter spin-off about the American CIA agents in the world fighting, you know, the same agents of evil of Spectre or whatever they do when they reboot it? you know, how is that going to be any different than just any random CIA show that Amazon puts on Prime? Right. And this is the other part to go back to your question from 10 minutes ago about why my heart sunk.

The other thing that really really has me bummed about this is I think of the major streamers, Amazon Prime's original content is the worst. I was going to ask you about this if you were more upset that it was Amazon in particular than anybody else. why I like Mr. and Mrs. Smith is my only quibble with that statement, but otherwise I think I largely agree with you. I haven't watched the Mr. and Mrs. Smith yet, you know, and one show that when I mentioned this on Daring, and also I'll add that to my list. And I, you know, I like, I like spy stuff. I like spy shows. I just, it's spy shows, heist shows, spy movies that are, you know, more heisty is sort of the sweet spot, you know, I like that. I like that. sort of plot. You know, it's a very middle-aged white guy thing to like, but that's what I like. But I don't know. I was, when I mentioned that I just don't think Prime's original content is good, people pointed to a show called Patriot that was on as like a sort of somewhat comedy. And I'd never even heard of it. It was on like 2015. It was on for two seasons. And then they canceled

it. It sounds like Amazon. Yeah. And I did my favorite show on Amazon, but I can't recommend it. It was a show called The Peripheral from a few years ago based on a William Gibson novel. And it was really well done, but they canceled it after one season. And it's one of those shows where that's why I can't recommend it. It was a very good season, but it clearly stopped at a point that it, you know, they were

really, it wasn't a satisfying conclusion. It was meant to keep going for at least in the first. another season or two. And it didn't. So it's like, so it's the best show that they made. Good production values, good cast. I thought it was pretty smart because, you know, I hadn't read Gibson's original book, but it seemed smart enough that they surely seemed to use the source material well to make an intelligent show. So much else that I've seen on Prime is just sort of like it looks bad and it's sort of dumb. Yeah. Well, and I think I'm now thinking about how. how many of these sort of generic,

kind of anonymous seeming spy shows there are out there. And a lot of them were big hits. Like, the night agent on Netflix is the most forgettable show of all time, but is a giant hit. And then there's the recruit, which I thought was the night agent, but it's actually a different thing.

And there's just a million of these, right? And I think, like, I probably watch more of them than most. But I just keep thinking, like, you take all of that stuff and you rename it James Bond. And maybe that's where we're headed is we're just going to have a million generic things

with this name that isn't generic. And that's how Amazon feels like it can win, which is a real bummer of a way to go. And you've got to go back to the word branding. You've got this brand that, you know, like a way to style the logos of whatever you call the show, you know, a way to style that,

I don't know what it would be. I'm not a logo designer, but a way to style young Moneypenny in a way that looks, James Bond branded, musical scores. Disney does, if you like the proliferation

of cinematic universe content, I mean, Disney does a good job with stuff like the music for various Star Wars shows. You know, and you can tell from, if you didn't know what was playing, you could just listen and say, oh, this seems like it must be a Star Wars show, right?

And I guess they'll do that with the Bond greater bond. And they haven't said they're going to do a greater bond cinematic universe. You know, like I said, before, maybe they'll do the right thing and sort of keep it rare or special, but I doubt it. What is the right thing in your mind? What feels like the best case plausible scenario here? I would say, I would like to see them acknowledge because I think, and again, it sounds so simple, but obviously all of these companies with all this money, they get caught up in it. Like, who thinks it sounds like a good idea

to run a creative artistic franchise by committee? Who thinks a committee of executives in the streaming company should be the ones making the artistic decisions of casting and writing and plotting and pacing and stuff like that? Nobody, right? You want filmmakers and creative,

people making those decisions. So they could nip this in the bud and sort of acknowledge all of our fears by writing a big check. And the name that comes to mind is Christopher Nolan, right? Who famously at one point wanted to do a Bond movie. Right. And the problem that they ran into was that the Barber Broccoli ultimately always had final cut of the Bond movies. And Nolan, you know, it was sort of irresistible force for me. an immovable object, right? That Nolan doesn't do anything anymore unless he gets contractual, you know, not just a handshake, but in the contract final cut.

But if they just said, you know, call him up and say, you know, let's make a deal for a three, let's do three movies, you're in control. You cast it, you're in charge of the writing, we'll give you the money. We trust you to do a great job. Just do three great, you know, reboot the franchise with a new, new actor, you're in control, Christopher Nolan. That would be perfect for me. Or, you know, there are other people other than Christopher Nolan who could get that role, but it has to be a filmmaker slash creative person. Someone who, like, if Christopher Nolan passes or they choose somebody

else, but Christopher Nolan hears who's in charge, he'd be like, oh, well, I kind of wish it was me, but that sounds good to me that they're in charge. Right. Real like Dark Knight trilogy, but with James Bond right situation and that went I would say very well for everyone involved but it does seem like that that dynamic just doesn't seem to exist anywhere anymore

I think there was a while where there were folks out there writing big checks and giving creative control like that's that was the house of card story at the very beginning a million years ago I think Apple was doing that for a while at the beginning but we've seen this real retrenchment back from we're gonna write big checks

to great people to make great things and that's going to make it all work. Because the theater business has died, because the streaming business has gotten more complicated, because it's ads. The thing that worries me the most is it feels like every business incentive is going to be, we want to make infinity,

10-episode-long mini-series about James Bond and not a great movie every three years. And that's just the business now for these companies. Right. And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure inside Amazon in particular that having numbers, and spreadsheets and, you know, two-page memos or whatever their famous memo length is,

to back it up with facts actually works, or at least works politically inside the company. I don't know that it works to produce. It works when you're selling cloud computing. Right. Certainly. And I think it's about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking, right? They're not people who are invested like the broccoli's were in thinking, hey, we're spending all this money.

We have a $400 million budget to make a fifth movie with Daniel Craig as James Bond, whatever the budget is. And they're, of course, interested in the box office of that movie when it drops and when it comes out and what the critical response will be. And the fact that it's concluding a run in the role for Craig, that they want it to feel like a capstone to a great reboot of the franchise. But they're also thinking about the fact that Bond movies get watched 10, 20, 30 years from now, right? Like, after Barbara Broccoli's gone, you know, like just the way that her dad is dead, but the movies he made still stand up and are beloved.

And to have somebody who has both those goals in mind, you know, I'm sure there is a short-term financial logic to it, you know, and I'm sure there will. was with Disney with Star Wars, right? That they're selling more toys continuously by keeping it in the air. There's always new Star Wars stuff. There's always new Marvel cinematic stuff. Like, in some ways, you know, there is an upside to it. It's not all downside, but it's just different. And it's so much more like everything else as opposed to being something special, right?

That Star Wars is no longer special. James Bond movies are still special. They really are. Yeah, it's true. And I think it's been, it's an interesting moment in the Bond franchise because I think part of the reason this happened is because by all accounts and reporting,

the franchise was in total, like, disarray. They don't have an ex-bond. There's apparently not a script for a movie. Nobody had agreed on anything. The last one came out in, what, 2021? Like, three and a half years ago. Yeah, and I remember the timing because it was sort of like the,

one of the big, blockbusters to sort of reopen theaters after COVID. That's right. I remember that. That was like, that was the post-COVID movie. Tennant was the mid-COVID movie. And no time did I was the post-COVID movie. Right.

Quote unquote post-COVID. So, and yeah, I think the part that gives me hope, I guess, is that maybe now we can be out of impasse, right? I would rather have something than nothing, I guess. If those are the two choices you're going to give me. I would rather have meh, James Bond than nothing, I suppose. But then I wonder if that's the thinking that leads us down this road of problems. I guess the way I would put it, and I often come back to this in my writing, that it really matters what, it doesn't just matter what your top priorities are as an unordered list.

It matters what order they're in. And if you want to, there's a Walt Disney quote that they put up at Disney World when you're walking around and they always cover, you know, if there's a ride that's under construction, and they cover it up so you don't see the construction, and they put inspirational quotes from Walt Disney. And my favorite one is, I guess I'm paraphrasing here, but I think I can get it really close. We don't make movies to make money.

We make money to make more movies. And yes, you want to make, you want your movies to be profitable, and you want your IP to be profitable, and you want the investment you've made, in it to pay off over time. But the most important thing is to keep the art as high as possible and make it popular enough to make money, not to maximize your money and secondarily make the content as good as we possibly can, because of course, that'll keep it going. But if the most

important thing is how do we make the most money from this in the next few years, it's going to hurt the artistic quality of the output. It's inevitable. Yeah. Yeah, and it's, and that is way that most people seem to be thinking in this particular long time. And there's this whole misnomer. We see it in tech all the time. I mean, and people, but it really isn't true. It's a philosophy that some people have, but there's no bearing in law. I wish Neely were here. He could probably, maybe he'd tell me to go bugger off and it is in law, but I'm pretty sure it's not. I've looked into this, but this notion that publicly held corporations are under a legal obligation to quote, maximize profits for shareholders, right? And that, oh, well, if they make this

decision that's sort of bad for the product, but clearly you can see how it's going to make the money, that people who want to excuse them say, well, they had to because they're under a legal obligation to maximize profit for the shareholders. That's not true. And well, in Amazon famously, for like 15 years, Jeff Bezos was like, I am going to actively make less money than possible. in order to continue to make this company a success and more valuable. Amazon is definitely not that company anymore, but it is certainly true that that is a thing you can do if you choose to. You can do the right thing if you want to.

You know, and Tim Cook has talked about that at Apple. There was a thing like 10 years ago, or in the early years of his CEOship after Steve Jobs had passed, where somebody had asked, somebody at their shareholders meeting had questioned the amount of money the company was spending on accessibility. And he was like, I don't care about the bloody ROI. And you can just say, like, why Tim Cook used the word bloody is because I think actual

American curse word was on the tip of his tongue. And he caught himself and somehow shifted to the very unusual for Alabama and bloody. I don't think he's running around saying that in his day. Yeah. But it, you know, by all accounts of that shareholders meeting was very angry and that not every decision they make is going to be about the return on investment, that they're there's a long-term view that will ultimate, and that long-term view will maximize long-term profits, right?

And I think, you know, people looking back at 15 years of Tim Cook would say, yeah, maybe the guy knows what he's doing in terms of profits at Apple. And I think the long-term value of owning the James Bond franchise isn't about what they're going to do in the next three years. It's about what they do for the next 30 years and about how what they do in the next three years, how it holds up. Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, Andy Jassy, if you're listening, get at us.

We have thoughts for you. Or at least give Christopher Nolan a call, right? Yeah, right. That solves a lot of problems. I'm good with that. John, thank you for doing this. Let's see this again sometime. Yes, very fun. Hopefully under better circumstances. I would love to come back on if they make a great movie and be like, yes, we were wrong. We had no reason to fear. Thank you. I would love to be wrong. That will be a great day on the Vergecast.

I very much look forward to it. I think it's more likely I come on and we talk about how terrible the young money penny. The 16 part mini-series. All right, well, until then, thank you, John. All right, we got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take a question for the first cast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

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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. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back.

Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, you can email Vergecast at theverge.com. You can call 866 Verge 1-1. You can, like, I don't know, blue sky. We're not that hard to get a hold of. If you have questions, we want to hear all of your questions. Thank you, as always, everybody. out. This week, we have a question

about face computers. Hey, it's Mark. I got, I don't know, I'm using a laptop on a computer table on a desk, and I am just unhappy. The laptop screen is so low, I feel like I'm just cranking my neck down and I'm sick

of it. And while external monitors exist and they're great for a desk, I want to be able to move around, travel, go different places, be in the living room, wherever I need to be. Office, I don't care what I like, can you help me find something I could put on my face, some type of glasses that I can connect my MacBook Pro to

and use as a monitor. And obviously, the Apple Vision Pro exists, but it seems that the value is just not there. The value's not there. I'm not paying that much for all of those features that I don't need when all I need is a really good screen that plugs in to my face. So please, help me, please. All right, V song is here.

Hi, V. Hi. I have never wanted to help anyone as much as I want to help Mark. Oh, my God. Mark, I feel for you so much. Yeah, Mark's going through it. So what do you think? Where does your head immediately?

I have an immediate reaction to this. Where do you go? I have one answer for Mark, and it is the X-Real One glasses. This is where I went, too. Okay, good. This is the answer for you, Mark. This is actually, I think, the only answer for you, Mark. because so what the X-real one look like is they just look like a normal pair of glasses from afar sunglasses.

And then it has USBC. You plug it into anything that can output video by USBC, so it can be your phone, it can be your laptop. And then, bada-bing, bada-boom, we've got an X-a-B-B-a-B-B-B-a-boom. We've got an X-Streen front of you, and people will just think you're a gibroni indoors wearing sunglasses. But in front of you, you get to see an ultra-wide screen if you so choose to enable the ultra-wide. or you get to see a very large screen in front of you that it's actually surprisingly really good quality. So, yeah, I've been testing the X-Real-1,

which is their newest series of glasses. They also unveiled the X-Real-1 Pro. What makes it pro off the top of my head, you get, you know, when someone smacks pro at the end of something and you get just a little bit extra, it's that. I'm using the regular X-real ones, and I think they're great as is. I think they're about $500. So, you know, a seventh of the price of a Vision pro.

Yeah. And it basically is going to extend your screen for you. It's not going to hide your screen. Your laptop screen is still going to be on, but you can just look up and not have to crane your neck down. You can look up and type. So, yeah. Just crank your font up. My eyes are like really bad.

So whenever I'm typing in it, like I was slacking a message to you, David, earlier, in the X-Real ones. And I was like, oh, Jesus, I can't read this. Because my eyes are notoriously bad. So I had to just, like, be a really old lady and crank up the font to, like, 150. And I was like, oh, now I can read this comfortably. And you can, like, adjust the distance of, like, the virtual monitor. So you can put it further back if you have better vision or put it real up close like me because I'm blind. So, yeah.

extra one. Okay, so I think you're right, but I just want to talk this out a little bit. I went to exactly the same place that you did, which I think suggests that this is probably the right answer. I think we can dispense with the Vision Pro immediately because it's $3,500 and it's really heavy. And it's just like for this thing that you want, it is wildly overkill and also like not ideal because it's really heavy on your face and it's $3,500. And just not portable because Mark says he wants it to be portable. So I'm assuming that he, occasionally wants to go to a coffee shop. And if you want to go to a coffee shop,

please don't bring your fishing pro. I just, yeah. It's, the travel case is not that portable. Is it possible, though, that a meta-quest could be the answer? It's possible. I have tried doing work in a meta-quest before and come across similar issues. Not in the sense that it's more comfortable,

but I just find it just disorienting. because, I don't know, you don't really have peripheral vision in a quest. So if you are out in public, Mark says he doesn't care what he looks like. And I love that for Mark. But I think you will care even less if people aren't staring at you because I feel the stares when people stare at me. I just feel like you'll be more comfortable. And honestly, a little safer because you never know who's a whack job out there, just taking pictures of you. Like, that's fun.

Or stealing your laptop while you're not looking at it. Or stealing your laptop while you're not looking at it because you're in a headset. I just, I don't think really we're at a place where the headsets make sense for productivity, no matter what the big tech people say. Like, gaming, sure. Like, I think the metaquest is great in terms of like how lightweight it is. It's much more comfortable than the Vision Pro. I find it looks really grainy in there anyway, though, so that's not my favorite thing.

So I think in terms of screen resolution, listen, I watch Strait Kids videos in the X-Real to test. And I was like, oh, my boys, my sons, my K-Fsons. They're in such high resolution. I love this. Okay. Yeah. So, and then the other thing I'm trying to figure out is there are basically two ways to do a screen in front of your face, right? One is the like standard X-Real thing where it's just a display in front of your eyes.

and when your eyes move, the display moves with your eyes. Right? Like that's very straightforwardly, this is the thing that Xreal and a couple of others have been doing for a while. The other one, and I think this is the difference when you get into like the pro universe, is you get the sort of three degrees of freedom where I can like leave the screen over there. Yeah. Or kind of have it exist in like anchored in physical space around me,

even though it's a virtual screen. And I'm trying to think if I'm just a person trying to use my computer, which of those is better. Because on the one hand, like my screen exists in a space, and if I move my head, my screen stays over here. So that sort of tracks with real world.

But also, if I'm wearing these glasses so that I can look at my screen, actually being able to turn my head and still be looking at my screen might be a good thing. Yeah, I think that is a good thing. I do appreciate that about the X-rail. There's a button you can press that.

We'll just turn them into normal glasses in case you have to see what actually. is going on around you, so that's not so bad. My thing is if you're actually working, typing in the headsets is a bitch. There's no way around it unless you have your peripherals with you. And I mean, if you're connecting to a laptop, you can just use the laptops keyboard. That's totally fine. But it's just not a comfortable experience is what I would say. So if you're doing long-term work, I find a pair of glasses easier to wear for a longer period of time. if you're trying to do deep work.

The one thing I do find that the pro headsets have an advantage over is you could make that screen so big. If you ever really want to feel existential dread in a draft, just make the screen the size of your wall, stare at it and just go like, why won't the words come? Have you ever done that? That is like sadistic. I'm going to look at every word that I have written for this story six feet across. That sounds awful. I have done that. It is awful.

I will tell you I've done that I've just like full screened a full screened CMS stared at it and just gone like wow I've made a life choice and wow I really don't like the structure of this graph

what if we just delete it so I have done that not frequently mostly when I was testing just to like torture myself because why not why not I will say that if you're doing a lot of writing though you really got a

crank up the font in the X-Reels. And it's not my favorite to write in. It is a lot better if you're doing just casual media viewing. But you can do it. And as long as you're not looking at 40,000 Excel cells, I think you should be fine. Like if you're just making a deck, blow the deck up. You'll be fine.

It's great. If you're doing like a draft where there's hundreds of tiny little words, just crank it up to 180. And then you can read comfortably instead of squinting in your glasses and going like, yeah, that's the only thing I'll say. You do make an interesting point about the resolution, though, because there is a certain kind of like number crunching spreadsheeting work that I would say no one should do in a headset of any resolution. Correct. It'll just destroy your eyes and brain trying to make sense of all of it. Also your soul.

Also your soul. Yeah, nothing like if you want to see the Excel numbers bigger. you're in real trouble. But I think, yeah, there's like, part of me, here's Mark and it's like, Mark, what you need is not glasses. What you need is one of those cool, foldy stands that just moves your laptop up higher. I was also going to suggest that. I was like, Mark, Mark, what if we, what if we, I think Welch took a picture of the guy one time in a coffee shop who just had like seven books stacked on top of each other and the laptop on top of it and was just happy as a clam working. I will say you probably have seven books in your bookcase mark if you want to try that.

Then before you shell out $500 for a pair of smart glasses face computers. But if you are going to go the face computer route, I really do think the X-R-1 is probably your only option. There might be other competitors that I just haven't tried yet. But as far as one that I have gotten my hands on, put on my face, and feel comfortable, recommending, I would say the X-Real. They have multiple options in multiple price ranges, but the ones that I have used and can say has a pretty good screen resolution is the X-Real one. Yeah, and I think in a case like this, if you're serious, like, I was just looking at X-Ril's

website, because I've tried a few of these, and it's like you can get the thing that you're describing, which is screen in front of your face, for less than the price of the one. But I also think if you're going to use this thing as hard as it sounds like our buddy Mark is going to use it, you should pay for the extra resolution. Like, it's your, your eyes will thank you if you just spend a little bit more to get the one that looks the best you possibly can. That, and especially if you, like, want to watch a video privately on the way back. True.

Commuting. Like, that's, I'm telling you, the stray kids, the makeup resolution was really great. And I was just like, they're so beautiful. I love this. I love watching my effeminate sons from a different country, dance. complicated choreography and Technicolor. It's great. And they're doing it just for you because they're doing it just for me because

they're on the glasses. No one can see me watch a million TikToks of the Justin Baldoni Blake lively case. It's just for me. And now for all of us. That's on top of that. And now for all of us. But it's just we won't tell anybody. Don't worry. I've watched way too many

TikToks about that case. So I'm glad that it's private. It's for the best. It's for the best. V, thank you, Mark, I hope that helps. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about.

Lots of great Sean coverage of all of the framework stuff. I'll link to John's stuff on James Bond and Amazon and all that stuff. We'll put some stuff on the extra real glasses in the show notes. All of that in the show notes. Keep an eye and everything, but also keep it locked on the Verge. As far as I can tell, this surprisingly early gadget season is not going to stop anytime soon. So keep an eye out. Anyway, as always, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings,

James Bond pitches you want to get out to somebody. You can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge11. We honestly love hearing from you. It remains my very favorite thing about doing this show, is hearing from all of you. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poor. Nelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, all of the politics, all of the gadgets, all of the everything. It just keeps happening. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.