The Vergecast - The next Macs and the next Twitter

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the next Apple event, a Twitter successor, and Windows Phone regrets. Further reading: Apple plans ‘Scary Fast’ product event just before Halloween  Apple’s future AirPods roadmap just leaked, and big changes are coming  Apple TV Plus is getting a price hike — and other Apple subscriptions are, too The Apple Watch’s double tap points at a new way to use wearables  iOS 17.2 Beta Introduces Journal App - MacRumors Meta’s Threads app has almost 100 million users, says Mark Zuckerberg Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake Here’s your first look at Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater gameplay Humane's AI Pin is Here’s your first look at Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater gameplay Google reportedly pays $18 billion a year to be Apple’s default search engine Is my co-worker AI? Bizarre product reviews leave Gannett staff wondering In the end, the FTX trial was about the friends screwed along the way The obsessive tormentor who made professors’ lives miserable The restaurant nearest Google Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to Veritcast. The flagship podcast of Samsung decks, powered by Knox, supported by Android. It's real. When he turn on a Samsung phone, the logos are out of control.

Powered by Knox. I mean, it has always been thus. Powered by Ann. Nobody is better at logos than Samsung. There's some touchwiz in there. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi, we're in the studio together.

This is very exciting. You can just reach over and smack Alex. He wants. Thank God, honestly. Alex Tran's here. I'm just really excited to hear Neely talk about Dex. It's a full hour of talking about Dex. That's all we're doing today.

There's quite a lot. Apple has a surprise event in primetime up against Monday night football. That's a choice. That's a real thing that's happening. There's some AirPods leaks, price hikes on services, a real theme of our show lately. David wants to talk about one year of X, and I believe we're going to put social networks on the Go-90 scale. We are, in fact. It's just going to be incredible.

And then we have a lightning round. including, I would say, the funniest lightning round element of all time, which is Microsoft executives either bemoaning or being proud of the fact that they killed Windows run. And the needle just swings back and forth between those two things.

The same people every couple of years. It's coming up on the Vergecast. But first, let's talk to X. Can I just read everyone two messages from Slack that Neli sent? At 1128 a.m. on Tuesday, October 24th, Nelai sends, we have a Vergecast room

for all of us to make the show. Neelai just says, also, hello from Dex. And then a moment later, I have paired it to a mechanical keyboard. So that's the worst for everyone in this office. And there are two typos in that message. So this is now an important part of my life is tracking your Dex situation and in general your Ninja Train situation.

How are we doing? Here, the basic updates. I have a Z-Fold 5. A really cool Z-Fold 5. It has our D-Brand skin on it. So that's cool. It does look good. It looks really good.

Putting those skins on is not a small amount of work is a thing I've discovered, but they do look very cool. It looks very cool. Boy do I dislike this phone. Boy do I just not like it. And it's not Android. I like a number of Android phones. Android's great.

Specifically trying to use a folding phone for what I'm trying to do is not good. Are you one of those people who's like really mad about the crease in the middle? No, so I don't mind the crease. Okay. So the pixel fold and Z Fold 5 are kind of. of the same folding display, but they fold in different directions. So Samsung went with tall, skinny, and Google went with the correct way. Yeah.

So using this phone when it's closed is ridiculous. It's a TV remote. It just really is. And nothing quite works right. And then when you open it, you have to use two hands. Yeah, always. Which is fine. So I'm on the train.

I get my tablet. And it jelly scrolls. So the display controller, I think, is on the left. And so I scroll with my finger on the right. So the left side of the screen moves up Faster than the right side of the screen And so the text I can just see it go whoop Yeah

And I can see it Dan can't see it We just argue we just argued about this in the office He's like I don't know what you're talking about And I was like I'm on a roller coaster I don't like this It's such a funny thing because this is one of those things with phones That we largely solved like back 10 years ago On this show like I bet if you go back to Vergecasts

From like 2013 and 2012 There were a lot of people mad about wonky scrolling stuff on Android phones. And the thing we're like, you can't scroll and read the text at the same time, which is kind of how I was describing to people. And we're back at this somehow. We're back at, although I will say Neil, I just opened his phone and got immensely distracted. The scrolling.

The scrolling. So Samson might be doing something right here. It doesn't have a ringer switch. I don't open it and like monkey with one UI to turn off the ringer. So that's the phone. So the first part of this where I just roll up on the train, I've got one device. I don't like using this phone. I understand why it's sick as hell.

Yeah. Yeah. And in that blissful moment when I've got it open and I'm reading the Google Doc and someone's like, what is that? That's, that rules. Yeah. Do you get that? Do you get a lot of like people looking at your shoulder being like, whoa, fold a phone? On the train.

It's a flashy thing to do to unfold a phone, even in 2023. People have seen them, but you're still just like, ha ha. Whoop. Oh, you like to see this luxury? No problem. Just make eye contact. So that part's cool. Ask for your train ticket.

You're just like one second. Me open up my phone. Yeah. And you're always just kind of like in a fight. Whatever. But that part is fine. Like it's a phone. It works.

It's a good fast Android Samsung phone. Except I find the display scrolling to be extremely distracting. That might just be me. A noted pixel density enthusiasts might just be me. Some people can't see it. Okay. Fine. Then you get to Dex.

So then you roll in the office. You have a USBC doc in a Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. I'm just pulling stuff out of our reviews closet. How many keyboards did you go through? Because I kept going in and out of meetings. I'm at the third now. I'm in a Logi MX Mini or whatever it's called. They were just stacking up on your desk.

It was not great. And I've got a razor gaming mouse, like a wired ultra-high DPI gaming mouse. It's like 20 buttons on it. Yeah, there's a lot of buttons on the side, all of which appear to be mapped to something in Android for some reason, which is not great because I'm, whatever. So you plug in a USBC doc, HTML display, then you get to Dex.

And then Dan Dex expert, Dan Seafert. The Dexpert. The NASCAR. He told me that you have to install an app called Goodlock. Okay. Which is made by Samsung to ultra-customize Samsung One UI.

And his characterization of this app is they made this app to get around Google's restrictions. Because they have to ship one UI not too far away from Android. Right, because Samsung for a decade completely lost its mind with software design and tried to shove apps called Milk Music at you. Google was like, stop doing that.

So now all that stuff is in Good Lock. It's called Good Lock. Is Milk Music in there? Goodlock has two tabs at the bottom. Do you think it sounds like Good Luck on purpose, where they're just like, hear some stuff? It's what it feels like, look, I know there are extremely hardcore Galaxy fans out there who think I'm crazy for only now discovering good luck and I apologize. I'm just saying this is an app where at the bottom of the screen the two tabs are makeup and life up. Yeah. And then you can install various

plugins sick to one you have. Did you life up? I lifed up a little bit and I installed the plugin that lets Dex run at 1440p. So now I'm running Dex. Yeah. Looking good. Dex runs Android apps. It turns out so Slack doesn't have a sidebar. So good. You just like it. You're just using the Android app wider. Right. On your desktop computer. It doesn't make them like tablet apps. It just makes of them as many, many, many phone apps.

No. So then I solve this problem by running Slack as a web app in Chrome, in which it is very broken, because it's running an Android Chrome in desktop mode. This is the thing about... I was so close to this working. This is the thing about the whole Android and Google universe is it's all there. They've made all the things. Yeah.

It's just like they refuse to have the meeting where they're like, what if you're thing and your thing both existed in the same place. Yeah. Like, we would never do that. So again, Dan's advice to me was treat this like a Chromebook and use Samsung's internet browser because it's better on this than Chrome. So I switched to Samsung's browser, moderately better. Okay.

It's just not quite there is what I would say. You can see how it would rule. Mm-hmm. Like your desktop looked like a very functional desktop from afar. Yeah. When I last saw it, I didn't see a keyboard attached. I just saw you were using the phone as a touchpad. Yes, that's true.

Before I had a mouse, you can just use the fold as a touchpad. So that was my touchpad with like my little mechanical keyboard next to it. The monitor looked. I was like, oh, that looks like a computer monitor with like computer stuff happening. That looks normal. Can we get to the thing you were going to do in the lightning round, but we should just talk about right now, which is. Talk about metal gear solid delta. Yeah, you can talk about that in the lightning round.

But no, Satina Della gave an interview this week to Business Insider in which he, like every other Microsoft executive in history, said giving up on mobile and Windows phone was a mistake. And, like, you know who could have done a good job at the thing you are describing is Microsoft. They sort of tried. They have tried. They're trying now. They stopped trying for a long time. They're, like, sort of pushing back in that direction. But, like, all the stuff you're describing where it's like, oh, I want a thing that, like, runs Android apps when it's my phone.

But then I sit down and I have something that is much closer to a full desktop operating system. It's like, you know who could have built that starting 12 years ago, but instead did a bunch of weird shit and then shut all their platforms down and fired their CEO. It's Microsoft. All right. I'll read you the quote. Here's an Nadella quote. Because, boy, does he agree with you. He was asked, what about a mistake or a wrong decision that you might regret?

Nadella says, the decision I think a lot of people talk about. One of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO was our exit of what I'll call the most. mobile phone as defined then. In retrospect, I think there could have been ways that we made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones. You're totally right. I read that as him saying there's another category of devices that we didn't do, didn't think about.

But he's definitely saying there is a version of a phone that is kind of all of those things, and we should have built it. Or he's hinting that they're going to try yet again. Sure, but they aren't. Pano's Penae. He tried so hard. That's not going to happen. They just get, because they either have to do Android or they have to do the thing everybody else has to do, which is build an entire OS from scratch.

Look, I'm just going to say this directly to our friend, Satcha, if you're listening, Satcha, you made the right decision. It was strategic catastrophe to buy Nokia. Yeah. And then to do Windows phone instead of. It looked cool, though. It was all stupid. Oh, yeah. The bad calls were made before him. Yeah.

He was just like, you know what? The platform is on fire. Into the ocean with you. That is a very deep cut. I'm not going to explain it. But the people who get it into the freezing finish ocean with you is basically what Sotchen and Lent said to these people. And I think that was fine.

I think the company is doing much better. Well, I think he's hinting at here is, and we're going to talk about humane later too. Yeah. There's like suddenly a bunch of people are like, what comes after the phone? And there's a lot of action around what comes after the phone, mostly because none of these people have businesses. I was going to say the people who say all of that are not Apple and not Google who really like phones. Yeah. There's just a lot of heat around what comes after the phone again.

It comes up every so often. And this is when the pendulum swings for Microsoft executives to, oh, should we have quit on the phone? And like a year ago, you asked Dadella this question. He was like, that was the best decision I've ever made, is getting away from this dinosaur and saying, we sell services across everyone. platforms. Yeah. I mean, I think in general, Alex, I think you're right that this is never going to work and Microsoft to be foolish to try now.

And I think it's been foolish to try really for the last five years to start building towards that again. But I do think there's a really interesting tech history alternate universe in which we tried to do this, right? Because I think even if- I'm holding people trying to do it. Even if decks were amazing. It unfolds into a bigger screen.

Have you seen it? It's amazing. Even if decks were amazing, I don't think there's ever going to be a mainstream use for it because it's just not how we've learned to use technology. It's just not how it works. So here's that actually, besides all the little problems in the software, there's one deeply hilarious problem with this entire approach to having just one thing. I come to the office.

The whole point of this is I don't have a desk anymore. If I had a desk, I just put a laptop on the desk and I would leave, which is what I did for years. But now because we're like roaming, desk, hybrid work, so I don't have a desk. So I'm like, I can't just leave my laptop on this like hotel desk. But then I have to get up. I know. I have to get up and go to meetings all the time where having my computer is often useful.

And instead of this little guy. And I'm just like, what am I doing? Nothing cooler than sitting on your phone in a meeting being like, no, I'm taking notes on the meeting. Don't worry. Everybody's like open the spreadsheet. With my little folding phone and laptop mode, like this is the worst. Yeah. So anyway, I'm going to try this for another week just for the comedy of it all.

all, and because I feel like I should write down some of these experiences about the future of computing and jolly scrolling, to be quite honest. And then I think my solution is going to be, I'm just going to leave my laptop in the reviews closet where I found this one. That feels right. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'll just buy another computer for home.

Okay. And that's the real solution to your homework for next week, though, is you're not allowed to bring your laptop to the Vergecast. You have to do the Vergecast with only your, you can bring your whole damn deck set up if you want to. Bring the mechanical keyboard Bring the razor mouse No laptop allowed next week

You do not want me to bring a mechanical keyboard To the Virtchast I mean I do For our audiences sake alone You do not want that amount of noise in this room Our audio engineer would not be a fan now You can AI it right out Yeah it's no problem

Invidia's got a thing for that All right let's talk about some actual news There's a bunch of actual news We should start with Apple because there's a bunch of Apple news Including an event Yep So there was some rumor build up late last week, early this week,

that Apple's going to have some Macs. A lot of people didn't believe it because we're just... It's late in the year. It's late in the year. Yeah. We have passed the point typically where Apple is commonly going to release products. And there have been some rumors that there were going to be no iPads for the rest of the year and no Macs for the rest of the year.

And then Apple did the thing where they launched that stupid pencil that we talked about last week. So everybody was like, okay, well, if they were going to have another event where they were going to launch the pencil, why would they do this this way? I think it's just because it's stupid. They wanted to get it out of the way. So, yeah, there were a lot of good reasons to think there wasn't going to be an event and then all of a sudden out of nowhere we have an event yeah so monday night at night

yeah the night before Halloween this is called scary fast that's the name on the invite streaming only and we believe it's going to be max we assume it's going to be max because it's like the most likely thing and there's been some reporting about it the m3 we think coming to macbook pros okay yeah potentially a new 24 inch iMac all of that stuff is kind of overdue no 27 inch Which drives me insane. I think John Gruber believes there will be a 27-ish. I hope so. I think John Gruber might be, they call it witch casting,

which is a term that I love very much. I hope he's right, I really do. But yeah, the 24-inch I-Mech IMac is pretty overdue for an update at this point. And I think the 27-inch IMac is just the studio display and the Mac Studio now. I think that's how Apple sees it. It's wrong, and I hope they change their mind. But, yeah, that and MacBook Pros, which doesn't really seem like it, merits a whole event.

They don't seem to have invited anybody to this. It's a purely virtual event. Here's what I believe about this event. I've heard this theory already. Apple is looking at its own streaming numbers. They know it's probably just chip bumps to existing form factors, a reasonable guess, right? And they know that people will watch their events no matter what. So they're going to do a primetime infomercial that millions of people are going to watch.

And it's just going to be a weird, spooky Halloween-themed TV show about the Mac. Okay, I have several questions. Yeah. Question number one. Does Tim Cook come out in costume? Yes, Frankenstein. Or Frankenstein's monster. You think he's going to be Frankenstein's monster? Like, I just want to see, I mean, mainly because I want to see Tim Cook with, like, a green face.

Just, like, presenting products, because it'd be funny. What do you think the maximum amount of costume, Tim Cook would wear is? I've been thinking about this because my parents are coming this weekend to do our first Halloween with Max in the new town. And I told my mom, it's like, I don't buy you costumes. And she was, she just made this noise. meh. And I was like, okay, what if I just get you like a witch's hat? She's like, okay, what about a witch's cloak? I got my dad a big silly haggard beard. And I'm just seeing how far I can push it, like how many additional elements I can add. And like suddenly they will just be in full kit.

And I don't think I'm going to get there. I think I'm going to get to two elements and we're going to stop. Yeah. I feel like you can do like hat and beard. Yeah. And that's about as far as you're getting it. Yeah. So how many elements do we think we can get on Tim Cook? Oh, I think he goes all the way. You think he's just a full commit. No, Craig goes all the way. Yeah, I know Craig goes all over. Craig would be unrecognizable. Craig, full Dracula is my belief.

Ooh, that's good. Ooh, with the hair? Because you get the big flowy Dracula, you know. And like the little cravat or whatever that Dracula always wears. I think Tim Cook is going to be more like... I want to come back to Dracula always wears a cravat. Is it... Whatever the thing is he wears...

I don't know Vince Bash. I only recognize the blade Dracula, Drake. Please continue to take you, Dick. I have Drake. Short for Dracula. That's what they called him in this movie. That rules. I think Tim Cook is more like in the office.

They have a Halloween episode. And Jim shows up with just a name tag on that says Dave. And Dwight's like, what are you for Halloween? And he points at it and goes, I'm Dave. I feel like that's about the level of costume I would expect from Tim Cook. Yeah. He's going to wear like a full zip instead of a quarter sip and be like Halloween. But this is just my general theory here is that Apple owns a streaming service.

They have Hollywood stars and celebrities at their beck and call, and they know their numbers. They know they can attract attention on primetime on a Monday, up against Monday night football, and that's going to be fine for them. No other company can do this. I agree with everything you just had. I just don't understand tactically why you would do it for a boring event and not the iPhone. This is what I keep getting stuck on is like, why now? Why make your ultra-flex spec bumps to laptops?

Unless Tim Cook goes. Because the stakes are low. They have to do, when it's the iPhone, all the analysts have to come. The partners have to come. The stock price has to go up or down. They have to do. We have to be there. The press has to be there and do the hands on.

Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff you got to do with the iPhone. And they're still veering that towards full infomercial. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This, if it's just a bunch of spec bumps to a Mac, they don't have to do any of that stuff. Who was the last? I was trying to think of this. You can test the conceit that you can move the event to prime time.

Yeah. Right. Whereas if you try it with the iPhone and it flops, you've made a huge mistake. Right. Whereas this is just like, we're just having fun at Halloween. But I think their events are headed inexorably in this direction. Who was the last person to do a primetime infomercial? Because all I could think of was the Victoria's Secret fashion show.

And like, there's a reason. If Apple brings out Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy for this thing, it's all of. I mean, what this makes me think of is. that event Apple had, Jesus, I don't know, five years ago when they brought out all the Apple TV people and it was just a parade of celebrities

with nothing to show. It was the worst Apple event ever. We're all just sitting in the room and it was a bunch of people being like, here's a TV show we're talking about making. Do you have anything to show us? And then they like had a couple of trailers

at the end, but it was just a lot of like Kamel Nanjani being like, I might make a TV show. Remember there was one like an acting exercise and they're like, listen to the wind. Yeah. This was before they had. show. So they didn't show a lot of trailers. They were just like Oprah's here and she's like,

they're in a billion pockets. Right. And the pitch was look at all these celebrities who will do stuff with us. Yeah. And I would guess if you're going to do something like this again, I would not be shocked if there are musical guests, which Apple really hasn't done in a while if there are lots of celebrities. What if Heidi Klum is there? It's just because she goes all out. It's the Victoria's Secret Fashion show. No, no, she goes all out for Halloween. Like remember the year she dressed as a worm? Tim Cook there with a name tag that says, Dave and a tidy clume and full worm. That's all like that's TV.

Yeah. See, this is how you make a spectacle on television. This is just my theory. It could just be a bogged standard Mac event. I just think if you're going to program something of this in primetime the night before Halloween, you definitely have cravats. That's a given. But I think the most important piece of the puzzle is like, does Apple think that it is

primetime entertainment? Oh, I absolutely think it does. Yeah. No, I think that's right. Because you have to believe that about yourself in order to attract eyeballs at this time. And I think they will be successful. I think a lot of people are going to watch this thing. All of us are going to be weighted on pins and needles for 27 in trimax.

27th trim. There's only one metric of success. Do I buy a new 27-in-chimac? Well, no, if they do it at primetime, are they truly competing with primetime TV? Are we going to see, like, is that what we need to measure them against or just other Apple events? Like, do we need to measure them against money? Well, there's no measure. I have no idea how many people watch that. You see, like, the concurrent numbers.

YouTube or whatever, but that's only part of it. I think there's been a bunch of interesting news this week. Like Apple TV Plus got more expensive, as a lot of their services did. There was the news from Bloomberg that Apple is making yet more effort to consolidate everything into the TV space. It just feels like we are definitely at this moment where Apple is trying to flex itself as an entertainment company. And I think the idea that it's going to treat its stuff as like huge TV and they're going

to start to have like Apple event up front. I think is like not true. But there's definitely a thing that's happening that Apple believes everyone will pay attention no matter what it does. Yeah. I still don't understand why that leads you to say, let's do this at 8 p.m. Eastern on a Monday night just because we can. Like, that's weird.

But I think it'll work. Like, it's going to work in the sense that a lot of people are going to pay attention because people always pay attention because it's Apple. And the funniest part of this is no other company has been able to get to where Apple was like 10 years ago in terms of making their events an event. Sony tried really hard for a long time. Samsung continues to try. Sony did have Taylor Swift.

I just won't put that out there. Yeah, Sony literally had Taylor Swift. Yeah, but it wasn't good. It was, like, deeply uncomfortable. It was, they were doing 3D TVs. It was not like a great time. Yeah, they said, look at the TV, Taylor Swift is on. Instead of Taylor Swift.

She wasn't like Taylor Swift yet. She was like, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has always been Taylor Swift. But there was, like, different degrees. I'm so afraid. I'm so afraid of this conversation. Where I confused her with Jessica Simpson, and that's where she was at then. That feels like a you problem.

I'm worried about your physical safety. I love Taylor Swift. I'm a huge fan of the Ares tour. The cool move for Apple, because it's going against Monday Night Football, would be to bring Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. That's how you won up Sony. You get them to publicly announce their relationship. So we think it's chip bumps. We're not doing that.

No, I like this plan better. Tim Cook is dressed up as Taylor Swift. And Craig is Travis Kelsey. You see what I'm saying. It's a very obvious thing. All right. Well, we figured it out. So we think we think we're getting M3s and that quick pros.

we think we're getting a 24-inch iMac refresh. We'll see. Yeah. Then there's some other stuff leaked. German had new AirPods. Apparently the third-gen AirPods are not selling well. People are just buying the cheaper, older ones. Because if you're in that middle, why not go all the way to the pros is basically my feeling.

Yeah. I think there are basically two kinds of AirPods buyers right now. There are people who buy the newest pros, because they're the best ones, and they're very good. And there are people who buy the thing that goes on sale at Costco. Yep. I am the person who bought them on sale at Costco. I literally could not tell you. what generation of AirPods I have.

And I don't care because they are AirPods. I don't like the pros because I don't like the sticking them in the ear canals that just feels bad in my ears. But I think that's the case now. They have entry-level AirPods and new pros and anything in between. There's yet another kind of buyer. Okay. And I have seen them. It's not Costco.

It's the people who buy the knock-off AirPods maxes at Home Depot, which are just in the middle of the store. At Home Depot? I see people pick this. I meant we bought a new house. in Home Depot every weekend. That's where you live now. It's just like where I'm going. And I watch people walk by this display of knock off AirPod Maxes at the Home Depot.

And they pick up the box and I look at them. And I've seen at least two people do like a furtive look around because they know. And then they walk away with the box. And I'm like, oh, there's a lot of people on the New York City subway. We're in the Home Depot, AirPod Maxes. And I don't even know. Like, why is Home Depot allowed to sell fully counterfeit products? But it's happening.

Every weekend I see this. They're like 20 bucks. David's scrolling through them right now. Okay. I can offer you a pair of $100 skull candies, or I can offer you a $20 pair of Zumi soundplay wireless over-ear headphones. They look exactly like AirPod Maxes. For 1997 and do look alarmingly.

I'm telling you on the New York City Subways, a lot of people are wearing $20 Home Depot AirPod Maxes. This lady's just vibing. She's having a great time. Neelai, I have great news. They have HD Sound for an immersive music experience. I'm just telling you, I think this is a third category. You've got the two categories of AirPods buyers.

And then you have the whatever that looks fine. It looks like the thing that's expensive. That's why you go to Walgreens and they just sell headphones in line. And it's like, who buys these? And it's like some people buy them. Yeah. And so I think that those middle, the third gen AirPods, like the good ones in the middle, I think Apple expected those to be the big seller.

Yeah. But actually, you're being squeezed by Home Depot on the bottom. And at the top, people actually give a shit, and they're going to buy the best ones. Right. Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I do think it's exciting to see, frankly, Apple, like, continue to push what AirPods can be. Because it sort of seemed like, for the last couple of years, they were just like, well, we won.

AirPods are, like, everywhere, everybody has them. You either have AirPods or you have the other ones. But the problem is they're now commodified. Yes, exactly. And now it's like they're pushing on some of the stuff. I think the new ones supposedly are going to get. They're going to have shorter stems. which is very upsetting if you like to use Bluetooth headphones for audio stuff, like for talking.

Yeah, I'd like longer stems. Yeah, I was like that was the part I was like, no at my desk. I would like AirPods that are basically like dental headgear that kind of go all the way down around your chin. It's just one piece. Wow. This is a good idea. Get the Rayband Medans. Do they still make neck buds?

Those like things that you were. Oh yeah, you can still get neck buds. That's you, baby. Yeah, the Walgreens checkout counter. All right. So that's that. We don't know when that's happening, but they're coming. Yep.

You see them reinventing that lineup. Because I think wireless earbuds, total commodities now. They have to keep pushing them up. Alex, we've been talking about price hikes with you. I think every week now. It's another one. Throw a dart at the board of streaming services,

and it's like the price is going up. $9.99 for Apple TV Plus. Seems very high. Yeah. I really enjoy Apple TV Plus. There's one show on it that's one of my top ten shows of all time. I'll watch it like every six months. It's like my office.

I think Apple TV's hit rate is higher than any other service. Yeah. But it's also got 12 shows. I mean... No, it's got more now. It's got more now. I disagree that it's hit rate is higher. Really?

I think it has hits, which is unlike other streaming service. Is this because you watch the Octavia Spencer show and it's not very good? Most of the show. That's what I mean. They make a lot of brilliantly produced excellent looking nothing. See. Yeah, see. A show in which if you just go look at the.

Reddit for the show C starring Jason Mamoa, the most common question in that Reddit is can they see? Because the show is not committed to its own conceit. It's complicated, guys. It just depends on which character you're talking about. But it is beautiful. It's beautiful, yeah. Yeah. Are you looking at the Reddit? No, I'm looking at the, I mean, I honestly, I stand by this. Like, there are very few disaster shows on Apple TV. That's true. That's true. Everything on there, with the exception of the morning show, which is full, honest to God, garbage. Wow. It's a soap opera.

It is so soap opera, so melodramatic, that, like, we know where Reese Witherspoon was on January 6th. But like... That's a spoiler. I'm so sorry. It's just like, what if you spent all the money in the world to make a soap opera? Yes. That's why I love it.

I'm like, wow, we're finally getting prestige soap operas. But, but yeah, the prices are, $10 a month is hard to, to, to, you know, to sell. stomach, especially one of our commenters after we put the story up, just broke it down and by percentages. Apple TV is going up about 43%. Apple Arcade is 40%, Apple News is 30%. Overall average, it's 37%. Does it feel like you're getting 37% more service?

Can I get a 37% raise? Got to maintain it. No, only if you're bundled with three other people. To me, what's very obvious here is Apple is trying to get everybody to subscribe to Apple One. Yeah, no, you can see it. The Apple One is only going up five bucks. Apple One Premiere for families has gone up five bucks. And if you use Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus, that's that price right there, done.

Everything else is gravy. You get all of Apple services. Like, it's so transparently a better deal to be on Apple One than to be on some other mismatch of their services. But it only became a better deal like this. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was actually trying to switch over to Apple One like two or three weeks ago.

And I did all the math. And I was like, well, I don't use some of this stuff. So I'm not going to do this. Yeah, if you use News Plus and Fitness and all of that stuff, it's been a better deal for a while. But right now, it's like if you use two things. It's a much better deal. Yeah. Now I'm really mad.

I have to say there's no way anyone should pay $12.99 a month for Apple News Plus. No, that's absurd. Someone out there is doing it. I mean, it's Tim Cook. Someone else besides Tim. It's got to be coming in the bundle. But it's an a la carte subscription. unless you are extremely committed to reading PDFs,

which I am, that's a bad deal. Yeah. Like, that's so expensive. That's more than the TV service. Yeah. And you get paywalled news, which is good. Yay for money for the news industry. But there are not very many people for whom that's going to be worth $13 a month.

Just don't see it. Right. And now we're just like fully in the bundle. Yeah. Yeah. Other bit of Apple News, iOS 17.2 beta is out. Yeah, this is the other thing we'll probably hear more about on Monday. I would guess.

It's a lot of little things. The big thing is the journal app is finally coming. I don't know why it took this long. I'm not sure anyone cares that the journal app exists. I forgot about the journal app until you just said that. I think you and a lot of people. But now it's coming. My guess would be,

so the developer beta is out now, my guess would be we'll get some kind of public beta pretty fast. Or it'll just hit. Like it's a 0.2 update. It's not ultimately all that exciting. But they will probably talk about the journal app on Monday. Who would be my guess? I don't think it's,

Oh, all Macs. It's a, it's going to be a TV show. Yeah. Ooh. Spooky fast. 27 inches. Just trying to manifest it. And then we have a big story this week about double tap hit the Apple Watches.

V has a story about how it works, which is pretty cool. It seems really, really cool. I don't buy that it can't come to my Apple Watch Ultra, by the way. Or my Series 6. Or my Series 2. But it does seem really cool. The one thing that's interesting is you have to have to. have your display on for it to work.

Yeah. And it doesn't seem to be super reliable. Like, it's definitely a work in progress, this feature. But it's a cool idea, and it seems to be, like, V's story really interesting just in getting into how complicated something like this is to make and just, like, if you think about what your hands are doing all the time, it's a noisy input mechanism. So it's just, it was neat to read her story and see all the stuff it takes to do it. I don't know about you, but I'm constantly clenching my fists.

Just sitting there, like the, the meme. of Arthur? Just furious. Bring me Drake. What if they have actual Drake? What if they had Drake dressed up as Dracula? That's my prediction for the Apple event. There it is.

No 27-inch I-Mack. Drake dressed up as Dracula. No actual Apple stuff at all. It's just going to be Tim hanging out with his friends. That would be the true flex. No new products. Just hanging out. Or they show off the Apple pencil, the new pencil.

Just the pencil. Death first. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back and David's going to execute this idea of putting social networks on the good 90 scale. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back on the Vergecast, the show that we make every week. We may have just been watching Blade Trinity. I'm still thinking about Blade Trinity. It's a great movie.

It's a really good movie. No. I mean, it's a watchable movie. It's a movie. It's a movie you will have a good time watching, but you probably will. won't like earnestly recommend to another person. Yeah.

So you're just one of those people who really likes bad things. Yes. I like him and a bad thing. Because they're bad. You're like, I'm glad that this is terrible and exists. No, it's bad. It's bad in the right way. Like it's a well-made bad movie.

It's entertaining. It's just not good. Like the morning show. No. See, I disagree with every part of that about the morning show. Yeah. There are some things that are like bad and sloppy and ill-considered and not coherent. Like, Blade Trinity is like, they had an idea and they executed the hell of that idea.

And it just wasn't a good idea. All right. Yeah, that I can appreciate. Yeah. Right. Like you executed your whole vision perfectly. Yeah. And you shouldn't have.

There's not a frame of Blade Trinity where they weren't like, this isn't exactly what I wanted. You just should have wanted something else. Yeah. It should have just got a different way. Understood. All right, David, this is your baby. And I believe a listener has requested that we do this. This was specifically requested.

It's been a year. As you're listening to this on Friday, it has been exactly one year since the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter was made final. Obviously, Twitter is no longer, both literally and metaphorically, it's dead. We've had a year full of new ideas about social. We've had a year of would be coming and going. We've had a lot of change. We've been talking about it a lot. And so I think what we haven't done a lot of, A, over the last year is just talk about Twitter as a product.

Like we've talked about the machinations of the company and all the weird stuff going on. But like, is it still a good, vibrant, thriving, potentially successful social platform? And it seems like a good time to check in on all of the other ones that are trying to be this thing, of which there are an alarming number. You made some of these. Increasingly smaller number, spoiler alert for what we're about to get to. So what I figured we should do first is just like, let's do the state of Twitter a little bit. A year after Elon Musk got it, took it over. I actually don't think this is going to take very long because I don't think it's a particularly complicated opinion to have anymore.

I think if we'd had this debate three months ago, reasonable people could disagree about the vibrancy of Twitter or X or whatever you want to call out. I think at this point, it is pretty much undeniable and unavoidable that it is a worse platform and a dying one. Yeah, but there's a lot of jackasses in the world that really. really like to use X. Sure. Like, what I want is it to be at an 80, but I think the jackass factor brings it down to like a 45 or a 50. All right.

Well, let's get to the scale in a sec. Okay, sorry. Because first, Neil is going to have to give us a speech about what the Go 90 scale is. Sorry, sorry. I got excited. I got excited. I have to remind a bunch of people what Go 90 is. It's going to be a whole thing.

Yeah. But I think, like, at this point, and I do think the question of, is X going to continue to be around for a long time, is separate than is it vibrant and cool and useful and like is it culturally relevant in the way that was. Yeah, very different. I already feel like it is drastically less culturally relevant than it was even 12 months ago. Yes, 100%. Yeah.

No, without question. And there's a way to measure it. Twitter was never very big. Right. It was always the smallest of the social companies. It was a bad business. I will once again issue our disclaimer that criticism of X under Elon Musk is in no way praise of Twitter under Jack Dorsey. It was a badly run company.

And again, they sold it because they didn't have any ideas on how to make it that valuable. Clown Carnigold, mine. Yep. That's the Zuckerberg quote about Twitter. So bad company, but outsized influence in the media, in sports, in politics. I mean, the joke for years that cable news was just host reading tweets to each other. Yeah. Which was not untrue for a very long time.

That I don't see anywhere. Yeah, it's gone. So the notion that you could solve every problem by tweeting or create vastly more problems is gone. It's just that's sort of over in a big and important and probably healthy way. Is there even a Twitter person

of the day anymore? You know that person everybody would dunk on? It's Elon Musk. That's what he spent on money. That's such an interesting point. Yeah, for so long, there was always like the main character

of Twitter and everybody would be talking about it and then you'd forget about them. The bird watching woman is always the first one that comes to mind. It's just Elon every day. It's just Elon every day. His, the reach of his tweets is dramatically increased. Yeah, because he said, make my tweets.

Sure. And if I bought Twitter, I would do the same thing. But then recently, apparently, it's gone down. Did you see this? He tweeted something in a reply, which is how he tweets a lot, and his stuff gets huge reach because he's Elon Musk and on and on. But then at one point, I might get this slightly wrong. But I think he quote tweeted his own tweet onto his timeline saying,

bringing this to my main timeline so that it gets more reach. Yes. And it's like, oh, even Elon can't get the view. counts anymore. And yeah, it just, I don't know. Again, I don't think we need to like dwell on this forever, but it's, there's just nothing about that product that feels like it has gotten better in 12 months. And there was like a relationship between Twitter's size and its influence that kept it

relevant. Yeah. Because it was never its size that made it relevant. Yeah. Like TikTok is very relevant because it is huge. And everybody uses it. And everyone uses it. And but it's still pretty insular.

Like, your average TikTok trend does not break into the mainstream too much. Everybody's going to be doing that slip slide soon. Just you wait. Out on the streets. Oh, I've seen it with the skippy dance. Yeah. It's a lot. I tried to do it.

You'll die. Did you try to do it? In my house. Tell us more. I'm at the point in my golden years here where I look at something. I'm like, that's a young man's game. I'm in my midlife crisis phase. I'm still like, I'm going to try.

But no, TikTok is really fascinating just in that way because it's the phenomena are large, but they are contained. And the whole user base does not see everything by definition. And so TikTok itself has a lot of cultural import. Individual things that are happening on TikTok are pretty siloed. Twitter was just like, all of Twitter will now look at this. Right. We'll talk about this.

We'll be engaged with this. And for too long, that thing was COVID. Right. But like it was the driving force of a lot of that debate even, like massive worldwide influence. And now Twitter, even if it keeps. the users, the influence is gone. Right. And that's the danger. And so the advertisers are leaving. We've seen reported. The users are fleeing.

And I think Elon's sort of like raging against it. He's just trying to like scream his way out of it. But online so it's not as aggressive. Yeah. I mean, look, he took Twitter and he turned it into parlor. He did it. He did it. Yeah. That's what it is now. And now I do wonder there's an interesting, like the conspiracy theory has always been that he's trying to just bankrupt it. It's the equivalent of like burning your house down for the insurance money,

seems to be the theory. I don't think that's what he's trying to do. It does seem very clear that what he wants is to build the like finance app and thought he could just bolt that onto Twitter and it would make sense. Yeah, he thought he could just convert

all of those users and instantly have his app. Right. He's just like, I'll just let Twitter users pay each other and then that's how I'll get my finance super app. I do wonder if this all falling apart might just accelerate his like I'm going to go make PayPal again plans.

So I think X is already very different than it was 12 months ago. I have a feeling 12 months from now, it's going to be even more unrecognizable to what it was when he bought it in a bunch of weird directions. By that point, we'll all be paying a dollar just to have an account on it. And so none of us will have an account on it. Yeah. Truly one of the most hilarious. Or the European government will find it out of existence. Yeah.

But the thing that is just obvious to me one year in is that the cultural relevance. of Twitter. That everyone is going to talk about it, that the news will be driven about it, that the politicians are worried about it, that you name it, gone. Yep. And I think the thing that most immediately accelerated that recently was what's going on with Israel and Hamas. And all of the misinformation stuff that was happening, like the flooding of people out of Twitter and into new platforms really took off in a big way just in the last few weeks. I thought it was really interesting that everybody flooded out of Twitter and into new platforms, none of which actually all. also did a good job.

Oh, no. Everybody's like, we want to figure out TikTok will tell us the real news. And there was like a story this week about how TikTok did not, in fact, you do a very good job of it. I think New York Times did that with Taylor Lorenz. And so like, no, nobody, just go read the news. The news got it pretty wrong. Yeah, the news also got it pretty wrong.

It's not been a great time. But like if you're starting from that baseline, right, which is the New York Times issuing major corrections. Yeah. Well, then the secondary information ecosystem is going to be bad, too. And we've definitely seen that. And the thing is that Twitter, at least in its Jack Dorsey period, had an inkling of wanting to be, like, neutral. Neutral is the wrong word, but it just wanted to be, like. There felt like there was a level of, like, peer review happening on Twitter before where, like, generally the accurate stuff would crawl to the top eventually or the cock.

or the context would arrive and you'd be like, okay, I understand what I'm reading here. And that doesn't happen anymore where somebody will just be like, yeah, this is crazy, isn't it? I would say it's like the opposite of that. It's almost like neutral, but it's not neutral because Twitter was never neutral. But it was level and there was things that were out of bounds.

And the new version X is like, what if we just amplify the things that are out of bounds? And that is a distinct shift in the character of the platform. I actually think it's even simpler than that. And I think one of the things that is working for threads right now is that the people in charge of it are believably trying their best. And I think that was a thing that people believed Twitter for a long time was it was a lot of people trying to do a very hard thing, but generally trying their hardest to do it right. And reasonable people can disagree about right. But I think the reason Mark Zuckerberg became a bad guy for a long time was that a lot of people believed he was not trying to do good things.

And in a truly masterful PR campaign, Mark Zuckerberg has won many of those people back. But I think... The masterful PR campaign, by the way, is making... Compete with Elon Musk. No, it's make Adam Aseri the face of this product. Oh, absolutely. And I think Adam Massary and the team running threads has done a really good job of being out there and being present and appearing at least to be trying hard to do the right thing. And it's very clear now that the leadership at X is not interested in what the right thing is.

And so it just changes the feeling that you get from being here. Like, I am no longer in good hands. And that feels bad. Yeah, which is weird because these products at scale, all of them have the same incentives, which is to increase engagement and be sticky. Right. But you see Adam constantly try to thread the needle on, is there news here or not? And his answer is like, I really don't want there to be.

And people are going to do it anyway. But we're going to show you other happy stuff. Right. Zuckerberg this week on their earnings call said, there should be a text-based social network of a billion people that is more positive. And so you see them. They're actively trying to make it so you can't talk about Israel and Hamas. You definitely cannot talk about COVID, which, again, I think is a defining moment in the Twitter.

This is the thing that broke Twitter the most. We'll see if the other platforms survive. But that thing where all of the influential people are using one platform and it's crazy and you can just yell at them directly, which was a delight, is gone. Yep. I do not think it is ever coming back. And I think that's okay. I think that is easily for the best. I agree.

So which is a good segue to our next bit, which is all of the would-be successors. Neli, will you explain the Go-90 scale? All right. So Verizon started a video streaming service called Go-90. They were early to the idea of starting a Doom streaming service. Credit to Verizon. We profiled it. You can read that story.

But eventually, like all streaming services, it died. It went 90. So the scale is the Go-90 scale of Doom streaming. services, which we are repurposing here for Twitter clones. But the Go-90 scale of the doom-streaming services is zero is alive. Zero is alive. And then you can Go-90. And you can die.

Like, Go-90. You fall over and die. I encourage you to read this story about Go-90. Ben Popper wrote it. It's a lot of telecom executives thinking they understand teenagers. I understand that you. You could join a video crew on Go-90. Your friends?

I just feel like somebody, the minute someone came out of of a meeting and was like we've decided to call it go 90. Whoever that person's boss was should have been like, never mind we're not doing a straight service. Like we're out. But okay. So that's the scale. Let's just start with X.

It's a good balancing point to start with. Where do we think, again, remember this is between fully alive, crushing it, totally vibrant and like full dead. Yeah. Like end of platform going to be gone. Where do we feel like X is? Okay. I said it earlier, but I think it's going to be at 80.

Like that's where it should be. But I think it has such a high, like, kind of jackass quotient on the platform right now that is more like a 50 to 45 at the moment. Yeah, let's say 45. It's at a 45. Yeah. Right. dab in the middle.

Yeah. For a lot of people, it's an 80. It's like most people is an 80. But there's just enough that it's like a 45. Yeah. My instinct would be to put it a little higher except, A, like you're saying, never underestimate the number of people who are the worst. And B, these things just take longer than we give them credit for, right?

I spent a lot of time thinking about the people who still pay for AOL that they got on desks. It's like that stuff doesn't die as quickly as we think it does. We stop talking about it and most people move on, but like most things die slow. And I think Twitter has begun what is probably like the inexorable slow death, but it has not died. So I think that's right. Somewhere in the 45 range feels about right. Yeah. Where do we put threads?

Which, so the Threads news this week was also on the earnings call like you were saying, Eli. They announced that Threads has almost 100 million monthly active users. What does almost mean in this context, who knows. But it's a big number. The number has been growing. All the people, whatever, two months ago who were like, Threads is struggling to keep users have less to say now. Thread seems to be doing fine.

Where do we put it on the list? 45. Really? Yeah. Why? But just like a different color of 45. Okay. Like, you know.

Happy 45. Yeah. It's a happy 45. Like, happy 45. Most products fail. That's just the nature of them. Most new products just fizzle out. Meta's launched a lot of products.

I was just about to say, yeah. So the case for and against threads is that it's meta. Yeah. My immediate instinct for threads is to put it at like 25. Because A, Zuckerberg is out here now saying we see a path to a billion users, which is what he's been saying all along. I think he's enjoying this competition. I think he likes how much threads has made him the good guy.

and I think that's going to buy threads a pretty long runway. Threads also, I think, seems to be working. Like, we're going to get to a bunch of other ones, but Threads is... Threads has the heat. It has the heat. That's exactly right. And I think that can be fickle, but it very much has the heat right now. Yeah.

So I would put it lower than 25, or lower than 45. I'm in the, like, mid-20s. Yeah, that's where I'm in the 20s. It feels very, very likely that it's going to last a little while. But that's not, okay, fine. Yeah, I like... Okay, is it going to last a little while? kind of a different question.

But it feels like it's got some legs to it. Yeah. It feels like of a lot of these we were going to talk about, I think this is the one. Yeah. All the rest of them are dead. Yeah. And some of them are like literally dead this week. Yeah.

Like this is the one I'm ranking closest to zero. It feels like it's going to have the one that lasts the longest. I think the danger here is when you do that, you call it the winner. And I don't think it's actually the winner. That's true. And that's why I'm at 45. It has the potential. It's like a happy 45.

Yeah. It very much has a potential to be the winner. But some of the decisions they've made and some of the postures they have struck are actually dangerous for them. Yeah. Right. So it's not real time. Like there's a bunch of people lately doing tests to see how like real time threads is. Even in the following feed, it's like algorithm where it's keeping you from real time posts from people you follow.

I mean, but the EU is going to fix that for us. Sure. The danger for threads would be. at least culturally is essentially that it turns into Facebook, right? Right. Which is like there's a version of threads that is hugely successful and totally culturally irrelevant. Yep. And that's what Facebook is.

But Facebook is zero. It's a really good business. Sure. But it's not like it's not ever going to get to what Twitter was. Right. Like that thing where people on cable news are reading tweets at each other. Which by the way, might have been bad for democracy and society. I think a perfectly reasonable case to make is that every tech choice we've made in the last 15 years was wrong.

And we should just go back to do that 2006 and do it again. But specifically, CNN is a bad podcast of people reading tweets to each other was a bad moment. Yes. Yeah. A hundred percent agree. And I think this is what Zuck and Messary are talking about when they're like, this shouldn't be. We don't want to do news. They have a million reasons to not do news.

Governments around the world are making them pay for news. They're blocking it. There's a lot of complication there. Yeah. But I think if you look at the most negative impact of Twitter, it was the news became Twitter. and Twitter lacked all nuance and was just a dog fight. Yes. All the time.

And I don't think they want threats to be that. So I'm saying it's just like it's, it's almost certainly going to be the winner. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll split the difference. We'll put it at like 35. 35.

There we go. Mastodon. Masson's a zero. It's alive. Necessarily by default alive. It depends on what you're talking about with Mastodon. Yeah. Because it is definitionally unkillable if you talk about the decentralized network of

things that is Mastodon. No, we're not talking about activity pub. I'm not talking about Activity Pub. I'm talking about Mastodon, the social network of many, many, many Mastodon servers. The speed that David got there. Everyone knows I want to talk about it. No, I mean specifically Mastodon, the social network made up of decentralized servers that people can run and federate however they want.

I feel like that's definitionally unkillable. Sure, but I also feel like that's less and less what Mastodon is. Massadon has leaned into Mastodon. Dot social being the thing. Like, they made this very intentional choice in the name of getting more people onto the platform and making discovery easier to default people to what amounts to a centralized platform. You don't have to stay there. You can leave if you want. You can federate.

But like, Macedon and Macedon.com. Which is one instance of Macedon are increasingly the same thing. And I don't know what that means. I think there continue to be open questions about what happens when Mastodon gets 100 million users if literally the people running it can afford to do that. I think you're probably right that it's pretty close to zero at the moment, but I also think the idea that it is unkillable, I don't think is true. Yeah, I think the concept of Mastodon is zero. I think execution is like in the 40s or 50s because we're so early in this conversation about decentralization and stuff. Or in the movement or whatever you want to call it, we're so early on in it that I don't know if Mastodon is necessarily going to be the most successful one.

I don't know if it's theories for how to do decentralization is going to be. going to work. Yeah. Especially when you have threats just out there. I'm trying not to talk about it. I got too close to activity pub. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm not sorry. David is keeping us from the truth. That was specificly to David Peter. That's me. But yeah, I think I think mastodon's social and that concept and stuff is is much higher on the scale because we're already seeing this. This is something that Dan talks about a lot. He's our big mastodon user in the office. And he's seen it a ton where everybody's. Like, well, I don't want to be on my little servers that I'm on.

It's actually more complicated, and I want to be on the main Mastodon server. And that's death for that whole platform. Whenever I want to be on the main one is everybody's desire, then the whole conceit falls apart. Then you've re-centralized the service. Yeah, like, then what have you done? You've made crumbier threads. Well, yeah, right. And then you become something that threads can eat.

Yeah. And so I'm like at a 4550. I think this really depends on whether you think Maston is Mastodon social enough. Because yes, there's one platform. I think they're opportunistically trying to grow users on that one. But, you know, they're a very idealistic bunch over at Macedon. Yes. I'm rooting for them, but I'm like, whoa.

Eugen was on Decoder, and he was basically like, I don't know how to make money and I don't want to. Right. And I actually believe in his posture. Yeah. And I think he just wants to grow the service because there's an opportunity to grow the service. But I think fundamentally they're into the decentralized approach. to the network, which thread could federate into and could either crush or flood with users or who knows. I will say this.

When we're talking about all of these and talking about the scale and survivability, we think a lot in that concept of growth, but that growth itself, like the growth at all cost is a very like threads financially incentivized thing. And a lot of these, particularly something like Mastodon, that's not their interest. It is about that decentralization and stuff. So I think for a lot of those users, they'll probably be there for ages. Yeah. Well, and I think part of the reason I wanted to do this on the go 90 scale is like streaming services, this won't be a winner takes all. Yeah. Right.

Like there can be lots of these that exist. Ideally, yeah, that's the ideal state. Right. Yeah. That's, yeah, again, activity. All right. Although some of these on here. Next one up on the list, blue sky.

Yeah, we're going in order from like possible to less possible. It's about to get real ugly. But let's, it's a hard drop. Yeah. Blue sky's a 70 for me. Yeah. And it's a vindictive 70, mainly because I'm on Blue Sky. I never use it.

And a bunch of my friends in, like, academia use it a lot. And they're always like, why aren't you ever on Blue Sky? So I want it to go away so they stop asking. Blue Sky is definitively where the weirdos went. Yeah, it's where the weirdos in academia. Whether that's an insult or a compliment, is it relevant. All the weirdos went to Blue Sky. Just thinking of our coworkers who are active Blue Sky users.

I'm like, yeah. It's the weirdos. Yeah. And that's like, it's where the shit posters went. Like, if you mostly just went to, like, cause low-stakes trouble for other people, Blue Sky. Yeah. And you have 40,000 followers there right now. Nice.

Look at you. No, I don't. I have four. Oh, nice. And it's all my friends saying, why aren't you chatting here? I was like, because look at threads. Blue Sky. I agree.

I had 75, a little higher than Alex. And it's not even, and it's also not even active in that thing we're not talking about today. That's totally not related. Well, no, they have their own decentralized. That gives it like a plus five. You see, you can close to your death. Like a modifier, yeah. Yeah.

If the tension for Massadon is between Mastodon, the decentralized social network idea and Mastod on social, the centralized server that you can log on to, Blue Sky is at the far end of the tension where they're like, we made a decentralized social network. It has one server. We won't even tell anyone else how to set up their own server. The protocol isn't finished and we're standing up trust and safety on this server. Also, Jack Dorsey is an investor in our company. You just are trying to shoot it to 90.

It's there, but all of these companies are going to run into a revenue problem. I think threads will solve it very quickly. Again, Mastodon, I think, is just ideologically unkillable. Blue Sky, how are they going to make a dollar? What's the plan? This is a group of people that advertisers do not want to be near. They're going to open a Patreon. Right.

It's going to be some weird mix of subscription and contributions. And the goal of it is not to run the centralized server, at least from their white paper. They're just very far away from where they started. They're running a clubhouse. That's fine. They're running clubhouse. Clubhouse is also dead, I would point out. I was like, that's on the night.

That's 90 on the scale. And they just have to make some decisions along the way there. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I would put it about that high, too. They did a couple of things really right. Like the way they thought about user names was very smart. Yeah.

They had some nifty ideas about custom timelines that I continue to think is very cool. But I think they're going to end up having the legacy of being like friend feed, right? Where they're like, we had a bunch of ideas before the products took off. And they're going to be like, we did that first. Everybody's like, oh, they invented the news feed. And there's like some developer out there who's like, actually it was me first. Everybody's like, care because Facebook destroyed you. That's going to be the legacy.

There's already some like connector software that connects Blue Sky's decentralized approach to the activity pub decentralized approach. And you can see how that thing is just designed to piss everyone off, you know? Like the app when you need to move music services. Yeah. And you always think it'll work and it never does. We'll just see how this goes. But my feeling is that it's successful now because it has a bunch of investor money in it. Yeah.

And the turn is coming. Yep. All right, a bunch more. These are all going to be fairly quick. I'm going to change the order up here. Substack Notes is the next one I want to talk about, which is slightly different. Oh, Substack is a company right now? Is it easily at 65 or 70?

So Notes is even higher, right? Notes is just like a long for the ride. It's 70, 75 for me. Notes or Substack? All of it. Make the briefcase against Substack. Substack's entire business is taking a cut of other people's businesses. The number of people who have started successful substacks is not large.

Like, it's large in the context of the internet or like maybe like the media, Casey has a really successful substack, got more power to Casey. They're taking 10% of his revenue. This is a business that is founded on Wales. So you just need- And it does not seem to be creating new ones. Yeah. Right.

And then the ones that it has created, some of them are like, again, large amounts of money, large amounts of subscribers, cultural, relevance shaky, the Barry Weiss's of the world. Andrew Sullivan's of the world. I came up as an Andrew Sullivan reader in the 90s. Fine, right? But they've got a handful of those that are making a bunch of money. They're taking a huge amount.

You take 10% out of Andrew Sullivan or Heather Cox Richardson or Barry Weiss, the top of the charts at Substack. You're taking an awful lot of money from those people to send emails to just what you're do. That's the service you are providing. They are not bringing new customers onto the platform. Most new subscribers on substacks are subscribers to other substacks. Yep.

The recommendations think seems to have worked. So they're just moving, they're taking more money out of the existing substack base and not bringing new people on a subsect. Never mind. I'm at 80 now. And then in April, they are hitting up retail investors for cash in like a pre-public round of investment. They won't really solve in numbers, but we know substack had not. negative revenue last year. It's just, like, substack is in a place where the next thing they have to do is introduce

advertising on their platform because they need a big new source of revenue to make that go because they can't convince millions upon millions of more new people to pay them. And I know people are going to say that I'm biased against substack because I had Chris Best on Decoder and I yelled at him about not moderating subsec notes. I'm, whatever you think of that, I'm looking at the math of their business. And I'm saying, there's a cliff coming. and that's why you're hitting up retail investors for cash with negative revenue. Like, that's...

However you think about the trust and safety function of substack notes, when you're in that position and you're charging your most popular creators, the most money to send emails, eventually one of them is going to wake up and say, I wonder how much MailChimp costs. Yeah, there's other services... Or WordPress. Yeah.

Yeah, there's so much free stuff that they can go and do this on. and it's just doesn't seem it's bad I agree all on agreement on that one I'm just gonna read you a bunch and I want you to tell me if any of these are not at least an 85

and then after that we can we can go to break I have Pebble which is objectively in 90 it died RIP Pebble know what Pebble was it was called T2 for a minute because they just straight up were like

this is the new Twitter and then it was Pebble it's gone there's also Noster which is the other decentralized thing that Jack Dorsey is invested in. And then we have things like spoutable and countersocial and post and wt. social and co-host. I thought these were all mastodon instances.

Nope. Sadly, do we have any reason to not put any of these things at least in 85? I want to put WT social at a zero just because I'm, I think it's funny. I want to root for it. Just pick something to believe it. I'm rooting for you, W2 social. You got to believe in something. Yeah, it's my tinkerbell.

So all of, they all have the same problem. They all have the same problem. It's not users. It's not technology. It's how are you going to make money? Yeah. What's your plan? Let's say you have 100 of the world's most dedicated spoutable users.

Spoutable has 100 people who are logged on to it and they have 24 hours a day of user engagement from its hundred people. What's the plan? Is it charge the money? They're going to make flower crowns. I just think all these have a sort of blinkered view of what it would take to replace Twitter. So does mastodon. You just need a place to post. We didn't levy that against Macedon.

It's true of Macedon, too. Massadon, first of all, as a company, is like two people funded by a government grant in Europe. Sure. And one contractor who manages billing. You should go listen to that episode of Decoder. That's real. I was like, what's your architry? He's like, well, there's me and Claire.

And that's like the whole company. Obviously, they have server costs, and I'm sure they're going to grow in different ways. But as a company, this is just a social experiment. I think if you're wt.comcial, you might believe. you're a company. Yeah, if you believe hard enough, it could be a zero. And I think if your company is modeled after Twitter, a notoriously poorly run company, you've just got some problems coming your way. Yeah. I think the cold start problem of how do we get a network effect or how do we get a much of users is actually, and they're all trying to compete on weird ideas

about what people had a problem with on Twitter. And I think they all missed the fact that a lot of people liked how dramatic Twitter was. Or at least couldn't look away from it. Like it had that car crash appeal. Yeah, yeah. It's like, what if we made Twitter without car crashes? And it's like, yeah, no one's going to look at it anymore. I want my Twitter person of the day. Yeah.

I love telling people who don't use Twitter about it. And they're just like, okay. Anyway, here's what's going on with my kids. Did you see Kevin Durant tweeted, I'm on threads with a burner. Come find me? No way. And it's like, that's what people are here for. I respect that.

He's not tweeting I'm on WT social with a burner. Wait. So this is threads to. lose, basically. Nobody has won this yet, but it very much feels like the next 12 months are threads to screw up. Yeah. And I would put it just the mirror image is it's a negative 45 for Twitter and it's a positive

45 for threads. But it's about to be an election year. Yeah. A lot of weird stuff is going to start happening on these platforms. Just a lot of weird stuff. And those numbers can move. But I think threads, their attitude about news and real-time information, is just the pressure on that is just increasing.

Yeah, and that's going to collide with an election in a pretty real way. Yeah. And just sports. The NBA season has started. We're still in the middle of the NFL season. Yeah. Like that audience is wanting to move to threads and it's just like not happening. Yeah, I think that's right.

Yeah. The next 12 months, I think, are going to be really fascinating. Like, I think many of these we will not even mention in a year. And I think the stakes are going to feel super high for a lot of these folks as we want towards an election. I'm still rooting for W. Social, which I've learned a lot about. It's got two stars on product hunt out of five. Okay. That's, yeah. Lifewire's got a great on how to use it.

Yeah, I'm just like, it's the non-toxic social. Like, that's great. I'm happy that there's a non-toxic social network. Okay. We've officially, Alex is now Googling WT social, which means we're on here. This segment has gone 19. It's all over, baby. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll rack with the lightning round. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. We're still open for sponsors. As we know, the lightning port has been deprecated. Some people have been posting at various Ford executives on my behalf.

Thank you very much. I appreciate you. I'm still looking for a major American ship company. Sponsor the Thunderbolt floor round. And just trying to will things into it. You have to make the media company you want. Neelaz Vision Board is just Thunderbolt floor cables. They're very expensive.

I'll take the first one, which I'm... The only thing I wanted to talk about this week is Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater, now running an Enreal. The top. It was the first thing on the rundown. And David moved it. It was great. Just watching it get highlighted.

In our editorial meeting today, I said there's a lot of weird passive-aggressive stuff that happens in Enterprise Software. And what I was thinking about was David re-running the rundown every week. Can I just say, just before you get into this, This might be the greatest video game title of all time. Metal Gear Solid Delta colon Snake Eater just whips to it. That's so good. This is one of the greatest video games ever made.

It was a PS2 game. It just ruled. It ruled. Now it still looks like a video game. Like you get new game play footage now, new engines. No, it's still super looks like a video game. But this game ruled. This used to be called something else, though.

This was Metal Gear Solid. Snakeyter. Yeah, it's Metal Gear Solid Three, Snake Yeter. I didn't get past one. Oh, my God. I'm still in a box somewhere. The number of things that you and I just have to stream together, right? Just on this show alone, it's all of the Metal Gear's now, just a full-on week-long

Twitch stream, Blade Trinity, and I believe pump up the volume is still. This is going to be a good time. Everybody come join us. It's going to be great. This is our... We're going to start a podcast called Copyright in for In InVindon, in which we just watch all the things that we have to watch. I'm more excited about this game than I think inside.

This is a defining video game. Are you going to take that day off? And just burn through Metal Gear Solid. Yeah. Probably. That's my idea. All right, David, what's right? I love that.

Mine is a little tidbit of information we got. So we've talked a lot about the Google antitrust trial. And one of the big open questions has been, how much money does Google pay Apple to be the exclusive search engine on all the Apple devices? We knew it was billions of dollars. I had heard numbers as low as five and as high as 20. many, but these numbers have come out, but they've only come out in closed court, and they're not being given to reporters.

Like, the access to information has been a huge open question during all of this trial. The New York Times had a report on Thursday that the actual number is $18 billion, or at least in 2021, Google paid $18 billion to Apple to be the default search engine in Safari. There was also some interesting stuff in there that when Satina Della testified, he said, and it seemed like he was kind of guessing at the time that one thing Apple might be worried about is that if it took the deal away from Google, Google would use all of its many powerful and popular iOS apps to do things like promote Chrome. If every time you went to Gmail, it was just like, hey, download Chrome, a better browser,

like a lot of people would download Chrome. And they were very afraid that Google was going to do that if it lost the search deal. Satya said this like it was a possibility, but not that he was certain. But the Times report said that, in fact, Google was thinking about doing exactly that and was building things to compete with Spotlight and was going to start to get people to use Chrome by using its other tools on iOS. How is that any different from right now

if I go, if one of you sent me a Google Doc and I try to open it on my phone on Safari, my phone flips out unless I go and I download the stupid Google Docs app and log in and use that? How is that any different? The Google. It might be the single worst mobile program. No, no, no.

No, no, it slides. Google slides. Okay, no, you're right. Google slides, sheets, and docs are all full disaster. But I'm saying slides is, you know how every year the iPhone comes out or any phone comes out? I'm like, this processor is crazy fast. Like it's just there for headroom. I'm like, can this run Google Slides?

Because it probably can't. My phone's going to get hot and it's going to slow down and crash Google Slides. How slides on decks? I don't want to think about. Let me unfold this stupid stuff. All right, but keep going. But, well, so to answer your question, though, it would be kind of. like, this is not a perfect analogy, but if you were to like open a pages document on your phone

and Google just threw a pop-up being like, wouldn't you rather use Google Docs? It does that currently? No, if you try to open a Google Doc, it'll take you to Google Docs. But if it does for anything. I'm saying if you opened any web page in Chrome and Chrome was like, wouldn't you rather use Google Docs? I'd set it on fire. Yeah, probably.

That's my villain's story. That's how you get me to never want to use your products again. Yeah, but also it's how you get a lot of people to download your stuff. This is true. And Google kind of... I bet you also have the Google Docs app on your phone now. I had to. It bullied me for so many years.

This is the thing. They don't care. I needed to put my notes in for a story on the train. This is the thing, right? And if you're Google... If you're Google and you can say, stay logged into YouTube in the YouTube app by logging into Chrome. I hate it. You're going to get people to download Chrome.

FTC do something about this. And truthly... Well, they have put Google in trial. I think it... Do more. I think it's possible that Google would never have actually done this, but the threat of doing it, at least the DOJ would tell you, is enough to keep Apple, along with $18 billion, from walking away from Google. I want to just talk about that for a second.

Google, if you're listening, I will also make you the default search app on my phone for $18.40. I'm here for you. So it's interesting. The context of this is fascinating. So in Europe, Digital Services Act is in force. Apple is going to have to let people pick Chrome. Google will have to let people switch default browsers in various ways. We'll just see if this regulatory intervention actually does something.

Notably, for the past decade, it has not. Right. Right. Like, there have been browser ballots and search ballots on Windows PCs and Android phones in Europe. They don't do anything. They don't do anything. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of evidence that shows that the thing where you boot up the phone

and it says, what search engine do you want to use? Everybody picks Google. Right. And everybody picks Google, in large part, the DOJ would argue, because they've never heard of any other search engine because of the way that Google does it. So people are like, what's Ecosha and why would I use that? I'm just going to pick Google. And this is the hard part of the DOJ's cases.

They have to wind this all the way back and essentially argue that Google has made it so that you've never even tried another search engine because it's impossible. And that is a very hard case to argue when Google is like their, just they're just right there. Like, just go do it. Here's what I'm curious about, though. The only browser about I could see working, you turn on your iPhone and says, do you want Chrome or Safari?

Yeah. And I think that's a coin flip. And that's in this case, too, that people think that that's a coin flip. That's two brands everybody's heard of. Yep. Which is, I agree. I think it'll be really fascinating. And I would bet in somewhere in Apple Park in Cooper Tino is Safari for Android.

It's just sitting there. Yeah. They made Safari for Windows once. Yeah. It didn't go well. I think they would pick this fight backwards if they had to. They will bring it to Google if Google's going to bring it to them. Yeah.

And they're like, there's this like mutually assured destruction thing that has worked for everybody for a long time. Again, along with 18 billion dollars. And either it's going to stay that way or it's going to get all unwound. And I think it's going to get. The other piece of this puzzle, which I think is a pretty important wrinkle right now is just a bunch of reporting this week that Apple's behind an AI or feels like it's behind an AI needs to get back. better AI, put it in all the products, as you would expect. And Apple's privacy posture will keep it from going and hoovering up a bunch of data or sharing a bunch of data.

And you know what would be a good source of data for an AI tool is search queries. Yep. We know this because they're a great source for Google. And that's how Apple gets a bunch of differential privacy shielded input for an AI system. It's on some little chip. Just right on the board. So you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, you can see how they would do it.

That was my Tim Cook impression. That was good. It's good. He's full vampire fangs. Kravat. We'll see. The dynamic there is interesting because it might be an Apple's long-term interest to not take the $18 billion. No.

Said no one ever. If there's one company that can look past $18 billion, it's Apple. It's Mastodon. Claire. Those are the only two. I really bet everyone should go listen to Edgar. He's a fascinating guy. It was a good one.

All right. Cranzo, course. Okay, so mine is a shout-out to Mia Sato. She has a really, really great story up on the site right now called, Is My Co-worker AI? Bizarre product reviews leave Gannett staff wondering. It's really, really good story.

It's basically reviewed, which is one of the sites for Gannett. Gannett does, like, USA Today. I have a lot of local newspapers. Reviewed as their kind of wire cutter. And a bunch of new reviews appeared on it. And everybody was like, I didn't write that. And then when they went and they looked up the people, a lot of them didn't seem to exist.

Oh, boy. And so it seems that this was all part, like this was stuff that Gannett went, partnered with another company who's using AI to just write AI churn and then try to like sell you stuff. I don't have these ideas. Well, it's not going great. The reviewed staff is pretty upset about it. They just recently went on strike over union stuff with Gannett. So with News Guild. So no disclaimer needed.

I could see you getting ready for it. So, yeah, the story is really good. It's really, really wild. There's a bunch of stuff we still don't know about this, the rationale and everything like that. But sucks for the folks that work there. I'm just saying if you work at a business and any one of your business thinks, we should just get some AI chum to get Google search results to make pennies. You should leave that business. There's a product pros and con.

and apparently instead of like pros and cons, it's just specs. Yeah. Did it. Or, I mean, on the flip side, if you are the scammer using AI to cheat Google out of pennies, you're, you know, buy another Lambo, you know, live it up like, kind. Yeah, I was like, it's going great for you. These are the last days of disco, brother. But that internet's ending, and this is the force that will end it.

Yep. All right, here's mine. I'm very excited about this one. It's Humane's AI pin. Oh, God. It was named Times Gadget of the year. Time. One of many, to be fair.

It's just no one's ever seen it, you know? I also have named it my gadget of the year. It's really serious. Sure. We learned that it has some integration of GPT somehow in it. And it has a light called the trust light that lights up when it's listening, which I would remind you is apparently all the time. So it's just constantly a little glowing. There's a little yellow light.

It's not even a light. It's just a piece of yellow. I will say this time thing is interesting in that it has a couple of new details like the trust light and the fact that it has a magnetic attachment. That's something. I like that part. That's cool. It also has one of the funniest disclosures in history. So again, you're putting an unannounced product that really no one knows anything about on your best inventions of 2020 list.

Bold strategy. And then it says at the end, investors inhumane include time co-chairs and owners, Mark and Lynn Benioff. It's just a tough look. Like, disclosure is our brand. We love a disclosure. That's a tough way. This product you've never seen, it's so sick. It's funded by my boss.

You're going to love it. Best inventions of 2023. Well, I will say this. The owner of Time magazine is scheduled to be on decoder soon. There you go. I'm going to ask him about the pin. If he brings the AI pin, I will take all in it back. Yeah.

What else can we do? I hope he has it. He won't do it. He's not going to be. betray the Ohana. Are you kidding me? Come on. I'm fascinated by that thing though. It's supposed to launch November 9th. There's so much we don't know. They have done this like what eight month long hype cycle at this point you mean? They've been out there talking about this. I think that original TED talk where he showed off and or lied about a bunch of demos was in April. So we've been

talking about this for a long time and this thing is either going to be great or it's going to be a total disaster and I have a very hard time imagining anything in between. And I have a much easier time imagining total disaster. So there was some reporting that in Open AI integration, that St. Altman might be an investor in this thing. There's also some reporting that Sam Altman and Johnny I are working on their own thing, which is fascinating because Humane is a bunch of X Apple designers. That's got to be a weird email chain.

Yeah. Just in general, just a weird email chain. A lot of ellipses. A lot of thoughtfully considering materials. And then also you betrayed me. It's like, it's all in there. I don't know, man. I'm still stuck on the basics.

You want to call Bethany. How does it know Bethany's phone number? And how does it call Bethany? Yeah, does it have a service plan? How do you configure the IMEI? Magic. Just the basics. I just want to know.

Yep. It's all magic. And I'm telling you if this thing requires an app on your phone to function disaster. Yep. And it definitely does. I'm so excited. for this. It's going to have to be 15 hours long and it's just them explaining how it does basic things. I cannot wait. It's very good. I should disclose that we are also owned. By human.

No, that's not true. There is a number of disclosures we could have made on this episode, but I leave those as an exercise to the viewer. No, I don't think there were any. No, we did good this time. We did good. All right. We should end the show before we script us up. If you think we missed one, send us a note, you know, we're here for it. I close the tab with all the... Quick, somebody talk about Netflix. FTCS trial. No, shoutout is Lerker.

All right, all right. A few things to mention before we close. Sam Bankman-Fried was on the stand in the FTX trial today. Liz Lipato has been there every day. She's having the time of her life covering this trial. Yeah. We're going to have her on the show in the next week or so to come talk about it. David and I went to the premiere of the Bloomberg doc about FTA.

X yesterday and people walked up to me and we're like Liz is doing a great job covering the trial. That's incredible. So she's having the time of her life and I'm eager to see what Sam had to say today. And then we have an incredible, I guess you could say a spooky story about someone who has been tormenting professors online. And it is one of our best layouts ever. It's very cool.

Go read it. It's great. And then lastly, as you all know, we've been covering Google obsessively this year, just the culture of Google mate. The last day's a disco. You got to put the marker down and see, like, this is the world we made before we move on. So we've been covering Google and Google's SEO web. And we have a really great one this week.

For Mia, who's been on a run lately. Yeah. It's called the restaurant nearest Google. It's about a restaurant called Thai food near me in New York City, which is the whole name. The SEO has broken out of the internet people. And she found a bunch of other businesses around a country. Notary near me is very popular. Barbershop near me is very popular.

And she just went and talked to these folks about why they named their business is this. And we got a lot of comments. This is like when people named the A1 Auto Shop. Yep. They're just trying to beat the discovery algorithm. But this is a new way of doing it. And of course, Google's in the story being like, that's not how it works.

A lot of our Google coverage involves that dynamic. But the story is great. The pictures are incredible. And Mia said the food was good, which is important. So go check that out. It's on the site now. That's it. We're way over.

Subscribe to installer. listen to Decoder, listen to all of our shows. Yeah. Virge is a cool. It's a cool website. It's the only one left. That's it. That's a Vergecast, rock and roll.

And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge is a production of the Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. We'll see you next week.