The Vergecast - The real cost of the PS5 Pro

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Nilay, David, and Alex talk about the new PlayStation 5 Pro — why it's so expensive, why it doesn't have a disc drive, and why it made so many people feel feelings. They also talk about the fallout from this week's iPhone launch, the first days of the Google ad trial, Kamala Harris's earrings, Huawei's triple-folding phone, and much more. Further reading: PS5 Pro: all the news about Sony’s next console Sony’s PS5 Pro has a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling The $700 PS5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive Sony’s new PS5 heralds the end of disc drives Here are all the games enhanced by PS5 Pro PlayStation 5 Pro comparison: What’s different from the regular PS5? Sony will sell you a refurbished PS5 if you don’t want to drop $700 on a Pro The people want disc drives. Microsoft lays off 650 more Xbox employees No, Kamala Harris wasn’t wearing these audio earrings These are real earrings — and also real earbuds Google Pixel Watch 3 review: third time’s the charm Huawei’s new tri-fold phone costs more than a 16-inch MacBook Pro Here’s a closer look at the Huawei Mate XT triple-screen foldable The Meta Quest 3S leaks in Meta’s own PC app Google and the DOJ’s ad tech fight is all about control Google dominates online ads, says antitrust trial witness, but publishers are feeling ‘stuck’ WhatsApp will send messages to other apps soon — here’s how it will look The US finally takes aim at truck bloat Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from your notes Facebook and Instagram are making AI labels less prominent on edited content 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. Hello and welcome to the Rochcast, flagship podcast of advanced rate tracing, the technology that everyone flammers for every day.

Kids going to school, screaming for advanced rate tracing. Taylor Swift, get out of here. It's advanced rate tracing. She also wants it. She does. Yeah. Loudly and proudly at the VMAs. Yep.

Demanding. It's all she talks about. Hi, I'm a friend, Eli. Alex Cranes is here in the studio. We're together. Yes, this is so exciting. And we're not CGI, even though the ray tracing looks like we are. Yeah, look at those reflections. Oh my God, they're incredible. No one can stop them.

David Pierce is here. You know how Tom Cruise has like made his thing that he is the enemy of motion smoothing? Taylor Swift should do this for ray tracing. Taylor, if you're listening, and I know that you are, please make a thing where you come on at the beginning of every video game and you tell me how important it is to turn on ray tracing. this is this is your moment to do real good in the United States of America be like pick visual fidelity over performance post about that with your cat Taylor I will say what I will say that in the comments of our YouTube there's a sort of

raging mini conspiracy theory about whether David is actually in a living room or in front of a green screen and I'm net we're never going to tell we're never going to tell we're also never going to tell you how long this show is supposed to be we're just going to keep saying we're going over and David is going to keep clipping a little bit. Not all the way. I don't think I've ever seen David sit on that couch. Yeah. No one's ever been back there.

What couch? All right. Wait, what? But once we get ray tracing and ABLE on David, you'll never be able to tell if he's going to look so sick back there. Full volumetric static image of a living room. We're going to send millions of dollars.

Just so many like, oh my God, the sun hits it, the reflections. If you're looking for more mediocre Star Wars shows, just wait until we enable David's volumetric set. Oh, there we go. Now, okay. Liam, this just changed everything. Now, instead of having my one maybe real, maybe static background, I get to have a new one every single podcast. Yeah. We're doing this.

I do, I will say, I have a, I think, like, eight foot wide green screen underneath this couch. You're giving it away. Well, I guess it's a second eight foot wide green screen. Right. Right. It's the green screen behind the green screen. But the setup to make it work with my computer was so complicated that we just gave up. Which is why I don't have a more interesting background, unfortunately. Well, soon we'll get your running in the full volume, and John Favro is going to direct you in a meta quest.

Deal. I'll wear the helmet. That's how he directed the Lion King here. I'm into it. I think it might have been a rift, actually. I was like, he wore a headset? Yeah, because when they made the Lion King, it's like all, it's all. CGI. So he directed it in a headset. I don't know exactly why he was in the headset, but there's a lot of photos of him in a headset

directing a long-king. Okay, there's actually news talk about, including a legitimate ray tracing segue to what is arguably the news of the week, which is the PS5 Pro. Not the iPhone. But the iPhone, I guess the iPhone happened this week. This is a lot. If I'm being completely honest, based on just the vibes on the verge.com, the PS5 Pro might be bigger news than the iPhone, which I think says something about the iPhone this year,

but also says a lot about how a lot of people feel about the particulars of the PS5 pro. I just legitimately forgot that I was the iPhone. In my mind, we did a Vergecast. The week ended. I took a flight home. It was a red eye. I was asleep. I woke up in New York.

That's a new week, everybody. Like start the calendar right over. But I think you're generally correct, David. Like, you know, in the room, it's like very hard for me to tell. Yeah. Because it's just an artificially hype environment. But out here in the world, even other reporters I've talked to, interest is low. Yeah.

It's not great. Not only that, but it was so, like, disappointing that I think the general Apple vibes are bad because of it. Like a lot of people all over the internet and some of them at this website that we work at called the verge.com who are generally people who like Apple and think stuff that Apple does is cool. are like turning on the company like to the point where it's like is this an inflection point where Apple has lost the plot like that's a thing you see over and over and over now yeah it's wild I would say I saw John Gruber who I saw at the event he John lives at charmed large style he came to the event with armed only with a pen and a notebook I love that incredible I mean I think he had a phone on him but he had no laptop but he tweeted afterwards Apple misses Steve Jobs like everyone else

or some variation in that sentence, which is a lot. That's a big one. M.G. Siegler, who is also a friend or an entire blog post, about half one needs an editor. It has too many products and I can't say no. And part of his thesis was they're too stuck to the way Steve Jobs would have done things and they need to change for, they need to make more aggressive changes. His example, of course being the iPad, just let it run macOS, which is kind of like a hard diversion. You know, it's like extreme nerdery.

but you see that that vibe is out there, right? This is a company. It's no longer saying no. It knows it's about to make more money from services than the hardware. So it's just making all the hardware without a point of view. I don't know, man. I think the thing that's weirdest for me is they're going to ship the phones without the software. It's sloppy feeling.

And there's just something about that that they wouldn't have done that before. Yeah. Well, it was only a couple of years ago where they did that whole thing where they said, we're going to slow down on all of our software because we are going too fast and we're getting too sloppy. And then to see them just kind of do it again, but even more aggressively is surprising. Yeah. So we'll see. And there's, you know, I think a big question that I have in general is whether any of the AI stuff comes to anything.

We're going to talk about some AI products later on the show. There's some interesting ones that have come out. Some stuff is happening that is legitimately interest raising, whether it's going to make all of the money that the AI industry is currently spending. who knows, but Apple's in a rush to ship this stuff for what? I don't know. I agree with you, David. Like, to my mind, the PS5 Pro is it's generated more interest because it is a more considered product.

It has a stronger point of view and what's going to happen next. Whether you agree with that point of view or not. Yeah, yeah, you can disagree with it. But it's a stronger statement of like whatever, whatever Sony thinks is next. while Microsoft is making the opposite statement, if like maybe we should shut this down, right? And like there's some turmoil happening in that industry and there's like winners and losers.

And it just seems at least on the smartphone side. And we have covered smartphones since the day the verge started. Like our, we began this thing in 2011 because of smartphones. And it feels like whatever wave that is has crested into it like a steady state. Even though like just over there are some of the most interesting smartphones that have ever existed. Like the trifold. Yeah, like the honor trifold got more. It was at the top of CNBC.

That's how I know things have like broken out of gadget world is like when more mainstream outlets cover things in weird ways. Yeah. And so you looked at the top of the CNBC website on Apple Day or the day after. And it was like the normal stuff. Like rate cut? No. Yes.

Who not? Like at CNBC. And then just in the middle of that was $2,800 triple fold smartphone. And it was like, that's the keyword. Like a bunch of finance bros. for like, hell yeah. I want to spend $3,000 on an insane smart. They want to watch the charts go up and down.

Yeah, on the biggest phone they can. And it's like that is more interesting to people than whatever is happening. It wasn't Apple will announce his iPhone 16, right? And there's something there. It's a gimmick, who knows, right? We'll see. But there's just something. Something is up.

Yeah. We're going to, you know, we're going to carry on with the coverage. Ideally, we will review the phones. We'll have something to say about them. Like I said, I'm still open to audience feedback on how to cover phones that are launching without the core software. We've gotten a lot of that feedback, by the way. And I think it's interesting to me,

and I would say the plurality of the folks who've reached out to us, agree with me, that you in particular are so hung up on this software that hasn't launched. Because I would say there is very little indication that anything in that software is going to, like, meaningfully change your life in any way. Like, this is the AI story right now, is you have to tell people you have an AI,

strategy and what cool products are there that exist that are mattering to lots of people all the time. The thing is you don't have to do that unless you're totally behold. You get fired and your company goes out of business if you don't. You are so beholden to the stock market. You're so beholden to your shareholders that you are not actually considering what is a good product. And that feels like what we're budding up against is people chasing the shareholders at the

expense of the audience. Oh, I agree. I think it's the whole thing. actually shipping is all downside. Like, when, when you put this stuff out in the world, that's when all the bad stuff happens.

It's like, it's like the old Silicon Valley line, right? Like, don't start making money because then people start asking why you're not making more money. Like, don't start shipping AI because then everybody will ask why you're not shipping better AI.

Like, this, Google has been through this 10 times over at this point. Like, it just keeps shipping stuff and it's broken and people freak out and it's bad and it is just nuking its core business in the name of chasing AI stuff. And people are starting to watch.

wonder why. But if you don't tell investors that you have an AI strategy, you won't have a job long enough to see any of it through. Yeah. So it's like if I'm Apple, I think this is a total conspiracy theory that is not actually what's going on. But like it is a, it is not a stupid idea to slow roll this as much as you can. Talk it up and don't ship it is like a pretty solid save your ass strategy. But it's totally out of character for them. It's totally But AI has been out of character for everybody. Like, so many companies have not been themselves since chat GPT launched. That's true.

I will say I've been plagued with a pixel 9 pro these past few days. And every time you pick up that phone, it's like, do you want me to do something for you? Have you met Gemini? Here I am. Would you like to add yourself to this photo? You're not in this photo? Put yourself in the photo. Yeah.

And you're like, can you just turn off Bluetooth? And it's like, I can't. So sorry. It is like a, it is like a version of Clippy from hell. You know, it's like. Do you want me to add some text to this email for some reason? I could. Yeah.

Why not? It's fine. It's just a very, it's a weird time. That said, we'll pick up the Apple stuff later. One thing to note, I hear what you're saying that it's weird that I'm focused on the software as in shipping because I'm Mr. Review. It's in the box. One thing that did get announced just in the time between the event and today, the FDA actually did approve the hearing aid features for the AirPods too. That's very cool.

Continue to believe will be the biggest, the most impactful announcement of this event. Yes. So that did happen. We assume it will ship later this fall now because they have the clearance. That's a big deal. But that's it. We're waiting on everything else. All right.

Let's actually talk about PS5-4. What is it, Alex? You know, have you ever looked at a computer and you're like, what if this computer was a little cheaper? Yeah. It didn't do as much stuff. it played video games really, really well, but it's also twice as much as another thing we have

that plays video games really, really well. Yeah. And it just plays it a little better. Is this just like a GPU upgrade for the PS? It basically is. Yeah, it's a GPU upgrade. It's got a much bigger GPU. They are claiming much better ray tracing, and also their version of DLSS,

which is an Nvidia thing that upscales. So much more intelligent AI. But it's not actually D. DLSS. It's not actually DLSS because that's just their AMD based refund. Right. They're AMD based, but not actually the AMD version. This is a Sony version of the same thing, AI upscaling.

And those are kind of the three big deals out of it. And the other big part of it is that the price, it's $700. The normal one's about $450. And so it's not quite twice, but it's expensive. Yeah. And it's also got, you know, no disc drive. and people are having a lot of feelings about the disk drive. Well, you can get an accessory one, right?

You can get an accessory one, but it's kind of like, remember when they took the disc drive out of the MacBook and everybody lost their mind? It's the same thing. It's like physical media. I love physical media. It feels like physical media has been like on an uptick. And now it's like, oh, so I've just been $700 for this and then another $80 for the disc drive. What this feels like to me is as if Apple revved the Mac. Pro and was like this thing is sick fastest ever everything is amazing. You're going to love it. It has one USBC port. Yeah. That's it. Enjoy. Like it doesn't make any sense to me that you would make your highest and most impressive looking thing, which has a Venn diagram of users that I would say overlaps fairly aggressively with the section of users who care about things like physical media and having a collection of discs and cares about the liner notes and all this.

of like those two people are the same person. And so the idea that you're going to be like, we're going to give you all the power in the world, but no physical media is just so strange to me, even if it were going to make this thing more expensive. If it was $800 and had a disc drive, I would understand it way more than I understand, $700 and no disc drive.

But you can spend $780 and get the distrave. Yeah. But I think it's the fact that it's called the pro. It is so much more expensive. And then it doesn't have a, disk drive. So that's where people are getting concerned. But at the same time, as we talked about earlier, this is where they're heading, right? Like, they've been heading this way for a long time. They don't want you to have a disc drive. They don't want you using the desks. They certainly do

not want used games to exist. Yeah, they want you buying the thing on their store, and then when it doesn't work, going and buying the new upgrade on their store over and over and over again. They're very happy with that. And most of the developers and stuff seem pretty fine with that. It's just the real hardcore fans. But the hardcore fans so far are really excited about this thing. Wait, I'm, I like a disc drive, I like musical media, I like owning software. I think my prerequisites on this are, you know, my cred is there. You've talked about it a bit, yeah.

You know, I feel, so let me just make the argument here. Yeah. The PS5 in particular, from inception, has been all about wicked fast SSD speeds. Yes. So you were never playing the game off the optical. You're always copying it to the SST. So the disc is like a totem. Yes.

Right? You're always downloading the game. You're holding it and you're like, yeah, I can do this. Theoretically, you can play parts of the game off of the disc. But for the most part, it's downloading it on versus. You're definitely at least copying enormous chunks of the game. Yeah. And then you have to do your day zero updates and all of that stuff.

So what I'm just like if you, like I'm a person with a vinyl collection. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, I like to put on a record and then like shake my fist at the man because they can't, the internet has nothing to do with listening to music in that case. I think the concern here is that now you can't, like if you want to play a PS4 game or something, if you want to play an older game, you can't, you know, you have to pay extra for that. If you want to watch a movie, which like the PS5 has historically been a very good Blu-ray player, you have to now pay extra for that. And it's got that pro moniker, so you're like, okay. I see what you're saying. It's just like value for dollars.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just like, it's a squirly, squirly space. But like the PS5 Pro is really cool. But I'm like a graphics nerd. So I'm like, yeah, this is sick. But also, I don't need to spend $700 on this thing. I've got a PS5 with a disc drive. It rules.

The thing that actually gets me is right next to this, they released Astrobot, which is like game of the year contender. I've been playing Astros' playroom with Max. We're like going to, we bought the controller, which is adorable. we're going to play Astrobat whenever she tires of Astros' Playroom. The thing about a six-year-old is like, yeah, just keep playing this game. Yeah, just the first five minutes over and over and over again. You're good, actually. We don't need to introduce new ideas or spend money.

But like, from what I can tell, Astrobot is the reason to buy a PS5. And it is not the reason to buy a PS5 pro. It just feels those things feel disconnected to me in a way that seems as ridiculous. Yeah, because the Astrobot is focusing in kind of like the Nintendo play style of Nintendo is all about It doesn't care about the graphics as much. It cares about how the game plays. Whereas PlayStation and Xbox have historically been like, we care about how the game plays,

but also we wanted to look fucking sick. Yeah. And in this case, they're like, yeah, like we've got this one side where we have this astrobot and you can use the controller in all these really incredible ways. It feels like a switch. It feels just new and dynamic and fun. And then we got this like...

Other thing. Yeah, this thing so you can go play Grand Turismo. What's the best... What's the best argument for the people? Yes, five for a. Do you really like Spider-Man 2? And that's like the core argument for the PlayStation. Yeah.

The PlayStation 2 is literally had the Spider-Man font on it. It really is like, like the core argument is, do you really like The Last of Us and Spider-Man and some of these other games that have actually implemented ray tracing? And do you really want to, like, you really, really like that? And if so, go get this because it's going to look a little sharper. it's going to look a little cleaner. I think if you are playing on a con or if you're playing your console on a monitor,

it makes sense. Sure. If you're playing it on a big TV and like a huge sunlit room, don't do this. Like that's just a waste of money. You will not be able to appreciate a single bit of this. I will say I think the most compelling argument of this. And I think, is this name Mark Sernie, the lead architect? Okay.

I can never remember if it's Matt or Mark. It's like the same. It's two different people in my head. but anyway, it's Mark, said basically the thing that they've seen is that everybody is forever making tradeoffs between performance and fidelity, right? So like, do I want it to look good or do I want lots of frames? And that is, that is like kind of the gaming performance tradeoff. And with the PS5 Pro, you don't have to make that tradeoff, right? Like, you can have very high settings at very high frame rates. That's not a thing that most people will notice, but it is the

kind of thing that matters, right? Like, it's, I, I, I, I, I, I, I see that as the same argument for like why the two of you spent six times as much money on your televisions as I did. It's not for everybody. Because my eyes work, David. Yeah, then why not spend $700 on this? And I happily set it to Fidelity mode and I let it drop frames while I try to figure out the new kicking indicator from that in every year.

It's fine. It's impossible to use. But I think to your Astrobot point, I think the thing that is odd to me about this launch is that there isn't one sort of great example, right? There's a bunch of games. They've actually, I think, upgraded a lot of games. There are a lot of things that will look slightly better. But this is the sort of thing that I think works when you can come out with like a sort of

next generation looking game. I think that's increasingly hard to do. We've seen this since, since like the PS3 of saying, oh, I think we're kind of hitting our limit on how we can make, how good we can make these games look. And the difference between a PS4 and a PS5 game, I'm so sorry to a lot of people out there who are going to be really upset with me right now, isn't actually that different.

Like, yeah, I will notice it. Neil, I will notice it. A small group of fans are really going to notice those differences. The majority of people are just going to be like, yeah, that's the game. Sometimes it's a little blurry, sometimes it's not. And the majority of people don't care about that. And they're really trying to push this idea.

They said, oh, a lot more people are choosing the performance mode over the fidelity mode. we wanted to make them not have to choose. That's why we did this. How many people? Like, I don't think it's the majority of people. But that's fine, right?

This isn't supposed to be for everybody. Yeah. It's for professionals. Yeah, but it's for professionals. Who is the professional? This is just for Ninja. That's the only way. But it's not like there's any pro features here.

The pro feature is we put a bigger GPU in because we could fit a bigger GPU in. And one of the critical. The original PS5 was it and the Xbox were underpowered as soon as they arrived because they were based on that current gen AMD technology. And so it's like they've always been a little behind the times, but the exchanges that the games just play. And so now that PlayStation is putting all these options in and making you think about these things, you're starting to think of it less like a console where just you plug it in and go. And you're starting to think of it more like a PC. And I think that's a dangerous place for Sony to be historically the famous PC Pro successful PC program over there.

They really know how to do it. But like it works for Microsoft. It makes sense for Microsoft. Microsoft's doing the exact same thing. Both of these companies are pushing these things towards PCs. They fundamentally are. All the technology in them or PC technology. They're based on AMD's technology.

Nintendo's over on the other side saying, what if we just did cool shit? What if we made good games? Yeah. What do we just make good games? And it's a weird place that Sony is taking this. And I don't know if so, like, makes sense for Xbox. It doesn't make as much sense for Sony. I will point out that the $80 disc drive is sold out on Amazon and Best Buy in Target.

This is the Venn diagram. Well, it also works for the PS5 Slim. So, you know, there's a lot of Slim owners out there, I'm sure. This is what kills me. The Slim not having a disc drive, I completely understand. Yes. That makes perfect sense having it be cheaper and smaller. And for people whose games are digital,

which is most people, makes absolute perfect sense to me. This just doesn't. And in this one tiny lane, you have a group of people who will put up with a bigger console, who are likely to pay more for it, who are willing to make all the sacrifices required to get the very best possible everything out of it.

Right? The only reason to buy this is if you want the 10 out of 10 experience. Let me get in here with my hot tape. Okay. Let's go, Liam. Are you all ready? We're ready. The problem with the PS5 Pro is not that it's too expensive.

It's that it's not expensive enough. They should have released a $9.99 version of this thing, not a $700. It should actually be a PC that you can hook up to your TV and have the, like, lovely experience of just it's always working for your game. You just turn it on and start playing your game. But with the graphics that people are buying their PC games for. Yeah. Sony knows that there are a lot of people out there that care about having the best possible version of their games and they'll play them on PC. I think they've proven that they could sell a 99 PS5 to the extreme end of the market, the enthusiasts. I like that you've just pitched a home theater PC. I was

Everybody comes all the way around. Somebody at Microsoft is hearing this going, oh, God, oh God, oh God. We're going to do it again. We're just too soon. They were just too soon. They're too soon. To Liam's point, I do think the idea of play PC games but don't have to deal with Windows would be compelling to a surprisingly large number of people, which I think is also what

Microsoft thinks and can't figure out what to do with. It's trying. It's trying. I mean, I think the next Xbox. Not the next gen X. Didn't you just describe the Steam deck? Yeah. Right? I mean, isn't that that like you're on a plane, you can play PC games and doesn't run Windows, the battery life is good?

Yeah, but the Steam deck runs a, like, smartphone chip on a tiny screen. It's like a potato compared to the PS5 graphics wise. All right. Here's my poll for the Vergecast audience. Let's assume you own a PS5. What would you rather spend money on? A Steam deck or a PS5 pro? You're honest, I'm very, I feel like just based on this conversation, that's more of a choice than we are. Right. No, I think that's the wrong question. I don't think this is like every year when people are like, should you upgrade from the iPhone 15 to the 16? Like the answer is no and no one is doing that. The answer is if you have a PS4 or a PS4 pro, like to me, the interesting upgrade path is if you have a PS4 pro and you've been sitting around waiting for the PS5 pro to buy one, is this the thing you were waiting for? If you have a PS5, I would bet the number of people who are like, oh, throw my PS5 in the trash. I'm buying a PS5 pro to get slightly better ray tracing. It's like, vanishingly small, but I don't think that's who Sony is going for here. But I also think the PS4 Pro, I was one of those people.

I had a PS4 Pro. I really liked it. I have one right here. Yeah, it's great. Got a PS5 because it was new and I wanted to play all the new games. If you're on a PS4 pro, you're not having to pay twice the amount. Like the PS5, the PS4 wasn't this high a markup between it and the regular PS4. Didn't it also come out like right after the PS4?

No, it took a while. Yeah, it was a couple years. And it was a big upgrade. Because you were doing 4K, you were doing like a lot of big stuff in it. Whereas this one is just like, we've, do you know what DLSS is? We made our own weird version of it. Yeah. And like that's a lot harder to sell to the normal, like the normal folks.

I say because we're all big nerds here. We love having a good point. Look, I watched these comparison videos. I waited for a digital founder to do its thing. Yeah. And I was still like, yeah, I'm good. I'm horrible at Madden and I play Astrobot. The whole meme right now is people watching it and like pausing it.

and taking their glasses off and on, trying to see where the differences are between the two versions. Because it's really small. And yeah, it's noticeable, but it's really small. And most people don't care that much. They just want to play the game. I will issue my almost weekly reminder that you can't evaluate the quality of anything on your smartphone screen. Yeah. You just can't.

You can't look at stuff on a smartphone screen. Just like when people try to, we do it all the time. When we're like, listen to these speakers and we record them and then people watch them on YouTube on their smartphone speakers. I don't know what's happening there. That's nothing. That's just like a handshake agreement through the internet that we're going to feel some vibes. Yeah. That's not right.

Just believe us. We're telling the truth. That's how I feel about those videos videos. I don't know. I'm very interested in what is happening in the broader gaming market because it feels like that shakeup. The split is like really happening, right? Like we knew this PC moment was happening for consoles. But this in particular, like it was a moment with PS4 Pro because you were like,

okay, now we are fracturing the console market. And the way the console market typically isn't fractured. The whole point of the console market is no fracture. Like everything is, you go, you buy this thing, it does the games. And now you're getting all these different skews, sort of like Apple, just introducing all these different skews. And like, yeah, okay, you're going to meet more of the market here. But you also lose why people like this product to begin with, which is simplicity. I wonder if what we're seeing is just this, like, incredible bifurcation of the gaming industry.

where on the one hand you have the handheld revolution, right, which is like, I think is going to eat the low-end consoles alive. It's already happening, right? Like, if I just want to play Astrobot, the idea of me needing a gigantic box to do it, I think, is like, that's ending very quickly. Then the flip side is the high-end stuff is going to get higher end. So it feels like we're going to end up in a place of, like, music streaming and vinyl and nothing in between, right? You're either going to have this sort of, like, beautiful, bespoke setup with a lot. of very specific things, but it is going to be extremely high fidelity and wonderful, or we're going to lean deep into convenience and streaming and everything is going to be lower quality, but that's what people want. Well, I think there's a third prong here that kind of affects it, which is that they own so many of these studios that are making these games, and these studios aren't making games for anybody else, right? Like, Astrobat, you can't go play that on anything but a Sony device, because Sony wants

to keep you in their wheelhouse. and that's, ooh, the FTC, it's going to have feelings. I think if you get, if you're like, look, we're basically PCs, we're doing all of this stuff. Also, you can't play Last of Us on anything else. People will start having feelings about that in a very real way that I'm kind of curious about. Well, I think Sony is allowed to have its first party studios, which has been whittling down. It's when Microsoft bought Activision and said, we're going to close off Call of Duty that you've got all the regulators. I would point out that ever since Microsoft actually closed that Activision deal, it is.

has just been clown car city over there, just banging into walls and falling off cliffs. It's great. They announced just today that they're going to lay off 650 more Xbox employees. This is just a wave of layoffs and strategy shifts, all after they fought too thin nail to buy Activision because something. Because they want to have, everybody wants their little fiefdom, and you have to go and buy the console to get into play the games,

rather than just play them on a PC, which they can all theoretically. do because architecturally they're all the same. Well, sure, but I'm, Sony at least has a, well, first of all, it's the winner of this generation. Yeah, because it's got the good games. If you don't count the Switch. Like, it's, it's, it's one every generation that it's been anywhere near, right? And the new Switch we think is coming out that will probably win whatever generation it's a part of.

Yeah. The cycles don't quite let up. But Sony has beaten Microsoft pretty soundly this generation. I hear what you're saying, like, the underlying software or the underlying hardware architectures are similar, like they're AMD chips. But the PS5 is an opinionated device. Yeah. Right?

Sony has a lot of thoughts about the PlayStation and what it's for and what the game should work like. And Mark Serney has a lot of ideas about settings. Right? Like, there's a vision there for better or worse, and you can not feel it and you can be mad about the distrive. But Sony has confidence. Microsoft has confidence.

I think Phil Spencer is a confident person. they have a lot of ideas. But actually, it feels to me like they knew they were losing, they wanted to make a big swing, and they have just whiffed on a bunch of their big swings. They whiffed on cloud gaming, which was supposed to be the biggest swing of all. They haven't pulled it off yet. This Activision deal, you know, they let Call of Duty be the sideshow, but it was really about Candy Crush. And Phil has said this to us.

Mobile gaming is the future, and no one has a foothold there. We got to win there. That was also kind of a weird side. show of cloud gaming. And none of that, I don't think anybody, any consumer, if you're a, if you're a gamer, please, please use the feature on iOS where it makes your emails a little bit nicer. But then email us. I'm curious, did Microsoft buying Activision improve anything about playing games for you? Like, I don't see it yet. And it's true, the deal is pretty new. Yeah. But you see that what's happening over there is they are looking for a new strategy or a new

vision. And I think he needed that before you made one of the biggest acquisitions of all time. But I think Sony's muddied. You talk about it's got this big clear vision. It's muddied that vision. Because on the one point, yeah, you have Astrobot. You have the Last of Us. You have Spider-Man. You have these games, these first-party games that look gorgeous or stunning, play great on this thing, have really kind of unique things focused on that controller. And then you just have everything else. And Microsoft has kind of said, we're going to be everything else. We're going to own that space. We're going to be the PCs. We're going to bring, you know, kind of gaming PCs into the console space. And Sony's now saying the same thing. Even though they got

this lead, they're saying, yeah, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to muddy the waters here. And I think that's where, like, the PS5 Pro doesn't have that clear vision you see in their games. Oh, I think it has one very clear vision. It costs more money. Costs so much. Right now if you're going to buy a console, is there any, and you already have a switch. Yeah. Because that's what you should buy. If you're going to buy a console, you're going to buy a PS5. Yeah.

Right? They're the winner. That's what most people have chosen. Unless you don't want to play those first-party games. If you just want to play Call a Duty and stuff, go get an Xbox. Most people are so going to buy PlayStation. Because all their friends are on it. To the extent that there is like a default choice, it's the PlayStation.

Yeah. Right. So then you have a PlayStation and you can discount the regular one because you have your economy of scale. So you can go into the holiday and be like, here's the cheap PlayStation, like you're saying. Yeah. Get that serious ass. And then you can, but there's some category of people that will just spend more money.

And you can sit there. We had a CFO at Vox Media all the time ago. Discribe to Strabb is waiting to catch the basketball. He's like, I'm just, the money comes and I'm here to get it. And I was like, I don't think that's what a CFO does. But it was a learning experience for me. He was great. I think Sony is just like, here's a more expensive one.

Catch the money. We're just here. If you have 300 extra dollars, we'll take it from you. Yeah, that's true. This is the game both of these companies have been playing. for like this whole generation, right? And Microsoft's bet has been for years now that we are on the cusp of a giant shift

in how this entire industry works. How we play the games, where they are, how they're architected, the kinds of games that we play. Like Microsoft has been making this bet for a long time now. I think Microsoft still thinks it's right and is running out of patience for it to actually happen.

Sony is just sitting around saying, look at all this money flowing in. And then the question, will be, if you fast forward a few years, is Microsoft going to be right before it gave up or is Sony just going to have so much money at the end of it that who cares? But like, Sony is basically betting

that this shift is going to happen slowly and Microsoft is betting that it's going to happen fast. Okay, I'm going to end by saying one thing that will make everybody mad. Yeah. Or that you will completely agree with. I don't think there's a middle ground. It's weird that Microsoft has tried to run away

from the idea of the Xbox being a thing that just plays games really well for so, long. It's never wanted that. Right? It's like the whole Xbox one side quest with where it had IR blasters and H-GMI pass. Like, well, I don't, people got so mad at me when I was like, this is a disaster. My ongoing theory about this is that every once in a while there's an executive meeting at Microsoft and somebody turns to Phil Spencer and goes like, why are you here? And so he has to like explain why Xbox is part of Microsoft and eventually that morphed into like talking about Azure and then it was just toast. Right. Can we run?

This is what I mean. Like, first, like, we're going to do it. We're going to take over the, we're going to have a dish network integration in the Xbox. Like, they were all the way down the rabbit hole of that stuff. And they walked it all back to games. And then it was reasonably successful again. And then this generation, they were starting with games. And they're like, well, we lost the Sony.

We're going to stream the games from Azure. That will disrupt the whole market. And that just has not panned out. And it just seems like if they. maybe some focus on the main thing would continue to be successful. But that's back it up to the first thing and it's a how do we be part of the Windows strategy thing

inside of Microsoft. And then fast forward to this generation and it's a how do we be part of the cloud first strategy of Microsoft. I think there is a very compelling case to be made that the best and worst thing going for the Xbox team is that they work for Microsoft. I was going to say, though,

I think part of the reason they've been doing all this flip-lopping is because their first-party games haven't landed the same. like they just don't land like Sony's first party games move consoles people buy consoles for Sony's first party games

I don't know Halo was good for a while Halo name another one Halo too you see like and Microsoft went on this whole

buying spree they were like we're going to buy all of these companies and then they got they got told okay you cannot make Call of Duty

exclusive for you yeah not exclusive like first party exclusives you know The Last of Us, Spider-Man, those are exclusive.

They come to the PC eventually, and then you can sort of play it through Xbox, I think, through the cloud. But you have to wait a while. If you want to play The Last of Us, which all the other gamers are playing and everybody's talking about, you go get a PlayStation. Well, but yeah, and I think that all, like, that all sort of flows from the same circles, right? Where it's like, okay, if our job is to sell consoles, how do you sell consoles? Do you sell consoles with really good games? But if our job is to, like, increase the market share of our cloud services arm of our company, you just prioritize things very differently.

Yeah. I think Phil Sensor would take deep issue with that characterization of Xbox, but it's always a little more true than anybody wants to be. By the way, can I just read you the first paragraph of his note announcing these layoffs? For the past, this is Phil Spencer, his memo to Microsoft employees. For the past year, our goal has been to minimize disruption while welcoming new teams and enabling to do their best work. As part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure and managing our business, we've made the decision to eliminate approximately 650 rules.

Welcome. You're fired. That's tough. And then at the end of it, he's like, we've had some good days and we've had some bad days, and this is a bad day. It's like, thanks, Phil. I mean, there's no good way to write those notes. No, there's not.

I think mergers are bad. That's all I'm saying. I think generally they lead to chaos in disruption in actually smaller companies with less focus or less ambition. and I suspect that will be in the long run true of the Activition deal. Are you saying Warner Brothers Discovery isn't a good company? We got to go. We got to take it.

All right, yeah, we're taking a break. We'll talk about whatever Zaslaw is doing a little bit later. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. We're back. And we have the most breaking news of all. In the middle of our break, literally in the middle of our break, Google put up a blog post announcing the developer preview of desktop windowing on Android tablets. I know that the audience is as lit up by this as we are, but I have to tell you, this whole room got so distracted that we almost forgot to start the show again in the middle of the break.

Just looking at this blog post. It's a good blog post. If you're a Dex head, just know, your empire is falling, crumbling, brick by brick, is Google ruthlessly Sherlock's your entire, your entire operating system away from you? So basically a pixel fold, which feels like one of the hotter phones going right now. David just got one. Yep. It's sitting here in a FedExbox on my desk. Liam has a pixel watch on right now. And a pixel fold. And a pixel fold because he bought a pixel fold and now he's in the ecosystem. I'm seeing him. People are excited about this phone. And so Google, which has, Liam was trying to run the pixel fold on a desktop monitor the other day. And it was the saddest thing I've ever seen.

It's adorable. Truly this, like no, literally no affordance for running with a keyboard and display. Like, here's your pixel full. Like, here's a mediocre Android tablet. And it's still square. It was right. It was beautiful. Everything about it was great.

As you know, Samsung has decks. As Vergecast listeners know, Samsung has this thing called decks, which is the desktop mode for its phones. There's a lot of weird decks stuff. stuff going on, literally different skews of the same phone and the Samsung lineup run different versions of decks with different capabilities. Samsung, baby. It is just not a thing you can depend on. As someone who has desperately tried to live the deck's lifestyle, the only person I know

who ever pulled it off successfully is Dan Sefert, our former reviews editor, who now works at Google because Google was like, Dan, can you explain what is going on Samsung device? So I was going to ask. Yeah. So there's a man named Dieterbone. who also works at Google, who also was a big believer in window freedom, I would say. And then Dan, America's number one Dex user. Yeah.

Goes to Google. One and only Dex user. Yeah. anymore, which is weird for people that worked in media together, especially. We just don't. I see data. We talk about anything else. So I don't know.

We have no inside info, and I maintain that line because I like talking to Deeter. He's my friend. So we just enforce this. We had to like learn what to talk about that wasn't work or gadgets. Very weird. So I don't know. But I'm just taking credit for it. Yeah.

I'm saying with no, literally no evidence and actually like an ideological resistance. to knowing. Yeah. And a deep knowledge of that not being how it works. Yes. We're still taking credit. We will send our armies into your house and introduce desktop windowing. Could not agree more.

I'm into it. So, okay, here's what's actually going on. It's just a developer preview right now. They're showing it mostly in a pixel tablet. I have to imagine that this is going to be what will happen on pixel fold, which pretty much acts like a tablet when you unfold it. You can just freeform windows. You can just run Android like a desktop operating system.

You pull a Chrome window down and it opens a window with a nav bar and tabs and navigation. It should. I think there's some weirdness here between what is a Chrome OS device and what is it? Like the Google weirdness here is very powerful. Like the Chrome OS team just saw this and is like, what the hell? Or they're like, aren't we on the same team? You know it's with Google. So there's some weirdness here about just the difference.

in between the apps like ChromeOS can run Android apps. Weird that came to nothing as most of these ideas generally come to nothing. But the idea that Google is taking a bigger step forward in particular with the fold, because I don't think Android tablets is a thing really matter if they have free-form windowing, but in particular with the fold and foldable Android devices that when they're closed, they act like Android phones. And when they open, they have free-form windows. that can be useful in a variety of computing situations, that's a big deal.

Like, it feels like a big deal. They have to actually chip it. It has to, like, work. But this is the thing that everybody wants. You just carry your phone to work and you plug it in, and it's a computer. We're a little bit closer there. I'm sorry. I'm just looking at the desktop windowing thing they have,

and it feels like the person, the sample they're using here, the person is lying about going to Tahoe. this is so Gemini can summarize it yeah the Tahoe debrief and then behind that you see they've been Googling Tahoe interesting interesting they're like Gemini summarize this webpage about Tahoe an email about my trip to Tahoe like Windows

calling you out there a little bit it's good I will say yeah you're right that the they're like on a video call they're doing an email while they're searching for literally just the word to-ho. A little weird. A little weird. But these look, I don't know.

I think these windows look nice. They seem to move smoothly in little jiffs we're seeing. It's such a rising tide lifts all boats thing, too, because the biggest challenge for Android apps on Chrome OS, once they got past some of the basic compatibility issues, has been that Android apps look like butts when they're big. Right?

Like overwhelmingly. And this is a thing that Apple has had really good luck with over the years and it has served Apple really well is making apps look good at different sizes. Google has struggled forever to get developers to care about anything other than the vertical size of a smartphone. And one of the reasons people like to build apps for iOS before they build for even Android smartphones is because the screen sizes are different. Like it's so hard to build a good Android app because you essentially have to build a hundred

of them that all look slightly different at slightly different orientations at slightly different sizes. So like the idea of there just being one software of one screen size is very appealing to people, which is why a lot of people like to build iOS apps. What Google has made an effort to do over the last few years, it has not done it exceptionally well, but it has done it relatively well, is get people to build these more flexible apps that work at tablet size and they work at smartphone size and they work at the size of a laptop screen to run on ChromeOS. And so every bit of it that gets better on one of those makes it better for all of them.

Right? So like the Pixel Fold being good this year should be very exciting to people who own Chromebooks because it's going to make people who make Android apps make them better for the fold, which will make them better on the Chromebook. And every one of these pieces just gets better and better as time goes on, which I think, like, and for this, again, I can't imagine there are that many pixel tablet users out there in the world. But like this is just a step again in that direction.

Dan's just so happy. I do have one question. Does Android design, like, do they not have responsive design? Where you just like, okay, you make it? In this context, it's called adaptive. Okay. So they've been, and they've pushed that for a long time. Yeah.

But adaptive is not a checkbox, right? Like, it's not a thing that you say that make my app adaptive. Like that you have to build it to be all of those things. And that's, it takes work. So they don't have like a tool set that it'll be like, boop, boop, boop. Adaptive. So they do. You'll see some.

And this is why there are a lot of iOS apps that look the same on an iPad because you can basically just sort of like paint by numbers into a template and it'll do it at all the different sizes. And some folks do that and that's fine. But like if you want to build an app with different ideas about navigation or different animations or like literally to load a page at all the different sizes an Android device can be is a challenge, especially if you like care about how it looks and works. and then you throw in all the different devices and all the different screen refresh rates and there's just so many variables but the sheer raw like x-by-y-y size of the app has been the biggest holdup for Google forever

because it's a thing people have not invested in doing because Android tablets were not any good Android apps and Chromebooks didn't work and nobody cared about foldable phones and so like as each one of those gets better they all get better and that's very cool. I think I'm just kind of surprised because, like, in web design, we had this whole moment where everybody was like, you know, you can just download this little theme and it's a responsive theme and it's going to automatically resize it for anything you do.

And the fact that Google doesn't just have like, here's the lazy way. Well, no, but somebody built that theme. That's like, that theme doesn't just exist. Well, if you listen carefully, that's the sound of every web designer listening to the show screaming. You're welcome. I like to fix you off. You know, just the WordPress theme that just exists. Yeah.

Yeah. I paid $40 for it. Them theme for us. Thank you. From desktop mobile, we had an MDOT site for a minute, to responsive was a nightmare. Responsive design is really hard. It's really hard. It's gotten a lot easier because it has become so much more important. But it is really hard. Well, I think my question is, why doesn't Google do that work? Actually, can I tell you a fun fact about responsive design? I love a fun fact. My fun fact about responsive design is that it was a Vox Media designer, Scott Kelle.

him who invented some of the very first responsive design prototypes. Well, that's awesome. Yeah. And he was like, he's like, look at this thing. He was like showing us stretchy web windows. And I was like, make our site do that. And then the office lit into flames. You're going to talk for a long time.

That's awesome. See, that was live breaking gadget news on the rich cast. We still, our hearts still aflame when there's Android windowing. Yeah. We're still where we came from. David, I think you think that. story is very funny? I do think the next story is very funny.

All right. Make the case, buddy. Okay. So there was a debate. Well, let me back up. So there's some election happening in the United States. Actually, let me back up. So the founding.

Do we know where Trump stands in Android windowing? He doesn't like it. Which candidate do you think is more likely to use decks in the office? Neither. One of them is a lawyer. She's using like word perfect. Tim Walls. Oh, that's a good one.

Tim is definitely on like a galaxy note just because he wanted the stylist. You see what I'm saying? And he refused to up there. Yeah. Yeah. Tim has a foldable keyboard in his backpack at all times. That feels exactly right to me. JD Vance is like, here's what I want to do.

I want to, I want to nationalize I message. Like that's where his brain is up. By the way, have I told you guys about how we discovered very recently that J.D. Vance has a house like right down the street from me and there's now a secret service. Motorcade that goes by my house like almost every day. Oh, wow. That's the whole story. That's it. That's all I wanted to tell you. There's now a park that is like the size of this room that's fake behind me that is now closed because it's too close to J.D. Vance's house. And that's how everyone in this neighborhood found out that J.D. Vance has a house here. But he's never there. He's walking into donut shops across America confusing the population. Apparently one of them might be in my neighborhood. I'm going to have to start walking into donut shops every day just to see if I can find J.D. Vance. Anyway, let's talk about these earrings. There was a debate. Kamala Harris was wearing earrings and that became tech news because there was a set of people on the internet who advanced a clear.

not correct theory that the earrings she was wearing were actually headphones. And I just, I brought this up for two reasons. One, because it's not true. And this is like a thing that people have tried to do for years. The idea that the candidate who does well in a debate is being fed answers in some way shape or form is like a long-running conspiracy theory that's never proven true. But B, I think it's very funny that the earrings in particular that she's being accused of wearing, there's some strong evidence that they don't actually exist. This is like a Kickstarter company that doesn't really seem to have shipped. Like in fairness, we have not covered this company closely. So maybe there's more out there. If you are an owner of Nova H1 headphones, get at me. I have a lot of questions.

I believe you mean audio earrings. You're right. I apologize. The H1 audio earrings. They just aren't what she was wearing. Yeah, they look very different. If everybody would have been funnier if everybody's like, she's wearing beats, but they're like, she's wearing a Kickstarter project. The only similarity is they both have a pearl on them. Like, their pearl earrings. That's it. The fact that the CEO is out there being like, I can't confirm her to deny that these are our fake earrings. It's like, well, one, what are you doing?

The fact that the guy who can't ship his product to saying that. Yeah. And also the battery life only lasts two and a half hours, which means they probably would have died like mid-debatte if we're being realistic. She's putting them on right before she goes out. Yeah. Just give him to me. Let's go. She takes off her earrings mid-debat, puts them in a charging case, takes him back out. There was a very funny, in Gadgett days, way back when, when Obama was first elected,

there was all these reports that he wanted to keep his Blackberry. I don't know if you remember this. It was like frothing at the mouth, will Obama get a Blackberry? And then there was all this stuff about he would need like a secret Blackberry. It was like ultra lockdown. And he really wanted his Blackberry. and there was this company that made a phone called the sectara edge. And the CEO of that kind, I don't remember what they're called.

I don't know. I refuse to remember. But the CEO of this company is like a military vendor guy. And he's just like on all the TV channels being like, this sector edge is the most hardened military grade, blah, blah, blah. And everyone's like, Obama's getting a sectara edge. And like definitely not. He ended up like a black 308,000 that was just like stripped of its apps.

And then later on he had an iPad. And it's like, why did we spend so? much time talking about the Sector Edge. I think Josh Topolsky had a post and gadget during those days where he was like, it's not the super phone 9,000. It's in Blackberry. Like that was like the headline. It's pretty good.

Yeah. I'm learning so much about, they were not technically smartphones. The Sexsera Edge. Which was made by General Dynamic. Yeah. See, I knew. He's like, here's what we do. It's cruise missiles and this weird feature phone for the government.

Well, that was like, remember the Boeing black that Boeing was like we made a super secure smart phone? Like this is a whole. It's a whole genre floating out there. There are many stories during the Trump era that I spent too much time focused on. Fox Scott in particular. But I don't know if you remember, they would always describe him as having a super TiVo in the White House. Oh, yeah. Trump would watch his super TiVo and he kept referring to it as a super TiVo.

And like, you know, America's political reporters are not being like, what's a super TV? Like, I get it. But I was like, what's a super TiVo? Like, I've had every TiVo that's ever shipped. Which one is it? Is there, that company is now a patent licensing troll. Like, which TiVo is it, dude? And it was just a bog standard direct TV box.

And one time they published, someone published a photo of the Super Tivo remote. And it was a $4, like, white direct TV remote. But somebody, like, painted a racing stripe on it. So they're like, Super Tivo. It's just like, dude, he's got direct TV. Like, I'm aware that it can record four channels at once, but like, soak in everything. Honestly, I think if direct TV had rewritten everything. Honestly, I think if DirecTV had rebranded a Super TiVo, it would probably have been more successful.

The one Trump has. Senior Citizens of America, you can all have DirecTV together. It's a remote, but it, like, has the cover on it, so you can only hit two buttons just to make sure. It is very sad that everybody just assumed Kamala Harris's earrings were earbuds. Do you think Tim Walz has ever back to Kickstarter? That's my last question for you. 100%. I mean, J.D. Vance back to Kickstarter to it.

for the cover for the United States. Let's move on. There you go. I will cop to getting this wrong at the top of the show. I said it was Honor because Honor has also been hinting into Trifold smartphone, but it's actually the Huawei trifold smartphone. It's $2,800. It looks sick.

Again, while we got like booted out of the country, you will recall, and almost went out of business because we wouldn't sell them chips. There's like a whole thing that happened with... They'd make their own operating system. It starts all over. And now they're like three screens. And everyone's kind of like, what is? What if? What if we let Huawei back in the United States?

I want this. The world's first dual folding triple screen. So it's the mate XT. It is... Ultimate Design. It's called the Matexte Ultimate Design. They announced it on the same day as the iPhone, which is very good. It's very expensive. It's $2,800 thereabout, depending on the conversion factors we go on. That's 250 gigs of storage. Our story points out that's $300 more than a 16-inch MacBook Pro. many times can I fold up my 16-inch MacBook Pro, Nilai? All of the videos, all the assets, all the content that while you're released is just the thing unfolding and showing people

looking at presentations. Somebody got a hands-on with it, though. Somebody has a hands-on? Yeah, so GizmoChina got a hands-on with it and put in a couple of additional specs. It's only a little thicker than the Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold. And it looks like you can watch this video. We'll put it in the show notes. It looks sick. The camera. camera is huge. Yeah, that is a big camera. That's a big boy. Oh, I'm looking now on YouTube,

there are more Chinese hands-ons with this thing that are starting to trickle out. But they're all just the thing unfolding. Yeah. That's the only content that exists is a very controlled demo of a thing unfolding. What else do you need to know? That's the whole job.

Well, does the operating system do anything when you turn it into a sheet of paper? We need to see before and after. Don't worry about the process. So one of the things that I am very curious about in this next turn of phones, we've been talking a lot about pixel fold. It seems to be very popular amongst the gadget population, whether it's going to move Google's market share at all. It won't. But if you're a particular kind of gadget nerd, it is the device that runs like talking about it into lately, which is interesting.

it feels like folding phones that by fold they've reached a point where now they're just maturing in iterative steps yeah right compared to where the galaxy folds started which means apple will have one next year maybe uh in pixel folds still you can still feel the same it's not perfect but it's it's right in a way you can see that a little crease when you open it still um you can you can definitely feel it with your finger uh but it's like it's hit that point and so now are we just at okay add another one yeah do we think

I mean like I understand like the Chinese fund market and the Indian fund market are like full of these ideas like yeah do bonkers hardware stuff and see what happens markets around the world

are generally more open to weirdness just because of the way our carriers are and Apple's I message domination they're all a bunch of Vergecast stuff that means we don't get cool phones first oh no he's this one video has the guy

actually folding it and then you watch it all like realign itself. Yeah. It looks cool. I mean, Huawei did have to build their own operating system because, again, the amount of sanctions the United States government put on Huawei, just changed the direction of that company. That's fine. But it just seems like this is a weird.

You look at this, you look at how people are excited about it in a way that the first set of foldables didn't really capture, but now maybe the technology is mature enough. I think there's like also, there's a weird cultural element here too, because we're seeing all of these things happening in other countries in the United States is so focused on the iPhone and the iPhone is so stuck in in in class slab land and and like Google it's really nice that Google's coming in but Huawei's been doing this for a while a lot of these shawmi's been doing this a lot of these other countries have been doing really really cool stuff with phones that just don't come to the United States in many ways it's it's less like they're doing

weird stuff it's more like we're getting a little left behind Yeah. I mean, again, it's so hard to break into the U.S. smartphone market because of the essential duopoly of Apple and Samsung, the carriers have more or less enforced. So it goes. We've talked about this so many times. But I'm just wondering from a hardware perspective, do we think the regular folding phones have reached their sort of like, we're done with this? We don't need to figure out any basics here. Now we're just because I think a lot of people are, the folks are comfortable with that, that little. It doesn't seem to bother people that much. And they figured out the front of the phone, right? Like with the Pixel Pro, that was the thing everybody really likes about it, is that they figured out the front. So you can just use the phone as normal.

You never even have to open it up. But then when you do want to, like, have a good time. Yeah. You open it up and enjoy yourself. I don't know. David, David, you have long. Take me out of this. You have long insisted that it'll be the flip style.

Yeah. Does seeing a triple fold change your mind? It should. No. I think the triple fold is an interesting tablet replacement way more than it is an interesting phone replacement. Like, I think phone that turns into smartwatch is a way more compelling thing to most people

than tablet that turns into phone. And but to your point about the hardware, like on one level, we are getting there. Like, this stuff is pretty good. There's work left to do. They need to get more rugged. The cameras need to get better. the screens need to continue to improve.

The whole thing needs to get thinner and lighter. Like, these phones are big. They're big. And there's just, there's a lot of work left to do. But in terms of, like, can you make a phone that kind of works open and closed? Like, the answer to that is yes. Right. And I think we've landed on, especially with this last generation,

Samsung has gotten closer to the right size. One Plus is getting closer to the right size. Google is seemingly very close to the right size. I think what you're seeing from a lot of these companies and Huawei and Xiaomi and others have done this for years is like unbelievably cool really high-end tech demos that like they don't think a lot of people are going to buy this phone but it gets people excited.

It's like it's a branding exercise as much as it is like an actual phone to sell to humans. I disagree. It's so cool looking. It is $2,800. It's $2,800. Look, you put that on like a 10 year The whole point is that it's cool looking.

Yeah, a 10-year plan paying like $30 a month. This would be great. Didn't you just complain about the PS5 pros cost? If it could fold it like an accordion, I would take it all back. It was like big GPU, but also folded like this. Yeah. Yeah. You put the motion in.

I'm sold. Now, I do think we're going to hit a point where people start doing even weirder stuff with this. But also like there's a there's a, there's a thing that's coming that is a lot of new wacky experimenting in phone hardware, and I'm very excited about it. Like, it got stagnant for so long, and then a couple of people tried folding phones, and it didn't really work, and I think everybody decided maybe this isn't going to be the thing,

and now it feels like it might be the thing, and I think, like, nothing is going to beat the candy bar phone anytime soon, if ever, but the, like, the experimentation is coming back, and I think That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is all 6.9 inches, almost 7. We're starting to strain the boundaries of how big a phone can be before. I want to accordion that immediately. You know, the first thing I did in the hands-on air, just fold one.

That list of things you said about what folding phones need to get better, they need to be more durable, the screens need to be better. That's the same list of qualities that you could have applied to the first iPhone. Oh, for sure. Right. And so it's just they're on the same path. Right. And that's what I mean. Like we figured out the core technology and now we're just iteratively improving like around the edges to get them even better. That feels like a moment. I'm not sure where that moment's going to lead to. The fact that we're like screw it two screens fold out kind of feels like maybe they figured out how to get one screen to fold out in that now we're just seeing what else we can do. Put another fold in. I'm just dying for the three screen phone. It's so done. Just just think about the difference in how this. screen looks and feels from the first Z-fold to now, right? Like, just the sheer amount of, like,

material science improvements that have been made to get to this point is crazy. Those things were, like, plastic. And was it, it was Dieter, right, who, like, accidentally peeled part of the screen off thinking it was a screen protector. Like, that was not that long ago. No, no, Dieter had a tiny amount of dust in his review unit that broke the screen. And then somebody else peeled off the screen protector. And then Samsung delayed the launch of the screen. That was not a long time ago. And now, like, four years ago. Yeah, like that, the speed with which that stuff, and that was always the gating factor, right?

Like, the question was not, how do you build a good hinge? It was, can you make a screen that works like this? And works means a lot of things. But I think the answer to that is like, yes, and we're almost there. And so I think you're right that, like, the path now is way more about software and it's way more about use cases and it's way more about details. And, again, it's way more about due. people actually want this, which also is, can you make this thing for $800 and not $1,800?

Yeah. And those are like, those are big hills to climb, but they are, I think, like, I don't know, to just ruin the analogy, they're like hills you can see the top of. Whereas I think not that many years ago, like, can we make this screen not fall apart? Was genuinely, I think, kind of up in the air. And now you can just do it in a little accordion. Just boop, boop. You just walk up to any phone you see and fold it in half.

Dude, I'm telling you, there's one shot in this Huawei video where it's open on It's open on two, so it just looks like a normal foldable phone. And then he just kind of reaches below and pulls up the third part and the UI just gloriously expands. Yeah. I've watched that like 25 times since we've been sitting here talking. It's awesome. It's sick. It's coming.

I'm telling you, it got more attention from a certain audience on iPhone data than the iPhone. Yeah. There's something to that. All right. I want to end by putting two Google stories together right next to each other because I think they're kind of really interesting when you put it right next to each other. We've actually talked a lot about Google on this episode. They seem in one way to have a bunch of confidence. And maybe that confidence is just like, we have to put Gemini in front of you.

So here it is. But we reviewed the Pixel Watch 3 this week. V reviewed it. She gave it an 8. People like it. Yeah. People really like this watch. It is a confident product.

The integrations across the sort of pixel and Google ecosystem are solid. We've been talking a lot about the pixel 9s. For all of their general issues with swerving reality into chaos because of their just absolute nihilism about AI image editing, like they're good phones that people like. And the PixelWatch3 is a good watch that V really likes, and I think people who buy into the ecosystem aren't going to like it. There's something happening on that side of the house for Google, where they've fallen into a groove. The hardware is good. There's a thesis in the software, even if the...

Every time you pick up a pixel phone, it's just like Gemini. Like, there's still a thesis. There's a point of view, which I think is very strong. They haven't had a point of view for quite a while. That's that's a house. On the other side of the house, well, their search engine just got rules to be a monopoly. And they are on trial again right now for antitrust for their ad tech stack. And, you know, there's trial, it's witnesses, there's documents, Lauren Feiners in the courthouse covering it for us.

It's all very boring. It's a bunch of suits talking about display ads in the web. Like if you want to go to sleep, programmatic advertising is the thing to talk about. But what's fascinating is, one, in all the documents, all witnesses, the way Google's business people talk about its business is ice cold. Oh, yeah. Right? There's no Google cuddled bugs there at all. It is literally, how do we own this market?

Here's the value. The value is, there's a line in one of the emails. It's like the value here is that we own everything. like that's that's the thing that makes this powerful as we own every part of the stack and so that they're just saying it out loud and then you have the clients the actual people buying advertising being like Google's technology here is bad we're just stuck with it right and like the core ad tech server that Google's been using to serve all the pragmatic ads all over the web they're like this is bad like this is like 20 year old technology that we would like to get

away from but we're stuck with it because there's nowhere to go and that is a weird dynamic for Google. On the one hand, with the AI stuff with Gemini, maybe they got, you know, caught on the back foot, but they, it provided some amount of focus for the company, it seems like. And it's reflected in these pixel devices. I think you can see it. Like, there's, there's a reason for them to be the way they are. Yeah.

Which is really interesting. I don't know. If not for chat, GVT, would the pixel nine have been, had this much focus? I don't know the answer to that question. Like, they weren't on this path all by themselves. Like, it took this weird sort of diversion from Open AI to bring them here, but it worked. And then on the other side of the house, the money, people are like, this is a monopoly. We don't like using this technology.

And it feels based on what happened in the search trial, like the government knows how to beat Google. This is the case. I would remind everybody that Google tried to avoid a jury trial by just sending a check to the United States government for what it calculated to be the maximum amount of damages. On its Wells Fargo account, they're just like,

here's some millions of dollars. Is this good? We'll put it in the show now. There's a picture of the check. You can just look at the check. Google sent a check. That's how monopoly works, right? Here you go.

Literally how monopoly works. Like, they were so desperate for this not to be happening that they just wrote, they just fronted the money for a settlement. And so I just, I would just juxtapost

those two things. I think it's, you see this company, it kind of like at war with itself a little bit because the thing that is funding everything is at all of this risk and the future is like coming into focus over here. Except that in so many ways so far all of Google's future stuff has just been ancillary to the other thing, right? Like I think the most damning critique you could make of everything Google has done in 25 years is that it actually doesn't care about anything but search. And so everything gets subjugated to the needs of search. Like the people who build Chrome will tell you they could have built a better browser, except that what they had to do is optimize for search queries, which is a weird thing to have to optimize for in a web browser.

And so like, and this is a story you hear over and over from Google is everything eventually loses at the hand of the search team. And I think you could make the case that the only team as powerful at Google as the people who make the search engine are the people who make the ads. And like that is who is now being thrown into this. And to your point, like, the thing we say a lot on this show is that what happens at one trial has very little to do with what happens at the next trial. And I think that's probably true in Google's case here too. Like all this stuff is still very up in the air. But the thing we heard over and over in the last trial was Google's argument was Google is very good, which is why we keep winning.

And it's very hard to argue that there are better products out there than Google. And yet Google still lost because the argument came up over. and over that actually what Google is doing is preventing that from happening, right? That like maybe the reason there isn't more competition for Google is because Google has not allowed it. And amid meta, the judge, was very receptive to that argument. This one in which the overwhelming thing seems to be, actually this sucks and there's nothing anybody can do about it is like, even the way Lauren was covering the first couple

of days, you get the sense that the people accusing Google of being monopolists are very confident coming into this. and how that means it'll go, who knows? But there is a real sense of like, the argument is extremely strong in this particular case. And it's going to come down to market definitions as it always does and it's going to get deeply wonky. And I'm going to court at least once next week

and I could not be more excited to listen to people yell at me about ad stacks for weeks. But yeah, it is. Like Google is both kind of feeling itself and fighting for its life all at the same time. And it's very odd. I feel like I need to disclose here. We have ads on our website.

What? We have free. Oh my God. And Vox Media is president of revenue and growth. Ryan Pauley is on the list of potential witnesses in this trial. I haven't talked to him about it. I don't know if he's going to get called. He's just on the list because we run it.

We run a programmatic ad network called Concert. Theoretically competes at Google. That's truly not our side of the house. like it's all the way over there. I love Ryan is great hair. I will say that. That's the one thing I know about that. He does a great hair.

Agreed. But like this thing where you say like you're a, anybody listening, pull over in a car and think about the internet. That's my instruction to you. Do you like the ads that you're seeing? There's a million companies, a million ad tech companies that are like, we can make better ads. And all of them are like, and then you run into the monster and you give up.

Most of those people flip the ad tech companies or they try to bundle them up to create a new monster and they get rich and then they, you know, live a healthy life on LinkedIn complaining about the monster. Like they're well practiced at this. It's not like they're available to you. The reporting is easy to do. It's just kind of what you're really trying to sell an audience, even what I'm trying to sell to you right now listening is like there's a reason ads in the internet are bad. And it's because no one, the market is not actually competitive for better ad experiences. Okay. But which is worse? Ads now, the ad experience now, or like in the 1990s where it would be a pop up of porn that would then infect your computer.

Well, so in the 1990s, I was a teenage boy. So you're like, that ruled. I was a teenage girl. I was like, early 2000s. This is great. This is what I was here for the whole time. Can I just say one more thing on this before we leave this subject? One of the things I have been paying a lot of attention to, and I'm well aware that this

is like a giant generalization, but it has really jumped out to me in reading some of these court documents so far. Like a thing you hear a lot from people in and around the tech industry is that like if you want to believe that in the early days of the tech industry, it was like a bunch of well-meaning hippies who just like wanted to make the world a better place. And then that eventually got morphed and ruined. They all blame the MBAs. They're like a bunch of people like graduated from Harvard Business School and came here because they thought that's where the money was and they changed the culture and they ruined everything. And like, boy, does that ring? true when you read some of these documents.

Like to your point about these people being ice cold, it's like, these are the MBAs. These are the people who are like, oh, you want to build a cool product? I don't care. That's not interesting to me. We're just, we're in charge of this money machine. Yeah. Make us money. And like that is the thing that runs Silicon Valley now.

And it's just very hard because Google does such a good job of for the most part being like very cuddly. Like, yeah. I think there's a reason Google still has one of the worst logos in world history. Like, it's cuddly and dumb and it's still. kind of looks like Marissa Meyer drew it herself. Right? And there's a reason there was a slide in the YouTube office. Like this is a company that its entire image was friendly.

And then, you know, in the background, Eric Schmidt, former chairman and former C of Google, just a few weeks ago was like, here's what I would do if I was running an AI company. I would steal everything and then have the lawyers figure out the copyright problem. And it's like, oh, that's because that's what you did with YouTube. Like fully what you did with YouTube, even though Viacom was dumb in that lawsuit and their own people kept uploading videos to YouTube. in the middle of the copyright lawsuit, which is why they lost. It's a true story.

But there's a ruthlessness inside of Google that I'm just seeing playing out right now. And the thing I'm pointing out in particular is viewed a certain way, its products, the pixel products in particular, have never been better. Yeah. Like, they're good this time. Like, they have a point of view. They have clarity. And then over here, the things that have been reliable Google, like,

ATMs are kind of in chaos because of the regulatory pressure. And I'm just not sure how that plays out together. That's what happens when you have the MBAs run stuff. No MBAs on the Pixel team, please. That's how you stay out of court. You stay away. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be back with a lightning round.

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the Lightning Round. The Lightning Round is still available to be sponsored. There were so many commenters on YouTube who were happy for us that we finally sponsored the Lightning Round. I just want to thank you to all of you rooting for us. But it is misplaced. Give us money and then be happy. How about that? I do get emails and I

try to take the money but I don't know how because it's not my job. I can't be like I take Stripe. It's just not like a thing. All right. Lightning Round, Krantz. What's you got? You know how trucks are huge? This is actually kind of a sad one for you

Because I know you love a big truck Every time I see a raptor now I'm like I'm my baby But sometimes trucks are too big They're all Not sometimes Many times the trucks are too big If they come up to my shoulders

I'm like 58 That's that's too tall The US is finally taking aim And they are proposing these new rules And they were going to use crash test dummies But instead of for crashing It's for pedestrians Because

So we're going to run the car into people Like crash test dummies Yeah yeah just a little boop I think that's really nice because a lot of the times now we've been seeing these really big trucks and then you see all of these YouTube videos and stuff of people in these really big trucks and they can't see little kids in front of them. And it's like somebody should check that out. And apparently the government was like, we should check that out.

And presumably the only way to do that is to make the truck smaller. I will never be able to describe to you why I just started imagining it's the Beatles Abbey Road cover, but it's four crash test dummies lined up like the Beatles. And then just like a cyber truck just floors all four of them. And they're like too big. That's an AI prompt right there, David. Yeah. Coming soon to a runway generator near you.

Just immediately what popped into my head. But there is a lot of optimism about these rules. People seem to be really, really excited about it. It feels like it's a good first step. So it's after all these years of just watching the trucks get huge. It's nice to be like, hey, how about they don't get that tall. So, Neely, you're the, you're a truck guy. Does this, like, is this going to piss off all the truck people?

Sorry, I just type the Beatles Abbey Road cover, but it's crash test dummies into GROC. The AI image generator, that's so bad. This is what you get when there's literally no, I'll send it to you, David. When you, when there's literally no safety standards on your AI emin generator, that's why I picked GROC because it won't stop me. Their heads are true. You were asked, yes, as a person who once owned a truck and still thinks of my truck fondly. For example, when I use GROC to generate crash chest dummies as the Beatles' Abbey Road cover,

I think about moving back into the woods and driving my truck again instead of living in society. What I wonder is, do people buy the giant trucks because they're the good trucks and people want good trucks? So if they make the good trucks a little smaller, it'll be fine. Or have we gotten to a point where, like, I need big truck. And if I can't have big truck, big mad. No, actually two things, there's two data points that kind of refute the idea that people actually want the big cars. Some people want big cars. One, the Ford Maverick is a small truck that is just selling like gangbusters.

Okay. It's a hit product. And then two, people are starting to import these Japanese K trucks. I actually saw one at the Apple event driving down the road in front of Apple Park. And it was like an attention magnet. Yeah. And there's just these little trucks. And the beds, there's still like five and a half of a little trucks.

They're still like five and a half foot beds. The beds are about the same size as a full-size truck. They're just small. Right. So they're as useful, but they're just small. And I think you're seeing a bunch of interest in small cars again, like the market wants them. And then you look around and all the cars are so gigantic. Like, I think pendulum just swing back and forth.

There's like tax stuff where you, like, buy a car for your small business. You can write off the full depreciation that has pushed like the dentist of America. They're buying giant SUVs. I think that stuff is coming to an end or changing in some way. And so I just think like between the market, the regulatory pressure, and then just the reality of you get in a car that's so big, you need cameras to drive it. That's too much. It's getting weird, right? Yeah.

Like when the solution to we, you can't see children is we put cameras all around the truck that can see the children for you, you're just, you're just in a weird spot. So I think I look at like I thoroughly enjoyed owning a raptor. It was very fun. But I lived near no one. and every time I drove that thing into New York City, I encourage, if you ever have the opportunity to drive a Ford Raptor through the West Village at night during dinner time whenever it's eating outside,

listening to The Cure with open windows, take it. That was just a weird experience all the way around for everyone. Everyone was like, what is happening right now? The car is just incompatible with the city. It's incompatible with a suburb I live in now. It's just too big, which is why I got rid of it. And I just see a push, particularly like the Vivian Arth

three, that's a small-ish car. Yeah. The Ionic 5, the Hyundai Ionic 5, it's actually big, but they designed it to look like a small car. Like, it's SUV-ish proportions, but it's designed to look like a classic hatchback. And I think people are attracted to it, selling really well because it feels small, even though it isn't technically as small as it looks. So I just think there's more interest in smaller stuff as opposed to just like full-on

You have to crawl into them. I was in a friend got one of the big RAM 3,500s. And I was like, hold on. Do you have it like a step or something? How do I get into this thing? It was just nightmarish. I do misnomer after very much. I'm just saying it one more time.

I think about it all the time. The car ruled. I drove it not at all. I start asking Becky if he can buy a big truck before it's illegal to have a big truck. No, that's fine. We have a very cranky Mustang inside. It's a good time. All right, David, what she got?

So mine is news that actually happened like right after the Vergecast last week, but I have been thinking about ever since, which is that meta finally sort of showed off what WhatsApp and Messenger are going to look like now that they're being forced to interoperate with other chat networks. This is one of those things that has been sort of burbling forever. We've known that this is going to happen because of some EU regulation that basically says any sufficiently large messaging platform has to interoperate with other messaging systems. but there's just a couple of screenshots that they showed off. One, they look great. You're going to be able to either have separate or combined inboxes the way you can have like multiple email accounts in one email client. Like it seems like obviously how this should work,

excited that it's going to work that way. I always kind of thought they were going to do like you have an inbox and then the like Facebook side inbox thing that you have to like go way out of your way to do. But they're actually seemed to make it a sort of first party messaging system, which is very cool. And then also there's a screenshot that shows basically how you will set it up in each app and meta invented two messaging apps just for the sake of these screenshots.

One is called spruce and one is called blurb. And I have been designing and product managing spruce and blurb all week. And I have a lot of thoughts about them as messaging apps. Which one do you think is better? Spruce or blurb? Spruce is like businessy. It's like spruce is is kind of like, where you go to like LinkedIn vibe blurb is like yo where it's just like it's just down to clown

on blurb all day all right blurbing baby yeah yeah you just like yo you want to blurb later like that has connotations you know no in yo you could only yo yeah yeah well okay you're right blurb is more than yo got it okay just be clear you can you can yo in blurb to be clear yo is a feature of blurb and two super yo's equals one blurb it's important to understand that i got it i have an app in my phone called bonk yeah yeah yeah is there kese newton got really excited about bonk for a minute bonk was yo with bonk was yo with bonk was like bonk was like real-time collaborative yo All right. Yeah. But I just think this is very cool.

And as far as we can tell, all of this is just coming to the EU. Again, this fascinating schism happening between the experience of technology in the United States and the EU. And in many ways, the EU is going to be much cooler and more open and more interesting. But just the way this looks and the way this works has me, like, actually sort of excited about what messaging might look like, so I thought that was cool. Yeah. By the way, the EU thing that you mentioned is, I think is going to be part of my solution to how to review the iPhones and talk about them because Apple Intelligence isn't coming to Europe.

So we're just going to make like European iPhone content. Continental iPhone content. I love this. And then we'll make like freedom-loving American content. Bald eagles everywhere. Yeah, where the iPhone is just constantly summarizing everything. It's like, text. Summarized.

America. All right, Neil, what's yours? Mine is, you know, more AI Dumerism,

but in a fun way. This is legitimately, I think, the most interesting AI product I've seen yet. Do tell. So Google has this thing called Notebook ML.

They actually have two different versions of this, this core idea. So Google has this idea. They've settled on this idea. They're going to take all of their AI stuff where they can take a bunch of data.

They have big context windows for their model. They can understand a bunch of documents. They have good voice synthesis. They own YouTube. Here's their idea. We're going to take a bunch of documents. We're going to turn them into a podcast with voices talking to each other. And so they have one for scientific papers, which I believe we have access to, but we haven't really tested very much.

So inside of Notebook L.M, which is their AI powered notes app that they announced last year, David. You're my notes. It was last year. And it's like if it imagine a feature that should be in either Google Keep or Google Docs, but isn't. And that's, That's what notebook L.N. But it's in blurb from what I understand. It is, you can blurb to notebook LN for sure. Yeah. Anyway, so in this app, you can give it a bunch of documents, and it will just generate a podcast.

Like two hosts talking about your documents. And it is kind of remarkably convincing. I'm sorry, I've been reading a bunch about this, and it's like, I can sort of understand it, but just hearing you say that sentence, you give it a bunch of documents and it can generate a podcast. I just want to, like, throw myself out of a window. It's like a, and like people have been using it. The podcast hosts use phrases like messy as heck. Like they use idioms.

It's just weird. And it's like Google has had this idea twice now. Like, you know that thing where creatures evolved to become crabs? It's like Google's AI efforts evolved to make podcasts out of documents. Like simultaneously evolved twice inside of Google. I think it's utterly fascinating. And you can use it now in notebook L.M. The weirdest one I've seen is Robert Stevens, who is the founder of the geek squad,

the actual geek squad in Best Buy. The founder of the geek squad, Robert Stevens, appears to be a member of the Bennett Valley Community Association in Sonoma County, California. Apparently, the Bennett Valley Community Association has been having a lot of fights about whether to allow weed to be grown on farms there, like commercial cannabis. growing. And so he says he uploaded a bunch of docs and like meeting notes and PDFs into this tool and it just generated a podcast about this fight that for all the world sounds like a true crime podcast about whether or not they should grow weed in Snowman County. Can I just play

at the beginning of it? Please. Yes, please. All right. We need to dive into another file of documents. Always. What do we have this time? Well, today we're headed out west to Sonoma County, California. Oh, nice. Wine country. Not so fast. This isn't about a relaxing getaway. It's actually about a pretty heated controversy brewing in Bennett Valley. Bennett Valley.

Okay. I'm intrigued. So it all centers around commercial cannabis cultivation. Seems like a lot of places have been grappling with this since legalization. Yeah. Right. It's just like he didn't write that script. Wine country.

Here's just a bunch of weird minutes from board meetings. and it made a... Now, is it accurate? Did it hallucinate the heatedness of this controversy? I don't know. Did it hallucinate

that the AI needs a vacation? Yeah, super-de-doper-dib. There's a part in here where it notes correctly, if you listen to it for longer, it notes correctly that the board's lawyers told it that its first attempt

to ban cannabis cultivation would not work so the board backed down and tried a new legal avenue and it issued that AI issues that as a criticism of the board which is fascinating for a guy on the board to publish but like that's

to me this is one of the most interesting uses of this tech that I've seen no one is making podcasts about the Snow County weed controversy it doesn't seem like there are only four subscribers well technically someone did make the podcast but right but no one listens

I'm interested in generally, can you make people more interested in the things that are happening in their community? Yeah. Every day, wherever you live, there is some board or HOA or town council that is doing stuff. Yeah. And there's a desert of local news throughout this country.

It's not being covered. If you can turn it into weird true crime podcast, is that actually useful service of AI? I don't know the answer to that question, but this is the most interesting thing that I've seen out of it yet. Yeah. All the same problems are there. Is it going to hallucinate? Is it telling the truth?

Can it be manipulated by the people who are making it to be favorable to one side or not? Is it accountable? Is it interesting to listen to? It feels like an important question. Wine country. Well, so what I found, I think the reason that this sparked such interest to me is not the wine country. They actually were telling a story. Yeah.

As you go into it, they're like, here are the stakes. Here's the back and forth. Here's a thing that happened. Here's the next thing that happened. This is legitimately, like, they, They constantly do this tell a story thing where they're like, you're just driving in your car and your kids sad in the back and you just have the AI. Tell it a story. And that's always stupid.

Yeah. This is actually like an interesting use case of it. Right. Because there's things that actually happened. Again, do I know if the AI's, I'm not deep in, I'm not deep in Bennett Valley's weed controversy. Not yet. I'm going to be. But it's just interesting that one, like Google announced it.

This is, again, they've come up with this idea twice down side of Google. and then two, people are actually using it, right? Like, this is someone who is on this board, who is dealing with this controversy, who is like, I tried this out. This is good enough to share, right? This is, to me, he thinks it's good enough to share. I think other people are going to use this in other ways. Is this going to make good podcasts?

I don't know. Is this the most interesting sort of how do you get people to consider things in their, like, local community that they would not have otherwise considered attempt that I've seen in quite some time? It sure is. Now, do I think that this works for every case? Because notebook alone, well, you just do anything. You put any random assortment of documents in there.

I'm very excited to put, like, any one of our legal decisions in there. Like, the Google antitrust decision, I want to make Google make a podcast. Right? Like, I'm very, are they going to do a better job than we do? But there's just something about all of the LLM stuff where all it's ever really doing is playing with language, right? we've enabled natural language input, we've enabled computers to use language in ways that couldn't do before, where it's actually this kind of thing that feels like the most interesting

use case. I don't know that this use case can support the hype or the investment, but actually, like, we can make your local politics somewhat more digestible to you. It's the first time I've ever been like, all right, there's something going on here that seems interesting. That doesn't seem like massive copyright theft in the end of reality, which is how I usually evaluate these things. Well, the challenge there is can you have this use case without all that other stuff? Yeah, I don't know. But I agree. It is an interesting use case. And I also, like, the other news

kind of of this ilk that came out this week was Open AI released 01. Its new, like, reasoning capable model. It looks like an emoji. First of all, terrible name. Open AI said to Kylie Robinson, who wrote the story of us, they were like, oh, we think our names are bad. We try to reboot it. Like, you did bad again. Sorry, Open AI. is nothing. But one of the things that it does is you ask it a question, and because it's a quote-unquote reasoning model, it takes longer to answer because it's just doing more steps at a time. But it will walk you through the steps that it's taking.

And Kylie included this screenshot in which it's saying things like, this is the model reporting back as it's talking, as it's thinking aloud. I'm curious about defining variables to translate the problem into algebra. And then a minute later, I'm thinking through a new variable to measure time and establishing clear definitions for years in the past. And, like, we're still down this road of making these things seem sort of human. It's like when you talk to Siri and it goes, hmm, or, um, and it's like, is this, is this what is this? It's the most irritating thing in the world. I'm like, you're fake.

Like, do I want the AI to pretend to be a person? And I feel that same way listening to this podcast. I'm like, are you, what are you here for? I want all of them to go and watch like a whole one of the Star Trek series because they actually do interact with computer. Like the computer is not irritating in it. It's like, hold on, let me process that. Tea, Earl Grey, pot. Yeah, done.

The tea machine is like, hmm, I'm thinking about which blend you might be. I've always wanted to just communicate only nouns and adjectives. Yeah. Very good. I will say just to, you know, the people are going to yell. me because I said something nice about AI. I will say something dumber about AI, which is meta's taking the AI labels off of Instagram, or they're hiding them in a menu, because none of that was ready, none of it worked.

No one has any point of view. And LOL, nothing matters. They just gave up. We have just given up on this. We're doing AI generated images of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift having a cat baby. That's a real picture that I saw this week. Why? Why?

The end. There you go. You said it all. This is like the real, the real plus and minus of a right now. Maybe this will help people engage in local communities. I will have to see this picture. And there will be no label on it because no one figured out how any of that works. And maybe it never will.

That's it. That's the Verge cast, everybody. Yay. Fold your phone in half. Any phone. It doesn't have to actually be a fold. Just get out there and start folding phones in half. Brut strength.

Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast. this week, hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.