The Vergecast - The perfect Swiss man

Episode Date: October 9, 2015

Dieter Bohn, Nilay Patel, Casey Newton, and Kirsten Frisina on the hype-seat caress your brain with knowledge about Microsoft's new confident and purposeful direction, whether Twitter Moments is useful or not, Google AMP's benefits for the internet at large, and how the Steve Jobs movie is a great film but also a castle of lies. Thought of the 'cast: If you die in HoloLens, do you die in real life? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No, no, no, no. I don't know any vocal exercises. Damn it. I know that we're live. Watermelon. Here's the thing about starting the Vergecast. Yeah. At this point, I think that us duffing the beginning of the Vergecast is like, it makes the viewer feel, the viewer, the listener feel at home.

Yeah. It makes our producer Jorge so happy. I just think, look, you're a person in probably America, although we have strong international listenership as well. So you're a person of the world. You're a citizen of this earth. He's a man about town. You've got your headphones in, you got your car stereo on, you're in the bathroom.

I don't know, wherever you are. The speakers are blaring. And there are either tiny speakers in your ears or bigger speakers around you surrounding potty. Made by Ben-A-Li-Lewson. Yeah. Yeah, you're a perfect Swiss man in your house. And you've got those awesome bang and Olives and speakers. You're sitting on a perfect leather cube sofa.

Your vape is heating because you're about to vape. the most perfect marijuana ever created by man in Switzerland. And you're like, I'm going to start my show. At the first thing you hear. You say it in Swiss, of course. Which I don't speak. But in your mind, imagine that you're Swiss. You know what I'm saying.

And you start it, and then you hear me just blow it. The Swiss speak German or French? I don't know, whatever they speak. I've been vaping a perfect joint all after me. Does it mean anything? And you're like, and you hear me blow it. And that is finally when your veneer of perfection fades away and the pressure of being a perfect Swiss man just melts.

And you're like, you know what? I'm home now. I can be a real person. Right. And your couch reveals itself, not as a perfect cube, but as a dumpy brown leather sofa. And it's three in the morning, you've got a half box of dominoes. And you're like, you know what?

I'm home now. I just wish you could have given us some more details on that scenario, so we really could have pictured it. But I'll try to make do with what you described. That was basically how I think my life should go. Deli just wants to be a Swiss man. I don't know if I want to be Swiss. I think that I want to live a life of like complete angular perfection. But if you know me enough underneath it is just roiling chaos.

And you're like, how does he do it? This is the Birchcast. That's great. Anyway, look, it's a day in October now. September has faded away. Now is October. Everyone's Twitter handles are stupid because of Halloween. Don't do that.

Yeah, please, God, no. You're better than that. And I will say that we've had just a ridiculous week. So I'm Neil Lippeel. Casey Newton is here for some reason. Nice to be here. He just showed up. I thought I would see what y'all do out here.

Dieter Bone is here with me. Hello. And in a hype seat. Kirsten for Sina. Oh, you pronounced it. Right. Actually, I was pronounced it right. He said retconning the past four episodes of the show.

No, we've had a ridiculous week. So, Casey's in town because there was a Google event, there was a Twitter thing. Dieter and I went to the big Microsoft hardware event. Carson ran in the office tweeting furiously. What else happened? We scoped. Oh, we scoped. We saw the Steve Jobs movie last night.

I interviewed Sorkin and Danny Boyle. And Sautia Della. Maybe Sautch Nadella. Just so much stuff. Wild. Wild week on the Verge. One of those weeks, it's like, this is why the Verge exists. Yeah.

Fall is primetime for Theverge.com. Don't sleep on it. Yeah. Check it multiple times a day. Everyone's very busy. No one has time to go home and vape their perfect weed cigarettes. That's why we just fantasize about it for the first 20 minutes in every verge pass now. What must it be like to relax from time to time?

Yeah. We seriously, we try to have a drink class on after the Steve Jobs screening. And all this like, you know what? We have busy it tomorrow. We're going home. It's true. It's the earliest the Birch crew has ever gone home. Yeah, but tonight.

Tonight, the walls are coming down. I can't go. I got to work tomorrow. It's awful. Here's the thing about a million tech products getting unveiled in September, October. Then they get released. And then Dieter never sleeps again.

And then there has to be work to be done with them. Yeah. I mean, that's what you say. I mean, you know, let's just, I think you can just say at a very high level. Some new squares of glass will be released. Touching them with your fingers will enable certain, you know,

features and capabilities and, you know, but your own mileage may vary. Yeah. I think, I mean, you know, what was there's a terrible John Chen interview, Cia Blackberry. With the Blackberry Perf. With the BlackBerry. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Yeah, you did. That's exactly right. And he was like, you know, it's got the latest Qualcomm. It runs the Google. Great camera. And Dan Seepert was like, if I could just boil every hands-on video I ever shoot down to, it runs Google and has the latest Qualcomm.

he's like I'd be golden I know John Chan apparently was on stage at Code Mobile yeah he wants to sell 5 million Blackberry devices next year I bet he does don't we all yeah

and I want to be a perfect Swiss man look we all have dreams so whatever so that's happening Blackberry continues its slow descent into madness and just futility but Microsoft is back

they are back they're back great event It was a really good event. Yeah. Even me, like, somebody who does, like, basically nothing but snark about Microsoft, looked at all these products and thought, hey, like, there are some nice things here. It wasn't, you know, honestly, it's the products look good and that made everything better.

But actually, what struck me about this event, and we went with this massive crew of people, and it was a big event, and, you know, Microsoft can be really cheesy in a very particular way. They love, like, we brought the fans out. And, like, Apple, like, has a cult, but there's rarely, like, a standing event. for a MacBook Pro. Right. Like, Microsoft is like, we found the people in America

who will stand up and applaud when we show them a laptop. And they're here today, tweeting with this hashtag, which is great. And usually that comes off really cheesy and false. Although,

but this time it came off very sincere. Yes. In a way that's like Microsoft is, I've always described covering Microsoft as watching somebody else do a puzzle, which is infuriating. Right? Just that would be, that would fuck.

And Microsoft can never do it. And it's like they were finally like, we just, we put the puzzle together, guys. They did. My favorite moment of the whole presentation was towards the end when Panos Penae said, you know, I'm not supposed to do this, which that's always when my ears perk up because I think go right off the rails. He's like, I'm going to let you guys touch these. Would anybody like to touch them?

And people just started rending their garments and hurling themselves at the man so that they could touch a lapboard with a detachable screen. Which feels awesome. Yeah. Also, they have to stop calling it. digital clipboard. I agree. Every time they call it

clipboard, like what could have a lamer association than a clipboard? It's like a stapler. You can't clip anything to it. Like it doesn't work like a clipboard.

It does look much like a clipboard. But no. All right. So it's a great event. I was about to actually there because technically when you double click the thing on the pen, it opens up the clip mode

where you can clip part of the screen and then put it out. This is bad. No, no, no. You've clipped. It's a digital clip. No.

Let's just back up. I'm just saying. Let's just zoom out together as a group. Deeter tell us what happened at this event. Man, so much. So they announced, they started with phones, right? Or do they start with band? They start with the band and then the HoloLens and then phones.

So I started with a new Microsoft band. I still find it an insane product. It's still awkward and weird. But this thing measures literally everything. And it's not quite to the level of like the, $500 GPS enabled crazy insane smartwatch with the chest strap and blah blah blah blah blah but it's

like half a tick below that $250. We'll see. I'm not a band health kind of person but it seems nuts and it's like basically a smartphone that is really big and awkward but not not smartphone smart watch. My take on the band is that nobody knows what these are four. Right.

They're for regular old plain old average athletes who happen to run ultramarathons. Yeah. That was how they positioned it. It always winds it being like something that you give a loved one at Christmas that they wear for three weeks and then either lose or just put in a drawer. Yeah. Or they became like insanely addicted to numbers and you're like, what happened to you?

And there are so many numbers to be addicted by them. That's what happened to Christy Turlington Burns. She's like, I have to run through Africa now. Anyway, so that's a band. That's what the video was. We saw a HoloLens demo. Yeah. I mean, the thing about the band in the HoloLens is the thing I meant to say with the band

was nobody knows what wearables are four. Right. And so, like, it is at least interesting that Microsoft isn't like, our solution is a watch because nobody is what they're for. So they might as well start in a totally different zone and iterate towards the final solution versus, you know, we made a watch just like everybody else. But I think they're very open about the fact that they're like, yeah, we don't, I don't know, does you like this?

Do you want this? Yeah. Like, there's no killer app for the wearable yet, right? The killer app is ultramarathons. It's like measuring your VO2 max I guess Anyhow, so there's a band And then Holland's demo

Yeah, where a guy walked around a room Very, very, very slowly In a reaction to giant killer Scorpion robots invading his home Yeah, yeah He's just like, oh look, the walls exploded And there are robot drones flying through it That wants zap me

Let me casually mosey over to this corner But isn't that how you play video games? I was going to say, that's definitely how I play Halo You sit in your living room and you, like, steal cars and you, like, run around and, like, shoot people, but you don't actually, like, do those things. Did you just want to see, like, terror on his face? Did you people not play as children? Did you not, like, build forts and run around and, like, play guns and, like, pop up. We know that we're not, like, none of that stuff was photorealistic.

It's not like you're actually thinking that your wall is coming down. No, I know, but in terms of, like, a holographic game that is, like, action-packed, the reaction, like, you want a game where you can actually, like, But here's the problem. If you die in HoloLens, you die in real life. And so you have to be very careful when you do that. But the news there was that the developer kit is coming Q1 of 2016, and I think it's like $3,000. $3,000.

Yeah. Which, like, real talk, we're not going to see this thing, release to consumers until holiday up next year. And is the $3,000, is the $3,000 just the HoloLens itself, and then you would have to have a really powerful computer to plug it in? No, Holland is a standalone. Yeah, but the dev kit, I don't know what it is. It could be like a crazy just like thing and the cable to your powerful computer.

Right. The HoloLens like they're getting to the place where the hardware is more final. But when they first prototyped it, like they wouldn't like basically Tom was like blindfolded and they put the thing on his face and they took it off. They're like, don't look at it. Well, I'm just kind of sick of the demos that they do because they're showing us in the demo is something that's not realistic. Like the field of view is so much smaller than what we're seeing.

And when you're watching the demo and you see all of everything that's in the room, that's not what the HoloLens is showing you. The HoloLens is showing you like a tiny little bit of it. And so I just, I think that we wrote a piece about that, how it's like a little bit smoke and mirrors. Yeah, it's Adi. Addie's all over that. I mean...

I'm not into it. It's just like, show us what the actual device is. I don't think you can. Very different. There's like this weird problem, which is that like most of the screens and video that we capture is designed for mass viewing. And then everything in every piece of technology we cover, almost every single thing is.

like about more and more personal experiences, right? So like VR, there's no way to show VR to multiple people at once, unless everybody has a hardware. AR is the same thing. Like, it's actually really fascinating. Like, how do you communicate to a mass audience, the experience of something that's designed to be as intimately personal as possible?

But you can play the video, like you can display what the person is seeing in their headset, and you can watch that, just like how you, like, watch someone else play a game on Twitch. Like, you could do the same thing, and you could see exactly what's in the frame as opposed to, like, I don't know if I'm making myself clear. No, you absolutely could, but that wouldn't give you field of view.

Well, it would, though, because it would cut off. If we were seeing exactly what the HoloLens was seeing in those demos, we would only be seeing a video that's a certain distance wide, and it would actually give us an understanding of what the HoloLens is like. I just think that they're doing themselves a disservice with the demos, because it's giving people too high of an expectation. Yeah, but I think it's also their destiny. trying to teach people what the difference

from AR and VR is. And so I think their demos are way more about establishing like this is what it does versus this is what they're experiencing. Because it's not, no one's ever made that product before and try to give it to consumers and like try to make it exciting. I think they're desperately just trying to be like, here's our vision of this product and like what it can do. And it's better for them to like.

Oversell it a little bit. Oversell it and make it hyper-realistic versus here's just like a picture of like cartoons on a screen. And I think that tension is just real. It's like, literally, I just keep wondering, like, no one has figured out how to do video of VR experiences yet. Which is actually going to make the Microsoft stores, like, weirdly important, right? Because that, like, people are going to have to see it to decide if it's something they care about. And, like, who knows, if they like it, maybe the Microsoft store will be the reason why. Also, I was at the Microsoft store, and it's funny because the headsets are there in a glass case. And it's like, this just

looks like. It is a little strange. Like, put this on your, space sometime. Can you imagine if Apple just put the iPhone 7 in a glass case in like every store every store? They probably still sell so many. Okay, so those are those things and then phones. Yeah, so two Lumia's, the Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL, and then there's a cheap 550, whatever. The big deal is these are like the first Windows 10 mobile phones, which I think is what we're calling them now, which is just the best. Kill me. So they run like, her. a version of Windows 10. They run Windows 10.

Once you get down to the semantics of it, I'm sure that there are fistfights that happen amongst Windows fanboys and fan girls. But basically they're just Windows phones. Like, you know what a Windows phone looks like, feels like how it acts what it does. Except that they run the universal

apps, which are the same apps on desktop as they are on the phone. They just shrink down responsibly. So Facebook has committed to putting some of those apps on there. And then the other thing that they do is this thing called Continuum, which you plug it into a display, and then you can just open up a bunch of apps on the display and like a little tiny desktop. And you can switch between the apps so you can't Windows stuff, but they're like the full

version of the apps, the same stuff you'd see on Windows 10, but running off of the phone. And like we launched like four or five apps plus had an app running on the phone. It was fine. Like switching was fine. It's super cool. I don't know if I really believe, like Microsoft's Clemsman. is that, oh, in the developing world, just buy this phone, you know, buy a $100 dock, and then you'll just, that'll be your computer for, you know, the rest of your years or whatever.

That's a long way away. That's a long way away. But it's like really cool. And then we found out after the event that these phones that are, you know, fine, they're good. They have this one cool feature are exclusive to AT&T. Wait, are they exclusive? Yeah. One of them is.

I don't know about the other one. But it's either way, it's like, er. But I don't think that. they need to sell these phones. They need these phones to exist. They need to just stay in there and keep that relationship with AT&T going, I guess. So that someday other OEMs will say, hey, no. I don't think it's about OEMs.

I think it's about apps. Microsoft's whole thing is to claw their way back into the mobile app market. And they have this big problem where nobody pays for software anymore in mobile. And Microsoft's entire business is selling you software. Right. So now they've moved to this market. where you're going to pay for subscription to their software and various mobile platforms, but they need to convince all the app developers to put apps on the phone so that their phone is good.

So their phone needs to just exist while they work their way towards their future of whatever Windows 10 is and whatever the new model for software sales is. But that's why they make devices now. Right. Right? And the reason they make the Surface Pro and the Surface Book and they're doing Windows 10 and they're giving Windows 10 away for free is literally to convince people to make universal apps so that when some time down the road,

when they put out the next Lumia, they can say, oh, it has a bunch of apps because we gave Windows 10 away for free to everyone, and Facebook made a universal app for the Surface book, and it just runs on the phone time. I mean, if they're successful, the next Lumia won't be a Lumia. It'll be a Surface phone.

Yeah, and I think that's actually why it's not branded Surface Phone. I get the real sense that they don't want to ruin that branding with a failed product. Yeah. Right, like, Surface is a successful... How did that stop them from releasing the Surface RT or the Surface 3?

Yeah, no, the service Pro 3 is great. Yeah, the service 3 is great. I have a question. Yeah. With them giving Windows 10 away for free, how is Microsoft making money, like, right now? Well, so every time anyone sells a computer,

they still pay a license fee. Yeah. Okay. Is that their main source of income? There's a limitation to the free-up price cycle. Microsoft has like $7 or $8 billion businesses. Yeah. Over a billion dollar businesses.

It's more about their enterprise stuff at this point, right? SharePoint, Azure is huge for them. Yeah. Yeah. Xbox. Xbox. The surface line is like a $3 billion business for them. Yeah.

So Microsoft makes a lot of money. And so when I was talking to Della, he's like, I actually need this company to stop worrying about money. Like revenue and profit are the signs of success after you've made all the bets. But I need people to care about whether or not the customers love our products and whether or not they're using it. He's like, I don't really care if. I don't know what example he used.

I think there's OneDrive. He's like, I don't really care if the OneDrive team is squeezing more profit out of OneDrive. I care if the customers are using it more and more and more and more. And that was like a fascinating part of the interview because I think Ballmer really cared

about squeezing profit out of every leverage point that he had with Windows and Office. And he was great at it. He was really good at it. And I think that culture is still in Microsoft where they know how to make money. You know, it's like we talk about Amazon this way, where it's like, one day Amazon's

going to flip the switch, and they're going to make more than a dollar a quarter, right? But right now, you know, they just keep investing all their money in R&D. But, like, is there a switch to Amazon? Like, you know, we don't know, because they've never done it. No, they've done it once. There was one time they did it. It was like two years ago.

They're like, hey. When they had, like, an outrageously profitable quarter, we're like, see, and then they immediately spent like $800 million dollars on R&D. Yeah, they're like, fire phone. Yeah, we're drunk. But Microsoft, like, Microsoft has the switch. You know it.

Like, it's a there. And I think that culture's there. And I think Nadella has spent all this time being like, Don't touch the switch. Stay away from me. Like, we need to get back in the game. Yep. And that is really interesting because it means he's pissing off so many of his partners,

particularly I think now, like, the Surface Pro 4 irritated everyone. The Surface Pro 3 irritated everyone. And now the service... Because it was good. It was really good. Although, I never liked it. like there's so here's what they did with the service pro four to fix the things you didn't like they've they've tweaked the keyboard again so it's a little bit more keyboardy whatever they've made the

trackpad bigger uh mostly in the x maybe a little in the y uh but it's actually good i just don't buy the form factor they can't the thing about the service like finally might like this is the computer i've always wanted for microsoft because it's their computer it's integrated it doesn't have the garbage yeah it's like this is what they want windows to be i get it and you're like but why fucking kickstand like kickstand's good But whatever. Like, it's just a bad idea. It's like they couldn't make a laptop so they made some other bad idea about a laptop.

They fixed a stylus. But now they made a laptop, which is very exciting because it's a very good laptop. Yes, let's talk about the laptop. Yeah. The Surface 4 is a spec bump, right? Like, if you like the Surface Pro 3, you are almost certain to like the Surface Pro 4. They kept the same connectors. If you, like me, thought the Surface Pro 3 was the best execution of a fundamentally dumb idea,

then you will feel the same way about the Surface 4. Yeah. Also, shout out to people like myself who just aggressively did not kill. about either Surface Pro. Right. I think that was a lot of people. There's three of them. There's two regular ones.

One of them only ran Windows R Maps. That was a product worth buying. By the time you've told me that much, I just, like, my iPad's wonderful. Thank you for my iPad. Anyhow. So Microsoft talks about how we made the best laptop ever. It's a 13.5, I think. It feels like a 14, but it's in a 13-ish factor, basically.

amazing screen. It's got this insane hinge. You're like, why is this hinge so insane? It looks like a snake. It's called Dynamic Folkrum something or other. Yeah. Muscle wire. So this is the thing about something else.

We're not there yet. Right. This is the thing about this presentation. And I submit this to you and to our audience. There are only two people in the tech industry who can sell names for specs in a way that I know that those names will then show up in our comments. Yeah. It's Phil Schiller. can just name shit at will

about Apple products. And then people are like, well, it doesn't have a retina display. You're like, those are just words. Whatever. And now, Penness Penang. Yeah. You can just be like it has a G5 optical stack.

And I guarantee you we're going to review the iPad Pro whenever we review it. And we're going to talk about the stylus. And someone in our comments is going to be, you know, just doesn't have that G5 optical stack. There's actually, too. There's the G5 optical stack and there's pixel sense.

Yeah. Well, if you don't have pixel sense, just get the fuck on my face. It's a really good, laptop. It has a huge track pad. It's got a really great keyboard. It's made out of magnesium. It weighs. I said it weighs heavy, but it's like heavy relative to like a magma car, but it's like, you know, three and a half pounds. It's like what a professional laptop at that great ways. And then these gets to the reveal and he's like, oh, and by the way,

pushes a button and lifts the screen off and the thing is a tablet. It's like a really great feeling tablet. Yeah. How heavy is the tablet? It's not heavy. Like I just want to hold it all the time. So that's a good way. I've seen me like cuddling it in private moments in his office. I mean like it's this is a problem like I have never I have not been excited about a Microsoft product a long time. No. It's funny because during the event when they're announcing on stuff, they're so excited. They're like Windows 10 everywhere.

And Deere looked at me and he was like, this is a really good event. And I was like, I hadn't yet been so they hadn't showed me the surface forget. My heart hadn't yet found its new love. And I was like, yeah. until you go home and your fucking Xbox One crashes because that's my experience with Microsoft actually. It's like I have this thing, I play the games on it and it crashes all the time.

And I'm like, they haven't figured out. And then I was like playing with a service book at the event. And I was like, I want this experience really bad. I have this dream where I just take a pen. I write on the, literally write on the website what I want to fix. And like, this is finally the product. Oh, and the pen is so, they change,

you can buy tips for the new pen. Yeah. Oh, those look so cool. It feels, there's more friction. They made it softer. It feels way better. And PixelSense in the G5 optical stack means that the pen is way more responsive. It has way less.

Oh, my God. Thank you, nerd Dieter. I'm just saying. The PixelSense G5 optical system. There's just like, here's the thing. And the reason I say, I'm like joking about Panos and Schiller being able to say these things. But the reason, and I think this is actually important, it's Panos did an amazing job. of telling you why they had done the engineering of the product.

And he kept on saying, this is really nerdy, but it's important. And let me tell you why. And then he would explain, this is why we engineered the hinge this way, or this is why the chips and the phones are liquid cooled or whatever. He was going through, in extreme detail, very nerdy specs about his products. But he was saying, let me tell you why it matters, because it enables this experience or that experience. And we were joking last week at the Google event

That now every phone launch has to include Some sort of freshman seminar about how photography works Like here's a sensor here are microns here are pixels The pixels turn light into electricity The electricity rockets through your phone And assembles itself into a memory Everyone has to do it And Google just kind of like fell down on the job

They're like we bought some Sony shit It's pretty good No they have a picture with the size of the pixels Yeah but like you have to do it But it's like, I've never seen Google sell specs in that way. Right. Like, they try not to. I think a lot of the industry has been taught by Apple that the experience is what

matters, so you shouldn't focus on specs. But then they miss the fact that Phil Schiller is always talking about specs. What's about how you talk about the specs? Like, the entire difference for me for this presentation for Microsoft was that Panos Penae, I think that's how you say his name. He was, he actually seemed like he cared about what he was talking about. Like, and like when he... As opposed to Microsoft's previous zombies.

Well, no, but it's. You can do a presentation and be, like, very professional and up front and come off fine and neutral, but he came off, like, extremely passionate in a way that I haven't seen someone be in a tech presentation probably like this year yet. Right. Yeah. Well, he came off as passionate. In previous events, he's just come off as angry. And so it was actually really great. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm just saying, like, I haven't seen Microsoft deliver this level of understanding of why it's. making the products and why the products have good specs and why it exists, which is literally the question I asked Dadella in our interview. It was like, why does Microsoft exist? And he has this line and it's Pat. And actually, you know, if you, we did our interview. We're like, oh, that's great. He's so human. And we like watch build and he says all the same things. So whatever. But he's like passionate. He's like, we make things so you can make things. Which is such a great, that's it. That's the whole statement of purpose from Microsoft. Now that is very much

in line with, it's funny because we watched the Steve Jobs movie yesterday. And, you know, in that movie, Jobs is the famous bicycle analogy is recapitulated, which is humans are more efficient on bicycles, computers are bicycles, we can give it everybody, and now we're all smarter. And it's the same idea, right? We enable you to be creative. Right. But Microsoft has never known that before. Right. Right. Like, usually Microsoft's statement of purpose was like, we want to put a computer on every desk because that's how we get rich. Right? And now it's like, we are a platform company

that enables people. And so the service book, to me, is like they understand why it's there. It's not just, like, you know the way Samsung will just, like, add features to a product? And we make fun of them for just randomly adding features to a product. Right.

It very much feels like the service book is not just adding features and form factors. It's, we're going to make the best laptop we can because this is the best expression of our software. Right. There was no wave your hand over it to turn the screen on or like whatever something.

do with a tablet. Whatever Samsung can do. I just, I don't know. Like, I don't know what Windows OEMs are going to do to compete with this thing. And, you know, today they try. They're going to by making products that are cheaper because this thing starts at $1,500. That's it. Like, they own the top end of the market now.

They're competing with Apple. And Tom interviewed Panos. And he basically was like, yeah, we're, Apple makes premium products. We make premium products. We're competing with Apple, and I'm not afraid to say it. Yeah. I mean, I just have to say, it was, I think you said it just a minute ago. Like, I think this was the tech launch of the year.

Like, we, the Google. one was pretty flat and marshmallow is pretty eh, it seems. And Apple was like, I don't know, it's bigger and it has a stylist. Right. We don't have a TV streaming service yet. So it's, you know, it's like Apple's doing the stuff it does and it's just a monolith and it, you know, it's so dominant that it's just going to keep doing stuff. And that's great. But there's no, there's no sense that Apple's like has fire, right? It's like, you can push. Well, we haven't seen their car yet. Yeah.

Yeah. I had this thing about 3D touch, which is, you know, when you, like, try to scroll an unresponsive touchscreen, it's infuriating. 3D touch is worse because you're squeezing it, it's doing nothing. And so all you can do is squeeze harder, and then you feel like a weakling because it still does nothing. My Rose Gold iPhone 6 is currently at a UPS store in San Francisco, so I won't be able to get it until Monday.

Attention UPS drivers. Yeah. Free Rose Gold iPhone. But I am really curious to try that because I enjoyed very much using a 3D touch at the Apple event, but I'm hearing a lot from people that they're having trouble with it.

And I did send the phone into jiggle mode a lot. I can't get mine to go into jiggle mode now. Really? Yeah, I can do force touch, but I can't get my icons or if I try to highlight something, I have so much trouble highlighting now with 3D touch. Should we go to the money zone?

Yeah, I'm going to like you to read the ads today. Because I've worked hard enough. It's a really disaster. Wait, is there anything else to say about Microsoft? There's so much more to say about Microsoft. Well, you've got to review the products. I think that's the moment.

But I've never seen a more confident, purposeful Microsoft. I think Nadella is, he told me, you should obviously go watch the interview, but he told me during the interview, he's like, when I became the CEO, and he and I had this crazy long car ride. Because we had this long conversation with them. They're like, we want to do a video interview with you.

We want Nadella in front of your audience. We want to make him a human because he's only done business coverage so far Um, or like been in the Wall Street Journal and they're like, tell me about the share price and like I want to talk about products. I want to talk about him. and I want to get out of the venue because doing these interviews, the venue sucks. I'm like, okay, and the first idea, I'm going to tell the story. The first idea was basically, like,

I would take him on a date. And I was like, well, go to, like, they actually suggested this. They're like, go to a dive bar or, like, go to some cool restaurant. And I was like, yeah, actually I kind of want to do that. Like, that sounds awesome. And then the logistics were just too hard.

So, like, what if we just use our unopened Microsoft store? It's empty. We can be there all day and, like, light it and do all this stuff. So we did all that. but the Microsoft store is not near the venue. Oh. And so I just like got into his escalate. It's just like sat in traffic together for a while.

And like shot the shit. It was great. Does he have one of those cars with like a potmobile with like plastic so that he can like wave at people as it goes down like Broadway? Yes. No. No. It's just an escalate.

It's just whatever. Anyway, so we were, uh, we run this car and he was just telling me. I was like, how's this been for you? Uh, and he's like the thing that I've learned is it. my job is just to repeat myself. Like the secret to great leadership is just repetition. And he's like, you just say the vision and you say it and say it and say it. And that's like, that is the essential fact of what I do.

And he's like, I have like four different personas. He's like, I'm doing this today and tomorrow I'm going to Wall Street. And my Wall Street persona is out. And it was just like this fascinating, wonderful conversation. And then we got to the story. We did the interview. And at the end, I was like, what's been your hardest challenge? And he's like, I had to figure out what my job is.

And that's something, you can watch that in the video. Yeah, the end of that video was awesome. He's like, what is my job? And he's like, my job is, it's not micromanaging the products. It's creating a culture that lets other people micromanage the products and, like, develop them. And it was just like that, that Microsoft has never had that kind of clarity in its leadership before. And I don't know if the products are good. Like, they look great, and I kind of want a surface book.

And it's funny because I think Google is getting just irritatingly cartoony. I can't stand to look at Dieter's phone. Well, this is the Nexus 6, which is... No, when I look at the operating system and I see the Google logo on that search bar, I literally want to pick up your phone and third across the room. Like, the whole thing is a cartoon,

and it's like, it's not, it doesn't feel serious to me, right? It's like, it's, they want to make technology so playful that they've lost the sense of purpose. And the iPhone is like, I'm used to it. So I'm playing with this. I'm like, oh, man, Windows 10 looks serious. Like, so maybe the products are good.

They seem good. But the idea that Microsoft is going to be focused is like really great. Because I really think that these companies need serious competition head up, as opposed to Apple and Google, which compete at angles to each other constantly. But the idea that Microsoft will just be a straight, direct competitor to Apple and sell devices and software together with the vision of how they connect to... It's like a thing. It's fantastic. As a journalist, you're always rooting for balance of power.

Like, there need to be five giant companies at least all competing with each other at a very high level. Yeah. I'll win. Speaking of which, it's time to make some money. Are you, are you, are you a tech professional searching for a new company to share your tech skills with? So you should, you should probably check out Hired. They connect talent with top tech companies. On Hired, software engineers, designers, they can get five plus interview requests in a single week.

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Now you have enough money to quit. Well, so here's another thing. you go to hired.com slash Vergecast to sign up. They're going to double it. They're going to give you $4,000 for getting hired. That's a good job. So if you're not looking for a job,

but you know somebody who is, you can refer them to Hired, and Hired will pay you the referer $1,337 as a bonus if the person you referer gets hired. Casey, do you know what $1,337 spells out? Oh, my God. Elite.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Thank God, thank you out I didn't fail that quiz. So I don't know what you're waiting for. You should just go check out Hired.com slash Vergecast right now. Is it time to... That's it.

Okay. So, Casey, you've had some adventures this week. Wait, boy have I. Hold on. I forgot to do a thing. Yeah, we haven't hype checked a single thing. Kirsten. I'm just interjecting at Will at this point.

Hype check, hype check the surface book. The surface book? Yeah. I don't want one for myself, but it means. makes me super excited about where Microsoft is going. Yeah. I'm super excited for like the very next Microsoft event and like what they will do after this. Because I feel like we're like seeing the beginning of them becoming focused.

And I'm excited to see what like two or three years of focus looks like. Hmm. Interesting. Hype check Panos Panay. Oh, 10 out of 10. So many hearts. We're all over the place. This hype check scale is chaotic.

I just give you numbers and hearts. Hang on, hang on, hang on. I got one more. Hype check, the former cruise line lounge singer. Oh, my God. Who now demos products for Microsoft on stage? Who is that guy? wearing a fedora and purple shoes.

That guy needs to go. I'm sorry. I don't know who you are. I'm sure you're great. I'm sure you've thought about... My hype check is shruggy. That's my hype check on that. I don't know.

When he was like... He's like a nice guy. I'm sure he's a great guy. And I'm sure the improv classes that he's been taking are really fun. I just don't think he should wear hats on stage. Anyway, Casey. Yes. Let's discuss the state of the web.

Yeah. And media. Some things we care a lot about. So two, at least two big media stories this week, the first one was that Twitter finally let us see Project Lightning. Yeah. And if you've been following Twitter story this year, you know that they've had a rough year. They've had some uncertainty in their leadership.

They've watched their stock price fall. and they've been unable to really move the needle on the number of people who are using the service every month. It's sort of somewhere around like 300, 315 million people. And so Dick Costello decided to move on to greener pastures this summer, and right before he quit, he told the world that they were working on this thing called Project Lightning, which emerged this week in the form of moments,

which is a new tab that if you're in the U.S. has already rolled out on your phone, you tap on it, and you see Curember. selections of tweets that kind of highlight some of the big stories of the day. And those tweets are from sites like ours, from everyday people, from everybody on Twitter. And they've been packaged by Twitter itself, which created an editorial team for their first time. So Twitter is now like an actual editorial product. And they're also having their partners package some of these moments together. So the Washington Post and BuzzFeed and some others are putting these things together.

And the idea is that Twitter has been too hard to use for average people. Most people don't want to figure out who they should follow, who they should unfollow, what a favorite is or a retweet is. So Twitter is trying to give them a dead simple way when they open up the phone. They can just tap on the central tab and they will show you the best of Twitter. And during big events like the Oscars, the Super Bowl, the big playoff game, you will get, you can, if you want to, tap a follow button, and Twitter will bring you all of the best tweets from the Oscars or the Super Bowl.

And then as soon as the event is over, all those accounts that you're seeing, they all just kind of disappear. So those are the two big ideas and moments. It rolled out. It's gotten, I would say, mixed to positive reviews. And, you know, what do you think? Well, I think the idea is right. I think I'm a little bit skeptical about the prospects of this being the thing that vaults Twitter from 300 million users to a billion users. Yeah. People like news apps a lot, but they don't love them necessarily. Like, I think that Twitter is going to have to get a little bit better at finding and packaging these tweets and delivering them to people for it really to feel amazing because I was talking to Josh Jezzo, one of our editors yesterday, and he says, you know, I tap through this thing,

and there'll be like 10 tweets in a moment, and the first tweet is, a damn broke. And then there are 10 more tweets telling me that the damn broke. Yeah. Right? So, and that's the thing about Twitter is that these individual tweets, like they're not meant necessarily to join together.

And so you have to get really good if you want to be able to tell a whole story by stringing together 10 or 12 tweets. Sometimes it's easier though. Like, you know, when Miley Cyrus and Nikki Minaj are just yelling at each other back and forth on Twitter, that actually is pretty easy to put together and regular people are going to love that.

So I see that as being big upside, right? You just tap that moments tab and you're like, know, Miley and Nikki are having a huge fight on Twitter, swipe through it. That's awesome. So I am definitely in the mixed camp. Yeah. Because that is not what it can do for you.

Really? And that's not how it's designed, right? It's designed to show you photos and videos. Yeah. Like that's what it wants to do. It desperately wants to show you photos and videos. The whole interface is, and it's beautiful. Yeah.

But it's, like, very visual. And it's mostly about photographs with, like, and it's not about tweets. Like, it's weird because it doesn't funnel you into Twitter's product, which is Twitter. It's like a new product that's like built on It's like it's flipboard It's meta Twitter Well it's displaying the tweets in a different way It's not taking you away from the tweets

Because every single thing that you see is a tweet They're just enlarging the images And putting the text at the bottom And hiding all the things that you do to control a tweet Yeah but I mean you can get to those with the three Like button Yeah you can click a menu and open Twitter That's part of it is not what makes me concerned

And confused about moments I have real questions about how they're curating it because like Casey I don't know if you can talk about a little bit more about how they're doing that but like I opened one of the moments today and it was about Hillary Clinton and nine of the like 10 tweets that were in there were all Fox News and then there was one that was from Hillary Clinton's official account so I'm just kind of I'm I'm confused about who's curating these who's making them are they meant to be impartial versions of events are they going to be like you know stories by all by Fox News. Like what, who's creating the stuff that I'm seeing in there? So there's a guy named Andrew Fitzgerald, who's leading the product team. Or I'm sorry, who's leading the editorial team.

They have a small team in New York and San Francisco. And what, the way that they're finding these tweets, or at least the candidates for the tweets to put into moments, is looking at what tweets are getting the most favorites and retweets, signals like those. And then they kind of, you know, look at this. pile of tweets around a subject and the ones that seem to be getting a lot of engagement and that the Twitter team thinks are really relevant they're going to go ahead and put into a

moment. Now what they've told me is... There are moments that are strictly specifically from a single publication though. So that Fox News one... Yeah, there's a little Fox News logo above it. Oh, well, so there's a massive moment. But so here's my question. And this is what I mean about the tweets. Because the fact that it's not tweets, like, yes, they're explaining the tweets in a different way, but they're prioritizing the tweets with photos and videos, right? What is a tweet? What is a tweet? How are they going to contend with Black Lives Matter, which is something that literally was created on Twitter.

Yeah. But this product doesn't have any way to contend with. I think if there were to be a sort of huge moment on Twitter around the hashtag Black Lives Matter, you should absolutely expect it to see it as packaged as a moment. But that's just tweets. That's like people saying I support this. Yeah, but, you know, right now or in a world where there's no moments, there's no way. there's no way of easily finding, like, you know, what is the tweet that started this latest thing? Like, who are the leaders of this movement, right?

Which tweets are getting the most engagement, right? Twitter can, like, just go find that. And you as a person, you know, because the average person isn't going to, like, just go dig through, like, the source of a hashtag, right? But Twitter can sort of figure that out, package it together in a moment and deliver it to you. And then you open Twitter while you're waiting in line at Starbucks, and you're like, oh, there's something going on with Black Lives Matter. and you tap it, and then you just swipe through, you know, 14 or 15 tweets about it. Like, that's, like, absolutely a better experience.

But that's a flattening. Sure. I have many thoughts about this. But, like, yeah. Okay, this is going to be crazy. Okay, let's go there. I've been vaping my perfect tweet cigarette. It's like IKEA.

What? Here, just hear me out. Sure. Going to IKEA is an exercise in futility. and frustration, and you should never go there, because everything in IKEA looks great when there's 50 of them. You're like, I do want $54 clocks, because there's

like a wall of clocks that are cheap, and it looks cool, and it's visually presented. You're like, I want every color. It's like, it's this moment that IKEA can create through volume, right? And then you buy the one thing, and you go home, and you're like, this is garbage, or just bought a $5 clock. Like, I needed the other 49 for this to be the experience

that I saw in the store. Twitter is about volume. It's about the immediacy of Twitter, the power of Twitter is like, suddenly your timeline explodes. And you're like, something's happening. And you take one tweet out of that and it's like, this is meaningless to me, which is why, like, news coverage of Twitter is often, like, either they have to fall down the hole of, let's show you 50 tweets, or they're like, I don't know, what's some other hashtag? Like, some hashtag is exploding, right? Like, tornado is, I don't know, that's a bad hashtag. Hashtag blessed is exploding. Hashtag blessed is exploding. And they're like, here's

one and it's like whatever like they're not going to show you one they're going to show you 15 but but that explosion but that's a thing but they can it's that explosion in the timeline where everything else gets interrupted by a moment right is actually the power of Twitter and if

you take that out of that and into a tab and it's just like what's happening you click on it and it's like but they're not taking it out of your timeline they're just adding another feature for people that don't have a timeline on it's flattened right it's just another Twitter-powered newsreader. If you're a new user, you don't have a timeline

anyway. You're not flattening anything. What I'm saying is your goal is to get people into the product of Twitter. That is... Yes, and maybe the product of Twitter is evolving. That's the thing. That's not the goal of this. The goal of this is not to turn people into Twitter users. They've decided they're done with that, I think. And that's what moments

is about. Is Jack Dorsey the person to decide that people are done with Twitter? Is he the person to decide they're done with Twitter? Well, I mean, that's Deeter's claim, right? at Moments is actually a new product for Twitter. It's not Twitter, but it's built on their network. It is a new product for Twitter. I mean, or another way of thinking about it that I've heard people at Twitter describe it as

it is a DVR for Twitter, right? Like, you know, I mean, we're weird in that we spent 18 hours a day staring at Twitter. Most people might want to check it, you know, once a day tops. And for those people, there does need to be a way to say, like, here are the Twitter highlights, right? Here's Sports Center for Twitter, right? Where it's just like, here's kind of the cool stuff that happened today. And that's what they're trying to build.

they're at 1.0. I suspect it will get better over time. I suspect you'll start seeing more real-time stuff in there, like Periscopes. I suspect you'll start seeing their new instant article format that they unveiled this week alongside Google. Like, I think you'll see that in moments as well. Interesting transition, you know.

Yeah. I got to go to the money zone before we transition to that. No, no, no, we're going to run long today. I can feel it. Talk about AMP. Whatever, Twitter moments. Are we, is there our final thoughts? Yeah, why, okay.

For new users, great. Give me a flat experience that gives me SportsCenter for Twitter for the day. Superb. Awesome. Love it. What about the people that already follow 800 people and understand Twitter? Then those temporary event follows. No, then those temporary event following in that tab is actually really useful.

Like, I used it last night for American Horror Story because there was the premiere. And it was actually really enjoyable to have those tweets. I retweeted tweets that were from the Moments tab because they, like, if you follow an event in the Moments tab, then the tweet shows up in your normal timeline with a little lightning next to it. And that was awesome because I'm not going to follow all of these random people that follow American Horror Story.

It was the first time I had actually really watched the show live and it made me immediately feel like I was like watching it with people. It immediately gave me access to that real-time Twitter thing that we all really enjoy and love and that most people kind of don't get access to. I think I figured out my problem as the Twitter moments. Yeah. I fundamentally am uncomfortable.

believing that Twitter can do something good with product. Based on what they've done for like the past year. Dave had a rough time. What I realized about like the reason that Twitter is my favorite thing to write about is because it was born broken and then it became. Like all of us. Like all of us. Like Steve Jobs.

Ultimate transition. It was it was so broken and yet it was useful in this way that nobody really expected. And so everyone started using it. and it just continued to be so broken. And we all had our ideas for how if they would just do X, Y, and Z, it would be perfect. And they could never quite do it. And they're sort of just always, like, ambling along in this state of, like,

brokenness. And, yes, it is, like, a metaphor for all of it. Like, Twitter is us all. I mean, I want to stop the show. Like, I don't know what to do. No, but I can't make a better case for it than Kristen did. Like, what Kristen described, like, Twitter is going to, it hopes that literally 700 million people have that same experience.

the next couple years. Maybe they will. I don't know. I just think a product that doesn't tell you what Twitter, like the power of the moment's product is the network behind Twitter. Sure. Right. And so, yeah, it's another cut, a filter over the top of that network.

But there's nothing about it that teaches its users what the other, that the network exists. Twitter is happy to have, it's just a newsreader. Twitter's happy to have 300 million years. users be the plumbing, you're the plumbing. And the rest of it is for everybody else. And also, by the way, all you have to do to see the rest of Twitter inside moments is to

tap on a tweet. Like, tap on anything in moments and you will see the action. You'll see the favorite and and the tweets. You'll follow a few more taps away. You want to be a power user? Like, tap the ellipsies. You can see, like, pretty much anything you can do on Twitter. And it's all available inside every tweet inside every moment. Fine.

Right? It's like you're uncomfortable admitting they did something good. Well, they did something good, But it's not for you. That's the thing. They did something good, but it's not a power user. Like, this is the argument I had on Twitter, like, all week. But I'm not a Twitter power user. Like, I don't use tweet tech.

I think it's too much. You are a Twitter power user. No, I'm not. Sit down. Sit down. I just send some tweets. I'm tweeting right now. God, you caught me.

How many people do you follow? Too many. I don't know what I'm doing on this place. I'm following 1,500 people. You think it's normal? No, that makes you a power user. Yeah. Yep.

How do you follow 15 hundred people? With malice in my heart. I don't know. I'm like, I angry follow everybody. It's hard not to follow people too. Following you. Well, it's hard not to follow people. It's definitely not to follow me.

Casey Newton, by the way. But, yeah. Fine. All right, let's talk about AMP. Yeah, let's talk about AMP. So, one of the big trends in media this year has been the destruction of the internet. For those of you listening somewhere, wherever you are, Casey basically just did jazz hands when he said media.

I'm trying to make this a more visual presentation over time. Can you turn to the camera? Yeah. The future of media. Let's get that as a gift by the end of day, please. On my desk. So this all started with Facebook, which noticed that lots of people like to read news inside the Facebook app. But when you tap on a link, it takes upwards of 40 minutes to load.

And so Facebook said, what if we just stripped out all of the, you know, the advertising. and the ad trackers and everything else that goes into a web page these days and just preloaded it and pre-fetched it and we'll cut some deals with the publisher so that they can actually, that they can sell ads, et cetera, et cetera. And so Facebook launched this and many think pieces are written. But it's like just transparently true that the articles do load really fast and they look really nice and surprised. Like people are tapping on them more because they load really fast.

So if you're another platform on the internet, you have, to respond. And so we saw Apple respond with Apple News, which is a sort of similar product inside a news reading app. And this week, we saw a collection of companies come together, led by Google and Twitter, to show off something called AMP, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. And it works not unlike what we've seen from Facebook and Apple, in that it's stripping out a lot of stuff that normally gets loaded when you load up one of our pages or a page from another publisher. We're partners in AMP. We should just submit it. And we're partners in AMP.

We're co-conspirators here. The difference is that this is an open-source project. So you can go onto a GitHub repository and fork it or make any changes that you like to. And the idea is that over time, this will become sort of the best and most popular way for publishers to display these instant article formats in the web. So my understanding is, like, when it's all said and done, like, you can go to the page and say, hey, yo, show me the AMP version instead of the regular version. Like, I will be able, as a user, be able, like, click on the AMP mode in my browser. Yeah, how does this work? Well, I see AMP when I search for it from the web,

but not when I just go directly? Is it a browser thing? Right now they've released a developer's technical preview, so they are not answering all of those questions. Right now, if you want to check it out, you can go to, I believe, on your mobile device, go to g.com slash amp demo, and just search for, like, news keywords

such as, you know, Taylor Swift or Microsoft Surface. You search the verge. You can search the Verge. Yeah, and you'll see some of these, formats loading and like kind of a pretty carousel. And that'll at least show you what the reading experience is like. Now, is this something that eventually gets added to the browser or how do readers find these articles?

That's still to be determined. I think the assumption is that, you know, eventually publishers like ours will just sort of upload everything in a format that is able to be interpreted by AMP and so that if you're on your Android phone and you search for a news story, like Google will find the amplified version of it and show that in search results.

So we have a little bit of color, obviously because we're a partner. So I'll probably get this wrong because I'm not like building the stuff. But the goal for us as a publisher is we have a platform called Chorus. Casey wakes up every morning, types in the chorus, and publishes this thing into our system. And our system will then publish to not only our website, but instant articles. It'll publish an AMP version. The AMP version will get cached through Google because that's the big piece of this that I think Casey you didn't talk about.

Google's going to help you cache AMP. So whose servers do that? they live on. It's open. They have their own, but they're letting other people cash it. Right.

So the, the incentive is give it to us and we'll do it for you. Okay. And presumably boost you in search results. Right? Everyone's...

But they must be saying they're not going to do that, right? Why would they say that? They're saying that they're not going to boost AMP over. Like, I think, I read somewhere that,

like, Google says that they won't give preferential treatment to AMP stories, but it turns out that pages that load faster get preferential treatment. Yeah, that's what it. It's the same game

that Facebook played with like, we're not saying we're going to privilege insin articles, but if like 10 times more people click on them, that will have a benefit. Yeah. I mean, it's just, the thing about AMP to me, and again,

this is very difficult for us to talk about across the board, right? Like, Fox is going to start publishing Facebook and some articles. Fox is going to, we're in Apple News. And by the way, follow us in Apple News.

And, you know, everywhere else. And everywhere else. We are partners in AMP. Like we, you know, we work for modern media company, the modern media, company has lots of people who think about partner platforms. The whole metaphor for our company

is not just about, you know, our website, but it's media brands that go everywhere, like, all this stuff. So it's hard for us to be like critical of these, like, I'm just transparently telling you, right? Like, we're partners in these products. We want to be there. That's the future of publishing. We're going to be there. So we're participating in the ecosystem. At the same time, we have to critique them as products. And the thing that gets me on AMP is that, the whole point of responsive web design was to get away from a desktop web and a mobile web and to not have M.Theverge.com

a website that was crappier than theverge.com. And AMP is just like, you know what? We did such a bet. And Google is really complicit in the ad thing and the trackers and the slowness. They run the biggest ad network. So it just seems like Google's like, you know what? We blew it.

What if we cut the web down to size and don't let you use JavaScript and we'll find a new way? And it's like, we're just resetting the web to, like, backwards. Absolutely. And I just kind of don't understand. Like, whatever the thing is, there's going to be, like, an extension on Chrome and Safari.

That'll be, like, turn on the amp switch, whatever else. And then people are just going to browse the web with AMP, and we're going to have to, like, rebuild using the tools that are available on AMP to, like, actually give people the full experience that we want. Yep. Yeah, so this is the question that I asked yesterday at the event was, like, couldn't you get, like, 95% of the benefits just by not loading so much crap in people's browsers, like, when they're loading up your web pages. And then that's when

they, like, patted themselves on the back about the magic of pre-cashing and pre-fetching, like, for 10 minutes. But absolutely, this is just resetting us to a point before we, you know, ruin the web with lots of, like, slow trackers and beacons and stuff. You know, trackers and beacons, which also, like, help pay our salaries, right? So, like, we couldn't be more conflicted about any of this. But that's why it's, like, good to talk about. Right. I mean, it's just, you watch everybody, you mean, Facebook's doing it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, like everyone's just rebuilding the web, right? Like, what if the web sucks?

Like, we're done with this. It's too crappy. The ads are tracking you. Like Apple's like, what if we build the web inside this, this garbage app? And Facebook is like, well, we can build the web too. And then Google's like, what if we build the web again on the web? And it's just, it's bonkers to me. And I get it.

And like, I think AMP of all of the things is the one that feels the safest to me. Because Google's making such a big deal about how it's open and it's not proprietary. And like, that's the spirit of the web that I, literally built our careers. Yep. So I'm partial to it. I mean, like, there's an element to this, like, if people listening to this almost certainly now,

like we fought, we were activist with net neutrality, and I care passionately about that subject. There's a piece of this where the reason that we cared so much about net neutrality was because the democratizing effect of the internet. And you watch the walls go up on these media platforms, and you're like, wait, that's not, I didn't fight for you, so fuck.

Like, it's bad. And so, like, my, like, alarm bells are going off around all this stuff because it's, it's all like, what if we compress the web into some other box so you can take it other places? But, like, for any of these one platforms to, like, have a severe impact on the internet, wouldn't, like, we all have to start using them? Like, a vast majority of us? And is that really likely? I mean, look, if, so we run. According to the Twitter responses to my, do you use Apple News question today? Oh, yeah, nobody uses Apple.

Apple News is hot garbage. Like, they should be ashamed. And I mean that seriously. And for the number of people on the show today that I've said should be ashamed, I feel bad for you. But the Microsoft guy, like, get ready to hat. Apple News team, just reconsider your lives.

Whatever's next. I feel bad. But no, like Apple News is, like, not a good experience, right? And what's particularly funny to me about Apple News is that it has a web browser in it. So if you click on a link in Apple News story, it just like opens another web browser. And it's like, oh, you didn't even...

Even if it's a link to another verge story, It'll just open a Verge web view, which is bonkers. But I don't think it's about that so much. It's not about like, are they going to eat the browser, the internet? It's if you are, like, we're, the verge is enormous. Like it has so many readers. The traffic is from so many sources. It's just like, it's too big for any of these things like really hit us.

But Facebook for many sites is like 80% of their traffic. So Facebook decides, like, you have to do instant articles or we're taking your traffic away. Facebook has an enormous amount of leverage over you. If Apple decides, hey, Apple blogs, we'll pay you more if you just stop publishing on the web and come into Apple news where people who love Apple are going to read you, they can pull that off. And that's the piece of this that scares me. It's like there's an incentive to create silos. There's an incentive to build walls and say, we can build a better experience

for the people we have leverage over because we can do a better job of building audiences for you here. And I just don't want that to happen. I think the fact that we now have three major players who are all building their own versions is at least somewhat heartening, even if we don't like the trend,

there at least now is a balance of power, right? And I think also that generally these platforms don't really have a great understanding of editorial businesses and they don't really want to. And so they're going to try to keep those platforms like relatively neutral. But I think that's why Apple News is bad. Yeah.

Right? Like, I think they want to have an understanding. I just think that's what Twitter definitely does. I think they want to understand it, but they don't want to be, like, media titans. You know, I think they want attention on their platform and they want to sell hardware and software. Do you think that, like, Twitter wants to influence the next election, like, in favor of a particular candidate? Yes. Okay.

And do you think they would manipulate the platform to make that happen? I think that they would not be sad if it turned out that a decision they made happen to manipulate the platform in that way. Well, I mean, this is really a fascinating question. Yeah. This is a fascinating question because certainly they now have more leverage over the media than tech platforms really have had before. Yeah. Unless you want to, like, go back in time and tell me that printing presses were tech platforms and somehow. They were.

Yeah. Yeah. Coming next week on the podcast. Soft player. All right. Do the soft layer. Soft layer. Did you know that Software delivers a cloud built for innovation?

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It's like what's going to happen? What is going to happen? What is this drunken idiot going to say about the cloud? I'm sorry, Dieter. No, it was fun. We're all going to podcast ads. Let's talk about them. All right, so we're at an hour, but I actually want to do 10 minutes on the Steve Jobs movie.

Let's do it. This is going to be a little bit of a spoiler zone. But the movie comes out tomorrow. Super spoiler zone. And I kind of think that. I'm going to talk about the very last scene, actually. It's a good last scene. But we all saw it last night.

I interviewed Sorkin and Danny Boyle on stage. And I don't know. We've been kind of like talking about it all day. Like I literally walked up to Deeter this morning and he didn't say hello. He didn't transition. He just continued saying his thought about the movie. That's where we're at. Which I'm writing for Sunday, so I'm not going to spoil it.

All right. Don't spoil that thought. Why am I pointing at you? So I'm going to. So we're just going to do a few minutes on Steve Josh. We don't know. wrong point in each other. So Steve Jobs movie is out.

We did a review, Kwame did a review. I have this theory that I've been working out. Yes, it's so dumb, but let's go for it. That it's basically a Batman movie? In the sense that... Steve Jobs talks like this. Yeah, it's very

disturbing, actually, and when he fires the batterang it was. It's so weird. No, it's... Like, there have been many Batman movies, many Batman franchises, many Batman comic books. And in one sense, they have nothing to do with each other. Right? Like the 60s Batman and the Christopher Nolan Batman are not at all the same thing. Literally, the nothing

to do with each other, except for the tropes, right? The elements of myth that connect the two tales, right? So like, you know Batman's parents are dead. You know he fights crime. You know he wears a mask. You know he has a car. I don't know. He's got a cave. He's got a cave. He's got a cave. He has a butler. It's all these pieces of a story. And you can assemble them, those pieces in any story

and call that story Batman. And that's this movie, where you know that Steve Jobs, it literally demands that you know some stuff about Steve Jobs and no more. So you know that Steve Jobs was at Apple. You know that he invented the iPhone. You know that he is dead.

This movie demands to have the emotional impact of this movie, you have to know that he's dead. And it is very emotional because at the end you're like, ah, I wish you. she wasn't dead. But it has nothing to do with reality. It's the elements of Steve Jobs' life remix to tell an Aaron Sorkin movie.

And it's a great movie. And an Aaron Sarkin stage play adapted for the screen. And that's the most important thing to, I think, well, maybe not the mo. But for me, it was the most important thing, was hearing Sorkin tell you last night, Neli, that he always defaults toward writing plays. He likes things that take place in confined spaces where there's a ticking clock. And this movie is like three confined spaces and three ticker. clock's yeah anyway yeah but it has nothing to do with reality no and he i'm just going to spoil the

second act because it drove me it continues to drive me crazy uh sorry kirsten it's okay i know uh but just sitting here quietly getting spoiled no it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not about the story the movie is about this experience yeah you can't spoil a biopic but it's not it's not it's a biopic but but but but but but the second act and i i i i i still you know it's a biopic and i i i Anybody who's listening to this podcast is going to be just as mad about these inaccuracies as I am. The movie ends with Jobs promising his daughter that he'll make the iPod, which is insanity. And the second act, oh, in telling Scully that he killed the Newton because he's going to make the iPods. Fuck you.

Like that didn't happen. But then the entire second act of the movie is about next. And like the conflict is that the computer doesn't work before he launches it. And the reveal, the solution in the conflict is, I know it doesn't work. This is a Trojan horse. And we're going to wait and see what Apple needs. Make that. And then I'm going to sell this company back to Apple and become the CEO.

And it's like, that shit didn't happen. Yeah. Like what actually happened was he left Apple and started next. Next was a huge failure. He didn't know what to do. He spun his wheels for a while and then did Pixar. And that was a huge success that allowed him to just like, I don't know, bumble along with Next until Apple was like, we're fucked too. And he was like, I don't know.

What about this? And then there was a bidding war in like a literally technology bakeoff between two companies. Like there's deep, deep history there. Is Pixar even in the movie? No. The first question I asked. Right? The first question I asked Sorkin last night was you just made a movie about Steve Jobs.

It does not include the words iPhone, Pixar or cancer. Like they're not in the movie. It's not there. The movie ends. He walks on stage to introduce the IMAQ, which miraculously has already been reviewed. crazy, like whatever. Fuck this movie. I'm so mad about it.

Like, these inaccuracies are, uh, they're crazy. And they're all in the service of telling us what. He was a difficult man, but he was a genius. Which is every Steve Jobs movie and is like the least insightful thing that

you could say about him. I have this theory that there won't be a good movie made about Steve Jobs for 50 years. I think that we're actually still too early into the world of mobile to know what was truly important meaningful about him. Just to make it super weird for a second, I've been thinking about this in the context of Hamilton, the musical.

Have you seen it yet? I haven't seen it yet. All you just talk about why to see it. Well, I ran out of days in New York, which happens. And also the tickets are like $350 on Stubhub. But here you have, you know, 200 years after a man dies, you know, this brilliant guy,

Lynn Manuel Miranda, is it? Who just like went back and find out. And was sort of like able to translate that story and figure out what was meaningful about it now and write it in this incredible, like beautiful and moving way. Right now, we're so early in the sort of like,

you know, post life Steve Jobs era that I don't think we've really had enough time to reflect. And so instead, all we can do is go back and imagine, what if this man had tried to resolve

all of his most personal conflicts in the last 10 minutes before three product launches? Which is insane. Yeah. It's literally insane. Like, that's the last thing you're thinking about right before you do a product launch.

Like, no. It's just structurally contract. and broken. It's magical. It's like magical realism. It's like, I will say that.

Like, you have to accept that, like, that's ridiculous. And, like, it's just, that's the structure he built for his story. And you accept that, like,

it's dumb. It's like, when you go watch, when you go watch a Bazelerman film, do you really pissed off that, like, things are bombastic and crazy? No, it's a Baselerman film.

When you go watch an Aaron Sorkin film, you don't get pissed off. There's, like, there's the problem, though. Here's the problem, though, Sork and Boyle, they don't stylize the movie. it's like realism, right? Like, if they had done everything in like bright, crazy colors,

and there was like show tunes and tap dancing, and it was just insane, then it would probably be a lot more interesting. Instead, they've, like, presented this simulacrum of the truth, and it's all just a castle of lies. So Casey and I didn't like the movie. Not so much. How are my favorites? But other people that we saw it was last night, loved it.

I walked out of that movie and hated it, and today I like it. It's a, it's a good movie. Yeah. If you didn't have, that's so weird about it. It's, if there wasn't a real person named Steve Jobs, it would be like a fucking great movie. What? If you didn't have to, if you didn't have to reconcile this movie against the truth that we know. Here's the thing.

If there weren't a Steve, there weren't really a Steve Jobs, like, you just wouldn't accept his cruelty to his daughter. You would just be like, this is like the most like unlikable person in the world who even cares about any of. these like fake products that don't exist, right? Aaron Sarkin actually revealed the key to the movie to you in your interview. What's that? That when he died, everybody loved him. And he's like, but nobody actually knew him. They knew the products.

And so the key to the movie is like the product reveals that we never actually see. It's like he interacts with people through the things that he makes. And so every interaction we actually see him have with somebody is broken and dumb and annoying and he's being a dick because he doesn't know how to do it. it because what he actually wants to do is just make a product for that person. That's why he tells his daughter, I'm going to put a thousand songs in your pocket and like that horrible corny line because that is what he does. And so this is the ultimate spoiler. The last scene of the movie is his daughter's there. He walks out on stage and then he turns around and starts

walking back towards her as everything gets all hazy and beautiful, right? I cried the first time I saw. Right. She thinks she's walking back to her. Misty. His, like her daughter sees her dad walking back to her. And she's like, oh my God, we're about to have a moment. But he was never walking back to her. He was walking to go start his product presentation. He was walking back to the product. And so the whole movie is about the interaction of a culture to a guy through products

and how that screwed who he is and how he relates to the people around him. Right. Also, one of his products is money because he solves every problem by telling people he's going to pay them. Yeah. It just keeps happening over and over again. No, I'm with you. My favorite theory about the movie, and literally is my favorite theory, is Ross and T.C. retreating back and forth each other, that you could watch this entire movie, and John Scully could be a ghost.

And it actually makes more sense. Like, there's a scene in the second act where, like, he walks into a hallway, and, like, there's all these chairs stacked up. Oh, yeah. And Scully's just sitting there waiting for him. And he's like, this is why he should get, and it's like, in what reality did you walk into this empty-ass hallway and sit down and just wait patiently for Steve Jobs to show up to deliver this perfect line. It's like that, no.

Although I will say that I interviewed John Skilly recently and I arrived before he did and I went to... And he was a ghost? No, but I stacked up all the chairs in the room. No, but I went to use the restroom and when I came back to the conference room where we were meeting, he was sitting there with his wife and a dog.

So I'm just saying there's precedent for Skilly turning up in unexpected ways. Fine. It may have been the most realistic thing about the film to me. You know, it's interesting. I think this movie is just undone by reality in a way that, like, the social network was not undone by reality in every turn. That's right. Like, you could, like, the social network was, it was a very compelling story.

And again, was compelling because it was hewing roughly to an actual thing that happened, which was a lawsuit over who founded Facebook. And they totally fictionalized a lot about Mark Zuckerberg and who he was as a person. but I just, I thought that movie, like, had a really great tension to it, and it had the thing that I like the most about Sorkin's work, which is that he actually writes persuasive arguments for both characters. Like, that's why his scenes are fun to watch,

is because, you know, and, like, if you watch the Ash and Coucher jobs movie, it's just, like, it's just jobs being right in every scene and, like, a bunch of people applauding because he was so right. It's just like people losing arguments to see jobs. Sorkin, at least, tries to balance out that interaction a little bit, and I thought he was particularly, good at it in the social network where like you know mark Zuckerberg is not portrayed as a kingmaker

he's like a more complicated figure and some people love him in that movie and other people think he's the villain right like anyway no no yeah that's a movie man you should here's a thing and it's it's a weird piece of advice to give about a movie that like I don't know one and a half of us hate because the other part of me is like it's a good movie and I like sorkin and there's a lot of like witty dialogue there's there's some great lines in it yeah um so whatever so you So you should go see this movie. In the same way that I have these friends who refuse to read the Harry Potter books, and I'm like, you just have to read them.

But just get it over with because they're the fabric of the culture, and you should just know what people are talking about. That's this movie. And this movie will be a frame in which we talk about Steve Jobs for a long time, but literally nothing about it is reality. Yeah. I don't know. I wonder how much it's really, like,

because I do think it's true that, like, the social network made Mark Zuckerberg just like an incredible, like a just enormous celebrity. This movie, it's like Jobs is already super famous. There's already a lot of like Jobsian lore out there. And like how much of our memory of Steve Jobs is really going to like, you know, come down to a fictional memory of the next launch? Like I don't know. I don't, I'm like, I actually suspect it might not like penetrate into our consciousness

as much as the social network did because it's not as good as a movie. Anyhan. The assender was pretty though. Good looking man. I will say it's sexy Steve Jobs. it's like a real concept now because of this movie. And it's my Halloween costume. Man.

No, when like... He was so cut? Yeah, in that first act, there's a scene where he takes off his shirt and it's just like, Steve Jobs didn't look like that. There's just no way Steve Jobs looked like that. Like, Steve Jobs with an eight-pack is basically like what fast when I looks like that's really. All right.

Carson, are you ready to engage? Do you know? Have you reached this point in your career? I mean... Is our hype checker? Yeah, I can engage if you want. All right. Well, I'm going to read...

Wait, Dieter, you have to read the post roll. Well, that means that I'm going to tell you that Braintree is supporting today's episode of The Vergecast. They give you a full-stack payment solution. They support all kinds of payment types for your customers that they might want. They accept Android pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Bitcoin, Venmo, cards, and whatever else. And that means that you can accept them too. Just give them your money. There's just a simple, single integration.

It works across all different platforms, and there's superior fraud protection, customer service, and fast payouts. just go to Braintree payments.com slash vergecast Cool. All right, Kirsten, you get three. Kirsten, you get three.

Three? Okay. I'll say first you should definitely follow Snapchat because I run it and it's awesome and we're ramping up the amount of stuff we do on it.

So it's the real Verge on Snapchat. Follow us. The second one, you should follow our Twitter because we tweet out really awesome gifts and videos and everything that's awesome on our site. So that's at Verge on Twitter. I don't know.

What else should we? I only have two. I've got two. Wow. That's crazy. We're on like 15 different platforms. I just picked one. There you go.

Do you know the handle for those exactly? Because I do not offhand. Bum, bum, bum. I don't know. Just type the verge into shit and follow us there. Here, follow, do the iTunes. Tell them about how to do us on iTunes. Here's thing.

We have four our podcast now, the Vergecast, which is this one. When you go on iTunes, review it, I would like to know what you think of Casey's haircut. to this week. Yeah, which is being dramatically injured by these headphones.

Yeah, it's killing you. Or, you know, go see the jobs movie and let us know you thought about that. You know, that's great.

Control Walt Delete goes up on Thursdays before the show. So you please listen to control, Alt Delete. Walt and I, this week,

talked about ads. I actually really want to get him through a few the jobs movie for us because he really used to jobs.

Oh, you know he's going to have some strong feelings. So I'm pushing to do that. So maybe maybe give Walt the nudge

because I think it would be really interesting to hear what well things with that. But ControlWaltly is a great show. Verge ESP with Emily and Liz and What's Tech with Chris Plant. Actually, in the What's Tech this week is great. It's phenomenal. We had the CEO of our company, Jim Bankoff, go on and explain how ads on our site work and how we make money and all that sort of good stuff, which is awesome. All of that is at iTunes.com slash The Verge. You can also watch The Vergecast on YouTube if you just search for Vergecast. And then you can talk to all of us on Twitter. So I am reckless. Casey's Casey Newton, Dieter's Paclon. Kirsten is Kirstenna.

You've got to come up with a snappy way of giving people your Twitter. Right, I don't know. It's like just try to spell it. Good luck. We'll see what we can do. And that's it. That was our show.

Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week and something else will happen. Rock and roll.