The Vergecast - The MacBook Neo's a winner

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

David and Nilay bought new computers this week, as the MacBook Neo turned out to be a surprisingly great cheap Apple laptop. The hosts discuss their experiences with the machines, from the processor to the keyboard to the mess that is MacOS Tahoe. After that, they talk about the future of Xbox, Project Helix, and what it might mean for every gaming PC to become an Xbox... and for the Xbox to become a gaming PC. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, the latest on Paramount and Warner Bros, Grammarly's sloppelgangers, and more. Further reading: MacBook Neo review: the Mac for the masses   Asus chief says Macbook Neo's affordable pricing came as a shock to the entire PC market — compares $599 notebook to a tablet and content-consumption device The MacBook Neo is surprisingly easy to disassemble and repair. From 2007: Ballmer Laughs at iPhone Apple Studio Display XDR review: a great, but expensive, pro option The iPhone 17E is good, but you probably shouldn’t buy it  iPad Air review 2026: the M4 and other chip bumps make a difference  Apple is going high-end with new ‘Ultra’ products next  iPhone Fold rumor: iPad-like multitasking, but no iPad apps and no Face ID  Microsoft’s next Xbox, Project Helix, won’t reach alpha until 2027  Microsoft’s ‘Xbox mode’ is coming to every Windows 11 PC  Microsoft says you should build next-gen Xbox games by building them for PC.  FCC chair blasts Amazon after it criticizes SpaceX megaconstellation Brendan Carr on X FCC chief tells CNBC WBD-Paramount merger deal is ‘cleaner’ than Netflix’s, will be approved ‘quickly’ Grammarly is using our identities without permission  Grammarly is turning off the expert review AI feature that stole our identities  Grammarly will keep using authors’ identities without permission unless they opt out  The Live Nation settlement has industry insiders baffled Samsung Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus review: This again  Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We have a lot to get to today, but mostly we're going to talk about the MacBook Neo. Like, we should just lay that out up top. There's a lot of news. We have Xbox stuff to talk about. We have a bunch of other Apple stuff to talk about. Brendan Carr is still a dummy. We got a lot to do. But all I care about right now is the MacBook Neo.

It should be said both David and I purchased MacBook Neo's for the purpose of the podcast because we just need an excuse to buy MacBook Nios. There was no reason for me to buy it. I literally two days ago was sitting on my computer, sitting at our dining room table, shopping for a MacBook Neo on my M4 MacBook Air. And I had this moment to be like, what on earth am I doing here?

So the story we both told ourselves today is that we're doing this A for the Vergecast, and B, I'm going to give this computer to my wife, who she came home for lunch today. And I showed her the computer, And I was like, this is your new computer, and she could not have been less enthusiastic. That's right. Just the most whatever possible response to this new computer.

I tried to do that with the Studio Display XDR. I was like, I'll buy myself this. And I was like, Becky, in your office, you'll have two monitors. I'll give you my old one. And she was like, I don't need that. And you can't get over that wall. There's nothing to be said. By the way, shout out to, I won't say the person or the Apple store that I went to.

But I went to the Apple store to buy a MacBook Neo. Again, because I convinced myself if I spoke about the MacBook Neo on the Vergecast without physically holding one, the audience wouldn't think I had any credibility. This is how I worked my way into this purchase. So I go to the store and I'm buying the laptop and the person at the store recognizes me.

And I was like, I'm this close to buying an XDR. I was like staring at it. He's like, do you want me to sell it to you? And I was like, the second it goes on sale for $1, I'm going to buy this thing. And I just started joking, $32.98. Like hit me. And he's like, I get you a dollar off. And I thought about it.

He's like, do you want me to go get a manager to get you that off? And I thought about it. And then I was like, what I have foolishly chosen to sell is our stupid ethics policy. And I can't take your $1. And I'm Charlie Browned my way out of that store. So this suggests that if you try hard enough, you can get any Apple product for $1 less than the retail price. It does seem like there's some pricing flexing. I guess.

Apple store. Yeah. Also, shout out to the person and Vergecast fan that I ran into at the Apple store this morning, who was very excited to talk about the Vergecast and the Neo,

and it's very excited that we're going to be talking about the Neo on the Vergecast. Shouts to you. You know who you are. That's where David, I get recognized. Not on the street.

No, God, no. In the Apple store. In the Apple store and it's CES. It's great times for both of us. It's great. Before we start with the Neo, can I start with just a very big nerd update? Yes, please.

So last week, I spoke about the kaleidescape, the very expensive streamer in my house. There were some comments on our Instagram that are like, it feels like we're subscribing just for Nilai to live his extravagant lifestyle. And I just want to point out to Ed's review in it. I did not spend $13,000 for our subscribers money on high bit rate streaming, although I would. So I just want to lay that out. The reality is I did not do that. But if I had the opportunity, I might, you know, I might. I think we can say, again, our ethics policy, requires.

that when we hit the point that your subscription money is only funding Neely's luxurious lifestyle, we'll tell you. You know what I mean? We'll come on this podcast and be like, listen, we're good. From now on, if you subscribe to the verge, it's boat. Yeah, and we'll do that from the boat. It'll be great. We're not there yet. So it's a review unit. I just want to lay that out there. We're going to send it back the whole thing. That's the ethics policy. And the second piece, and I just want to, I just want to shout out to all of our people out there. The number of people who reacted to that segment by just saying out loud, this is why I torrent Blu-rays, it's off the charts.

Like the number of people are like, you and your dumb legal streamer caring about high quality, you can just get the torrents for free. And then there was an argument, a pretty good argument in, I think, both on our Instagram comments and on the YouTube shorts comments of all places about. the relative extremely minor bitrate differences between kaleidescape and Blu-rays. And the best part of this, in this conversation that was kicked off by people being like, this is why I steal the movies, was a deep complaint that Disney, in particular, Disney, cheaps out when it encodes its movies for Blu-ray.

And they insist on putting all of the movie onto one Blu-ray, regardless of how long the movies are. So like Avengers Endgame is three hours, but they fit it onto a single Blu-ray. They'll compress it however much they need to. However much they need to. So in this one case, the $13,000 collidescape is better because Colliderescape doesn't have to care about file sizes when they re-encode from them. And it was like in this extremely like heated debate about like, I stream the movies, why would you pay for this? This is stupid. You can get Torrance.

Are these people who are like, yeah, but for Disney ones, you have to pay the money. This is like when you were like everybody needs, what was it, Sony Bravia core just to watch Spider-Man. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Anyway, shout out to all the people. That is exactly what I want from the Verge community is that argument. It's very good. Can I ask a really stupid question? If you, hypothetically, and I'm not, this is not legal advice, if you torrent a Blu-ray, can you, will it look as good as a Blu-ray? It depends on what you torrent. Well, sure. But like, in theory, can you rip a Blu-ray and have a digital. file that will play back looking as good as a Blu-ray? Yeah, you can torn a bit-for-bit Blu-ray. You're going to end up with some weirdness.

They call them remixes. Okay. Because you have to... I'm sure the people in the comments will explain all this too, David. But you can get a bit-for-bit copy of a Blu-ray. The problem then is where are you going to play it back? Right. And, like, how are you going to play it back?

And who is going to run it on the Blu-ray? You burn it on the Blu-ray. Or, you know, if you're going to stream it off your NAS to an app like Plex or infuse on Apple TV, will the Apple TV play back uncompressed atmos or will that get reencoded into 5.1, which is basically what happens right now. So you just end up with some like, I have got this huge file and they need to play it back somewhere. But you can get in the problem in the Blu-ray is Blu-Rays have like menus and extra scenes. And like you have no navigation for that. Like the code to run the Blu-Rae menu doesn't run anywhere.

You've just got a bunch of video files. So there's some weirdness there, but I mean, this is what people are doing. I love it. I was just very happy that we got from Neil as an idiot who spent an extravagance money to this is why I steal

the Blu-rays to I'm very mad at how Disney encodes its Blu-rays like basically in five comments. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah, I couldn't be happy with our audience.

There is a real like piracy is back culture thing happening that we should probably dig into some other time. Like the, there was such a long run of like moral conflict over downloading media

and I feel like there is no longer moral conflict over downloading I think a lot of people would walk up to David Ellison look him dead in the eye and be like I will steal

every movie that you make using Warner Brothers Discover. 100%. 100% It's just going to happen. Yeah. We'll come back around.

We're Warner Brothers is going to make an appearance during the line area I believe because you're back and whenever you're here we have to talk about Warner & Paramount for the rest of my life

apparently. Thank you, David Allison. But yeah, we should get to the MacBook Neo because the computer is out, our review is out, Antonio de Benedetto reviewed it for us. The reaction to this thing, I would say,

has been pretty universally, like, rapturous. This computer appears to have accomplished exactly the thing Apple intended it to accomplish, and maybe even more so. Like, have you been as surprised by the positivity around this thing as I have? Not really. I think what I'm more intrigued. by is the positivity around the sense that Apple is having a good time for the first time in years. Like, when you open the box for the Neo, it has the little tab that says hello on it.

And like the classic Mac font, like Apple has not been playful in a long time. Like, truly has not. Their TikTok account is bananas, like literally pictures of bananas. Right. Do you see the TikTok they made of just a Lyme doing a FaceTime call? No. I mean, it's just like nonsensical avant-garde weirdo TikToks that they're making. They started another new Instagram account that, you know, it's just more brand of content. But there's just a playfulness to Apple's like vibe around the Neo that I think connects directly to it costs $5.99.

The more expensive one costs $6.99. It's colorful. It's fun. This thing is not taking itself very seriously. So then you run into and it's running an iPhone ship and as a Kigs Ram, but you're not supposed to take it seriously. your ticket seriously. And it turns out an iPhone ship with a gig's RAM, as we have known for a long time, is remarkably capable. We've just been hidden behind iOS. And so if you just let that system be capable, it turns out to be very capable. Yeah. I mean, I think to me, the thing that has been so interesting has been exactly the thing you just described about a bunch of people being like, well, this computer doesn't do X, Y, and Z. And just overwhelmingly, it's like, well, then it's not for you. That's fine.

like instinctively understand what this computer is for in a way I think is really fascinating. And this, we started to see this even over the course of like the 24 hours after it shipped, right? You go from, okay, it's just a cheap laptop. Well, Apple makes the M1 air. Why not continue to do that? And then you start to see some of the things that Apple did to this, right? It is the marketing campaign and it is the colors and it is some of the choices they made with the device. Not all of which I agree with, by the way. I have some real quibbles with this particular. particular computer here. But it started to really coalesce around like, oh, Apple's actually doing a very specific thing here. And it is, we talk all the time about Apple's ability to sort of have a whole thought, right? And this computer feels like this is not a worse MacBook designed to be cheaper.

This is like a different idea about a computer in a way that I think resonated with people pretty aggressively. I mean, Apple will tell you. I mean, this was their entire message to us. When we talked there are executives at the event, they kept saying, we can't make crap. We're not going to make crap. We were just able to make this computer great using the things we had today. I watched the tear-down video of it, and it is remarkable at how much it is just an iPhone. Yeah. Like, the motherboard is this big.

Yeah. Right? It's nothing. It's spread out a little bit because they have room, but you can see that, oh, this is just an iPhone with a huge battery and some speakers. It's so striking because you pick the thing up in one of the first things, you know, notice about it is like it is dense. It is a solid piece of computer. And that's because it is just all battery. There's just nothing else going on in there. It's got it's an iPhone with a giant ass battery and a keyboard. That's the whole thing that's happening there. Does it make you as

angry about the iPad as it has been making me? So let's just talk about this now. Because I think the main philosophical argument has been basically does the existence of the MacBook Neo just completely obviate the iPad? And Apple would obviously tell you no. But, but, the main philosophical argument has been, But I have a very hard time now coming to the conclusion that if you have $600 to spend on an Apple device, you should buy anything other than this device. Like this to me makes the iPad error, especially if you're thinking about it as a somewhat primary computing device. Like even if it's not your only computer, it's a thing you intend to do more than just hold and watch movies on. If you want to like, my mom is a good example, right? Like my mom uses her iPad a lot to look at pictures, to browse the web.

specifically Zillow. She does New York Times games on it every morning. And she does a lot of like email and basic little things. The Neo is a better, more usable machine for almost all of those things to me. Maybe. Maybe. I want to stay on the positive side. I don't think it accused of being relentlessly negative.

And boy, am I ready. But I think, you know, I think the right combo for most people is a laptop and a phone. And this is why non-Ipad tablets have all kind of just sort of, they live in that sort of fizzled out middle space, wherever it knows it's the right category for a bunch of things. But it never hits the way the iPad seems to have hit in certain places. I think this is the right laptop for people whose lives are primarily on phones. Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it.

If your phone is your main computer, this is a great secondary computer. Yeah. And I think the truth is that for most people, literally in the world, for most people, their phone is their main computer. And so then you're like, okay, what do I really need? I need a more capable web browser quite often. Yep. And then there's a subset of apps that might be fun to use.

And then this thing is like, well, here's a more capable web browser and a pretty good keyboard and a good trackpad and a fine display. You know, I'm a display nerd. So 100% of SRGB is not. Not where I want to live. But it's like all that stuff is fine because really what you're doing is like, Like, here's a device that can do things my phone cannot do. You put it up against the iPad, and the reason I'm asking, does this make you mad about the iPad?

Is if they just didn't nerf the iPad's operating system, this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago. Yes, very much so. Ages ago. And this has a lower spec chip and less RAM than most iPad. Yeah. The equivalent iPad to this price-wise runs an M-4. Yeah. I just reviewed it.

Like, it's also $600 and it has an M4 in it. It is vastly more powerful than this thing. And they just will not let the iPad be powerful in the way that this thing is allowed to be powerful. Here's my theory about that. I don't think it, I wonder about this and I've wondered about it for ages and various combinations of people will deny it to my face or insist that it's a conspiracy theory. But really what you want the iPad to do is just run desktop Safari. if it would just run desktop safari not weird iPad mobile Safari

Plus but they would tell you it is desktop Safari they are lying to you this is what I mean different people will jump out of the woodwork and both confirm and deny this in the same brand they use phrases like desktop class yep it's like well what is that nope I just want the one that's very obviously able to be run on an A18 chip with AKs different RAM

sure can if you would just do that the iPad becomes a different computer and that to me is the entire that is the match Book Neo, like, at the end of the day, you boil it all the way down. And it is not that it can run Garageman because an iPad can run GaragePan. It's not that it can browse Zillow because most people just browse Zillow on their phones. Like, whatever it is that you're saying, it's not that it is a better DoorDash machine or like whatever apps that exists on a phone. It is, oh, the browser is good and there's a keyboard and a mouse.

And for everything that hits the wall on a mobile device, that's the exit ramp. Yep. And this thing just provides that eggs ramp over and over again. It's very capable of doing all the other stuff. You know, how many creators have now posted the videos of them scrolling 4K timelines and all the stuff that people are worried about? Of course it's capable of doing that stuff. But I just, like, I think the reason people are excited about it is it is the perfect companion to a phone.

And I don't think that that paradigm has truly existed yet. Yeah, that's a good theory. I think that's largely right. And it is, we've always talked about the upside of, PCs, and I use PCs broadly, like Macs, Windows, whatever, as the backstop to all of that stuff, that there are walls you run into on your phone and on your tablet and on other devices, some of which are artificially created by the companies that make them, particularly in Apple's case, it just refuses to allow you to do certain things that you want to do. But in part because,

like, the UI doesn't afford it, right? There are just things you can't do on a six-inch screen as well as you would want to do it on another device. And so, having a larger device as the backup is valuable. It just has been for a long time. And I think you're right that this becomes a cheap and pretty good version of every single one of those things. Right. Like Antonio's review basically just goes over all the things it's pretty good at. And it being pretty good at everything ends up being really, really, really meaningful.

Especially when you put it up against all of these other Windows laptops at the same price and even higher, which almost always come with at least one sort of screaming problem. Bad performance, bad battery life, bad keyboards, bad webcams, bad whatever else. Like there's almost always at least one sort of huge gotcha feature. And the Neo just doesn't have any. And to be able to offer, this will do all the things you want to do pretty well for $600 is a huge deal. By the way, did you end up getting the $600 one?

or did you get the 512 gigs of storage and the touch ID? I bought the touch ID, David. I don't know why. I also bought the touch ID. And the guy who sold it to me at the Apple store essentially told me I was getting the touch ID. He was like, oh, and you want the 512 and the touch ID, right? It was like it was, what A, he said these things are absolutely flying out of the store, which I thought was really interesting. And B, it was literally like he assumed I was going to spend the extra $100, which I was anyway.

but like it was just it was just not even a question in his mind. This is how Apple's pricing works. It's genius. Like they truly clocked me the minute I walked in and they were like, this is the actual price of the thing. Let's be honest with each other. Yeah, they made basically $99 a profit off you this day.

I mean, these are the problems for the other PC makers in the world. Yep. One, the entire Windows PC market is basically driven by subsidies. So whether that's preloaded bloatware, that those companies pay to preload on the PCs, whether it's the stickers that Intel and AMT pay to put on the keyboard deck, whether it's Microsoft itself doing weird pricing schemes so that co-pilot shows up in your face and starts screaming at you the second you open the computer.

Like, there's just a whole bunch of compromise in the pricing that is related to other companies using the computer as advertising. Just straightforwardly, that subsidy drives down the price of PCs. The same way that subsidy drives down the price of like smart TVs. right a smart TV is basically zero dollars now and it's because it's a giant advertising terminal in your house and literally you can get a TV for zero dollars with a giant advertising terminal physically glued to the bottom of the TV like that market has reached its conclusion the PC market is on its way there so if you're going to get a Windows PC for $600 it's not the hardware compromises that will really kill you it is the subsidy compromises that make the user experience horrible that will kill you. And Apple just doesn't do those things. Or if they do those things, they do them in a way that drives everyone crazy. We all know what's going on. But they have like,

well, we're just telling you that you can use Apple wallet. Kind of like, you know what I mean? Yeah. And what's funny is that is so much less present on MacOS than in most other places. Like the constant. Oh, it's all over the phone. Yeah. It is constantly your phone is telling you about fitness plus and about all the things you can do in Apple music and about all the new stuff that's on Apple TV Plus. And I think. In part because notifications are just so much less front and center on MacOS. It just doesn't feel nearly as in your face as it does on the phone. Yeah.

And to whatever extent, Apple doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff. It doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff. Right. And again, this is like on the margin, Apple does this stuff. Like, you can see it. It's present in their products. They are using their own products to advertise their own services in a way that I think is gross. And most people who experience it for what it is know that it's gross.

but it's just not the same as Windows. Like they're, you know, they're just qualitatively different. And so, like, out of the box, you're just getting a nicer experience because it's not chunked up by advertising subsidy. And then there's just hardware scale. Apple makes a lot of A18 chips. All the money isn't in the chip because they've already made $20 billion of them. And so the money is in the other components and you can feel it. Yep.

And I think that is just very, very difficult for. other PC makers to compete with, let alone Apple is really good at pricing you into spending $100 more dollars on effectively nothing with such insane margins on the RAM already that they didn't have to do any pricing games because they can just take a little less money for RAM. They can take a little less profit for RAM. Like, what are you going to do? And I think Antonio has been talking to other PC makers and other PC makers are talking about it. And David, you're making this point.

They seem caught way off guard. Yeah, which is nuts, right? I mean, I think the most direct quote we've gotten so far was from a Seuss, which just had an earnings call. And one of the questions they got on their earnings call was essentially, what do you make of this computer? How do you feel about the Neo? Do you view this as a threat? And this is Nick Wu, the CFO, who basically said, you know, we had an inkling. This was coming.

There have been sort of supply chain rumors about this for months. So like we kind of saw this coming. We were surprised it was as cheap as it was, which I think is really interesting. That I think people probably expected this to be like $7.99 or $8.99, not $5.99 and $4.99 at education, which is a genuinely low price for a device like this. But then he says, he was talking about the processor and the 8 gigs of RAM.

And he said, this may limit certain applications. So I think when Apple position the product, it's probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream. notebook usage scenarios, because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet, because tablets are mostly for content consumption. This just, like, that's just dead wrong. Yeah. It's just dead wrong. And I think it is so reminiscent to me. I read that quote and immediately thought of Steve Balmer in 2007 being asked about the iPhone. And we actually,

we just pulled this clip because it's, I found this on YouTube again. And there was the first comment on YouTube is, YouTube showed this to me again, 17 years later. So I think the The algorithm seems to have spiked to this clip again. But let me just play you this response from Steve Ballmer when he's asked about the iPhone. The first offent, 2007. Steve Jobs goes to Macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that? $500 fully subsidized with a plan.

I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine. Now, it may sell very well or not. I, you know, we have our strategy. We've got great Windows mobile devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q phone now for $99. It's a very capable machine.

It'll do music. It'll do internet. It'll do email. It'll do instant messaging. So I kind of look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot. First of all, I had a Motorola queue, and it was not as good as the iPhone. It's not a good phone.

But also, like, obviously the details here are different. What Apple just did is go down in price and what Apple just did is make something available to many more people with a keyboard, ironically. But the response feels the same, which is to look at this and say, well, this isn't what business users want. And it's like, well, you have officially missed the point here. And Microsoft has been missing this particular point for a very long time. The whole Windows ecosystem has been missing this point for a very long time. long time that by some mix of, I would call it tech debt and bad product management, to be kind, these companies are either unable, unwilling, or both to actually properly make great products

in this price range. And have been for a long time. Like, Antonio's working on this story, which I think will probably be live by the time most people hear this. And at one point, he was like, I don't blame PC manufacturers for not having a response to the Neo yet. I was like, buddy, you have this backwards. Then where, where, where? is this 10 years ago. Like, this, this has been, this thing has been sitting here for forever. You let Chromebooks eat it alive and then Google kind of forgot Chromebooks exist and Chromebooks stopped getting better.

That thing has been languishing for forever. And this has just been open PC space for a long time. And it's sort of wild that Apple was the one that managed to fill it like this. A company that generally had no interest in doing this kind of computer for a really long time, just looked around and was like, oh, we, that's not hard. We've got these leftover iPhone chips. All right, let me play devil's advocate. Okay.

Because I agree with how you're saying. I do think the PC makers are a little bit boxed in by just the pricing dynamics. Like, they don't all make their own chips. Right. They're also beholden to those chips. Like, Intel being bad is part of the problem here. Yeah, right. But at every level, like, Apple has to find the profit at the end of the process.

Right? They're like, we put all the parts together and then we market up. Apple's profit margin, if you look at their results, is like rock solid between 30 and 40%. That's just, that's what they do. Every quarter, that's how much profit they make. And they just back into it because they make most of the components. Right.

And so when the price of RAMs sky rockets, they can pay more to Samsung or whoever for RAM, and they can kind of like back it out and all the other stuff. If you're a PC maker, if you're an Assuse or Adele or whoever, you don't make anything. So every part in your computer, someone else has to make the profit to make their company run,

especially the chip, which is usually the most important part of the computer. So you just start with, okay, we got to pay a margin to Intel that Apple doesn't have to pay. You just start behind the curve,

like legitimately behind the curve. And then Apple buy so many chips from TSMC that they get massive discounts on their volume. Right. So you're just like, all of a sudden, like you just start, way, way behind in the race.

And so, like, I don't, I don't doubt that this is a very challenging thing to compete with, just on the fundamentals of the fact that the PC competitors can't remove the margins from all the components and then mark it up at the end to solve the problem. That's fair. Right. But I'm just playing devil's advocate. Like, I just see that problem and I'm like, whatever. The real, like, dynamic in the PC industry for more than the past 10 years now is that Apple decided it would own the high end.

So if you just look at sales of laptops that cost more than $1,000, it is more likely than not that every one of those sales is an Apple laptop. Yeah. They just went and they're like, we're just going to compete on this price and up and we're going to win. And statistically, they've won. And Microsoft knew this. Like when Panos Penae ran Surface,

he was like, this is my problem. I cannot convince this industry to spend that money in R&D to compete there. Microsoft is going to do it and then I will develop hinges and keyboards and track pads and we'll just give it away to the ecosystem so that their stuff is good

and we can credibly compete at the high end because if we lose the high end there's nothing left. Right. And that's what they all did for the longest time. And maybe there's like

good high-end PC laptop competition now. They made some good progress. There is, there has been good stuff over the years. There's interesting ideas in that space.

Del makes good stuff. The whole bottom has languished and all of it is like, do you want 15 inch screen for $700, here's whatever garbage that we can surround that screen with. And people are like, yeah, that's the thing we wanted.

And I think Apple's showing up with the 13 inch screen at that price point. And like no one has an answer. But like I know why the PC market looks the way it looks. It's because Microsoft with Surface recognized that Apple was going to run away with $1,000 and up. And it was not economically viable for any one company to solve that problem.

Microsoft had to do it for its entire ecosystem. Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the Surface Go over the last few days because that was Microsoft's biggest swing at this price point. And actually, I went back and read Deeter reviewed the Surface Go in 2018 when it came out and gave it an eight and a half. Like this is a, there were things to like about it. But it was fundamentally, it was a 10-inch computer. And there are a bunch of problems that come with making a 10-inch computer. And I think one of the things Apple understands and got right about this is that 13 inches is the right size for a laptop in so many ways.

And especially at smaller sizes, Microsoft got really hung up on doing hybrids that just didn't quite pan out the same way. And I think if you just go back and redo the surface go process, and they're like, okay, well, what if instead of trying to sort of overcorrect on the form factor here, we just make the cheapest surface laptop we can and charge it at this price, I wonder what that computer would look like now. It would look like Microsoft declaring war on its PC partners

and never doing it. This is the problem. They're always in between the big parts of the market with the surface. Right. Yeah, that's very true. You made a face when I said 13 inches. What's your problem with 13 inches? Well, I didn't realize that I had recycled this,

but I had a 12-inch MacBook, which was one of my very favorite computers. In fact, hilaracy. Dieter. I bought it from Deeter. And I, I, he really screwed you on that one. He did. Um, in a very Minnesota way, at one point, I was like, do I remember to pay you for this? And he was like, of course you did. And I don't know if that's true or not. So maybe I paid him for it. Maybe it did. But that was, it was like a very Minnesota, like, yeah, you're fine to worry about it. I just wanted this thing out of my house. It was ages ago. And I love that computer. I think I finally recycled it.

But that computer was the perfect size. And when the Neo was announced, I was really sad they hadn't gone one tick smaller. And now that I have it and we've had this conversation, I completely understand why they didn't. They made the most mainstream computer they could. And 13 inches is the most mainstream size. And that is the right answer to this question. Yeah, I think that's right. And I will say the, what, the air is 136, right?

I don't really appreciably notice the difference between the, the Neo screen and the air screen at this point. Yep, 136. I do notice the size of the thing. Like the air sort of wears itself a little lighter to me than the Neo does, even though they're technically the same weight. And the Neo is actually a little smaller in some dimensions. The Neo feels chunkier as a computer to me. What have you made of it so far? You've been using it.

I have two grapes I would like to talk about. But I want to know what you've thought of the Neo so far. I think the Neo is a beautiful piece of hardware. And for all the reasons I've said, I think only Apple can really produce it. and I'm really happy that they got rid of Allen Dye because Mac OS Tahoe is a visual abomination. Is this your first Tahoe experience? I've used it like academically. Okay.

You know what I mean? Like at a remove. Yeah. Like I have a computer with Tahoe on it. And I like, you touch it through a piece of glass. Yeah. Like literally a piece of glass. Like my work computers, I just don't update them until I have to because I just can't

take them down. Like this podcast machine, I don't even know what it's running. Like, it just needs to work. And that's the thing it does. And then, uh, I thought liquid glass was bad. So I didn't update my main work computer over there. Again, I have a, I have another Mac that has it on there, but it's just sort of, it was to dink around. It's like what I put the updates on. This is the first time I've like sat down and really used Tahoe with liquid glass. And every part of it is infuriating. And Apple should be embarrassed. And the number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is because I know that Apple has no choice, to fix liquid glass entire at WWC,

and then you should wait until they rev MacOS 27 and they undo this ungodly abomination of an interface. It is so bad. Liquid glass on a phone is like fine. It's not great, and I don't love it, but it's fine because you, you know, phone is inherently a single tasker. What they have done to delineate windows

and the menu bar and items that you've selected on MacOS with liquid glass is so bad. It goes against every principle of good design. It goes against every principle of just common sense. Like, should two things that are different look different or the same, David? Obviously the same. What if you couldn't tell what's what at any time on your computer? What if my whole interface was just like a weird, blurry mess?

There are parts of Tahoe that are legitimately slow for no reason. When you open control center from the menu bar, first of all, when you look at the menu, bar and the top right, every button does something different. So, like, you click the clock and the notification slide in from the side. You click Control Center, and there's, like, a very slow fade animation. Yep. And Control Center, like, bubbles in, which is exactly what you don't want for quick controls. Correct.

Like, it is basically, like, oh, you just want to change the brightness. What if there was a Broadway show? Like, you don't want that. You just want the brightness toggle to appear. But that's different than the slide in. And then you keep going down. and then another one's a drop-down, and then you get all the way to, like, the Wi-Fi icon,

and it's a standard drop-down. And you keep going, and you get to the regular menus, and when you click on those menus, they don't shade in dark enough for you to tell that you've selected a menu. I'm so glad you're finally doing this. This makes me so happy. I'm not even in the weeds of this interface.

I'm like, I'm going to raise the brightness and pick save from the file icon, and all of this is stupid. Yeah. It is, I told you, I didn't want to go negative, but I'm telling you the Neo, It was like, it first made me really happy, and then it made me incredibly sad that this thing is, it's like a visual disaster. It got to the point where I did the only thing I can do when I'm so mad at an Apple interface.

I just started texting John Gruber. Who hates it as much as anybody? I was like, I see what you're saying. And he was like, yeah, dude, it's bad. He's like, if anything, I'm not going hard enough. The menu bar is actually such a perfect example because it's also like it's translucent now, but it is still a hard border. And those two things don't make any sense. So it looks like it should be interactive with everything,

but it's not. It's still a hard line. But just look at the menu bar now. Like I'm just, I'm going to do this while I'm sitting here. Okay, so you click on the clock and it slides in from the right. You click on the control center and it bubbles in. It really is slow.

I hadn't really even noticed it until he said it. I mean, it is like a song and dance routine to be like, I want to turn the volume up. And of all things that should just appear, that's it. Then you do search and it opens up spotlight in the center of the screen. In a modal. Yeah.

Then you click on battery and it opens up a menu to the left. You will click on Wi-Fi and it opens up a menu to the right. It's like, it's literally like every single one of these was designed by a different person and none of them ever spoke to each other. It's insanity. Apple is so good at this. Like historically, the thing that they're good at is looking at this and being like, make this make sense. And they've just lost the plot here. My favorite Tahoe thing forever, though, is just if you want to understand the problem with Tahoe,

Take all of your apps and drag them to the same corner and then see if the top left corners line up. Spoiler alert, they don't. Apps are just, there's no, there's literally no rules anymore for what's going on with Tahoe. Tahoe is very bad. Liquid glass is very bad, but the Neo is still awesome. And I really, like, we came out of last week being like, this thing is going to sell huge. And I think it's actually going to be bigger than I thought. I think this will replace the MacBook Air as the sort of default.

I don't have any follow-up questions. What computer should you buy computer for people? Maybe. Maybe. I think we have yet to see. I think it's hard to know at the very beginning. I think all the benchmarks suggest that that is true. All the sort of early reviews, our reviews suggest that's true.

I think once people start using them at scale, we're going to find out. It's possible. But the 18 Pro is so. tested. We, like, that chip is, is mature and good and made it monstrous scale, uh, that I don't worry about, like, battery life problems we don't know about. I don't know. I just, I have a hard time imagining what it would be.

That would be the glaring problem. Of course you have a hard time imagining what it would be. It's so obvious what it would be. And you can't, it's like blocked out in your brain like Westworld. They're like, it doesn't look. It's eight gigs of RAM. Oh, God. That's what it would be.

It would be. Can I tell you how unbelievably vindicated I am? We're going to run a 12 minute supercut of everybody yelling it. me for saying eight gigs of RAM is fine. And then all those same people saying, oh, it only has 8 gigs of RAM. That's not a problem for normal everyday computer users. Yeah.

Fuckos. I was right the whole time. That's it. The only question mark I have is once you, once a millions of people buy this thing and they start using it for all kinds of stuff that nobody could possibly foresee, will 8 gigs of RAM swapping to this storage, will it be not a problem,

whichever one assumes, or will some weird stuff bubble up? And then I would just point out, Once again, Alan Dye's last vindictive act was to foist this interface on millions of unsuspecting consumers who just want to spend $700 on a nice computer with touch ID. They're just out here doing their best. And I'm telling you right now, Mark Zuckerberg, you got rolled because you have no taste. If you saw this work and you're like, that guy, I know everything I need to know about you, man. So fundamentally, the MacBook Neo is a referendum on Mark Zuckerberg's taste.

That's what I'm saying. This works for me. That's all I'm saying. The one other thing I should say before, and we should move on from the Neo here is it is a bummer. The thing doesn't have a backlight on the keyboard. Particularly because they color matched the keyboards. So on the indigo one here,

it's actually, it's a pretty dark keyboard, which, like, aesthetically looks really nice. But even sitting here in decent light, it is hard to see. It's dark text on a dark key. And I think Antonio had one of the lighter colors and said it was a little easier to see on the light keys what you're typing in the dark.

But on this, Like, they're dark keys. And a backlight would have been really nice and not that expensive. Here's what I'm hoping for. If you're not a car nerd, but I'm a huge car nerd, if you go into any car forums, all car forums are sort of dominated by people going on T-moon and Alibaba and putting in RGV ambient lights all over their cars.

There's just a huge market for that for every car. This thing is so modular and so repairable. I'm just waiting for the weird Alibaba market of backlit keyboards for the Neo to show up. Like, you know, it's got to come. That's what we want. We want weird gamer keyboards to the MacBook Neo. If you're making one now, send it to us.

We will prominently feature it here on the first. That's real. We do want that. That's absolutely correct. Before we get off of Apple stuff, we reviewed the iPhone 17E this week. Allison did that. I reviewed the new iPad Air. I don't think we need to talk about either one of them because they are precisely exactly what you think.

The 17E is sort of fascinating because Allison, I think, made the correct point, which is that it's a very good phone. I think as Apple approaches its budget devices, that is the right way to do it. They put MagSafe back. Again, it's like this is a much cleaner, correct set of tradeoffs to get to a lower price. But the base iPhone 17 is the best to the base iPhone has been in a long time. And the leap is $200. And I think like if your budget allows only the 17E, awesome, we'll be very happy. But I think the case for moving up $200, especially given the,

the economics of how people buy phones and the way that people use their phones and, like, the primacy of phones in modern life, you should spend the $200 and get the better phone if you can. It's 100% the flip of what we're saying with the Neo. I think if you perceive the Neo is like, this is a great companion laptop for people whose primary computer as a phone. You should absolutely spend less money in a laptop and more money on the phone. Oh, man. Okay. 17E and MacBook Air or 17 and MacBook Neo.

17 and Neo. That's what I, like 100%. Because you want the real camera. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, unless there's some specific thing that you need that M5 chip for, which, you know, if you know what it is, you know what it is. Go get it. But I think for most people having a slightly more capable phone is a much better trade-off.

Yeah, I think you're right. But the other one we need to talk about here is the Studio Display XDR, which you have not bought, but I am confident by the time we do this podcast next week, we'll be in your house. The second it goes on non-corruption. sale for even $1. I'm buying this this one. What if I give them the dollar so that they can give you a dollar off?

What if you buy me a computer? I will accept you buying me this computer. That's fine. All right, deal. John Higgins reviewed it for us. It seems to be the thing we hoped it was. Are you as enthusiastic about this now having, we've tested it, we've seen it come out. Like, is it what you wanted?

Yeah, it's absolutely what I mean, it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. That's out of the MacBooks, right? But it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. I, you know, it is very expensive. Yeah. But what you're buying for that is basically a bunch of calibration settings. And so I think I'm curious to see if other display makers use similar panels or similar

technologies without all of the added cost of doing all the calibrations and bring some of the core technology at a lower price, which is 100% true of the 5K panel that Apple is using in the regular stereo display. which you can now buy on Amazon in a totally no-name Chinese case for $500. Yeah. Right, and it's just not, and we're going to review that too, because I think it's really interesting to see how it's literally the same panel from my 2012. Like, it's just been around and now you can buy it in a bunch of different configurations.

The XDR is a step forward. And so I'm, like I said, I'm going to, I just, again, I saw it at the event and I literally just looked at it in the store and I came this close to buying it because it looks great. like spectacularly great. And it's, it is a step forward. I barely even need this thing because I do almost all my photo editing

on my MacBook Pro, which has an image like it has the same kind of core technology in it. But you know what I keep saying. You stare at screens all day. You should spend the money in the best one you can because they last forever. And,

you know, if I can convince myself that I'll have this display for 10 years, it's only $320 a year, David. Think of the savings. I mean, I will say there are very few technology devices. I would say it's even plausible to say I'm going to buy this and keep this for a decade. I think the studio display XDR has a strong shot to last a decade on your actual desk. Monitors, screens just last forever.

TVs and monitors just they last forever. It is so hard to convince yourself to upgrade. So like I said, the second it goes on sale for even a dollar, I'm going to buy this thing. And not like a corrupt sale. It also apparently has a better webcam, which is very exciting. I put tape over those webcams. No, thank you. My webcam, all of my webcams in the house, are there real cameras with power buttons?

For privacy reasons or for camera quality reasons? Both. Yeah, fair. You get one with the other. And the idea that there's like a software-defined webcam in my computer that someone could come get. This is where I am with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has tape on his laptop. You ever look at a picture of his laptop?

He's just tape on that webcam. And it's like, oh, buddy, you're the guy who wants to put glasses in everybody's face has tape on his webcam. I know. Yeah. I will say, by the way, we keep getting emails from people volunteering to come to your house and take apart your IMAQ to turn it into a display for you. I don't know what your precious ethics will allow on that front, but we have a series of

volunteers who are willing to come do this for you at any point. I think that's allowed. I think that's not. I mean, that's just like, that's just somebody doing their house. You know, like, that's a good time. Yeah, I got a big, I owe a big part of my journalism career to fixing David Pogue's Xbox when he was the tech columnist at the New York Times. There you go. This is how it starts, people.

Go to Nealai's house and fix his IMAX. We'll do, my little, my little village here in Westchester County does repair cafes. Maybe I'll just, I'll just, like, hijack the repair cafes. Like, everyone bring their 5K IMAX. We're making monitors. Just a parade of 5K IMAX down the street. Yes. And then the senior citizens who are all there to get the.

their ancient vacuum cleaner is repaired will be very confused. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right, two more Apple rumors, and then we're going to stop with Apple for a while. The first for Mark Grimmond at Bloomberg is that the next set of Apple releases is going to be high-end stuff. Having now done some of the low-end stuff, it's going to extend up even higher, potentially called Ultra, but not necessarily called Ultra. It sounds like the foldable iPhone fits into that, about which we also have some rumors. but there's just a real movement up in the market here for Apple.

And I think this is really interesting. There was also this news this week about Uber Elite, which is like newer cars, fancier rides, just catering to expensive people. And I think that's a trend that is coming in a really real way. Like we've talked about this before, that one of the great, cool, exciting things about technology is we all have the same iPhone, right? Like, there is just the iPhone, no matter who you are within a very small,

stratifications, the same technology is available to everybody. We may be headed for a period of that not being the case in a really mainstream way. I would pay a thousand extra dollars from MacBook Neo that didn't have liquid glass on it. I was putting that app in their universe right now. That may become available to you, but I think the like, until now it's been, you know, new technology that hasn't quite come down and called. Like foldable phones are still really expensive, right? But that's not, nobody would call that sort of a mainstream thing yet. And when they become mainstream, everybody sort of assumed the price will come back down. Maybe we're just headed to a point where there is going to be a true luxury class of mainstream technology for a while, which I think is really interesting.

And I don't know quite how to feel about it. Pricing products is kind of like an art and a science. And I think what you're seeing is there are some people, I mean, you're just seeing income inequality. That's what you're describing. Yeah, essentially. And so some people just don't care about $1,000 of price difference, and they'll just spend it. And some people really care about $100 a price difference. And you can hear these companies, they're just headed, their products are headed in two different directions.

Yeah. And, you know, I think the fold, the iPhone fold, being the ultra product, it's hyper expensive, sort of makes sense. Like, you want to price your way into early adopters. You want to price your way into someone who, if they feel like the product is bad, and they got cheated, isn't so mad. Right. They're just going to buy another phone and move on with their lives.

I think the rest of the Ultra products, you've got to make a case for something beyond. It's the fastest chip. Sure. And I think once you get away from like pro is the designation, which means nothing in Apple World anymore. Right. And you go to Ultra.

Like you have to make some case for it. It can't just be like it's wrapped in the finest of leathers. Like something else has to happen there. Right. I was going to say you get like the Hermes version is what Apple has tradition. Yeah, so we'll see. And it's going to need a new move. But I can see why you would introduce Ultra with the fold to say this is the best possible

thing or the most expensive possible thing. And you're not just getting, okay, it's so expensive most people can't afford it. You're getting also, we don't really know how it's going to work. And I think the rumors around a fold are like, we don't really know how it's going to work. Yeah. So the rumor right now, the rumor that came out this week is the outer display of the iPhone fold will be about the size of a small iPhone, which seems like a victory.

And then it'll open up the wide aspect ratio will have side-by-side apps. This appears to be like an exciting new thing that Apple will tell you it has invented, but is not going to have the full sort of suite of iPad multitasking stuff. It won't run iPad apps, but it will let you do more stuff.

I have a lot of questions. But the biggest thing that is here that I think really sucks is that apparently Apple is going to ditch face ID for touch ID in order to accommodate the thinner display so that it can have them fold. I think this is a bad idea and Apple should stop it. Face ID is so much better than touch ID that going back, this happens to me all the time. I use face ID on an iPad Pro just like in my day-to-day life. And then I get the new iPad

error every year to review it and it has touch ID. And the amount of time you spend on a device that sort of moves in an aspect ratio like that, figuring out where to put your finger and how to, it's awful. And going back to that after having your face just sort of make your phone feel like it's unlocked, sucks. And it will make this supposedly very premium thing

feel annoying to a lot of users. I'm curious if that rumor is real. I mean, that's the rumor. But if they do it, they're going to do it the same way as the iPad, right? They'll put it in the power button or the sleep wake button on the side.

Yep. Which is maybe not the worst thing on a phone because you've got to hold the phone. Yeah, but you're holding what amounts to a double-sided phone and trying to reach, like, it's just, that's bad. No, don't, I don't want that. And what if the power button moves depending on how you open it? Where is it going to be on that? Like, there's just a lot of questions.

Yeah. And I think not knowing where to tap the thing to unlock my phone is bad. I will say, I've been using the pixel 10 pro and having both. is awesome. It has both the underscreen thumbprint reader and face ID or whatever face unlock, whatever they call it. That combination

is awesome because... Oh, what if they go with an underscreen one? That would be fine. That would be fine. I could live with that. But the fail gracefully from face ID when it works to touch ID when you're wearing sunglasses to pass code if we can't figure out how to do it otherwise is exactly the correct

graceful scale down. And just starting with touch ID. Every time I get on an iPad, it annoys me all over again. I don't know. I mean, we'll see. I have many more questions about this than Face ID.

I mean, if the grand failure of the iPad is you won't just let it run Mac apps, the grand failure of the folders, you won't just let it run iPad apps. Yeah, there's a line in Emma's story that she wrote about it. Emma Rothen-Roth, our team, wrote about this. This is again from Mark German at Bloomberg.

And Emma writes, Still, Apple is reportedly trying to take advantage of the phone's larger screen real estate by updating its core apps with a sidebar on the left side of the screen. Like, oh, a sidebar. Look at us. That's what my $1,000 is for. You know, the problem is all these projects started, you know, 500 years ago. I know. Again, you know, under one Allen die. I don't know what to say, guys. Yeah. Like, again, I think liquid glass on a phone is like, it's fine. Because there's just not a lot of ways to get tripped up

when you're just looking at one app at a time. The second you have two at a time, the second in multiple windows and menus, which is what you're going to buy with an iPhone fold. It is nice knowing that whatever augmented reality device meta comes out with will be a disaster. Like, do you remember there was that period about four or five years after Steve Jobs died

where there was a lot of coverage around, like, you know, this was the first one that Steve Jobs was not person. I wonder if we're going to get the reverse with Alan Dye, where it's like, thank God, this is... We are absolutely going to get the reverse. This is finally the last one Alan Dye touched before he left Apple. Apple doesn't leak as a company, and I guarantee you the people at Apple are going to leak. Like, the stain is gone.

Yeah, we finally took all the code out of this one. Yeah, I agree. All right, we need to take a break. We have a bunch more gadgets to talk about, including some Xbox, somewhere between hints and news, but lots to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for the show. comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything

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You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. All right, we're back. So it's G-D-C this week. Game Developers Conference, Jay, Peters, and Sean Hollister are there on our team covering a bunch of stuff. And I would say, did you guys talk about Project Helix on the show last week while I was out? Not really.

Okay. So Project Helix is this thing we've heard inklings about. Obviously, there's been this huge shakeup inside of the Xbox team. Asha Sharma is now running all things Xbox inside of Microsoft. And hinted is maybe not strong enough, just sort of said out loud that the next Xbox is Project Helix. and that it's going to play PC games. And this is a thing we've been hearing about forever. This is kind of the obvious convergence coming between the Xbox and Windows

and kind of all of the things Microsoft is trying to do into a platform strategy that makes a lot more sense. We got a few more details on it this week, and I would say more evidence that is tangential to the existence of Helix, but suggests that it is going to be the exact thing that we thought. Microsoft is telling developers that if you want to build next, gen Xbox games that you should build PC games, which is sort of fascinating. Yeah.

This shift feels like it's happening, right? Like, whatever Xbox is going to be, it really looks an awful lot like a Windows computer. Yeah. I mean, they're announced Xbox mode is coming to Windows 11 PCs. And they're finally calling it Xbox mode, which, thank God, instead of Xbox full-screen experience. Here's some questions I have about all this. One, you know, the rumors were that Phil Spencer had always been going to retire and this was part of the plan and he was stepping down and that you know sarah bond who was

president of xbox was really running xbox while phil dealt with integrating activation or whatever whatever big set of dumb issues that he bought when he bought activated friend who knows and then you know tom reported this out that phil and sarah had really alienated a lot of people with the this is an xbox campaign and like trying to make xbox everything but the console and that asha sharma would come in and she's like, I don't know anything about Xbox. I'm just going to listen to everyone. Right.

Which is what, you know, what you do as a new executive. Yeah. And then it's like, this is the exact same plan, you guys. This is the same plan.

Like, maybe the advertising campaign has gone away. But the idea that we're going to put all the focus on the console, you're just announcing that you're, you're going to build appliance like Windows gaming PCs. And that's the future of your console, which was the plan. It was,

it was just 100% sent the plan. Like, what about the plan was so bad that Phil Spencer's long-awaited retirement just happened suddenly in a rush and his hand-picked number two who was supposed to take over didn't get the job. And a lot of people, a lot of theories about, like, you know, who's taking shots at Sarah Button? But, like, the truth is she didn't get the job. Yeah. That's just a thing that happened. She didn't get the job. So, like, what about this plan is different than the plan that got one person sort of shoved aside and another person out the door entirely and didn't get the job? Like, I can't tell you the answer to that question right now based on what we know.

It's a good question. And I think none of this is to say, by the way, that this is not necessarily the right plan. I think there is still a strong argument to be made that betting on PC games is a smart move for Microsoft in a variety of ways. Right? Like we just talked about all the reasons that Apple is kind of eating the PC market from all directions. One thing Apple doesn't sell is gaming PCs. Apple would love you to buy a MacBook Pro and play games on it. Apple wants nothing more than for you to play games on your MacBook Pro.

They don't want that. That's all they do. They want a demo one five-year-old Assassin's Creed game twice a year and be like, we're good at video games, and that's the end of that. No, all they want to do is be like metal. And developers are like, I don't care about this at all. Please leave me alone. Well, they care about it when they're doing weird free-to-play loot boxes on the iPhone.

Yeah, agreed. But gaming is a huge business. Gaming PCs are a huge business. This is a thing Windows does really well. there's an Azure play here, there's an Xbox play here. Like, it is actually a really interesting bit of sort of perfect corporate synergy to just care a lot about PC games if you're Microsoft. But you're right that that has been the case for a very long time and it is not super clear what has changed. Right. Something happened where Phil Spencer, who architected this plan, got pushed out the door in a rush.

And that's a retirement that was, quote, long plan. But, like, it wasn't like some big celebration of Phil Spencer. Spencer. It was like, see if Phil and his handpicked successor did not get the job. And there was just a lot of reporting about all the problems there. People have a lot of feelings about, but she didn't get the job. And then there's a new person who's like, we're going to

come, we're going to make the Xbox great again. Right? Like, and then there's this. And I just can't tell you what's different. I'm trying. I'm looking at this and me like, okay, like, is it just that this train was on the tracks and Helix won't

even be a thing until next year. Right. They've said it won't even be out in alpha until next year. So there's a lot of times, there's a lot of time for a lot of things to change. Yeah. But the idea that the Xbox is just an extension of Windows is that's been the plan. There's not, there's not another plan. I do wonder if the, this is an Xbox debacle is a piece of all of this, because there's so much done. inside of the Xbox team that has just muddied that thing that you just explained, right?

Where, like, there's Xbox Play Anywhere and there's Xbox Cloud Gaming and there's the, this is an Xbox mate. And I think it has looked a lot like Microsoft has lost the plot, even if it hasn't lost the plot. Do you know what I mean? That there's a real focus function here that is just saying, what if, what if this is what they're trying to do. If the Xbox's job is to be the class leading way to play PC games, and then you can also buy a gaming PC, you can also buy a handheld that's going to run Windows.

All the software is the same. You can build one game that will work all across these things, and Microsoft can say, oh, you want a thing that is just Xbox mode all the time to put it in your living room, buy this. Do you want a gaming PC? Buy this. Do you want a handheld? Buy this. All your games will work everywhere. That's not that. different if you squint from what they've been trying to do all along, except that the way that they've put it together and the way that they've packaged it and the way that they've marketed it and talk about it has been insane. And so it's just like, what if you took this plan and took out all the parts that seemed like

nonsense, but kind of kept the plan the same? Maybe that's what Helix is. And it was Jason Ronald was who is the VP of Next Generation at Microsoft. It was an unbelievable job title. was talking about Project Helix, and he said it's going to have a custom AMD chip, and he said it's going to have, quote, an order of magnitude increase in ray tracing performance up to and including path tracing. Terrific, right?

Like, what if this thing is just a super optimized, super simple Xbox mode only kick-ass gaming PC? Do you know how much easier that is to explain than what the hell has the Xbox been for the last 10 years? Well, so I have two thoughts about this. One, I'm convinced Microsoft's inability to convince Apple to let them do game streaming is what just like pulled this whole thing apart.

That's possible. This is the rug pull. This is what you retrenched to when you couldn't make game streaming work. Right. If they had been able to do game streaming and leverage Azure and just be like, your phone is an Xbox now, maybe all this is very different. And there are lots of arguments about this.

Maybe it was never going to work. But they were never able to just ship an Xbox game streaming app on iOS. Right. And be like, here's Xbox. It's happening. with the power of Azure, your phone is now on Xbox. There are a bunch of people

listening to and watching this who are yelling about latency and control the lag and all of that is true, but the other truth is that Microsoft never really got to try. Yeah, they never got to try. We just kind of don't know.

There's a lot of weird ways they try. They tried it in the browser, all this stuff. But like, I think that was their plan. And they just couldn't do it. So then they ended up back at, well, it's Windows or whatever nonsense. And then their other problem, this is my other big thought, is their problem is Windows.

Fundamentally, their problem is Windows. This thing that they're junking up with bad AI ideas at every turn that fundamentally, and this is like, I'll connect it to the Neo. The great power of the Neo is like, even if you think the chip is underpowered, almost all the apps you want to run are web apps and a browser. Yep. So you're fine. Yeah. Anecdotally, I've heard from a bunch of people over the last week who were very excited to buy a Neo, explicitly because it doesn't have any co-pilot nonsense all over it.

This is your problem. These are your choices right now. And you're just stuck here. By the way, we are going to cover Linux on the desktop here at the Virgin 26. Hell yeah. This is the year of Linux on the desktop. We're just going to manifest this as the year of Linux on the desktop. And one of the reasons I'm saying that is, you know, our own reporters, Sean and Tom and everyone else keeps saying it is better to play Windows games on Linux right now.

This is a huge problem. Yep. this is just a problem across the board. So, like, maybe this is the plan, and it's all going to work, and you're going to make an ultra-optimized Windows PC that runs Xbox mode all the time. But it feels like what you're going to do then is get, you're going to strip out all of Windows.

So then you're just, you're kind of just making a console again. And maybe the goal is the games can play anywhere. You can download the games on Xbox mode on your gaming PC, but those people are still going to be like, oh, I'm running this dumb co-pilot windows, and I hate it. Well, yeah, I mean, that's why I think Xbox mode ends up being really interesting and really important here, because if you can make a thing that is sort of Windows at the bottom and Xbox on top, you might have something that can solve a bunch of problems all at once, right?

You don't have to re-architect everything across platforms. You can build games that run everywhere, but you can have something that either when you want it to or all the time doesn't look anything like Windows. And doesn't look anything like Windows is such a feature of, of so many of these devices. Like, Sean keeps reviewing these handhelds, and every time you press two buttons, you end up in a Windows setting menu, and it's awful.

And so, like, there's just, if they can actually fix the layer on top with Xbox, but still have it be Windows underneath, that could work. That is just nothing about the history of either of the full screen experience, which has been out for a minute, or Microsoft as a company suggests that that's the case.

But I think Xbox mode in theory, I think at least helps solve some of that problem, which is why I'm very curious to see how it pans out over the next little while. Yeah. This whole situation is just, if you know what's different, you tell us.

But it does seem like something was going awry and some plan was deemed not good enough, which led to massive executive turnover at Xbox, and a new CEO of Xbox, whose first public comments were, we're going to bring Xbox back to what makes Xbox great, and I'm just going to do a bunch of listening because I don't know anything about video games. And then here's the same plan.

Right. Yeah, I mean, there's no shot. Helix didn't exist before. Right. I mean, Tom has been reporting on Helix for months. Yeah, exactly. So why announced the next step of the plan that you thought was bad if you thought the plan was, I just don't know the answer? Do you think the plan is good?

I mean, just the very basic idea of merging PC games and Xbox games into what? one, effectively one thing to develop for developers and one thing to buy for gamers and treating the Xbox as some spinoff of a gaming PC rather than like a whole different gaming system. Do you think that's a good idea or a bad idea? I think Microsoft should sell Xbox and they should give up on being a consumer company. They're not good at it. I think the only reason they still have Xbox is because it is the one thing Microsoft does that truly resonates with people under the age of 500.

Yeah, it's the one thing that like every Microsoft's employees kids think is cool. Well, they have Minecraft accounts or something. But that's all part of Xbox gaming or Microsoft gaming. Like, they should just let that thing go. I mean, they can't now. They're in it way too deep now. Yeah, the biggest

acquisition in their history. Like, I don't know, there's just a bunch of mistakes that they made. I think they did all that stuff because they understood that mobile was important. and the next generation of gamers would come up on phones and they needed to be in that business. And I'm telling you, someone will write it, hopefully it's us.

The moment that Apple did not let them do game streaming, everything went off the rails. And I just feel like you should acknowledge that. And maybe it's time to, like Microsoft in its heart wants to be an enterprise company. That's the thing that they are. That's a thing Nadella has made them. He's done an incredible job turning that company around.

And if you recall, the first thing he did was he got rid of Nokia and said, we're just, we're done with this. Yeah. Nokia was a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. Like a lot, a lot, a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. That's true. I just, I don't, the idea that you can evaluate this is like, is this the right strategy for Microsoft? It's like, dude, it's been a decade. They've been chased in this dragon for a decade. They have. Maybe just let the games company be a games company and live its own life without either having to be like, this is the thing that will make Windows PCs cool or this is a thing that will. spike Azure usage. You know what the thing that spikes Azure usage is. Every single day, open AI does something stupid. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, I mean, you do wonder, the two things that are really interesting, sort of historical sliding doors moments here are that moment years ago when everybody looked at Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and said, okay, this kind of live service game

is actually the future of everything. And we can build tons of them and maybe there will be lots of them. And do you know the ones that keep winning? It's Fortnite, it's Roblox, and it's Minecraft. And so many dollars and so many jobs have been lost trying to unseat those three things. That I think there was just a sense of this is going to be a big, huge, giant teaming industry. And it's still just pretty much the three damn games. Basically, everyone got drunk on COVID.

Like, I don't know how to explain this. Everyone was at home and spent all their money in their laptop. And every single tech company was like, oh, we're all brains and vats now. We're going to do brains and bat stuff. No one's ever going outside again. No, it's ever going outside again. And we just need to find a way to collect the money that people that are waving at their laptop every day because that's where all the money is and that's where all the time is. And that's how you got cryptocurrency.

Yeah. Straightforwardly. Like, what if we gamble with fake computer money? Like, great. That's where you got prediction markets in a big way. It's where you got huge over hiring and tech companies, which we're now undoing by calling them AI layoffs. Like down the line and you get all the way to live service games. Like, Fortnite is a metaverse.

that's where you got the metaverse like Mark Zucker would be literally like I will put your brain in a vat I will ship a bat to your house tomorrow you just got so upside down because everyone was at home

and then people left their house and live service games have the same network effect problems as any new social network right like remember peach I do remember peach did I use Pete does

yeah or whatever else yo like they're all the same it's like here I am no one else is here I'm out All my friends are still on Fortnite. Yep. Well, that, yeah, so that's the one piece.

And then the other piece is the AI thing, right? Where it's, I think right as this sense of, okay, gaming is this gigantic industry. It's where people spend a ton of money. How can we tap into that and change it? Was like, do you remember when all those conversations were happening where everybody's like, oh, we pay all this attention to Hollywood? But gaming is this many multiples bigger as an industry. And it's where young people are going.

And gaming is the future of everything. Right as all of these companies were like, oh, we should invest deeply into this. Like, smash cut to AI just takes over the industry. And I think it's just an interesting, if that, I think, probably wrong idea about gaming being the future of everything had gotten another couple of years of runway before AI had come in and just completely taken over the conversation. Who knows how many more bad investments Microsoft would have talked itself into? Who knows how much more NFT conversation we would have had to remember? Actually, do you know my favorite, like the world got drunk on like COVID confusion?

is my plug for version history. It was Clubhouse. Right? The chat app where VCs would be like, what if I said racist stuff in an ephemeral talk space? Like, we ran those stories. That's your next episode of version history. Yeah. Coming out this Sunday. It was me and Ashley Carmen from Bloomberg

and Casey Newton from Platformer, both of whom covered... Who both worked at the verge. Who both worked to the verge. Both covered Clubhouse. We had ourselves a time talking about Clubhouse. But yeah, it is... All of that stuff is really... wrapped up together. There was this sense at one time that the way everybody was going to do

everything was going to be different and was going to look like video games. And that was not correct. And so you can see how Microsoft looks at video games at one point and is like, this is actually more adjacent to what we're good at than we realized. And I think that was not correct. I recognize we started by talking about GDC and Project Helix and whether or not Windows is a good platform playing video games on. I'm just ending this segment by saying you can have evaluate a lot of ideas the tech industry has right now by asking yourself, does this only work if we're all brains and vats? And the answer is often yes. Like the answer is this would go a lot better if you were a brain in a vat. And all you could do was use the interfaces provided to you by a handful of giant tech companies.

They'd be psyched. And whatever Allen die is cooking up at meta. All right. That's enough of that. We, what game are you playing right now? Are you still madden? It's a madden all day. It's just madden all day. So now the season's over, you don't have to take the injuries from the auto updates on the roster. Packers are sick if no one's hurt. I'm killing it. I'm thrilled for you.

This is great. All right. We should take one more break. Then we're going to go back. We've got some lightning rounds up to do. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns.

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Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who are, Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning.

And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause for flavor.

Nealai, are we doing this? Oh, we're doing it. Okay. It is time, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I missed it last week. I missed it terribly. I'm so thrilled to be back. I wore my bread and cars a dummy t-shirt out in the world,

kind of by accident without realizing I had it on. several questions. Branded car is a dummy. Wow. That's good. A little like David Bowie-ish. Yeah, it's got some real 2000s indie vibes. It's got some real, like I would say like there's like a little spoon vibe in there.

Yeah. Yeah? And a little postal service? Yes. Not quite enough reverb for the postal service, but we're headed in that direction. Not enough, Jenny Lewis. Can you get Jenny Lewis to just actually come and be my girlfriend? Is that a choice? Jenny, if you're listening, and I know that you are.

If you can go to Neely's house and fix his IMAQ, everything, Neelai will retire from journalism. This is where I somehow in the segment where I just rail against an unelected power hungry bureaucrat, I admit to the Vergecast audience that I've had a crush on Jenny Lewis and say I was like a teenager. We all knew. Let's be honest with each other. That was a good one. Last week we didn't run on it because we were getting too much. Slop. That was handmade and I appreciate it. Our listener who sent this in goes by the Northeast Valley.

And I hope that's your artist's name because that's very cool. Thank you for sending that in. That is very good. All right, what do we have, Nealai? I've got two. Also, David, you live in D.C. Where wearing a Brennan Carr's a dummy t-shirt out in the world might provoke some real reactions. Yeah.

Did you get any real reactions? I got a couple of who is Brendan Carr, which feels like a pretty good. It made me think of the like, who's that clown is the sick as burn because it implies It's not just that you're a clown, but you're not even one of the better-known clowns. Made me think of that. I enjoyed that very much. And then I got one person who saw the back, which says America's favorite podcast and then a podcast, who was like, oh, do you have a podcast? And I just sort of ran away.

That's not it. Tina Nguyen, who's our DC reporter, was at an event. And, you know, it's supposed to be a very polite room full of powerful DC people. And people whispered to her that they very much enjoyed this segment. So shout out to the people whispering to Tina. I know we have listeners out there. I know you're listening, Brendan. All right, I got two this week for you.

And one's just a toss up to you for the thing that you are doomed to do every week on this podcast. So the first one, I think this is very, this is like emblematic of Brendan and how he has no thoughts or opinions or feelings of his own because he's such a dummy. And so, like, his programming misfired this week. So usually Brendan, who is totally captured by the

telecom industry and just desires be the speech police, usually when it comes to picking between consumers getting better, faster, or cheaper internet and the needs and wants of 18T and Verizon and whoever else, he will pick the telecom companies. Yes. Right? Like, Brendan is like, we shouldn't put labels on your internet service that tells you what all the fees are because that's too much work for your cable company, ISP guys, to figure out. So we're taking those away.

This is a real thing Brendan is on that we've discussed in this segment. So this is like, you know, his core programming. don't protect consumers, protect the telecom companies. In any dispute between telecom companies and consumers you're going to pick, Brendan's going to pick the telecom companies. What happens, David, when the telecom companies fight? And you're the government regulator in charge of the telecom companies. You say, now, now, children.

I love you both equally. Brendan does not realize that his job is to be the neutral arbiter of these disputes and be the regulator because he's so captured by interests all the time. Right. He's just a fundamentally corrupt idiot. Right. So this week, Amazon filed a petition responding to SpaceX applying for permission to launch one million satellites. So SpaceX applies for permission to launch a million satellites to do data centers in space. Why doesn't the Verge do more stuff like that?

Can we just apply for permission to, we don't have to launch a million satellites? Let's just see if they'll let us. You can feel any way you want about Elon Mustang. I will launch a million satellites to put us data. center in space. Whatever, they do it. This is one party asking the FCC for permission. And Amazon files a petition response saying, and I want to quote the petition, this seems to describe a lofty ambition rather than a real plan. Timing is likewise uncertain. Deploying a million satellite constellation would take centuries, even assuming the availability of all global launch

capacity to do so. And the argument is if you give SpaceX permission to do this, you're going to cut down on the permission you give other people to do other things. Sure. And Amazon is, of course, very well positioned to say these things because they have their own satellite constellation they want to launch. They have the money and the resources and the time and the Jeff Bezos to spend the money on lawyers and fight to fight against Elon Musk. This is what you want. Like in our system, you want the two parties who are positioned to fight to a policy outcome to do this. This is why you set up a system of having petitions. Right. To protest requests.

This is a good fight that should happen. This is the system working. Yeah. We asked for permission to do this. Does anyone have any objections? Amazon is like we have an objection. Brendan, his little brain misfires because there's no poor little consumer paying their $80 month Verizon bill to screw over here. There's no comedian to muzzle with his censorship.

There's just two feudal lords battling for his goodwill. So instead of staying out of it and saying, this is the process, we will let the FCC's lawyers and technical experts evaluate the request for permission, evaluate the objections, and come to a ruling. Brendan, what does Brandon do? He's posting on X, which is owned by Elon Musk, and he says the following. Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellites short of it, meaning its upcoming deployment milestones, rather than spending their time and resources filing

petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit. You know, there's a, there's just a kind of post on X that you know they hit the post button and we're just like, oh, nailed it. And you're like, you didn't. You didn't nail it. You didn't nail it. He picked a winner. The process is you ask for a permission. You file petitions saying I support or oppose this thing. And then you evaluate it. You're running a little administrative court and that is supposed to look fair. You're not. You're not. not supposed to be the head of the agency before the process has even begun to play out saying, you suck.

I pick Elon. And Brendan, because he didn't have a consumer to screw over, but he has to do something corrupt at every turn or violate his weird programming, did something corrupt. I'm telling you this is dumb. You can feel however you want about Elon saying he wants to put a million satellites in orbit to build a data center in space. sure. You can feel however you want about Amazon saying actually this is stupid and we want to put a bunch of, we want to launch our own constellation and junk up the skies and lead inevitably to Kessler syndrome. Whatever feelings you want, all of that is, maybe it is a bad use of Amazon's resources to be doing this and they should just pay all the drivers more. You can feel any way you want about all these things. The thing that I know that you should react to is the head of the agency picking, aside before the process has begun to play out. That is just naked corruption. Yeah. And saying, don't send me petitions, says guy whose job it is to receive petitions. Like, yeah. What are we doing here? Yeah. By the way, to your point about, he thought the tweet was a banger and it's not,

it's very funny that Brendan, who oversees our nation's telecommunications provider, think that it's a clear black and white tradeoff for Amazon between filing petitions and launching satellites. There's only one employee at Amazon who knows how to do both things. Like, I don't know, man. Like, I feel like the lawyers could file as many petitions they want. And if they stop, it won't affect the satellite launch plans. Maybe the lawyers also launch the rockets. Amazon's a wild place.

Yeah, like, Amazon's like, Claude, launch the rockets. Like, what do you think is happening? God. Like, and maybe you think they're being anti-competitive and they're just trying to buy time to launch more of their Leo, whatever. Sure. fine. But again, this is just nakedly corrupt by Brandon. This, by the way, ties into the second thing Brendan did. Not this past week, but the week before. I'm sorry, David, this is where you come in.

You're going to make me talk about David Ellison, Archie. I'm going to make you talk about Warner Brothers and Paramount. So Warner, you know, they decided to go with Paramount. They actually had a meeting this week, which I'm confident you will talk about in a second here, where David Ellison met all the Warner people. But Brendan, who raised a lot of concerns about Netflix buying Warner, said to CNBC that he expected the paramount bid for Warner to be approved, quote, pretty quickly because it's cleaner, quote, cleaner. Again, just why even pretend there is process at this point? It's just they picked a winner. They picked a winner. The David Ellison said he was going to screw with CNN.

And Brennan Carr was like, great, I don't have any more concerns. And the idea that we have a neutral regulator is completely at the window. because Brendan is a corrupt dummy. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show and answer these allegations directly. I will make them to your face at any time. Apparently on the streets of D.C., we can go at it.

My Brendan Carr's a dummy t-shirt is raising a lot of questions. I'll give you a t-shirt, Brendan, that our listeners made for us. It's a great t-shirt. I only have one because it's like a precious fan-made object. But Brendan, I will give you my Brendan Carr as a dummy t-shirt. You can have it if you face me in the thought. underdome of this podcast. A shirtless knee lie against a Brendan Carr's a dummy wearing Brendan Carr.

That would do numbers on TikTok. Look, I'm not saying anybody wants to see me without a shirt. I know for a fact people want to see me without a shirt on more than I want to see Brennan Carr without a shirt on. Anyway, that has been Brendan Carr's a dummy America's favorite podcast than a podcast. It's very good. That does lead right to my first lightning round item, which is this meeting that happened between David Ellison and David Zazlov, the Davids, as I call it, Mr.

been a tough time for David's. Like, we're not, we're not being represented super well at this moment. I will say it does seem like at any moment you could take over Warner Brothers. Yeah, I mean, at this point. The likelihood of you getting to run Warner Brothers is statistically higher than you. That's true. But it also seems like David Ellison is just sort of running through the Davids now. So like David Ellison might host this podcast at some point. I don't know. He's welcome to do that as well. I'd be great. I would happily turn it over to him as long as he wears the shirt. But so anyway, so David Azlov went to. the Warner Brothers lot, I think, to have this big meeting with the executive team at Warner Brothers. This is apparently a sort of normal tradition that they do. Went and he talked about it talking through, you know, that he expects to make 30 films a year, which would be a big number not seen in decades from a single studio. He said really nice things about HBO, which is really funny because out the other side of his mouth, he's talking about how he intends to turn HBO Max into Paramount Plus.

that at the end of all of this, there's only going to be one streaming service. I assume that streaming service is Paramount Plus. Sure, whatever. There are a lot of questions about who Casey Blois, who runs HBO, will or won't report to within this new structure. Like, the HBO side of all of this, I think, is going to be very messy and very fascinating. And very bad. And very bad. And probably it is not going to lead to the next season of things being very good, would be my guess.

But all of that is to say, then David Ellison takes a bunch of questions. One of the things he said, to your point, he acknowledged that the process with Netflix, all of this stuff had been, he called it, quote, a turbulent process. But then he said, and I quote, that part is behind us, which is either flatly not true or evidence of the true level of corruption happening here, right? Because, like, frankly, the fact that Brendan is saying that is kind of just saying. the quiet part out loud that everyone has assumed, which is that there is basically a handshake deal with the Trump administration, that this will work and is fine. And that there will be no process. There will be no meaningful review that this will all just get waived through because everybody agrees politically. And that is the assumption being made by a lot of people who are critical of this deal. And there is just increasingly loud evidence that that is what is going on.

And the thing, the specific thing is not whether or not James Gunn is going to make Superman ever more woke. is CNN. Yes. The specific thing that is at play here is whether or not CNN can be more biased in favor of the Trump administration. Yep. Which will be harder and harder to do as the Trump administration gets more and more confused about why we are at war. Mm-hmm. Like, you just can't, you can't have CNN all day being like, it's pretty good war, right? Even telling people why it's a good war gets more and more complicated every day as the Trump administration forgets why they're doing it.

It's not going great. Yeah. So, like, it's, whatever you think of, like, should you let Zach Snyder make a 4-3 gray scale Justice League, which, again, was 18T's idea, or should Batman be super woke? I don't know. Maybe that's good about, I don't know, like, make the art and let people decide. Like, that's how you should do it. I don't think that's what the Trump administration cares about. I don't think they care about Ellison's promise to make 30 movies a year in theaters, which seems impossible to do.

It does. It also, I will say, David Ellison is like a guy who has been making movies. So to the extent that he is like an actual person with some track record in Hollywood, did he do it all with his dad's money? Like, yeah, sure, but he has been in this game for a while. But the thing that really bums me out the most. But I'm just saying even if, like, you can decide that you believe David Ellison that he's going to put up dad's money, Oracle money, to make 30 movies a year and put them in theaters.

And maybe that's a good economic decision or about. one. Maybe there's enough demand for 30 theatrical releases a year. I would say there's almost no evidence that there is demand for that. Who knows, man? Like, whatever, you can evaluate that. That is not what the Trump administration cares about. No. What they care about is CNN. Right. And David Ellison has promised Trump that it's been reported. He promised sweeping changes at CNN. Yep. He did say in this event that it would remain editorial independent, which I would say is also what he has said about CBS News. And that is do with that what you would like. We have all watched what has happened to CBS News.

But the other thing was that he was asked about layoffs at Warner Brothers Discovery. A thing that you like to say that is true is that the only thing that always happens because of a merger is layoffs. It's the one and only guarantee. And he did the thing that they always do, which is essentially promised that that's not going to be what happens. He's been saying that they see upwards of $6 billion in cost savings and synergy. And he said in the meeting that this is from variety. Most of the cost synergies would not come from layoffs. And I can just tell you with no inside evidence that that's a lie.

It's just it. There is no way that is not the case. That is where those savings come from. Like maybe they're going to sell one of the lots. That's a thing that's been talked about a lot, right? This is very valuable real estate in L.A. That's not where you get $6 billion. You get $6 billion by firing a bunch of people who have the same job at two different

companies. That is what is coming. Yeah. No, without question, it's what it's coming. Actually, I can add a tiny little bit of reporting to this. Please. So you and I have spent years covering all these platforms, like the streaming platforms and their user interfaces and the people who build them. We know a lot of the people who have built a lot of these platforms. And so I know some of the people who built Paramount Plus. And I know some of the people who have built HBO Max and the platforms that Warner has been using. HBO Max is like a particular disaster, right? It started as HBO Go and HBO Max and two different things.

They'd merge them and they bring in discovery. And all of these people are saying, what are you going to improve with Oracle's technology? Because this stuff is pretty good now. Yeah. It's just streaming video. Yeah. Like this is kind of like a white label solved problem. And unless you're focused at like Netflix levels of algorithmic discovery, which is

where your focus should be, you can't just show up and be like, Oracle will make this better. Right. The core parts of the platform, particularly the case of HBO, where they had to go through

like massive gyrations to fix the problems, they're like, yeah, the problems are kind of fixed. Yeah, you can stream Game of Thrones without crashing now. We're good at that.

Yeah, they got there. It took them a long time. Yeah. Spent a lot of money, but they got there. Paramount, again, those folks are like, what has he been talking about?

Like, this team is good, the product was good, there's nothing to do. So unless he's talking about we're going to use the TikTok algorithm to show you a thing, which he's not saying. Right. He's just waiving the idea that Oracle technology will fix things at a slide deck. There's nothing to fix. So I don't think there's $6 billion of like tech infrastructure debt to repair or cost savings because you're running too many data centers. It's just going to be people. Yep.

It is in every business, it's the biggest line item. So I don't know, man. It's all bad. Yeah. The good news, again, much like Al and I going to meta to destroy it from within, is that buying Warner kills you. True. And apparently every media CEO has to flirt with the idea of killing themselves in this way. It's just part of the process.

You get too much money and then the universe takes it away from you by convincing you to buy Warner. This is what happened. This is going to be the end of the Allison family. Yeah. Agreed. All right, let's do one more each and then then let's get out of here. Okay, I want to make this a true lightning round item

because we're going to go deep on this in a different way. So last week, Grammarly just stole our identities. Yeah. You might recall. This is like a huge story. It spun fully out of control. So last August, Gramerly launched a feature called Expert Review where you could, like,

you know, grammarly, like, expresses itself as a keyboard on your device where you, like, type, and the Gramerly keyboard, like, correct? your grammar, that's what it's supposed to. Now, what they're saying is sort of the last mile for AI. So the AI will always be there watching you type. No, thanks. I don't know, man. That's what they say. And so their big idea was that in grammarly, you could submit your writing to be reviewed by experts. And the experts are like, it's just an AI. And then to make it more compelling, they decided the AI would be me.

And you and Casey Newton and Julie Angwin and all these other famous journalists. Bell Hooks is in there, which is particularly horrible. Like, literally just like, do you name any author that's been published a bunch? They're in this feature. I think we can all evaluate how many people use Grammarly by saying that this feature launched in August and we noticed it yesterday. I was just about to say it. So this is bad. So there was, I think it was Futurism or Wired did an article being like, look at all these famous authors in this feature.

And then we went to test it. And instead of getting famous authors, we got ourselves. We got Sean Alster and me and all these other people. So we published this thing that's like, hey, this is us. And we asked Grammarly for a statement. They gave us kind of a nothing burger statement. Then they rolled out email in opt out. So if I wanted to not be in their feature, I could email them, which is not how it's supposed to work.

No. It's like, do this magic incantation. And then we will take you out of the product. And then, you know, I heard from friends at other huge publishers being like, how did you find this? Or lawyers want to know. You can tell. that the sort of like legal drums were, we're starting to go.

Julia Anguyn, who is an excellent reporter filed a class action lawsuit this week, and then Gramley fully rolled it back and said, we're very sorry, blah, blah, blah. The reason I'm saying this is lightning round at him is because Shashir Mahotra, the CEO of Gramerley, has long been scheduled to be on Decoder next week.

Amazing. Like, well before this happened, he was going to be undercoder. So he's still scheduled to be undercoder. I think he's going to be on the show. We're taping that next week. We're going to try to turn around as fast weekend. So I'm just going to stop it here because I wanted to come on Decoder.

But now it's now it's out there that Shishir, you have to, now you have to show up. You got to show up. And if you don't, then I'll just do that episode of Decoder with an AI version of you. I like it. I think that one is, it's going to get, it's going to get weirder before it gets better on that front. And it also, it is sort of a perfectly AI story because it is not actually, it wasn't you. It wasn't even based. It was just like Neli vibes in some of the edits.

It wasn't in my vibes. No, it was the worst edit of all time. Yeah. That's not how I edit. But, and I want to say this as clearly as again, somebody who edits and gets edits,

there's no way you can look at someone's published work and determine what they are like as an editor. Correct. You cannot do it. Not a chance. They're just different tasks. Like 99% of my edits are me just like, highlighting a word and saying clunky.

You're not going to get that out of my writing. That's true. And I'm curious to ask a lot of questions here. But I think the number one question of my mind is, why did you think that you could get to this is what I'm like as an editor from reading my published work? Because those things aren't, they're not even in the same universe.

Yeah. No, it's the whole thing is very bad. And also like if you use that feature, and trust it, I'm very sorry, because it is leading you astray in lots of... It's making you write SEO slot. Every one of the screenshots that you see of, like, the edits, it's suggesting it's like, oh, that's bad. Like, that's actually just an objectively bad idea.

And I hate that it's a resource to me, but it's also just a bad idea and not correct and is making your writing worse. It's good for telling you, like, when you use the wrong tense of a word, and I would not trust Gramerly for much of anything beyond that. Yeah. Anyway, he's coming on the show, we'll see. Yeah. Okay.

for my last lightning round item, I have kind of a thing and a half. First, just some super quick follow-up from Tuesday's episode. When I was talking to Lauren Finer about all of the stuff going on with the Live Nation Ticketmaster settlement, one of the things we said was that it seemed like the deal meant Live Nation was going to have to sell a bunch of its amphitheaters and venues. It turns out that is not actually the case. There are a bunch of venues that are going to have to have an open ticketing model, so they'll have to use things other than Ticketmaster.

But as far as we can tell, it doesn't seem like at this point, according to the deal, Live Nation is going to have to sell any of its amphitheaters and venues. Important update from everything we're talking about on Tuesday. There's also a bunch of shenanigans still happening with Live Nation Ticketmaster. Even though that settlement happened, it looks like courts coming back as soon as next week. We'll catch up on that when the trial restarts again. Lauren, poor Lauren is going to stay in New York. For our purposes right now, I want to talk about some big news that dropped today, actually on Thursday, as we're recording this.

Alison Johnson on our team has been working on her review of the S-26 Ultra from Samsung. Don Preston reviewed the S-26 and the S-26 Plus, which are exactly what you think. Samsung took its phones and did them again, only now more expensive because of ram shortages. But the big thing, and we talked about this when Samsung announced this, other than the what is a photo apocalypse of it all, the big new thing that got announced in the course of this phone being announced was this thing that Google and Samsung called, I believe, task automation. and this is the AI can just go do things for you on your phone feature. This is what Apple has been promising with Siri. This is what Google has been talking about with Gemini.

This is what Rabbit tried to do with the large action model. Like, this is the thing with AI. This is what everybody wants to do. They shipped it. It's out on the S26 Ultra. I believe it's coming to the pixel. Shortly, I have a pixel 10 pro that it has not shown up on yet. But this thing is supposed to be out there.

Allison has been testing it. She has had like some pretty interesting. experiences with this thing, but it, like, it kind of works. Your phone can use itself. Let me just read you one paragraph that she wrote just to give you a sense of how it works. She writes, the first prompt I gave it was pretty simple. Order an Uber to the airport. This is like a classic AI use case, by the way. Gemini asked for clarification to determine which airport, a good question to ask. Then it went through a couple of steps on its own, adding the destination and opting to skip the step where you specify your airline, which doesn't really matter

at my local airport since it's all in one terminal. As promised, the system stopped before the final step and prompted me to review the details before putting in the request for the car. That is a smashing success of a hands-on story right there. Obviously, that is like, I think as we discussed, that is like the simplest, most straightforward example of this thing that gets very complicated and very messy very quickly. But she also, like, she had it order Starbucks for her. There's just like a set of things that this thing appears to be able to just commandeer your phone and go do on your behalf.

And that is nuts. I mean, when we talked about it when it was announced, we got a lot of feedback that was like, everyone's lying, AI doesn't work. And my feeling has always been Google is smarter than that. Right? Like, they know they can't announce broken Siri, which is what Apple announced.

Right. Like, here's a Siri that doesn't work. It's like not a choice for them. And I think they have very wisely picked food delivery in ride sharing. These are the only two things are going to try to do at first. Yeah. Because they are the most solvable constrained problems. And then you kind of,

expand to like the universe of things. Well, they're also interacting with the database, right? Like, it's, it's anything with this kind of incredibly structured data is where it's going to be. So I have a great question here because Samir, when he was announcing this feature at the event, said, we can do this any way you want. We can do this via MCP. We can do this via API or we can just click around in these apps. So it's unclear.

I know Uber, Dara has been on Decoder and he's like, we are happy to integrate with this stuff. It doesn't matter to us. I don't know how they're integrating with the Starbucks app. So it's unclear to me if they're just literally running the app in a virtual machine on your phone and clicking on it. Allison's experience so far suggests that it is actually just like literally scrolling around the app for you, which is pretty interesting. And if all that's running locally, that's bananas. Yeah. So I have a million questions on how this works in practice.

But the fact that it's working is the thing. Yep. I've actually been thinking a lot about this because I think the none of this works stuff was very much a feature of this podcast for a long time. and I think has slowly gone away because this stuff is starting to work. Like a lot of it doesn't. There's still a long road and the gap between some of this works

and we have invented digital God is still so vastly enormous that we have to keep talking about it. But like, I don't know, I just keep coming back to sort of that that Claude Code moment that everybody had over the holidays. It's like these tools can do things now.

They do do things. It's just fancy autocorrect argument is no longer. correct. Something meaningful has flipped. And I think now the questions of like, okay, what does this mean morally? How do we talk about it environmentally? How do we, what is the business of all of this? Is everybody full of shit talking about the like digital God possibilities? All of that still exists, but I think is actually now vastly more complicated because some of the stuff works now. Some of it does work. And we have to reckon with it now in such a different and more

nuanced way because some of it works now, Eli. I'm aware that some of it works. And I, you know, you talk to vastly more software development than I do, but it sounds like the existential crisis in software development is here, like fully here. Very much so. Yeah. I, my hesitation, as you're saying this, is I think it's all still pretty brittle. Sure. And the promise of this technology, particularly Asian stuff, is that it will overcome the brittleness of every other attempt to do this kind of thing that has ever existed before. So like Alexa, there's a Virgin history this season on Alexa. Yeah.

The problem of Alexa is that you just... It was brittle. You'd ask it to do stuff and it couldn't do it. And then people stopped asking it to do anything at all. And they were like, I know it can do music and timers. And that's where that technology died. And I think this is still pretty brittle. I just think the boundary of things that people expect it to do is getting bigger.

You're right, but you're framing it wrong, right? Like what happened was Amazon built a hugely successful machine for playing music and setting timers. They've sold a lot of those things. There are a lot of them in people's house and they are a lot of them. like a meaningful interface for a lot of people to do a lot of things. Like there is a generation of kids that is growing up talking to Alexa. That's real. It's happening.

Like that's a very powerful thing. What Amazon never figured out is to how to A, do the next thing and B, figure out how to make two nickels rub together from doing it. And this is where we are with AI right now, right? Like the thing where, yes, this can write some code for you is real and powerful. There are a bunch of little things, again, that is starting to do. like can AI order coffee from Starbucks for you? We are rapidly running at a point where the answer is just yes.

That's not digital God. I don't know how to be clear about that. It's also not clear that that's anything, right? So we are at, I think, that fun, interesting moment that we were with Alexa all those years ago where it's like, okay, it can, this is something. How much is it is the next question? And everybody continues to assume that just because it can do the first two things, it will eventually be able to do everything. The last run we took at this proved that that was not the case. This is when we had a bit brittle.

Yeah. I think we've expanded the envelope of where the brittleness is. Yeah. But there's still some brittleness that is yet to come. Yes. By the way, I have been threatening everyone that we're going to do a segment of the show called New York versus San Francisco where we just invite Casey on and then, you know, I just have different ideas on AI. I think it might be time. To your point, it might be time.

I had a meeting just before we recorded this podcast and the person I was talking to started with. I know I'm in San Francisco where everyone is completely AI-pilled, but... Yep. We've got to do it. Casey has agreed to do it. We just have to do it. I'm down. I think it's a good idea.

And I'll just like, I'll be Chicago. You know what I mean? I'll be somewhere in between... Good old Midwestern Dave is here to moderate New York versus San Francisco. I love it. It's going to be great. All right. We should get out of here.

We've gone way over as we are wanted to do. I missed a week. It's nice to be back. I don't like when I don't have anybody to talk to about this stuff. I have to bother, like, my three-year-old about technology. He's not interested. But that's it for the Vergecast. Like you said, Eli, Clubhouse on version history this Sunday.

We're not feed-dropping. So to all the people who yelled at me about feed-dropping, we will not be feed-dropping Clubhouse. Go to the new Version History YouTube channel. We're a version history podcast on TikTok and Instagram. Those accounts are small, and that makes me feel vulnerable. So please go follow them so I can have some self-confidence again. Oh, my God. This was openly manipulated than you've ever said.

It's true. This is where I'm at right now. in my life. I said something about like and subscribe and I got a comment being like, like can subscribe is so 2008 and this made me truly feel feelings. Who's on Decoder on Monday? It's a CEO of Yahoo. It's a wild convo. There's a lot there. Jim. Is everything gambling now? And we talked about it for a while. Spectacular. I'm personally very excited about that episode. I've spent some time with Jim over the last several months talking about the future of everything. And he's a good hang. I'm excited to hear that episode. Remember, if you subscribe to the Verge,

you get all of those podcasts. Ad free. Plus, uh, everything else that we're doing with the verge, all of our newsletters, all of our everything, theverge.com slash subscribed. It's a good website. We're pretty proud of it. Um, the email is Vergecast at theverge. The hotline is 866, verse 1-1. This shows a production of the Verge and the Vox Media podcast network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time. Neelai, rock and roll.