The Vergecast - The shine comes off the Vision Pro

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Apple fans starting to return the Vision Pro, Xbox exclusive games, Super Bowl streaming troubles, and more. Further reading: Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is ‘the better product’ vs. Apple’s Vision Pro Meta’s big vision for face computers might be better than Apple’s Microsoft’s gaming chief on Xbox games coming to PS5, next-gen hardware, and more Microsoft prepares to take Xbox everywhere Gemini Advanced is most impressive when it’s working with Google Gemini 1.5: Google’s next-gen AI model is almost ready  Google’s Gemini assistant is fantastic and frustrating OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model ChatGPT’s memory gives OpenAI’s chatbot new information about you Can watermarks save us from deepfakes? Automating ableism  The text file that runs the internet  Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU FCC commissioner wants to investigate Apple over Beeper Mini shutdown  Apple appears to be breaking iPhone web apps in the EU Walmart might buy Vizio to win the fight over cheap TVs  AI at Work Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of perceiving the world through screens. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah. The thing I told you about. It's accurate. That no one believed me about. So does that mean our podcast is like very good at first and then sort of slowly gets more annoying over time? You fluctuate. It's magic until it's not.

It's the Vergecast. It's very good. Quite a lot going on this week. Yeah. As we're recording, we are expecting breaking news from Microsoft about the future of the Xbox. Yes. Yes. So we're just going to react to that in real time.

And then we'll have Tom Warren come on the next show to explain what's going on. But we'll react to that in real time, I promise you. I'm your friend, Neely. David Pierce is here. Hi. I should warn everyone that I have a deeply sore throat. So the, like, sexy smoldering thing I'm doing is just a one-time thing. And it will not be this good to listen to me every time.

No, you should keep it. We're going to do an AI. We're going to do a sexy smolder AI. I love this. OpenAI.com slash sexy smolder. Alex Kranz is here. Deeply disappointed. I don't also have a cold right now.

You could vague you big. Yeah, I could drop it a little lower. I don't even know how far to go. This is when you first started podcasting on the InGadgett podcast ages ago, I was like, I should have a podcast voice. Yeah. But gave up on that immediately. You have to. Otherwise, you forget about it.

And then you're like, hello, how are you? This is my normal voice. and people are like, you went with Mickey Mouse? That's my normal voice. You don't, I actually do a verge voice. At home, I talk like this all the time. Can you do an impression of your podcast voice for us?

Just real fast? I think Decoder is my fake podcast voice. Oh, interesting. It's a pseudo-MPR. I think of that as like Nilai Patel in his study swirling a brandy. Yeah, that's the Nelai Phi of Decoder. That's the same voice. That's right.

That makes sense. It's drunk Ira Glass. That's the decoder voice. that's what I got for you. Okay, I love this for you. We got to start with some housekeeping. This is our first Vergecast back on the main Verge YouTube channel. I am told this was a complicated move, but it should be simple to experience.

Dave, can you explain what's going on? Yes, okay, so there are now two channels on which you can experience the Verge cast. We have the Verge's main YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com slash the verge or search for the verge. that's where all the full episodes are going to live. We just wanted to have the show and the rest of our stuff kind of be closer to each other, easier to find. And with all the stuff YouTube is doing with podcasts right now,

it actually makes sense to have those things a little closer together because now you can subscribe to just a single playlist, if all you want is the podcast, you can subscribe to the channel and get everything in YouTube and get the podcast and YouTube music. It's all a little weird right now because Google is still sorting out how all of the podcast stuff works. It's very in character for Google.

I just want to be clear about that. Yeah. So, like, all of this is stuff that I think we are doing correctly and just slightly ahead of Google. So hopefully this will continue to make more sense as time goes on. But basically, all the full episodes

are going to be on the Verges YouTube channel from now on. And then we're going to do, like, clips and extras and silly stuff where we make fun of Neelai off the show on the Vergecast channel. So that's where all that stuff will live. I promise,

there was a lot of weirdness as we moved all of this stuff. Liam, our producer, did like a heroic job to get all of this done. It was messy because YouTube is messy, but I think it's done now. People seem to have, like, found the Vergecast again in all the YouTube platforms. So it should work. And if you don't listen to this podcast on YouTube, don't worry about it. Literally nothing else will change. I hope this makes more sense as time goes on should be Google's motto.

I just want to be 100% clear on that. We have a product team focused on making this make sense. Yeah. I hope this makes sense as time goes on. Is how Google approaches product strategy at a very high level. I'll give you one, but one example. And I don't know why this threads post did the numbers it did, except I think it spoke to people's very souls.

I bought a big, silly Sony TV. I'm very happy with it. It's an A-95-0. Very, very pleased with this. It looks amazing. It came with the webcam, which I think is just representative of how deeply overcharged I was for this TV. They were like, we made so much money. Here's a camera.

Fine. So I'm like, what can this webcam do? Nothing. It can watch you while you watch TV and adjust the settings. That's a hard no. Yeah. And then there's a Zoom client and there's a Google Meet client. So I was like, fine.

Oh, it has gesture controls, which are after the Vision Pro, I'm just not doing gesture controls. I know what happened. Oh, my God, this is the best. If this goes where I think this is about to go, this is my favorite thing. I clip the camera to the top of the TV. I launched Google Meet to sign into our staff meeting and basically be a brat at our staff meeting. And I'm like, where do I type in the code? When you can't.

And I was like, okay, where do I switch accounts to my work account? then you can't. Oh. And so they've made a Google meet client for Android, which this television runs, uh, they can't join meetings. What? It can just call, you can just call people with your phone number from your television, a thing that everyone wants to do.

Yeah, no. David, I'm curious for your guess under what happened here because I think I know. So what happened was Google in its. infinite wisdom, uh, decided that duo and meet should not be different things, because when you call one person and you call another person, it should be the same thing. Uh, so what they did was they renamed duo to meet and then renamed meat to meet original. And then I think I have this right. And then the old duo now meet became Google meet. But I'm guessing what never happened is that your TV never got an update.

So you still have Google Duo with a different name. Yeah. It didn't get up. There's no update available. It's not my TV didn't get an update. My TV is hardwired to the router. This is a very insane TV situation. Well, okay, you're right.

Google forgot that this TV exists. Google forgot to update the meat client so that it could join meetings. Right. It changed the name, but forgot to change the app. There's a can ban board in Mountain View labeled, we hope this makes sense over. time and update the meet clients so it can join meetings as a card on that board. It just hasn't moved in over a year. Neelai, I have to tell you, they scrummed this, and they didn't, they decided that updating

Nealai's TV was not a corporate priority. It's an Android app. Your TV was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. A TV is just a giant tablet. You don't even, remember when they were like, Android tablets are back. We're going to try hard again. Remember that? It'll make sense over time.

You'll worry about it. We hope this makes sense over time. Don't worry about it. Come. Anyway, I had to audio and they joined this staff meeting. I was like, I don't even, I can't join from my phone down here. And all the power was great. It was great.

Truly. All right. So we're on YouTube. The upshot of that is one, I can't join meetings from my television. And two, we are now available on the main YouTube channel. Yeah. Is that all right? That's right.

Pretty much. All right. Let's talk about the news. There's quite a bit of news. news. Let's start with the Vision Pro. It is two weeks after the Vision Pro hit. Which means everybody has to return it now. You got to make the big return decision. Right. Look, a lot of influencers bought the Vision Pro to make a bunch of Vision Pro views on YouTube.

And now they've returned the Vision Pro. Because why would you keep it? If that's your goal, like, why would you keep it? Right? Like, you've milked that for all its worth. That's how you used to be able to do, like, reviews and stuff once a ton of time. You'd just be like, yeah, I definitely want this very. expensive product. Right. I would just say there's a clout element to Vision Pro discourse that we keep pointing out. Like Vision Pro thrown at a cyber truck. Subscribe to my newsletter.

Like that is a whole... Well, that one can't be returned. Well, if you get enough newsletter, so... That's true. There's just a whole universe of that discourse that I think we can just set aside. As a family, we can agree. We're going to set aside the clout chasing part of the coverage. Then there's a bunch of people who are happy with it and they're keeping it and it works for them and they're excited and they've got big lonely TVs to watch. That's great. We can talk about that because I think some of that is coming into focus as well.

Then there's the people who the hype balloon for them popped and they are genuinely returning it for a variety of reasons, all of which seem fairly predictable. Yes. And I think that it's the gap between the hype and reality that is really disappointing a bunch of people here. So people are returning it because it's not comfortable to wear. People are returning it because it makes their eyes hurt. They're getting headaches. People are returning it because they are lonely in it or the pass-through isn't what they thought it was going to be. The windows management was one I saw.

Someone returned it over window management? Yeah, it was one of many reasons. But like a big factor for them was like, yeah, I can't manage the windows properly. It doesn't feel like that. If you are a person who had enough feelings about window management to return a $3,500 computer, please, we should hang out. We love you. Just come on over. Like, we should talk.

But that's how I would diagnose it, right? Is the things it was promised to do and then the things it can actually do and the product it is now, there is a pretty staggering gap between those two things. Yes. And I think the thing we've really spent the last week kind of discovering as a society is that it turns out that Apple having a long history of making these things work and having a presumably very cool roadmap doesn't mean. anything for the thing on your face, right?

Like, this is what we talked about when we did this review, right? Like, you can talk all you want about where this is going and who's right about the future and the big ideas behind all of this and Apple's ability to execute. And I still have not changed my mind on any of that. I think if you were to bet on a horse in this race, you'd be crazy not to bet on Apple. Just historically, that is true. It doesn't change anything for the fact that you just bought a very expensive thing that is uncomfortable to wear for a lot of people, doesn't do that.

much for most people's use cases and is $3,500. And so I think we saw a really normal thing happen, which is a lot of people tried it. It's super cool. Like you went through this too, Neely, like the first time you put it on, you spend a couple of hours in it, you take it off and you're like, oh my God, that is the most impressive thing I've ever seen. And then the fifth time you do that, you're like, well, it's, I'm not doing this because it's cool.

I actually need something out of this. And the entertainment side of things seems to be holding up. Like the people who want to watch a large screen, look at cool panoramic pictures they've taken, whatever, that seems to be working for people. But the question of A, is that enough for this $3,500 headset? And B, can I do that comfortably? Like literally physically comfortably. Yeah. Is turning out to be a higher bar, I think, than a lot of people who bought this thing expected.

I want to stay focused on that use case. I would submit to you if you take your $3,500 and you go and buy the biggest TV you can get for that money, you will be happier in the long run than owning a first generation vision pro. Yeah, because you can do TikTok at the same time.

Because you can do TikTok at the same. You can watch the show with someone else, which everyone keeps forgetting. Like maybe you're a solitary person and we've heard from a lot of people like this and you never have people over to watch TV. The one time you want to, and your only option is the Vision Pro,

you're going to be like, huh. There's also just being able to move around, not having the weight on your face. There's just something about that that's different. Yeah. The thing you'll lose out on is the audio side of it because the Vision Pro is very convincing with spatial audio, especially if you wear good headphones with it,

like AirPods Pro. That's very convincing. And as a travel device, on an airplane, I've seen a lot of people wear this thing on airplanes and say, like for a long haul flight, you're flying New York, San Francisco, and you do the immersion, and you're just like in space, and you just don't feel cramped anymore. Great. $3,500 external battery pack.

Like, you're still a generation or two behind from that thing being valuable, I would say. But if that's the whole value proposition, you're really missing out on a lot that you should be getting from a computer that can put windows everywhere in your space. Yes. And I keep seeing apps that, like, could be really cool. There's one V-Song and I were laughing at last night. It's basically a virtual peloton. So you have any exercise bike, preferably one with like Bluetooth that compared to a thing over ant or whatever protocol that is. And it just mounts a big virtual screen in front of you and then you go on a bike ride.

That's cool. That is cool. That's super cool. And then it's like you have to work a Vision Pro in your head to do it with an external batter pack. With a sweat. Yeah. It's like none. It's not made for that.

Yeah. Like it just isn't made. for that. And then there's the other app that everyone keeps talking about, which is the Mac display. And I thought it was utterly fascinating that a lot of the first conversation you saw from Vision Pro owners was the killer app for this thing is my Mac. Yeah. Which is wild. Like just what? Like the application model has nothing to do with spatial computing. It's just a big window in your Mac. The Mac is notably much more open than an iOS or iPad-O-based device. So what you want is your rack applications. And then you have this big screen and Apple keeps building it as a 4K screen.

And then over time, you started seeing people say, this is actually kind of a little blurry. This isn't as sharp as I thought it was. And it's because Apple is making a 5K, like an iMac display or a studio display. They're that resolution. They're making a virtual one of those at that resolution. And then they're downresing it to 4K and setting a 4K video stream of that. Lies. Which you can then scale infinitely to whatever weird size you want. And so I called this out in the review, and it was just like one of those things is like so hard to explain. So much of this device is once you see it for yourself, you get it. But it is really hard to explain.

You're looking at the screen that seems sharp. And then underneath it are like five scaling operations. And then on top of it, there's foviated rendering. So you've made this huge Mac display that is already fuzzy because of the scaling. steps in between the virtual display that's created, that's 5K that's being scaled down to 4K and sent to the headset. And then you've made it really big. And then if you look at the center of it, the edges of it are blurry because of the foviated rendering. And so people are just sort of running into the reality of what that screen really looks like. And they're like, oh, my

application model is still the Mac. I should just use my Mac. Yeah. Right. And I think the other part of that is also, to your point about it's not super clear until you see it, the actual interaction of the Mac apps on my Mac, the Vision Pro apps that are actually optimized for this spatial computing, and the iPad apps that run in the Vision Pro is not good. You can technically have all of those things,

but the world you want, and I think the world a lot of people expected, is one where all of my apps are just all of my apps, and some of them run on my device, some of them run on my Mac, but I can just sort of put them all anywhere and they all interact, and that's pretty cool. That is not at all how it works.

And I think that, like, the people who are mad about the window management are the ones who are like, well, either the idea of being able to leave my email in the other room is actually, like, not a good thing. It's neat, but it's stupid. And why would I want that? Or this thing about like, okay, I've been promised something like sort of world scale app multitasking. And this is actually a tiny little slice of that plus a bunch of other slightly confusing things. to me this is like when they put stage manager on the iPad and you're like I can see what you were going for here you just missed it by about 30% and it kind of kills the whole premise for me the two things that I think would make that much better and you can see them and I think

that that's the 30% one to have to make it smaller like the hardware is not ready for the software like I have come back to that several times like one way to think about this is that this is a simulator for the hardware they want to build. And you can see putting windows over your house and having digital objects everywhere would be amazing. But then you have to wear a Vision Pro. And every time I see a cool Vision Pro app, I think, yes, but to have this experience, you've got to put all that weight on your head. And for some people, that's fine. I don't want to discount the people who are like, that's great.

But the reality of it is then you degrade, like literally degrade reality. You are wearing a Vision Pro on your face, and the world around you is a lot grainer and there's motion blur and the past through isn't good. and you are prioritizing the digital world over the real world. And I just don't think that's an appropriate. And the moment you walk into a dark room, you just see mud, right? Yeah, I mean, it's a camera. Yeah. You just cannot overcome cameras.

And I have now talked to it because in the review, I basically called the top on pastor. I was like, it can get better, but it can't get 5,000 percent better. Right. And if you did, like, by the time you get that much better, some other technology will come along and be disruptive. very smart people disagree with me on this. I'd fine. Who knows? But we all agreed that the timeline for that is 10 years out.

And I am just not making any predictions on what happens in 10 years of technology development. Well, I think a bunch of us in the office have been talking about how would you shrink this headset? Like, did they make a design mistake in it? And a lot of people were like, well, why didn't they just take that computer and put it with a battery pack, right? And just take a lot of that weight out. But then if you put it with a battery pack, you'd effectively be carried. around like a Mac Mini in your pocket with a battery attached to it. Backback, full Apple backpack, big puffy white straps.

You need fans to cool it. Who knows if it can like actually be fast enough along that wire to do all the stuff, all the incredible processing it's doing? It's like, no, it's actually a really, like, I keep going back to it. It's a really fascinating device because it is so complex. It is such like exquisitely designed device that doesn't do a whole. whole lot. But that part of it where it doesn't do a whole lot, that's because it's new.

Like, there's no apps for it. Yeah. We saw a report this week from Immersive Wire, I want to say it was, that most Vision Pro apps hit a ceiling of 1,000 downloads. Like, very few people have this product. Right. Vanishingly few people have this product. Vanishingly few app developers have started building apps that are made for it.

But that's a cycle that. Yeah. And that's a cycle that's going to continue because if no one's making apps for it, then nobody's buying it. And if no one's buying it, then no one's making apps for it. I do think what's clear is that this is a repeat of the, you can't just blow up an iPhone app and have it work on the iPad problem, which Apple thought that ecosystem would buy it a ton of time.

And that it didn't. Like, luckily, Apple was able to get the iPad ecosystem going very quickly because the you will just 2X your iPhone app and it'll be great was a total non-starter. And I think we're going through that again, where it turns out iPad apps are not the answer. Like we, what we have seen overwhelmingly so far as people being like, there's some cool stuff. Even Apple now is going into Apple Arcade and saying, here's some of the stuff you can actually use for spatial. It's cool. This idea that, you know, you have access to this giant set of apps and it will get us there and buy us enough time to get to the next thing.

I'm less convinced of every day because it just doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to be sort of satiating people that way. So I want to talk about one more limitation that I think the community has discovered. of this thing, and then I want to talk about Mark Zuckerberg reviewing it. Yes, that was the best. Which is deeply, as a professional reviewer, all I could think of is, boy, I hope more CEOs try to take my business. Like, just get out there, Sundar Pichai. Just start reviewing stuff.

Be like, I'm... Reviewing the pixel. He should review the pixel. Sundar Pichai, pick up a pixel challenge. Pay attention to the pixel challenge. The other limitation that I think is really weird. And Addie will have a piece on this on the site by the time you're listening to this. The people in the like the Vision Pro subreddit and the people that I've seen in other places online do not think Apple's default fitment is good.

Yeah. So they're like, you go in, you get your face scanned or you do the iPhone scan and you get a light seal and all of them are like get a smaller light seal. Some people are like, take the lightsill off and mash it against your face, which I tried. It is very convincing in terms of field of view. Get a huge field of view. I felt like I was underwater, like the ones that are not designed to be special. directly against your eyeballs. But they're like, get a different light seal, make it smaller, like mess with the fit because they don't think that the fit that Apple is giving people is right.

Which we've discovered Apple really does not want you to do, right? They really don't want you to do that. You can't just walk in and buy three light seals and see which one you like the best, right? Because they're $200. Well, they're $200. But so like, I'll just, I'll make that concrete if you're listening. We have a review unit. We want more people on our team to use it. We want to make more videos. We have ideas and I have to cover it. Even if we bought another one,

even if we sent the review in it from Apple back and we just bought one. In order to be fair in coverage as more people use the thing, we have to make sure it fits them. Because if it doesn't fit right, the eye tracking goes completely wonky and people get headaches.

So, okay, I told Owen our video director, let's just go to the Apple store, just buy a bunch of light seals. Turns out there are 17 sizes. There are $200 a piece. and Apple won't let you just buy some. You cannot go to an Apple store and just buy some. They keep him in a drawer.

You have to ask someone and then they'll be like that. So Owen who made the Vision Pro video with like Owen is on that team. He edited that video. They made him sit for the demo, the full half hour demo, and then they let him buy one in his size. And it's like, why? Just we want to give you money. Yeah. Up to $4,000.

Like, if you walk into any store and you're, you're like, I'll just, here's $4,000. Just give me one of everything. Few stores in America will be like, no, you just actually there's a process here. Yeah. Hermes would be like, get out. You get one. Yeah.

And when you think of the Vision Pro Light Seal, you immediately leave to Hermes. 100%. Same experience. Same like, I walk in. I'm like, ooh, do I have enough money to be in here right now? Yeah. It's Barney's, Armes, and the Vision Pro Light Seal in terms of luxury purchasing experiences. You can't just buy a Ferrari.

You got to buy a bad Ferrari first. Yeah. You can't just buy a vision for a light seal. You got to sit down for 30 minutes first. So that is annoying on its face. If you buy it for enterprise use, I've seen a lot of designers. Like, we bought one for our office so we could, like,

share it as a 3D modeling tool. And they're like, this is just like not designed to be shared. If you spend $3,500 to have it as a cool TV, it is challenging to get it to fit the other people. That's just physically. Yeah. You can accomplish the goal. But it is challenging to be like, this computer is available for someone in this office to use.

Here's a selection of things that make it fit your head. It's so consumer hostile. So there's a, I think there's a connection here. It's too new. Yeah. I think they just shipped the thing. There's, like, you know, you all know how I feel about headphone jacks. Yeah.

That was a hostile move. This is like the product isn't ready to support that. that thing. And the way that it's in particular not ready is iOS and iPadOS have no affordance for multi-user support. Yeah. So the Vision Pro, it has optic ID in it. It can scan your eyes and log you in. It should be able to scan my eyes or your eyes or David's eyes or someone else's eyes and be like, here's your account, you're you, we know you're you, here's your account and here's your stuff. And it has nothing. And like on top of it, it has none of the like, recalibrations stored.

So if I have one, if I have a Vision Pro, and I lend it to you, every time I lend it to you, you have to recalibrate. I have to put it in guest mode, and you have to recalibrate it for your eyes. Yeah, that's stupid. That has to, that was a deliberate choice, though, right? That has to have been a deliberate choice by Apple to make it hard for you to share this thing with people. Because for all the reasons you've been talking about, that the hardware is not set up

for success for you to be sharing. But why? That's why I think it's hostile because they never... Because it's not finished. But they cannot possibly... It's hostile with, like... I don't think it's like Apple is hostile. Okay, so let me explain why I think the headphone jack is hostile.

Let me rewind this conversation. They took out the headphone jack. They didn't need to, especially the phones started getting bigger. They did that because they wanted AirPods to succeed. AirPods are a huge success. I know people love their AirPods. I know people think we were wrong about AirPods. They basically created a market for proprietary headphones.

Yes. AirPods are proprietary headphones. Yes. Like, I know they run a Bluetooth, but they actually run a special version of Bluetooth. Ginzi gets you on that one. They're all like, can you believe they got rid of the headphone jack? Who allowed that? And I'm like, we wrote about it all the time.

I did my best. But, like, that was straight and hostile. Like, they created a market for proprietary headphones and they flooded the market with their own headphones. Yes, I'm aware that people really like them. Whatever, it's a thing that happened. Not allowing multiple users on the iPad at this point in the iPad's history, a little bit hostile. Like, you have families. People share their iPads.

schools. There's some enterprise support for shared accounts on iOS devices if you're in a school or a business. But a regular person who spends $5, $700, $700 on iPad that is not a family device by any stretch of the imagination is locked to one user because Apple wants you to buy multiple iPads. I want everyone in your family to have an iPad. Okay, there's some just raw capitalistic user hostility there. Fine. They're the richest company in the world. What a shock. I think with the Vision Pro, there's no expectation that a family of four is going to buy four vision pros. I agree.

And I think that's why I'm like not ready to call it. I think they just shipped the product that was done. I think it was hostile design. I don't think it's necessarily like Apple was set out to, to had a big vision here. I think it was just, well, we want to make this thing as cool as possible. And that means we need to make it as finicky as possible, regardless of what that means for like use cases for other people, because we want to make it as cool as possible. And that's hostile to the users because of the. they can't share it. They can't do anything with it. They do have to go buy another one or they have to go buy a $200 light seal if they want to have that experience. And like, I don't want to say the Quest Pro was a good product. But that part of it. Just remind everyone, we gave the Quest Pro a four. Yeah. And the headline was, get me out of here. But could you put it on, like, when you put it on your head, did it fit? Did you have to go buy a $200 light seal to make sure it worked? Oh, no. So I, I don't buy that premise.

honestly. Like, have you ever put on somebody else's headset and you spend 15 minutes screwing around with the lenses and the strap to get it to fit your head? Like, it's, there's just no world in which you have a good experience using these things. Ironically, it's one of the reasons I think meta-ray ban strategy is closer to the right one because that's just a pair of glasses that is much closer to a thing you can just put on anyone's head and it will more or less work. You might look stupid in them, but it's just a pair of glasses. Whereas, as something like this is just by definition

so individual user-centric that I think for Apple to say, oh, share it with your friends, they're going to have a trash experience in it. It's actually a bad idea. Like, I think if we get to... No, I think it was a bad idea, what I'm saying is go further back.

I think it was a bad idea to design a product. Well, you're just arguing it was a bad idea to ship the Vision Pro, which is fine. Yeah. To ship it in the state

to say, hey, we're going to charge you $200 for a light seal, hey, we're going to make it so, extraordinary for one person and no one else. I think that's just inherently hostile to design. I will say, I do think an interesting question that is becoming more and more open is whether Apple overshot. And this is where we should get into Mark Zuckerberg's review of this thing, because

it's part of the case that he made, which is that Apple basically came out and said, we are going to make the best, most impressive, most incredible thing possible. Every other consequence, be damned, right? And it did that by all accounts. Like, I don't, I don't think it may. missed in terms of doing the best anyone possibly can at this moment in time on very many fronts. Is doing that a better idea than making something that is 85% as good and maybe half the weight? Don't know. Like, is it something that Apple should have shipped that was much closer to just a screen and an entertainment device as opposed to trying to do all of this other stuff?

I think this roadmap Apple has set itself on where it made the best thing possible and it's just going to try to bring it down in all of those ways over time towards people is a strategy. But I think it's less and less obvious to me that it's the right one because it's like you want that to be the luxury thing that not everybody can afford, but everybody who can really loves. And even that is not what it's getting right now. It's not like the Tesla Roadster or the super expensive first luxury item you see from a lot of

companies. It's not even working for those people. It's not the Samsung flip phones, right? Yeah. Like that was that was a thing. It was like, okay, there's a lot of flaws in this. If you peel this part off, it will destroy it and then Samsung will not be happy. But like it still worked pretty well. I mean, yeah, more than one person could use it. But it actually did the, it delivered on the promise. And this feels like it doesn't always. But the promise there was just it unfolds. Yeah. It was a much simple promise. Right. The promise that Apple is making is we will intermediate reality for you. And that was perhaps too big a promise to make.

I think David said this a couple weeks ago, which is with the Apple Watch, and so, so many people have compared the Vision Pro to the Apple Watch, which I'm just going to remind everyone I got right in that review, too. But the Apple Watch underwent drastic, drastic changes. But David, I think it was used to this couple weeks ago. They got the form factor right. Everyone knew that this is how it should look. And all you're doing is refining the thing around the shape that it should be.

And here, it just seems obvious that the form factor isn't right, right? That they shouldn't do pass through in this way. That what you want is all the, you want glasses. So I think it does bring it to the Zuckerberg review, which again, I think every CEO should just review their competitors. Fantastic. 100%. David, do you want to tell us what's going on with Mark? Sure.

Okay. So let me just briefly set the scene for you here. So Mark Zuckerberg and his newly long hair, which I'm shocked we have not talked about it in a show yet. But we'll just leave that. Sitting on a couch in a dark long sleeve shirt, I think, with an immaculately fluffed pillow behind him. Lovely setup. Did a, I don't know, what, maybe five minutes or so just kind of riff on his experience with the Vision Pro, how he feels about the Quest 3 compared to the Vision Pro. Because there were a lot of people, remember when this came out, who were like, oh, the Quest.

is dead. Meta actually rushed to launch the Quest 3 ahead of the Vision Pro. These two things have been very closely pitted against each other as sort of opposite ends of this strategy for a very long time. And he sat down and basically, we should just play a clip here, but he basically said at the end of his experience, he thinks not only is the Quest 3 a better value, he thinks it is straight up a better product than the Vision Pro. Yeah. Pull over in your car and just look at this man's hair and then listen to his voice. I think the Quest is the better product, period. And, you know, the different companies made different design decisions for the headsets.

They have different strengths. But overall, Quest is better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for. And that's a good line, right? Beautiful hair, too. It's great. It is, like, lustrous. That's what punching other men in the face will get you.

Just gets the follicles, man. He's just rocking. Healthier than ever. By the way, you know, mixed martial arts is listed in meta's risk factors with investors. Yes. So good. Our CEO made deeply injure himself fighting other humans. Very good.

Anyway, so the point there, right, is everyone thought, okay, does $500 get me 85% of a Vision Pro? And honestly, in the review, we didn't talk about the Quest a lot in our review because they feel very different. Yeah. Yeah. And I think now what Zuckerberg is trying to do is actually make them more competitors. See, I don't even know if I agree with that. I think part of his take, I think, is that they're actually very different things, that everybody wants them to be trying to do the same thing and sort of compete on what they can do for different people.

And it's like, oh, I want to do X, Y, and Z. Should I buy a Quest or a Vision Pro? And his whole point is kind of, you can't do any of that stuff on the Vision Pro. The quest, and I will say the single funniest thing about this whole video to me was the moment where the camera flips around and it becomes clear that he's filming this thing on a Quest 3, which just means there is a person sitting there very still, just staring at him with the headset on. Just like you do with the Vision Pro to your child's birthday party. Yeah, exactly. Like, next time we make a video, Neelai, I'm just going to stare into your eyes the whole time. It's going to be

incredible. But it's a big part of what he talks about, and I think is the most compelling part of Zuckerberg's case here is that for all the stuff people actually want to do in a headset like this right now. We can talk about 10 years from now. We can talk about the big far future of headsets for everybody. But in terms of like right now what people want to do inside of a headset, there's just more of that in the quest. Yeah. There's more games. There's more apps.

There is, you can do three Mac Windows if you want to. Although setting that up is a Byzantine nightmare of like what I call software dongles. Oh, yeah. You don't want, it's not great. You have to download a bunch of apps that just sound like malware in order to, like, it's bad. Yeah. And you're like, I'm sending my entire screen to meta? No, thank you, sir.

I don't care what your hair looks like today. No. You're not actually sending your entire screen to meta. But you understand what I'm saying. It's a nightmare of weird applications. And Mark actually calls it out. Like, their Apple's ecosystem is great. But if you want to play a bunch of games or you want to do fitness, if you want to

want to control the thing. You have high resolution controllers, which he calls out very specifically. And the heart of what he's getting at, and I think this is really interesting because you rarely see CEOs acknowledge this. He's like, we made different tradeoffs than Apple. Yep. And we think our tradeoffs make a better product, period, not just a cheaper product, not just a better product at our price point. And he comes back to that over and over again. And if you go listen to any CEO ever talk about their products, I talk to a lot of CEOs, and a lot of decoders like, you made this tradeoff. How did you make that choice? And they're like, we didn't make any tradeoffs at all.

All the time. Yeah. Like all the time. Especially Apple refuses to acknowledge that they made tradeoffs. Right. Like in the review process, we're like, why is the battery over here? And they're like, yeah, we want to save weight in your head. And that is as much of a tradeoff is.

Because it is meant to be over here. Jesus wanted it that way. And it's like there's that one you can't avoid But everything else they're like these are the best displays ever made Yeah, and then Mark is there being like we've looked at these displays and they are OLED displays and they have exactly a kind of motion blur that you would expect from all that displays Our lenses are better that meta really believes the Quest 3's pancake lenses are better They have a wider field of view So we lose X from the displays the resolution that Apple has in their displays

But we gain X in the lenses I'm not saying these are the right tradeoffs I'm not saying these are the right tradeoffs I'm not saying these are tradoffs that make you make you buy anything. I'm saying a CEO acknowledging the tradeoffs in a product category is wild, like fully wild. And I don't know if you saw this, a lot of people were like, this is Zuck's Balmer moment.

Oh. Where Balmer was like $500 fully unsubsidized of the plan. I like our phone better. And that's, there's an element of that to what Zuck was doing. Oh, no, I disagree. I thought, it felt more like a victory lap. a legit victory level.

Wow. Okay. That's how you took it. Yeah. Because I, you know, V put up a story this week that I worked with her on about the visions of these two companies because they're both, the end game for both of them isn't VR. It's AR, right? Like, both of these companies are waiting.

Eventually, the technology is going to get there and they're going to do face computers. And that's what everybody wants. Spatial computing. After 15 days of the vision. Okay. Excuse me. Can we say everyone wants a face computer? That's what everyone in Silicon Valley wants.

That's what all the VCs want. But I think their strategy is a much smarter strategy. And I think when you think about how you have to normalize these products because they are really big, really wild and really insane, you have to normalize that. Like it's going to require a cultural shift. And meta is moving with much smarter purpose in that direction than Apple, who is like face computer that looks like ski goggles. Put it on your face. It's way too heavy and you might throw up. It'll be fine.

And meta's like, okay, well, we've got like these glasses that just. just look like glasses and you can't do as much, but you can still do like, you can still like scan photos and stuff like that, which is really, really cool. And they've got the VR headsets that actually like do VR well. Yeah. Which, like, I think that's just a better strategy. I think he's right. And when I was watching it, I was like, oh, this is him just taking this victory lap.

And also making some egregious claims, like meta is going to be the open ecosystem. Yeah, which is bananas. Yeah. Are they going to let Lenovo build quests? I was like, oh, are you just announcing that everybody's going to be making headsets for meta-OS? What they mean, from what I understand, is that you can sideload applications on a quest. No, what meta means is if you build something cool, we'll just buy your company. And that's an open model.

Yeah, it's an open ecosystem because you get rich. What they mean in every phase of computing, there's Apple being weird. And then there's everyone else being like, what if we work together? And then there's Apple being weird. Yeah. That part I was like, oh, I feel. feel like you're, like, you had me this whole time. Your hair looks great.

You're like, you're saying the things that I really do think about this whole field. And now you've just lied. He does keep saying that they will be the open player in VR. And it's really unclear. I was like, I really want to sit him down with like a computer historian to explain to him computer histories that he understands that what he is saying is not true. Oh, I'm sure he has access to computer historians. He probably does.

He probably, but he doesn't listen. I think there's a, there's just a way of positioning yourself. up against the big bad of Apple that he's taking advantage of. But I think right now what they have is side loading apps. Yeah. But I will say also to your point, Alex, I think one thing I'm really starting to realize is how significant meta's lead is just having been at this in public for a decade. Yep.

Because again, like me and I go back to the Apple Watch, you launch the thing and then you wait around for a couple of years for people to tell you what they want from it. And then it's your job to kind of chase that and figure it out, right? Apple is good at that generally and does it very quickly and relies on its developers to do it for them. Meta's been at that for 10 years now. Like the thing where here's a thing on your face, it's kind of ugly and you'll probably throw up. Like, you know what that sounds like is the first three Oculus products. That's just what it was.

And it turned off a lot of people. And we all, you know, hemmed and hot about whether a whole generation was being turned off by their first experience in VR because it was so bad. But now it's been at this long enough that it's pretty good at it. and it has a pretty clear sense of what people want right now. And I think that's where things like the meta-rayband stuff come from. It's like, oh, people want super immersive, and that's either like gaming or the fitness stuff. They want to be in another world or they want as little technology as possible.

And so they've pushed to both ends of that and I think are able to do it. Whereas Apple very much just put out a tech demo and we're like, is this anything? Like, it's starting at that road now. And meta has been on it for a long time. I would say that there's a, I think there's a little bit of a danger of the bomber problem and that Apple is relentless. Yes. And they do stay focused. The difference, the difference.

And they have all the money in the universe. Is that Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Palmer. Yes. It's just an observation that I've made over time. I've studied these two men very carefully. I think meta is more reactive to consumers and that Bombers Microsoft is much more reactive to enterprise. Yeah. That's 100%.

And that version of Microsoft, not Microsoft now, but that version of Microsoft in particular was addicted to making the ugliest shit possible. Yes. They were just like, it's Windows Mobile 6.5. It's the same Windows mobile that you've hated all this time. But now the stock launcher is a honeycomb. Also, that won't be there. And carriers can do whatever garbage they want. And it's like, this isn't a good idea.

We made the icon smaller. This is bad. And Apple was able to for it. And so I think there's some meaningful different. is here because they have been in market with a complete consumer product. I'm not saying I have a Quest 2. You have a quest like lots of Quest 2 is out there. Some Quest 3s, Apple's coming at this from a different direction.

I'm not something they won't succeed. But I think after two weeks with this thing, like the barriers are just crystal clear. Yeah. In a way that the barriers to the quest are also crystal clear. and they're going to converge more than they don't, but saying like Apple revitalize this market, I think, is... Generous. Yeah, and with the watch, they had a huge advantage,

which was no one else could make a watch. Well. No, I mean, like, literally, like, the iPhone does not allow other watches. Oh, that's true, yeah. Like, Pebble existed. I was just, yeah, I was just like, Pebble was a great watch. No, but if you want to do the thing really, you get a text message, and you respond, yes.

Like, Pebble was not allowed to do that. Yeah, you'd be like, oh, okay, let me pull. my phone out. So we'll see. No, we've talked enough about the Vision Pro. I like that we just spent 40 minutes being like, everybody's returning this product. Let's talk about it. Oh, it is the most fascinating product. It is Apple's first big bet. I want to talk about it. I just want to end on this. I want everyone to do this homework and send me your evaluation. We've talked a lot about my theory of wearable bullshit.

Whatever that is, where the chart is value on one axis. and then like fiddlyness, and then a 10x multiplier if it's on your face. That's as far as I've gotten on this. So an Apple Watch started really fiddly with not a lot of value, eventually crossed the line. And now people are like Apple Watches. We all have one. Yeah. AirPods, not very fiddly at all. Super valuable.

People really like them. Face computers historically below the line. Very fiddly, enormous social cost. Not a lot of value. Yeah. Where do you think the Vision Pro is on the graph? Send me your graph. We'll just go through them.

I'm dying to know what you all think after this. Because that's fiddliness. No, it's a value on the values on the y-axis, fiddliness on the X and then a 10x multiplier for on your face. That's it. That's what I think it is. There's an entire episode where we go through this. So I'm just, go back and look at that one if you want more versions of the graph.

But just send me your graphs. I'm dying to know what you think about the theory of wearable bullshit as a positive vision credit. All right. We have to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-not.com slash sell. We're back. As we've been recording, vamping to fill time with the Vision Pro, Microsoft has been quietly making announcements in the background on a podcast, I believe. Yes. The weirdest way ever to announce things. We've been recording a podcast while they have been publishing a podcast. And now our podcast will be about what they said on their podcast.

Do we now directly compete with the Xbox? Yes. Download ours. Don't download the Xbox. Phil Spencer just went on a podcast and said everything the Verge said is, true and always has been. All right, Alex, what is going on in the news over there? Okay, so there's been rumors for the last few weeks that Microsoft was going to take a couple

of games that are exclusive for the Xbox and make them not exclusive. Put them on the switch, put them on the PS5. Fans were not pleased about that. Can you explain that to me? Actually, I have realized in all of this chaos that I don't understand why people would be so up in arms about that. Well, I think if you go and you spend a lot of money on a product, And you invest a lot of time and energy into it and, like, buying a lot of games for it.

And then, and you're like, yeah, I don't get, like, the last of us. And I don't get Horizon Zero Dawn. And I don't get all these cool PS5 games. But I get, was it, Starfield? And I get Sea of Thieves. And then they say, okay, now Starfield is going to go off and be on PS5. I would probably, like, I'd probably be a little bit. So you're like, maybe I should have just bought a PlayStation and not, like, at all the games?

Right. Like, why did I even buy an Xbox to begin? with. I get that. Because they're like $5,600. That's expensive. So Starfield is not coming to the PS5, but Sea of Thieves, Grounded, High FiRush, and Pintamit are coming to the PS5 and the Switch. First, hi-fi rush and Pintament, then

Sea of Thieves and Grounded. See Fethives is like a really pretty popular Xbox game where you can be a pirate and you go play with other pirates. It's cute. It's fun. It's a big, like, it's almost an MMRP, but not quite. These are pretty popular games for Xbox. And now they're going to be on

PS5 and Nintendo Switch. Wait, can I just say something about this? Microsoft has not actually officially confirmed those four games. What?

Tom has reported and knows that it's those four games. Yeah. Microsoft won't confirm that those are the full. They're just saying four games, but they are not,

they've pretty clearly said it's not going to be Starfield and it's not going to be the rumor at Indiana Jones video. game that's coming out. So it's not any of the big games. I mean like real like Microsoft does a handful of like gigantic things in its arsenal now and none of the games you just named are those games. Like Xbox fans please don't come for me. But but if you're not like a big hardcore Xbox

fans, these are probably not the biggest games in the world. It's it's nowhere compared, nothing compared to like the Last of Us or Uncharted or some of PlayStation's exclusives. I'm horrible video games and all of these sound like. fun names for thieves and a comic book. Yeah. I'm pentiment. I'm a sea of thieves. Like rejected musketeers.

Yeah. Oh no, it's high-fi rush. But it's, it's, this has been a big deal for the community. Tom actually got to talk with Phil Spencer about it. There was a big interview. And I have definitely been maybe editing that little area looking at that stuff. I maybe knew a little ahead of the podcast. What was coming or not coming.

Spoilers. And I thought what was really interesting was he was very evasive in the interview with us about like what games were coming and what games weren't coming. He wasn't really commit to anything. He and when asked specifically about Starfield and Indiana Jones, which are the ones I think fans are most concerned about losing that access to or losing that exclusive access to. He said, you know, I don't think we should as an industry. ever rule out a game going to any other platform, which is, you know, if you just want to be able to play any game, like you, Nilai, who is bad at games and probably doesn't want to own every system, that's great news for you. If you're really invested in one ecosystem, that's less great news because, like, the console wars. Yeah. So a really interesting thing here that I am hoping you can explain to me. I have for years now assumed that the Microsoft strategy is game streaming. Yes.

Right. They're slowly moving to Xbox game streaming. They bought Activision. Mm-hmm. They want to be everywhere. And Phil Spencer has said to me, like, we are bad. We're the number three player in video games. In consoles.

In consoles. And if you look broadly, all the action is on phones, and we got to go there. Yeah. And that has always felt like a hint of we're going to go do game streaming. Now there's the Digital Markets Act. Apple has to open up different stores. Apple has said they're going to allow game streaming. So you look at this shift, and it is not that.

They're not putting Xbox Game Pass on the PS5. They're just porting four titles to the PS5. Yeah, and people were that upset about it. But that's the part that I don't get. It's like, why, that's a lot of work. Like, isn't the point that we're going to stream the titles over there? It's not, like, given the architecture of these consoles now, it's not as hard of work as it used to be, because they both run on the same, like, AMD kind of, architecture. It's different enough that it's like, it's not like just point and click and you

immediately transfer, but it's not as hard as it used to be. I think this is all kind of part of showing that they're friendly and that they're not going to create a monopoly in gaming. Because right now they own Activision Blizzard, which was like one of the largest game companies. They are effectively one of the largest game companies in the world right now, right? Like I think Tencent and maybe Nintendo are the only thing that might even come close to them. So just absolutely enormous. And if they want to say, okay, no more call of duty on PS5. In 10 years, they can do that. So this...

No, but they ran around the world, promising any government official that they would ship call of duty for at least five more years, right? Ten, ten. Ten. Yeah. So they're like committed for the next 10 years to doing this stuff. I mean, there are like feudal lords in European countries that you've never heard of that have secured a 10-year commitment for call of duty.

And they're trying, and like a feudal lord, they're trying to show how magnanimous they are, right? They're trying to show, yeah, yeah, we got you. We want to be everywhere all at once, but we also don't want to destroy all of our competition because we need them to sell games. Oh, man. That is so charitable and so wrong. Yeah.

What's your read on it? So we should, you're probably right, honestly. I don't know. We should cut off here because I think we're going to have Tom on the show on Tuesday, who knows clearly more about what's going on than anyone at Microsoft. So Tom's going to explain what's going on here. But, Neelai, I would just point you to, uh, the Xbox one and the thing where Microsoft said,

hey, here's a console that plays all of your games, but we're doing it in a slightly new way. And also a different thing happens when you turn on your TV. And gamers just about burned the buildings down at Microsoft. Like, this business is too big to screw up. And if you're Microsoft and you're out here saying, game streaming is the future. We're moving these three games you've never heard of

and C of Thieves over. And people lose their minds. Like, Microsoft is going to play this the slowest possible way because it is desperately afraid of losing this little bit of love that it has in the gaming community. Like, I do actually agree with Alex that there are some reasons to be worried about the anti-drust ramifications of just running roughshod over the gaming industry, which in theory Microsoft could afford to do. But also, pissing off gamers goes real bad for everybody. And Microsoft knows that better than anybody. And so it is going to take this the slowest. It feels like it can afford to take this, I think.

Which is why there's a lot of rumors. We wrote a piece this week. Like Tom really thinks a handheld is coming. He'll talk more about it with David on next week. Sean also fully wants, he wants to manifest a handheld that's like a steam deck with Xbox built in. Like I am rooting for Sean because I think that will be cool too. But they did tease some like unique hardware coming. They've teased that some bigger hardware is coming down the line.

Phil Spencer keeps liking tweets about. Yeah, he keeps liking tweets about handhelds. And in this conversation he had with Tom, he said, yes, some unique stuff's coming. So like... A handheld is coming. Yeah, a handheld is coming. Is it going to be like a good handheld or is it going to be more like what Sony like farted out? We'll see.

All right. Yeah, sorry. We'll come back. Tom will be on the show. We'll unpack all of it. Yeah. I'm legitimately confused about why port four games to another console. I'm going to like...

If your strategy is to be everywhere. and the problem is phones. We're going to throw you into the Xbox like Reddit and just, I think the confusion will go away. Can I interest you in gamers? Oh, no, it's high-fi rush. They were mainly conferred. I think they were more concerned about Starfield, which it sounds like is not going to be in this initial run. So to be fair, that was the one they were really passionate about because it just came out.

They're like, don't do it like this. But I would bet you $10 that if Microsoft had its druthers and was not afraid. of the ramifications, Starfield would be in this. Oh, 100%. Like Microsoft's strategy includes Starfield and Indiana Jones being available everywhere. It just does. It's coming.

It's just they're going to be like six months from now. They're like, oh, it came out. Do worry about it. Yeah. Phil Spencer is just like quietly tiptoeing in slippers towards the future that he is promising. Like, that's where we're at here. High up on the tippies.

Exactly. Oh, my God. High heels on the tippies? Yep, I know. There we go. I said it all the way to work today. That's how I walked. It's the next line. That's the real pro.

I'm not going to finish it. Let's just move on. We're good. We're good here. I love TikTok. All right. That's Microsoft. And again, Tom will be on the show.

And we'll try to figure out what all this means. We should talk about AI briefly before our lightning around. By the way, two more people have asked me how to sponsor Lightning Round. And the answer is that for all my jokes about taking your money, that's not my job. I don't know how. That's not what we do. here. Just Vimmoim. The influencers know how to take money. But we are, we just do disclosures and other people take the money. So we'll figure it out. I promise someone else is going to take your money. But we should talk with AI quickly and then do a lightning round. We mentioned at the top of the show that Google's strategy is very much, we hope over time this makes sense. I would say that my understanding of the Gemini product roadmap right now fits perfectly into overtime. We hope this makes sense. Because they announced Gemini Ultra, which is 20 bucks a month.

And then David, you just wrote about Gemini 1.5 Pro, which they're like is as good as Gemini Ultra. It's fantastic. What is going on here? So Google, in case you've wondered if Google is good at naming things now because they decided to name everything Gemini and that seemed like it made sense. Don't worry, my friends. Google still sucks at naming stuff. there are, I think, four different product names between the Gemini product that you use and the Gemini subscription that you pay for. There are four different product names.

But at any rate, so Gemini 1.5 is basically Google's new next model. It makes sense. Everybody's always working on these next models. I was talking to Sooner Pichai, their CEO, about this yesterday. And one of the things that he told me was he thinks that over time, eventually these numbers won't matter to people and all of this stuff will just sort of happen in the background he compared it to google search where like search doesn't get new version names it just kind of gets better over time i want to point out that sam altman said that a million times before announcing

gpt4 just saying oh sure and there's three point five and there's three point turbo and there's gptt4 and now gpt5 is apparently a thing even though he said it wouldn't matter like all of this is insane um but we're going to get to that point eventually but right now we're very much in the this arms race. And I think especially the way you have to understand the arms race is these two companies in particular, OpenAI and Google, are in a massive land grab for developer resources, right? Like if every company on Earth is at some point going to have an AI strategy, and at this moment that's what it looks like, there are basically two players right now they can give a whole lot of money to. And there is a lot of money in winning that,

like think about what AWS did for Amazon, right? Because it was early to, we're very good at you developer resources in the cloud. There is now a belief that the market for AI is going to be even bigger and happen even faster. So these companies are just running as fast as they possibly can, and they honestly don't care all that much if the version numbers don't make any sense to us as users. So Gemini 1.5 is coming out, and at some point it will just sort of wholly replace Gemini 1.0.

And there's the three sizes of it. There's Ultra, which is like the big full model, all the epic stuff. The pro, which is the middle one, which is the one that most consumers. and then there's nano, which is specifically designed to run on people's devices. Google hasn't talked much about nano yet on any of its Gemini stuff, but that's, I think, interesting piece of it. The big thing with Gemini 1.5 is that its context window is much bigger. And essentially what that means is you can just put a lot more stuff into it at a time.

When you, there's a bunch of weird, complicated math to do, but typically they say it's like three quarters of a word is a token. and Google's context window for Gemini 1.5 is a million tokens, which is a lot of words. You can do hours of video, hours of audio, all kinds of different stuff. So you can just plug all this in and then ask questions about it, do stuff with it.

And they have big ideas about what people might do with this huge context window. And there's a lot coming. So we could put like the entire B movie in there and then find out like if we were supposed to really think there was a romance. between a human woman and a B. That is a great question-ask computer, actually. Do you detect love? I really want to do this.

Let me up the difficult for you. If you do this, please, please email me. There's a great exchange in David's report on this where I think Sundar says you could fit the entire Lord of the Rings movie into the context window. And David's like, that means that's happened to Google. He said it so without thinking that he was just like, it was as if he had like left the Lord of the Rings meeting right before talking to me. And so it's just like, this definitely happened, right?

It's very good. What's fascinating to me about all of this is, yes, there's an arms race for developers. There are still, I think we're hitting the same place with AI on a slight longer time frame as people are hitting with the Vision Pro in a slightly shorter time frame. We're like, it's really cool, fastest consumer adoption history. And now we've all just run into the limits. That's right. Yes. Right.

And I think developers love it. Because you can build new apps. I can certainly go get funding from VCs. You can write code with it, which I think people really love to do. And sort of everywhere else, it's like what I can do is produce spam at a higher rate than spam has ever been produced before and turn the internet into a fetid swamp. Oh, the corporate folks love it. Yeah. Because they're like, yeah, I can just have it do all my emails.

When I have to do a memo, I just have it write the first draft of my memo for me. And you're like, well, you shouldn't do that. Don't you you should write that's important. Oh, I actually I think sending corporate emails with AI I don't actually send a lot of emails. I refuse to use on our press software. Well, not that part. But like the idea that some transactional email is better written by AI than fine. But like that is a pretty small use case on the grand order of things. Yeah. I'm wondering like David, as you look at this model as you played with Ultra as you've played with the other ones. do you see that next set of big uses showing up? No. I think there's going to be an increasing kind of creative state of the art. Like one of the other things that happened this week was OpenAI launched SORA, which is its text to video model. And so I think the kind of state of the art of stuff you can make creatively, there's a just massive room left to go.

And there's going to be all kinds of cool stuff on that front. But I think we've been talking about on the show. a while now, when is the sort of novelty of using these AI chatbots going to wear off? And we're there. I think it's happening. And one of the other things I'm starting to see all over social is a lot of people who started paying for co-pilot for Microsoft and are now canceling it. And people are starting to sign up for Gemini Advanced.

$20 a month, people are starting to goof around with it. And you look at it and it's like the thing so many people keep saying about the Vision Pro is like amazing technology. I took it off and kind of. never had a reason to put it on again. And I think a lot of people are starting to feel that way, especially in the sort of one-to-one consumer use case about AI stuff. And also, I think that's why all these companies are going after companies, because if I'm already signed up for this stuff through my organization, like, yeah, I'll use it to make it easier to make charts or whatever.

I mean, that was Microsoft's whole strategy, right? Like, get co-pilot out. Yeah, but co-pilot is 20 bucks a month to make charts easier. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah. But, but, You're like an IT guy with endless budget at a big company. The days of endless IT budgets are over. Who knows? All these companies are contracting. They're like not spending lots of money. That to me is like this is the big gap.

I will say that I recently set the action button on my iPhone 15 pro to open the chat GPT voice assistant. Just the cheap one, 3.5, not four, not the one you have to be four. And it is like, oh, they should just make Siri this. They should throw Siri away. and they should just make Siri this. It is revelatory when you're like the other day we had to reheat chicken wings from the Super Bowl and I just asked my phone and it said an answer to me. Was that answer correct?

Did it lie? How are the juries? Did it hallucinate the temperature in the time? It was fine because the stakes were so low. Yeah. I asked it twice. Chicken wings is high stakes though. No, but they're not reheating.

That's true. Reheating. Yeah, that's fair. Does it, because I asked it twice, and the first time I said 350 degrees, the second time I said 375, and I was like, this doesn't matter. The stakes are very low here, and I didn't have to trawl the SEO at Internet. Yeah. And Siri, I asked Siri. And Syria is like, I don't know.

If it isn't 200, would you've been like in there being like, this feels wrong, but I'll go with it. That's how I would describe the Chad GBT use case. You know, that old Stephen Colbert word truthiness. Yeah. Like, if you're comfortable with something that just feels right. I really encourage you to set chat chagip to your action button. But actually, that's a really good, like, example of the problem that all these companies are having, right? Like, Google is essentially ripping and replacing Google Assistant with Gemini for the same reason.

Like, this stuff is going to be better at those things. Would you pay $20 a month for the thing that you just described? Like, no, nobody would. And so there's going to be this, like, mainstream use case for this stuff that no one will pay for. and then there's going to be a ton of money, at least that's what these companies are betting, in the business use cases. But to me it feels like we are quickly hitting something like a ceiling

of what people actually want to do with these things day in and day out. Like a million token context window does not make you better at chicken wings. It just doesn't. And so I think that next thing for regular people is going to have to come from somewhere else. And there's a bunch of different ways these companies are trying to do it. Open AI has been making a bunch of tweaks to like how it builds its models to try and make them sort of smarter and more efficient. It also launched a thing this week called memory where it can actually remember things about

you and what you like and your preferences so that it should sort of interact with you in a more human and like friendly way over time. That's the stuff that I think is going to be interesting. Just building bigger models to do more high-end stuff is like purely a business play. And I think you're right that $20 per person per month is more money than most companies have to spent at this moment in time. So I don't know, I don't know which of those things is going to catch up first. Can you imagine spending $20 a month for like possibly right, possibly wrong chicken wings reheating

instructions? I mean, I think if you just buy chicken wings at restaurants, you're always, it's always a gamble. Are they going to be good? Yeah. If your chicken wings budget is 20 bucks a month, it's a gamble every time. Yeah, that's true. It's because chicken wings are a big deal.

They are. Very important. I want to talk about the other side of the AI debate real quick. David, you wrote about robots.txte this week. Sarah Zhang and I talked about the copyright battles that are facing all these AI companies on Decoder. There's something else here, right? These companies are forging ahead with ever bigger models, ever more use cases, higher prices, and the sort of underlying question of, is it okay to take all this stuff to make the models,

remains extraordinarily unresolved. The Sarah Silverman case, a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman, suing open eye. They just had a setback in their case. All of the claims except direct copyright infringement, which is a big deal. But all the other claims are thrown out. The judge seemed very skeptical. There are some specific concerns in there that are pretty wonky, so we don't have to go into them. But that case is getting whittled down.

I think the Times case against Open Eye is a little bit stronger. so we'll see, but we don't know if these companies can even do it, like whether this is copyright infringement such that the courts just shut down the entire notion of this to begin with, or if the payments that they're required to make become so high that the business models don't work out, all open questions. And then, David, I want you to talk about robots. at TXT because there's this little handshake agreement of a text file in every website, and that handshake agreement is like one hand is just crushing.

the other one. And it's like, this thing can't support the weight of it, I don't think. Yeah. So I got, I got sort of obsessed with this years ago when I first started talking to people about Google AMP for a story I wrote, which was basically like, what is the value exchange on the internet, right? And it turns out that a lot of the sort of policing of the internet happens in that file you're named robots.t. If you go to almost any website and then just put up slash robots.txte, it'll pop up a text file that you can see that basically decides which crawlers from around the web are and are not allowed to co onto a website. So crawlers exist for lots of reasons.

Many of them are from search engines, which are indexing the web in order to be able to send search results. Amazon has a crawler that checks for pricing around the web for what the government would say are extremely nefarious reasons, and Amazon would say are for legitimate business reasons. You might run a crawler to check all the links on your own site to make sure that they're still live. Like, there are a lot of reasons to run crawlers. And this is like a technology from the early 90s that basically a bunch of people on a mailing list, including like Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Andreessen and a bunch of like early internet optimists decided is like, okay, you're just going to put up this thing that says essentially who's in and who's out.

And everyone else who makes one of these crawlers is going to abide by those rules because we want the internet to work. We're all cool people. This is going to be great. That worked pretty well for a surprisingly long time. And now what's happening is if you run an AI company and you want to get a bunch of training data, you know what's full of training data is the internet. And so you just go, you crawl the whole internet, you pull all that stuff in, you dump it in, and you train your model on it.

That's how you get recipes. That's how you get all this stuff. Like you just base it on all the stuff that exists on the public internet. And so now, if you're a person who runs a website or a recipe blog or any number of other things on the internet, you have to go in and decide who's in and who's out. with a thousand new crawlers, a bunch of companies of varying levels of decency and sketchiness. Open AI has been in a bunch of media coverage about this because it actually told people how to block GPTBot and promise to abide by it and by all accounts is doing so. A huge portion of websites on the internet, including, I believe, all of Vox Media blocked GPTBot.

The New York Times did. A lot of publishers have. But there are a lot of things out there that are either two-suits. small for now to even be known to these publishers or just don't care. They just don't have to respect this little tiny text file that has no legal or technical authority. And so any AI that wants to come in just can. And that's just where we are. And we have just like broken this basic give and take that the internet ran on for so long. And like I talked to Tony Stubblebine at the CEO of Medium, who has been a big proponent of kicking out the bots.

in this particular way. And what he said is basically, like, we're getting nothing out of this exchange. They're just taking everything from us and telling us that, you know, it's for the good of society. And, like, screw that. That's not how the internet works.

That's not what we're after. And I think everyone on the internet now is starting to have to make that exact same set of decisions. And what's fascinating is OpenAI only made GPT bot blockable after they had said, scraped the internet. Correct. And I honestly think that they did that so that media organizations, and I'm not privy to what Vox Media does at that level. I don't know why they did that or didn't

do that. But I'm pretty sure they did it so media organizations, companies could block Open AI and feel like they had some control and then Open AI could go make a deal. Right. And be like, oh no, you took the control away from us. That is, I will say that is precisely why. I mean, I talk to the Open AIS chief strategy officer who said basically that exact thing, that it is, this is a way to signal that you would like to make a commercial deal. And, uh, let's do it. And that is a pretty wild way of backing into something like that. But yeah, it is, it's not an accident that OpenAI didn't tell people about GPT bot until it had already been pretty far down the road. Yeah. Because without doing what it did, it, GPT4 and chat GPDT wouldn't be as good as they are.

Like that is the trade. But then the question is, who experiences the downside of that? Like, is that bad for the internet? Is it bad for the world? Or is it just bad for open AI? It's like, that's the question now. Yeah. And I think individual creators are feeling the pain of this very deeply.

Yeah. Even when we just write about neat AI tools, we get people who are sort of morally outraged that we would acknowledge that some of them are neat. Because it's built on something. It's built on some taking. And whether or not you think that taking is fair or not is sort of divorced from whether it's legal or not. And I don't know that anyone has quite figured that out, right? Somebody needs to pop it into Am I the Asshole on Reddit. That's what you need to do.

It's a perfect one, right? And then you enter all of that into the million token Gemini field. Is this correct? Yeah. And then we send it to the judges and we're like, look, we figured it out. The robots figured it out. They talked to each other. We got this.

We know who the asshole is. That means who legally is right. Again, I keep coming back to what I refer to as the endgame post. Yeah. Which is a person who's like, I love podcasts, but I don't have time for them. I just feed them into an AI. And it's like, dude, you just want articles. Yeah.

Just go read those. What you want is articles. Like, just go read articles made by people who care about you. It's a very simple, very simple way of getting what you want from the internet. Read. Just read. Like, people would like to read. It is amazing that the broad future of computing is like more reading.

Yeah. After all these, anyway, it doesn't matter. I think that the turn for these AI companies, for open AI, for example, you can signal you want commercial deals with it.

They're being sued. So if you go out and make a bunch of deals, you're kind of admitting that you need the deals. And the New York Times is going to, or whoever else is suing open eye, Getty is doing stability. It's going to say, look,

you know that you should pay money for this stuff. You didn't pay us. to begin with. So you're on the, and that is a strategic nightmare for these companies. It is. And I think James Kwan, the chief strategy officer at Open AI was talking to, one of the things he said is, and this kind of goes back to what you were talking about before, is that Open AI feels very strongly that chat GPT should be mostly free for most people

for exactly that reason. Like that's the value they believe they deliver back to the world, is that by giving to this system, you then get access to this. system and the increase in quality of this system is good for the world and you can have it and it will make your life better. And I think you can view that as like dystopian black mirror nonsense or you can view that as like a fair trade in the way that Google search was a fair trade. But like that is the dynamic that we're about to reckon with in a lot of really, really messy ways. Yeah. And what is the most fascinating about all this, we can bring up all the way back around

to Google. No one is going to block the Google bot. Correct. Like no one thinks that. be invisible from a search. You can block... Torrent sites probably would. I don't know what those are. Alex's Plex server continues to rock and roll in the background. No one's blocking Alex's Plex server. Use NEPA.

You can block Google with some gradations. You can block Google search, which no one will do. And then you can block the other stuff. You can block Google's AI training. But no one is willing to say, I'm so mad at Google for scraping all of our stuff, that we're going to block search. And I think that's... When that one flips...

and people are like, it is worth it to be invisible to Google, like the architecture of the internet changes. Yes. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back for the lightning round. Sponsored by you. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. AHA moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce. ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have

comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's Claude.a.ai slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people,

all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend,

prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon.

We're back. Do you remember when Time Magazine said the person in the year was you? Yeah. And it was the little mirror. It was in a real mirror. That was when print magazines had budget to put mirror on the cover of magazines in every grocery store in America and be like, that person here is you. It was like a foggy, people are like holding their carrots.

Be like, what? It was all like curvy, warped. looking, oh, that's not me. I'm just here for milk, not conceptual print ideas. So you're saying y'all didn't frame yours and put it up next to your other awards? That's not that's not what you did? That's weird.

Donald Trump has like the fake one and then like, this one's real. Like it's me, you guys. He looks at it everywhere. It's like, it is me. I was for real that time. All right. I feel like all of my lightning around entries are just

complaining about streaming the Super Bowl. Do you want to go first? Mine is like, I just find it fascinating. The big, big turn in the whole DMA thing with the European Union, I message is not found to be a, what is it they call it? Gatekeeper. Yeah. I message is not found to be a core platform service.

So they're not going to make it open up, which feels probably right, given that no one in the EU. Well, this is the trade apple. Yeah. They've notably made the trade of San Diego. We will support RCS, and I think this is what they got in return. Yeah. So they're free and clear, as are my personal favorite Microsoft's edge browser is not considered a core service.

And Bing Search was found to not be a core service. I don't think anybody has ever found Bing Search should be a core service. I know. I just really loved that. It was like, okay, I message. Like, damn it. And then Edge. And then Bing.

Not even the bureaucrats of the European Union. bring themselves to regulate Bing. I wonder if they just like chuckled. They're like, oh, no. One thing that is really interesting in the mix there is Apple broke web apps in the EU. So for a minute, it looked like Apple would support what's called progressive web apps in the iPhone. Where you have a web app, you can save it to your home screen, you push the button, it loads up in a wrapper. And it feels just like a normal app.

This is great. I think this is like in terms of out. That's how I do the verge. Yeah, that's how I do the verge. It's how I do R CMS when I want to post a quick post really fast. Ooh, that's smart. A quick link that just opens up a web wrapper. It's not in Safari.

And Apple broke it two betas ago in iOS 17. And they didn't say anything about why. And then today they finally released a statement on their developer portal that's like, well, we have to support other browsers in iOS now with their browser. And as you know, they all have to be equal. So how could we possibly re-architect all. all of iOS to support launching a web app and another browser engine from the home screen. So we just shut it off.

And it's like, dude, stop doing malicious compliance. Yeah, like that was just like kicking and screaming. Like, that's just a hissy fit. Like, do you know what platform supports PWA's and allows other browser engines? Android. It's right there. You can just look at it. It's just whiny.

It's the most popular operating system on Earth. Meanwhile, the other browser makers have spent the last few weeks making very clear to everyone that Apple has actually, if anything, made it harder to be a browser maker in the EU now because you essentially have to run many different versions of your app inside your one app, and it's just going to make everyone's life impossible. Apple, come on. Great job, Apple. Look, we don't talk about this aspect of companies.

Very often we treat companies as sort of singular entities. There's a real split inside Apple right now between the suits, basically, the policy and the business folks. and the very idealistic engineers who make the products. Yeah. And I think that this EU thing is really pushing on that split. In a way that, you know, Apple is a very well-run company. They are mission-driven in their way. But I'm wondering how much of this stuff,

where it's like a bunch of pretty bad faith responses to a law that's designed to make computers feel more like computers. Yeah. You just wonder, you know, like someone had to like, write the code to break all the web apps in the EU. Just like furiously. Yeah, just like... Like, suit standing over their shoulder, just like, I hate you so much right now,

but I'm going to write the really good code. Right. Like, yeah, some lawyer is like, do the malicious compliance. Yeah. You know, and they like file the Jira ticket, and the Jira ticket is just labeled malicious compliance. That's kind of suck. That's all I'm saying.

Like, on the, on Decoder, I'm always asking about how decisions are made, but like how a decision actually gets implemented is equally interesting to me. It's like someone had to file the Jira ticket. It's like per DMA break web apps. There's three levers in Tim Cook's office. One of them says ship the thing. The other one says, buy that company.

And the third one just says malicious compliance. And he just pulls it and just like lights start flashing all over Apple Park. And that's how everybody knows. Yeah. I don't know. There's something weird there that I, you know, again, we usually think of companies as like singular entities. Yeah.

Like there's Tim Cook and arms. You know, like, and like Tim Cook. Cook is in control of all the arms or sooner we're trying arms and the arms are like, who are you? You made a messaging app? But these companies are tens of thousands of people, if not 100,000 people when they're at their biggest. And they are not singular in that way.

And this is the sort of thing that I think, I get that Apple's very mad at the Europeans. My caution is this is a sort of thing that breaks a very idealistic culture. Because you have to make everyone believe that you are totally right. Yeah. And that this little move, which is not a very, which is a very cynical kind of move is actually, is actually somehow idealistic. That's just complicated. Yeah. All right.

I basically did a lightning round under your lightning round. It was great. It was good. Well, yeah, we haven't. Like an after shock. There's like a sub lightning round under. You can sponsor an aftershock. I don't know.

I was just about to say that. All right, David, what's yours? Mine, well, I'm going to after shock when we start complaining about that. Super Bowl, so I'll come back to that. Mine was just, there was this news this week from a Wall Street Journal report that Walmart might buy Vizio, which I just find deeply fascinating. And also, kind of to be a bummer, I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we thought Vizio had a chance to be a really interesting forward-thinking player in TVs.

That was 2011. I wrote a profile of Vizio in 2011. Was that 2011? It was like when we launched. Yeah, I guess that's right. was supposed to buy Vizio in what, 2017. And then after that, it just kind of started to slow. Let echo.

I totally forgot. Yeah. And they came. They were like TV. And then they disappeared. And then I could not get them to take the TV back. Didn't they make a car at one point? Yes.

Yes. That was a truly weird. Yeah. Oh my God. That was just a sci-op. That was a Chinese government sci-op. I loved that company. That was a good time.

But anyway. But you remember, in 2011, I wrote the profile of Vizio. This guy, Matt McCray, was the CTO. He was a lot of fun. Do you remember they put out Windows laptops and kept saying they were bone stock? Oh, yeah. It was great. All that was great.

And they kept on trying to expand by doing like fan service and the TV business was just their business. Matt is now the CEO of Arlo Cameras. And I think Vizio is just like really, they tried so many interesting things. Remember when the TVs were just Chromecast? Yeah. I have one of those. Oh, boy. But that's what everybody wanted.

In practice, no. They had like the Android tablet that was the remote, right? I know. Yeah. I don't know where it is. But this is what I mean about revealed preferences. Everyone in our audience is like, I don't want a smart TV. I just want a panel.

And then they like ship the thing. But it had no remote. We wanted a remote. I just want to turn up the volume without having to charge my name. Everyone is like, I just want a dumb TV. I don't want that. And then they shipped it. And I'm like, no, I don't want that.

Yeah. I want giving a smart TV. The day the update came and I like, it didn't even, it must have come. months in advance. And I turned that TV on because it's like my bedroom TV so it's never on. I turned it on and I was like, oh, my Vizio is smart now. And it was much more usable. And then I was very upset because I was like, that wasn't the promise. Yeah. I got bummed. It's revealed preferences, man. Everyone wants to run some weird data tracking smart TV operating system. Yeah. So $2 billion, Walmart wants to buy Vizio. Yeah. And it just feels like that's a lot of money also to basically

improve its house brand of TVs, which is essentially what Walmart would be doing. I would remind you that its existing house brand is called On with two ends. So I would spend $2 billion to not have on with two ends as my house brand of anything. Vizio's kind of gotten embodied by TCL and in high sense in the last few years in the budget TV market. So it's... Yeah, like what a bleak statement though, right? The fact that that is true and that is true is so...

It's such a bummer to place the TV market is right now. go from like, it was such a good company because, okay, you'd get the TV in and it wouldn't necessarily be like, like, you'd have to fiddle with it. You'd have to mess around. But then it could look really, really pretty. And you'd be like, oh, holy crap. I spent like half of what I could have a good to spend on an LG and I have a great looking TV. And now that's just not quite the case anymore. And now the whole TV business is collecting data on people who watch you while you put up your webcam into Nelai's living room.

Yeah, Vizio has been doing that. Yeah, like Vizio was a really a thought leader in that department for a while there. Unfortunate for all of us. Well, that's how they made the TV cheap. I mean, this was. Yeah. They essentially subsidized it. And then Roku came in and was like, we can do it better because our operating system is actually usable.

And that's why Roku partnered with Hysense. That's why they partner with TCL. and now Roku is this really dominant force in advertising and in TVs. Envisio's off in the corner being like, let go, I blame you for everything. Well, Roku also came to people and said, we have an advertising business that will give you a cut of. And that has become a business for Walmart that it thinks it can do more.

Like, it's just all, this is a lot of money being thrown around for big deals and big companies, and none of it is about making good televisions. And that just sucks. That sucks. You know, it's a great television. It's Sony, you know, I don't know. that watches you while you're trying to watch the camera and I turned all this stuff off try to join another meeting with that TV tell us how great it's not going to happen we're done

messing with the features of the television did you have to like go and put the webcam back in a box oh the webcam was like quickly discarded I've got I've got a drawer that I just think of as the e-waste drawer yeah and it's like maybe one day I'll be like where is that webcam and I'm going to open the e-waste drawer it's going to be great speaking of let's complain about the Super Bowl Right. I have a lot to say about this whole situation. It is an embarrassment that in America, on the most watched Super Bowl ever, Oh, Lord.

Where America's sweetheart did something with Travis Kelsey on that. She won the Super Bowl. She won the Super Bowl. Actually, can I just say this other? You know, there's a video clip of them running to each other after the Super Bowl and she'll hugged each other. And then finally the clip with audio came out because he was miced out. Yeah. And he's like, I love you.

Thank you for coming. I appreciate you. Thank you for flying halfway out on the world. And then he says, was it electric? And she's like, it was unbelievable. I have asked Becky if shit was electric,

like 50 times a day since I've seen that clip. Like, I'm like, porn in the clock, I'm like, was it electric? Easily the best thing to come out of the entire Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey story runs for me.

It's just constantly asking Becky if things are, and she's like, no. She does not think it was unbelievable. Shut down. immediately. No. Anyway,

so we're not streamed in 4K but kind of streamed in 4K. So I'm Paramount Plus I think David that's where you watched it. That is where I watched it.

That's where I watched 30 minutes of it. They only gave a 4K stream to cable companies. So nothing direct from CBS. So if you had cable or direct TV, you could switch

to a 4K CBS channel which was upskilled 1080 PhD. So it already looked weird. One of the most vibrant cable companies in America is YouTube. So YouTube TV, you can pay for the 4K ad on, which I churned off of ages ago because it was not worth it. So I paid the $10 for 4K for the month.

And I go to watch it and the bit rate keeps crashing on YouTube TV. Just like I'm watching my router. It starts, you know, like 15 or 20 or whatever the 4K stream would be at. Not even that high. It's like eight. And then it just like just dropped like a stone. It's brutal. And I kept switching back to the 1080 feed on CBS and it looked great.

Why didn't you switch over? It's not my internet. Switch over to Nickelodeon. Everyone told me the Nickelodeon stream look right. It was, it looked beautiful. Yeah. Dora the Explorer explained what illegal holding is. And now I know.

At the end, they slimed everyone, I believe, on the field. Yeah, that was good. Just a disaster. And some people thought it was working great, but I post on threads like this bit keeps crashing and too many people agreed with me yeah that it was a bad experience for me to think that it was like my internet uh i switched from the apple tv youtube tv app to the android app on the sony tv assuming google would you know like a good gatekeeper yeah would preference its own service on its own operating system it worked for slightly longer it worked for five minutes before it crashed

uh but then i then it crashed well we hope it will make sense over time is max sports Or whatever this new super sports streaming service called, is that going to save the Super Bowl? The Super Bowl does not need to be saved. Well, you know, like, save it from bad streaming experiences. I just think it is fundamentally embarrassing that we as a nation cannot figure this out. Like, you go to watch soccer in England, and they're like, it's 10, 4K feeds anywhere you want to be.

It's free. And also there's free health care. And, like, what are we doing? As you said that, I saw like an American. flag dropped behind you and I just like heard the the American music. Oh yeah. Someone's going to mad to me for not being sufficiently patriotic that we have to watch upskilled 1080P.

No, no. I thought that was the most patriotic things I said in a while. You have to figure this out. Fix the Super Bowl. I also, speaking of sports, I made a big gaff last week because I mistakenly said that Fox sports channels are owned by Disney and that is only true. And I believe Argentina and some parts of South America. That's where all the listeners.

are, it's fine. Yeah, it is not owned by Disney in America, where it is owned by Fox. Right, Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, it's still owned by Rupert. I forgot. But Disney does own it, just not in this country. I'm sorry. I would just like to say two things about that. One, we screwed that up, and it was complicated. It was very embarrassing. I was annoyed. Two, it makes this whole thing even funnier because it now is even more like Hulu. It is three, direct competitors being like, let's be best friends. We'll figure this out. Yeah.

It's fantastic. It's so good. And it's also very funny if you go and look at Fox Sports on like the Wikipedia page and this is current owners and there's a list of like six current owners depending on what region you're in. I was like that's good. Help out. Come on Fox.

Like just one company own the company, please. No, that's not. Rupert's breaking up his empire. Yeah. And by the way, you need Fox Sports because you have to have Fox Sports because of football. I mean, I don't. But the cable companies do. Yeah, that's true.

And to get Fox Sports, you have to carry Fox News. Right. That's a real thing. They leverage each other. Fox News, I have a lot of feelings about Fox News. Fox News on its own popular, but they are a bundle deal. Yeah, they are unstoppable. You can't get football without taking the other thing.

That's not a choice for you. Which many cable operators have always sort of like been aware of. Yeah. That's America. All I'm saying is we can stream it in Forehand. How was Paramount Plus? I know you watched it on Paramount Plus. I would just like to briefly complain about this.

I try not to use The Verge as a place to be annoyed at customer service things, but Paramount Plus sucked for me during the Super Bowl and I'm very upset about it. So for a while, it just didn't work at all. It would throw up like a mysterious, a bad thing happened. We don't know. Try again. And then I would try again and it wouldn't work. But eventually it worked and it actually streamed fine and looked fine. But this incredible thing kept happening, which is that the audio would get about eight seconds ahead of the video.

and so literally every single time the play would have just finished before I saw the play. So Jim Nance would be like shouting about how Brandon Ayuk caught it for 20 yards right as their snapping ball. It made it so unpleasant to watch this game. It was like I literally stopped looking at it for a while.

I was like, I'm going to listen to this like it's radio and Tony Romo is just going to say nonsensical things at me. But it was just, I kept, I would like try to pause and you can't because it's live and it's, It's illegal to pause things or something. I would go out of the app and come back in and it would work fine and then go back to being off by about the same amount. I rebooted my TV at one point. I did the whole Roku reboot at one point.

That's bad. Oh, you were on a Roku. See, there was your problem. Those letters bouncing at you when you want to watch TV and it's like, do, do, do, do. Oh, my gosh. You got your food right in front of you? Nightmare. Yeah.

I'm telling you, watching those letters bounce when you reboot a Roku and you're just trying to get there. Was there anyone else in the room with you? It's like they're taunting you. Yeah. I also think this was also a little bit like Paramount was getting back at David particularly because he makes fun of how much I enjoy Paramount. I have said a lot of mean things about Paramount. So I did deserve this. But like we're square now Paramount.

Listen to Sherry Redstone. We're cool now. What heartened me was the number of people responding to my complaints about streaming sports and internet by telling me to get an antenna. And I thought of you, Alex. I did not dig out an antenna with 15 people in my home. I've already switched operating systems. We're not doing antenna runs right now. It's great.

It's a good time. We did watch the halftime show at the low bit rate because I couldn't switch it to the other stream in the middle. Oh, can I complain about another thing about Paramount Plus? Yeah. So I, like the genius that I am, opened up Paramount Plus after one of my many reboots, clicked on the thing that said the football game, and it took me to a separate channel where they were talking about the football game. So I was like, oh, this is just the halftime show before the thing. And then Anna, my wife gets a text from her friend being like, oh, are you watching Usher?

He's sick. And I'm sitting there telling her that it must not have started yet. And it turns out that when I clicked on football, it didn't click on football. It clicked on something else for me. And didn't. So I missed like three quarters of Usher because it didn't select the thing that it was supposed to select. You can watch it on the Apple TV app.

You're doing great, David. I'm still angry. I feel like a lot of your choices are your fault. Oshare took his shirt off, Nelai, and I missed it. I missed it. You did. I did see the roller skates, though, so it was like... The roller skates were sick.

Can I just say it was electric? I want to just do a quick, atmost music update for everyone. We installed the big home theater in our house. It's done. If you've been listening to Veroxas since September when we moved into our new house, in the background has been constructed. sounds every time I record from my house because we've just been renovating. It's done now.

Only two things that need to be done. Who knows if they'll ever get done. But it's done. And the TVs are done and we have a 5.1.4 Atmos system. It's cool. Yeah. I like it. And so I texted a friend who believes in Atmos music more than I do.

I said, this is as much of a chance as I can ever give this boondoggle. And he sent me a list of things to listen to. random access memories by deaf punk the Duolipa record a bunch of other stuff and so I listened to it I was also told that Amazon music is better their codec is better than Apple

so I compare I'm doing my best yeah really run and into ground two things I've discovered one the only idea anyone has is putting percussion accents behind you Like someone

Someone rings a cowbell And it's like behind you It's like like every song with anything like that Like a Tom Phil That's going around you And that's what we got And we've solved that problem Like in the manual of how to remix a song for Atmos

It's like if there's any sort of Percussion accent Get it back there Two And I've been joking about this for I want to say over a year in the Atmos remix of Come Together by the Beatles, George Harrison sneaks up behind you playing the guitar.

This is your dream. You've been waiting for this. Was it slow sneak? Was it? No, yeah. It's at the very end. Uh-huh. You know, there's like little, just like a little guitar.

Like happening and come together. And it starts behind you and then it comes in front of you. It was like he was in the room with you. Like each successive one gets closer and closer and then it's in front of you at the end. And you have to understand, I'm listening to this at like 11.45 p.m. alone, just cracking up. Just losing my mind. Like, this is the funniest thing that's ever happened. It's just like me rewinding come together over and over again.

And be like, no, that's real. It's very good. I encourage everyone to listen to it. We're done here. Atmos has been completed. You've solved it. It actually happened. It's very funny

It's deeply meaningfully funny If you know of any other songs Where the guitar player sneaks up from Please let me know It is now my now my go-to demo song Dare I say it's electric All right we got in this show Tom will be on to talk about some actual news that happened

With Microsoft soon We are now on the main YouTube channel So go listen there. I want to call it. We started the second episode of Decoder. So we have two every week now. On Mondays, we do the big interviews, CEOs and so on. And then on Thursdays, we run an explainer with Fridge Reporters and other friends of the show, just figuring out big topics.

This week was AI and Copyright Law, which is why I'm bringing it up with Sarah Jong, who is wonderful. It's a good one. And it's like anyone who has been listening to us rant and rave about that will enjoy that. You should go listen to that. Yeah, that's a good one. And then, David, you've got a big right-to-repair story on the TV. Tuesday episode of Virchcast this week. Yeah, so Will Poor, our newest producer, has been running around basically trying to figure out

what in the world all of this right to repair stuff actually means. And he's going to spend a bunch of time this year telling us sort of different stories from different parts of the right to repair world. And his first one is coming on Tuesday. So the episode's going to be that. And Tom, it's going to be a fun episode. Definitely stay tuned. Will's just going to fix stuff.

So mail him your broken gashets. The end of this is definitely Will opens a repair shop. Like, there's just no question. And that's not how this ends. It's going to be amazing. Finally. Finally, we're on one of those kiosks in the mall that can change your bed. It's always been our dream.

And then he'll sponsor the lightning ground. Should we call it aftershocks or shockwaves? Let us know, vergecast at the verge.com. That's it. That's Vergecast, rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1.

The Verge is a production of the Verge and boxmedia podcast now. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.