The Vergecast - Tim Cook is destroying his own legacy

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

We've been covering what's happening in Minnesota, and the killing of Alex Pretti, all week on The Verge. To begin this episode, Nilay explains why — and why so many others seem to feel the same way right now. After that, the hosts talk about the CEO-studded screening of Melania Trump's documentary last weekend, the disastrous public appearance from Tim Cook, and whether Cook and other CEOs have any other option but to capitulate to the Trump administration. Then it's time for some gadgets: we talk about the super-foldy, super-expensive Samsung Galaxy  Z Trifold, the Clawdbot / Moltbot phenomenon, and whether Google can finally put Chrome OS and Android together the right way. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy, Tesla's anti-car pivot, Apple's design hires, and more. Further reading: On the ground in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti  I grew up with Alex Pretti  Creators and communities everywhere take a stand against ICE  It doesn’t matter if Alex Pretti had a gun  Why won’t anyone stop ICE from masking?  Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, and AMD CEO Lisa Su are at the White House for a VIP screening of the Melania doc. Tim Cook had ‘a good conversation’ with Trump about deescalation  Cook in 2020: Speaking up on racism From The New York Times: Amazon’s $35 Million ‘Melania’ Promotion Has Critics Questioning Its Motives From The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Melania’ Set for a $3 Million Opening Despite Amazon’s $35 Million Marketing Push Here’s Tim Cook hanging out with accused rapist Brett Ratner at the Melania screening What TikTok’s new owners mean for your feed  TikTok USA is broken  TikTok is still down, here are all the latest updates  TikTok is still struggling in the US due to a “cascading systems failure.”  TikTok US is mostly back up and running  TikTok blames its US problems on a power outage  Oracle admits it broke TikTok. Congress doesn’t seem to know if the TikTok deal complies with its law  Is New TikTok banning the word “Epstein” in DMs? Not really.  TikTokers are heading to UpScrolled following US takeover  Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media  Meta is stopping teens from chatting with its AI characters  Bluesky is testing ‘live’ features to take on X  Best gas masks The Samsung Trifold will cost nearly three grand  Google just leaked a first look at Android for PC in action  Chromebooks train schoolkids to be loyal customers, internal Google document suggests  Moltbot, the AI agent that ‘actually does things,’ is tech’s new obsession Clawdbot’s bad day  I used Claude to vibe-code my wildly overcomplicated smart home The FCC’s Late Night Comedy Show Tesla discontinuing Model S and Model X to make room for robots  Tesla says production-ready Optimus robot is coming soon  Tesla hits a grim milestone: its second straight year of decline Elon Musk invests $2 billion in Elon Musk Hang on, there’s a Trump Phone Ultra coming too?  Halide co-founder Sebastiaan de With is joining Apple’s design team  The Stream Deck-packed gaming keyboard is a monster of good ideas Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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throughout the course of this episode. I'm your friend David Pearson Lab, tell us here. Hey, buddy. How's it going? How are you? Do you know? We were just talking before we started recording about your podcast studio dreams. Would you like to very briefly tell the people of your podcast video dreams?

Okay, so here's what I got. So I record in the attic of my house. I mean, right now, the thing you're looking at is the attic of our house. And that's fine, except that I have two small children who are noisy and do not care that I record a podcast in the attic of this house. That's correct. And so my dream, I have two dreams. One is that we'll build a podcast studio above the garage, which is just a thing I say all

the time. I have no idea if we'll ever actually accomplish this and, like, whether I can get through, like, the small village politics of zoning variances I need to do that. The other idea I have, which is very important, and I just want to throw this out there, behind my house, there's our backyard, there's a fence, and then there's a thing behind the house. Behind the house is a broken down parking lot that is owned by the Catholic Church. And my dream is to buy that parking lot and then build like a podcast village back there. I have no idea how to do any of that.

Like I don't, you cannot just call the Catholic Church from what I gather. And the fact that the Pope is from Chicago, my family is in Chicago has gotten me approximately zero progress. Not done. So if you know how to get a whole of the person in the Catholic Church who can sell me a parking lot, give me a call. Or, I mean, you know, email me. That'd be better. I'm just curious because I don't, I mean, I look at it every day. Mike's going to tell you, I'm a reasonably effective person.

I just don't know how to get stuff from the church. Do you? I just ask Gemini. And I will tell you several things. One, there is a phone number for the Vatican Central Telephone Exchange, which I'm happy to give you. Number two, Gemini's answer refers to Pope Francis a couple of times, which is, you know, not exactly what we're going for. And it actually suggests sending snail mail to the Pope. If you want to reach the Pope, send the man a letter.

Well, hey, that's an improvement from indulgences, which is what I was assuming would happen here. Also, from what I understand of the Catholic Church in New York State where I live, that is just a, that's just like machine politics to the next level. Anyway, if you know anybody who can sell me a parking lot at the Catholic Church, give me a call. Pope, if you're listening, and I know that you are, get at the... Chicago Pope loves AI. He's talked about it a lot, so we could get down. All right, so right at the top here, I think we should talk about what's going on in Minneapolis, and particularly the way that we've been covering it and talking about it.

We talked about it a bit on Tuesday show. It's been all over the site this week. We've done a lot of different coverage of what's going on on the ground and the politics and the policy of it. But a question that you and I know have gotten a bunch. I've gotten it a bunch and I suspect you've gotten it a lot more is why and how are we covering this? This is a question the verge gets every time some sort of large non-phone-related cultural event happens. But I know this is a thing. We talk a lot about this in the newsroom and I know you think about it a lot.

So let me just put to you the question that everybody has been putting to us. Why is this a verge story in the way that it has been so much this week? Yeah. I think there's two ways to answer this. The first way is the way I think we usually answer it, which is to identify all of the tech angles in the story and say these are our stories. And there are a lot of tech angles in the story. And I think we're going to talk about some of them here on this show today. But I actually want to just zoom out and not do that approach. I get a lot of emails and comments and posts from people who are sort of apologetic about it. They say they just want to read us for an escape from the news and to talk about tech. And like I said, they're kind of apologetic about it. And I get it. Like, I definitely need a break from all of this. But I think it's more important for me to say that the verge is going to keep covering ice and the Trump administration and politics generally. Because we have spent 15 years building this platform in a little institution that creators refer to us as the mainstream media, which is very funny.

But it's a little institution. And if we don't use it right now to say it's bad that mass government agents are kidnapping people off the street and shooting people in the back, they try and document it, then we will have done all the work for nothing. And I feel very strongly about that. I go on and on about the idea that what we sell here is our ethics policy. And I feel, and our newsroom feels just as strongly that what we stand for, what the verge stands for, are some pretty universal. values around freedom and decency and kindness and respect. And I am dead certain that that demands that we speak out as clearly as possible and that our headlines are as blunt and direct as possible.

And I get an equal amount of feedback from our audience and our subscribers that say, yeah, keep doing it. You can see it in the comments. I get emails that say, thank you for being so blunt. And then equally important to me, and maybe this is only important to me, I also get the feedback from all of the people that have worked here over the past 15 years. And I care about those people a lot. We call them expats because you can check out, but you can never leave.

They built the place. I know that they helped me build the place. They are not shy about telling me when we get it wrong. They're not shy about anything. And I get a lot of notes from that set of people that say, keep going, keep doing it. This is what we helped build the place for. and it helps them push in all the places they are. So I think that's just a role we play.

If we get it wrong, you know, we'll hear about it. And if we die because we are clear about our values, I think we will accept that. But we're going to stay on it. We're going to be sharp and clear. And if you need to go use our homepage and push all the follow buttons and make a feed of just like Windows news, the tools exist.

And you can do that. And I'm happy for you to do that. And I promise the way I, promised in Trump one, like, when it's all over, we will do another one-hour show on the HTML. I promise you. Although it does turn out that HTMLI is actually the most political thing we have ever covered on the verge of the verge cast. So I just want to be clear. We're going to keep going. I think it's incredibly important for us to keep going. The thing that actually gets me about this moment is I'm watching all these creators in all of these different areas

say the same thing, just across the board, beauty creators, tech creators, you name it. car creators just across the board. And I think that speaks to the moment we're in. And I do think there are lots of verge stories here, right? There are lots of stories about surveillance and the big companies and our CEOs. We're going to talk about all that. But just the core of it is if you have built the platform, if you have spent all of this time making the thing that people depend on,

now is the time to use it. And I can't be clearer about that. And if some of you just don't want to listen to us or you want to filter out the stuff you don't want for our homepage, that's fine. But I do think that's our responsibility. I agree. And I think it's been really interesting to see how many, like you said, other creators and other places that are, in many cases, deliberately non-political, come to that same conclusion. That I would say, and I'm curious if you feel this way, I'm not normally a, like, silences complicity person. I don't, I actually think it's sort of

ridiculous that we demand that every celebrity, every person with an audience have some strong opinion about everything that happens in the world. I actually think there would be better if most people shut up about most things. But this week has felt different in a really good way. And it does seem like a lot of people have come to that same realization that, okay, there are some things, particularly this thing that I have seen with my own eyes this week in these videos that have been passed around that have been everywhere, that I feel obligated to say something.

And that has been such a sort of universal response on the internet over the last five days in such an interesting way. Yeah. There's just a core, you can call it a libertarian streak in America. Whatever it is, no, the government can't do that. Whatever that is. It cuts across the board. And the government can't do that. And, you know, I spend a lot of time having good faith, angry, whatever conversations about technical government.

policy on the code or whatever, but there are some lines and there are some things that I think we are still generally the same for everybody. And this feels like one of them. I would say that I'm very concerned, and we're going to talk about it in a second here, that we all saw it and we all agree on what we saw, is under attack by AI and the platforms and a lot of bad faith actors. But in this moment, we all saw it. And, you know, I hope everybody read the piece that our creative director of Kristen Radke, wrote, she grew up with Alex Prattie. I just straight up cried when I read it. But these are real people facing real consequences for exercising the rights that our Constitution says that everybody has. And that, all of that is a mess. And I agree with you. This is one of those

moments when everyone's saying the same thing. And you can see that the Trump administration is responding to it. There's lots of stuff. We're not everybody's going to say the same thing and we're going to disagree about it. But this is one of those. And I think it's very important for us to keep covering it because it might feel like Trump sent Tom home into Minnesota and some policy is going to shift and it's going to be over, but it absolutely is not going to be over. And our job as a newsroom is to just keep covering the story. Yeah. To your point, Kristen's piece is fabulous. And it was like, I mostly know the things that are about to happen in our newsroom. That's just one that like appeared on the site and I missed it entirely. And that was, boy, was that a thing to read first thing in the

morning. That's a terrific piece. Chris is great. There's a lot of good stuff on the site about this. And I do feel like it's been a very verge way of covering this stuff in a way that I have really enjoyed. There's been, you know, Sarah Zhang writing about policies and stuff. We've had a lot of really great, like on the ground coverage, a lot of discussion about how the information is moving. We wrote a whole thing about the massive dick subreddit. Miyisado did a great job on that. Like, this is, I think this is not just a story you have to sort of.

of look at and be like, what is the tech angle here? And I think, I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show, but a thing that I've always liked about you, I hate most things about you. But the thing I've always liked about you is you were the easiest person to talk into a tech angle in history. That like, there was a story. I forget which story it was years ago, but you were like, there's a phone in it. It's a tech story.

And I think that is like, A, the world we live in is mediated by those things in ways that I think we grapple with this all the time, right? Like if every single thing happens on the internet, does that mean that every single thing is a verge story? And the answer is no, but also some things rise to the level that we don't have to do that debate anymore. But also, the lines of that are like what we explore all the time. Right? Like to what extent is the internet making these things happen and changing them and changing the way that we understand them? It's like, that's the story of everything.

One of the advantages I think we have is The Verge and with our audience specifically is that we don't have to explain everything from like the ground up. Yeah. Right. Our audience, our listeners here technically adept can see how reality is shaped by what happens on the screens. And I think importantly can see when particularly this administration trying to tweet things into reality runs into actual reality and the breakdown that occurs there. So, yeah, there's a lot of angles here, like, through and through. This is a story that was basically memed into existence, and then there was a ton of video. And, you know, the governor of Minnesota asking everybody to document everything.

You have major newsrooms doing second by second frame-by-frame alignments of multiple angles of video. You just see, like, oh, we put cameras on the phones, and now, like, politics is different. So I think there's a lot of stories there. but I also think our advantage is we don't have to explain why things are tech stories, that the understanding of the tech is actually what drives the culture, and we can just talk about that. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, like you said, this is, this story continues to change.

We're going to cover it a lot. We are Vergecast at theverge.com. You're Neelai at theverge.com. I'm David at theverge.com. We're not hard to reach if you have thoughts. Many of you know this already. We read all the emails. We read all the emails.

Please keep telling us what. what you want to do, what you want to hear more of how we can make the following buttons more prominent so that you can tune it out if you want to. For our purposes here, there is one specific thing I really want to talk about about this. And a thing that I particularly want you to just help me think through, which is while all of this is going on in Minneapolis, across the country here in D.C., in my backyard, there was a screening of the Melania documentary called imaginatively Melania at the White House, and Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, Lisa Sue, the AMD CEO, and a bunch of other, you know, big-name people went to this event.

There are a lot of circumstances around this documentary that are also ridiculous. Amazon paid $40 million for the documentary, which is like orders of magnitude. The 28 million of which went directly to Melania. Right. And I think which was $26 million more than anybody bid. So if you win a bid by double, you're bad at negotiating. Or great at corruption. Or great at corruption.

And then they've spent $35 million marketing it. So they're putting an enormous amount of money into a movie that no one is ever going to watch is going to be bad. Melania is a producer. There's just zero chance this movie is any good. The movie is not the point. Can I say one thing about the $35 million? If you buy the movie corruptly from the corrupt people, you say to the corrupt people,

you're going to spend $35 million marketing the movie, and then you actually spend the $35 million, not only are you great at corruption, you are horrible at lying. Because the thing you can do is just say that you're going to spend the $35 million, and you don't have to. Just like, for example, Donald Trump Jr. can announce a cell phone

and not ship the cell phone. Like, take the lesson. You can just say stuff, as David is constantly reminding us. the fact that they actually spent the $35 million is what I think the funniest part of this whole story. What they really should have done is buy like $100 worth of Facebook ads and just target them to that one block of Pennsylvania Avenue. And all the ad should be like, we spent $35,000. It's like, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, this ad cost $35 million, which is all that should say. So again, this movie, which they bought for $40 million and spent another $35 million to market, like you said, just nakedly abribed to the Trump family. Add in the fact that Tim Cook, and I want to talk about Tim Cook, and I want to talk about Tim Cook in particular. He's not the only person implicated in this, but I think he is the person we are talking about the most as a result. Goes takes a picture with Brett Ratner, the director of this documentary,

and becomes kind of a flashpoint in this whole conversation of what is Tim Cook supposed to be doing in this instance, right? Like, what do we expect of our CEOs? What are any of these CEOs supposed to do? Right. And honestly, this is the question that I have. So people have spent all week basically being like

Apple, Apple is bad. Apple is burning many decades of good reputation that it has. Tim Cook is, you know, Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave. Tim Cook is the wrong leader. Tim Cook has a responsibility to do more on and on. There has been a huge backlash to Tim Cook, A, actively participating in this thing at the White House and also sort of the long history.

I mean, the man gave a, like, gold plaque to Trump. He has been party to this administration in several ways. But then also saying, why isn't Tim Cook saying anything? Why aren't they taking some stand or using their platform to say something about what's going on in Minneapolis? And Tim Cook eventually wrote a memo saying he had a good conversation with Trump about de-escalation, which is the most like nothing burger of a thing you could possibly imagine. Oh, this is one of the worst memos in Tim Cook's entire tenure. It's really bad. It is a lot of words to say nothing.

Yeah. I actually just want to read it to you. And I want to put it in context. To be clear, the federal government executed a man in Minnesota. And that night, Tim Cook went to a party at the White House for the screening of a documentary about Melania Trump that is the product naked corruption and then post for a selfie with a director who has been accused multiple times of being a sex pest. This is pretty tone deaf across the board. Yes. So then there's a sound cry as David's saying, and then he writes this memo. And I think he wrote a, the memo because Apple employees are starting to say, what is going on here? Like, our company has values. Like, of all of the companies in tech, Apple is the one that like stands on its values, right? We're for artists and we have these values and we care about equality and all of the things that Apple cares about or says they care about. Anyway, so then Tim, I think, is pushed into writing a memo to Apple employees, which leaked

to Mark German and Bloomberg. Here's a memo. And I'm just going to intersperse my commentary. I'm sorry to read this. Team, I am heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis. What are the events, Tim? Which ones? There's quite a few, actually.

Two of which are particularly horrible. Is it those? He's a big Timberwolves fan. Or is there a bake sale that went awry? Like, what are you talking about? Yeah. My prayers and divas synthes are with the families and communities and everyone that's been affected. Who has been affected?

Is it the two dead people? Because they seem like the most important people. Or is it Donald Trump? He was affected as well. His poll numbers went down. And then the next line. This is a time for de-escalation. Who should de-escalate?

Is it the militarized immigration police that are wearing mad? Like, this is nothing. This is nothing. And it goes to, I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views. And I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all. What are the issues? What was he open to? Because after that, nothing happened.

So I just, what I see is a Tim Cook who is captured by a variety of political problems, tariffs, his biggest market is in China outside the United States, like American manufacturing, the fact that Apple runs the app store and Elon Musk hates the app store. Like, he's a political creature now. That is the reality for Tim Cook. And he has to manage this president. and he's given into it. And I think in doing that, he is trashing whatever legacy he thought he was going to have. It's going to be this and not Tim Cook built Apple into a company multiple times bigger than Steve Jobs could ever dream of.

And I think that's a shame. I think there's a lot to say about the Tim Cook era at Apple. And there's a lot to say about Tim Cook for a long time, very clearly communicating Apple's values. more than any thoughts he ever had about any of the products. And now it's Tim Cook wasn't a product guy, and Tim Cook cashed in his legacy and his values to Trump at a moment when it was very clear to hardware store owners in Minnesota what their values should be and what they had at stake

and they should put gas masks in the front of the store, right? And like, that's a tragedy. And I think your question is like, what should all the CEOs do? They've all picked the same way. But, I mean, I think... intellectually and emotionally, I feel all of what you're just saying. But then there is a certain part of me that's like, what else is Tim Cook supposed to do? He's just supposed to not go to the party.

Like, going to the party is a choice. Going to the documentary is a choice. Sure. You could just not go that day. You could just not take the selfie. Right? You can disengage from Mar-a-Lago, right? You can disengage from the social circuit and stay engaged on the politics.

And I think a lot of people would understand. All right, Tim Cook, do you remember the first Trump administration? They opened a fake factory in Texas. Like the factory already existed. Apple didn't even own the factory. It was Flex. And it was to manufacture the Mac Pro. And it was already happening.

And they just sort of reopened a manufacturing facility. And Trump got to do it. For the photo up. And Trump got to do it. And we all just had to sit there. And we're like, like, this is a sort of nonsense. theater, Tim Cook is going to do. I think a lot of people would be like, all right, like, we're going to do some nonsense

theater to get away from tariffs. Going to the party, when you own a rival movie studio to Amazon, that's the choice. And I think now we're in the place where maybe the politics are so corrupt that you have to go to the parties, too. I think that's the answer. But I don't think, I think that's the line. I think you can actually get away with it. Maybe that is the nonsense theater.

Like, maybe the nonsense theater is you have to show up, right? Like, we have a president who is, like, leaving events to go stare out at the ballroom he's building. Like, we're not doing politics the way we normally do politics. The one use of AR that I can think of that would be useful for Tim Cook right now is building a model of the ballroom and letting Trump wave the iPad around. Just walk around outside the building. I've seen that demo so many times. Like, let, like, get, like, make an even bigger iPad. Be like, look, dude, we made you a special 17-inch iPad.

You have to grip it like this, and you can look at an AR model of the ballroom from every angle. And by the way, if you click this button, it gets even bigger. I think that in the Vision Pro, too. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, everyone would be happy with that. That's fine. And do that photo up all day. I don't think you have to do this.

And I think when you send statements to your upset company about it, I think you can actually be clear about what you mean. And I don't think that will piss anyone off. That's fair. I just think we're at the place now. There was, I saw one of like Slack responses from Apple employees to this note that was like, well, at least we didn't hear about this and a push notification from the wallet app. Oof. Like, this is a company that feels like it's straying from its values in a way that its own employees are noticing. And I think that's dangerous.

I feel like Andy Jassy doesn't get this because no one thinks of Amazon is anything but just like a ruthlessly like efficient corruption machine. Yeah, I don't think anyone would be surprised that Amazon is. doing this, right? Like, that's, it's, that, that is, and that's the thing is I kind of come back to trying to figure out every time whether ultimately you boil all these things down in your dramatic capitalism. And it's like, well, okay, let's, let's solve for shareholder capitalism. And then we can have the rest of these conversations about values. But I do agree with you that there is a line there somewhere where it's like, you can be a responsible leader of a business and not like a horribly tone-deaf person

who doesn't represent all the people who work for you and what actually matters and what you say your values are. I just think that that line has been made very hard to find by this administration on purpose. On purpose, and the administration is more than willing to use state power to punish you. There's a reason we do a Brennan Carr segment every week

that man is willing to use the power of the government to punish speech. I think that problem gets worse if you're really big. Yeah. We have railed against the monopoly scale of these companies on the show for years. And, like, that's your problem. Like, one version of this problem is you as a customer feel trapped, right? You're mad at Tim Cook, you're mad at Apple, you're mad at Amazon, you're mad at whoever.

There's nowhere for you to go. You're stuck. That's weird. Okay. You're these companies and you're so big that when the government comes to put pressure on you, it kind of feels justified. Like, what else can stop you? Like, these companies are all.

all as big as other countries. Like Apple and meta and Google and Microsoft, they are as big. Their income, their revenue is as big as the GDP of some other countries. So like, of course the only power that can check them is the government. So they're stuck. And that's like what I mean

that like coffee shop owners and bakeries and hardware stores and mid-sized printing firms in Minnesota are like leading with their values because they're fine. And in many cases, they're gaining customers. and the customers are losing

and the ones they don't want, because they're not out of people in the world because they are total monopolies. And, like, I think, like, we talk about that all the time, but the scale of these companies is so out of control that they've become, like, value-free zones.

There's nothing they can do. Because they have to be. There's no growth in values at some point. Yeah, they're just out. And I don't know. I think that's bad. I generally think the scale of these companies is bad. And it's generally for what I think are purely capitalistic reasons.

Like you can vote with your vote and you can vote with your dollars. And if you can't vote with your dollars, you're kind of stuck waiting for the government to do stuff. And that feels bad. Like, I don't know if you've noticed the government's pretty bad at doing stuff. Yeah. Right? So I would prefer to say like, this sucks. I'm switching.

And that is just not possible at the scale of these companies. And then you get to, they're so big that they have to treat our government corruptly. and I think that's even worse. Anyway, I think Tim has other choices here. I think he'd re-bolster his image. But what he does is he protects Apple from Trump for three years and then rides off into the sunset and retires to become the executive chairman of the board for the next CEO. I actually don't think he's going to be remembered well.

I think he's going to be remembered as the guy who capitulated. I think you're right. I went back and was reading Tim Cook wrote and posted publicly a thing after George Floyd was killed in 2020. And let me just read you at the beginning. I just want to the tone shift of this is just insane. And then we can move on. But here's how it starts.

It says right now there's a pain deeply etched in the soul of our nation and in the hearts of millions. To stand together, we must stand up for one another and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism. Like, the word and feeling and tone of that could not be more different from what has happened.

And I remind you, that happened in the first trumpet. administration. The external conditions were nominally the same. It's just hard to read both of those and have any feeling that Tim Cook meant either one of them. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think it's easier to blame the nebulous idea of racism, which is what that is.

Yes. Right? He's not blaming the cops in that statement. And here, there's only one thing to blame, right? And out of control secret police and he just can't say it. I don't go to the parties. That's my advice. I think just of a piece with all of this stuff,

there was a bunch of news this week about the changes with TikTok. Basically, the deal went through last week. TikTok USA got off to, I would say, just a horrifically bad start. They couldn't keep the thing online enough to show you videos, which is a bit of a problem if you're TikTok. There was also, there was a bunch of meta news, Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call, that AI is the future of social media and a bunch of people just like made fart noises

into their computers as a response. But it seems to me that there is a thing that's happening here where the sort of public at large and I hate to generalize everybody, but it kind of feels like any benefit of the doubt, any belief in the general desire

to do the right thing and do a good job with these platforms in particular is just gone. It's gone. Utterly gone. Gone. The TikTok thing is very funny because I think that there's going to be some sort of weird new ownership censorship scandal coming. Right?

The Ellison family Oracle bought TikTok. A group of investors include Andreessen Horowitz are part of the consortium that bought TikTok. Like a bunch of people who have expressed beliefs about content moderation just bought an important platform. And I suspect they're going to do something with it. maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're not going to, but I think they will. I don't think that's anything

to do with what happened this last week. I think that what happened this last week is Oracle has to run something now. And then it broke. Yeah. And like a very funny part of this

is TikTok kept putting out statements. Being like our data center partner put like had an outage and it's like, you mean Oracle, the company that bought you? Right. You just can't say it. This is the catastrophic system failure

I was referring to at the beginning. That's what they called it a catastrophic system failure. And it's like you mean, you mean, Larry? You mean dad broke it? Because that's your data center partner. The company that bought you because the government made it happen. Like, why can't you just say it? I think that would be back in on TikTok if they were just like, you know, Larry did it again, guys. Yeah, dad broke it. Like he's, do you scrunt around the garage and he unplugged the server? Like, which is basically the Oracle experience from what I'm told. So there's that, which is very funny. then there's some reporting from, I think, Bobby Allen at NPR that because they separated the infrastructure from ByteDance at large, there really was a data center problem with Oracle in the U.S.

And it was supposed to fail over to the BightDance data center in Singapore. And that link was broken. And then there was a catastrophic failure. This is also very funny because I would remind you, TikTok was banned 100 years ago. Yeah. Like, they had been prepared for this. outcome for a long time. You would think.

And to only now realize that the failover link was reliant on the illegal data center is just the funniest funniest outcome. Yeah. But I do think it suggests no one trusts them. No one trusts content moderation. No one trusts what they see in their feeds. Instagram had this weird bug where stories were not getting any views. And so everyone leapt immediately to anything I post about ICE isn't getting any views.

TikTok had the weird bug. weird bug in DMs where it appeared the word Epstein was getting blocked in DMs, but only if you sent it as a single word, which is not how anyone talks in DMs, but everyone Leptu TikTok is banning the word Epstein because of ICE, which is a conspiracy theory that if you just sort of examine it, makes no sense. And you're like, oh, no one trusts these people. They're all too big. All of their content moderation has gone away. They throw it out the window for community notes or not even community notes in the case of meta. They say it's happening, but it's not actually happening.

And now the Trump family and its aura of corruption has like personally touched all these platforms. Mark Zuckerberg will do anything he can to get in Trump's good graces. He's still not in Trump's good graces because he's still Mark Zuckerberg.

Like what are you going to do with that? And we can see there's other platforms that are growing because people are totally fed up. Yeah. And I don't think, I don't, can you see how they can recover the trust? Because I can't.

No. And in part because, it is so hard to see, right? That, like, something as as flagrant as they took it over and immediately banned the word Epstein from TikTok is just not how it works. That's like, that's not what these companies do typically, unless, you know, like, would that happen? Could that happen eventually? Sure. I mean, it is what happened with Elon, right? He took it over and immediately changed how that moderation worked. He did. That is very true. And I think, I think we're going to see that in this case, right?

someone was asking me the other day, is there a world in which at the end of this TikTok remains TikTok, and it sort of feels the same and this transition is normal? And my answer was no. Like, even absent all of the politics, just the fact of who these people are and the way that they're rerunning the, they're retraining the algorithm and the way that they're rethinking,

the way that people's data is stored, and the way that they're going to redo content moderation, it's going to be different. And it's very hard to imagine it's not going to be worse. And the hole that they're in now suggests that they would have to do a bunch of very loud, proactive, successful things to make this work. And again, I would remind you, TikTok has been trying to do this for years. Project Texas was, like, as loud and nakedly transparent as I think it is possible to be in this space.

And it didn't do anything for anybody. And I think once you've burned your reputation to this extent, I think it's very hard to get back. And it's the same for Tim Cook. Like, are we one cool iPhone feature away from everybody being like Tim's genius? Like, no. I just not see it. I don't know how you get this back. I mean, Tim has spent years pretending to be surprised by his own products at product introductions.

Like, I don't think he can announce the new feature and be like, I did product innovation. Right. Like, I've personally seen this man have Johnny I've, like, point at the back of a Mac Pro. And he's like, wow, look at the fans. And it's like, you've seen it before. Like, I don't know what that is. No one believes that he's a product innovation. Like, I think what I'm getting at is, like, once you have the stain.

of corruption, it's yours forever. Yes. You can't get away from it. And all of these companies right now feel corrupt because they are so close to the nakedly corrupt thing that I don't know if TikTok can ever get the trust back. I think it will just be conspiracy theories about content moderation from here on out.

And I certainly don't think meta is going to get any of it back, given their history, given the fact that Instagram is just a platform for the weirdest slop. Man, I saw sexy Winnie the Pooh just doing the doggie the other. day. And I was like, I don't, this is making me feel too many feelings. I saw a sexy Winnie the Pooh doing a duggy is not a sentence. I'm going to forget you saying anytime soon.

A lot of people have seen it and a lot of the comments suggest that a lot of the people had the same emotional breakdown that I did at that time. I am officially never a child again after seeing that video. Damn, Winnie. Anyhow, I just, these platforms have lost our trust. Yeah. And I think that's one of the weirdest outcomes of all this because they're also how all of These videos are being distributed. And so there's something very important there about being able to trust what your eyes can see, being trust that it's not being manipulated by AI in real time, that it's not fully generated by AI. And that the people distributing the content to you are telling you the truth and are trustworthy.

And can reach you. And can reach you. Every single one of those is a lever that now these people have a new group of people has an opportunity to pull. Yeah. And there's like, I think it's very hard to show how. how to do better when you've entered the faith. Like even, again, if I'm going to approach this

with the best faith possible and say Larry Ellison just wants TikTok to be awesome. He just wants to watch sick videos of trucks. Like, that's all Larry Ellison wants. If I believed that, he is still going to have an incredibly hard time convincing people that he is not

who they think he is because of the unbelievably long list of evidence suggesting he is exactly who they think he is. And we've at this point out where like all this stuff with the Instagram thing. They're perfectly reasonable technical explanations for why view counts wouldn't be going up the way that they're supposed to on Instagram. Everybody immediately leaps to conspiracy theory. This is, this is malicious in some way. And it's like you said, I think once you've inspired that

immediate connecting of dots in people's brains, you can't undo it. Yeah. And especially once your platform has been so successful spreading every other conspiracy theory in the world. Yeah. Like you're stuck with that. You live in a house that you built. Well, and I think the bet for I mean, the bet for Twitter in a very real way, and I think the bet for TikTok is going to basically be, where are you going to go? What's your other move? Which is why it's been fascinating.

Have you joined Upscrolled yet? I have not joined Upscroll. There's another, Upscruld is the TikTok clone, right? It's like number one in the App Store. Yep. Not yet. There's another one, Skylight, which is the app protocol, open social web,

TikTok clone that I'm interested. I just haven't installed on my phone yet. Skylight is very cool. I think Skylight is really neat that it exists more than it is like a particularly sophisticated product, if that makes sense. but it's like it is built on all the stuff that makes blue sky special and interesting, but it's TikTok.

And I think that's very cool. Upsrolled is just, it's positioning itself as we are TikTok with better values. And boy, is it working for people. It's really fascinating. And I don't think that app has any sort of particularly terrific set of features going for it. It's run by people, I think, in a team in Australia, New Zealand, the app is fine. It's like it just, it looks like an app that was getting a few hundred downloads a day. which is what it was getting, and now it's the number one app in the app store.

But it does suggest there is meaningful energy for something else. It's like one of my predictions for this year was we're going to get a new social platform that matters. And whether I wouldn't bet on it being upscrolled, but it sure looks like it's going to be something, that there is real appetite for it in a meaningful way. As always, my bet is on the open social web. Something's happening there. Can we actually, can we end on one thing? Please.

are the one piece that we put up about all this that made me laugh the hardest, although it is a pretty poignant feature about the nature of tear gas, is Sarah Zhang wrote Best Gas Masks. And we had the comments that piece like, stick to tech. And her commenters were like,

this is tech, it's gear, it's a gadget. So I would like to put gas masks on the, on the Eli scale of wearable bullshit. Oh, dear Lord. Because it's a gadget. We could do it. So if you remember, and we've rejiggered the scale a little bit.

So if you remember, the scale of wearable bullshit is the X axis is fiddliness and the Y is utility. And so if you have something that you put on your body, the utility has to far outweigh the fiddliness. Nealai, I have great news for you.

Yeah. Travis, our producer, has vibe-coded something for it. Of course. Would you like to see it? I would love to see it. Okay. You know AI has really taken a turn

when we're vibe-coding every week now. I swear, Travis keeps completely, that he has to do this, and I think he loves it. I think he loves it, too. Oh, this is perfect. So you see, on the y-axis, there's very tall, right? You've got utility, so, like, very useful, and the x-axis is fiddliness, and you can go to fiddliness. And then, oh, you put in the line that I asked for.

I think that line is at 2x. So anything above the line is good, and anything below the line is useless. Okay. So do we have, can we put eyeglasses on here? Sure. So I have, well, okay, let me, let me just tell you the ones we have here. I have the Vision Pro, I have the meta raybans, and I have the meta rayband displays.

So let's put those in first. Okay. So the Vision Pro is very fiddly and not very useful. So yeah, that's perfect. So kind of down here. It's way below the line. Low utility, high fiddly, way below the... It's in the dead zone, right?

Yeah. This diagonal needs a name. This is like the eyeglasses diagonal. Yeah, right? That's great. What was the other? We have the meta raybans? Where are those going?

The meta ray bands are like kind of fiddle. They're like on the line. Okay. Right. They're kind of fiddley. Yeah. Kind of like. Well, I would say down further down.

Yeah. Like there. Like lower medium utility, lower medium fiddly. Yeah. They're glasses. You got to put them in, but they're useful because you get. Do you see what I mean? Yeah.

Like regular glasses skyrocket high. Like massive utility because they allow you to see. Right. That overcomes any amount of fiddliness. They go, they go up here in the. high utility not fiddly part of the range. And then the displays I think are even more fiddly because you got to

wear the bracelet. Yeah, they're like often. So they're a little higher utility. Low, low, low, yeah. And lower, lower, a little higher utility because they have a thing in their Yeah, but like substantially more fiddly. And so you can see how the eyeglass line really defines this here. Yeah.

Okay. So then you get gas masks, which are very fiddly. Right? You got to tighten the straps. You got to make sure you get a seal. From our commenter As it turns out, you've got to pick the right cartridges to filter out the chemical irritants the government is using to repress you. But if you need it, the utility is off the charts. So these these belong at the, basically the top right corner of the graph. Right above the line over there, but only if you need it.

Oh, I forgot to mention, by the way, face is a huge fiddliness penalty. Yes. So all these things, if you have to put it, if you have put them on your face, the fiddliness is off the charts. Yeah. But as to your point, if we're talking, does it do a job that is important? Hard to beat gas mask. Hard to beat gas mask. If you need it, then it overcomes face.

Do you see what I mean? This is why it works on the chart. It's just another gadget that you can apply the rubric to. It's very good. This is where we've come to it, America. We'll link to Sarah's piece on the verge. But like you always like to say, you find something internet and you're like, this is a PhD thesis. Like, Sarah's buying guide to the best gas masks is a PhD thesis on so many things, but also is the verge.

Like, if you're like, what is the verge? Read best gas masks and you will fully understand the whole thing. When I say I get notes from like our expats, a lot of people are like, yeah, this is the thing that we, this is what you should do. It's sincerely absurd and also fantastic. All right. We love a weird graph. We love the open social web. This is what we do here.

We should take a break. And then we have the, let's get to gadgets. We should do some gadgets. We're going to write turnout of this and we're going to get back to some gadgets and some AI stuff because that's what else is there to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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Neely, there's a new phone. Have you heard of my phones? I love phones. What are we here for? The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold is on sale today, Friday, January 30th, if you're watching or listening to this now. And the big thing we've been waiting for on this, this is the three pane folding phone, was the price.

The price is, I would. say worse than I expected. It is $2,89 for a 512 gigabyte of storage smartphone. It seems high. It's pretty high. There's my take. How's that? Here, can I do some inside baseball? Yeah. We're the verge. We're on a reviews program. I think the reviews program is the heart of what we do here. We spend a lot of time thinking about product reviews. Samsung didn't give anyone review samples of the trifle before they on sale date. sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. The thing is obviously being in sale.

No, no, no, no, hold on, hold on. It almost never happens. Like, at this point in the phone market, the Apple does it after they launch. Apple is like the most secret of all the companies. Sure. But most companies are giving out, I can't think of the last time

a like ostensibly flagship phone didn't have any reviews before it went on sale. That just doesn't happen anymore. Yeah. I mean, obviously the thing has been out in Korea, and some creators have certainly, like, imported Korean units. Sure. But usually the latest reviews hit is, like, the on sale date. And, like, Apple and particularly, like, manages to that.

Samsung is just like, no. And I suspect that that means what it usually means, which is they don't want people to review the phone before you can buy it. Yeah. The pictures of this phone look great. I'm like everyone I'm curious about how durable it is I'm curious about how thick it is when it's folded Like they've been very careful

To not show you pictures of how thick it is when it's folded And so like you can look at our hands on video You can look at a bunch of stuff You can see it's pretty thick when it's folded But $3,000 and we're hiding from reviews A little sketchy A little suss I mean

A this makes me think of I had a film reviewer friend years ago who told me you can tell how good a movie is just by the date the reviews come out and the closer, like, if there are no reviews until the day the movie comes out, it means the movie sucks and the studio thinks it. But if you start reading reviews like two weeks ahead,

they're trying to build buzz for an awesome movie. Like, truly, it's a very fun thing that, like, if you just, you can chart it moving back from release date. And I think there's something to that here too. But, I mean, you were at the verge in 2019. You remember the first reviews of the Galaxy Fold. Oh, yeah.

Dieter killed the phone. So this is what I was going to say. Literally. Like, if I was, I was not working at the verge at the time, but my memory of it is it was, it was Dieter's review and it was one other. Was it Marquez? Somebody tried to peel what looked like the screen protector off of it. Yes. And it wasn't the screen protector.

It was, it was the screen protector, but it was laminated on the screen. Right. And so if you tried to peel it, you broke the screen. And I think that made this whole line of phones take a huge hit. Yeah, I mean, they didn't do the launch. They like went back and rejiggered the phone. Right. And it took a durability hit for a long time.

Like I think still people perceive foldable phones to be more fragile than they actually are because of the first impressions of the Galaxy Fold. Well, and also because they are more fragile than regular phone. I mean, they have a hinge. They have a moving part. You can see the thing that would break. Yeah. But like, yeah, I think the charitable interpretation here is Samsung is terrified.

The uncharitable version is this product sucks and Samsung knows it. I don't know. It's only one of those two. They are so deep into the development of folding phones. I don't think it just like fully sucks. I think probably it is not quite as useful as 2899 would have you believe. Yeah. And by that, I mean, like, it's a thick phone.

Like, I mean, I want this thing really bad. 2899 is literally buy a MacBook, an iPad, and an iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. It's, we're going to, we bought one. We're going to buy one. And we're going to review it. And then we'll review it.

And then I'll take it. And because we bought it, I can keep it. And that'll be great. That's my plan. So, okay, my question on this one, outside of the reviews, right? Like, we're going to spend a lot of time reviewing this. And one of the questions is like, is it worth the money? But in Samsung's interest in just selling this thing to people,

I kind of don't think the price matters. This to me rings of like the Vision Pro, where it's like the people who are going to buy this, we're going to buy this anyway. And maybe if it was 10 grand, you turn some people off. But the people who want this phone are going to spend what it costs to get this phone. And I assume Samsung is not anticipating selling tens of millions of them. So like maybe maybe it doesn't matter.

So this is the real problem for Samsung. If you want to sell this form factor, the thing that is important is that when you unfold it into a tablet, it is useful as a tablet. Yes. And it's not just a movie viewer or whatever. And have you used an Android tablet? Because what you got here is Samsung Android tablet. And none of that ecosystem makes sense. Still, to this day, we should talk about aluminum, the new Google operating system.

the system that leaked. There's something there that's interesting. But if Samsung doesn't sell enough of these to make it clear that there's a market for people who want a phone that unfolds in an Android tablet, the developers aren't going to show up, and then this thing is hooped from the jump. And I actually think that might be

why the reviews are limited, because the first thing I would check out is what happens when you unfold it. Is this useful beyond I can watch a movie at a larger scale? Right. I can watch videos at a larger scale. Right. And I don't know.

I mean, what I'm really asking here is, do you think Samsung did a good job on the software? And you can just have whatever reaction to that question you want. Right. Historically speaking, the answer is probably not. But yeah, but that- Ladies love the Whiz, man. That is an old Vergecast cut. There's six of you who got it.

And for the rest of you, I'm very sorry. If you don't get that joke, you should start on this episode and listen to every single one in reverse chronological order until you get to that joke from like 20, 12. And then it will all make sense. But no, you mentioned aluminum OS, which I'm literally, wait, was it aluminum OS or is it aluminum OS? I've seen it written both ways. I've been saying aluminum because I think it's funny that Google would tweak Apple that directly, but it would be very funny. Whatever it's called. And I've seen both. It should be aluminum. Rick Austerlo at Google, if you're listening. And I know that you are. Aluminium is the correct answer. But this is the long-awaited combination of ChromeOS and Android that is supposed to make these things make sense. Chromebooks that can functionally run Android apps, Android tablets that have a desktop class browser. This is the thing that it always should have been. And I think you're right that if something like the trifold is going to work, it's going to have to be software like this. And we saw, I would call it a brief teaser of what it might look like. Nine to five Google found a bug report

with some videos that included that were basically that were uploaded showing this thing it's running it's also called Android 16 so this thing appears to be real

and out there in the world and people are using it it looks kind of just like ChromeOS and Android together it's what you think it would be like if you close your eyes and smush those things

together in your brain that's what it is it's decks Google made a Dex and they have a better design team than Samsung Yes. And more coherent thoughts about the role and function of software at our lives.

And they made decks. And that's amazing. Like I, you know, I tried to use decks for a week on a Z-fold. And boy, did that not work. Nothing about that was a good idea.

But this, if you have an Android phone that functionally turns into Chrome OS, you know, when you unfold it or plug it into a bigger screen, and you get the benefits of all the apps that are already there, without having to contend with the idea that Samsung has its own browser, its own app store, its own window.

Like all of that made that messy. Like, Dex is messy because of it. If you just do that natively in Android, you got something. Like, you can see how unfolding the phone to make it really big to get you essentially, like a laptop class experience

would be, like, amazing. Yeah, I am so suspicious of this actually working because Google has been trying to do that exact thing for a decade, maybe long, and it's super obvious that you should combine those two things. Google understands better than maybe any other company, the power of a desktop class browser.

It also has Android, which is very powerful and has a lot of apps. And putting those two things together is not like a novel idea. It turns out to just be a very hard engineering and design and U.S. problem. And then throw in this infinite range of screen sizes and orientations, and this thing is just very hard. But I do think it's cool and exciting that Google appears to be actually committed to the road of this thing, of how do we take one device and turn it into lots of devices in different orientations. I think that's very cool.

Yeah. And Samir, who runs Android, Samir Samot, what's in September of last year? He was at the Qualcomm Summit. And he said out loud, they're doing this. Here's a quote. What we're doing is we're taking ChromeOS experience and re-baselining the technology underneath it on Android. So straightforwardly, they're taking ChromeOS. They're stripping out the sort of Linux foundations of it, and they're putting in Android.

I have a lot of, like, wistful feelings about that. It's probably the right choice technically, right? Sure. But I bought my parents a Chromebook like 10 years ago. It was a Chromebook pixel. Remember when Google made a $1,000 a Chromebook? Yeah. I bought it from my parents.

I actually wrote about in the site, and the thing about it that was great was that it only had one interface paradigm. At that time. Now, ChromeOS has all kinds of stuff in there. fake apps and all the stuff. But at the time, it was browser tabs. It was browser tabs. And I, you know, if you bought your parents a Mac back then, it was like, remember they had like the launcher.

There was different windows and like, the app store, but then regular, like, too many paradigms. And it was just like impossible to use. I did not want to do text support over the phone. And the Chromebook was like, just use the web. And they were just like using it. They got it. It was like one interface paradigm, very simple.

And this is like the end of that in a very real way. Like we're doing mobile apps next to browser tabs and we're going to mix it all together and we're going to have to manage everything. And I'm just sort of wistful that there was one moment or like applications on the web were enough to support an entire platform. And then we immediately got away from that. It's a wistful. That's all I'm saying.

I mean, it's because you can't collect a 30% tax on the transaction. I was going to say it's because running an app store is a lot more lucrative than running a web browser. It turns out. We've had a bunch of lawsuits about that recently. Turns out. One other thing we should talk about, there was a bunch of really interesting AI stuff this week. Like we're,

you and I've been talking a lot about this sort of ongoing trend of 2026 being the year of AI products, right? We've done a lot of infrastructure. We've done a lot of technology. The models are hitting a really interesting threshold. One model. One model. Well, we're going to come to that. Yeah.

But we're hitting this point where I think the, the most interesting question for most purposes, is what are you going to do with any of this? And all these companies are like, oh, God, we have to make money on this at some point. And Sachi Nadella said this thing. It was like, we have to be useful or else people will stop giving us permission to do all this. And it's like, yeah, dude. But anyway, there were a couple of interesting things this week. I wrote a story about this thing, Yahoo Scout, which is basically a Yahoo spin on AI search that I think is very cool.

It is the most search engineer of all the AI products I've used. It has like hyperlinks that look like hyperlinks. It's very attuned to the web. It's weird that it comes from Yahoo. But I liked it a lot. But the one I actually really want to talk about is MaltBot, which you in particular are kind of obsessed with. I mean, I'm obsessed with it in the same way that everyone else is obsessed with it.

I'm obsessed with the first of all, because the story is absolutely chaotic. A developer started a thing called ClaudeBot, which is C-L-A-W-D, Claudebot. Not to be confused with the other Claude. Not to be confused with the other clod. But kind of to be confused. Well, it's like it's a local AI application that sits on your machine, like on a lot of people are buying MacMany's to run it, and then it can do everything on your machine based on the models you plug into it,

and obviously one of those models is Claude. And the reason I said one model has made a particular turn is that it very much feels like Claude, specifically like Opus 4.5, has made this turn where it is remarkably more useful in the specific domain, like in the domain of software engineering than it used to be. and because there's, you know, Claude code and Cloud Co-work, you can give it a Gentic task

and can run off and do them. And of course, a bunch of developers are like, it's alive. Like, just like immediately how people feel about this. But it's a tool that can write apps. And then you apply that skill set to just like general tasks. Well, you get something like Claudebot, which Anthropic wrote to developer and said,

you have to rename it. So you renamed it, Maltbot, which immediately started a crypto scale. Like, this is all very funny. Yeah. But Molt bot, which is the renamed Claudebot, you can put it on a Mac mini, and then you can text it, right? You can, like, you basically connect it to Telegram or WhatsApp or anything.

You can text it from your phone, and it just does stuff on your computer, including writing apps for itself. Right. To accomplish tasks, because Cloud code can write apps for itself. So I think a lot of people just, like, their minds exploded that day, right? Like, what if my computer could use? itself and not in just like a constrained domain, but literally it was like, I can't do this today. I will just write code that I can execute on this Mac Mini.

Right. And I've now written myself an application to accomplish this task. I'm not even going to tell the person that prompted me for this, but I did it. It's just done. And you can, there's infinity TikToks and social posts from people who are like, look at this wild thing I had to do. There's a lot of problems with this. There are security nightmares up and down about letting AI just, you know, just just have unfettered access to write code on a machine that has all of your data.

And that is accessible via messaging platform. Right. Like, I think people have already, like, exploited Cloudbot over email and text. Oh, yeah. But you can just prompt, inject, attack this thing all day and all night. But I think there's also a piece where because the tool has gone from, I'm generating a bunch of slop or I'm ingesting a bunch of slop and then hallucinating summaries of the slot.

Like, basically, like, we've gone from the Apple Intelligence, like, table stakes, sloping, generation to now this computer is doing stuff. And it is solving problems on its own. And I think that's pretty like many questions, many security concerns, all that stuff. But that's the turn, right? That's the turn where I think this goes from we can generate a bunch of dancing Winnie the Poos to, okay, we're getting real work done. Actually, another example I'll use, um, Gen 2E saw all the people using Claudeau's

to like monkey with their smart homes and went on what I would call a journey of self-discovery about home assistant. And she got Claude, like Claude code, to build her a home assistant dashboard. And this took a lot of work. Like it was slow in some cases. Paul S who runs home assistant got a phone, like helped her through it because it's still too complicated as it should be. But you can just see the, you can see how it's going to work. Right. instead of downloading Home Assistant

and building a bunch of YAML and screen with dashboards and getting it wrong, she just talked to the robot and it did all of that for her. And then she ended up with a dashboard that actually can intermingle all of her incompatible smart home systems together. And Jen has like particularly complicated smart home because she's a smart home reviewer. And the comments on that piece were like,

this seems more complicated. And a lot of people are like, but you're not a smart home review. Well, I also think she's a perfect example of no one would ever build the product Jen needs. There's no business. in it because there's only one gen on earth. Luckily for us, she works here, but luckily for the world, there's only one gen.

You know what I mean? Like, no one has the set of needs that Jen needs, so no one is going to go to the effort to build that kind of software. But the idea that you can just build it for yourself, I think, is so powerful. And Thomas Mann, who runs Raycast was on the show a couple of months ago. And he is super into the idea of cloud code and all of these AI agent services for writing code too. And his point is basically, like, I am suspicious of AI tools that try to sort of reinvent the wheel every single time. And every single time you ask it to do a task, you have no idea what

it's going to do. They always do something different. They're super and unpredictable. We talk about this all the time. If I just ask Alexa Plus to turn off the lights, God only knows what's going to happen because it's not actually a predictable system. But what you can do is you can use these AI tools to build software that is then predictable. And it is, it's like you build it one. And it's like you build it once and then it works forever instead of having to essentially build it and hope every single time the idea that you can use it to build the exact software that you need tune it to your specific needs and then it will work reliably because it is just software is like that that's a super intriguing turn for how we think about AI to me just to be fair a lot of problems of that too so

the idea that everyone has a slightly different riff on the same app solved in slightly different ways that's not great. Oh, I totally disagree. I think that's awesome. It's awesome and sure. There's a list of pros and cons. It's awesome in the sense that a lot of people have custom software. It's very bad in the sense that what if like one in 10 of those has a catastrophic bug that brings down the power grid?

Like that's not good. Sure. There's a reason you deploy software at scale. Yes. Right? And mostly professionals write it. Right. Like what if you write your own code and you build your own app with an AI and has just a

even stupid or bug that like if you turn the light on and off three times while staying in one foot, the light bulb explodes. Like that there's like dumb bugs that show up in these apps at edge cases and in weird patterns that you will not be able to solve or even in the cases of most people, even identify the pattern that leads to the bug. Like this is why QA exists, right? It's to figure out what patterns like the bug so you can like reverse engineer and figure out. That is the danger here. And it's the danger like straight up of like I'm also a smart home nerd. And the idea that anybody can show up to my home bridge and debug what's wrong with it is ludicrous. Because that thing is just a reflection of my personality at this point.

I mean, it's not nothing that Jen needed to get Paulus the creator of home assistant on the phone to solve this problem. Right. Like, for now what it is, is I think this stuff is at its best when it's shortcuts for people like Paulus, who know what the N-Sate is supposed to look like and can debug their way there. Right. And I do think that's very powerful. There's nothing, this is the turn. Like, there, I've been waiting for a turn where the thing is obviously more useful to do normal tasks than to make slop.

Yeah. And like, maybe this is the turn. You can, you can feel it coming. I also think just Anthropic might think Claude is alive. Like, there's just like, that's like, like, burbling in the background of all this. Like, I think a lot of people in San Francisco think it's alive. By the way, we do have to do this segment where we get somewhere from San Francisco on. to do New York versus San Francisco

where I just remind them it's not alive. That's my second idea. We're going to do that. It's a good idea. Is this alive? And you just ask people in different coasts

and just see what happens. Somebody in London, somebody on the Mediterranean who just like, they're on a boat, they don't care. Yeah. You're like, I don't know.

It seems alive. But this is, presumably this is the turn, right? It's not the AI search tools. It's not chat ShoebD doing ads to bite some of Google. It's like, we're going to invent new kinds of products entirely.

Yep. Is a molt bot going to be? Like, I don't know, but it is a window into a possible future. Yeah. And right now this stuff is like nerdy and complicated is all hell. But I do think there is a huge interesting opportunity to figure out how this stuff trickles down to being useful for normal people, right? Like the comparison, everybody makes a AI stuff is we're at the command line PC era where you have to sit down and know,

know the language and be able to do the things in the right ways. And even people who are claimed that it's just easy to get what you want to chat, GPT are liars. Like you have to know how custom instructions work. You have to prompt engineer. Like the existence of the phrase prompt engineering suggests that all of this is too complicated. So, but it's like, how do we, how do we pull this down to what it's actually supposed to be, which is pointing and clicking on a screen?

Right. Like that's how we got a lot of what we got out of computers. we need that equivalent for AI and it feels like we are slowly stepping down toward that with a lot of these tools. Yeah, I think it's very funny and this is very reductive

and it's probably wrong and I'm sure some will correct me, but when you put like Gemini in thinking mode, it is basically prompt engineering itself. Like if you ever click the thing and you see it sort of like prompting itself to think through things, and it has a personality when it's doing that

which is fascinating to just look at and it is like a neurotic, somewhat stressed out, personality. It's just like, oh gosh, that's not right. Yeah, it's like, what am I doing here? Like, do we even know what I'm, like, in the middle of the snowstorm that we had here in New York? I, you know, I ran my snowblower like 15 times. And like, the last time I was like, screw it. Like, how much would it cost you get a heated driveway? Which is one of those things you think once every five years during a snowstorm,

you sit away. And I was like, all right, like, you know, you look it up and you know, and you know, and you know how long your driveway is? I'm like, we're not going out in the snowstorm with a measuring tape. So I asked Jen and I, how long is my driveway based on public records and it lost its mind and gave up and like you looked at the thinking and it was like I just don't know if I can figure this out. And it's like I know it's not alive and I know this is you know it's all it's just hallucinating its way. But it's like man, this thing seems stressed out. You felt a little bad, didn't you? You're like I'm really sorry. I didn't mean like why like how would you make a computer do this? Like that's what I felt like legitimate.

I was like man like there's a data center somewhere that we made it do this. And like this is not the right outcome. Like, this can't be how it's supposed to work. You melted a bunch of snow off the roof of a data center to do that. Yeah, exactly. It's self-prompting itself into like an anxiety spiral. Like, this isn't how computers are supposed to work. Yeah, I don't think so. We should take one more break and then we're going to the lightning ground. But before we do, a call out to all of you, if you have built software for yourself using these tools, I want to know about it. We're covering a bunch of these. I'm doing a big story about people who are making software like this for them. themselves. If you made an app, if somebody you know made an app, especially if it's like weird and

niche and complicated, like gens, if you can out gen, Jen, I want to hear about it. I'm David at theburge.com. We're a verscastleburge.com. Send us all of your weird, handmade, bespoke, vibe-coded apps. This is a terrifying thing to ask for. I'm very excited about it. All right, real quick break. Then we're going to do the lightning around. We'll be right back. 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. cloud.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. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. And unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembark, as 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 assess that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon.

All right, we're back. Eli, we've talked a lot of politics. But I feel obligated once again to ask you, is it time? It's time. No. We got music this week. We actually have a lot of music this week. I asked for theme songs.

It's true. And many people have sent us, Brendan Carr as a dummy theme song. So it is time now for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Cars a Dummy. Run the music. That has such a dummy. Brandy Cars a dummy. Brennan cars a dummy.

It's such a dummy. Brandy car's a dummy. It's such a dummy. That has such a like YouTube mashup circa 2009 energy to it. I love it very much. It's fabulous. The fact that it's auto-tuned us is very good. That's from Miguel who sent that to us.

A lot of other people said that we're going to keep running the theme songs. But thank you, Miguel. It made me laugh very much when I heard it. It's good stuff. I'll keep this one. short. There's a big Brendan Carr's a dummy coming up next week. There's a vote. He's going to take. We'll cover all that when he gets to that vote because it'll happen. We're pre-announcing Brennan Cars the dummy now. I already know he's a dummy. He's such a dummy. I already know what he's

going to do next week. I already know how he's going to be an idiot. Next week. We'll get to that. I don't want to overdo it. We've done a lot of politics and what I want to call out specifically is a lot of people think I'm some like liberal animal, right? Like whatever it is. I will remind you that mostly what I say is that government's huge regulations are bad and that free market competition between big tech companies is good. And you can just decide what my politics are based on that. And most of you decided that I'm some sort of like liberal maniac. I'm going to counter you with the fact that last week we talked about Brendan Carr trying to impose restrictions on talk show hosts. And Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees with me that that is stupid.

It is not often that the Wall Street Journal opinion board follows the Vergecast in its analysis of government regulatory affairs. You'd be surprised. Okay, wait. So I once worked at the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. And I think I'm probably speaking out of turn here. But whatever, I would say the general perception of the Wall Street Journal is that there's a bunch of people on the news side who do terrific, important journalism. It's one of the best and strongest newsrooms in the world.

And then there's a bunch of people on the opinion side who are mostly old lunatic men with terrible opinions about everything. That's right. They're like we should turn ever, like we should shut the government down and should be roving packs of feral wolves sponsored by billionaires who get to do whatever they want. Like that is basically the, yeah, the tenor of most editorial board pieces. So my question to you is when when you have opinions about anything and then the Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees with you, is that a question. of victory or is that a huge L for you? I'm just going to read you that's a long post that definitely has some like sides

that I don't agree with. It's like whatever. But here's the paragraph about Brendan Carr trying to regulate talk show hosts. There's a strong argument that this rule violates the speech rights of broadcasters. It also makes no sense in today's diverse media market in which public broadcasters account for a shrinking share.

Many politicians connect with voters using social media and podcasts. Joe Rogan can host any politician he wants and show can shows on cable networks, but Jimmy Kimmel gets government supervision. That is precisely the argument I made I'm running cars as I mean last week. And I'm just saying these lunatics agree with me

and you can decide what my politics are as you wish. I don't know if I'm proud of you or if this is the last time you're ever going to be on the Birch case. Do you know what I mean? I have a lot of things to think about it. Here's what I'm saying. We should all, we should dismantle the

government and billionaires should all build their own feudal systems and we should have little land skirmishes across the country because that'd be fun. You all like Game of Thrones, but also leave Jimmy Kimball alone. The one thing we can all agree on in America. If you're such a dummy that the Wall Street Journal editorial board is a week after the Vergecast, you are doing something wrong. As always, Brendan, if you'd like to appear on this program, or apparently the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which I think we can arrange. Just give us a call. We'll have you on. We can debate it. I'm going to call you names to your face, as is my God-given right isn't American.

But you're welcome. That's been Brennan Karz's dummy America's favorite podcast of the podcast. Okay. Next time we're going to do New York versus San Francisco versus the Wallster General editorial board. That's a segment waiting to happen. It's going to be incredible. My first lightning round item is a bit of staffing news, which is not a thing we do a lot. I love a personnel transfer.

Yeah, this is like not normally Virchcast Futter, but I think this is really interesting. So Sebastian DeWith, who co-founded a company called Lux, which made an app called Halide, this really popular camera app. Sebastian's Ben on the Vergecast. Yeah. Is a veteran of the what is a photo wars. Has done some really interesting work. It makes a lovely app.

Also, a really good writer about design, really thoughtful, has joined the Apple design team. Yeah. In what I would say is an extremely good sign for Apple design. And a very funny sign for Alan Dye. A very funny sign for Alan Dye. So we've been covering this saga for a little while now. Alan Dye, who ran design at Apple, left to go start a design studio at Meta, which is a funny sentence all on its own.

He was replaced by a designer named Steve LeMay, and I think, according to John Gruber and a bunch of other people and a lot of reporting, the general consensus within Apple was that that was extremely good news on all counts. The thing that has been happening recently is that everyone has decided that liquid glass sucks because liquid glass sucks. In particular, everybody seems to be very mad at macOS Tahoe. Have you noticed this? Yes. There's just sheer rage about both how bad the design is in some ways and also just how kind of unconsidered it is. I think a thing you could always say about Apple was that it was nothing if not thorough.

And it even did its bad ideas all the way to the end. But there's this screenshot floating around all the time that shows a bunch of different apps with slightly different corner radii. And it's just like this is the most unappily thing ever. So anyway, so just the idea that somebody like Sebastian Deweth, who is, I think, fairly universally believed to be somebody who, A, gets it and B, is good at this, would go to Apple in this new era of Apple design is pretty fascinating. And I think potentially very exciting. This is a person that we have talked to a lot.

And now I think we'll never talk to again. I know. Sebastian, you're welcome on the show anytime. Yeah, anytime you want. You get a good run. I've talked to Sebastian a lot about cameras and how photos look and a lot of how I feel about, like, how HDR photos look, has been shaped my conversations. with him and the idea that there should be processed zero and halide with no image processing. Like, there's a lot of thoughtfulness there about how things should look and how they should work.

And I'm hopeful that this is the sign and not just people are flooding for the exits and, you know, and like their checks are being written to fill the seats. But I do think there's no way he would have gone back under Allen die. It is hard to imagine. That's hard to imagine. And maybe this is a sign. I agree with you that people hate Tahoe. I haven't even installed it.

Really? Yeah, I mean, I can just see that it's bad. Also, I hate installing new versions of macOS because they have been... I was going to say, you were on Snow Leopard for like 12 years. And I would be today if it stupid Riverside would run in it. It's very unlikely. If you can make your podcast app run on my 2002, 2002, IMac winning Snow Leopard, that'd be awesome. But, like, they have not treated the Mac to the level of care, right?

They've just been like, here's some iPhone ideas. And it doesn't work on that platform. So I'm hopeful this represents, like, we need to bring in some people who understand what it means for Apple to care about design. So we're going to go. And Sebastian used to work at Apple in the past. So I think you're seeing them being like, okay, we need some people to bring the history back and, like, the culture back. I'm excited for it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a really interesting one. By the way, Helaide, new version this week with a bunch of cool new stuff, including Process Zero, which we talked about on this show, which is basically strips out all of the processing, all of the post-processing, all of the everything that happens when you take a picture on your phone and just takes a picture. People really like it. They've done a bunch of cool new stuff. People seem to really like the new app. People should download it. I still think it's probably the best camera app on the phone, including.

I'm an Indigo person now, although Indigo's very slow. It goes so slow. It's so fun, but it's so slow. I think Indigo's worse on the 17 than it was on the 16. Indigo on that on the, but the 16 camera is really bad in specific ways. So maybe there's just less of a Delta. Also, I always ask Becky to take pictures using Indigo and she's like, no, the babies, you need live photos. Because they're moving all the time.

I want to see them move. Real fight there. Man, Becky gets it. All right, what's your next one? My next one is, we got to figure out how to walk the line on this one. Tesla is discontinuing the model S and the model X. Elon announced this on Tesla's earnings call this week. By the way, two years in a row of decline for Tesla car sales.

Yeah. Elon, we can run the audio. Elon announced that they're discontinuing the S and the X because they've got to focus on making robots. Actually, you just run it. The way Elon announced this is so weird. Go ahead. And then I guess I have like one, I guess,

it's not exactly, it's not exactly bad news, but it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to, to an end with an honorable, honorable discharge, because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy. And, and so if you're interested in buying a model S and X, now it would be the time to order it, because we, we expect to wind down, on S&X production next quarter and basically stop production of model S&X next quarter. So just say it, dude, first of all, like,

seriously. Incredible announcement. But it's not bad news because they're going to build robots that obviously are going to work. I think Elon's done running a car company. I think he's absolutely lost interest in his car company. There's news today that he's going to try to merge SpaceX and XAI. The thing that I'm saying, like, we've got to walk the line here

Whereas the Model S is a historically important car. And, you know, 2012, when the Model S came out, there were not electric cars being built to be as, it was expensive, but it was still a mainstream car, right? And the Model S is what led to the supercharger network. It led to lots and lots of people having electric cars the first time. It became a status symbol in its way. Obviously, the market exploded when they did the three and then the Y.

But the S was the vanguard of, like, the mainstream electric car for the longest time. time. The Model X had the Falcon Doors and it was crazy. Maybe it was not nearly a successful. That thing was a status symbol. And then they just stopped caring about those two, right? When the three and the Y took off and they became the big sellers, the S and the X just sort of languished. And they got little updates and little facelifts, but they really stopped putting the emphasis on those as they went more mainstream. And you can just like track the whole evolution of Tesla and electric cars and just how much they cared about the Model S. Do you know what I mean? Like the, they introduced the market. They introduced

the three for a minute. The three was like such a big seller that every other carmaker got confused and they thought people wanted electric cars in the pandemic. And then like that went away and now maybe Elon doesn't care about any of it anymore. And he's just canceling the S. And you know, like, you know, like the market for luxury sedans is not small. Like BMW and Mercedes exist every single day. You can make an electric luxuries today. They're going to keep trying, and he just doesn't care. And there's something about that, again, wistful. It's like, Elon is Elon today. And he's, boy, do I have a lot of feelings about that. But he incepted this entire market and this entire movement with the Model S. And now he doesn't care. He's just canceling. In favor largely of robots,

as far as I can tell. Right. Like the big push now is these optimist robots. Right. And autonomy generally, in the idea that everything's in a a robot taxi. And it's like, does any of this stuff work? Like, I don't know. I think he's pillaging Tesla to do whatever he wants to do.

Yeah, there was a bunch of coverage of this earnings report that essentially amounted to, actually the announcements of cars don't matter because this company is so unbelievably leveraged against the idea of autonomy and AI anyway, that them selling cars

is sort of immaterial to the stock price, which is a very weird way to think about what is going on with Tesla, but feels directionally kind of correct. Yeah, and, you know, he was like, if you want one, you can buy one. Like, you look at the Facebook groups for, I don't know, the Model S and the X. People are like, yeah, they're not going to support these cars if we buy them and they're just continued. Yeah, no.

And that's just a bad, it's a bad place to be. I'm, again, I think that, you know, Elon has managed to pull rabbits out of a hat with Tesla forever, but a lot of people don't want to buy his products straightforwardly because of his politics. Yep. And the sales are declining for two years in a row. and now he's selling even fewer cars than he was. Like literally there are fewer cars. Hilariously, they're going to keep selling the Cybertruck. Of all of the Tesla, as you would cancel, the Model S and the X,

like the 3-hero SUV, we're canceling that. We're going to keep the Cybertruck going. And he said this thing about the cyber truck that is such a capitulation. It's like, I don't know. Can we run his Cybertruck quote? We will transition the cyber truck line to just a fully autonomous line. And there's obviously a market there for cargo delivery. like you say, like localized cog delivery within a city, within a few hundred miles, something like that,

there's a pretty, there's a lot of cargo that needs to move locally within a city. And an autonomous cyber truck could be very useful for that. Remember when Elon Musk said almost exactly the same words about the hyperloop? I'm just sorry, like they made the truck because the best selling vehicles in America are pickup trucks. And you're like, now there's a market for autonomous cars. go delivery and we're transitioning the cyber truck to a fully autonomous like that means they're not going to make anymore correct right they're going to like make them on demand for when like your your local plumber wants to have a flashy card to deliver sinks or like this is so dumb

or by all accounts the huge numbers of them that are sitting around waiting to be sold yeah they're just going to i think it's sad that they they can't think of another idea for the model us to compete but we're going to keep the cyber truck or they're just not announcing that they quietly canceling it Yeah. RIP cybertruck wiper, the stupidest idea in Cartonson that everyone knew as a problem that has been recalled like a half a dozen times already. Speaking of stupid ideas, actually, before I get to my last one and we wrap up and get out of here, do we have a Trump phone update?

We do. I have not been tracking the Trump phone this week. I'll give you a preview. It's on the site now. Dom is covering the Trump phone. He's profiling all the main characters, the Trump phone company, Trump Mobile, which is just like a move, right? You just like print people's names and see what happens. And he got some of them to reply to him. And then they ghosted him. So interesting. So that's the Trump phone. You should read. It's

very good in classic Dom fashion. It's, you know, he's, he's on a mystery adventure trying to find the Trump phone, which does not exist. Although he found out that early on in the process, they also announced a Trump phone ultra that no one has talked about since. You can just say things, Eli. You can just say things. Oh, man. If they were actually smart, they would announce the Trump phone mini

for all the people who want a little phone. Yeah. And that would be exciting. But in November, Don Hendrickson announced to the trade publication Wireless Dealer Magazine, which didn't know existed, but now is my goal to own.

Immediate subscribe. Yeah. Yeah. Are you a wireless dealer? Let's get it. Here's a quote. We're focusing on evolving with our customers are offering even more powerful tools

and for their lives. Our next major step is the launch of T1 Ultra. Our premium device that builds on the success of the original T1. T1 Ultra was for sure a character and Terminator and you cannot convince me otherwise. I refuse to believe I just slotted there building on the success of T1, they're like just straight grifting pre-orders.

All right. This thing we conned a bunch of people out of their money for and now we're doing that, but bigger is like a pretty sweet sales page. It's got a bigger flight. on the back. All right, what's your last one? I just want to talk very briefly about a keyboard. This keyboard is called the Corsair

Gallion 100 SD. Are you a keyboard guy? I don't know that we've ever actually talked about this. We cover mechanical keyboards and stuff a lot on this site. I have like a boring-ass logitech keyboard that is fine. Are you a keyboard guy? No, not in the way that we have keyboard guys. I'm guessing you're an Apple Magic keyboard user.

Yeah, I've got this one. I will say I keep keyboards for a long time. Okay. So I keep a keyboard until it completely wears out. Like my last keyboard I got rid of because the space bar literally broke in half. Oh, wow. So that's where I'm at with keyboards. But anyway, so this thing, the Corsair Galleon 100 SD is basically a mechanical keyboard

with a stream deck attached to the right side of it. And if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know I am an avowed fan of the stream deck, which is basically just a bunch of programmable buttons and knobs that you can make do things. Yeah. I think that rules. I think everyone should have one connect to their computer. and I actually think basically putting it where the number pad would be on your keyboard is an incredibly great idea. Cam Faulkner on our team wrote about it for us.

It's a very good keyboard. He gave it an 8 out of 10. It's expensive. It's $350. But basically, other than that, it is what you want it to be. It's a good keyboard with a stream deck attached. But I just want to call everyone's attention to one paragraph from Cam's review. When I say we have keyboard guys, this is what I need.

There's really like, there's a mechanical keyboards, I think it's called Keyboard Warriors Slack Room, and it is honestly like the people in there are speaking a different language. There's so many words that I've never heard in that order. One of the things I'm sort of like proudest of is like, I mean, this is like not just a verge, but like, the keyboard people have just horsepowered the knowledge

of what a Hall effect keyboard switch is into existence. They have just insisted that we all know, that there is a thing called the Hall Effect, and you can make buttons with it, and those are the best buttons. And God help you if you think that anything but a Hall Effect button is acceptable in this day and age. And that is just, that just happened.

Like, they were just like, this is going to be a thing now. It's very real. Can I tell you how long it took me to learn that Cherry switches was a line of switches made by a company called Cherry and not a type of switch on a keyboard? At any rate, I love the keyword people.

I aspire to be one of you. but I am terrified at the prospect of it. I just want to read you this paragraph. It says, the design isn't that different from Corsair's Vanguard series of keyboards. The galleon includes gasket mounting and multiple layers of dampening.

You've already lost me. This is in the best possible way. But we keep going. Typing sounds and feels satisfactory and bouncy yet controlled. Its MLX pulse switches have a pronounced thawks sound and don't require much force to actuate. See what I'm saying? Also, thock is a word that everyone has agreed

is the correct onomonopoeia for keyboards, and it rules. Everything about this makes me so happy. One of the few missed opportunities is making the stream deck modular so that left-hand typists can easily access its buttons

and opt. Don't care about that. Right hands are the correct ones. Hey, hey, I'm left-handed, is what I'm saying. And this is where it gets really great. The Mountain Everest Max did this years ago, and it's all the more puzzling

given Corsair hired that company's founder Tobias Brinkman as the VP of its gaming division responsible for building this very keyboard. I just want to tell you, I know two things for sure. One, Cam wrote that sentence off the top of his head with no research or,

additional information necessary. And two, I don't know any of the words in that sentence, and I love it for it. Wait, you're not a Mountain Everest Max guy? Come on. I don't even know what that is. The Mount Everest Max could be so many things. Modular stream deck attachment.

Context clues, bro. There's Mount Everest. And right next to it, somebody built Mount Everest Max. It's like twice as large. It's good. I love this. Look, the point of The Verge is to have a platform so big that Cam can just nerd out.

about keyboards with stream decks on them. That's, I, this is what I want. We started with like, we got to have our values. This is my values. Is someone should care this much about keyboards with light up buttons. And I promise you, I swear to you, we will stay caring about it this much. Because at the end of this paragraph, Cam is like, why didn't you make what I wanted in Coursera's like, maybe we will try.

Yeah. Cam Faulkner. Very good. ideas than the company that makes the keyboards. Very good. We got party speakers. We got democracy. And now I got light up keyboards.

This is good, actually. I think we can, we, now that the cyber truck wiper is, is going to go out of our lives, we need to replace it with something. Maybe we're both just going to become keyboard guys. Justice for the Mount Everest masks. Or it's either it's going to be mechanical keyboards or it's going to be Linux. And it feels like, it feels like it's a dead heat. I'm headed to Linux.

Yeah. I have to say the, um, you were talking, I don't trust the platforms. We're like, what's do like a little bit of Linux stuff? And it's like, oh, we should be a Linux block. Like the whole audience is like, do Linux. To the point where I think Tom's newsletter this week is Microsoft being like, yes, Windows is very bad now. We're sorry.

Spectacular. It's very good. It's all, we're just coming back around. We're just doing early computers again. It's going to be amazing. All right, we should get out of here. This has been tremendously fun. Again, we're going to keep covering all of the stuff going on in Minneapolis, all of this stuff.

There's a lot of great stuff on the site. We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes. Read Kristen's story. Read Bestcast. masks. Read all of it. It's great stuff. And email us, Vergecast to theverge.com, David at theverge.com, Neela at theverge.com, reach out to us, tell us what you think, what you want to see more of, what you want to see less of. We read all the emails. I'm terrible at responding to email, but I'm very good at reading email.

Yeah. So get at us. But now we're going to get out of here. And I should say, the best way to support all of that. And our whole team and everything we're doing is to subscribe to the Verge. If you do, you get ad-free podcasts, including this one, and Decoder and version history, and it is the thing that lets us do all of the stuff that Neal I was talking about at the beginning. It is the thing that lets us just say all of this stuff out loud is all of you, and it is very cool. It becomes more that way every day for us, and that is a very, very, very cool thing about the verge right now. Go subscribe. Verge.com slash subscribe. It's like 50 bucks a year, right? I don't need. What does it cost? Ten dollars? You sound like a Netflix executive.

Stop it. For now, we're done. We're done. We're going to be. get out of here. We love hearing from you. Vergecast the burge.com. 866, Verge 1-1 is the hotline. Call us with all of your thoughts and feelings. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you on Tuesday. Julia Alexander, who is on Decoder this week, is going to be on the Vergecast on Tuesday. We have a whole bunch of fun stuff coming up. It's going to be great. We'll see you then.

Eli, Brack and roll.