The Vergecast - The PS5 Pro made us sit closer to the screen

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Nilay and David talk about the election, and how The Vergecast plans to cover and talk about the next four years of the Trump administration. But only for a minute. Then it's onto our reviews of the new Mac Mini and MacBook Pro, which reset Apple's desktop and laptop lineup in an excellent way. After that, Sean Hollister joins the show to discuss his review of the PlayStation 5 Pro, the news about backwards compatibility for the Nintendo Switch successor, and the state of Nintendo's fight against emulators. In the lightning round, we talk about really expensive domain names, oddly named smart home standards, and cloud gaming whales. Which apparently exist. Further reading: Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election What does Trump’s election mean for EVs, Tesla, and Elon Musk?  All the Big Tech leaders congratulating Donald Trump  Google CEO says company should be ‘trusted source’ in US election Another Trump presidency is literally toxic — his opponents are gearing up for battle Here’s FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr sucking up to Donald Trump by threatening to take NBC off the air Apple Mac Mini M4 review: a tiny wonder Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024) review: the Pro for everyone Amazon says it’s fixing the Kindle Colorsoft’s yellow screen Kindle Colorsoft owners complain of a yellow bar on the e-reader’s screen PS5 Pro review: how close is your TV? Nintendo’s next generation is off to a great start Nintendo says the Switch successor will be compatible with Switch games Why is Nintendo targeting this YouTuber? Did OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL? The Matter smart home standard gains support for more devices, including heat pumps and solar panels Nvidia to cap game streaming hours on GeForce Now instead of raising fees Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm 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 and welcome to Vergecast. The flagship podcast is spending millions of dollars on domain names.

It's cut. We're going to talk about it. That's a real thing that happened. It happens every day. You just don't know about it. And that's why this podcast is hard pivoting away from politics towards the buying and selling of domain names.

I'm your friend, Nelai. David Pierce is here. Hello. You know what I love about that is I genuinely think we have some real, serious competition to be the flagship podcast. of the domain buying industry. And this is why I love technology.

Like, you know, they've got real estate podcasts out there. So I'm saying it. We could, cyber state. Is that a word? I wrote a big story a few years ago about like the ongoing primacy of the dot com and got to interview some truly fascinating characters, people who just like bought a bunch of TLDs and just like screwed off to the Caribbean and now make millions of dollars selling domain names.

It's the greatest. One, we should do this. We should just pivot to this. Yes. So if you want to front our domain arbitrage business, you know, that's a lightning around sponsorship opportunity. Two, we are going to talk about a specific domain name letter, which is very interesting. And three, the entire dot IOTTLD is like vanishing. Yeah.

Which is like a big story because a bunch of crypto and AI startups have dot IO names. We'll come back to that as well. Do you own any silly domains? Um, you know, I went through that period where I, I had a Hover account and that was my form of sports betting. Uh-huh. And now all those, oh, the credit cards expired and the domain names went away. And so it goes. Yeah.

There was a period, I would say, of maybe three or four years where every couple of months I would get an email from Hover being like, your domain name is about to renew. Do you want to renew it? And it would be straight up for a domain I had completely forgotten that I owned. So that's all, I had a phase, I would say. It was like a shopping phase. I bought a bunch of domains. And now they are slowly winnowing away. But I still own a bunch of them.

I bought a domain for Anna to write her like a thing for her birthday one year. It was one of the coolest thing I ever did. So she just has her own website that is just like a love letter I wrote to my wife one time. Aw, that's very sweet. Coolest thing I ever did. And now I pay 10 bucks a year. And I guarantee you she hasn't looked at it in five years. Just wasting money now.

You had to bring it up like every anniversary. Yeah. Do you know how as you get older, you realize the deep lore of your friends is just that you were jerks? Like if you look at it with fresh eyes, we were just pretty mean to each other. We had a friend. That's how men interact. That's what we do. Pretty much.

I had a friend. They dated a person. This person, not very bright, and thought the word debacle was tobacco. And I own Tobacle.com for a long time. And I couldn't make it a thing because ultimately the core of it, was just being mean to someone. You can be like, I got this great story about tobackels. And you're like, no, you're just a jerk.

I think we're past the statute of limitations on it, though. It's time to really turn that. Everyone, everyone is like long since married. Yeah. But I'm just saying, I'm just prefer, I'm putting around that story, the self-awareness. Yeah, that was just the heart of your friend's lore sometimes is like, oh, you were super rude when you were 25 years old. Yeah, that's how it goes. All right.

We got a lot of talk about there's new Mac and minis. There's PS5 pros. There's upgrades to the matter standards. We got a lightning round and are unsponsored. We should start with the obvious news in America today, which is that I think I know when the Jeep Waggoner S is coming. That's exactly where I thought you were going. This is good.

I'm glad we're on the same page here today. I've gotten wind that it's December. So if you're in the market for Jeep's first EV, it may or may or may not be December. No, it's obviously the election. It happened on Tuesday. It's a big deal. Donald Trump won again, if you haven't heard. We're not going to dwell on it too much.

We didn't dwell on the fact that I wrote an endorsement of Harris last week. We try to keep politics off of this show. I have a whole other show to rant about politics, so we can do that over there. I will say, you know, we have a big audience. I'm sure some people are very happy. I know a lot of our audience is very upset. We're going to cover Trump the same way we covered him the first time, which is he's going to make a bunch of decisions. A lot of them will be tech policy decisions.

And this time around, we have a bunch of familiarity with how he approaches tech policy. And so do the big companies. Right. The big companies, their CEOs are all writing him congratulatory notes. Jeff Bezos is like, throw me a blue origin contract. Tim Cook probably doesn't want 20% tariffs on the iPhone. Elon Musk wants side-loading to happen on the iPhone. This is a thing that he has said, that the App Store review process is censorship.

This is a lot of competing tech billionaire stuff in a very transactional way with the character they're familiar with. And it's going to lead us to covering a lot of stories. Just the tariffs alone. Most of our products are not made in the United States. The idea that we can instantly impose tariffs and have that manufacturing move here seems far-fetched. If you will recall the last time this man tried to move technology manufacturing to the United States of America, we spent a lot of time pointing out buildings in Wisconsin were empty. Some familiar. How many weeks do you think it's been at this point?

Since Google announced a website. One of the first things happened in Trump One was Congress immediately repealed a rule that imposed privacy regulations on ISPs. And then we made a character, if you will recall, out of a Jeep pie. I know who the new character it's going to be. It's going to be Brendan Carr. He wants to be the head of the FCC. In all likelihood, he will be. We wrote a profile of him in the 2020 election because he very much was advocating for the FCC to be in charge.

of Section 230, which kind of makes no sense. It's all going to happen again. Right. So we're going to just cover the world as it stands, and the people and the characters are doing stuff in that world. Sometimes that will, I think, cross over to the show. Yeah. Many times.

I care a lot about broadband deployment. I know our audience does, too. We talk about the FCC a lot on the show. It's all just going to happen again. And we'll bring it up on the show as it's relevant. But I don't think we're going to make this a show about Donald Trump's tweets. I can make sense. Yeah, I think, I mean, you mentioned kind of what we've learned versus the last time we did this.

And I think one big change is we're just clearer on what's real and what isn't. And I think this is true of any political situation that like the question of what someone says and what is real are very rarely the same thing. And I would say it's just that the volume with Trump is so much higher. And so we've learned in ways how to sort of suss out what matters and what doesn't. But I think like it or not, like I chose not to become a political reporter on purpose. And yet we are at a moment in time where like I think you could argue that tech companies and in particular a handful of big tech companies are going to be more central both to the running of the government itself, but also like what that government is interested in than ever. And I mean, you look at what Elon Musk has been in the Trump campaign already. Like these things are intermingled in ways they've never been before.

And I think part of what we're going to have to do is both figure out what all of that means and try to cover the ramifications for regular people. Right? Because so much of it is yelling and political nonsense. And like I think we don't, this show in particular, we try really hard not to care about that. But like this stuff is going to matter in every other thing that we cover in new ways. And I think we have to figure that out. I'll just keep giving examples because I think it's a useful way to talk about it.

The Google antitrust case where they're paying Apple to be the default, that case started in the first Trump administration. Right. I got finished in the Biden administration. I'm sure Apple wants the new Trump DOJ to drop the antitrust case against them. But I'm equally sure that Andreessen Horowitz, which promotes what it calls the Little Tech Agenda and which spent a bunch of money on Donald Trump, wants that case to be pursued to the finish line because they would love to. who side load crypto apps onto the iPhone. There's just a lot there. I have no idea how it's going to shake out,

but just to bring it all back around, the fact that there is this week a PalmOS emulator on the iPhone is the result of government action. Like, there's just a lot of stuff that is true about the products we use and how they work and how they work together that is related to what happens over there. And we just have to keep an eye on it

because all of these people are going to start kind of nakedly lobbying the Trump had been and their interests aren't actually aligned. So there's just a lot of sort of inherent conflict, which will result in stories. And then I think ultimately result in changes the products we all use that we like to talk about in the show. Yep. There's a whole bunch of other stuff. And we will bring it up when it's necessary.

I'm eager to hear from everyone. We have all gone through this together before. Like if you want me to just start roasting Foxcon every day, like I can deliver. I just don't want to scream into the void for four years. So let us know. We got email addresses. We got voicemail lines. If you want to yell at me personally, I'll take it.

We are here to serve the audience. But we're going to try to figure this one out and make sure we are constructive as opposed to just being noisy, if that makes any sense. Yeah. All right. Hard pivot away from presidential politics. Tiny computers. Tiny computers. Speaking of 20% tariffs, the Mac Mini now cost $5,000.

But it's made by hand in your bedroom. That joke has layers. I'm just putting an effort. That joke has layers. Yeah. There's somewhere in North Carolina, I think. It either is or is not a factory. Mark Robinson has been sentenced to manufacturing the Mac Mini in your bed.

All right. All the Macs came out last week. They were announced last week. We have reviews, the M4 MacMex. The MacBook Pro 14. We have the baseball review. And Tony is reviewing the high-end model. Let's start with the Mac Mini.

Chris Welch reviewed it. He's in love. As I was reading his review, I do stop myself from buying a computer I don't need. Same. I haven't fully stopped myself yet. I still have it in my cart, but I'm not looking at the tab anymore. So I'm considering that a victory. But I would say by the time you're listening to this,

there is like an over 90% chance that I have bought this Mac Mini. I mean, it is the thing, right? It is what we hoped it would be. And I think the one thing I've been surprised by actually is how much smaller it actually is. And it seems to be meaningfully different in terms of where you can put it and how it fits on your desk and the little places you can stash it. And for something like this, which is designed to be a computer you mostly never touch or look at or interact with, that does matter. Right. I think I still don't know that that is like the most important thing in the universe. I don't think you should upgrade just to get a slightly smaller Mac mini.

But also everything else about it is good. The performance is right. It has a lot of I.O. I've heard a couple of people say they wish the front ports were Thunderbolt instead of just regular USBC. The back ones are Thunderbolt. But fine. Like this thing is $600. And I think in a time when Apple products are getting, I would say,

more expensive at dubious additional value. This one is just an unabashed victory. I think Chris's line is easily the best value in the entire Mac lineup now. I think that's probably true. And the thing that really cements it for me is the base model, the $600 one, has 16 gigs of RAM, which has kept me from buying a Mac for quite some time. I go into the configurator, I look at 8 gigs of RAM in the default, I go add the RAM to get to 16 gigs, and then I'm always like,

this is so expensive. This is the most expensive RAM in history. I'm not buying this dumb computer. Which is still true, by the way. Every one of the upgrades on all of these new MacBooks and Macs is like lunacy. It's like I know what these things cost. And you're trying to charge me 200 bucks for a little more storage. Oh, yeah, we have it.

Chris has it in the review. You can buy two base model Mac minis for a dollar less than the upgraded one. Than the upgraded one? That's so stupid. Yes, you can buy two base model Mac minis with 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gig SSDs for the price that cost to upgrade a single Mac Mini to 32 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage. It's actually a dollar less. That's just, that's stupid.

But again, to your point, the good news is, and I think this is true of both the Mac Mini and the new MacBook Pro, which we should also talk about, is that the base model is excellent. And I think Apple, Apple for years has given you base models that are. like almost there, but you always kind of want one step up from the base model of almost every Apple product. The thing they try to sell you is the one level up, either it was like the iPad that only had 64 gigs of storage or this one that had eight gigs of RAM, which is a perfectly fine amount of RAM. No, super wrong. How will you unleash the power of Apple intelligence with only eight gigs of RAM?

My friend. Very few things have made me feel more vindicated than everybody getting actually. access to Apple intelligence. But this time, these are the right models for most people. The base model is the one that most people should buy. And I think that's very much to Apple's credit. It just built the computer people should have. And if you just click buy and don't check any other boxes, you're going to get an excellent computer. Yeah. And what's also great is a bunch of the outgoing computers, like the M2 errors and M3 errors, are being sold out in 16 gig base configurations for the same price, which again, I think is because Apple just wants you use Apple intelligence,

but it's also proof that that extra 8 gigs of RAM did never cost them anything. Right. But it is. I actually think, I mean, we, for a couple of years, I think, had a long debate about when the M1 came out, right, the M1 MacBook Air, and it was like an obvious giant upgrade from the previous ones. And then the M2 came out, and we were kind of like, well, maybe the better buy is actually the M1 Air, which is getting cheaper because,

the M2 is out and the performance increase isn't necessarily there. And I think that question might be complicated, right? Like, is the increase from the M2 or the M3 to the M4 super meaningful? I think the increase from 8 gigs to 16 is meaningful. Again, 8 gigs is fine for most people. Super isn't. The argument, by the way, I know just to lay it out, I'm aware of the argument that David is too embarrassed to make that some of you will put in the YouTube comments, that the disc is so fast that going to swap doesn't really matter if you have eight gigs of RAM. I know, I'm aware of the argument.

Apple executives have looked me in the eye and made the argument, and I'm just telling you that it's still not good. Oh, yeah, I'm sitting here on an M1 Mac Mini with eight gigs of RAM, and I can tell you that that argument is not true, and yet eight gigs of RAM is basically fine. Just close some tabs. You'll be fine.

But anyway, going to 16 as the base is really important. And I actually am like eager to now go get my hands on one of the M2s with 16 gigs a couple of years in and see, because we're going to end up with like, you know, there's the, the Walmart version of it that is deliberately substantially cheaper and kind of the like entry level MacBook air. When that thing has like an M2 and 16 gigs of RAM, that is going to be a very, very compelling computer for a lot of people. And I just think like, again, if you want one of these beastly machines that's going to last you forever, like I feel very good about both. air, about both the new pro and the new mini. But especially as we get to this 16 gig of RAM baseline, even a couple of generations old is going to start to last a really, really long time.

Yeah. I am, well, first of all, the M1 Air, the Walmart special M1 Air, is now down to 649, and it still says built for Apple Intelligence. And I just have to, for as little as Apple Intelligence does, it's not going to go great on that computer. No. I would not buy that if you want an AI. machine. But given a minute and that thing will be $649 and it will be an M2 and it will have 16

gigs of RAM, right? Like when we get to there, that gets really exciting. Becky has an Intel MacBook Air like a rose gold one and it is dying. And I told her today to buy an M3 air 16 gigs of RAM for just about a thousand dollars. I think it's a little over a thousand dollars. I think this is the best buy in computing right now. I think that's right. You don't need an M4 for the stuff we're doing. And this computer is going to last forever with 16 gigs of RAM. So it's true that in the sort of MacBook Air Zone, picking the chip is sort of not as important as the RAM. And the fact that 16 gigs is becoming more prevalent in all of their spots is really good. Yeah.

For the Mac Mini, this is like, you just push the button. You don't need, like, and this is why I've been so close to buying one all day. Because they've reduced the pain of, like, going into the configurator and adding more money to the base price. Genius. It also is proof that that X-ray gigs of RAM costs them nothing. Oh, yeah. That was always just pure naked money grubbing from Apple. The one financial question I am dealing with as I go through this is do I spend the extra $200 to get the touch ID keyboard?

Because I'm sitting here. I have a Logitech keyboard that I really like. I have a Logitech mouse that I really like that I will never give up because the magic mouse is an awful piece of hardware that no one should use. Touch ID is awesome and goes a very long way. And especially if you're never going to turn the thing off because the power button is on the bottom, which did not bother Chris Welch at all, it's like the touch ID thing with the Mac mini goes a really long way.

Do you have an Apple Watch? I do. So I unlock my Mac with my Apple Watch. I've never even thought about needing to unlock it with. Oh, that's interesting. I have that set up with my phone, but I actually don't think I have it set up with my Mac. Yeah, I sit down on my I Mac at home

and I just like hit the button and it unlocks. It's great. Okay. And I've never, unless you want to buy stuff on your Mac, but I don't use Safari in that way. Yeah. No, it's really, it's purely a login thing. All right, this is good.

You've solved this for me. I can keep my computer, thank you. Yeah. We should talk about the MacBook Pro, and it seems, and Tony reviewed this one for us, it does seem like Apple has finally created some differentiation for the base model MacBook Pro. They've added the correct ports.

It has more performance than the Air. It's no longer this weird tweener where it was like, the base model Pro is just for people who don't want a MacBook Air. it's like, oh, this is a meaningfully good computer. And then if you want to go up from there, you can continue to go up from there. Yeah, again, it's back to the thing of like, Apple always wanted you to buy one above the base.

And I actually think that was even more true on the pro than others, which, like, weirdly they were caught in between, the base pro had a touchbar for like way too long. And finally, it seems like they just sort of scrapped the whole thing and were like the pro line now makes sense in order all the way up. And again, the base now starts at, I think, 1599. Yeah. Clear upgrade from the air in terms of price, but also in terms of like what you get performance-wise and all that stuff for battery life right now.

You've been a pro guy forever, right? Like, I'm an air guy. And to me, this does not make me on a pro anymore. And I suspect for you, this is like, this is exactly the pro that I'm looking for. And I feel like good for Apple for mostly getting that right. Yeah. I think that's correct. I mean, I'm a 15-inch, I guess,

Now it's 16-inch laptop person and always have been. So again, you know, Becky needed a computer, and I was like, you should just get a new macrocare. And it never crossed my mind to say, oh, you should spend a little bit more money in the pro. Whereas before, that was always kind of like, yeah, it's like it's a little bit more money. It was like, it's sort of $13.99 or something right before $12.99.

You get them on sale. And it was like slightly better and the screen was a little better. And the performance was basically the same. Like they really did. I think for one minute, the M1 Pro and the M1 Air. The difference was the pro had a fan, so it didn't throttle as hard. That's right. And that was the entire performance difference in these computers.

Yeah. And so they were just like smushed together. And now I think Apple has enough M-series chips in enough configurations and enough display configurations to meaningfully differentiate the products. And so, you know, eventually they'll be in a, is there an M-4-Air? There's not an M-4-A. No, not yet. Right. So, you know, eventually there'll be an M-4-Air, but then they'll put an M-5 in the pro.

And, like, now they just have enough products, like, at every level of the computer to actually pull them apart and create differentiation. And I think that M4 Pro, if you're, you know, a college student is interested in editing video or, like, doing photos. Like, this thing is a meaningful improvement over the air without breaking the bank. Yeah. Do you need a nanotexture screen? Like, I don't know. But, like, but I think it's actually interesting to see Apple, right? I mean, this company is defined by its, like, mastery of the supply chain.

they're using their supply chain mastery to actually create reasonable gaps between their products in a way that I don't think they could quite get to before. I agree, and also it makes the whole lineup easier to explain, right? Like, I feel like on the one hand, you now have the air and the mini,

which exists kind of on the regular person computer side. And then you have the studio and the pro as the sort of obvious upgrades, although the mini and the studio are closer to each other than you should, but the studio will get an upgrade and like you get what they're going for. And then the studio and the pro are like for people who mostly need these for professional reasons and they have some upgrades that go with it, you know, more ports, more power, like all

that stuff. And then the Mac Pro just like exists off on the side. But that there is now a sort of consumer desktop and a consumer laptop and a professional desktop and a professional laptop has not been the case with Apple's Macs in a very long time. and this is like the cleanest this lineup has felt to me in a very long time. Right. And then there's the iMac,

the desktop for receptionists. Yeah, we basically don't talk about the iMac anymore. It's like, the iMac is, if you want an iMac, buy an iMac. It's the iPad mini of Macs. Pilots are walking onto planes, the iMac strapped to their thighs. Exactly.

I really am going to take apart my old iMac, make it a display, and then buy a Mac mini for it. I just need to create the time for, like, no one in my family is like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a full afternoon to disassemble a 10-year-old computer and turn it into it. I will say we got a lot of people after we talked about this,

what, last week, saying they have the same problem. There are a lot of people out there sitting with like functionally useless iMacs that are still big, beautiful displays that you just kind of stare at it and they're like, why can't I use you? And so I think if we can solve this for people, this is yet another side business that we're going to start where we're just going to fix computers. We're going to call the I Fix It Folks. We're good friends of them. And we're going to figure out a way to do this as a community. And that means David's going to drive a van around the country fixing your IMA and turning it into display. It's going to be great. Yeah, I'm into it. It's a new sponsorship opportunity. If you thought the Lightning Round was exclusive, David's IMAX repair van. Sponsor the IMac van.

It's going to be incredible. Last little bit of gadget news, we should talk about the Kindle Color Soft. Oof. Yeah, that's it. I mean, that's kind of the whole story. Yeah. Tough, tough, tough beat for Amazon,

which came out with this whole lineup of new Kindles, including the Color Soft, the first Color of Kindle. A bunch of people were like, hey, Amazon, why'd you take so long to do color? Kobo and books and others have been doing color for a while. And Amazon, Pano Spine, it came on this show and said basically in as many words because it took us this long to get it right. This is, we, we did it. Everybody else did bad color and we did good color. And then a bunch of

people started getting color softs and it turns out they have this weird like faded yellow band at the bottom. And there are there are a bunch of reasons I've seen for why this might happen. There's, there's some speculation that it's, it's a UI thing that just doesn't fade properly when you switch out of like the library view into a book. It just doesn't pull that color off the screen. Amazon seems to have, uh, kind of freaked out at this. Like, if you look at the Kindle Color Soft page right now, the reviews are really bad. There's a ton of them. People hate this thing. And there have also been a couple of other issues. Like, it was supposed to ship with a dark mode. And then Amazon just didn't ship it with the dark mode. Uh, that was like a feature that was

advertised that just doesn't exist on this thing. And they had to delay shipping. Like, this thing has actually turned into kind of a mess in a way that for Amazon, which has basically like ruthlessly executed on slight improvements to the Kindle for 15 years, is very strange. And it's super weird because I'm sitting here with like the new paper white, which I love to bits. Like that, that thing is, it's excellent. It is everything you would want like a super simple Kindle to be. And the ColorSoft kind of just looks like a swing and a miss.

Yeah. But, I mean, the paper white. is an incremental improvement, right? They made the page turn speed a lot faster. Yeah. But it's the same product. And there's the point you're making about Amazon sort of relentlessly improving the same tiny iterations. I think people buy them and they just expect them to work.

Like you expect 99.9% similar functionality out of any Kindle. 100%. Like I asked back, I was like, do you want a new one? And she literally, she looked to me dead in the eye. She reads her Kindle, Evernet. She looked to be dead in the eye and said, stop buying me Kindles. because it's the only gadget I can buy her. She doesn't care of anything else.

And she was like, stop it. Like, I'm good. I will let you know when this one catches fire. And that was the end of that conversation. And I think, like, the, that's the new paperweight is that, but slightly better in a bunch of ways. Which is, to some extent, like, it's what Becky and what a lot of people want from a paperweight, right? Like, go faster when I press the thing to change the page. The color soft is the big change.

It's supposed to be the new thing. And you have to get that right. Yeah. Especially if you're going to come up. out and be like, oh, we, we took a long time to do this, but we think we've gotten it right. There have been all these... Also, you're in our DRM jail, so you will only eat when we feed you. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a tough look, and I think it's going to be really interesting. There's this new scribe coming out in a few weeks with a bunch of, like, flashy AI stuff. Like, they pitched this as the biggest rev to the Kindle line ever. Yeah, Panos was here. He was like, I set him free. Yeah, and if you're, if you're big... first swing goes like this. That is tough.

Have they said why? It's just like manufacturing error. Do they somebody step on them? They haven't said they've they've essentially just acknowledged that it is a real problem. Our review unit has one, Andrew the Sheffsky's been using it and has seen the yellow bar. His stance so far seems to be that it is worse in photos than in real life, but it is still very much real and there.

And Amazon has acknowledged to lots of people. And according to people on Reddit, which take with a grain of salt. Amazon has actually been calling people who have left bad reviews and bought the thing to see what's going on. You get the sense the company is scrambling that this has been such a big problem.

But Amazon has acknowledged that this is a real thing and is an issue and that they are trying to fix it. Is it a hardware issue or a software issue? Unclear. Wow. Yeah. It's a bad look. I mean, right now I'm just going to open

the Kindle Color Soft page. and I'm just going to like, so the reviews are truly, truly, truly brutal in a way that like the Kindle is everybody is like, it's a Kindle, I like my Kindle. The ColorSoft, which I would remind you is $280. Way more expensive.

Currently at 2.6 stars on Amazon. Oh, it is a hardware problem. It is. We have a quote. The company is making adjustments so that new devices will not have a yellow band. people who already own a unit can contact Amazon for a refund or replacement. And the statement from an Amazon spokesperson to us, we take the quality of our product seriously.

Customers you notice, jailband can reach out to customer service team for replacement or a refund. Could be either way. Maybe hardware, maybe. Yeah, who knows? But yeah, Amazon claims there's a fix. So we'll see. Right now, you also can only get delivery. I'm seeing delivery for two weeks from now, which is a thing that has started showing up.

Amazon seems to have, like, frozen shipping on this while they try to fix it. I feel so bad for them. There's such a struggling company with so little money. I know. It's awful. Hopefully they get it together. Real upstart ebook company. Hope they can get it together.

It's funny because this was, it really was the first, like, revitalized Amazon hardware. Here we go. And there was so much enthusiasm for it. Like I was actually really surprised at how excited people were about the ColorSoft. Because on the one hand, it's not a giant sort of leap in functionality. For most people, it's just like, now your book covers are, in color. But A, for people who like carry these things around and have them sitting on their night table, like that alone is meaningful. But also I heard from a lot of like comic book fans and

people who love graphic novels and people who are like, this actually changes the kind of thing I can do on this device. And again, it's, it's 80 or 90 dollars more than the paperweight. Like, it's not a small choice to buy this thing instead of a different Kindle. And it just, I feel for all the people who have just like thought this was the thing they'd been waiting for and it turned out it wasn't. This is why you got to stick with a boogs palma, man. Do you want one? I have a Palma 2 right here.

What do you think? Can I just quickly preview my Palma 2 review for you? Yes. I picked it up to do some testing and play with it and do some reviews. And an hour later realized I had picked up the original one instead of the second one. That's perfect. Yeah. That's where we are.

That's very good. Well, I picked up my Boogs Palma 1 and then put it down and then have never picked it up again. So I'm doing great. All right. Take a break. We'll be back with Sean Hollister to talk about the PS5 Pro. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies,

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I don't know. This is, this goes on YouTube. You have to say you're 18 years old and you can't read. It's good because, because look at my, look at my complexion. It's just fine. I have a lot of additional YouTube jokes to tell. And I'm just not going to tell them. If you sponsored the Lightning Round, I will call you personally and tell you the jokes I was

about to tell. They weren't about Sean. They were about YouTube. That's the worst argument you've ever made for sponsoring the landing round. No one is going to sponsor it now. We're going to have more incoming now than we've ever gotten. We'll still will not know how to accept the money. We're going to figure it out one day.

but it's not today. All right, Sean, you're here because you reviewed the PS5 Pro, which the embargo of which was the day after election day. So while everyone else is glued to the screens, watching counts go up, Sean, I believe you were just moving back

from your television one inch at a time to see when you could stop telling that the PS5 Pro had an increased resolution in Bloodborn. I want to tell you that you're incorrect, but that was literally exactly, exactly what I was doing. I was walking up really close to my TV to see all the glorious pixels and then continually walking backwards until I couldn't see the difference anymore between a four-year-old PlayStation and a brand-new PlayStation. I love this. This is what we do here. First, tell people what

the PS5 Pro is and then explain why you were doing exactly that. Okay. The PS5 pro is Sony's new game console, which is basically a PS5 with more storage, a little more memory, and a substantially faster GPU. The GPU itself, 62% faster by Terraflops. You get rendering performance increases of like 45%. So it's not quite enough to take your games from like they weren't 4K before to suddenly they are 4K, except there's also AI upscaling on board because, of course, everything has AI in it now.

And so with that, you can theoretically get a best of both worlds experience. where if previously your PS5 game was running at 4K, but only 30 frames per second, now you can run it as smooth 60, or if your game was previously lower resolution at 60 frames per second, you can now get higher resolution and more detail at the 60 frames per second. And so you put your existing games in this,

and if they've been patched to PS5 Pro enhanced, then all of a sudden they look better or they run smoother. That's great, right? it's it's it's it's it's p.5 but better it's also seven hundred dollars that's a lot of dollars it does have the little like rib on the side it does look nice yeah it's got like a little racing stripy thing i'm i'm into that but wait shan this is the thing i've been trying to figure out about the ps5 pro it feels like there there could be three different kinds of games for this one is like game that is not aware of the existence of the ps5 pro it's just it's just a game it's

It's a PS4 games, a PS5 game. The other one is like a game that already existed that has been like upgraded in some way to be ready for this. And then there are like theoretically games made with the PS5 Pro in mind. Do all three of those things exist in the PS5 pro world? Like if I put in a game that just does not care about the PS5 Pro at all, is it going to look better? In many cases, it won't look better. if it doesn't know that you've got a PS5 Pro in there, but there are so many edge cases here.

This is a very difficult review to write. Okay, so we have, let's start off with the obvious. Like, are there new games that are only for the PS5 Pro? Will there be exclusive games that only run on this? Probably not. Sony has not said anything to suggest that that will happen. They will probably save those for the PS6 whenever that comes out. And even those theoretically, maybe they'll let those run on a,

a PS5 and a PS5 Pro as well, you could theoretically now have a be in a place where games are like PCs. You get your new PlayStation, they look a little better. You play the old PlayStation, they look worse. It's all X86 under the hood now. It's possible. It's all AOD chips under the hood now. It's possible. Has Sony actually done that? Not quite. They would, of course, like you to buy games again and again and buy the updates for those games. So to some degree, that's not happening. I mean, there are barely even PS5 only games, right? I mean, I'm looking at the list. of PS5-only games, and it is just not that many.

There aren't PS5-only games, but there are a lot of PS-5-only versions of games. So you put the PS-5 disc in, like you were getting a different and better experience than the PS-4 version. Absolutely, 100%. Like, that is a much bigger difference, also, than the difference between PS-5 and PS-5 pro.

Okay, so the second question is, you've got no exclusives, no exclusives for this. But then you do have games that do not necessarily need the patch, is. They don't necessarily need to develop or put in the extra leg work to make a game run better because some PS5 games have an unlocked frame rate. Now, most of the time, you're like, a console experience. It's going to be a smooth 60 or it's going to be a smooth 30 FPS. The developers

decided we're going to lock it there so you don't have up and down in terms of the performance. You get a reliable frame rate. But because there's so much difference in power between PS4 and PS4 Pro and PS5 and now PS5 Pro, some developers are like, well, no, if we leave our games in this PC-like state, where if you just throw more performance at them, they'll be better, there are a handful of games like that, digital found retested, you know, Cyberpunk 2077. And it's like, oh, okay, that works. But there's this other wrinkle in here, which is that if you have a TV with a variable refresh rate on it, especially one that can go all the way up to 120 hertz,

you put a game on this with that unlocked frame rate, and now your game that was only running 30 frames per second could run 40 or 47 or something like that. If you play this exact same game on a TV with a locked number of hertz, a locked refresh rate, you're only getting the 30 or the 60. If you can't hit the 60, you're at 30, you know? So we're in that place where if you have the best TV, and you have an unlocked frame rate game,

then you don't need a PS5 Pro enhanced patch to get some excellent enhancements out of it. Most of the time, though, you're going to want these patches. Is the market for what you just described 11 people? I don't know. I'm not a guy with a variable refresh TV, but like... But that's your fault.

That's a personal failing of David Pierce. I don't disagree. Nobody should buy this in less. they have a 65-inch variable refresh rate, HDR, probably OLED TV, that they sit at least, that no more than eight feet away from. You know, they're sitting close to this screen.

Preferably like five feet, maybe three. Three would be good. I'm sitting in front of a 32-inch 4K monitor, that OLED monitor. It's a beautiful alienware monitor. And I like the PS5 Pro. lot on this screen. So, but that's, that's actually, I think, a good point because you, and you, you make the same point in the review, which is that you basically find yourself using it like a

gaming PC. This is not like a plop it in the TV entertainment center, sit back on the couch and game kind of thing. This is like, sit three inches from the screen until your eyes bleed kind of quality. This is the same argument we had about the steam deck. I mean, people love the idea of a gaming PC, but they don't want all of that hassle. And the Steam deck is like, here is so much less hassle. Take it with you. It just works for the most part. Even though it's running Linux under the hood, these Windows games just work.

Just start them up. We guarantee that these ones will work. And Valve doesn't always guarantee them properly. PS5 Pro. Plug that into your desktop monitor. Pick up your dual sense controller. It's amazing controller. And these games just work.

And they look beautiful. Right. This is why I bring this up because I think if you look at it, that way, you're no longer competing against a much cheaper, almost as good PS5. You're competing against a way more expensive, way more fiddly, way more complicated gaming PC. Wait, so, Sean, you mentioned this in the review. You said this is like the power of a mid-range gaming PC, right?

It's somewhere in there. Is that so much more complicated and expensive? A mid-range gaming PC. Yeah, you have to run Windows. Exactly. That's really it. That's really it. That and ports, I mean, Sony has ported a lot of good games to gaming PCs now.

It's various port studios like Nixies have done this. And some of them are great. And some of them are really, really not great. I booted up the Last of Us, part one on both my PS5 Pro and my gaming PC. And trust me, the gaming PC has more oomph under the hood. The graphics card in there, you're going to get more frame rate, more textures. I proved that out by playing Alan Wake to. But with Last of Us Part 1, it is not a good port on PC.

The little girl's hair in the beginning of the game, it looks like Medusa-like tentacles on my PC because there is some kind of buck. She is also a vampire, apparently, because she has no reflection in any of the mirrors on PC. On the PS5 Pro, the mirrors show the entire world, including her. Also, it took like a minute to load the game fully on, less than that, maybe 30 seconds to load the game on PS5 Pro.

I spent 15 minutes compiling the shaders for the game on PC, after which point it still didn't work properly. Yeah. So is it worth it? Look, I have a PS5. I play one game on it. I throw interceptions in Madden. I do that for about an hour every night.

On your frame TV, which it feels important to say out loud at this moment. On my 77-inch Sony Master Series, which does have VRR. Okay, there you go. No one in my house enjoys when I do this. there's a lot of swing in TV. But this isn't a game, I doubt

they're going to update Madden. The only thing they're going to update Madden is with, like, is more interstitial advertising to buy their weird cards. It's the only updates this game. Is this worth it for me? This feels like not at all worth it to me.

No. No, wait for a PS6. Oh, Max plays Astrobot. My six-year-old plays the hell out of Asteroot, which is the best game in the world. And the Astrobot dual suns controller is actually delightful because the light around the touchpad

glows in different colors when you play the game. The whole thing's delight. We played the hell out of Astrobot. I did not notice a difference. All right. Are there games that you feel like it's worth it? Like is there a game that it's like,

if I play this game for hours a day, this upgrade is that meaningful all on its own? You would have to be an Uber fan and it might need to be something competitive. And this is one place I didn't get to try like, Call of Duty on this with like, in like intensive multiplayer. I don't even know if there is,

like, a fast. refresh mode, but let's imagine for a moment you have like, imagine Call of Duty or really competitive fighting game comes out with an 120 hertz mode and all of a sudden this is like the best way to play outside of a PC because you actually have like lowered latency from your inputs into the thing or if they also like let you use a mouse and keyboard, maybe that's what they need to do. If they take this thing and they're like, it is your gaming PC. Every game you throw it will be better because we are issuing a man. that every developer has to have unlocked frame rate and resolution and graphic setting options on all of their games.

And we're going to let you plug a mouse and keyboard into it. And it basically is a PC, except it's a really cool and quiet and compact. This is like Microsoft's dream of the PC for years. You're describing the world's wildest Surface RT. If you're a Final Fantasy 7 Uber fan and like all you wanted for your entire existence since 19. or whenever it was, was to see Final Fantasy 7 turn into a

come to life around you. This still isn't that because it's not VR, but it looks better than PS5 for that. It's pretty muddy on PS5 in the 60 Hertz mode. Yeah. I do like the idea that this is a weird incursion into gaming PC world.

It makes it make more sense to me. Whereas when there's a PS4 and the PS4 Pro came out a little bit later, there was just some obvious reasons that I would want my I would want to upgrade my console at that time because that's what got you 4K

back then. Did you upgrade David? I only got a PS4 Pro. I still have a PS4 Pro. I bought that just because it was like there was like a Black Friday sale so I ended up with it.

But again, I played that on a 1080P computer monitor for a very long time. Do you have eyes? I say these things primarily just to piss off me like. This is, it's great. So I asked because all,

this means all of us are PS4 pro owners. All of us bought into this last gen. When the pitch was like, now you get HDR and now you get like 4K, which is like, contrived, checkerboard rendering. But like, but the thing about the thing about that you have to be a certain feet, amount of number of feet away from your PS5 to like not see the difference. You have to be within eight feet to really see the difference with PS5 Pro. That worked in the favor of the PS4.

Pro because at the distance you were away from the screen, you could tell that it was 4K, but you could not tell that it was contrived checkerboard rendering. At least I couldn't. Maybe you could, I could not. But this is not my, as everyone knows, evaluating video games is not the thing that I do because I play two of them. And I'm horrible at one of them. So, like, it's, don't take my word for it. But yeah, I agree with you broadly that the PS4 Pro made sense.

to me because it got me the two features I wanted to use on my TV. Right. Right. I want all the lights of my TV to be lit up, as everyone knows. And so it got me the 4K and it got me the HTR and that was great. This one is like, I don't know, whatever, it's more pixels. Like I always play in higher resolution mode versus higher performance mode because I, that's the tradeoff I'm willing to make and I'm not willing to make this tradeoff.

The idea that the PS5 Pro is actually meant to go up against a mid-range gaming PC and be simpler and faster and have a better library of more optimized games, kind of re-contextualized the whole product. I agree. And makes it way more like, $700 seems a lot less wildly expensive. Is that how Sony is talking about it? No, absolutely not. Well, maybe they should start.

All right, is that PS5FRA? Anything we missed, Sean, anything that stood out to you apart from that? How is the weird detachable disk drive thing? The detachable, okay, so it doesn't, not come with the disc drive, which is like, how do you call it the pro when it doesn't have this feature? How do you release this console to an audience of nitpickers who are going to care about those graphics and that frame right? But you think they magically don't care about physical media? Like, people care about physical media if they're nitpickers. And so I did have to

special order the disc drive and put it on this thing. It was so easy. Yeah, they're hard to find, right? The disc drives are not easy to get your hands on. Yeah, I would. I looked at GameStop, I looked Best Buy, I looked at Sony's side, I looked a bunch of places. Eventually, I found one at Walmart. Not a close Walmart, but I did, I did order it, it got to me next day, so good for you, Walmart.

And I guess I'll scalp it now. No, I'm not going to scalp it. You probably could. I really could. They are hotly in demand. Sony did not make enough of these things. But yeah, it clips on really easily. Once it's on there, it looks like an original PS5.

and it's smaller, you know, it's, and it's fairly quiet and not that warm. Like, I'm using, it's under the desk right now. I'm using it as a foot warmer while we do this. It's, it's currently ray tracing, Ellen Wake 2. And it's enough to warm up my feet a little bit, but it's not, they're not super toasty. And I would say it's, this is how we're measuring heat and thermals on every product from now on. Like, did it make my feet super toasty? under the desk. It's very good.

It's quieter than the original Steam deck was. The original Steam deck had a really noisy fan. This is quieter than that. Have they added Dolby Vision to the PS5 yet? If you want to play Blu-Rays on it? I don't think they have. All this extra processing power, and I just want Dolby Vision support. And then I would buy a new PS5 Pro with this

drive, and I would use it as Bluery player. I bought the Samsung OLED TV this time, so I don't have Dolby Vision either way. Oh my God, John. Sorry. Can everyone just check in with me, just send me a note and I will help you out. I'm doing my best out here. Neil, I have a 42-inch P-Series TCL I'm looking at. Can you give me a once over? I walked into a new neighbor's house today and he showed me the TV above the mantle and he goes, it's a different kind of frame TV. And I was like, I have to get out of this house.

Because he hadn't bought it. Because there's a bunch of competitors are frame TV now. And I was like, I got to go. I got to get out of here. I don't know you well enough to react to what you just said to me the way that I want to. And I don't have control over my emotions, so I have to just leave. That's good. Other gaming news,

it seems like everyone keeps expecting Nintendo to actually announce what should be called the Super Nintendo Switch, hint, but instead they've announced an alarm clock, and then I believe it was on election night, announced that the forthcoming Switch successor would be backwards compatible. Well, no, you forgot one.

I forgot one. There was also the music app, which was... I forgot the music app. There was like 24 hours of excitement of people being like, oh, my God, I keep hearing there's a Nintendo thing happening. This is going to be it. This is it. I am in Slack with Andrew Webster being like, we have to have a plan.

This is the biggest thing. And then they announced a music app. Some guy was like, I had this leak that it was going to be the switch the next morning. And Andrew Webster, he was like, my heart can't take it. Our games entered. He was so ready to write about the Switch too. and then the next morning the leak guy was like, I just got used by Nintendo so hard.

It is my favorite. I have come all the way around. I hope Nintendo does this for five more years. Just don't ever launch the new Switch. Just keep doing silly stuff. There was also a museum launch in there somewhere. Andrew got an invite to go to Japan, and it was about a museum and not the Switch to.

It's so funny. Do you think they know that everyone's expecting the Switch 2? So every other team in Nintendo is like, let's do our announcement first. They have to know. And this is now the funny. bit from a tech company in a very long time, and I love it so much. But this week, we got actual switch news, not the switch news we were expecting, but actual real switch news. But it was like,

and this wasn't an announcement, right? This was like, this was like in a briefing, like buried information. I think it was like a financial briefing. And then, and then Nintendo was like, I guess nobody noticed, so we'll tweet it now. And they did. On election night. In the middle, literally I'm sitting on my couch talking to people during election night we're tracking the returns as they come in and somebody just drops this tweet and slack and is like, did they just announce

backwards compatibility for Switch games? Right. Can I read you this tweet? As Verchcast listeners know, I like explaining how the journalism sausages made and this one is particularly good because at 826 p.m. on November 5th the Nintendo account just tweeted, this is Furukawa.

which is the president of Nintendo, Shantura Furakawa. But it just says this is Forakawa. Badass. No other names. I'm going to start all my tweets like that from now on. Does it not say, I am the president of Nintendo.

It just says, this is for Akawa. It's very good. You know who it is. What time is it? At today's corporate management policy briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will be playable on the successor Nintendo Switch.

What is the corporate management policy briefing? They had an offsite. That's what I'm taking away. from this. They had an offsite and they distributed some pamphlets and they're like, shit, this is going to leak for a cowl and get on the horn. It's either that or like an internal company newsletter that like only goes to the accounting department and they were like, ah, I hit all staff instead of accounting. Like I guess we'll just share this with everybody now. It's very good. I from now on, I'm signing every tweet from the verge accounts as this is Patel.

It's very good. It is good. But wait, Sean, if I, if I understand the news correctly, basically what they announced is that whatever is coming after the Switch will be able to play Switch games, which is a big and somewhat unusual deal for Nintendo. Do I basically have that right? Let's talk about the impact of this for a moment. So this could be one of two things. Let's go optimistic first. The Nintendo Switch, the original 2017 Nintendo Switch launched with like 12 games, all of which

were basically like Zelda and everything else. we had a headline on the verge. The Nintendo Switch launch games lineup is disappointing and needlessly confusing. That is where the switch began before it became the juggernaut that it is today, which has one of the biggest libraries

of any console ever released. It is amazing, and so the Switch 2, having that lineup on day one, would be phenomenal. The thing is, we don't know if this means it will have a cartridge slot or not.

So if it doesn't take the switch cartridges, then you're going to have to own these games digitally or buy them again or whatever you have to do there. And now we're back in the PS5 Pro. Why don't they think we like physical media space? I don't know which it is. They didn't say. I mean, I'm at, I buy the games digitally because I'm lazy.

Right? Like, Astrobot is available. I'm just going to download it. I've started doing that. See? At Luigi's Mansion. I got Echoes of Wisdom digitally, but I have so many cartridges.

The Bluey game is on the Switch at our house because no one was letting me drive to the story. It's like here and now. We're doing this, right? So I think more regular consumers have these hybrid libraries. And I think it's important for them to say like you just keep using this library

because once it's digital, it's just there, right? I mean, there's a million And don't get me wrong, there's a million other problems with this, including preservation and emulation, which we will talk about in a second. But I think from just a pure convenience or your library will be here with your new switch, I think it's starting to become an expectation, just like apps on an iPhone, our expectation. Like, I bought all this stuff. I'm going to get the new device. It's just going to be here. I want that so much, and I want it to be portable and preservable. And it's nice. You know, it's nice when you fire up your PS5 Pro and you're like, all these PS5 games are there and all your PS4 games. that you bought in your digital library,

but it's what's extra nice. When you can take all those discs that are on your shelf and also stick them in there. Why not both? Hopefully both. I mean, it's Nintendo. They're going to do some weird stuff.

That's, you know it's true, no matter what here, the Switch. Historically speaking, Nintendo has kind of gone on both sides of this, right? Like, if I remember, right, the Wii you played most, or at least some Wii games, but then, like, you're talking about

complete break to the Switch. Like, yeah, just, And, like, you go all the way back, and, like, the N64 was very much its own thing. It's not like those giant-ass cartridges went on to the next thing. So I guess it would be hard to put odds against what it seems like Nintendo might actually do here. Yeah, like the portables. It's been pretty good in the portable space. Like, if you bought a Nintendo DS Lite, you could play DS games on that.

You could also play Game Boy Advance games on that, which was basically an entirely different system. you couldn't put original Game Boy cartridges in there or Game Boy Color cartridges but you go back a generation before that the Game Boy Advance you could put Game Boy Advance games Game Boy Color games

original Game Boy games into that they would all work you go up to the DSI all of a sudden you've got just DSI and DS you don't get Game Boy anymore so they kind of like they try to do like one to two generations usually of backwards combat

and then occasionally like you said with this N64 they're just we're done but even like the GameCube you could stick a Game Boy player onto the bottom of that stick your cartridges in. So maybe there'll be some offbeat solution. That's the most Nintendo possible outcome here,

where they're like, here's a thing, but we'll also sell you this weird arm attachment that lets you play all of your other games. It's made of cardboard. Did you ever have the Nintendo robot for the nest? This just made me think about the original Nintendo robot. No.

They made a robot and I pushed the buttons on the... It was... Really? Look it up. It was... Yeah, it was ridiculous. A ROB. I wanted one so bad,

and I finally got one, and it was so disappointing. Like so deeply disappointing. Shocked. We are talking about emulation. We're talking about this stuff. Sean, we should end by talking about your story. You wrote about Nintendo going after YouTubers who are streaming games,

talking about game preservation. There's a lot of action in this front lately. And that's all right next to, I know, companies like Ambernik, which are just selling hardware emulators free and clear on Amazon with apparently no repercussions. Talk about this story. and then let's talk about that bigger picture. What is going on to Nintendo on YouTube right now? Yeah, so Nintendo, and I've written one story, but there's more in the works, I think.

Nintendo seems to have decided it wants to make an example out of one particular YouTuber, and it may be targeting others as well that we think there may be a copyright troll on the loose, and that's what a future story is going to get into. But this one guy is named Russ Crandall. He runs a YouTube channel called Retro GameCore. And the weird thing about Nintendo targeting him is that he is known for advocating against piracy. He shows up all kinds of genuine switch cartridges

in his videos to show you that he's not just like ripping games off the internet, although maybe he does some of that on the side. But he wants you to know that you can do this somewhat, legally, or so he says, by making your own backups of your games, putting them onto flashcards if you want to, and then taking around your entire library of Switch games with you that you have on genuine cartridges. This is possible now through a particular device that Nintendo really does not want the world

to know about. And so in a new example of the Streisand effect, they decided to target this guy. He is not somebody you would necessarily want to target if you're Nintendo, though, because he's a very interesting and likable person, I would say, who has an audience that understands him as an educator who, like, teaches them how to use things rather than boasting about how he pirate stuff. He also happens to be a New York Times best-selling cookbook author, a 22 veteran of the U.S. Navy, and all kinds of other things that you can read about in my whole whole. story. Yeah. It's a good story, but it does seem like if you're Nintendo and you want to go like full scorched earth on this kind of thing on the internet, like you can you can use copyright to pick that fight. But that doesn't seem like what Nintendo is doing here. It has instead picked a small series of very specific fights with a couple of emulators and now with this one YouTuber. It's

not like the stories we've heard over the years about, you know, companies that just go and issue mass copyright strikes for everyone using footage of any of their stuff, which is a thing that has happened a few times on YouTube over the years. That's not what Nintendo is doing here. And it's hard for me to figure out what it is doing. I want to say that the common theme here is Nintendo is just ridiculously less tolerant of people cutting into its current gen console profits. You want to talk about old games. You want to talk about, you know, you want to show off emulators with Game Boy games or SNES games or N64 games. You want to build emulators for those things. Nintendo's generally going to leave you alone. But once it started,

once we started seeing not only Nintendo Switch emulators and Nintendo Switch games all over YouTube playing on Nintendo Switch emulators, but the very latest games, the Zelda that's going to come out this week or just has come out this week. Here it is running in, you know, at a high resolution on a PC, look how much better it looks than it looks on the actual switch hardware. Maybe you should be playing it here on a PC instead. Or maybe you should take your whole library of switch games and play them on a steam deck, which is not only looks better than it does on the switch, but is portable like a Nintendo Switch. Is the Steam deck better than a Nintendo Switch? wouldn't want people to walk away with that idea in their heads.

This is where Nintendo started stepping in. And so we saw a while back, before it fought against Yuzu and Riojinks, the two big Switch emulators, before it did that, there was a while, I want to say maybe about a year ago, where a bunch of folks showing off Switch games on Steam Deck

started getting little notices from Nintendo that maybe they might not want to do that. and some of the folks who were, you know, the YouTubers who were more wanted to stay on Nintendo's Good Grace, it just went ahead and voluntarily started making some of those disappear. But they told other creators in their sphere, Nintendo did this thing to me, and Word got around that this was happening.

I think Linus Tech Tips did a video at one point, where they were like, we're going to call out this trend, and here we're going to blur out all of our footage of Switch games. We're going to be like, hey, look what we can do Nintendo. you're not going to go after us, right? And I don't think they did. But after that kept on a pace on YouTube, and we kept seeing more and more,

here's how you emulate your Switch games on Steam Deck, Nintendo went after the emulators. The software that's making all of that possible. And Yuzu was the biggest emulator, and there were whispers in the community that they were testing their emulator on games that had leaked out early. games that were not even out yet, a new Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

Allegedly, they had it and were making sure the game was ready for it before it launched at retail. And so that, regardless of whether, you know, Nintendo could pin that on them or not, seems to have inflamed Nintendo's Fury to go after them legally. And so Yuzu went down, Ryujinks went down, There are lots of forks of these emulators floating about the internet, but they are more in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the space now.

They've slunk back into the shadows for the most part. They're trying to keep a way lower profile. Yeah. It's funny. One of, you know, a verge trope, a thing the verge believes, uh, is that copyright law is the only law on the internet, especially when you have a platform, because it's the one law everyone agrees can restrict speech. And so you've got a process on YouTube where. big company can just say, like, remove this speech. And you can fight it. It sounds like from your story, Crandall at RetroGames is going to go fight it, but it's expensive and hard. Actually, I think he's not. I don't think he's going to fight it. He's not going to? Yeah, we started out, in my story, I say that he's waffling. And as of my last communication with him, he was waffling. But I rewrote this draft a few different times. Originally, when I spoke to him, he said he was

70%, 5% likely to fight this. He talked to, he talked to lawyers like, yeah, I've got a fair use case. I don't think he wanted to go to court over it, but he can at least submit the counter notice to the DMCA takedown, which lets YouTube off the hook and then, you know, puts the, puts the spotlight on him, and then wait and see if Nintendo sends him a cease and desist or goes ahead with a lawsuit. He was in that place where he was like, maybe I'll try my like, 75% likely. I was talking to him later and he's like, well, maybe it's 50-50.

I mean, it's expensive and complicated. Yeah. Right? And you got to be buttoned up. I mean, this is a thing we talk about with independent creators all the time. Go be successful.

But then there's a whole universe of infrastructure that you don't have because you don't have like a media company. Like we have lawyers. Like we get letters like this all day long. And I'm just like, cool. Our lawyers will see you now. and then our lawyer's like, Howard, do you want to fight?

I'm like, fight all the way. Because, you know, you get to say that sometimes. And that's fine, right? Like, that's the infrastructure of having a big company around and, like, having a reputation. And, like, a lot of the lawyers on the other side

are repeat players. So now everybody has relationships. Solo creators on platforms are just sort of at the mercy of whoever wants to go after them, including Nintendo. And then they have to make big, meaningful decisions

about whether they want to, like, fight for emulation software being displayed on screen is fair use like this is very confusing well and this is what the emulators themselves have gone through too

the question of like yeah even if we think we're right and we would win at the end can we literally afford the fight and I think the bet a lot of companies make not just Nintendo but one of the bets it seems like Nintendo is making

and has been right so far as that the emulators are going to decide they can't afford the fight right I talk to a lot of emulator developers for a previous story about what happened to Yuzu and what was happening to Vuechinks. And every one of them told me, no, I would have to roll over if Nintendo came after me because there's no way in hell I'd have the resources to fight anything. Or, and honestly, litigation is exhausting.

Right? Like, Nintendo's going to, you're fine, I'm going to fight. I'm going to spend the money. I'm going to hire the lawyers. Nintendo's going to come after you and say, give me every piece email that has ever mentioned anyone involved in the development of this emulator. Show me all of your history, your DMs on GitHub. Like, whatever it is. Like, I don't know if GitHub has DMs, but you understand what, like, show me, like, involve all of these other people, because these are almost all volunteer projects in one way or another with lots of different contributors.

And it's like, oh, this is going to be exhausting and not everyone's going to play ball. And it's all, like, yeah, I feel for these communities when they come up against this stuff, but it's also just very true that the only mechanism. we have in the United States to handle anything as copyright law and copyright law is like the bluntest instrument and you know YouTube's approach to copyright strikes like you get three

and you're dead like that's it yeah I think a lot of people need to know like they a lot of people don't know Nintendo does not serve you with a copyright strike the copyright strike is a YouTube platform feature where YouTube can

make it easier on themselves so that they don't have to face down any lawsuits from Nintendo, they can say, hey, creators, we're going to make this three strikes and you're out rule so that you police yourselves. That way, we don't need to get involved very often. We'll automate it as much as we can. Come to us if there's a problem and maybe we'll reach out to Nintendo on your behalf, like they did in this case. YouTube did reach out to Nintendo, according to Russ Grandal, and to see if they would pull their strike willingly once they knew who Russ was and what kind,

what Russ stood for. And Nintendo was like, no, we're not gonna, we're not gonna pull this. That sounds right. By the way, that entire system is called Notice and Take-Town. It's in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And every platform has it. YouTube just has one expression of it

and YouTubers running into that stuff. When they make the video about it, it's like when they get their wings. Like, more people are familiar with copyright law because of YouTubers complaining about copyright law, then like, know the speed limits in their own towns. And this is all just a thing. Anyhow, it's fascinating.

Sean, you're going to be writing about this more because it feels like emulation is a real crossroads. It really is. Well, I cannot personally write about the Apple aspect of it. It is fascinating, utterly fascinating, that this was the year that Apple said, hey, you can go ahead and put retro game emulators on our iPhone platform.

We're going to explicitly carve out something in our App Store rules for that. despite the fact that as far as most of the lawyers are telling me are concerned, putting games, your own retro games onto an iPhone, it's probably not technically legal. Well, that sounds like a long story that we should publish and we should come back and talk about. Let's take a break.

We'll come back with a lightning around. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse.

And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority.

That's this week on America, actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus.

and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. The Lightning Round, unsponsored, although there might be some news on this front.

You can sponsor David's mobile repair bin. David will come to your house and take any iMac you have and turn it into a monitor. David's iMacMobile is still very much up for sponsorship. Have you seen the little board? I think West Davis heard about it. There's a little board that lets you turn the sunflower iMac G4 into a monitor. And he has he did it to his like 20-year-old IMAC G4. And I immediately went on eBay and looked at 20-inch IMAC G4s, which are 20 years old.

And they are so expensive. Really? They're crazy expensive. I mean, they're just, like, beautiful furniture. They're, they're, they're one of the only gadgets that old that I would happily just, like, put up on that mantle behind me. Yeah. Well, I think, you got to, we'll link Wes's write up, but he was like, why did I do this? Because it looks awesome.

Yeah. It's good enough. It's just a honor. It's great. All right. Lightning round. We promised some hot domain name chat. David, what she got?

I'm so excited about this. So, uh, the other day this week, Sam Altman. just tweets chat.com and you click on it and goes to chat gpte. It turns out there is a whole fascinating story behind the fact that if you go to chat.com, it leads you to chat gpte. And the story in a nutshell is Darmesh Shah, who is the CTO of HubSpot, bought chat.com for $15 million, $15 and a half million dollars, like last year. And then two months later sold it for, we don't.

don't know exactly how much, but he said a profit and enough of a profit that he was able to give $250,000 a profit away. Do with that, which you will. My guess is it was substantially higher than $15.5 million. I cannot prove that, but based on what I know about domains and the fact that chat.com would be very highly in demand to a large number of people, I suspect that was very expensive and that he made a tidy sum of money in two months on his $15.5 million dollar domain name purchase. Anyway, it is now the domain name that leads you to chat GPT. Just to clear up a thing that has gotten very confusing on the internet, chat GPT, not rebranded, still called chat GPT, still a thing a lot of people know, I still hate the fact that GPT is like

a term that has entered the public lexicon that we all just say now. Hate that. But it is still called chat gpt but chat.com now goes there and i think that is going to be the kind of product domain for that thing going forward which is fascinating in a bunch of different directions it says something about how important websites still are in the world it says something about how important dot com domains still are in the world it says something about why opening i raised six and a half billion dollars because domain names are expensive like it's just there's just a lot going on in one purchase. But this all happened about a year ago and it just rolled out this week and I think is is now going to be one of the bigger domain names for a pretty long time. It does seem like

Darmesh also got shares of Open AI, which is fascinating because it's not a public company, but it's about to become a for-profit public nominee. There's a lot here. He should read that. He put up a tweet being like, it's everything, here's the whole thing. And there's a long prompt for ChatGBT BT that helps you. He's like, it's a prompt that GPT-O-1 does a really good job of reasoning through, and that ends with how much do you think he sold the chat.com domain for? What percent of that was in shares of OpenAI, provide an approximate range and share reasoning?

But he doesn't show the answer. So it can just hallucinate whatever you want. It's very good. So, I mean, that's wild all the way around. It's not like Chat, GBT, the most successful consumer product in a long time was struggling for brand recognition. It is also now baked into iPhones, or will soon be baked into iPhones. So the idea that they need a domain name is just like pure vanity, it feels like.

Like they have the distribution that they want. But it does seem like as they go towards being this new kind of for-profit company, that they're just going to become more consumer-friendly in a variety of different ways. Yeah. I mean, I've been saying this on a show for a while now, but I think the thing that is happening right now is that Open AI is being lapped as a product organization. by a lot of other folks. Like, Apple is building better products

around chat GPT right now than Open AI. Let's not be, no, you sound drunk. That's what I'm, that is the lowest bar in history and it's still the case. Like, this is,

this is where we are. And I think... Give me one example of Apple building a better product around chat for you than the open AI. It's easier to get to chat GPT on an iPhone. But that's just a pure distribution advantage. But that's my point, right?

I like, the better example is, uh, Google is doing much, more interesting stuff on top of Gemini. If you had said that first, I wouldn't have accused you of drinking on the job, David. This is why you got to lead with the hot take and then pull it back. This is what we do here.

No, but I think the actual real example is Anthropic and Claude. Anthropic is just building vastly better consumer products on top of Claude more quickly than Open AI, even though OpenAI typically has been first to a lot of the underlying technology. But you're starting to see this shift where, like you said, chat.com becomes just a more understandable way to get to this thing than anything else. Like one thing somebody said to me a long time ago was that just being able to put a simple domain name on a billboard goes a really long way.

Like just, just to be able to just like you can imagine the billboard, right, that it's just like a pure white billboard and it just says chat.com on it. Like that's powerful in a way that like opena.com slash chat gpt is not powerful. And there's just a bunch of little things like that. They've launched this new set of models that are starting with 0.1. instead of GPT-40 turbo. Like, they're getting slowly better at putting this in front of people

in a way that is slightly understandable. That only goes as far as your products go. I will say chat.com 100% sounds like a 1990-stating site. That's, I mean, that's just what that sounds. I mean, it does. Great. And I met my wife there, to be honest.

Rename ChadGBT to plenty of fish and we'll be good to go. shout out to Casey for the wife joke wait do you want to know by the way i plugged all of this into chat gpt all the stuff darmesh said to do i just did yeah and the it gives a lot of thoughts and then the conclusion it draws is darmesh likely sold chat dot com for around 20 to 30 million dollars with 25 to 50 percent of that amount in open a i shares ordinarily that's based on nothing and i wouldn't believe it but that that's what he told us to do so i think yeah you can take that as something like the truth.

And if that's the case, and he did it a while ago, which it sounds like he did, that man has made a ton of money on this domain name. Because like what happened to the valuation of OpenAI with this new fundraising? What is what, like, this was a damn good domain name purchase. If indeed it is what ChatchipT says it is. There's so much better than Tobacle.com, which I simply let expire. You're missing out. Do you think they're going to rename Chat Chitabot to just chat?

No, I don't. I think chat chagipt is actually against all odds a very good brand. People know what it is. I think it actually explains itself better than, like, Claude. And so there is a, it is sort of KleenexE in the AI world right now, where, like, people know it better than any other AI product. And, like, if you can make Google work for 25 years, you can probably make Chad GPT work for 25 years.

And I think they were. Is that a problem for them? I thought the famous thing about clean. was that Kleenex did not like that Kleenex was the generic word. Oh, you were saying Kleenex. And I was like, I don't know what David's talking about. Kleenexie. That's what you've been saying.

Oh, boy. We all need to go outside. Has it been a weird few days? Is my brain mush? Yeah. If I had to unearth stories from 2016 to 2020 and be like, oh, I used to know a lot about this? Yes. Clean.

ex. Yeah. It's a classic. There was a defrag program that everyone loved. Yeah. No, but, Sean, to your point, I think, I think there is something to that. I think it is, that's like real sort of champagne problems stuff when you become so big that other people start associating knockoff products with your product.

Like, everybody wants to have that problem, even though that problem is kind of annoying. And I think. And even though that, just be clear, that problem is also fake. Kleenex owns its trademark. They have not lost the rights to the word Kleenex. But the idea that you go see any tissue in the store by any brand and you're like, oh, it's Kleenex is like you can see how that's a problem for Kleenex, but I don't think Kleenex is upset about it.

I think they're doing fine. There's a, well, a, they made like a musical about it. Or one of these companies with one of these names like this made an entire musical about how you're not supposed to say, you're supposed to say something else, which is why they'll say facial tissue. That is a, this is a horrible tangent. And now it's time to talk about the Matter smart home standard, which is my lightning round night on.

Matter 1.4 is out. We're two years into this. I will tell you that I, needed a smart plug for our Halloween decorations, and I bought just the regular Miros home kit ones, and the Maras Matter ones, and the Matter ones were so finicky that I just sent them back. And I was like, well, this still isn't ready. And that's kind of where I'm at with Matter. But Matter 1.4 is out. Gen 2, he wrote about it. She's been tracking every ounce of changes to the standard. As always, with Matter updates, there's more devices. So there's heat pumps and

solar panels. They did robot vacuums. This stuff is all happening. They still don't have security cameras. The reason I want to talk about it is one, the vocabulary is amazing. And I need to explain the vocabulary to explain the thing that is good about Matter 1.4. So in the Matter standard, every smart home ecosystem is called a fabric. You follow me on this? So Apple HomeKit is a fabric. Amazon Alexa is a fabric. I don't know why they picked fabric.

I'm guessing it's because the radio standard is called thread. Yeah. But they don't all run on threat. It's very confusing. They're all called fabrics. And the big thing, the big, big thing in Matter 1.4 is multi-admin across fabrics, which is yet more vocabulary. But all it really means is that when you set up all of your devices in Apple Home and then connect to Alexa, they all just go over there. So you don't have to set them up in two places at once, which is a thing you would have thought they would have figured out from the beginning of.

matter. Yeah, I just assumed that was how it already worked. None of this, none of this worked to the beginning of matter. Like, the border routers between Wi-Fi and thread weren't incompatible, that the off was incompatible. Like, none of this stuff worked. So they've got, they've had the standard on the market, which is, you know, Apple kind of like really pushed this. They've worked with Amazon. They've worked with Google to get the standard out. It's built on HomeKit in a lot of ways. And the idea is all of these smart home devices should be compatible with everyone's ecosystems. And For about two years, what that has meant is there's more devices, but they're really only compatible with the one you choose to make them compatible with. Right.

If you have Google Home stuff and Alexa stuff in your house and HomeKit, you kind of like pair your smart plug to one. So you have more choice because the matter accessory makers can just make one thing. But you don't actually get more compatibility. What you just described is directly against the whole point of matter. Right. So they have finally done the thing. They did matter now. They did the thing.

They're calling it enhanced to multi-admin. It lets the thread border routers. Thread is the low-power wireless signal that all the stuff is supposed to run on. So the border routers that bridge from thread to Wi-Fi are now compatible. So you can have an ERO and a HomePod Mini and all this other stuff. And they will bridge to thread and make one big thread network instead of multiple thread networks, which is what they've been doing up until now. They are doing a better job of managing Wi-Fi network.

routers that have thread routers in them all the stuff needed to exist but the main thing is bridging multi-admin across fabrics which is just platforms and that means you can set it all up in home kit and then you can buy an amazon Alexa and be like i already have a matter i already have all the stuff and it will just figure it out now is any of that going to work will it import your rooms and your device names and all the stuff that you need to like really make that work unclear Jen is very good reporter. She asked the matter people this, and they did not say. I really, really like Jen's whole quote in this story.

I'm hearing it in her British accent right now. Matter will make everyone play together nicely this time, promise. Yeah, Bluetooth is going to work great next year. That's where Matter is. It's in the zone. But I forgot to mention, by the way, the reason I've been pointing out it's called Fabric this entire time is this is called Fabric Sync. Which is nothing.

This thing should be called like needle or sewing machine. Like there's a bunch of, there's so many things we could do here. But if you're going to commit to this stupid bit, you have to commit to it correctly. And the quote from the, call it like color match. Like I listen, I have ideas.

And the quote from the connectivity standards alliance spokesperson here is, if a new device shows up on fabric A, it can automatically be added to fabric B. However, it is unclear whether the correct name and location of the new device will automatically go to the other platforms. so you have to enter this manually.

That will be up to the platforms to implement. So another year, a matter 1.5, everybody. Bluetooth is going to be great next year. But this is the thing. We're so close. It's all coming in a focus now, right? You buy a smart home device, you just add it to one system.

Suddenly you can just talk to your Google Home and access that device. This is the thing everybody wants. So close. We are in that funny moment now where it's like if we could just pretend that every smart home gadget that had ever been made

didn't exist and start from scratch. We could build the good things so quickly, but because we did the good thing so late, everybody is having to back their way into making this make any sense in a way that is just going to make it worse for everybody for a long time. Like every story about matter getting better makes me want to buy smart home products less. Because I'm like, this all sounds great. And I have absolutely no belief that any of it is coming to anything that I own ever. Look, David, you just keep looking at your garbage TV.

And I'll let you know when it's time. By the way, I want to say thank you to the dozens, if not two dozens of people who wrote to me and Joanna about smart garage door openers. And the people in particular who mentioned the Rat Go product, which stands for rage against the garage door opener. Amazing. Incredible hobbyist project name. It is a hack that gets past the Chamberlain Security Plus Protocol, which it is true that Joanna stood on a ladder and installed one of the MRAS things. And she has a chamberlain thing, which DRM's the button. the button on a chamberlain.

This is the power of monopoly. The button is DRM'd with the security protocol. So it's awful. It's all ridiculous, but there's a hack called the Racka. Rage against the garage opener. And now she's ordering one of those, I believe. Love that. This is our community.

You're our family. All right. No matter what happens out there, we've got your back. And Joanna is literally texting me photos of herself on a letter. It's very good. All right, Sean, what do you got? I also have a mayor house in my garage that I need to install. and hopefully get around the Chamberlain TRM button.

But I've also got a story about Nvidia, a company that made $16.6 billion in pure profit last quarter, has decided to cap the game streaming hours on G-Force Now, its cloud gaming service, for its whales. I don't know why they're doing this. They are doing it in the best way possible. Believe me, I will tell you all about it. So first off, it's a 100-hour cap per month.

So you have to play more than like three hours every single day of cloud gaming, which is a lot of cloud gaming to get to this cap. And they're not going to instill that monthly cap until January 1st, 2025 for new users. And I think it'll be, yeah, 2026 for existing users before they lose their playtime. So if you get in now or if you've already been a user, you don't have this monthly cap until an entire year from January. In addition to that, while some people worried that they would lose their founders' memberships, that they would suddenly have a cap on their founders' memberships that were promised to have a certain quality of streaming for the rest of their lives as long as they maintain their monthly dues. And videos come out very recently in an FAQ and they says, founders, as long as you keep paying,

you won't have a cap either. So, founders are taken care of, existing customers are taken care of for a year, new customers can get taken care of for a year if they start early. lots of lots that they've gotten out ahead of this they're telling everybody it's clear their messaging is clear they're doing a good job compared to most of the companies that we needle for this but i don't understand why they're doing it at all because the only people they're going to hit with this are the whales who i would assume are their most vocal and passionate supporters of this service once you got a whale man you just keep going after him Yeah, just keep raising prices. That's so it goes. You've never owned a casino. But they're not charging more.

Why don't they want to say, hey, you know, well, you can pay more for the unlimited, but they don't have that as an option. They're just like, no, we're capping it for everybody. So I actually, in a funny way, I think doing what you just described ends up being a worse PR move to basically say, oh, you want the unlimited thing. Now you have to pay more for it. You're going to piss people off more that way than doing what Nvidia did. I still, I have two thoughts on this.

One, maybe Nvidia should make better chips that do all this stuff more efficiently. This sounds like an Nvidia problem, not an anybody else problem. You got a bunch of money. Maybe you should make better chips, Nvidia. That's just thought. Thing number two, and this was everywhere in the comments on this story, and it was my reaction too is just like, oh, God, another really great reason to not bet on cloud gaming is, like everywhere you turn, it feels like something about this deal is not living up to

its potential. And it's, I mean, it goes back to the same stuff we're talking about with even just downloading digital games. Like, there is this sense that all of this could be ripped away from me at any time. And none of these companies are doing anything to make that not feel like the case. And even this, I agree with you that this is a relatively small thing and it will not hit that many people, but it's just another one of those things that's like maybe don't bet too much on this being a good thing for you forever. I wrote a piece three years ago, that the only way cloud gaming is going to succeed is if it removes all of this friction.

And it theoretically could. Like once upon a time, you could just press a button on a web browser and you'd be playing a game instantly in your web browser, no problem. On a Chromebook, Assassin's Creed. Yeah. But I wrote, I just put a list of bullet points.

These are all the things that go through people's minds before they sign up for cloud gaming. What if my connection isn't good enough? What if my home networking gear isn't good enough? What if I live too far away from the servers? will it actually have the games I want to play? Will there be enough of them to justify the fee? Will developers bother to port new games over?

Will they run as well as if I just bought a console or PC? Will I need a special controller or a dongle? Will I go over my data cap? Will I be able to play with my friends who are in different platforms? Will I lose access to my games if they lose a distribution deal or shut down the servers? Will I have to wait in line to play the games? Can I get my save games? What about the outages?

Are they hiding how well these games will run? What if the company decides it no longer wants to be a game company, which has happened to several of these platforms now. There's just so much uncertainty going in and just one more piece here from InVVIA. You've sold me. I'm buying a $700 PS5 Pro. I'm sitting two feet away from it.

Yeah, every time we talk about this stuff, I'm like, I'm all in on Blu-rays again, I'm all in on game cartridges, and I'm buying a console. Like, it's the only way, turn off all the internet and just let me play games offline. It's going to be fine. Yeah, homesteading, but for video games.

Yeah. I'm going to grow them myself outside. It's too bad though, because it works so well, and those people that Nvidia are capping know it. Yeah. Is G4 now a success? I mean, you mentioned how much money they're making, but they're making money selling H-100s to meta. Is G-Force now a success for them? We don't know.

I'm guessing it's got to be a cost for them, you know, because they have massive hardware investment and infrastructure investment to stand this thing up. So theoretically, they could say, oh, yeah, we've got a data center that can do this AI thing or it could also do that G4 Now thing. Maybe they're starting to build it that way. But last time I looked, there were special cloud gaming-specific data centers for this thing, laid out in a particular way with particular chips. It also kind of makes you wonder if they're capping it at 100 hours a month, what are the whales playing?

Like the top 1% of GForce Now users, like, how many hours a month must they be playing for Nvidia to decide that it has to have this hard cap? It's got to be a lot. Like, if you have a bunch of people who are at like 102 hours, you're not introducing this cap. They're like, they found somebody who is just like has the thing on 19 hours a day, 31 days a month, and they're like, we have to make this stop. I wonder if people are just like leaving it on to, I don't know.

Maybe they've figured out some workaround to mine Bitcoin through this. I'm not sure. That sounds right. I mean, that's the sort of thing I would use you for now to do if I knew how to do any of that. And I think we're all worried about NVIDIA's ongoing survival as a company. So I hope this works out for them. Yeah. Data caps are back, baby.

You wait. They're coming. This FCC. They're going to do it. All right. We got to wrap up. We're way over. Sean.

Thank you so much for coming on. There's just a lot on the site this week that isn't politics. Go read it. We had a good week on Theverge.com. And we're back next week with even more. That's it. That's the show. Not going to 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 Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.