The Vergecast - The rise of Clubhouse competitors / Apple's WWDC rumors / What is Google Chrome FLoC?

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk with Verge deputy editor Dan Seifert about this week's Apple rumors ahead of WWDC 2021 — from their AR headset to new iPads. Senior reporter Ashley Carman joins the show to discuss social audio platform Clubhouse and the rise of competitors from other companies. Further reading: Real-world evidence shows that the COVID-19 vaccines work Biden administration looks to organize ‘vaccine passport’ development Apple Maps will show COVID-19 travel guidances so you know what to expect at the airport Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine highly effective in adolescents Amazon gets FDA authorization for an at-home COVID-19 test kit Errors ruin 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine Apple WWDC 2021 announced as online-only event Apple Aiming to Announce Mixed-Reality Headset With In-Person Event in 'Next Several Months' Ming-Chi Kuo Says Apple’s AR/VR Headset Will Weigh Less Than 150 Grams Apple reportedly plans revamped AirPods for as early as next year New iPad Pros reportedly launching as soon as April, and the 12.9-inch model may have a Mini LED screen Apple reportedly mulls rugged smartwatch coming as soon as this year Casio announces first Wear OS smartwatch in iconic G-Shock lineup Google Chrome FLoC: how it replaces cookies and what it means for privacy  T-Mobile is betting big on Google’s Android services: RCS, YouTube TV, Pixel, and more T-Mobile is already shutting down its live TV service, partners with YouTube TV and Philo Google Nest Hub (2nd-Gen) review: sleep on it Huawei's Mate X2 foldable adopts Samsung's dual-screen ... Xiaomi announces the Mi Mix Fold, its first folding phone The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra’s camera bump is no moon; it’s a space station Bose Frames Tempo review: the specs to beat Spotify is launching its own Clubhouse competitor Even LinkedIn is making a Clubhouse clone Discord’s new Clubhouse-like feature, Stage Channels, is available now Slack is getting Instagram-like stories and push-to-talk audio ... Instagram launches its own TikTok Duet feature called Reels Remix Facebook shorted video creators thousands of dollars in ad revenue Samsung created a whole Hulu series that’s sponcon for the Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G Biden plans to connect every American to broadband in new infrastructure package NBA on NFT We read your phone plan’s fine print so you don’t have to The unsettling surveillance of anti-Asian racism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Dan Seafurt joins us, talk about a bunch of Apple rumors, including the new rumored headset. We talk about cookie apocalypse, what's going on with T-Mobile and Google and some gadgets, and then Ashley Carmen joins us figure out what is the future of Clubhouse. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone. else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And

Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of mixed reality.

See? Yeah. We're all about the future here. I'm your friend, Nelai. Dieter Bone is here. I also am a friend of yours. Dan Seaford is here. Hello.

I will be. your friend. This is a real friendly episode. And later on, we're going to have Ashley Carmen to talk about Clubhouse and Spotify and LinkedIn and every other app that's doing live audio. But we got some we got some gadgets stuff to talk about Dan. But first, as always, I want to start the show with a COVID update. Still the biggest story in the world, the biggest thing affecting all of us. Lots of COVID news. I've been saying the past few weeks. How many weeks? Several weeks I've been saying there's light at the end of the tunnel. I will say it's been three weeks since Joe Biden announced that you have a website that would come out on May 1, May 1,000.

Now there's four weeks to go since the announcement three weeks ago. Correct. All right. That website is up. You can just go to it. It's limited in scope on May 1. It's supposed to get bigger in scope, but we're keeping track of it. That said, the big news about vaccines is that states everywhere are opening up vaccine eligibility.

So this past week, anybody 30 and up in New York can get it in various states, anybody can get it now. There's also news about vaccine efficacy. So now that lots of people out in the real world have gotten the vaccine, studies are being run, the evidence shows that the vaccines work. They are effective. There's studies today that the Pfizer vaccine is 100% effective in teenagers. So as more people get vaccinated and there's more studies about the vaccine, we are just learning that they are more effective. There's a lot of discussion about vaccine passports, which in some cases look like apps on your phone that verify you've been vaccinated so you can go into public places. An enormous amount of

of debate on how to build, use, and verify the information in those passports. We have a couple stories on the site about those. The vaccines are also changing how we interpret the COVID numbers. So if you're anything like us, even watching the case counts and hospitalization and deaths go up and down over the past year, now that there's vaccinations, how we interpret the numbers, which ones we emphasize is changing. We've got a great story about that. I keep talking about second order effects. People are traveling again. I'm off next week because I've got I've got a shot. My wife got her shot. My sister got a shot. They're going to visit us. They're getting on a plane with their first time in a year. Whoa. It's a big deal. But airport experiences, safety, all that is

going to change now that people are feeling comfortable doing that stuff. Apple Maps is going to show COVID-19 travel guidance in the app so you know what to happen at airports. That's going to be just a new wave of information, organization, and experiences that we have. Amazon got FDA authorization for an at-home COVID test, which is still important, even if you are vaccinated. We still need tests. And then lastly, we have to manufacture lots and lots of doses of these vaccines, lots of them, 300 million people in the United States.

As we ramp up that manufacturing quickly, there are errors, one of Johnson and Johnson's contractors made a huge error in 15 million doses of that vaccine had to be tossed. So it's, there's good news. There's some bad news along the way, but the light at the end of the tunnel and then once a sufficient number of people are vaccinated, I think we're going to see a lot of things like Apple Maps, travel restrictions, just a lot of help in understanding what is and isn't safe to do and how you should act in public places. I do think the vaccine passport idea, it's going to come into play.

Like big, the NFL wants people in stadiums this year, right? They've announced it. To do that, they're going to have to verify that most people. are vaccinated in those stadiums. How are they going to do that? Is a big question. That pressure is going to make this happen in some way. We'll just see how it goes.

We're on track that very closely. And there may be people for health reasons who can't get a vaccine, and so that's going to complicate that entire situation. Also, we're staring down the barrel of a potential fourth wave here in the U.S. So the light is at the end of the tunnel. Please don't make it longer. I end every show by saying wear a mask. Please continue to socially distance, follow the rules, wear a mask.

We're very close. trip at the finish line. Please don't trip at the finish line. Wear a mask, get your shot, wait the appropriate amount of time. But light at the end of the tunnel. That said, talking about gadgets. Apple announced WWDC this year, online only again. Which, you know, I think last year, Apple of all of the companies, manage the virtual event infomercial, the best, in my opinion.

Yeah. I mean, they manage it truest to their, you know, I don't know, ethos. Google just up and canceled its developer conference last year. They're just like, you know what? Nah. Nothing online, nothing at all. We've talked a bunch about the different ways the online conferences have gone. I'll be curious to see if Apple tries to iterate on what it did last year because last year was a rush job but didn't really feel like one.

So I'll be curious to see what they try and do this year. Yeah, I mean, my takeaway from it last year was they went into it thinking, oh, this is a rush job. But Apple, like, they like controlling things. I don't think they were all that sad to put on an hour-long infomercial about how cool how cool they were. And I think they're like happy to do it again. But, you know, most Apple products recently have been very iterative. The one new product they've announced was AirPods Max, which like they just sent us units for hands-on. And that was fine because it's headphones.

If they announce like a new product, if they announce a car virtually, like that will be very hard for them. So there's a lot of stories, a lot of rumors that they're pushing and get people back in the office. They're pushing and get events back. And this online-only WWDC will sort of be the last one. Now, we have been waiting for a March event. March came and went. There were a lot of rumors. It didn't happen.

We're due iPad refreshes. We're do a bunch of refreshes across the Apple product line. I have no idea what's going on there. No. Well, and the other thing I guess to talk about is the invite. There's always criminology of what the invite is. and this time, Disclosure, my wife works for Facebook

Reality Labs, which is a division of Facebook that makes Oculus and may also be the division that's working on AR glasses. There were an emoji in the invite, and then you could see the reflection of the very pretty icons in the glasses that every single animogy was wearing. So it's just

like, they want to show you how excited they are by the thing they're seeing on their screen, so they had it reflected on their glasses. But a bunch of people are like, oh, there's the AR glasses. They're going to announce them. They're going to announce It's like the developer kit for the AR glasses at WWDC. That was a speculation that flew around for 20 minutes. Yeah.

I see it, right? They had glasses in their invite. At the same time, that's two on the nose for Apple. Well, it's like Apple knew that people would say this. Apple is not dumb, right? They know that people look at their invites and try and suss out what they mean. And there's no way they were like, oh, God, I didn't even think of that. People might read into AR glasses in that, right?

They knew it. It's just a matter of, is it a tease just to be a tease? Or is it a tease because they're actually to do something? Yeah. I mean, there are multiple rumors now about whatever headset this is going to be. There was another one this week. Ming Chi Kuo said they're going to weigh less than 150 grams. Alex Heath had the information has like more drawings of it.

Yeah, they're going to make some kind of headset. It will, because it's Apple, have some sort of advancement in the hardware compared to everybody else. like that's what they do. I don't think they're going to announce something that is just the same as the Quest 2. But like, what they really need is apps for it. And I personally do not think the multi-year experiment of putting AR gimmicks on the phone and the iPad has like paid off in a robust developer ecosystem of AR apps. Are you kidding, Nilai? I'm so excited to get glasses on my face and see what an IKEA couch looks like in my living room.

Look, I'm moving soon. and I literally just switched back over to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and I'm going to use the LiDAR next week for really real to map out of room. I mean, that's great. You could also use the measuring tape. There's a number of ways to accomplish that I'd ask. I will say Sebastian DeWithet, Haleigh, did a lengthy review of the 12 Pro camera after several months now, and he was like, the LiDAR actually makes a difference in night portrait mode.

Okay. So, like, yeah, there's, sure, the sensor on the phone is doing stuff and they're making use of it. But if the goal was to prime the pump of developers doing AR stuff in Apple's ecosystem and figuring out what they could do, yeah, we're like at the fart app zone of developer ecosystem. Right? Like, we're not at like big use cases. We're not at like, you know, Oculus is very proud of itself for like having developers that make millions of dollars a year in revenue selling apps in their store.

Apple's got to get there. I'm confident every one of those developers will immediately figure out how to port their experience to whatever Apple headset, but there's a reason you would announce a headset at a developer conference in some limited way, because you need to really kickstart that ecosystem. I just like my big question is beyond a little bit of hardware like push, you know, a better, slightly better hardware than everybody else is like a fine thing to bet on with Apple. That's a lot of developer platforms for Apple to manage now, right?

Just a lot of them. and they've kind of forgotten about some of them along the way. Like, they make an entire TV product that appears to have been forgotten. And, like, that's crazy, right? Like, are they going to be, are they going to just turn their focus over there and further let some of this stuff wither away? Or are they going to figure out how to care for all of it at once? I feel like Apple's a big enough company and has enough resources that they can figure out a way to care for it all at once. And yet the Apple TV hasn't been touched in how.

long. Yeah, I mean, the Apple TV is the like the exception that proves the rule maybe. Maybe it's not that far. But like the Apple TV is an interesting case. You mentioned earlier that there's a lot of things that are overdue for updates. The Apple TV obviously is way overdue for updates and doesn't make a ton of sense in the market right now. But at the same time, Apple's idea for the Apple TV was that it would be a platform for applications. It's not though. It's a portal for content. And like the idea of what a TV is versus what a phone is and what a tablet is and what a Mac is and what maybe glasses are or something like that is like a little bit different, I think, in the actual real world use cases. So I don't know. I don't see the Apple TV and think, oh, Apple's going to screw up the glasses. No, I don't see

they're going to screw up the glasses. They're going to do a good job with the glasses. But the Apple TV is just going to get worse. Their attention is going to get pulled away. They have a lot of platform. We've talked about it so many times. They have the phone. They have the iPad, which is now its own individualized variant, OS of the phone. That's two. They have the watch, which is yet a third. They have the Mac, which is now a weird hybrid individualized variant, right? They can run iOS apps. Yeah, but we maybe don't have to support the touch bar on it anymore, so that's simplified things a little bit. They're definitely going to add a touchscreen. So that's, wait, wait, hold on. That's the phone, the iPad, the watch, the Mac, the TV.

Yeah. Then they might add a headset and a car. to car. It's a lot to manage. And like, I would say of, they have an I message app store. Right. Like, it's all happening. It's all in there. Of those, the only app store that I think has significant and meaningful traction is the phone.

iPad is getting there. Is it, though? I would say that, like, you know, if you're looking for an example of a, a platform, a new platform that has not seen enough attention since it was debuted, I think iPad, the iPad is a great example of it. Like iPadOS barely changed last year, even though the phone dramatically changed in terms of UI and options for developers and things like that. iPad OS kind of just kept on, kept it on. Well, they had their big change the year before. Like the, I think they might be TikTok in it. Well, maybe that's the case. Which, by the way, is pure evidence that they cannot do two

things it was. Exactly. Sure, sure. But I mean, like, I think like you can look at the iPad and there's like so many obvious things that they could improve and do, and they just like drag their feet with doing it and, and, and, and, like, maybe that's an example of, like, one area that's, like, not seen enough attention because it is not the phone. It is not the brand. Well, okay, we've been looking ahead to WWDC. We should actually talk about this event that we're expecting to happen, that we thought would happen in March, that should happen soon.

Which would be the iPad event. The iPad, maybe a TV. Maybe a TV. But, like, the big things on the list, like, there's got to be more Macs coming soon. There's AirPods 3 floating around. Take AirPods Pro and pull out the little rubber ear insert and then they turn into AirPods, I guess. I don't know. There's air tags.

There's Apple TV. There's iPad. There's a bunch of stuff. But it seems like what we're really due for and that what German is saying is like the iPads are next. And we are a little bit overdue for like iPad pros. Yeah. Last year's update was very much not much of an update. Right.

They unlocked one processor core. and they added a LiDAR sensor. Like, this is what I mean. They're like, is this enough to build a developer ecosystem for a headset? Well, you guys have one more core now. I get it. But I think they have to figure out, I know, I have an iPad pro with a keyboard case. Dieter and I, you've had one.

We have a bunch of people on our staff who use them. We hear from people who use them. They finished that idea, right? Like an iPad with a USBC connector and a keyboard case. To introduce new hardware, they need another new idea. Because if it's just another iterative processor bump, like, you might as well buy one from two years ago. Like there's a tiny fraction of people in the world

who are maxed out on the performance of a two-year-old iPad Pro. Well, so the big hardware idea is got to be that the bigger one is going to have a mini LED screen. Sure, but even that, like even if we're just like updating the screen, like they need a software refresh

to make it more capable or they need a design, which I don't think they're ready to do, a design refresh to make the keyboard situation. Oh, I super do not want a design refresh. I don't want to have to buy another damn keyboard. I actually, yeah, I actually super disagree that we need a big, huge design refresh, or that we need necessarily big, huge new hardware capability. If all they do is they put the camera on the front in the right spot, you know, on the horizontal side, that's enough for me.

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not suggesting they need to, like, build a laptop version. I'm suggesting things like camera in the right spot in two USBC ports. Like, ooh, wait, hang on, hang on. Radical finger here. Like, what if we like, go for it, right? You know the original iPad? The original ones, we're supposed to have two 30-pin connectors. One on the long side and one on the short side.

Yeah. So you could dock it in either configuration. Yeah. And at the last minute, like literally the last minute. Yeah. Steve Jobs changed this mind. Well, you know, they must have a bunch of USBC plugs lying around that they never put into the iPhone so they can just slap the X run into the iPad. Yeah.

All I'm saying is I think the iPad right now, if you look at the iPad error in the iPad Pro, people are getting out of them exactly as much as they can give. Like, when you think about the iPad error, the iPad Pro, and then like the M1 Max, there's a clear split at which you're like, I'm throwing this thing out and I'm getting a Mac and I'm going to do Mac stuff. But that's entirely because of software, though. Like, I don't think when you say like they're at what the max that they can do, it's like, it's not because the iPad's hardware is incapable of doing more. It's, again, limited by the software. And like, that's where like if they were going to release new iPads last year, which they did and they added the core, the meaningful difference would have been adding new software features and they didn't. So maybe we're due for those big software features and those news changes and those things that are, you know, knocking off the list of things that stop the iPad from allowing you to do whatever you want to do. Right. But historically, you would get those at WWDC.

Like the order of operations here is what I'm like focused on. You can put out a new iPad, but if it can only do the things that the current iPad OS can do slightly faster, what story are you telling? Yeah. Right. That's, I think that's just like one of those things Apple has to figure out in its TikTok cadence of like now managing 50 platforms at once. Right. I will say the AirPods, if they make the original AirPods better or the not the original, how would you call it like the base model AirPods better.

Yeah. Yeah. The regular AirPods. Like they're just going to sell a bunch of those because the original batteries are all dying. Yeah.

It's a real win for them. And then air tags are just like this endless mystery. It's unclear why, what the hassle, what the problem is here. But they could, if they did Apple TV,

air tags, iPads, I want them to do IMac and MacBook Pro desperately, but like set those aside. If they just do those three things in an event, then they can be like,

here are the new iPads. They're the fastest ever. We learned a bunch for making the M1. They're even faster now, but these aren't M1s. These are a number and something, something best screen ever.

They're the best. You're going to love them. Go buy one. And then they'll move to Apple TV, Apple TV, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And your phone can find your remote because it has UWB built in because we're changing the remote

and they will sell a million of those. And then while we're using your phone to find stuff, here's air tags. You know, just like, that's a complete event. They just knock it down. And I don't know why they don't just make that event happen. For what it's worth, we saw reports today. I think Samsung's air tags version is going to be shipping real soon.

Like you could pre-order it now with UWB technology and stuff like that. So, you know, Samsung's doing it. Maybe Apple's just trolling Samsung and doing R&D. It's just leaked out some airtag stuff. That's why we don't have a folding iPhone yet. Let's Samsung figure it out for three generations. Yeah. Makes sense.

I mean, they've had the UWDB chips. what, this is the second, they were in the 11 Pro and now they were 12, right? Yep, yep. And like, beyond AirDrop, which is still pretty finicky, there's nothing, right? UWB is also in the HomePod Mini, and it does the little, little dance from the phone to the mini when you walk up to it. Okay. It's very advanced.

I'm supposed to be, like, unlocking a car and, like, going to the moon. Anyhow, other Apple rumors, there's actually, I mean, this is actually a pretty good. good week of Apple rumors. Yeah. Rugged smart watch, which makes a lot of sense. It makes tons of sense. There are still plenty of people out there buying Garmin Phoenixes or Cassio G-shocks or whatever, just full-on watches that are good for the outdoors and swimming and better than what the Apple Watch can do.

The big question for me is if Apple makes a rugged smart watch, what are they going to do about battery life? Because the Apple Watch is a solid two-day watch for me these days. But in that category, you need more. You need Waybar. Solar panels. Sure. I'm throwing out ideas. I mean, well, the thing is with all of those watches, the garments that you mentioned, the Suntos,

the ones that the real outdoor enthusiasts like, they're all huge. And the reason that they're huge is because they have giant batteries stuffed in them. And in a lot of cases, they don't have full smartwatch OSs on them. They're not running a bunch of background apps and things like that. The only thing that they're doing is tracking your GPS location for X number of hours in a row. So it'll be interesting to see if Apple figures that out. Yeah. Well, they do, they're running real-time operating systems.

Like, they do heart rate. They do the stuff. Yeah, they do the fitness focus stuff. But, like, you can't, there's no voice assistance on there. There's no, you know, you're not opening your garage door with that watch. You're not managing your to-do list with that watch or whatever else you use a smart watch for. Well, so you can go two ways. One, Apple puts in a huge battery and says it's the S-4 chip.

What are they on now with the watch? six I think Sure the next generation in their watch ship Even more efficient giant battery They solved it Or you can turn off most of the features And run it in outdoor mode I think my predictions they go with giant battery

Because what they want you to do is leave your phone at home When you're out Yeah I think that's right There's a third option which is Put a second screen on it that doesn't take up any power Which is what Tickwatch does And what Cassio has just announced it's going to do It's making a G-shock and it's doing

the second screen option. Yeah. They won't do that. Apple will never do that. Yeah. I mean, this thing looks neat, but yeah, I don't, I don't know, man. Like, it's a cool, it's like the first G-shock in a while. I'm like, yeah, I should just have that because it's neat.

I mean, like, G-shocks are cool, but they're like, mostly they have looked the same for many years. And this one's like, oh, this one's wild. I think Apple goes big battery, giant rugged watch, and it lasts for a couple days outside. I think that's right. And, like, they want to sell you the cellular one that you, like, it's your computer on the, on the trail or whatever. Yep. I can already see these ads. And they're already going to make me feel bad about myself.

I don't know. I mean, like, this order of events to me is the issue, right? Yeah. It's, you maybe want all of Dub, Dub to be focused on this headset. Like, the headset market's about to get really competitive, right? Like, Oculus exists. The Quest 2 is good. Snap is working on.

something we've heard a lot about it. I don't know what Google is doing. Apple is about to enter, like we know Apple's going to enter this market. It starts to get real crap. Like they need a good story. They need focus. They need developers pay attention to it and not the other platforms. But then they just have all this other stuff to care

for and all their regular products to announce and like they missed their first window at the beginning of the year here. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess so. Yeah. And the thing that the other thing that we alluded to a little bit is we're still waiting for arm processor updates on the iMac and the MacBook pros that are, you know, actual pro machines. Those make a ton of sense to announce those at WWC. That's where all

the pros are paying attention to, et cetera, I mean, if they're going to announce those. That's where they announce to the Mac Pro. It's where they announce some of the Pro. So if they're going to announce an iMac that has, you know, 47 arm cores in it, that's the place to do it. So I would be surprised if we saw Arm Macs before Dubdub, but it is, another one of those things that it's like on the list of like, when are they going to update this? And yeah, it's really hard to suss out their schedule this year. I can just really see them waiting like because they're Apple. Like they don't need to do anything, right?

They can just wait to be like, okay, we're going to have in-person events again. Yeah. Like we're just going to wait for almost all this stuff until we can have the moments that we want to have. Because what are you going to do, not buy an iPhone? Please don't tweet at me that that's what you're going to do. I mean, like, clearly that worked fine for them last year. A lot of people, uh, did. buy iPhone.

Which I continue to find surprising. I guess I did too. But I buy every phone. How many phones I bought on the show? But like laptop sales and all the stuff are up. I think they like can they, this is what I keep going back to. They have so many things to care for. Right.

Like they have to continue to turn over the entire line of Macs. It's funny. If you think about all of the things they have to accomplish, maintaining the iPhone is actually like in the middle of the list, which is their entire. business. In terms of ambition and stuff they actually need to invent. Yeah, they need to put out on iPhone 13 this year.

I'm sure they've been working on it for several years, but like, they're going to sell a lot of them, and it will be fine, because iMessage exists. It will have a slightly smaller notch. Yeah. And it's hard. I'm not saying that's easy to do. I'm saying that the scale of the challenge compared to we need to launch an entirely new

AR platform and get developers to buy in and not make stuff of the like the Facebook platform or the SNAP platform that's very hard. We need to completely revamp our TV product strategy because we literally employ TV showmakers. If they want to, though. Like, I mean, that's the thing with the TV

that's interesting to me is like, the TV is the one piece of Apple's hardware that is not so tied into the software experience because you can just watch Apple TV plus shows on any other platform. That's what I mean. That's what I mean they have to revamp their product strategy. So it, okay, so what's the reason

to buy an Apple TV instead of using an Apple TV app on another platform. It's a little bit simpler, a little bit nicer interface with fewer ads. It's not simpler. It's got fewer ads in the interface or fewer, like, less tracking. That's good. And you can play Apple arcade games. Sure. Yeah.

It is the one platform that reliably turns on all the lights for every service that should turn on all the lights. Yeah. But even like the Chromecast is good at that now, too. I wouldn't say it's good at it. It doesn't unsighting it. Comcast is also good at just freezing and giving up for me lately. But like, you know, Roku does it.

Fire TV obviously does it. And all of them are doing it at a quarter of the price of the Apple TV. So like in order to buy an Apple TV now, you have to be a like AV nerd or really like Apple Arcade games. If you're an AV nerd, you've already bought, you've already sent me an email about the Nvidia Shield. Like it's already. Or you already own the Apple TV. Yeah. Because it's been out for three or four.

years or whatever. I'm sure there's someone at Apple listening to this right now being like, guys, we stopped carrying on with the TV two years ago. Isn't it off? Yes. Like, but this is all I'm saying is it's wild to think about apples. The things they are rumored to be announcing this year. The product lines they are shifting or carrying over or need to reinvent. The car they presumably want to build. And then like order them all in the list of like, how hard is this to do and be like, oh, making the next iPhone is actually sort of at the middle of that list. Yeah.

Because they're Apple and like they're, they're, I'm sure the iPhone team is like protected and not being moved around. Yeah. So like I just think it's going to be, this is like I said, light of the end of tunnel, hopefully we're all going to events again. The order of operations for Apple, like it's a well run company. I just think I'm very curious to see how they order all of these things. And then how they make the phone feel as big as they've traditionally made the phone feel

when maybe, you know, Tim Cook. rolls up on stage in an Apple car wearing a VR headset. And then he's like, also there's an iPhone 13. We'll see. All right, we got to take a break. There's actually, there's a lot more tech news to come. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. It's updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week.

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or do you want to start with Cookie Apocalypse? Let's start with T-Mobile. Ease ourselves in to talking about federated learning of cohorts. Yeah. So, okay, T-Mobile had a big piece of news that there's like two pieces to it. I think they're equally interesting.

Piece number one, they got some kind of deal with Google. Google paid them a lot of money. They're going to support Google's RCS, just straight up, going to be compatible with the universal profile. They're going to have Android messages be the default on all Android phones on T-Mobile, including Samsung phones. There's a whole

wacky thing that happened with the S-21 there. And they also are going to start carrying and pushing the pixel, which is very good for Google because Verizon did nothing for it. Maybe T-Mobile will. Probably not, but they're going to give it an honest try. And T-Mobile's like, oh, also if you want

live-streaming TV from us, you just can get $10 off YouTube TV because we're done with the other stuff. Remember the thing we tried in October? Yeah, we're done with that. This is all one deal. This is all one deal. So, T-Mobile bought Layer 3.

Yep. I already missed Julie. The only other person who goes, shit about this is Julia Alexander. No, but you actually do need to explain that the actual, why this TV thing is so hilarious. I think people forgot about Layer 3 and that T-Mobile launched a whole damn service off of it eventually. So, yeah, so T-Mobile buys this company called Layer 3, which is a, a cable company effectively. Yep.

They shut it down. They roll it all over and say, this is the future of our streaming service. This is all connected to my theory that a gigantic company CEOs have no ideas and they all just copy each other. So like, they're like, oh,

you bought Warner Media? We buy a small cable company and launch our own TV. So whatever. So Timo buys a small cable company. Then they launch a service called T-Vision, which is supposed to compete with YouTube TV. and all these other ones. Yeah.

And their whole thing is that it's cheaper than the other ones because they're T-Mobile. The uncarrier. And it turns out the reason that it's cheaper is that they have not gone to the TV networks and negotiated prices for how they bundle the channels.

Okay. Because they're the uncabler. So they're just like, they're like here, we bought this cable company. We're like swooping up their existing deals. We have new bundles for T-Vision and they cost less than everybody else.

And then like, Discovery networks and NBC and like whoever else you can think of is like hold on a minute You didn't ask us if you want channel X you have to bundle it with channel Y that's a contract we have everybody else And we're gonna sue you so then T-Mobile like enters like falls apart Mind you they announced T-Vision in October yeah of 2020 Yeah this is all just like happened so like all the cable networks are mad at T-Mobile team mobile team is like Whoops this stop marketing T-Vision Then they, like, realize they can't win.

Yeah. And so their choices are to raise the price of T-Vision and, like, actually try to operate. If you can't be competitive because you're cheaper, you have to be competitive because you're better. Right. Which is like, when the competition is Google, you're like, ah, like, we have to make a better YouTube TV. Like, what is the list of companies that have failed to compete with YouTube TV?

Sony, AT&T, famously. Like, just down the sling, like, down the line. these companies are falling apart trying to compete with YouTube TV, which itself might not be long for this world. Right. It's cable. And it's expensive as... Right.

It's like, I pay for it. It's $75 a month. God. They just raised the price last year again because of cable network bundling. Yeah. So they basically shut down T-Vision and then they say, what are we going to do? We want you, we're going to bundle on YouTube TV. I'm confident when they went to Google and said, we want to make a deal with YouTube TV.

Google said, no. until you light up RCS. You think so. Because if I was Sundar or any other executive at Google, I'd be like, I finally have leverage for this RCS situation. And you also have to actually sell pixels. Yeah, and also have you heard of our phone. You might not have actually.

There's no way that that's not how this deal is. Team Mobile was on the path to do a bunch of good RCS stuff. And they promised universal profile. It was a little bit of squishiness. There was some wackiness with the pixel 3A, where, like, T-Mobile supported the universal profile on, like, other phones, but not the pixel. It was like a fiasco. But the big thing now is it's actually not about RCS.

I mean, it's about RCS, but it's also about making Android messages the default messaging app. This was the big thing with the S-21. Samsung and Google, like, basically, you need to stop making your text messaging app. It's screwing everything up. It's just making it too complicated. Use Android messages. And Samsung said, you know what? Sure.

That's fine. We'll do that. Google's Android messages is now the texting app on Galaxy S21 phones. Cool. And then in America, nope, you still get Samsung messages as a default. And why? That's an excellent question that I invite you to ask AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. And so this turn of by the end of the year, every Android phone on T-Mobile is going to be using Android messages.

And Google and T-Mobile are going to, like, spin up a business for. business chat together, they're like going to somehow split that, split the revenue from that. This is about RCS and Android Messages a lot, more so than it is about pixels. But to me, it's about Android messages. Google's strategy is like, screw it. We can't get carriers to spin up. We can't win on like the network level. We can't win at the platform level to get people to adopt RCS.

So we're going to win at the app level. And so Android Messages really is like their big push to have a consistent chat app across all Android phones. Yeah, I just, they haven't had any leverage to do it. And it's just funny that Team Mobile just like half-assedly trying to compete with AT&T like wandered into this situation. Yeah. Also, every time I hear about business chat, which we hear about a lot. Yep.

We hear about it from Apple. We hear about it from Google. We unfortunately hear about it from the carriers. I'm like, who is using it? I used it once last year. It was great. It was I message. It was wonderful.

Okay. So you, Dieterbone. Yeah. Just, I mean, I love you. But one of the nerdiest people I've ever met in my entire. I didn't go seeking it out. It just, like, happened. I, like, hit the chat with the thing that you get on the website sometimes.

And it was just like, do you want to use, like, hi-message? Well, sure, okay. But-but-da, it was great. So, like, that's, like, that's how I would never expect it to work. Like, I've used the chats on the website. Like, I've chatted with Amazon to, like, resolve a shipping dispute or something like that. I chatted with Verizon's customer support because my files wasn't working or whatever. But, like, those are all, like, self-contained in the,

their apps and their websites. And like, I would just, if it was like, do you want to use I message, I would be like, oh my God, the system works. And like, I just would never expect it to work like that. Yeah, I just like, I've never experienced business chat. I'm saying, Dieter, you've only experienced it once. Yeah. And you're like attuned to it.

So if it appeared to you, if the option appeared to you again, you would use it because you'd be curious. Right. And yet every one of these companies is like, this is a huge business. We got to be there. I'm business. And it's like, I mean, it must be mobile world Congress. continues to exist. Google, by the way, announced they're not going to show up to that this year. Good on you. So, like, I don't know, when we used to go to Mobile World Congress, you like wander around and it's like, there are thousands of like multi-billion dollar companies you've never heard of that do mysterious, strange backend things behind the veil of the carrier service. And yeah, there's just money there. I don't understand it, but it's there. I think business chat is a shell game where they're all just chatting with each other's, like, slow, like, there's only like a fixed amount of money in the entire system.

And they're all just paying it to each other in a circle. It's a huge pyramid scheme. Yeah, exactly. They get their friends to sign up for business chat. If T-Mobile's going to push pixels, that means Google has to make a good pixel, right? Yeah. I mean, just to clarify, T-Mobile's carried the pixel for a while. But the important difference is, are they going to market it and push it?

That's part of the promise here is they're going to push it. And so, like, I think of, like, the one-plus phones, which is, like, T-Mobile's been a partner for a couple of years now. And apparently it dramatically increased One Plus as present in the U.S. because they're finally on a carrier. But T-Mobile seems to be a little more willing to promote these phones, put them on the big stanchions in their stores and things like that, where maybe Verizon for many years would put up a billboard in Manhattan once and be like, there's our pixel marketing and be done.

I do wonder if it's like a, I don't know, something to do with putting some pressure on Samsung. That's kind of a stretch. It does make me weirdly happy to think that pixel phones are going to have a better relationship with T-Mobile, if only because back in the day when we used to go and look at Nexus phones at Google, you just walk around campus and be like ask people what service they're using and everybody use T-Mobile. Like the Nexus was like a T-Mobile designed phone in some ways, and the original Android phone was on T-Mobile. Yeah. Oh, what do you think is going to happen? Here's a question that we'll apply to four people. What happens to GoogleFi, which runs on T-Mobile's network?

Yeah, there are no implications for Google Fi is the official line from Google. Because there are never implications for Google File. That would mean someone thought about Google Fi in any one of these meetings. Yeah. Since the pandemic, I have paused my Google Fi account four times because it's a three-month pause. So I just like a set account, just keep pausing it. One day, though, I'm going to be out in the world roaming across two networks at once. No, I've been, I turned mine back on just so I could like go out in the world and take photos and have it work.

a little bit better, but I don't know, it's dumb that I'm paying for two services right now. Yeah. Why am I even paying for one? It's bad. All right. We got to talk about these cookies. Okay. Where do you want to start?

What is the web? Damn it. The web is a group of things that are linkable and agnostic to the client, Eli. Okay. So speaking of web clients, it turns out there's only one that, there are two that truly matter. Safari on mobile and Chrome on desktop. Yep.

And they're in a fight. Yeah, they're in just a nonstop fight. So Apple and then Mozilla and then Apple and then basically everybody put Google. Like we're done accepting third party cookies. The only thing cookies should be used for is like keeping you logged into your website. That's theoretically all they're good for now.

And Google was like, uh, ooh, uh, us too, but we're going to take two years to do it. And the reason Google wanted to take longer to do it is they wanted to replace the function of third-party cookies with something else. And the function of third-party cookies is identifying you so they can track you so that they can advertise the same thing to you on every website that you visit across the entire web, right? Until you buy it and then you buy it and they will still advertise it to you for the next two years. Yeah. So Google has proposed this system of a bunch of different bird-related code names

to give advertisers the ability to do some target. without giving them your actual browsing history or identity, which with a cookie is relatively easy to figure out. Because you can put a cookie on somebody's computer and you can just gather that information. So they've created this system called Flock, which is the federated learning of cohorts. There's other related systems like Turtle Dove and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like flock is the big one. And the idea is your Chrome browser will look at your browsing history, local,

analyze it, and then in an anonymous way, all the Chrome browsers are going to talk to each other, and they're going to create these cohorts of basically profiles, like generic profiles, the profile of people who like, you know, trucks and cars and bikes, the profile of people who like flowers and rocket ships, the profiles of, you know, like a bunch of these different demographic profiles, thousands of them. And then, like, those will be automatically generated. They'll just have IDs. And then what will happen is, when you browse the web, locally again, your Chrome browser will be like, all right, this person looks like they're into flowers and rocket ships. So for this week, based on their browsing, they are going to give websites the ID that says that they're

associated with the group that likes flowers and rocket chips. And there's at least 1,000 people in that group, so it's relatively anonymous. And so when you go to the verge.com, you'll get, the verge.com will know that you're in cohort 59, and then it, you know, it's on our, it's our job to figure out what cohort 59 means, flowers and rocket chips. And then once that circle is complete, then an advertiser can bid on providing an ad to somebody who's into flowers and rocket chips. What's funny about that is, um, that is insanely complicated and weird. Yeah. In many ways, it is a completely streamlined, like, system compared to what we have now. In a lot of ways it is. Yes. So what we have now is like a weird,

backwards hack. So everyone complains about all the trackers on the verge. We'll just use our own website as an example. You come onto the verge, multiple third-party trackers are loaded. We are cutting them down over time, I promise you. We know. But it's what happens. All those are, in many cases, are just pixels and snippets of code that, like, fire.

And, like, your IP address is, like, registered as, okay, we loaded a pixel to this person, in this browser from whatever ad tracking.com domain. Yep. That company then keeps track. Like, oh, we are pixel loaded. That IP address loaded our pixel on the verge, on car and driver.com on whatever else. We've now created an interest profile.

For this person. We don't know who this person is theoretically, but they probably do. Because it's easy to de-not. There's no controls there, but they're just like firing that pixel all over the place, including the stores you visit, including like when you fill a shopping cart and walk away from it, they know it's in that

shopping cart and they can just like layer all this data together. Including when the microphone and Instagram listens to you. Just kidding. That's a joke. Jesus Christ, Deeter. What do you do to me? Including the fake news that Deeter just said. And then that all is created and now you're like you are associated with some line of database that theoretically says your interests.

Yep. On the other side, an advertiser show, but we talked about all the with Melissa Grady of the CMO of Cadillac Undecoder, if you want someone who actually does this for a living to explain it to you. On the other side, an advertiser opens any number of portals to buy advertising. We can use Google, for example, or Facebook or whatever. And they say, I've got a card charger for a phone. I'm looking for somebody who owns two cars, who has bought a car charger in the last two months and who makes this much money. Neli Patel is who they're looking for because you buy a car charger. You own two cars and buy a car charger. You own two cars and buy a car charger every couple months. They're like, they're fine.

They have found me, I assure you. But you put in that data. You open Instagram. Facebook, like, knows that about you. They know that those ads are in the inventory. They match you up and they serve you the ad. That's how it works at the web too, but with pixels. That is totally backwards, right?

Like, that is not what cookies were designed to do. That is certainly not what one by one invisible pixels from other domains were designed to. Like, this is all. a hack on top of the web with significant privacy issues. And honestly, an enormous dent into my car charging budget because it is very successful. If you talk to the advertising community, in particular, Facebook, with all their complaints about Apple's ad tracking, identifying, identify, and all that stuff, what they will tell you is, hey, this works.

Small companies get to buy really, really effective targeted ads, find their markets and sell more products, and they're happy about it in a way that they were not, you know, the ad products available to people in the 80s did not like work this way. So there's an argument about efficiency there. There's an argument for this is why a bunch of stuff on the web is free because Google and Facebook have a massive monopoly in doing this.

They collected a lot of data. They run giant free services. And then there's like the Apple argument, which is also you have no more privacy and everyone's like paying attention to you all the time in a really creepy way. Right. Those things are completely adults with each other.

So Google trying to like strip out all of the hacks and be like, we actually built a system for targeted advertising on the web is in one sense a good idea, but in another sense, like Google protecting its revenue. Right. Well, Google protecting its revenue, who is going to get on board with this thing? Does it centralize yet more power into Google's ad tech? This, you know, this Chrome thing, like many Google things, is ostensibly open source and anyone can use it.

No one's using it except for Chrome. You know, so like you go down the line and there's like possibly bad repercussions. or maybe it's great, but it's like kind of impossible to know right now. And the flip side from Apple's perspective is, you know what, we're going to block everything. Advertisers are smart people. They'll figure something out. But like, we're going to block everything and it's not our problem. And that's what our users want.

And it's going to be fine. Your privacy is more important than the ad tech platform. That's like noble. Honestly, it is. It's great. Protect privacy at all costs. Go for it. The question is, what will the ad,

tech industry do, and Google's contention is what they're going to do is they're going to fingerprint you. They're going to find a way to track you via little bits of metadata that your browser leaks out just by being on the web. And unlike cookies and unlike this flock system, those systems, once you're pegged, once you're tagged via a fingerprint, it is very, very hard to get rid of that fingerprint because you can't, you know, you can like munge your IP address, but like one of the things I link to is the way that your particular browser and platform happens to play a tiny millisecond snippet of audio identifies you. They just like they could figure out who you are within less than a second. And you can't change that. That's not changeable easily. There's like ways,

but it turns into this arms race of how many bits of entropy can we introduce into the data that our browsers leak out such that we can't be fingerprinted. And Google's contention is like that that war is dumb. Let's just give a bright, well-lit path. for advertisers to go down that protects some privacy rather than do a complete prohibition and, you know, once you know, what's the phrase, once all criminals,

if all advertising is criminal, only criminals will advertise. Like, it'll just make the entire industry really sketchy. Yeah, it already is sketchy is like the counter argument. I mean, we like, disclosure, I guess, Vox Media runs like an ad tech system called Concert. you can go buy it.

Like the whole point of it is to not be sketchy and criminal. Like anyone can go look at it. If you're an advertiser, I encourage you to call to whoever it is over there that you would call. Yeah. Buy some ads. It's on the other side of the wall from us. But the fingerprint is, fingerprinting is already happening. There are already lots of companies that do it.

And Apple has just committed itself to like, we will break the contract of web browsing by making fingerprinting. by making fingerprinting harder. And so, like, the iPhone, like, Safari and the iPhone just lies to web servers about what it is all of the time. Yeah. Because the metadata we're talking about here is, like, your screen size, what your IP address, what network you're on, whether Bluetooth is on or off. Like, just like a bunch of inconsequential data that is different enough from person to person to be an identifier. So Apple's commitment is like, we're just going to obfuscate stuff all of the time. And you just have to deal with it.

Okay, Apple's really rich. They got a lot of money. They can probably employ some engineers to keep track of fingerprinting and constantly obfuscate the phone. But that you're committed to forever. Yeah. Well, I mean, to be fair, so is every other browser maker. It's just that Google's trying to, like, again, make an escape valve

so that fewer people will be involved on the other side of that arms race. Yeah. That's their hope. What are the other browser makers doing? So Brave is actually probably doing the most in terms of, you know, being worth mentioning in terms of fighting fingerprinting, they have a system called farbling, which is just wonderful. That's pretty good.

And it's the system of basically introducing entropy, introducing chaos into the different kinds of things that your browser does so that it becomes harder to identify you over time. Everybody's, you know, mixing up IP addresses or Mac addresses or any sort of other identifying information. They're blocking it or they're providing false ones or they're rotating them out, you know, day by day, week by week. but in terms of trying to figure out ad tech, it's like, I don't know, I have no idea what anybody else is doing.

Apple had a proposal for tracking whether or not an ad was effective that involved, you know, like little keys and whatnot. That was basically the equivalent of, the digital equivalent of a podcast ad where you're supposed to enter a promo code. But it was just like the promo code system, but the promo code is automatic. I don't know how much pickup that's gotten.

Yeah, Apple doesn't care about advertising because they're just going to put ads in the interface for themselves. I just feel like, whatever. We'll just put the Fitness Plus ad at the setup screen and it'll be fine. Yeah. I mean, I'm very curious how this shakes out. I mean, the cookie apocalypse is real. The advertising community is talking about it left and right. Yep.

It is probably a good thing that this weird hack of, like, user tracking is going away. But they're still not like privacy regulation. There's, you know, like, there's no baseline of what, they have to, anyone has to meet. Yeah. Right. So, like, I know, in your story, you were noting, like, this isn't really rolling out in Europe where there's GDPR yet. Right. It's unclear.

Google won't say that it's because of GDPR, but there's a bunch of speculation that it maybe it's because of GDPR. Unclear. I haven't, like, I don't know, who knows whether this system is truly anonymous, the way it tends to be, how much data is actually going to leak out of it. One of the issues here is, if you've got. a bunch of browsers, creating profiles using machine learning on their own, some of those profiles are going to be for very sensitive topics, right? They're going to discover that there's a group of users that visit websites about protecting yourself from spousal abuse, right? You do not want to be put in that group. That is, that is like a bridge too far, right? Even if it's like as

anonymous as they say. And so what Google is doing is they are going to keep an eye on all of these categories that get created, and if they determine that one of them is a sensitive category, they will tell the Chrome browser, you never get to tell anybody that somebody, you never get to associate anybody with that cohort, with that group. So that's cool. It's good. It does put a little bit of centralized control within Google, but if any other browser maker decides to adopt this flock system, that browser maker needs to do that same work, because these, these cohorts are just getting created. Do you either have a centralized moderation system? Like, we're to talk about moderation, or you have to make sure that you choose a browser that uses this system

that has administrators that you trust to not identify you with a sensitive category. Yeah. This is just like AMP all over again, right, where Google's like, anybody can do it, but we're going to run a central one, and then it's just theirs. Yeah. I have honestly no idea where I come down in this debate. Like, I think Apple's approach probably makes the most sense. I just, you have to believe that Apple will.

win the Forever War every day. Well, and you have to believe that, I don't know, like our business won't go up and smoke because advertising will figure out a way to continue to make money in a world where there's like absolutely no targeting or like way less targeting. You can do targeting based on like the affinity

or based on the contents, right? There's a good guess that if you're visiting theverge.com, you're interested in, I don't know, tech. You know? So like, there's that kind of targeting. But does an internet where there's no kind of user targeting or user demographic targeting whatsoever work. Sure, but it works very, very differently than the one we have now. Yeah, but there's a part of me that's like, that's a good thing.

Yeah. At the same time, do I think that this creates even more power for Google and Facebook, which already have a dominant duopoly and internet advertising? I certainly do. Like, I don't think there's a way through this except I think all the browser makers should do it and like, we just have to see what the chips look. The current way is not good. Correct. The idea that there's only one correct way for. forward, I think is also not proven out. So I'd like to see more of the battle and I'd like to see more of the browser makers do this, but who it's going to be a weird few years on the internet. Yep. Of extremely boring ad tech lingo. All right. Before we take a break, we had a bunch of reviews

this week. Dan, you want to run through them? Sure. Yeah. So over the weekend, Chris, uh, reviewed the Bose frames tempo. Uh, now you might have seen those in a piece Dieter did a couple weeks ago on glasses or headphones that you could wear while riding a bike. Deider didn't like them for the bike riding, but if you take them out of that context and just look at them as sunglasses that have speakers in them that you can wear on a jog or other use cases, they actually are surprisingly good, which is a weird thing to say. This is totally like a product I would expect to be terrible. So Chris review those. Go check that out. I reviewed the Google Nest Hub, the new one that tracks your sleep, and that works pretty well. Does it? I mean, we

On this show, not long ago, Eli said he was looking forward to buying this thing because he just wanted a faster one. Yep. And so what I was, you got to let me finish me. Okay. It's really good at tracking your sleep.

It does that part pretty well. So if you want something to ambiently track your sleep, so you don't have to wear a bracelet to bed or charge a battery, it works great for that. It is also very slow for doing anything else. It is kind of like frustratingly slow at this point. And the biggest disappointment there was

we were hoping with the new model, it would be a speed improvement over the first gen, and I did not observe any in my testing. So Google's got some work to do there in terms of improving the user experience on that one. And then there was a bunch of phone news that came out. There was new foldables from Huawei and Xiaomi, which both look like Samsung's.

And then Xiaomi announced the Me 11 Ultra, also named after a Samsung, that has an enormous camera bump on it, which was kind of hysterical. screen on it. The camera bump has the screen. Yeah, it's the best. I love it. I just, I mean, it's hard to get one of these here, but man, do I want? I'm very disappointed in this nest-up being slow. I ordered one. It's on its way here just because I assumed, as any rational tech consumer would assume, that the new version was faster. Yeah. I mean, the frustrating part was,

like, Google told me, we put a new processor in there. It's faster, but they wouldn't tell me how much faster any details about the processor. So I was like, uh, it doesn't feel faster. I don't know. What am I missing here? Well, if you're out there on the boards and you've learned how to overclock your Nest Hub, just let me know, man. It's, it's just real, it's real staggering.

It's stuttery over here. I wonder if it's, you know, the Nest Hub is a weird product. It's built on Google Cast's platform. And it's like a software user interface built on top of the cast protocol. And last year, Google delivered a pretty big software update that added a lot more touch interaction levels to it and a lot more buttons and screen transitions and things like that. And it made the first generation pretty dog slow. And the second generation is also dog slow.

And I wonder if this is a thing they can fix with more horsepower or if it's something they just need to optimize on the software side. First of all, you can fix anything with more horsepower is Android itself is a testament to. Yes. But can you stay at 99 bucks is the question. Like they want to sell this thing for 100 bucks. And so obviously they cannot put a Snapdragon AAA in it, even though they'd be hilarious. And I would love to see it.

But come on. Let's go. All right. Well, again, I beg of you, please figure out how to overclock and nest up. We'll write it up. Just let us know. We've got to take a break. Thanks for joining us, Dan.

Thank you. We'll be back with Ashley Carmen in one second. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time. resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence

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We're back. Ashley Carman is here. Hey, Ash. Hello. All right. So we just need to talk to you about Clubhouse and the fact that Clubhouse is in everything now. So I'm just going to go through this list.

Spotify is launching a Clubhouse clone, LinkedIn, Discord, and Slack. And that's just the beginning, in my opinion. It is just the beginning. But it is many things. Well, so the first one I just want to call it. Because Stuart Butterfield was in Clubhouse with the CEO of Clubhouse. and he announced the Slack was going to build a clubhouse

which like set off a firestorm but I'm just going to be real here he announced that last October on the verge cast and he was like we need audio channels and it was before the clubhouse thing happened so everyone forgot and this is like the best thing about enterprise software is like no one missed attention to you

so he just like reannounce this thing he announced in October already that makes sense to me right you're at work you just want to like have a quick chat like drop in a room you have it talk you go away Discord already does that basically Slack and Discord are like weird parallels of each other. What is going on with Spotify?

Because that feels like the one that like is the biggest threat to Clubhouse and might just like suck up all the attention. Yeah. So some interesting context is that I interviewed the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Eck, in February and asked him about Clubhouse. And at the time, he was just like, oh, you know, I'm paranoid and I consider everything a competitor to us, including Fortnite. And anything that takes attention away from our Spotify shows and music. is like bad. Sounds like, okay, that's that. This week, they announced that they're acquiring Betty Labs,

which is the maker of the sports-centric clubhouse competitor locker room. It is going to be rebranded under a name they haven't announced yet. They'll be launching it for Android, not just iOS, which it is right now, presumably opening it up to everybody. It's not going to be invite only or anything like that. And they're going to expand its coverage. So it's not just going to be sports. It's going to be music, culture, and sports.

which fits nicely into all of Spotify's interests with the ringer acquisition and their music and I guess just broad culture. So the plan is really to launch a clubhouse competitor, but the key difference here, at least they haven't confirmed this, but it's like pretty much alluded to and like we can all imagine this is the situation, is that they want to be able to have people record conversations, presumably using built-in anchor functionality, their podcast creation software. So you can record the conversation from this soon to be. named app and automatically distribute it to Spotify and potentially other podcasting platform. So basically it's like a direct funnel to their podcasting ambitions, which just makes

a lot of sense. Here's the question I have about Spotify. So like they have anchor ANC-H-O-R, not the battery pack company. It'd be amazing if Spotify on the battery pack company. But they've got Anchor, which is their creation platform. But you like use Anchor offline and you like get a file and you like upload that to Spotify or something happens. And then people listen to that asynchronously, right? They listen to it later. Clubhouse is like real time. Like you open Clubhouse and then like four people are talking. You can like jump into that room and they can invite you in and then now suddenly you're talking and like everyone's alone together in their basement. Spotify has has none of that functionality. Like almost nothing in Spotify is live. Like that's a big change for Spotify to be like,

I might open this app, I might listen to some music. I might watch one of their weird video things that they make, I might listen to a podcast, or I might start talking. And I'm just like, how are they going to manage that? Well, if you mean manage from a moderation perspective, that I'm curious about. I manage the whole thing. Like, the user experience, like, Spotify is like an app that happens in the background for most people. Whereas Clubhouse, you know, the best parts of Clubhouse are when you get to participate, not just listen to Venture Capitalist talking about how they hate the media or whatever happens at Clubhouse. Like, you know, it's an interactive experience in a way that Spotify, right now is a very passive experience.

Yeah, I think, you know, Spotify's broader ambitions might be to take a heavier hand in performances, kind of connecting artists and fans. You know, they already do some work around this. Like they've started selling concert tickets and merch and promos and giving, you know, true fans access to limited stuff. So I think that's kind of where they see this going is maybe less of like us chatting on the soon-to-be-named app about our days and more like, oh, we have Bieber on here and you want to ask Bieber a question about his album. So come get it.

Yeah. The most interesting, I think we've talked about this every time you've been on to talk about Clubhouse. Like the flurry of notifications was super high. Horrible. A few months ago, right? Like every 10 minutes someone was opening Clubhouse and you're being invited or someone you knew. And that's gone down. And now it's like a lot of rooms and whatever and maybe you're interested, maybe not. The most interesting one I've gotten in a long time, two days ago, someone I know opened a clubhouse room that just said, I'm in the car for the next 45 minutes, come hang out. And she was just driving. And then, like, people were come in and hang out. Like, everyone was a moderate.

Everyone was talking. And it was just, she just filled the space, which was, like, incredible. Would you do that in Spotify? Like, that's, like, the kind of thing I'm, like, pushing at is they're all going to launch this functionality. But the way you might want to use it or experience it. is like, I would never want to do that in Slack. There's no chance that I'm opening up a Slack room. I love all of you, but there's no chance I'm opening up Slack room that's like,

I'm available to be chatted with for 45 minutes in my car. Yeah. I'm definitely not, I'm not going to do that on LinkedIn. Like, that's a nightmare. Can you imagine doing that on LinkedIn? Well, I think the issue for Clubhouse could be that all these competitors as a whole chip away a Clubhouse in different ways. So the VCs room where people are like, tell me how you made your millions.

those people could just go on LinkedIn, have fun. Do those things. The people who want to hear the Bieber chat, go to the Spotify app. The people who want to talk to journalists about their work or whatever, Twitter. And the people who maybe do want that kind of more social experience, I mean, supposedly Facebook is working on something. So Instagram, essentially. I just think in the aggregate, Clubhouse definitely faces the competition.

But I agree. Like they could carve out a niche right now that's just like, this is the Hangout app, but Discord is launching their own Clubhouse, and that's what Discord is. So, like, I just think they face a lot of competition, and it seems like this is just going to be in every app. So Clubhouse really has to differentiate itself to make it seem like a place that you need to be. What's your vibe on how permanent this that is? There was a whole big, everyone's going to do live video, and then all those live video apps sort of petered out. Facebook, like, we're like, oh, wait, if we make anybody be able to do live video, it's going to be really hard to moderate.

We need to create some reporting tools here. is it got it real dark, real fast. Is that going to come for live audio inside all of these apps? Or is it just going to be like, you know, the money will dry up once we can get to go outside again and not be locked down in the pandemic? I think it's totally going to stratify like basically if you're really, first of all, everyone keeps talking about on Twitter like, oh, they just invented radio. Like this is the thing. This is like the tweet. If you want to make a snarky tweet, like, have you heard of radio?

But it is a good point in that NPR employs full-time producers, editors, hosts, like professionals who do this all day long. Putting together a live show, like this is live right now. This takes planning and work. This isn't something that we can just, maybe if you're really good, get in a room and have some fun and talk about it. Like, you guys could do it, obviously. But like, it takes practice and work.

So I do think that you're going to have a situation where kind of these haphazard rooms that are just boring and bad kind of fall by the wayside. And then you have the professionals that sort of rise to the top. And that's where you end up with, again, kind of that celebrity content or the professional podcasters who are like, oh, yeah, I just put my team on this and we're just doing a live show, but in an app instead of in our podcast. And but that gets instantly connected to money, right? Like, every time I open Clubhouse and somebody asked me to start talking, I'm like,

why am I working for free? Like, I get paid to talk twice a week. And, like, Clubhouse doesn't have any built-in monitors. yet. Spotify obviously has a wide variety of ways that it monetizes, some which are, particularly our music, like very controversial. LinkedIn doesn't have like a creator monetization system. Twitter is working on one, as we heard from Kvon a couple weeks ago. Like all the, all this is like, you'll build a big network and the company will come up behind you with a way to make money. And Clubhouse is like they're going to do what tipping. They haven't really said anything.

Yeah, I think right now, at least for Spotify, the prevailing idea is kind of like ticketed events, pay to get access to the room you want to hear. So that could happen. But again, that requires the really good content. I just think there's going to be kind of a battle for the good talent as there is in every platform. I think with LinkedIn, like people love to work for LinkedIn for free. Like LinkedIn is the only social network where you pay it money to do things. Like you want to send somebody a message on LinkedIn. They're like, pay us money.

because it has its very business-oriented purpose. It's going to help you with your career in some way. I don't know. I don't use LinkedIn that much, but this is what people tell me. I can see the like fake South by Southwest vibe of Clubhouse just migrating to LinkedIn where it belongs, right? Like you want to talk about social media marketing strategy. LinkedIn is the place for you.

Please. Please. Get off Clubhouse. But like the reason that it's good on Clubhouse is like randos will show up to those rooms. that would otherwise not be opening LinkedIn at like 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night to see like what's up. And like that's how you get the like the major influencers that drop into those rooms to just like start talking. That's like what made Clubhouse exciting. If you split it all up the way you're talking about like then you really end up back in this like pre-programmed I'm opening this app to watch a show at a time. I also truly wonder my you know the thing that I think is funniest about Clubhouse especially during the pandemic was you would open it up and like bust. Bust. rhymes and a random VC and like two other like lower tier celebrities would all be just like hanging out right and like these rude these notifications would be insane it'd be like maria carey is talking about corvettes now and i'm like yep i'm going to listen to that for some reason like i have no

idea why this happened um casey pointed out that like the serendipity of clubhouse was like what sold it right like it's you would basically have conference calls it would be impossible to schedule all of those people are just we're at home alone in the pandemic with nothing to do Right? Just like, what am I going to do? Like, I might as well open this app and start talking because I can't go anywhere. After the pandemic's over, like, I don't they just want to go to, like, I'm just going to want to go to parties. The idea that I'm going to like sit at home at night just like talking to my phone by myself is like low on my list of post pandemic priorities. Right. And that's why it's interesting because Discord kind of aligned itself with the gamer community where it's like, oh, you can use this app while you're gaming to chat with your friends. And like that way it's ambient, you're doing it your activity, but also have that. Clubhouse is kind of making it where it's like it takes up, it's your activity. Like you're in Clubhouse. That's what you're doing today and tonight. And yeah, I just don't necessarily know that the interest will be there post pandemic. God, I hope I'm at a bar. I hope I'm at 10,000 dollars to smoke a cigarette in a bar. I'm just saying right now, do you make that happen for me. It's almost over. I want to talk about a few other influencer things with you. We've been watching Instagram try to compete with TikTok. They are finally just past the first hump of like duets,

basically. Yeah. So the kind of the update on Instagram reels, their TikTok copycat. I'm sure you guys talked about this at some point. I can't remember. But the core update is that they started deprioritizing anything that had a watermark on it, aka any TikTok content. So they're really come in for like people to be native to reels. And so this week, they announced that they now have this thing called remix, which is essentially duets where you can just remix someone's real. And that's it. But, but it's just like a core TikTok thing that made TikTok TikTok, the dance challenges, you know, making creative content. Oh, that was cool. So here we are. Instagram doing the obvious thing. I think the we're going to lower the reach of anything of the

watermark is like at once like the most like they're doing it for TikTok but they found out this way of communicating it that wasn't about like anything with a watermark. Right. What else is there? All those watermark things. And then you had a scoop this week about Facebook and video creators. Yeah. So this week I published a story about how Facebook basically shorted a bunch of creators on their payouts.

I said thousands of dollars, but that's because I only talked to. to three creators who were affected. I am sure it could get much higher very easily when I talk to other people. But basically what happened was they launched this whole new experience for pages that kind of like created a separate profile for your pages versus connecting it to your personal account. And they have this tool that estimates your revenue per month. So all these creators check this tool to get an idea of how much they're going to make that month. They were seeing a specific higher number. And then the payouts came and it was significantly lower. And every time they reached out to Facebook Facebook. She was like, yeah, we'll look into it. I don't know. They kind of just ignored

them. So finally, I talked to a few creators about this. And as soon as I reached out to Facebook, they called it a quote unquote technical issue that they've resolved and they'll be paying these creators what they're owed this month in April. Facebook and video metrics. Yeah. I mean, like every time Facebook has had a metric associated with video, it's been like, oh, we got that wrong. We overestimated it. We underestimated it. It's weird that they own as much of the advertising market as they do. And I just feel for these creators who, you know, Facebook is really courting these creators. It needs them to make content on their pages for people to be on Facebook.

And so these creators reaching out being like, hey, I'm not getting paid. Hey, I'm not getting paid. And I'm just kind of ignoring it. It's like, okay, guys, we really need to get a little bit better at this. Yeah. I wonder if that bleeds over into the Instagram side where like they really need the creators, right? Like I don't think of Facebook is having influencers the way they think of Instagram is having influencers.

and if they started getting a bad rep on one side, it's going to bleed over to the other side. Lastly, I want to talk about this because we talked about Clubhouse and all the branded content on these platforms and creators. This is like the farthest, right now of your phone company, right?

You can go hire a bunch of influencers to make videos about your phones. It's just a thing you can do. That's great. If you're Samsung, you can make an entire show and then get Hulu to run it for you as a show

that's just about the camera on the Galaxy S-21. And this is like a photo competition. And it's just going to look like regular TV, but it's just Samsung-sponsored content. It's called exposure. The show is called exposure. That to me is like, is this the future of influencing? That like we're done with, like, the baby social networks,

and now we're just going to make a show for Hulu. I mean, there was a minute when, including The Verge, Every website had a branded content articles on their front page and like, you know, the big fight to like make sure the logo that like in the box are on the thing to show that this thing is branded content. Magazines have had like whole like inserts that were like branded content inserts.

This is like the Hulu equivalent of a branded content insert in a magazine. Except they won't say branded content. It's a show called. I tried. I tried so hard. I don't know. I just this part of the economy to me is just deeply, deeply interesting. Right? Like Ashley in the previous section,

before you came on, we were talking about ads on the web and cookies going away and, like, everyone's freaking out about how to effectively run advertising. The thing that is next to and around all of that is influencer marketing. And every one of these social networks, podcasts included, is like, people are figuring out how to do influencer marketing at massive scale. And then Samson and Hula are like, we made a game show. I mean, I feel like this already is happening, though. Like, I can't remember like queer eye.

They're always just like, I'm in my Toyota truck. Like, you know, stuff like that where you're like, oh, Toyota paid you to say that. So it's kind of just odd that Samson's making so much noise. Like they could have just pretended this was organically like, oh, let's just pick the ultra. But instead they were like, no, we paid for this, actually. That's because they knew that nobody would believe it. They get called on it. So that's part they had to like make it explicit.

It's pretty good. I am probably going to watch at least one episode of this show. To find America's, what is it, America's greatest mobile photographer. I honestly, I was thinking Vlad should enter. Oh, that'd be great. Vlad Savov, if you're listening. This is like Vlad's thing. Yeah, I can think of a handful of people.

Man, we should have made this show. Crap. All right. Thank you, Ashley. I want to call it a few things before we go. We are running way over time. Just stories on the website I want you pay attention to. One, this week is Infrastructure Week in America.

As President Biden announced a massive infrastructure plan. And what we are paying attention to most closely, of course, is the broadband subsidies in that plan. McKenna is all over it. But a huge part of the infrastructure plan is expanding broadband, which, of course, is of great interest to us. We've talked about NFTs on the show for weeks. We've had Liz on to talk about NFTs. Her gigantic feature on NBA Top Shot came out this week. NBA Top Shot took huge, they took huge investment.

They have a high new valuation. She got to talk to Andre Iguodala, like pretty. cool story. Just go read that. That's great. I will tell you the funniest thing about this story. When TopShot mentions the blockchain and its ads, their conversions go down. When they take the word blockchain out, their conversions go up 400%.

Like read the story. It's really cool. It's obviously an intriguing company. People love it. The players are in it. Liz did a great job. But like, why is the blockchain involved? It actually doesn't make a lot of sense.

But go read it. It's a great story. Alison Johnson, who was on the show last week, she did a great story reading the fine print of various phone plans, which is cool. I encourage you to read that. And then lastly, I want to bring this up. It's a very serious topic. There's escalating violence against Asians in America. It's a real thing that's happening.

We've been talking a lot about how to cover it in a way that feels appropriate to the verge. It's always what we come through things by talking about the videos and where they come from and who makes them and how they get distributed. We have a great piece by Jane Who about the fact that these are all surveillance videos. And one of the videos in particular, no one will take credit for it. No one, like, it's one of the more famous videos. It has, there's a lot of issues. But it is very interesting to see who is distributing these videos, where they are coming from.

And the fact that increased surveillance, which is a thing we are always talking about, has not actually deterred the crime. So go read that piece. It's a very serious issue. We are finding all kinds of ways to cover it. We want to be very careful. But that was our first big attempt at unpacking something complicated. It's on the site. You should go check it out.

Okay, we've gone way over. Thank you for listening. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Deeter's at Backlon. Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen. Dan is D.C. Sefert. Go listen to Decoder.

We had Tracy Sun from Poshmark on this week, as well as a special Casey interview with Nick Clegg from Facebook. That one, that's heated. People are very unhappy with Nick Clegg, just permanently. But go listen to it. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.