The Vergecast - The Steam Deck is Valve's new handheld / iPhone 13 rumors grow / Virgin Galactic sends Richard Branson to the edge of space

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz discuss this week in tech news — the new Valve Steam Deck, Netflix potentially getting into gaming, a lot of Apple news, and some billionaires going into space. Further reading: The COVID-19 vaccines weren’t hacked — this task force is one reason why Foxconn and TSMC strike deal to buy 10 million COVID vaccines for Taiwan Valve’s gaming handheld is called the Steam Deck and it’s shipping in December Netflix snags former EA, Oculus exec to lead its video game efforts Apple’s latest iOS and macOS betas undo some of Safari’s controversial new design iPhone 13 rumors grow more certain ahead of September launch Redesigned iPad mini reportedly on track to launch this fall Apple just launched an official $99 MagSafe battery pack for the iPhone 12 lineup iPhone 12 reverse wireless charging can power up Apple’s new MagSafe battery pack Apple is working on Apple Pay Later to help you buy things without paying for them yet Apple reportedly wants in on NFL Sunday Ticket Apple’s weather app won’t say it’s 69 degrees Facebook says FTC chair shouldn’t help decide the future of its antitrust case Biden’s executive order puts net neutrality back in the spotlight President Joe Biden’s latest executive order is a huge win for right to repair Space tourism rivalry gets extremely petty ahead of Branson’s spaceflight Virgin Galactic has opened a sweepstakes offering a trip to space Virgin Galactic successfully sends Richard Branson to the edge of space Samsung’s next Galaxy Unpacked device lineup may have been entirely spoiled in huge new leak The Galaxy Z Fold 3 will support the S Pen Pro, according to FCC filings Ikea and Sonos picture frame speaker review: wall of sound TVA TemPad review: who needs TikTok when you can control time and space? We want to see your internet bill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, Alex Cranz joins the show. We talk about the new Valve Steam Deck, Netflix potentially getting into gaming, a lot of little bits of Apple news and some billionaires going into space. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of the Freedom Phone. No. We're not going to talk about it yet. It's coming up later. I just want all 10 people who have tweeted us about the Freedom Phone to know.

It's on my mind. I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking about you. I'm Nila. I'm your friend. Deidre Brown is here. I am tabs located in the correct place. A win for all of us.

Alex Cranes is here. Hello. I'm neither of those things. I was like, I'm movable UI. I'm undiscoverable buttons and weird gestures. Welcome back, Alex. It's been a couple weeks. I'm excited to be here.

Thanks for having me. It's like a quiet summer week. Deeter and I were trying to figure out what the through line of today's episode was. And we've settled on K. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. A lot of little things going on.

But we've got a bunch of actually really interesting COVID stories this week. Nicole, Whatzman, who is leading the charge in all of our COVID coverage for over a year now. Do you know if she started like two weeks before the pandemic? Yeah. Rough. Just a little like a little backstory. Nicole started and she was going to be our health reporter. And we had all this like, we had all these ideas about how we were going to cover health and tech and Apple and all the.

And all the. And then I was like, we have a we have another idea. you. Anyhow, she has a great story this week about the vaccine supply chain and all these tiny companies along the way of the supply chain that had no cybersecurity protections, had no information security staff at all, and how all of that had to be secured really fast. It's a really fascinating story. Go check it out. We live in this world of like big companies and ransomware and executive orders. And then this is just about a bunch of little companies that had to get their act together really fast to get the vaccines out. And it's, it's good news.

Like, they did it. So I encourage you to read a story about people actually doing the right thing in delivering. It's a nice change of pace. I love it. It's a good change of pace. Speaking of delivering, and actually, here's like a happy thing that Foxcon did. I'm starting on a, I'm like a good note here. So the political status of Taiwan, as I'm sure most listeners know, is like very fragile. China wants to be in charge of it. Taiwan thinks of itself as a country, back and forth we go. To get vaccines into Taiwan, Foxconn and TSMC, the chip company, were like deputized by the Taiwanese and Chinese governments to go make the deals so that countries weren't dealing directly with Taiwan. It's very strange. But anyway, Foxxon and TSMC have

now made a deal to buy 10 million doses of COVID vaccines and distribute them in Taiwan. Oh, that's great. You just like watch the vaccine distribution story hit all of the other pieces of the puzzle that we are always talking about, including international trade issues. So that's really interesting that if you read that story, you can see the mechanics are really interesting. And then we're now like learning more about the vaccines. We're learning more about COVID. So we have a gigantic data set that can now using machine learning predict the severity of COVID if you get it, which is super fascinating. So all these kind of downstream effects of what's going on with COVID. All that is to say, in this country, at least, there are like

two populations vaccinated, unvaccinated, and the unvaccinated population is the case counts are rising and the severity is rising. So if you are not vaccinated, please, I beg you. Go get the shot. I got it. I got it. I got it. There you go. Yeah. Here we are. So like, I just beg you. I know, I know it's hard. And today, the White House, actually somewhat alarmingly, started talking about COVID misinformation and how it spreads on social platforms and walked. I think Adi will have a story by the time this podcast is out, but walked right up to the line of like uncomfortable like content moderation suggestions for Facebook

because they have this big push to get people vaccinated and over the line and actually bring the pandemic to an end. So yeah, maybe maybe over the line. I think Eddie is writing about it right now. But you see that push and it's because America is by one sort of aggregate metric doing well. And then if you dive into locations and counties and regions and different groups, just a wide split.

If you live in Arkansas in particular, please go get vaccinated and tell your friends to go get vaccinated. It's messing with my travel plans. It's weird. Even where I'm from in Wisconsin, it's like county by county, the rates are like swinging 20%. It's absolutely wild. So if you haven't, please do, if you know people are hesitant, please be that person who helps bring along so we can finally bring this to an end. Okay, that's COVID.

By the way, our science team is still just relentlessly covering it, even though they want. They're like, can we? I'm like, not yet. So just do it for them. Okay. I would say this is the biggest news. Yeah. Biggest gadget news of the week.

The news happened right before we started recording, which was great because we have a big gadget news to talk about now. Yeah, we had nothing. That's not true. Thank you, Valve for announcing this paperware. The stream deck. Deeter, what is the stream deck? The stream deck is a, it's the Switch Pro. Steam deck.

Andrew just corrected me. The audience didn't hear it. I said stream deck. Yeah, you did. But it's the Steam deck. The reason I said stream deck is Elgado is also having an event right now where they're announcing a bunch of creator stuff, including an updated stream deck. This is going to be super great.

The Steam deck, imagine what you were hoping the Switch Pro would be, and that's what the Steam deck is. Is it? No, it's not quite. It's a portable thing that looks like just a really big honking, chunky switch. it's got AMD chips in it, so QuadCore Zen 2 CPU, and eight compute units with AMD, DNA, 2, graphics, whatever. It is a base price of $3.99, but don't buy that one

because it has super slow EMMC storage, and it can go up to $6.49, and it runs Linux, but you could install Windows on it if you want, and it's designed to play games that you can buy on Steam, which is great. There's no way this thing is real. What are you talking about? Oh, it's totally real. Jay Castrancas had a tweet that sums up this whole thing, which is big Kickstarter 2017 energy.

It looks great. These are obviously renders. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. We had the Steam controller there for a hot minute. And these actually have the little thumb touchpad things. Like that big idea, that steam controller is you don't need a mouse and a keyboard because you've got touchpads on your controller.

So they brought those back. I think he did it also in the most cowardly way possible, though. Because they did it right under the joysticks. So your thumb, the meat of your thumb is always going to be just sitting on those touch pads constantly. Maybe. I don't know how to play a video game. I'm trying to think of how you hold one in your hand. But like, I just wish they'd kind of committed one way or the other to the joysticks or the touchpad if it exists.

I mean, I think they learned from the Steam Controller that the idea is not as good as their hopes were for it. And it's gone. You can't buy it. You can, for a while there in 2019, you could buy one for five bucks. They had a fire sale, but now those are gone. I still have mine. I'll sell it to you. Really? Oh, yeah. I would not like it at all. I don't have actually the little remote to plug into your computer, so I don't think it's actually useful at all. I don't know how I could use it. But I have it. I'm actually, actually very excited about this device. Why? It's just like, you know how you see a really kind of crummy gadget, but it just hits that like gadget lust.

You're just like, this looks dumb, but I also looks like I would spend like four hours playing with it and it would be a great four hours. That's like, that's what it hits me with. I'm just like, oh, man, this looks like I would want to go to sharper image and play with this thing. This hits me like it has a 720p display. I mean, you mentioned the Switch Pro and what was the big thing about the Switch Pro was it was 4K output?

Yeah. and maybe a slightly higher resolution display. And like the Switch Pro didn't get any of that. And this thing is a 7 inch 720P display. Like, yeah, I don't know. And it's thick. And it's got like buttons on the back that you're supposed to use your pinky. Do you know what this reminds me of?

It just hit me. This is the modern day Atari Links. Ooh. Do you know what I'm talking about like four people? You two nerds don't talk about. But like I had an Atari Links. I spent so much time like saving money. money when I was like 13 to buy an Atari Lynx.

It was the talk of the middle school. I had the big one. They actually made a second model of the Atari Links that was smaller, but I had like the chunk. Yes. And what it was not was the Sega game gear. This is this in the switch have like the same exact like this is more powerful. Like the links was more powerful.

Yeah. Like this isn't even like a Neo Geo. Like the DOGO, you could be like, you know what? that was a really good console. It was just like nobody bought it. This is very much like some people are going to buy it, but it's not going to be a great. It's the links.

Like, yeah. Look, I'm excited for this thing. I don't care what all you say. I've been trying to stream X cloud games to my phone and my Comcast, Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in Mox Media Parenthood. Every connection is terrible. And, you know, I just

I want to play some control without a TV and this will let me do that. And I'm sure it'll be great. You know, I'm sure it'll be like high, high frame rate for high everything. Yeah, so the battery life numbers here are super interesting because of what they called out. What's that? Right. So you can play, this is a quote that they gave to IGN.

You can play Portal 2 for four hours. If you limit it to 30 frames per second, you can play for five or six hours. That's pretty good. But the other side of the quote is, for lighter use cases like game streaming, smaller 2D games or web browsers, you can expect a maximum battery life of seven to eight hours. Right. So they are explicitly saying,

oh, game streaming is a thing you should do with this device, which is really interesting because if you're Steam and you see that future coming, you've got the same app store problems as everybody else. You're not going to stream Steam games to a switch. Nintendo's not going to let you do that. You've got to get on the road somehow.

This, in that context, makes a lot of sense. Right? You're not, it's not a console where you're, like, actually bringing down Steam games. It's a device that allows you to do game streaming in a focused way as part of the Steam ecosystem. Totally by that. Right.

So it's running Steam OS, which is, you know, Steam's version of Linux. And they've got a system for getting Windows games going on that, et cetera, et cetera. But if you want, apparently you just install Windows on this thing. And Windows is, you know, already streaming Xbox. So Tom Warner already put the piece up. Like, yep, install Windows and stream Xbox, and there you go. You're good to go. That is like, there's all kinds of early 2000s drivers questions around there.

Like you can install Windows on it. Like, will anything work? Like, do you have to do BIOS hacks to like make it happen? Does it have like Windows precision touchpad on it? Ooh. It would be amazing if like one of the two touchpads was a precision one and the other one wasn't. I just, I don't understand why you would get this when you can get like an Android device from like GPD or something. that's a lot thinner

and we'll do all the streaming. Yeah, but it'll do the streaming, but you can't play, you can play Hades on this, right? You can play control on this. There's a bunch of PC games that are never coming to the switch that you might want to play portable

and you might have a Comcast internet provider at home and you wouldn't be able to stream ever because they're terrible. And so you want to have, you know, games that aren't otherwise available, available. That's why this thing is compelling to me. And so I refuse to believe that it's going to be bad.

It's going to be bad. I refuse to believe it, though. It's going to be so chunky. It's very big. I love this idea that how much have we talked about whether people actually game on their Android phones? Like, I still don't believe it. But, like, one of the things that's true is, as chips gets smaller and other parts of the cell phone supply chain get more commoditized. Yeah, you can just build stuff like this.

Yeah. And if you can connect it to an ecosystem like Steam, I mean, there are other, like, little gaming PCs around this. around this size that we have covered. They're all like no name manufacturers or whatever, but they exist. This is a category that is sort of developing quietly. Yeah, we've seen these things at CES, like two a year for the past three years. Well, I do find, though, that like this is really nerdy.

The chips in this is cool. Because it's using like a laptop mobile-based chip. It's like doing like an X-86 chip. It's not a arm-based. thing. And that's not as common in something this small. And AMD in particular doesn't usually go this small because it's always had like, it's a power hungry processor. So like getting it this tiny and getting AMD in there and like, that's just neat. That's cool. I don't necessarily believe the battery life claims, but I'm excited to try them out. Yeah. If it arrives. If it arrives. If it

If it actually, like, shows up. Yeah, well, they're supposed to ship it in December. That's what they're saying. Yeah, and pre-orders start this, like today, the day you're listening to Friday. They start on Friday. And the pre-orders are actually really interesting. They are trying to stop scalpers. And so it's a, you have to put down like a $5 deposit for number one.

For number two, in the first round, the only people they will allow to pre-order this thing is people who have made a steam purchase before June of this year. So if you haven't bought anything on Steam, you can't rush over there right now and make an account and pre-order this thing in the first wave, which is very clever. I love that. Now I've got to find a scalper who's bought something on Steam. Hey, man, I successfully ordered a Switch OLED model today, so I'm feeling pretty good about myself. Did those sell out? The first round of pre-orders went up, and it did the thing that all console pre-orders do when they go up is you never know which store is going to work, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't.

And then they, like, start flashing the buttons different colors over time. And then eventually you give up or eventually you get one. Yeah. So did they sell out? It's Schrodinger's OLED switch. Well, I mean, so this is the, I mean, I'm joking about it being vapor. Like, they've showed off a real one to IG. Like, they're obviously going to make it go.

It's a big company. Like, Valve can do things. But the chip shortage here, especially with new look AMD chips, is a real thing. Like, they've, they've got. contend with it. TSM, we mentioned them earlier, actually, is booking record revenue

and saying the chip shortage is going to extend into next year. So, like, there's massive demand for every chip that everybody can make, but there's just not enough. Carmakers, we, I keep talking to car CEOs and Decoder.

They're all like, yep, into next year. Like, it's not what we, it's not transient. It's like, this is another year of this shortage that we're kind of all looking at. So we'll see.

Again, I'm excited. This is the exact sort of thing that, if not for a convoluting pre-order scheme, I would just impulse by in the show. And once you get me there, I'm ready to click the button. Speaking of games, the other kind of biggest news of the week, and then, like I said, just a litany of other things. But the other kind of headline making news this week, Netflix has hired a former EA and

Oculus executive to lead game efforts. Alex walked me through this one. I don't, I'm just like, can everybody focus? Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. You know, I'm hearing like, we heard two kind of different things. theories for what games at Netflix could look like. And there's the one like, oh, they've got, the one I went to that I've been since told as stupid, which is that, like, they've got this big streaming infrastructure in place.

They know how to get content onto your devices. So how hard is it to do like what Google and Microsoft have been doing and just do cloud gaming, but Netflix style, right? And like, they know how to make deals with big partners and stuff. So they could do that. But I've been told that's probably very stupid and not what's going to happen. And more likely, it's like they're going to start partnering to do like mobile games and more beginner gamer friendly stuff using Netflix IP. So like Stranger Things.

Bridgerton, there's talk of a Bridgeton game. Oh, my God. I don't know what that would mean. Only good things. Like, I was like a dating sim. I don't. Yeah. Yeah.

Lots of outfits. Yeah. Like a little doll that I dress up in Bridgetton Club. I mean, honestly, I would play that in a heartbeat. But yeah, so I guess there's like this idea that they're going to just start because Netflix has really been pushing to try to find other revenue streams. And so the big one is like, well, let's do games. Let's do events. So besides just WitcherCon, there's going to be like a Bridgeton ball.

Oh, my God. I would honestly love to go and witness that. I hope everybody dresses in the outfits. So you mentioned different revenue streams. What is fascinating at that is Netflix historically, right, they only have the one revenue stream, which is you pay for Netflix. Yeah, that's it. And then you can, you can, like, there's some different pricing tiers, but they have, like,

two strategies. One is they go find more customers. And that's kind of like, who's left? And the other one is they just, like, slowly raise the prices on you. But there isn't some other thing that you can buy from Netflix. Like, you can just buy Netflix access. So to me, a huge question here is, is this. just more Netflix that you get for the same price?

Or is this another thing that you would pay extra for and actually becomes a second revenue stream? Or they just start making mobile games based on their IP and trying to just cash out on that. Here's my idea for Netflix. Disney got into video streaming. I think Netflix should get into amusement parks. I want Bridgeton World, really bad.

I buy it. Which your world would be good. I feel like Julia's not here. We need to like officially hand over the Julia disclaimer. block to Katie. Yeah. We'll do it in some way. We'll have our own event.

And like Julia can like annoyate Katie with all the disclosures. It'll be beautiful. I have to disclose. Box Media has a Netflix show. It has explained. The Verge has a Netflix show in production. There's a disclaimer. And once upon a time someone thought about making a Quibi show.

Quibi's up for like eight Emmys. I don't even know how that happened. It's up for so many. Oh, further disclosure. The executive in question here was at Oculus. My wife works at Oculus, which is a division of Facebook. We already did the Comcast disclosure. Is there anything else?

That should do it for now. Yeah. I have an LG TV. Is that important to know? I have one LG and one Sony. I only buy off-brand H.GMI cables, if that's important to anyone. Yeah, I just, I think the big question for all these streaming services now, right? Like, Netflix has all the people finding growth.

Like watching that churn, like Netflix subscribers go up and sometimes, they turn off, but it's kind of just like a permanent, they're in the enviable position if it's a default that you subscribe to. You're watching HBO Max, try to collect subscribers. It's doing okay. Disney's doing great. Peacock is not. I just subscribed to it, though. I'm the one, the one person that subscribed. But why? They put out a press release about you. Yeah, they did. They were like, we got one. No, it was some British show about women in a rock band, and I watched, they got me. there was like the one free episode and they're like, do you want to watch it? I was like, sure. And they're like, well, to watch the rest, you have to subscribe or pirate. And I was like,

I'm going to be good and subscribe. There was a button that was like pirate that like clicked you into Plex and like off your way. That just automatically appears in my head. That's part of my movable UI. It just appears just for me. That's like your AR glasses are like, another choice exists. And I was like, I'll be good. I will pay for this content. And it was a cute show. And now I'm like, well, now I have peacock. and I don't know. I'm trying to like watch things on it just so I can, I should just cancel it. But did you watch your, oh, did you watch the whole rock band show?

Yeah, it was only six episodes. Did you pay for without ads? It's very hard to pay for peacock. It was, it was hard to like, buy it. It was hard to like, and I was also on my Apple TV and trying to like do it through there. And they're like, well, you have to log in on your phone. I was like, oh. So I had to like go get my phone out because it was charging.

It was six. Here's my favorite part of the paying for peacock experience. This is true. This is true. Yeah. If you, if you, if you just buy it directly,

it charges your credit card twice. So it charges you once for Peacock, $4.99. And then you get a separate charge that's Peacock without ads, which is like another $3.99. And it's like, you couldn't figure this out,

could you? That I just bought the one without ads. Peacock is betting big on the Olympics. It's, Peacock is NBC. Yeah. He has the Olympics. They're expecting this all to happen.

But you're just kind of looking at these, these companies in this battle of streaming giants. and they're all just like out of people, right? Like if you want to get another customer, you have to take it away from Netflix. You have to convince them that you should pay in addition to Netflix or whatever other five streaming services you have. Or you have to convince them that they should stop playing Fortnite or whatever.

And this is like Netflix explicitly is like our competition is Fortnite. Because you're paying for us anyway. And so we have to convince you that the Netflix icon is a better use of your limited amount of time than your Xbox or. whatever. And so you can see why they would chase into games. Because if you, if your CEO has just like wandered the earth being like, actually our competition is Fortnite, like someone's going to the idea that you just make a Fortnite. I just, I don't. With Bridgeton characters. With Richardson characters. But I think that like the idea that streaming games are, you know,

the core idea is very simple, that you'll run the game in a in a data center and you'll stream the video of the video game to you, and you'll pass back controls in some low latency way. And, like, of course this makes sense. And Netflix is really good at streaming videos. So, like, of course they would just, like, be able, but like, it's really low latency video. You have to be able to pass the controls back. You have to run video games at a data center.

Like, I doubt Netflix is buying gaming hardware for its data centers. They're just sending out, like, video streams. And, like, Google and Amazon both tried this and with mixed results. I mean, Google's still trying. this technically, and so is Amazon. Yeah, technically they both still exist. I will one day finish my play-through of Baldur's Gate on Stadia, but then I have to subscribe to Stadia again.

So you've got to reallocate your peacock dollars. You see the problem. I think it's a long shot, but the cloud gaming idea is a very big long shot because there's just so much engineering they have to do. And if Google couldn't get together the people to make the games exclusively for their cloud console, Netflix is going to probably have a problem too. Or it'll all be like European and Korean pop song like video games, much like their content is now all like international content, right?

You don't see as much English language versus content so far lately. Well, they just had, they just had WitcherCon. So, the second season, The Witcher's coming out. Sexy Beasts, the Netflix dating show where people dress up in just full animal makeup. I get an email about that from Netflix every day. They're very excited about it. So many things are happening on Netflix. Two things at once. Sexy Beast, the dating sim would actually be kind of intense. But that problem, I think we're going to see it over the next year. The problem of the market being saturated and watching TV being so complicated is only getting worse. And like it has

waxed and waned. I think we covered a lot of this action last year. But as Amazon has its MGM transaction, which is not a guarantee. Right. The FTC is looking at it and all this stuff. But Amazon beefs up prime video. Apple continues to invest. Apple got a bunch of Emmy nominations for Ted Lassau. They're feeling good about Apple TV Plus, regardless of whether it makes any sense for

them to do. It's low-key great. It's way better use of your $5 than Peacock. I subscribe to both. Yeah. I have not paid for Apple TV Plus yet. They keep sending me the email saying, guess what? but refunding you your five bucks.

That's it. Cool. They will ruthlessly find a way to end your whatever free trial around before Ted Lassso comes out. I think that's the plan, actually. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I just haven't, like, I really want to watch for All Mankind season two. And people say it's like amazing. It's incredible. I really want to watch season two of Mythic Quest. Oh, yeah. We finally started watching Mythic Quest.

It's so good. It's really good. The first season was great. It's ruthlessly going after like, you know, micropayments in games, going after Apple. It's ruthlessly going after a bunch of, like, Ubisoft means, and Ubisoft is, like, part of the production of this thing.

Like, it's amazing. Yeah, so I'm just waiting until Ted Lasso the next season comes out. I'm going to pay for it, and we'll watch all those shows at once, and then cancel it and just, like, wait for the seasons to come out again. But, like, Netflix doing games. Like, Apple wants to push Apple Arcade. Like, Netflix is a really important partner to Apple on the Apple TV. They're just going to crash into each other in weird and strange ways.

And there's a part of me that says, yep, Netflix is sort of the default winner. They've got to come up with more stuff. But if they don't keep their eye on the ball, it is true that HBO Max has a better and more interesting catalog. A much worse app. Just a disaster of an app everywhere you look. But the library is better. Hulu and Peacock and Apple are not sitting still with that library. Like you got to stay on the ball before you get distracted by this other stuff.

I'm kind of curious, though, because Netflix is. It's so big that it's kind of used that, like, its size to knock people around, including Apple, right? Like, if you go into the TV app on the Apple TV, you don't get Netflix shows because Netflix said, yeah, we don't need to work with that. We don't need to be a part of this experience. And if they're going to go into games, they're going to kind of need to work with people. They're going to need something from Apple or Google or whoever. And I'm really curious to see what happens then. They're going to launch exclusively on the Steam Deck.

I hope, like, Valve executives are, like, checking the site to see what our coverage of the Steam Deck was like, and they see the Netflix news. And Netflix executives are reading the site, see what their coverage like, and they see the Steam Deck News. And I'm like, yeah, it's too great tastes. I mean, those are the two biggest headlines. We're going to take a break. There's just a whole list of other stuff we should talk about, including 5,000 bits and

bobs of Apple News. But let's 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. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From established brands like Allbirds and Heinz to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning, with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks.

So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance in burning out while you're trying to scale.

Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories, so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly.

Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UP-W-O-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Which of these bits and bobs of Apple News do you want to start with, Peter?

Oh, let's start with the betas. I mean, there's like one thing about the betas. It's like Apple listen to everyone. Apple listen to everyone, and they almost fixed the tab layout in Safari. They didn't actually fix it. They almost. fixed it. So now the URL bar is separate on desktop, which is great. They like brought back some more stuff on the mobile bar, so you've got, you know, more than like one button that's not hidden. And then that all seems fine, except that the tabs are just like floating buttons above your browser window, just like there's, there's just some buttons, and those are the tabs,

and one of them is 3% darker than the rest of them, and that's your active tab. What are you doing? I get the feeling that inside of like Apple's user experience design labs, they are thoroughly convinced that this is a better way and that people just need to get used to it and they will come around. But like they have only talked to themselves and they've convinced themselves that this is true. And then they put out the betas and they got all the feedback. And these are very grudging changes in the direction of maybe the discoverability of the interface and your most important. app shouldn't be hidden. Right.

Because like they still haven't put the refresh button at the top level of the nav, right? Like that button should just always be in front of you. I'm happy they're changing it. I hope they continue to change like honestly they should change it all the way back. The only thing I support is moving, moving the address part of the bottom so you can reach it. Yeah. Moving the address part of the bottom good. All the rest bad.

And I think that they want us to be thankful for what we had before. and so they just gave us something worse. And then when they go back to what we had before, we'd be like, oh, Apple, you're so good at design. You finally figured it out. Yeah, like I said, I see a bunch of ideas here that are like, where Apple, let's be bold, especially in the mobile browser. But I just like, the idea that you have the home bar at the bottom

that you can swipe between apps and then like 20 pixels above it, you have that address bar that you can swipe between web tabs. That's a mistake. Yeah. Like a lot of people are going to screw that up just on accident all the time. Well, hopefully they keep changing it. I would like to congratulate them for trying. Keep going.

You can do it. You can get all the way there. You can get all the way there to a user interface that people understand. The danger is that they're going to release iOS 15 and the story will be that the web browser is bad. Yeah. And like we've seen this now like as important as we think we are. Like we'll put out stories on how it works. But like the chatter on Twitter is just going to be this thing is stupid.

and there's no way to control that. There's no way to, you can't pay influencers to influence that conversation. It's just going to get away from them. You can just see it coming like a train. So I hope they figure it out. That's actually going to be in an episode of Ted Lassow. Social media is once again out of control. Ted Lasson and the Quest are hilarious in this respect.

So Ted Lassow is like full of product placement, right? Yeah. They all have Macs, they have iPhones. I mean, The Quest is a show by game development. And they just all have PCs and like razor PCs. Like really clearly labeled Razor PCs. Like no mistake what it is. Yeah.

It's like, do you know a company it's making a show? It's deeply hilarious. There's a bunch of iPhone 13 rumors and an iPad mini rumor. So the iPhone 13 rumor is basically that Apple is going to make Galaxy S21 Ultra. And that will be the next version of the iPhone pro max. That's it. They're going to switch to an LTP screen, is the rumor, and they're going to have an improved optical zoom. Supposedly for video recording, I don't know what that's about, but it just sounds to me like they're going to maybe put a periscope on it,

and they're definitely going to put an LTP screen that'll have variable refresh rate, finally, and that'll be the thing that gets you to use a pro iPhone instead of the regular one. So the optical zoom in video, you said periscope, that's because in video you want a smooth zoom, you don't want to switch between lenses? Is that your inference here? No, you can, you can, if you have a periscope inside the phone, you can get a longer zoom optically than you can otherwise. That's all. Yeah. Now, Sony is doing a thing where you can have like a, it can actually switch the focal lengths between zooms. It's like physically moving the lenses, which is nuts.

That's on the Xperia 1-3. But I would be very, very surprised if Apple did that. I think we are definitely the place where like Apple is putting stuff out on the iPhone a couple, one to two years after Samsung does it. And they often will implement it better than Samsung. But, you know, we're super late in variable refresh rate screens on iPhones. It's nice that they're going to go LTP. That's like what is going to enable it. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to say it.

Apple, I am begging you to leave the lightning port on this phone because it seems like the other alternative is no port. And like, come on. Well, so there's this rumor. it's Quo who says the MagSafe ecosystem is not ready. The Apple wants to do it, but the MagSafe ecosystem isn't ready. Right. I would remind you that Apple is fully in control with MagSafe ecosystem. There are no MagSafe products.

There just aren't. It's the battery. Apple just made its own $100 magsafe battery. I just bought a $50 anchor battery that has a little MagSafe magnet on it. But that one is a fake. As far as I can tell, that one, it like uses the magnets and he uses Chi. but it doesn't support the higher MagSafe charging rate. Oh, that's correct.

Yep. Right. So it's like it's sort of a, in the sense that Apple cannot restrict magnetism from operating in the world, it is a magsafe product. Not for lack of trying. Like, they can't make the magnets not be magnets. Like, yes, it clicks onto the back, but then it's just a Chi charging battery. Right.

It aligns itself. And this is kind of what Apple said, like, when they announced the iPhone 12, like, yep, it's got magnets on the back, we can't stop you. But what they can do is say it can only charge at certain rates. Right. So their new $100 MIG-Safe battery can charge at the full rate. It can... When it's plugged in.

When it's plugged in. Right. I think it's 5 watts when it's not plugged in. Correct. And it can go to like 15 when it's actually plugged in. And it also displays its battery life in Apple's little battery widget, which no other non-appled device can do. So you can see it next to your watch battery and your AirPods battery and whatever.

Yeah. And it does reverse charging. You can reverse charge the... puck from your phone if your phone is plugged in, which I don't think they're going to let anybody else do. They're definitely going to let anybody else do. But it's just funny to be like, we're moving towards a portless iPhone. And the reason we're not all the way there yet is this ecosystem hasn't developed.

And it's like, well, you haven't let anybody make anything. Yeah. I mean, this is, I mean, I complain about the Apple accessory ecosystems. The same is somewhat true of lightning. But like, all anybody wants to make is cables to charge your phone over lightning. So, like, people just make them and they knock them off. But the MagSafe thing to me is we're cruising towards a year of the iPhone 12, right? It's just a couple months before the 13 is going to come out.

And there are no accessories for this innovative new system. There is a wider diversity of types of add-ons under the Motomod modular brand than there are for MagSafe. Wow. That's it. I mean, we should just put that on the site. We should just, yeah. Of all of the things you have proposed writing for the website. Like burning the magsafe ecosystem with Moto mods is the way to go.

Yeah. I do like the idea that if you have the iPhone 12 mini, which does not have great battery life, this thing clicks on the back. You can still reach the phone. Like, that's cool. Yeah. I'm into that. I mean, it ruins like the whole reason to get the mini, though, which is that women can put it in their pockets. Well, this is like Z axis instead of, you know, X and Y axis.

So. Yeah. Those pockets are tiny. Yeah. We've got to get one. We've got to play with one. This is just, like, funny to me. It's like this whole, like, I have the moment car mount.

It's great. It's just a little black circle. Yeah. Definitely does not charge my phone. Yeah. It's a great, it's like the coolest car mount I've ever had. And I think Vergecast listeners know that's high praise. Like, you can get me.

It's very easy. But it doesn't charge the phone. Yeah. And it's like, why? The number of people who have tweeted me that, like, they've bought a series of hacks to turn the regular magsafe puck into a car mount yeah yeah i get it but it's because no one else can get that puck into their actual product right so they just killing me it's like they have all these all these cool accessory ideas and they just come to nothing all right they're going to

buy sunday ticket that's a solution well so there's more again bits and bob's new this week yeah sun nfl sunday ticket is like the grand prize of nfl licensing rights Yep. Direct TV has had it for years. It's just a horrible experience. Bad app doesn't work. Everything about that experience is designed to make you buy Direct TV hardware. Right.

So the thing about DirecTV having an NFL Sunday ticket is if you are in a place where you can get DirecTV, they might not let you sign up for it because they want you to get DirecTV with Sunday ticket. You can't sign up for just the online version of it. So I have consistently, up until last year when I stopped doing it, just made up addresses on DirecTV's website until I found one that they would let me buy Direct Sunday ticket. So if for nothing else that I won't have to lie about where I live to a company so that I can pay for their service, I hope Apple does this.

Yeah. So Amazon has been ordered to buy it a bunch. Amazon just bought some other NFL rights. It just comes up a lot, right? Like here's this prize that will make everybody buy your service. Apple apparently wants it. That would be like, you know, Eddie Q's. a huge sports fan. You can just see him being like, this is what I want. This is the win.

But like Amazon wants it like, I would bet that the various vice presidents that run AT&T just realize that they're like, oh shit, we own direct TV. Like maybe we should put it in our other streaming service that actually works. There's going to be a bidding war, but it's fascinating to me that Apple, like I said, I still really understand the strategic reason for Apple to make content, especially because they've distributed that app over everything, right? It's not selling hardware for them. They can just get it on your smart TV. I've yet to see the reason. They're making good stuff. Totally understand that. Why are they doing it? And then why would they spend all this money for streaming rights to

stream it on other people's smart TVs? Like, still very confusing to me. How long until Apple TV Plus costs 10 bucks a month? Ted Lassow season four. Yeah. No, I mean, that's the whole question. The answer to your question is, what's the plan here? The plan here is they have to charge more than five bucks a month. And so they're going to. And so the question is when?

Deider, I get that. But, like, they put the app on every smart TV platform under the sun. Roku on Android. Like, it is shocking to me that my Chromecast with Google TV has an Apple TV app. Like, all the ones they wouldn't do, I would expect they wouldn't do that one. But they went ahead and did it. And actually, a little crashy, but overall great. Yeah.

Just like the Chromecast with Google TV is. as a whole. But there's no app for Android phones, right? And if you're going to make a service like this, eventually you have to be like, well, here's a huge marketplace of people who might want to also watch our shows. And so like that to me is, yeah, they could charge more money, but then they're just squeezing more money out of a small market instead of setting the same price out of a big market. Is it supposed to be like I message where they're keeping it off Android so that you'll be like, well, I really want to watch Ted Lassow on my phone. So I guess I better in an iPhone.

Isn't that weird? I mean, I would think so. I do, but I also watch everything on my TV. Yeah, I mean, there's a theory there, right? That they know that more and more viewing time is going to tablets and phones, so they want to have that be the draw to iOS devices. And just as a nice service, they will make it available on every smart TV under the sun so that that doesn't become a blocker for you if you're thinking about subscribing.

getting it on TVs is not about getting it on TVs. It's about making sure that people who will subscribe on their iPhone don't say no because they can't get it on their TV. It's the anti-Qibby strategy is basically what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, I buy all of this, but the cynical flipside of that is that, yep, it's a lock-in strategy. Right. You're not going to buy an Android phone because you love Ted Lassa so much. And I, what?

What? They're all smarter than that. Like, just like, imagine that meeting. But I do think if they get Sunday ticket, then it becomes a real locking strategy. You want to watch any football game, any Sunday. You have to have an iPhone. That reminds me to your point, Dieter, like, these companies are just turning the cell carriers again. This is exactly what Verizon did with NFL.

It never inspired me to get Verizon. It only inspired me to hate Verizon and ruthlessly pirate football games. This keeps coming up on the set. on this show. So yeah, we'll see. Like I said, bits and bobs. Here's the last one. In this story,

it was just a real wild ride for Heim. Dieter, do you want to explain the weather app? No, I want to be the one to make the joke. All right, fine. So, Heim Gartenberg, who is a mathematical person, I would say, noticed that the weather app on his phone would not say that it was 69 degrees. Nice. Thank you, Dieter.

I appreciate you. Anyway, so it looks into this. It's only on some version. of iOS, it doesn't appear to be happening in iOS 15. We write it up because it's funny. It's slow week, as you can tell by the news we're talking about. Everyone just assumes Apple is doing this

on purpose. We assumed that they're doing it. It's a very Apple thing to do. Yeah. Right. And then people start tweeting, hi, me, starts figuring out. It turns out Apple's getting a core data underneath in Celsius and converting to Fahrenheit. And just the rounding error just like prevents 69 from happening. Like it just always rounds up

to 70 rounds down to 68. So we update the post. It's really funny. Here's the second funny thing that happened. Our dear friend, Marquez Brownlee, also noticed this. He's like a video creator. Like, that's his brain, right? So we put it the story.

We're tweeting about it. We're doing all the stuff. He just made a video about it. He made a video about it on TikTok. Great. Awesome. Whatever. We followed up.

We're text first. We made our TikTok video because we have this like small TikTok renegade channel that I can't stop from happening. Right. And I read in TikTok's like, they didn't know. They don't know. we have a website. So you copied my cousin.

We're like, we got to leave this alone. But the other day, our social media manager, Kate and Caitlin Hadden made a TikTok being like, we have a website. We have a YouTube channel and an Instagram. Like, we exist. It's like really funny. It was like the second order, like deeply hilarious part of that story was like our TikTok audience.

doesn't know that the verge is a website. It thinks it's just her. It's great. Yeah, they think it's Caitlin. Yeah, because people are like, why are you verified you have so few followers? And she's like, because of the, because we exist in the comments. We're like, see, she has a successful business. And it's great.

Caitlin does have a successful business. Good job, Caitlin's in charge now. Please direct all complaints to her. All right. Let's take another break. We'll come back and run through a bunch of policy stuff. And then billionaires just keep going to space. I hate it.

Support for this. show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they can. keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time,

What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. 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.aI slash vergecast. That's cloud.aI slash vergecast and check out ClaudePro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.a.com slash vergecast. Okay, we're back. Joe Biden keeps doing stuff. Olivia Rodrigo's in the White House. Yeah. All kinds of things are happening.

But he had a big executive order. Came out last Friday. Lots of bits and bobs in this order. It's all about competition, increasing competitiveness across the economy, a bunch of Virchcast stuff. I was laughing because it's down into the weeds of like standards patent licensing, which if you were a long time listener of the show, you know that we used to spend hours talking about like LTE standards patents and frand.

all the way down and there. But two pieces that we should spotlight here. This is strange, right? Like, this is stuff that when Trump did similar things were like, a little dictatory. But he had Lena Con, who's the new head of the FTC, and Jessica Rosen-Warsall, who's the acting head of the FCC, at the event with him.

And he signed the order. And he was like, I strongly recommend the FCC bring back net neutrality. And he said he has a bunch of suggestions for the FTCs to do. And the reason I make the Trump comparison is, Trump would often command his agencies to do things in a way presidents are not really supposed to do. Then everyone to get all up in arms. And here's like, they had a party. And Joe Biden's like, I think you should do this stuff.

And they're like, great idea, Joe. And like the optics are different, but the concerns are the same. Right. I think the difference here is he appointed the heads of the agencies to do these things. So he's just like repeating their ideas back to them as opposed to commanding them to sell TikTok to Microsoft or whatever the hell Trump was doing. So there's, I would, I take the criticism. I hear it at the same time, Lena Con at the FTC, like Facebook is like filing motions saying that LenaCon shouldn't judge cases about Facebook or she shouldn't be in charge of the FCC's

lawsuit against Facebook that might get refiled. Amazon is filing the same motion. You shouldn't judge the Amazon MGM merger because you as a lawsuit wrote articles about Amazon. I don't know who I'm stealing this from, but a very important headline we need to we're going to write about this is that these companies are afraid of the wrath of con. All right. If we ran a print magazine in the 90s, we'd like put her face on it with like a big.

Yeah. If anybody, if anybody's listening works for Wired. I just, that's your next cover. Just like do it. Done. Big order says, non- neutrality should come back. There is not enough votes in the FCC because not enough commissioners at the FCC yet. They just haven't appointed enough commissioners to like,

this vote on party lines to bring by net neutrality. We've been talking a lot about AT&T and streaming and all this stuff. I just want to remind everybody that Trump got elected. He installed the Jeep pie. Net neutrality went away. And AT&T was like,

we should buy Time Warner. Like, that was their idea. And they were like, we're going to do clips of Game of Thrones on AT&T phones and revolutionize the business with the power of 5G. And they just like said a bunch of nonsense

about how they could combine Time Warner's content with their excellent delivery, it all came down to, like, weird preloaded Android apps. Like, any carrier idea comes down to, like, three live stream TV services? Yeah, we've written a mediocre Android app, and now it's on everyone's home screen by default. But this cost, what, billions of dollars in value? It led to a total exodus of talent from HBO, like, all their executives left. Like, thousands of people got laid off in all this mess.

and then it failed and now they're selling it. And like, what if we just had a law that was like, AT&T can't have this idea anymore? You're not pro-net neutrality, you're anti-AT&T. It's just like, like, maybe you're going to make the argument that the carriers haven't done the worst things that net neutrality proponents said they would do. Yeah.

Which is even to my mind kind of shaky. Because AT&T definitely excluded HBO Max from data caps. like they did the things. Yep. But even if you don't buy that argument, because you haven't seen it or felt it, the idea just destroys businesses. Notable, like,

AOL bought Time Warner to mix content and access and destroyed itself. Just don't buy Time Warner is the real note here. Yeah, it's like ATT shouldn't be allowed to do anything and don't buy Time Warner, or the two core ideas in that neutrality would solve. I just want, like, there's a real argument you made here now with enough evidence

that actually you should prevent this, because what you want these companies to do is spend their money making the networks better. And if you don't just stop them from chasing content integration, they will get distracted. Yep. Because they always get distracted and it always fails. So like, I still think they're doing shady things of the network. I still think they're coming to shady agreements. I still think that given half an ounce of regulatory leeway, they will start, I mean, they are.

They're like raising prices. and putting data caps on after the pandemic. Like, they will act badly because they have no real competition for most people. Dieter, you can't switch from Comcast, right? They're going to act like monopolies because they are. But it is also true that even if you just want to look at it in the coldest business sense, they will chase the worst idea that any ISP has ever had every single time. They will buy Time Warner.

They will just do it every time. Actually, we keep mentioning NBC and Comcast. really interesting thing that is playing out with Comcast right now. When NBC bought Comcast, they were under a consent agreement with the FCC and the FTC that they could not mix content and access. Right. That agreement has expired. Comcast hasn't really done anything else because there's still lawsuits and regulatory instability. Joe Biden's just like talking about bringing it back.

So they haven't tried to mix it. That means both businesses have done well. And analysts are like, you should spin off NBC. like even when you do it as well as you can do it, people are like, why'd you do this? Yeah. Like this doesn't make any sense for your business. So we'll see what happens with the net neutrality thing. The other piece, and Alex, I know you're in on this, right to repair.

I love it. A lot of right to repair in this order. Yeah. So I guess like farmers are going to be able to repair their deer tractors now. I think the big thing was that it was kind of broad, but he basically told the FCC that they really need to be thinking about, like, how to stop unfair competitive, competitive restrictions on third-party repair or self-repairs. And specifically cited, it didn't cite John Deere, but specifically cited tractors and farm equipment as the big thing. But obviously, like,

that's, I think, gotten the most press, but it also counts for, like, phones and laptops and everything else that you want to repair that is virtually impossible to repair yourself right now. Yeah. And the idea is that you should be able to get manuals. there shouldn't be software locks and you should be able to get OEM parts which is really important. I just had the CTO, John Deere, Jamie Hinman on Decoder.

It's fascinating, right? Smart guy makes products people like his arguments against repairing a tractor are exactly the same arguments that Apple makes against repairing your phone. He's like, you'll do dangerous things. It's regulated. It's a computer.

We've got to keep the criminals out. Or you can just let us repair it. Like the farmer's like, these are our tractors. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, let us repair them. I'm like, it's my phone. It costs $1,500. I think this is a surprisingly big deal.

This is, like, rights repair, motherboard and vice have done it. Just a tremendous job of covering it over the years. We've been interested in it. They've really led the way in coverage. It's been kind of amazing to see just like how focused they've been on it. But it's right there. I think the reason we focus so much on John Deere is because everybody else,

we kind of had it slowly taken away from us, right? Like, it was bit by bit by bit, losing the ability to repair your laptop. Like, I remember replacing the entire display on my G3 Pismo that I spray painted in a bathtub in college. I made some. What color do you spray paint it? Purple. Okay. That's a great choice.

Yeah. But then my friends would come over and be like, why is there purple spray paint all over your bathtub? And then you say that's none of your business. Yeah. Perfect. Get out of my bathroom. Yeah. I did not get my deposit back.

But don't do that. But we all, like, it's been chipped away. Like, the things you could repair, like these companies like OWC and I Fix It, which I still think of, I still type in PeeB Fix It when I'm trying to go to I Fix It. It's just muscle memory. Like, the stuff that you could buy from those places to do your repairs a decade ago, even like five years ago, there was so much more stuff. But now it's like you can buy some special screws and some special like bits to remove the screws.

That's about it. Maybe a battery, if you're lucky. You better get your heat like a heat gun out to remove the current battery. So like I think it's good. It's, you know, as a big nerd, even though I have friends who have these tractors and are very excited, it's going to be easier for them to repair their $100,000 tractor that uses GPS to like, paint haylines or whatever. I don't know.

They're very excited. But the rest of us, like, I'm pumped. And I think this is a huge, huge deal. And like, I think it's really great that it's finally happening. Maybe. We'll see. Because it's still just the SEC was told to crack down. He's like, I would encourage you to do this.

Yeah. I'm sure they'll all be immediately asked to recuse when they start the crackdown. I've been collecting a bunch of old PDAs to, like, show up. off on a shelf. And I forgot that on the handspring visor, the stylus, you could unscrew the cap of it, and it had a little tiny Philip screwdriver that was exactly designed for the Phillips screws on the visor itself. That's awesome.

So that you could... You could take it apart and fix stuff and re-sodder the wires because that's how old that thing was. I don't know. The other thing that's really interesting about this executive order. Yeah, you know, you're right. He's instructing all the heads of all the departments to go do stuff. But it's explicitly under the rubric of promoting competition. It's not Apple is bad or right to repair is morally right.

No, no, competition, y'all, is actually good. And in order for us to have competition, we should do this stuff. And so instead of leading with the thing that everyone can argue about, he's leading with, hey, isn't competition good? And then everyone will be like, yeah. And then he's like, okay, well, how about this? stuff and it will pull more people along. Theoretically, if our politics aren't completely broken, which maybe they are. I agree with you.

One of the more interesting things about this whole situation is the bipartisan shuffle that is occurring. Right. So, like, right to repair bipartisan support. Like, farmers live in red states. They're representatives hear from them. Like, they're into it. They're, like, happy about it.

Consolidation and meatpacking. Republican representatives and senators. like care about it a lot. Republican senators actually don't like it. The consolidation and meatpacking is like this whole weird thing that's happening where a lot of people are for, like a lot of the independent producers are for it, but the larger producers who are the bulk of producers in the U.S. are against like stopping the consolidation.

They like the consolidation because they get the good deals and stuff. There's always a group of people who really like the consolidation. Yeah. They tend to have a lot of money and they speak loudly. So you have like these different groups, but they're all Republican, which is great. So it's like this fighting between these different like producer groups. So I mean, it's like there's a shuffle here that is happening under the usual red and blue shuffle that we're used to as it relates to competition. Here's my favorite part of the order because I think this is very funny.

So he encourages the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, who by the way is the acting chair, not the chair. He's got to nominate somebody. Yeah. But he encourages Jessica Rosen-Worsel, who's currently the acting chair, to adopt net neutrality rules, blah, blah, blah, to conduct future spectrum options, and then provide support for the continued development and adoption of 5G open radio access network protocols and software. Oh, no. O-RAN.

O-RAN is the network software stack that DISH network is supposed to use to make its 5G network to compete with TMOA AT&T and Verizon. That's correct. in here he's like can you just goose that along a little bit because nothing's happening here somebody helped charlie yeah so i mean that it's this is like this underlying we don't think about 5g networks as having suppliers and vendors right we're like we usually live at this

high consumer level like we think about at t and vrizona as providers of 5g to us the consumer they've got to go out and get Nokia and seamens and whoever else to like put stuff on their towers. Right. And right now all that stuff is effectively proprietary. Like you buy into one system. O-Ran is the open one

where any supplier can be a vendor. A lot of this is aimed at increasing competition so we're not reliant on Chinese companies like Huawei. Right. So even in here, all the way down

to the nerdiest thing I can think of on the verge cast, Joe Biden's like, I got an idea about O-Ran. Put that in there. Just for you. Does Joe Biden have that idea or does Tim Wu have that idea?

That's definitely Tim Wu's idea. It's actually. Absolutely, Tim Woods idea. This entire section, by the way, is under a previous section that instructs to protect the vibrancy of American markets for beer, wine, and spirits. The Secretary of Treasury shall not, after 120 days of this order, submit a report to the chair of the White House assessing the current market structure and conditions of competition on beer wine and spirits.

But he's all over the place. Yeah. He's like too many, too much consolidation in the spirits market. Diageo, get in here. I like the idea that there's like, there's an alliance between, like, like Diageo and Verizon meatpackers. They're like, we're killing us, Joe.

Diageo, give me a call if you ever want to do a vodka brand. I've got ideas for it. So I feel like we have to talk about Branson, Virgin Galactic. First flight, he was on it, made a big deal. It was real weird. Yeah, it was weird. They made a fake video of him riding his bike to the spaceport, which turned out he had ridden his bike the day before.

They faked it. I'm all for bike riding, but I mean, I don't know how that connects to anything. The thing that's interesting to me is, like, Amazon and, like, Blue Origin, they had to, like, be snipy about this, too. Like, it's not technically space, you know. Yeah, great. Well, so the really interesting thing about this, like the bicycle video, we're very used to SpaceX. Right. Probably everybody listening to the show has watched us SpaceX.

live stream. SpaceX basically apes NASA, right? And NASA is like, NASA TV is not like action-packed. Right, right. NASA, like, their streams are, you know, they're a government agency trying to educate the public and inspire the youth to do math or whatever. And they're very dry and direct. SpaceX, Elon's an engineer. Like, that's an engineering company. Famously, you know, Tesla doesn't do any marketing. Like, so SpaceX looks a lot like NASA, I think, as a company. I think, as a company, their engineering focused, most SpaceX launches are like, after the launch, there's a long period of just like watching a rocket float into the sky while a dot on a bar graph at the bottom moves along and then like excited people tell you about space engineering. And people are captivated

by this. This all makes sense. Our science team has very conflicted feelings about those SpaceX live streams, right? Because they're not real. Like they ape a thing that looks official. They ape the government regulated thing, but they're a private company that looks like it. But they're still pretty good and people watch them and people like them. Branson is literally like a music video executive. Right. That's who he is. He's an entertainment executive.

The Virgin Galactic stream was like an infomercial. Like no aping NASA whatsoever. There was another stream that was up from just like a YouTube channel. And they were just like, yeah, watch us if you don't want to. the fluff because interspersed with the regular Virgin Galactic stuff was like you know like at the Olympics that you like human interest pieces on like athletes yeah it was that but for Branson and then like one about one about his mom like just like all this stuff hyping it up and I was like watching I was like this like a sci-fi movie where the rocket explodes like it like it like it made me like it made

me anxious as I was watching I was like if you say something is great this much like something I've seen movies, man. I know what happens. It all went off. It was fine. But as space gets more privatized and commercial, I think we've all been kind of lulled into complacency by SpaceX being this engineering company that kind of looks like NASA. It's going to get commercial.

Like that plane landed and they're like, here's a song Richard Branson commissioned from Khalid. And then we just like listen to a song for a while. Like, why is this happening? And I think we should all. just get ready. It's like Blue Origin does it and Virgin Galactic does it and other companies start to do commercial space. They're going to do commercial space and it's going to look like branded content. Like if something went wrong in that flight, I would not have trusted that

video to be an accurate representation of the flight. Correct. Yeah. Would have just been cycling on the same two seconds over and over again until they figured out what to say. Yeah. I mean, the thing about this stuff is it's these huge celebrations. And if you actually step back and think about what are we celebrating. We are celebrating the fact that private companies have done something that we did as a, like, society and a government 70 years ago, 60 years ago, whatever. Like, that's what we're celebrating. And I know that's reductive and it's more than that.

But I don't know. It is a little weird. Like the joke that billionaires are going to space, they should stay there. I don't want anybody to die, obviously. but I do I do want to know other than a PR opportunity like tell a better story

of what the purpose of your space rockets are Well, Branson's is just a PR opportunity, right? Like he's just gonna... Branson said he was evaluating the product like he came off his rocket right and they're like, what was it? And he was like, that was amazing,

I dreamed of it since I was a little boy. What a great opportunity to evaluate the customer experience. and it's like, oh, like, you're not, Neil, like, that's Neil Armstrong, like, say, like, one small step for, like, they evaluate the customer. That's what your brain went to. Yeah. And, like, that's what I mean.

Like, I think we- QA is important, right? I just, like, you sound like the line manager at a jelly bean factory. Like, what are you doing, man? It just really struck me that we're really used to SpaceX. And SpaceX conducts itself one way. It looks a lot like NASA. And like I said, our science team has conflicted feelings about that, right?

But even still, like, it would be hard for me to make the case to most listeners to show that that's, that's, like, problematic. Your conflicted feelings there are like, can you really trust this? It looks like a thing you can trust. But whatever, but it still, it had a sincerity to it. It continues to have a sincerity to it. This Virgin Galactic thing was, I don't think we're actually ready for the commercialization of space and what it will look like. And this one, to me, it was like, oh, boy. We just saw it.

That said, I would love to have that customer experience. That would be so rad. Okay, some gadgets. There was like a bunch of little gadget leaks along the way. Deeter, walk us through him. We've probably got Samsung's entire unpacked device lineup that leaked. So we're looking at everything we expected, Z-fold-3, Z-flip, whatever the number is, some watches.

So that's happening. I think the date is also really. rumored. I want to say it's August 11th. Yeah, I'm excited to see what happens with the the flip two is going to have a bigger screen. That'll be good. The Z-fold three will have stylus support. I hope there's something else to this story because the fold three needs more than just stylus support. It needs a little bit more elegant software. It needs to get thinner. They need to change a form factor. I don't know that this is a year for that. Maybe it's year that they bring the price down even further. Like, if they, if they have this thing and it's like

$1,500, like, that's exciting. Otherwise, it's not. Well, the watch is exciting, right? This is going to be. The watch is exciting. Yes. This is going to be a big deal for the watch. No, I think this is the right year for the full three. Everyone's, like, they, poor Sam's, like, the pandemic hit, everyone's stayed at home. Like, right. I'm excited about a phone size thing that maybe is a little thinner that like opens up into a bigger useful thing like yeah mobile computing's back baby yeah but the fold three was the perfect pandemic phone if you could afford it because you could you wouldn't feel weird carrying around this big remote control in your pocket all the time didn't matter if it was awkward because you weren't going anywhere and then you would have a big screen

you know with you all the time instead of your phone it was great yeah i'm just like again my dream is to uh edit verge articles with a pen so if google could get to supporting that and Google Docs, that'd be great. And then just imagine the havoc I would reek on planes and subways with like a giant foldout tablet and a pen. I've had this dream for like 10 years. It's never going to come true. But just stay with me. Okay. I'm going to put my energy towards believing in that for you. I'll tell you. I'm going to submit my next draft to you in Word and then you'll be able to do it. Okay. I mean, I'll happily circle things in Word. Yeah, you could do it on your, you know, your bargain basement surface duo and, you know, get a, get a surface stylist for that. And you're

good to go. It doesn't quite, it's still not quite what I want. I've, I've thought about it, I've tried a little bit. Yeah. I don't know. It's, because it doesn't show up in all the places you want it to show up. I think you don't want the marking up. You just want the experience of the power. So if you want me to come out to New York and you could just be like, get me pictures of Spider-Man. Then, you know, that's all I want. When, here's a, like, if you're an editor, like, you know, you watch the movies. Like, the dream is that you will have the glass panel conference room and like all the pages of the magazine will be there and you'll like point and be like that one needs a spicer headline better photo here let's move this to the front of the

like you'll i i've never gotten to do this yeah when vox media in new york magazine merged i went to visit the editor-in-chief of new york magazine in their office and like hang out and he was like oh here's where we put the print magazine together and my immediate instinctive response was like fuck you I look so mad at him. He was like a little confused. I was like, no, no, you don't understand. This is just jealousy. Just a dream.

You're great, David. Yeah, just a dream I have. Let's end with what we promised we would talk about, the freedom phone. Everyone is complaining about big tech censorship, but no one is doing anything about it. They say, build your own phone. So I did.

So Dieter, a lot of people have tweeted at you, a bunch of people have tweeted at me. This is the second or third time the Freedom Phone has been announced. What is the Freedom Phone? It is an Android phone running probably, I guess, some version of lineage OS. That's basically just an Umi Diji phone. And it's a spitt an image of the Umidi-A-9 Pro according to animation is key. I think that looks about right.

And it has a app store that cannot be censored, apparently, and it has some preloaded apps on it, and it runs Freedom OS, whatever that. that is. Freedom phone truly is the best phone in the world. It does everything your current phone does, except censor you and spy on you. With the freedom phone, your freedom of speech is our number one priority. All of which is to say, it's a grift.

It is a way for Eric Finman, who is selling this thing, to squeeze a bunch of money out of people who are mad and think that buying an Android phone that claims that it is free, is the way to solve that, that anger. It's a grift. Don't, don't buy it. So, again, this is like the third time this thing has been announced. We have passed on every time. We're going to try to get one. I think that's important. But Eric Finnman, there's a video. You can go watch it. This is this guy. He's like, hi, I'm the world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire, which to me is a signal that I should stop watching a video. You keep watching the video and he's like, we got to stop big tech. I've built this phone to fight back against the oppressive sensorial power of app stores and privacy. like whatever. Then he's like, I have an uncensurable app store on my phone, the Freedom phone, which as Deeter pointed out, is a rebranded Chinese Android phone. I would also point

out, we've talked about app stores a lot on this show and in this world. You want a little censoring in your app store. Just a little. Just a little. Like you want like malware to not be in your app store. Overt identity theft scams. Maybe not in your app store. blatant ripoffs of other apps, fake Instagram clones. You want that not in your app store. So it's weird that he's uncensorable app store. Yeah. Then it does kind of like, it's unclear what riff on Android this thing is running,

but it's obviously a riff on Android. That also means it won't have the Play Store. Correct. Which means like you're going to buy this phone because you want freedom, but what you will have achieved is like freedom from YouTube. Yeah. I don't know, man. He's selling it for a huge markup over this Umi Digi phone.

I don't think it'll ever ship. I think it is all just a grift. Yeah. Every single thing on the website that says, like, you want to find up more. Like, it's just uncensurable app store. And you're like, oh, I want to, what does that mean? What's the button that lets me click on it to learn more? It's buy it now.

Preloaded apps. Oh, what are the preloaded apps? I'll click the button underneath it to find out what the preloaded apps are. It's buy it now. Oh, the free speech first operating system, freedom OS. I wonder what the features of this operating system are. I'm going to click the button underneath that to, find out what all this is about. That button is buy it now also. Can I just say my favorite thing

about the buy it now situation is that buy it now, you can enable, they've enabled Apple Pay. So you can buy your uncensurable phone with Apple Pay. It's very good. Like I said, we, we had this like internal argument about whether you want to give this obvious scam a lot of attention. And we think the best way to do that is to joke about it for five minutes on the Vergecast and then try to get one and see if we can pull apart what it actually is. But just, I mean, if you're a listener to the show, the basics here are obviously scammy, right? Like an uncensurable app store is inherently a bad idea. Who is, who is putting apps on that app store? I don't know, man. Like if in like, so, you know, their big one is parlor and gab. They want them all on there,

blah, blah, blah. Like, sure, I get it. All right. But parlor, like, Parlor's Android app probably relies on Google Play Services. It sure might. because that's what they targeted it to. And they won't have Google play. Like, there's like just a very, the basics of how a phone works here are like, yes,

I wish that we were more Android variants. Yes, there are lawsuits that might split apart place or we talked about that last week. This is just a dead ahead grift. It's also just very funny that it is. I mean, this is like how many small companies that have repackaged Chinese Android phones have we seen come and go?

Like, it just like doesn't work. Anyway, that's the freedom phone i hope we get one if you have a line on one please send it let us know i'm not giving them my apple pay information it's not going to happen for me but i would love to know more about this thing okay a few things to call out and we get out of here uh chris welch reviewed the sonos picture frame seekers which definitely look cool they're basically like a play one on your wall which is neat but the fact that you can't change the picture is like a huge miss to me yeah it's a huge

miss, but also everyone's very first thought is, I bet I could figure out a way to fix that. I bet I could, I could, I'll just take, exacto knife, just go to town. Purple spray paint in the bathtub. Let's get this done. Yeah, that's all you need. Yeah. I've been reading a lot. I don't know why I keep chasing this stuff.

Like, I just keep reading these articles at how you can take an IKEA symphonis speaker and use it to drive other speakers. Yeah. It's probably very easy. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. This is me saying, I have an idea for a bad Saturday. project that will fail.

But that's the reviews on the site. Heim reviewed the Tempad from Loki. So, it's one of the funniest things Heim has ever written. It's very good. That's on the site right now. And then we've been talking a lot about net neutrality, internet bills.

We have a partnership with consumer reports where we want to collect a lot of internet bills from people. And just evaluate prices, speeds, fees, weird taxes, all that stuff. We're hoping to get tens of thousands of bills. So go to the site, go to the consumer reports, send us to your internet bill. But through the link. But through the link.

Don't just like mail us your bill. There's a link. There's a partnership. It's great. It's called let's broadband together. Yep, we're going to keep everything private. Consumer Reports is running that whole side of it. We're going to do the analysis.

I think there's a lot to learn here. So check that out. Send us to your internet bill. Okay. That's it. I'm not going to tell you who's on Decoder next week, but this is just me chasing a big fun summary idea. You'll like it. but I'm actually not on the Veritas next week on vacation.

Deeter is going to do a full hour on RCS. Yeah, actually. It's going to be so exciting. If I'm in control, that might happen. You never know. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless Deer's at Backlond. Alex is Alex H. Kranz.

We love hearing from you. We'll see you in a little bit. That's it. That's Verchast. Rock and roll. Five stars.