The Vergecast - Truth, lies, and the Trump Phone

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Starting a wireless carrier is easier than you might think. So is building a half-decent Android phone! But doing all the things Trump Mobile promises, at the price and on the schedule it says, seems awfully close to impossible. While Nilay's out, David and Jake chat with The Verge's Dominic Preston about what we know about Trump Mobile and the T1 Phone, why everyone wants to be a wireless carrier, and what it would actually take for this to work out. After that, David and Jake talk through some big news in the TV world, and the streaming takeover that appears to be happening faster all the time. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for some brief FCC news, a check on the state of Siri, big questions about the ad-rich future of WhatsApp, a look at the new fediverse feed in Threads, and some thoughts on the Framework Laptop 12. Further reading: Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone  Who is really behind the Trump Mobile T1 phone?  Trump Mobile is a bad deal  What is the deal with the Trump Mobile T1 Phone?  What do Alabama, California, and Florida have in common? How Donald Trump and Ryan Reynolds can easily sell you phone plans  Even Klarna is launching a mobile phone service now SmartLess Mobile | Don't get outsmarted. Get SmartLess Mobile. Eric trump interview Trump is giving TikTok another ban extension  Vivo wants its new X200 Ultra smartphone to replace your camera  Streaming is eating cable and broadcast TV’s lunch. | The Verge From Nieman Lab: For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source Max will show autoplaying video previews suggested by AI  Senate confirms Trump’s FCC pick, Olivia Trusty  Apple’s upgraded Siri might not arrive until next spring  WhatsApp is officially getting ads  WhatsApp’s rollout of ads will change the app forever  Signal says it won’t add AI or ads like WhatsApp. | The Verge Reddit will help advertisers turn ‘positive’ posts into ads  Senate passes GENIUS stablecoin bill in a win for the crypto industry  Threads is adding fediverse content and search to its feeds  Framework Laptop 12 review: plastic fantastic | The Verge Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of phones that for sure definitely do not exist. It just doesn't exist. I don't know what to say. It just does not exist. But we're going to talk about this.

I'm your friend David Pierce. Jake Astranakis is here. Hi, Jake. Hey, good to be here. Your microphone works. Your headphones work. The camera works. People should know that this is a small miracle we've accomplished to make this happen.

It is. I have some fancy technical wizardry that I've just learned that I can do in this room. So we'll see if it comes up later. Yeah, it's going to get weird in here. Don Preston is also here. Hi, Don. Hey, happy to be here. We have brought you here late in the day where you are.

You're in the UK. It's late. It's the evening. But Trump Mobile exists and we have to talk about it. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's just these are the rules. I don't make them. I just abide by them.

So we have a lot of news to talk about today. We're going to talk about there's a bunch of interesting streaming stuff happening. I think this is like a sort of moment in the history of the television industry that we're going to talk about. Some stuff on Siri, some interesting politics news, WhatsApp got ads and everybody's having a lot of feelings about it. But we got to start with Trump Mobile. There is a phone. It's called the Trump Mobile T1 Phone, 8,002, a fact that gives me a great number of questions. And then there is Trump Mobile, the wireless carrier.

Dom, you wrote the original story for us when Trump Mobile came up, kind of out of nowhere. Do you want to explain what this thing is? What did the Trump organization actually launched this week? So they've launched two things. It came almost out of nowhere. There'd been some trademark applications a few days prior. So we kind of had an inkling. Maybe they're working on this.

But in that long term, maybe we'll see something eventually. And then all of a sudden, an hour after we published a story, there the thing was. So there's two parts of this. There's a network, Trump Mobile. which is offering a single plan called the 47 plan. They are an MV&O, so they're just kind of piggybacking on team mobile coverage. But that's just this kind of single plan you can get, you could bring any phone you want to Trump Mobile if for some reason you wanted to

and sign up. In theory, you can do that right now and switch to Trump Mobile. I think in practice that might not work entirely smoothly, but supposedly you could. But then they also wanted to have a phone because, you know, you can't have Trump Mobile without the Trump Mobile. And that is the T1 Phone, 8002. This, I feel like we know less about in that we know a lot of things about it, but don't believe very many of them.

We have a big long spec sheet. We kind of have a picture, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually a picture of a real phone in the world. And this is a phone they claim will be made in America or is being made in America or will eventually be made in America, some combination of the above. and it's coming out either in August or in September, depending on which part of their website you believe. Yeah, we should say, Dom, you're not like making different guesses here about possibilities. These are all things that people associated with this project have said out loud in public. Like, it either will or won't or might be someday built in the United States is a compilation of things that Eric Trump said.

Like, that's just these are not educated guesses. That is what the person responsible for this has said. out loud over and over and over again. This is what we're doing here. This is all we have to work with. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I like the way you set that up because like the Trump mobile piece of it is

just whatever, right? Like Jake, you wrote about sort of the economics of Trump mobile, but basically an MVNO is not a complicated thing to do. You can just have a wireless carrier if you want to have a wireless carrier. I mean, this is also such a funny week to have launched it because like less than a week before this, the Smartless podcast launched a mobile carrier. And like if smartless can launch a wireless carrier, then first off, stay tuned, Verge Wireless. It's probably not happening. But it could. It could is the point. I will say, Milai is not here today. He's off doing fancy people things.

I pitched him on the idea of Verge Mobile as an MVNO and he immediately greed lit it. And I am saying it in public now so that he can't take it back. This is happening. This is how he goes head to head with Brendan Carr. Because you know who regulates Virg Mobile. Yeah, we're coming through. This is how we make it happen. But yeah, look, like, Alison Johnson talked to a couple of analysts about, you know, why are MV&O is like blowing up right now?

And apparently it's, part of it is 5G. I hate to say it. But there's just a bunch of extra spectrum and bandwidth and capacity because of 5G. So these networks are like, how do we offload this? Number two, e-sims, make it really. really easy to just join whatever network you want and try them out. And then I think everybody's looking at Ryan Reynolds, who let's be clear what Ryan Reynolds did. He sold T-Mobile's own network back to T-Mobile for over a billion dollars, which good for him. That rules. One of the great

business coups of the century, honestly. And it's actually like a perfect microcosm of the whole thing. And I think Allison's going to come on the show on Tuesday and we're going to sort of dive deeper into the world of MV&Os. But Mint Mobile, which was an MVNO, like you're talking about, perfect example of this, right? Because all it is is you take spectrum that exists from one of these carriers. They give you capacity on their network. You then build whatever brand you want to around it. And all you have to do is manage like billing and customer service, right? Like the network piece of it, it's kind of like standing up a company on AWS, right? Like the networking is no longer the problem. You just sort of solve everything else around it. And that, that's,

That is all stuff you can increasingly, like, offload to a bunch of other SaaS things. So you just, like, you sign up for six pieces of enterprise software and, like, you have an MVNO. And you can just do it. And so it's becoming, like, a branding exercise now. And I think Allison compared it to, like, the liquor companies that used to just put, you know, George Clooney's name on a bottle of liquor and call it a day. Now you can do it with a wireless carrier. I mean, that's what it is, right?

It's a branding exercise, which is, like, that is what the Trump organization is. they just put their name on things. It's Trump stakes. Yes, I agree. And I think in a weird way, I actually think with Trump, this makes more sense than with some other things. But like, it's weirdly, it's the smart list one that I have not been able to get my brain around. Like, what is there, is there any celebrity or brand in the world that would make either of you immediately switch wireless carriers to be on that mobile carrier?

Dom, like who would do it for you? The only name that is for some reason immediately coming into my mind is Kyle McCleckland of, of Twin Peaks and so on. Twin Peaks mobile, you're in. I'm in, yeah. In loving memory of David Lynch, let's launch your mobile network and we'll go from there.

Twin Peaks also, ironically, have pretty good name for a wireless game. Yeah. Jake, what about you? Who would it be for you? Oh, we're going with the Rock Wireless, right? Twain, the Rock Wireless. It's going to be in every single movie contract

that he has to be like, hello, I'm speaking of you from Rock Wireless. Can you hear me now? Now, terrific. Of course you can. Of course he can. With the best connection across the 50 states. See, that's very good.

For international calling. Yeah. The thing that's really upsetting is that would 100% work. Oh, it would crush. He would do it and it would work. Like, you need somebody who can sell it. Yes. This is very good.

But wait, we'll come back to the MV&O stuff because I think like we're talking about, that's actually the more straightforward part of this. And Jake, you mentioned Trump stakes. Like, this is just, it's just Trump stakes. Like, it really is just. a pure brand licensing exercise. And fine. If you want to overpay to say that you have Trump Mobile, knock yourself out. The service will be fine. It's too expensive. It's $47.45 because he was the 45th and 47th president. My favorite part of that, by the way, is it would have made way

more chronological sense if it was $45.47. And they did it backwards just to scam you out of more money. Yes. You know, that's true. Hate that. But we should talk about the phone. And one of the amazing Verge things that happened to this week, which doesn't happen a lot, but is one of my favorite things that happens is a piece of news drops and like a huge percentage of Verge employees all begin the same quest at the same time. And this time, it was what the hell is that phone? Because we all made the same assumption. And Dom, you got to do this before anybody, which was we saw the Photoshop of this phone on the website. And we all sort of immediately assumed, okay, it's like it's a rebadged something. And then the internet's favorite question for several days has been, what is that something?

Dom, you see more weird phones than Jake and I do by virtue of not being in the United States. How has this exploration gone for you? More challenging than I expected. I think, though, the strangest thing about this was I did think the moment this dropped, I thought, I can find out what this is. I can absolutely go track down what phone this is. I was like rolling through my head all the names are the brands that I know work as ODMs and that do these off the shelf things

I can find a phone that has been re-skinned the weird thing is we can't we can find a lot of phones that are very similar a lot of phones that match everything on the speclist except one bit so it doesn't look like this is an exact version

of another phone on the market that's just been given like a gold spray paint and a you know US flag on the back whatever they've done, you know, they are working with, well, to whatever extent, and this is real, they are working with some sort of ODM in, most likely in China, to customize something a bit to make this from what we can tell. Because if there is an exact version of this phone out there, we can't find it so far. What's the closest you found?

Like, if you had to pick one, where do you land? Oh, I think some of the, I've never actually known how you're meant to say, but eulophone is always what I've gone for. I think some of the Yulophone models look very, very close. They have that perfect iPhone pro knockoff triangular camera module, and they do have some models in basically the same size. And with a headphone jack, which is that weird element that narrows everything down a lot,

including a 3.5-mill headphone jack, actually suddenly removes a lot of the phones that this could be, because that's obviously a part of the chassis and part of the design that I imagine is baked in fairly early in the design of these things. So I can't say that with total confidence. That's interesting because I think, and David, you pointed this out on the site, but the things that is most incongruous here is they say it runs Android 15, which is not true of a, you know, cheap-o knockoff Android phone,

and that it has a headphone jack, which is true of a very old cheapo Android phone. And so I also have been poking around Dom, and you can find a bunch of iPhone lookalikes on AliExpress. And the headphone jack is the thing that I think is particularly hard to come by. Jake, you sent me a screenshot. When you say poking around, you, I believe, went to Amazon and Googled big Android phone. And that was the great journalism that Jake did.

I thought that was about the right starting point. And I have now, let me tell you, it was so successful. I've repeated that everywhere. You just type in big Android phone and it gets you exactly what you want. Because it turns out that people actually just want a thing that looks like an iPhone. And you know what? That search result gets you there. I do think, like, what we have been finding is telling.

These things cost, what, Dom, like $150? Yeah. I mean, one of the closer comparisons, like, there's actually a phone that did get a real release in the U.S. Well, almost did it got recalled. But the T-Mobile Revell 7 Pro 5G is a pretty close match. I think the camera layout is wrong. It's not the exact same thing. But that did, you know, have a proper price announced by a major American company,

and that was $250. And it is a very close-spec match for this. If you go for one-ons direct from the likes of Yulophone or Doogie or Umi-Digi, then, yeah, maybe you're more in the 200-150 range. True kudos for saying all of those names with a straight face. The most enlightening thing about this whole process to me has been how truly deep the like Amazon alphabet soup of phone brands goes. I mean, it's wild. and every imaginable variation of specs you can just you can just have. And this is like a thing I like intuitively sort of knew, right?

That like intellectually I understand that phones are mass manufactured unlike almost anything we've ever seen. And they're everywhere and you can have any kind of spec that you want and they're just pulling parts out of a bit and putting them together and sending you the phone. But oh my God, can you just have whatever phone you want on Alibaba tomorrow? And like Jake, you said, 98% of them will look alarmingly. like an iPhone. It's just nuts how many of these are out there. And they're so cheap. Like a bunch of the specs, right? It was like a 5,000 million battery, 12 gigs of RAM, I think 256 gigs of storage,

all this like relatively fine Android specs, right? Like slightly better than the Pixel 9A. Way to go, Google. Uh, 120 bucks in many cases. Like you, I'm gonna start buying phones just for fun. Like I should, I need own more phones is the thing that I have learned at the end of this process. Dom, how much have you gotten a chance to try some of these, like, random cheap-o phones? Because, again, like, the specs are, they sound delightful. And then in practice, I get the impression that they do not perform, like, what you would expect from those numbers. Yeah, it can be a mixed bag.

I've tried a few, especially the ruggedized ones. They tend to, I think performance is usually okay in terms of them being reasonably fast to use, depending on what chips that you're going to find in there. But, you know, once you've got the chipset and the RAM, that's pretty much baked in. The software will probably be ropy. The closer it is to being stock Android, the better a time you're likely to have. The more they've bothered to put some spin on it, the worse of a time you're going to have. You will probably be lucky to get an OS upgrade, you know, or a couple of security patches.

I would never trust these things for any sort of long-term use. That are kind of almost like disposable phones. The big thing you're not going to get is camera performance. None of them have cameras worth a damn at all. And that was the giveaway for me looking at the T1, is going through and being like, yeah, a lot of these specs sound fine. It's 120 hertz OLED display.

It's got a decent sized battery. 12 gigs of RAM is more generous than a lot of these phones would ship with. But then you get to that camera, and it's a 50 megapixel main camera with 2 megapixel depth and macro sensors. No information about what those sensors in any of this are. So that 50 megapixel is probably absolutely dreadful. There's going to be no software doing it. on camera processing functionally, you know, it's going to be doing very little to improve the

image you get. Those macro and depth sensors are just dead space. The cheap end of the Android market has been throwing them on phones for years as a way to goose up camera counts. It's a three-camera phone. It looks like an iPhone with three cameras, you know, at a glance, that's a triple camera. You open the camera app up. There's only one camera mode to use. There's no ultra-wide. There's no zoom. You just have the camera. The macro and depth sensor might kick in at certain points. they might just not. And if they do, they're not going to do anything you care about. Yeah, two megapixel macro sensor is not an exciting piece of camera hardware, I would say.

No. Yeah, I'm so struck by like how many of the sort of specs that we have thought of as important for a long time. And like we talk about them in reviews are actually like not just table stakes, but almost kind of irrelevant to a lot of this stuff now. like you should be worried about a phone that ships with less than this amount of storage, right? And like anything below a certain number you should take as like a huge red flag. Everything else is like, it's just a phone. You just made a phone. And I think we've come to an interesting space where I remember, like I wrote this big story a bunch of years ago about this company Blue Products, which is a Miami-based.

They're essentially an importer of phones. But they were very early to this game of like essentially drop shipping phones on Amazon. and would bring them in and tweak them a little bit, and they started to do more and more over time. But they had, like, real, honest to God, performance issues because they were not using mid-range specs, and this is like in 2012, when mid-range specs were sort of a problem. Now you can get probably, we don't know what processor this T1 phone has,

which is a very notable omission, but assuming it's like a middle-of-the-road processor, you can sort of brute force into reasonable performance. on Android, right? Like, most things work fine because there is just enough performance headroom in even like a half decent processor that I think the like overall quality of a crappy phone has gone way up over time, which is fascinating. To get a phone that actively feels slow and laggy in that day-to-day usage, you know,

I'm not going to talk to about gaming performance. That's a different thing. But if you want something that really feels like slow when you open Instagram up, you would have to go below $100, I think, to find something that's. still and feels slow like that. Anything above $100 and it's going to feel fine just for social media and email and your average app. Right.

Unless you decide to just absolutely ruin the phone with bloatware and spyware and all kinds of stuff. And if I'm being completely honest with you, I think the Trump organization might do that. Like, I just, can you imagine the like Windows style crap that's going to get built into this? and it's going to come with like a hundred apps, none of which you want, most of which you've never heard of, all of which are like allowed to run in the background and cause all kinds of problems. Like, I think we've been on a good path away from junkie software coming on phones for a very

long time. Even Samsung, which can barely help itself, has kind of learned how to help itself. And here comes Trump Mobile. And they're just like, what if we just bundled every app that would give us a dollar onto your phone? Would that be fun? Would you like that? I'm fascinated to see where they land here because I still review a lot of Chinese phones and all Chinese flagships.

And, you know, phones that don't launch in the U.S. but would be in the like grand and a half price range if they did. And you can turn those on and they are filled with apps for a minute one. And not Oppo apps, not Xiaomi apps. They have every social media that come to the sun, every Chinese food delivery app, every different browser and search engine all this stuff. There's so much stuff loaded on. even a very high-end device in China, that is still the way that market operates. That's so interesting. And you're right, like in the West, like the funds that you can buy in Europe and the States, like, that just doesn't happen anymore.

But it is still a money spinner if you're willing to make that compromise. And yeah, I really bet the Trump Organization is willing to make that compromise. I know. I've been trying to decide, like, what apps do I think are going to get built in. I think the funniest one that I've been able to come up with is Signal. Like, I think Signal should reach out to the Trump organization and be like, just, just build us into the T1. We'll give you some money just for a bit. I think I would enjoy that very much.

But I suspect that will not be it and it will be much uglier. So Jake, here's my question. Is there any chance any of this is real? Like the $500 T1 phone launching on Trump mobile in September, is there any chance that's a real thing that's going to happen? Made in the U.S.? No. I think like can they have a phone available to send?

us by September. Yeah, why not? Like, I think we could get a phone available to, to send to people by September. Yeah, one Alibaba order away from having a bunch of phones that we could make sure. Right, right. And like, you know, like, if you look at the Trump mobile website, like, it does not look like a thing they put a lot of effort into. It, like, right, this looks like it was, it was put together in about a day. And so I'm not expecting this phone to be particularly great. I'm not, expecting them to put a ton of work into making this wireless service, all that exciting and appealing. I suspect they will get a phone out the door. Surely they have the resources to put in an AliExpress order. I think that is manageable. On that one podcast, we saw Eric Trump holding up two

versions of what supposedly was the T1 phone, 8,0002. He didn't say it was the T1. He didn't say it was the But he sure wanted you to think that it was the T1 phone. They keep showing it. Here's the thing. There are two versions of this phone that we have seen. There's the one on the website, which is just an egregiously bad Photoshop. And then they keep having, there's the ones that Eric has held up as well as the ones that they've posted on social media, which are either just iPhones with stamps on the back or they are, you know, the first versions of what they've imported from China. And seriously, I've been like pixel peeping on these things.

They have the antenna lines in the same spots as an iPhone. They have the buttons in the same spots as the iPhone. The one thing that I have seen is that iPhones are really the only phones that have the volume buttons on the left hand side. And I could be wrong, but all of the Android knockoffs I've seen, even they, the ones that are trying to be exactly like an iPhone, have the volume. buttons on the right. And these ones, so I don't know. I'm not sure if that's actually this he one that he's holding up, but, you know, maybe they'll just wave around some more iPhones. Listen, I think they're probably going to ship something. Do I think this phone is going to revolutionize the phone industry? No. Do I think this phone is going to convince Americans and

Congress that you can, in fact, build great phones in the United States? I do not think so, particularly because I do not think this is going to be built in the United States. I would agree with all of that. The Trump organization has said to a couple of folks that their plan is to build it in Alabama, California, and Florida. Make of that what you will. And again, we should say there is a technicality by which you can get away with something like this, right? Like the rules for what it requires to be able to say something was made in XYZ place are not as straightforward as you would like them to be. like it's it's it's it's all of this sort of vague language about like meaningfully changing something so like you could bring it here and take a thing that's facing like this and turn it like this and kind of get away with calling it built in america it's nonsense but it's it's true enough that i can see how someone in the organization will get up and say with a straight face this thing was made in america like TM by a very specific letter of a very specific law, this thing was made in America. And that just feels like where we're headed and it's going to drive me insane.

Yeah, I mean, there's basically kind of two versions. The FTC has a full made in the USA kind of system, which is quite comprehensive and challenging. And I don't think there's a realistic world in which this phone meets that, because it requires you not only prove that you've built it here, but that a lot of the parts were built in the US as well. And that is just clearly beyond what this phone could be.

But there is also basically this just kind of like, I can't remember the actual term of it is, but it's functionally made in the USA asterisk. And, you know, it just gives all this leeway for exactly what you might have done. And it's kind of partially made in the USA functionally, but you know, you can blow the lines a bit on where you use that.

And I imagine that's the space we're going to see them in whether. There's some sort of final assembly happening in the U.S. even if that's as little as, you know, putting the SSID stickers on them and shoving them in a box and calling that assembly. I mean, Dom, that's fascinating. This also gets at one of the other problems with the Trump organization running a mobile phone business,

which is who runs the FTC, right? Is the FTC going to go after Trump mobile for mismarketing their phone? Is the FCC? Is Brendan Carr going to go after Trump mobile because they're, you know, mishandling your data. Like, I don't,

it doesn't seem like it. Doesn't seem like that's going to happen. Like, I'm pretty sure they can say is made in America as much as they want. I do not see a way in which they could possibly get in trouble under the current administration.

Well, that's because that's one of the other little wrinkles around the question of whether this thing is real is something I was pointed out to me today is that no one's been able to find an FCC ID for this phone. Oh, interesting. And you do need, one. Like, if you want to launch a phone, you've got to have that. So that that could mean

this really is a full re-skin. They've changed nothing of an existing phone, in which case you could get away with using that FCC ID. But as we said earlier, we kind of looked and we just can't find that phone. It doesn't seem to exist the exact carbon copy. So then you've got to say, well, either they don't have an FCC ID and they really need one and they should have it by now for a September launch and that's going to mean there is no phone. Or you just say, well, you know, Brendan will fix it. And, you know, well, I'll escape by and it'll be fine. Yeah, we are forever watching tests of there not being any rules and just seeing what happens.

I will say, the optimistic part of me thinks all of this Trump stuff is a grift, because it is obviously a grift to get you to pay too much money for a phone and too much money for a mobile carrier just to say Trump. And sure, if you would like to do that, do it eyes wide open, know what you're doing. Knock yourself out. I think the grand thesis of this thing and that they're trying to do, I think is sort of fascinating. A thing we talk about a lot is how bad the U.S. phone market is because it is so controlled by a couple of companies, right? Like most people buy their phones in carrier stores. There are effectively three carriers. There are not that many places in those stores. And so the U.S. market is so incredibly small and controlled.

And, like, Dom, I'm forever jealous of you because you have access to just like a vast ocean of cool smartphones that for a whole variety of reasons just do not come to the United States. Part of that is like politics with China. But a huge amount of it is just the way that the wireless business works here, which is that is completely and utterly carrier dominated. And I think if we're if we're heading to a point where what happens at the end of all of this MVNO stuff, is that everything is sort of pulled out of basically Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, those companies become like infrastructure companies, right? In the way that like Google Cloud and AWS and Azure are infrastructure, you have on top of that lots of new ideas about how this stuff can work.

We get real competition in terms of like how you manage your wireless account and the perks that come with it and all the stuff that you get by having a wireless carrier because there's real competition on top of this network. they can also start to make new kinds of phones. It's actually really easy to make phones. This is what we've been talking about. More companies should try to make phones, but they don't because the pipeline has just been destroyed in the United States because Samsung and Apple own it.

They've just bought the wireless industry in every meaningful way in the United States. Google is like around, and that's it. And so I think if there is a world at the end of all of this, hopefully a much less grifty one than the one that we appear to be in right now, that is actually like, because all of this stuff is so commoditized, we're going to be able to get more of it from more directions. I think that could be really interesting. I don't think that's where we're headed because I think Apple and Samsung and the carriers

remain way too powerful, but there is like a glimmer of a thing here that is like, I can get access to wireless networking for a small amount of money and make it accessible in whatever way I want to other people that I think is like potentially a very powerful idea. Right now it's Ryan Reynolds and SmartList and Donald Trump. Yeah. But there's, we're starting to see other stuff. And I think like Clarnah, the the buy now pay later company launched an MV&O this week. And it's like weird again. But like I don't know, you can just start to see stuff happening when it's not like my entire life on my phone is not mediated through Verizon anymore. Interesting stuff could start to happen. And it's just a very straightforward

shift from the consumer perspective because you, if you're on Verizon, you're on Verizon, you kind of need to get your phone from Verizon, nine times out of ten, or that makes it a lot easier. They make it very appealing for you to do that. When you're on an MVNO, it's a lot easier to just buy your phone from Amazon and put the SIM in or activate the ESIM or whatever it is. And I think that is a shift basically the UK market went through a few years ago. I know for me, that's when I moved from, you know, getting my phones on contract from one of the big networks. I then switched to an MVNO about a decade ago and then was like, wait, I can just buy my, like, buy a Nexus phone on Amazon, and that's cheaper than doing it on the contract.

And then I just put the SIM in and that works. And oh, wow, I've saved so much money by doing this. And I think that's basically the slow shift we've had. And then as soon as Amazon can be the big phone player, it completely changes who's putting phones on the market. I remember I bought my wife an unlocked Pixel 8 relatively recently. It was on this, like, giant sale at Best Buy. And I bought her one. And she was like blown away that I could just take her SIM card out and put it in her new phone and it would work. Like, this is going to sound insane to anyone who doesn't live in the United States, but we have been so convinced by these companies that this is like a tightly controlled thing that only a couple of companies can manage for us and

that probably takes a professional to manage. No. And especially with ESIMs, like you were saying, Jake, all this stuff can just move around again now. Like, there's so much potential here. I 100% agree with her. Like, even when I do this with my own phones, I'm like, are they going to let me get away with it. Like, it feels like open in a revolutionary way when it's actually just like, no, like, this is just my data. This is my connectivity. This is my number.

Of course, I should be able to move it from here to here. And it is kind of a marvel that we're still able to do that. And, you know, ESIM does make it a little bit trickier, but in some ways, but it also makes it a lot more accessible in others because now you can just pop over to whatever network you feel like. Yeah. There is, again, I suspect this. closer to Trump and SmartList

than it does to full democratization of wireless networks. But like, I gotta have something to hope for here. You know what I mean? All right, Dom, we need to let you go in a minute because it is late and you need to go.

But before we do, what is the coolest phone you've seen recently that Jake and I are never going to get to touch in the United States? Oh, the Vivo X 200 Ultra, which I wrote about on the site the other day,

which I wish I had at the hand. It's like in a cupboard just out of arms reach. But it comes with this attachable camera lens, a telephoto lens that you like clip onto the the main module. So you basically have this optional, not quite, but getting their DSLR quality telephotos strapped onto your phone when you want it to be.

Which is one of those ideas that sounds stupid and sounds like it would be awful. And you really do look very stupid using it. It's very silly looking. But then you take the photos and you're like, ah, it's worth it. Jake has been making fun of me for having this particular dream for like 10 years. I, okay, I legitimately, I read Dom's story about this. I went, this looks insane and then I absolutely want this. Like, it's incredible.

It's like, I love that they're doing this. I have no idea why it doesn't make any sense, but it's delightful. The Trump Mobile T2-8,003 is going to have one of these and it's going to change everything. You guys just watch. All right, Dom, you need to go. We need to take a break. And then we're going to come back and we got so much more stuff to talk about. Dom, thank you for being here.

Thanks. Bye. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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Get started by posting your job, for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Jake, it's just you and me. Let's do it. Can I make a potentially insane-sounding argument to you that I don't actually think is that insane? You're going to think I'm crazy, but then at the end, you're going to think I'm not crazy.

I just have to clarify for the audience, this is our daily work. This is just how it goes. Let's go. Jake edits most of my stories, and every once in a while, I just appear. And I'm like, I said something absurd. Can you make sure it's as not absurd as I'm hoping it might be? I would like to argue that this week is the end of television. That like in a bunch of ways you can mark some studies and data that came out this week as the moment old school TV died.

I want to hear your numbers. I want to hear your argument. This is one of those things where. You're not saying it died with one grand strike, right? This is still, it's a long arc, and you're saying we've crested, and traditional TV is now, its moment has passed. It's more apocalyptic than that. So what I actually think is happening. So the way I've come to understand this business is that for a long time, TV made just earth-shatteringly huge amounts of money, right?

Like, that's just true. It was an unbelievable business for a really long time. time. And then streaming came up and a lot of these companies made the bet that streaming is going to rise and cable is going to fall. And by cable, I mean cable and broadcast, which is an important distinction that I will make a couple of times here. That that is going to fall, but it is going to throw off so much money while it slowly dies because a lot of people who have cable are going to keep having cable and there's a lot of money in cable and it's a very sticky thing that like eventually everyone who has cable will die and the cable business will die with it. But,

Until then, cable will be around and it'll throw off lots of money, so we're going to keep investing in cable. That, as we've talked about a bunch on this show, has been slowly shifting faster and faster and faster. I think there was a sense that maybe this was like a multiple decade change into like maybe it's a one decade change. And what we've learned is that it's a momentum business, right? Because so much of it is about where do you put ad dollars that in theory, everybody could just move it tomorrow. because if all the ad money goes away, none of it works anymore. Because for a variety of reasons that we can get into.

And so what I think, there is a thing that happened this week, which is the Nielsen gauge. Nielsen is the company that has done TV ratings for forever. The gauge is the thing they've been doing since 2021, I believe, to also try and measure streaming. And basically everybody outtuce says it's an imperfect measurement, but it is sort of directionally useful over time.

And what happened, this most recent version of the gauge was that streaming was bigger than cable and broadcast TV for the first time ever. This is like a hugely meaningful moment, right? So the number was that streaming accounted for 44% of viewership. Broadcasting cable accounted for 44.2%. So 44.8 versus 44.2. If you were to say, David, where's the other 11%? I don't have a good answer for you.

There's like an other category that I... The TV is just off. I guess. You're just where it's frame TVs. You're just looking at the art. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.

But anyway, so that's a big change. And the momentum is just nuts. Can I just read you a bunch of numbers from... Yeah, I love to. So YouTube main, which is sort of the industry term for like regular YouTube. Not YouTube TV, not YouTube shorts, just YouTube. The proper YouTube app. Google, as always, very good at branding.

YouTube main. accounts for 12.5% of all streaming, which is as big as Netflix and Disney Plus combined. It has been just dominant in this space for the last couple of years. It's up 120% in four years. Well, we've talked about it how YouTube's biggest platform is now the TV, which I like still feels bewildering to me. Like YouTube, my own YouTube usage has increased dramatically over the past like five years even. which is honestly on a person level bad. It's not good. I should spend less time on YouTube. But for me, it's still very much a laptop thing.

But you look at the numbers and you look at where their product efforts are going. And it is to the TV. And these numbers very much show you why. Yeah, I remember for years I would meet with people at YouTube and they would say, the living room is our fastest growing screen. But it was for a long time, it was like it went from very small to still very small but bigger. Right. And like fastest growing is a relative term.

But then kind of in the last 18 months, it started to turn to like, no, this is actually our biggest platform. And now they're starting to redesign YouTube around the TV. Like, we're seeing real TV first parts of YouTube in a way that I think is really fascinating. But I wrote a thing earlier this year for YouTube's 20th anniversary that was basically like YouTube is just winning the entertainment industry. And that is, that continues to be true. But the fact that it was up 120% in the last four years. just blew my mind. Like, think about how dominant YouTube was in 2021,

and it has more than doubled in, on television since then. Insane. Seems impossible. So that's just one. In, like, regular streaming services, I think we think of YouTube as kind of its own thing, but in the realm of, like, traditional streaming services,

Netflix has been in first place for four years running. It's up 27% over the four years that the gauge has been running. And it accounts for, like, seven, I think seven and, the half percent of streaming. So like huge. Netflix is like the winner of the streaming worse in like every meaningful way and is still getting its ass kicked by YouTube. But anyway, so Netflix growing like crazy, YouTube growing like crazy. In that same period of time, broadcast, according to Nielsen's gauge, has been down 21 percent and cable has been down 39 percent. That is falling much faster than I would expect. Yes. And like that's just absent the ad dollars problem, right?

This is just people are shifting their behaviors. And I really expected this industry to sort of just like chug along pretty indefinitely. And those are some dramatic, devastating declines that are really going to imperil the ability to operate those businesses. And I think, I mean, I suspect for a lot of our listeners and certainly for me, it's like, yeah, of course, right? Like, I have never had a cable subscription of my own, right? Because, you know, by the time I was out of college, right, like, streaming was available. Why would I not just stream everything that I need on the rare occasions, right? I went to, I went to a bar to watch the finale of Breaking Bad.

I think that was, that was the, like, the one where I was like, okay, I do need cable for this. But that just, like, doesn't even, that doesn't happen anymore, right? Like, that scenario doesn't come up where the thing you want to watch, you can't get access to at home. Like, one way or another, you can find a way to stream it, even if you have to sign up for an entire service that you don't want. Or even if you have to sign up for, like, a bundled cable streaming service for a month. But it's all doable. And it's like, you know, there is much to complain about in terms of, oh, okay, we've just recreated the cable bundle in a million different ways. Yep.

Sure. great. It turns out that streaming did not exactly save us a ton of money, and it is, in fact, wildly complicated. But these things are all available. It's all possible. You have those options in front of you. And I think that has actually accelerated pretty dramatically, probably just over the recent like five years, maybe during the time that we've seen that big decline, right? I think a lot of these stragglers were the traditional broadcast networks. And now you're finally going to be able to get those like major live events that traditionally you still would have had to have a cable subscription to get access to. Now that's all streaming. There's very little

that you need to have cable for. You need to have cable if you just want to like have that experience of being able to flip through the channels and not really worry about it too much. And this becomes like a self-fulfilling thing over time, right? Like I'm thinking a lot about sports rights. And I remember not that many years ago, all of the leagues made a point to stick with the brink. And I'm broadcast networks because what they kept saying was it's important to us that we have a product that is accessible to everybody. And in a few spots would leave money on the table in order to do so, right? Like it matters to the NFL that it is essentially accessible to everyone, even if that means not letting Amazon give you all of the money in the known universe to do so.

But the thing that has changed, right, is that you can make an increasing case that actually if you want to reach everybody all at once, the move is to do it on Netflix. That like, I think if you just took a poll of people that you know, more of them are likely to have Netflix than to have like a quick way to watch Fox. And that is a giant cultural shift that I think we're only starting to see the money follow. But that's the thing. Like when I see numbers like this, it's like everybody in this page watches the Nielsen Gage. Like say what you want about the numbers. It is the gold standard of how the advertisers in particular look at this stuff.

And they're going to look at this and they're going to say, oh, it moved. Not it's moving, but like, it moved. We have this, this thing that we have been thinking was going to eventually changed has now changed. Well, it's funny. We were talking about, uh, uh, Warner Brothers Discovery, uh, splitting in half last week. And one of the, I mean, part of it is because Zazloav has done a disastrous job. But, uh, another part of it is like, they're splitting it into the thing that streams really well. and the stuff that is cable TV

and that's just good luck. Right. It does make a bunch of that stuff makes sense and we should like Comcast, Comcast by the way, disclosure an investor in Vox Media giant fans of ours did the same thing.

They were like, okay, we're going to take the thing that's kind of working which is Peacock, which is by the way, womp-womp like at the very bottom it's like the lowest one

that the Nielsen Gage even ranks. There's like, hey, it's a peacock and then it's other. Like you did it. They were, Hopping champagne bottles when they made that list. Okay. They're like,

we have the logo on there now. That's all we need. But they did the same thing. They took the thing that works and then split off all of the cable companies. And it was like those companies now are just being essentially put out to pasture. Like there is this sense that not that long ago, there was this belief that like, oh, we should keep ESPN because it funds the rest of Disney and it will for a long time. and that idea is just quickly going away everywhere.

And this is what I mean by, I think, like, we're going to look at this as the moment it died because, like, everybody has been waiting for this sort of moment of confirmation that the change has happened. And this is not young people stream more. This is not, like, cable nevers or growth. This is people in America are streaming more than they are watching cable. And even Nielsen's thing, I think, was like,

these numbers are very close. So they're like, it'll probably shift and, you know, sports will start and it'll jump up again. But they were like, the trend is is unchanging and it very soon will be permanent that the streaming number is higher. And once that happens, it's going to get, it's going to get weirder and like the money is going to move even faster. I do wonder if there is a floor, right? Like you still hear about like, there's somehow there's still some AOL dial-up customers. And they're just like, they're like, it works. I'm not changing.

I'm sure there's a lot of people who just have cable and they're just never going to unsubscribe. I could see it like falling to a point and just staying there steadily for a while. But honestly, it sounds crazy. It really does sound crazy. It'd be like, actually TV is dead. It's done. But I think you might be right. Like this actually is a really momentous occasion.

You have sold me on this. Did it? It does mean I think we're going to probably continue to see some big changes in the streaming space too, as everybody races to take. advantage of that growth, right? Because this means there is more opportunity there now. It also means they just, by necessity, have to go over there. One of the big things that we haven't talked about yet that I'm curious how much it is contributing to this is the fast channels. Because that feels like a relatively new trend to me. And it seems like they are, you know, there are new ones launching every single week somehow. And that seemed to be very popular.

So I'm really curious if that is contributing to this, if part of this is that people are going, oh, I can actually just watch stuff for free. Like there are maybe even fewer ads on these free streaming TV channels. Like what am I doing with cable still? Like I'm paying $100 or more a month for this giant bundle of channels. I don't even know what's on half of them. And I, you know, the fast channels feel like one of those things that's like, if you had started that, you know, at the origin of streaming services, that business model wouldn't have made sense because the ad dollars wouldn't have been there. But now that the ad dollars

are shifting there, there's all kinds of new things you can do with streaming. And so I think we are going to continue to see, number one, more of these things launch, but probably some new models pop up. I mean, we also already see this with like Netflix and basically every other premium streaming service shifting to this, like actually just watch the ads approach. Totally. And I think Yeah, the fast channels are fascinating because they're just so easy in a way that I think. We talked about this for years, right? That like the biggest problem with streaming services is it's a hell of a lot of work to figure out what you want to watch. And what I miss about cable is I could just turn on my TV and it was just showing me television.

And I would just like leave it on a channel and it would play things. Like that sounds different now, but that's what it was and it was great. but now like the Roku channel is the fifth most popular streaming service. Yeah, that's incredible. The Roku channel. Like, insane. And the Roku channel is just, it's purely a fast channel. And the only reason it's popular is because it's there.

Because lots and lots and lots of people have Rokos. And the Roku channel just has a lot of free stuff, just sitting there for you to watch. And Tooby is also on this list. To be more popular than Peacock. Tough day for Peacock. But you're totally right. And these two things are starting to sit side by side, right? Where you have Netflix for like the high end premium stuff that I sort of go watch on purpose.

And then you have to be in the Roku channel for just like, I just show me something. I'm like, I'm consistently surprised at how much good programming is available on the fast channels. The frequency with which I will look up where I can watch a movie or TV show and they're like, oh, it's available with ads on this free thing. like, oh, with ads. And it's like not even that many ads. Like, it's, they are the best value in streaming. It is really incredible. No question.

I do think it's a lot of ads. And I think the problem is we are being sort of re-desensitized. That may be true. That may be true. Like, do you remember when they first started showing ads on some of these streaming services again? And it would be like one 30 second ad two times a show. And you'd be like, ah, I'm going to watch an ad.

How dare you? Yeah. And now we're back to like, there was news last week. that Amazon doubled its ad inventory. And like, I'm not going to notice. It's just, we're just back to having too many ads all the time. And so the one that kills me on the fast services. And I don't know if they fixed this because I either just stopped noticing it or they got

better at it. But they are just trash at knowing when to insert ads. It's just like something in their system is just like every seven minutes, just do two ads, no matter what is going on. And so it'll be in the middle of a person's sentence. That's not good. And it'll just be like, buy Sharman toilet paper. And then it'll go back to the person's sentence in the middle.

And I'm just like, this is not a good user experience. I'm fine with the ads. But like, can we put them where they go? I've still, may I've just been lucky. I've still had the other side of the experience where some of them's like, I can't believe this ads on this thing. And then they will show, again, it's like they'll show me 30 second spot at the beginning of something.

And then I just watch a two-hour movie. And I'm like, I think you guys messed up here. Like there, you needed to make me pay for this. It is the greatest scam in television when they're like, we're going to show you three minutes of ads and then you get the whole movie ad-free. And I'm just like, tight, I'm going to leave for three minutes. Yeah, I'm like, you guys just- What are we accomplishing here?

Didn't know you had this in your catalog. Like, you just forgot to sell ads against this. Yep. Yeah, I'm just like, I'm going to go make popcorn and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to watch an ad-free movie. Like, you can play an ad on my television while I'm not here if you like. This is part of the thing. Like, it is true. You are not always getting the best program.

Sometimes it's great. But sometimes it is, in fact, it's like that it is the C tier of movies that are on these things sometimes. But you know what? There are a lot of good, bad movies out there. Well, I mean, this is the thing, like Netflix, you look through Netflix sometimes and you're like, I've seen all of these. I've seen, like, and I'm like, I need that, like, weird tier of movies that you don't feel like paying for Netflix because not a lot of people are going to watch them. But I've seen it. You know?

I know what you've got. Yeah, I'm completely with you. I've watched hot frosty five times now. Like, let's, like, what's next? Okay, first of all, hot frosty is great. Justice for hot frosty. I said nothing to suggest otherwise. There are very few things in my life that I enjoy as much as that period between Thanksgiving and, like, December 23rd,

where there's just an infinite supply of bad new Christmas movies. If you're ever like, who are these four? The answers me. I watch them. I am the reason they keep getting made. And I am not sad. This is why streaming is winning. Because now there's more crappy stuff for me to watch.

It's great times. Okay, wait. On the TV is dying, can I offer you one more quick study on... I'm telling you, this is like an interesting week for, oh, no, TV's debt. So there's this group at Oxford called the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And every year they do a big report on sort of the state of journalism. the world. It's real bleak. It's just what I'll say about that. It's not great to be a journalist. There's a lot of stuff going on. The misinformation is everywhere. But there were a couple of

interesting shifts, particularly in the United States, that I thought were very interesting and also very bad news for television. So let me just read you from this report. It says, the proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States is sharply up at 54% so 54% of people are getting news via social media and video networks video networks being like TikTok and stuff like that that number is actually lower than I would have guessed but is is high and I think probably the younger the audience the higher that number is going to be that number 54% overtook both TV news which is 50% and news websites slash apps 48% for the first time so now for the first time ever social media and

video networks are the dominant place by which people in the United States access their news. And again, the trends suggest that number is only going to get even further away. TV is down 22%. Online news sites are down 21%. Print is down 33%. Like, there's only one number going up and it's social media and social networks. And everything else, podcasts, interestingly, hanging in there doing fairly well and are more popular in the US than almost anywhere else as a news source. But again, like TV news dying.

Yeah, I mean, this makes a lot of sense, right? Like, in the old days, right? The old days of eight years ago. No, but like, right, it was a real thing. Like the evening news was on. You had to have it on if you wanted to know it. Right. That was also when they showed the weather.

If you wanted to know what the weather. Right. And these things become increasingly less essential. It's funny, like, you know, I don't know at what point in time I would have been like, like, goodness. Like, you're eschewing the great television news in favor of some. For sure. Right, like, I don't know if this is a commentary on quality, by the way. But it is certainly, you know, the rise of, I think, like, social video news, like that kind of maybe spells out.

where some of this viewership is going, right? Like, and a lot of it is, it's super, super creator-based in a way that is, is very different from the sort of, like, giant networks that were around for the last generation. Like, the whole way people experience this stuff has just changed. Well, that's, I actually, I have so many questions. And I would love to know when somebody says, yes, I get most of my news from TikTok. Like, what does that mean to them, right? Like, does that mean that they caught a 10-second snippet of a podcast where,

somebody goes, you know, they just passed the genius act and that's going to regulate stable coins and then they just like swipe up. Like is that, is that the thing? Is it somebody? Can I tell you a fact that's going to really bum you out? Oh, no. Would you like to hear a list of some of the podcasts that people said they turn to for news? Yeah. Would you like to know the most popular? Is it us? No, it's the Joe Rogan experience. Which I think fairly neatly answers your question, right? Like, yeah. There is also this. giant change in what people perceive to be news. News used to be like a sort of put together a report of some kind and you would watch it at 6 p.m.

And that's what the news was. And then the news was like, I don't know, stuff on Twitter and New York Times.com. And now news is something else. And I feel like I can't even exactly describe what it is, but it is very clear that like if you think, if you're sitting there being like, I get most of my news from the Joe Rogan experience, that is like a fundamentally different understanding of how to move through the world than I am like fully capable of record with. It's so interesting. It's like, I mean, I go into the New York Times in some ways feels like the same audience who like likes to play chess and like like don't get me wrong. Like that's me, right? But it's like, yeah, like, yo, you could play Sellers of Catan. Like you could play Fortnite. Those would be more fun. I get all my news from Fortnite, Jake. Right. And it's like like, you know, sure, you could go to the New York Times.

And it will have great reporting and you'll get things in a timely manner and it will be accurate. Or you can hear a version of it and I'm putting version in like very serious like air quotes there on Joe Rogan like some amount of time later. And I think that that makes a lot of sense to me, right? Like news just becomes entertainment, right? You're not seeking out news. You are seeking out entertainment and you happen to find out things about what is happening as a result. The problem with it being entertainment is that it is not always accurate. You know, listen, this is like a podcast. We're chatting, but we also like, we uphold the same like rigorous standards as

as we do on the Verges website. Every single thing we're saying we're making sure is accurate. I have never been wrong on the Verge cast before, ever. Listen, our takes, our takes, no promises there. But, you know, this makes a lot of sense, right? And I think, like, to go back to your argument about TV. It's like, yeah, people are looking for the more entertaining and engaging experiences and TV in a lot of, like, number one, it's, it's, it's old, it's inconvenient. It is also just like, it is work in a way that flipping through TikTok is actually like pretty fun. Yeah. No, it just, it makes me think of like, do you remember that phase when Facebook went from like a thing that young people did.

And then all of a sudden, it felt like in the span of a week, everybody's parents joined Facebook. Like, do you remember that moment where all of a sudden everyone was on? You could just assume other people had Facebook.

That's kind of what it feels like we're going through right now with a lot of this stuff, where it's like, none of these trends are surprising. Like you're saying, like this has been happening. We've been talking about it.

But the speed at which it happened, and then this sort of immediate flip to like, just everybody's on TikTok now. It's not like every, your parents are on TikTok now. God, I hope my parents are not on TikTok now. But like many people's parents are on TikTok now.

And that, that thing has just happened. Like the shift is done. And it will keep growing. But whatever inflection point we have been looking for, it happened. Like it, it inflected.

And I think now we're just going to have to, like there's going to be so many, downstream effects of all of that. Even like the way that these giant news organizations that are used to vast amounts of money being thrown off by their cable news networks, that's going to change. They're going to start thinking differently about how these platforms work. That's already been happening, but it's only going to accelerate. Like, all of this stuff is going to change.

I mean, so interesting, like news was the flagship program on a lot of these big broadcast networks, right? Like, this was the prime time show. It happens like around dinnertime or right after dinner time. so you could all watch it together. It said it was there when you got home from work. Well, and then the next generation was 24-hour cable news was like the killer app of cable news.

Right. And you look at Netflix, how many news shows do they have? There's like John Mullaney's show is like the closest thing they have. Yeah, yeah, right. Like it is just so interesting that news is just not a programming category that people are bothering with. Yeah, yeah. It's, I don't know what to make of any of this.

And I think like you said earlier, none of this is a statement of quality. There's a lot of trash on TV. There's a lot of bad news on TV. But it is like, it is different now. And it, and it happened more quickly,

I think, than anybody expected it to. And we're like, it's all going to get faster from here, I think. Like, I just, I remember talking to folks

for this YouTube story that I was writing. And one of the things they said was that when YouTube hit the top of the Nielsen gauge, when it first was on the Nielsen gauge, and it was like, sort of apples to apples, how big it was as a TV streaming platform, YouTube's entire business shifted because all of a sudden everybody saw it differently.

Right? And that is like, it can happen that fast. These people look at these things and they go, oh, this one is winning and this one is losing. We're going to go on the winning team. And it just, that's how it spirals. It's also really funny how much this, like, this whole streaming thing started as a way to get away from ads and commercials. And actually, it's all just loop back around. and the thing that is driving it is that the ad dollars are now in streaming. Everybody's rushing their access where it is.

Can't escape it. No, this is just what we do here. Okay, wait, a couple more streaming things and then we should take a break. One, I think we just need to take like a very brief victory lap because Max, or Warner Brothers Discovery, announced this week

that when you go into the Max app, which is not yet called HBO Max again, but we'll be soon. Every time I open the app on my TV, I'm like waiting for it to change and it's going to be such a joyful moment when it switches to HBO Max. I'm going to laugh hysterically. But anyway, now they're doing AI video previews and they're actually going to be mining platform data to figure out which parts of a show or movie they should show you in the preview in order to make you more likely to watch it. And this is an idea that we had on the verge.

We invented this on the Vergecast and no one can convince me otherwise. I don't remember what it was, but I'll find it. I cannot wait until they start showing the twist at the climax of movies. And people are just like, what the heck you guys? Do you ever do the thing on YouTube where it has the little graph of how much people play it? And you just skip right to the most replayed bit. I only do that. That like, why would you click anywhere else?

Of course. It's just you go to the sixth sense. And it's just like, I'm just trusting. This is what I needed. Yeah. Like, of course is why. Like, oh, this sounded intriguing. Yeah, the AI is going to be both right and horribly, horribly wrong.

And then the other one is we're going to talk a bunch about meta in the lightning round because there was really fascinating set of meta news this week. But the streaming thing that it did this week was basically rename and rebrand all of the video on all of Mehta's products, particularly on Facebook, as reels. Okay. So, oh my God, me and Barbara Krasnoff on our team tried to get to the bottom of this a few months ago. We were trying to figure out like the different video products and what happened to you put. And Facebook had at least three different video products. And I want to be clear, they looked the same. They worked the same.

They were accessible through the same apps. They were just in different places. And we emailed them. And I believe they were like, yeah, some of them will play content from the. the others and others won't play content from the others. And so there's sort of different silos, but they're not different silos. Jake, are you saying we deserve credit for this too. Did we do this? When you emailed Meta, somebody sent that to Mark and he was like, that's a good idea, Jake. I should do that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what was ever happening over there.

I don't know how they were operating this. It was the most confusing way to operate three video services, I guess. I don't know. I don't know how this emerged. And, So yes, finally, here's the thing. It, like, on one level, Facebook says all video is now reels. It's like, oh, man. But on the other, it's like, actually, actually, this is, like, so much more sensible. Yes. Than what they were doing beforehand that I'm actually like, thank goodness.

Like, even if this means the real situation might be worse because it's going to be flooded with more stuff. It's like it was way too complicated beforehand. Oh, yeah. I think the most problematic outcome of this is I think it makes very clear that Facebook's future is just as a video player. Seriously, like I think Facebook is going to be, it's going to be groups, it's going to be marketplace, and it's going to be a video player. And I think the idea of Facebook as like the repository for all of the video created elsewhere on meta properties is their best idea about how to bring people. back to Facebook. Will it work? I don't know, but I think that is pretty clearly where we're headed.

And this gives them a way to just like pour everything back into Facebook. Because again, Facebook is very important to Mark Zuckerberg in a way that I don't think any of the other products are. And they will do everything they can to get people opening the Facebook app as often as possible. Just one other thought on this is I think it's very important to Facebook and to meta at large to be. competitive as a video platform. And I've written about this a bunch, but like anything you can do to juice view counts, you will do. And so for meta, to take all of these disparate video platforms and just roll them into one is going to make all of the numbers look bigger. And it's going to make it a

much more compelling appearing creator platform. It's going to make it seem like reach is much bigger. And so like one of the things Mark Zuckerberg has been saying is he wants Facebook to be culturally relevant again. I think that might be impossible, but I think you can juice video numbers in such a way that will suggest cultural relevance. And that might be all you need

if the goal is to just make a lot of money. This tracks me. I think I'm maybe I'm underestimating them. I'm not convinced this will necessarily work in a, at least in a good quality way. But I think this actually loops all the way back to the YouTube TV stuff that we were talking about. Do you want to juice?

engagement? Do you want to use time spent? Have people watch videos all day. Right? 100%. YouTube, they change their algorithm to promote longer videos. Okay, great. Now the videos are longer. Now they're better on TV. Now people are watching more YouTube on TV. You should make your videos even longer because people are sitting back and watching them. It is just a cycle that keeps going and now this leads to YouTube usage being super high. And part of this is not necessarily serely because people are just changing their watching habits, it's because there is just literally longer things that they can watch on YouTube

in a way that there weren't five or ten years ago. Yeah. And so, yeah, like Facebook, you want more people using Facebook for longer? Great, play them more videos. That seems like the only idea anyone has in the tech industry right now is like do AI to it or more videos. Those are the moves. That's what we're doing here.

Those are our new virtual segments. Doing AI, more videos. That's not bad. Our growth is going to just go through the roof. Everybody's going to hate it, but they're going to be stuck here with us. All right, we need to take one more break. Then we're going to come back to the lighting ground. Bear back.

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It's time for the lightning round. Eric Gomez, we have a sponsor for the lightning round. That is correct. This week's lightning round is presented by Google Cheminet. I feel like you get better at that every week. I mean, I'm trying. This is great. It's good practice.

Also, very cool Verge shirt from Eric. This is not a tease of merch that we are bringing back, but I would like to, and maybe we'll try. Vintage. All right. So, since Neli is not here, we're going to skip Brendan Carr's. as a dummy for a week. We're going to give Brendan two weeks to be a dummy. But there is one tiny bit of news that is related to our main man, Brendan, that we should just, we should just mention very briefly, which is that the Senate confirmed Olivia trustee, who was Trump's

pick to be the new commissioner of the FCC. The vote was, let's see, 53 to 45. And now this means there are three people on the FCC instead of two. And kind of just one, because Anna Gomez is just like running around telling everybody that Brendan Carr is a monster and waiting to get fired. Hooray. Great job, everybody. Good government. Yeah. This actually has a big impact, right?

There is now a quorum again, right? Because before they fired too many people. And so they just weren't enough people for the FCC to actually officially legally get things done. Right. Now there's three of them. Now they can. This is sort of, this is like a slightly weird process. FCC commissioners are usually,

nominated and confirmed in pairs. There's usually one Democrat and one Republican at the same time. Now, maybe you can make the argument that, okay, there already is Anna Gomez and there's an odd number. So maybe that's why I think some people are definitely a little worried about the fact that they only did a Republican this time. This is actually like very strange to me, but the Communications Act, which established FCC, it's a legal requirement. that there can only be three people out of the five commissioners. Only three of them can be of the same party. So that there is some limit to your ability to stack the commission. That being said, could the other two people be like the wig party?

I don't think anybody's tested that yet. So we'll find out. But yes, now the FCC back at it. Yeah. I mean, can I just read you a quote from our story? story, which I feel like just perfectly, it says all the things that I would like to say much better than I would say them. So Lauren Feiner wrote a story for us about Olivia trustee in the nomination process, the confirmation process. And she got a quote from a guy

Matt Wood, who is the VP of Policy and General Counsel of a nonpartisan group called Free Press Action. I'm just going to read you the whole quote. And then we're going to move on. He says, in normal times, there would be little reason to oppose the confirmation of a candidate as qualified as trustee. But these are not normal times. Trusty's confirmation. gives Carr the majority he needs to radically reshape the media sector in Trump's image, including offering policy favors to large broadcasters in exchange for their unwavering loyalty to the president. I agree with every single word of that, and that seems to be what is going on. Let's move on. We'll come back to this. Just end on that light note.

Yeah, Brendan Carr remains a dummy. We'll get back to this next week. And now an empowered one. Now a dummy with someone else who can sign the paper. for him. Next up, we got a little tiny nugget of maybe kind of news about Siri. Everybody is doing the developer beta stuff.

Liquid Glass is bad. They're out there doing more interviews about iPadOS, and we continue to hear spring 2026 for better Siri. I just want to put that out there. Okay, do you buy it? No.

I thought there would be some equivocation there. Yeah, I don't either, right? Like, 3-2026, that sounds like maybe an internal target. It also just seems very weird to me the idea that they would drop such a major feature, so late in operating systems release cycle. I think if you were to say would I bet on fall 2026 with like the next round of software, I would say more likely because it seems possible to me that they will have had a lot of time to do the work. They are going to ship some of the features, but not all of them.

Like, I think, I think it's possible. Developers will have had another full year to do the app intent stuff that I think is going to make a lot of the stuff work like we talked about last week. Maybe. Maybe I would believe that. But I think you're right, the idea that they would just like ship this thing in March as a like point four. Update does not, I don't know, just doesn't pass the test for me. I don't buy it. Neither do I.

One thing that I think is also going to be really tricky for Apple going forward is, you know, they have been breaking from this a little bit, but traditionally, they release software once a year, right? And they have some small updates here and there. And that has been breaking. That has been breaking a little bit. Well, they'll do like, you know, a little bit of an update in the fall, maybe a little bit in the spring.

But basically it all comes once a year. And I think for the AI world in particular, which is moving. so fast, and which is seeing, like, some really material leaps from release to release, where it's like, something can go from like, oh, I can never do that. It's so broken to like, oh, it can like kind of do that. Which, to be clear, is meaningful in a couple months' time. Like, Apple really puts itself at a pretty big, like, set aside that they have to just make Siri work, which apparently is a monumental task. Right.

Just being able to keep up with all the other, you know, AI players, they're putting themselves at a really big disadvantage with the way that they make their products and ship so infrequently. So I look forward to seeing if they can meet this, you know, reported internal date. I suspect later in 2026 feels more likely to me just given how much they've been struggling so far. I was talking to somebody the other day about all of this. And people have been throwing out the, you know, they should just kill the Siri brand thing for a while. And I just asked somebody, I was like,

well, would, you know, you're a product person, would you get rid of the Siri brand? And what would you rebrand it to? And they were like, dude, spotlight. It's sitting right there. People like spotlight. People know what it is. People understand how it works.

It's not trying to do everything, but it is trying to do all the things that people actually want. Just call it spotlight. Like you don't even have to retire Siri, just keep adding features to spotlight. And I was like, oh my God, that's it. Like, I don't think that's going to happen, but I kind of think that is a brilliant idea that I wish I had had on my own. All right. Next up, some news that caused some surprising amount of both consternation and funny jokes on the internet this week.

WhatsApp is officially getting ads. Ads are coming to, let's see, if I remember this correctly, there are. are going to be ads in the status sort of story screens that I sincerely believe no one ever looks at. There are going to be promoted channels in the channels interface, which I think is actually growing pretty fast. From what I hear, channels have actually been a pretty big hit, especially globally. So notably, the place that ads are not is in your chats. But this feels to me like maybe not the beginning of the end of WhatsApp, but the beginning of a very different WhatsApp.

Well, this is also right. Like the founders famously never wanted ads in the app. And like, look, like they had just watched Fight Club. They were like kind of like on one and they were like ads are the death of humanity. It was like a little dramatic. And like it's, you know, ads bring us a lot of free stuff. It's all right. But it is true, right?

I think they did like they did have a pretty singular point, which is that like a chat app is really intimate and personal. These are all of your friends. They're people you know and care about. Having ads inserted between that is actually pretty disruptive. It's jarring. It changes the experience in a material way. And while meta has not yet, you know, gone and done that, you know, it's starting. It's happening.

They went, hey, we need to make some more money off WhatsApp. How are we going to juice it? The obvious answer, it's ads. Right. Yeah, I mean, there was the business chat thing that I think has turned into some of a business for meta. but this is also like clearly this is the thing that meta does best is ads at massive scale and this is also the thing that meta is best equipped to do from an advertising perspective

which is advertised for businesses next to other businesses like that's that's what facebook ads are like this makes perfect sense to me from a meta business perspective like of course this is what you would do and it is probably the least intrusive thing they could have done in WhatsApp but that's a really high bar, right? Like, it's all pretty intrusive. And I think there was an interesting thing that it had to note explicitly, which is that it won't use your messages or your information to inform and tune the ads. And this is the like perception change that I think is so hard to do after the fact,

which has come in and say, yes, of course we've been reading all of your messages. but we're not going to do anything with them. And even though, like, I actually, I have no reason not to believe Meta's lines about encryption. There are a million conspiracy theories out there, but if there has been a proof that WhatsApp messages are not encrypted, I have not seen it. So I will assume that they are.

But you don't, that perception goes away quickly, this sense of like I am in an actually private place, which already became harder for WhatsApp to do when it was bought by Meta, a company that is not famous for being a good citizen of your privacy, to then say, there's ads here, but we still don't, we're not looking. We're just putting ads. It's just a constant reminder of who is here with me in this place where I am supposed to be able to be by myself.

No, that's so real. Like, everybody thinks Facebook is like tapping their microphone. And it's like, they just know everything else about you, right? They don't need to read your chat. Yeah, they don't have to read your chat. Right, right, right. They don't have to. They already know this stuff.

And now it's going to be like abundantly clear how much they know about you. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's it's pushing in this very interesting like Snapchaty kind of direction, which is very funny because it just absolutely decimated Snapchat as a product. But they're trying to do some Snapchat stuff. But the last thing I want to say on this before we move on is just genuine kudos to signal for immediately after this happened.

screenshoting an announcement of it and saying, this was Meredith Whitaker, the president of Signal, who said, use Signal, we promise. No AI clutter, no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. We lead, we don't follow, hard emoji. Nailed it. No, like, it is very funny how much signals marketing

is just written for itself. And they just, every time they're like, oh, look, somebody did a bad thing. We won't do that. Use Signal. That's their whole marketing message. And it just keeps working. And it's very funny.

And I enjoy it very much. All right, a couple more. And then we should get out of here. There was this interesting change while we're talking about ads to Reddit this week that I found really fascinating. Did you, did you track this at all? What do you mean by track this? Did you pay attention to what Reddit is doing at all?

Reddit ads are not required to be interesting to you. But I'm happy to explain it to you if you'd like to know. No, tell me. Tell me. Yeah. So Reddit basically forever trying to grow as a business. business and has realized that the best thing it has going for it is all of the posts and comments on Reddit. So Reddit announced two things for advertisers this week. One of them is that it will

basically let you take all of the insights and all of the information from all of Reddit and use it to inform your ads, which is the sort of thing that is like true on lots of platforms, but is again the kind of thing that Reddit went out of its way to be like, we are a user-friendly and moderation-friendly platform when in like Facebook was like screw you we sell ads based on all your stuff Reddit is just fully doing that but the thing that I find even wilder is that now if you're an advertiser you can have an ad on Reddit and then right underneath it Reddit will will dynamically the AI driveny place positive Reddit posts about your product that you're trying to advertise so they will just find people who said

nice things about you on Reddit and just dump it right underneath your ad over Reddit. That feels, that feels weird. It's interesting. When I saw the headline for this, I, part of this feels genius and part of this feels,

feels really not good. Like, it makes sense to me if, you know, you're Mercedes and somebody's like, check on my sick Mercedes. Great, like, go promote that. That seems cool.

And like, you know, maybe that's a little weird if you're the guy who gets promoted. But just like streaming a bunch of random comments from out of context. That feels off. And I feel like users are going to feel betrayed because you do not believe that your comment is going to be used in that way, right?

It is meant to be in a specific spot for a specific community. And I think once you start moving that around, and particularly once you start putting dollars behind it that you, the user, are not seeing, that starts to get really uncomfortable really fast. So I understand why Reddit is doing this. There's like something, I think, very smart about, hey, there's people saying nice things about you and like having fun with your stuff. Like just promote that instead of putting a boring ad that nobody wants to read. I like that.

But yeah, they have to be really careful. Like, these, you know, community is everything for Reddit. And this is a thing that is disruptive of that in a very real way. Yeah. I would just encourage everybody to go look at the screenshot in Jay's story, which we'll put in the showout. It's a Lucid Air ad that just looks like a normal ad. It has a picture of the car. It looks like a Reddit ad.

And then right below it, there's an AI summary that says, Redditors show excitement for Lucid Air's performance, quality, and innovation. They also appreciate the company's service and delivery. And then it has a side-scrolling list of presumably positive posts about Lucid. I'm looking at this gift. This is the worst possible version of this feature. Like, I just don't understand this at all. It feels so disingenuous and like not representative of,

what is actually great about Reddit. No, no, this doesn't make sense at all. Yeah. And this feels terrible if you're one of these users, too. Like, it looks like you made an ad. Yeah. All right, two more things that may you should get out of here. First thing, the Senate passed the Genius bill,

a terrific, terrific backonym to get to genius. I'm very proud of this for everybody. And basically what it does is it establishes a regulatory framework for stable coins and crypto tokens, basically so that private companies can now launch digital coins pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. As far as I can tell, Jake, this is a huge win for crypto people, right? Like, everybody seems very excited that this is happening.

Yeah, I think the idea is that it legitimizes stable coins. It also means that the U.S. is not going to, you know, alternatively, crack down on them, right? I think that's the bigger fear. And this is saying, nope, go ahead, go do your thing. I read through some of the bill, and it does put some, like, I think, useful requirements to place, right? It requires that you actually back your crypto token with, with, you know, real assets. It requires that once a month you publish what those assets are. So there is some transparency and there is some requirements here. I would say this still feels

like a, you know, product in need of a market to me. But yeah, this is just a win for the crypto industry, it is an allowance for them to make these tokens. Theoretically, it will make them less scammy, theoretically. Yeah. I would encourage anyone who wants to know how this stuff works to read about Tether, which is a really fascinating stable coin and probably the most successful one we've had so far, has also had a just long-running series of shenanigans around it. And I think it's a good place to understand how this works and where it can both go really

well and get really weird. But yeah, the incursion of crypto people into the government continues apace. And one of the interesting things about this was a lot of the Democrat opposition to this bill has been about essentially like Trump coin exists. And now this makes Donald Trump just lets him regulate his own money now. And that's a strange thing. And so we will have to see how all that shakes out. But let's end on some better news, which I am much,

more unabashedly excited about, which is new Fediverse stuff for threads. And normally this is where Nelai and I just like gass each other up about how great the Fediverse is. My question for you, Jake, is are you excited about this at all? That's so funny. I was going to flip this back around because I'm the person who is I'm a little more skeptical. I was going to ask you, it seems to me that some of the Fediverse momentum has maybe slowed down. And admittedly, this is a pretty big announcement because I think when threads launched

I think it was at peak Fediverse hype and they're like we're going to be one the same with the Fediverse and then last year they're like there's some Fediverse

if you want it and now maybe there's finally a little bit more Fediverse but it does feel like in some ways it now feel like

things are even more fragmented to me right? Like nowadays we're like Blue Sky has a personality you know what you get on Blue Sky Threads is a personality

You know what you get on threads. I don't know what's happening on Mastodon, but it is there. It very much has its own personality. Very much so. I think, like, honestly, this is, it is encouraging to me to see that threads is still pushing forward on this. Because I could very easily have seen them just being like, hmm, and letting it drop. But I am curious from your perspective, somebody who is following the Fed of her stuff much more closely, how you feel about the momentum for the Fediverse right now.

I'm torn. So the news we should say was essentially now there is a semi-dedicated feed in the Threads app for Fediverse posts. And I say semi-dedicated because it's a feed within the following feed. So if you want to get there, you have to open the app, go to your following feed, and then there's a little menu at the top that shows you Fediverse post.

And you tap that and you go to the Fediverse feed. So it's there. and it is like front-ish and center-ish, but it's not like full Fediverse integration with the for-you feed on threads. But it is a meaningful integration of like, now you can see Fediverse posts inside of threads, and that's a real thing.

What I find more, maybe not alarming, but potentially worrisome, is talking to Peter Cottle, who's a software engineer at Meta, working on a lot of this stuff, and seems to be kind of the, the spokesperson for a lot of meta's threads work and Fedaverse work. Meta doesn't seem to know exactly what it wants to do here,

which I think is really interesting. There's one vision of the Fediverse that is like perfectly interoperable, interconnected everything, right? Like, I can post from one place to another place. You can like it and I'll see it and we can have a sort of cross-platform conversation. And like, what if Facebook was the internet is like that way of thinking about it, right? And that is exciting, but also complicated. And then there's another version of the Fediverse that is basically like there are just a million things in a bucket, right?

Everything is content. And newsletters are a type of post and images are a type of post and videos are a type of post and podcasts are a type of post. And all those posts go into one giant database of posts. And then the cool thing about the Fediverse is you can build any kind of app you want to both create and consume those posts. That's a very different idea than the sort of completely interoperable social network, right? It's just a content machine

that is not run by one company. Both very cool, very different. And meta does not seem to know which of those it wants threads to be. So right now it's much more like, the Fediverse feed in threads is basically like an RSS reader for Fediverse posts. And that's not nothing,

but it's not a completely interoperable social network. And then on the flip side, they're starting to do some of this work where like if I, if I post and you like something in a Fediverse app, that comes back to threads. But that continues to be kind of messy and weird. And so I just, we're at this point now where somebody needs to decide what we're doing here. And I think I have thought for the last year it would be threads that just by virtue of its size and by virtue of meta's importance to the internet, threads would dictate. dictate a lot of things. And from what I've heard from Fediverse people, the threads folks have actually been pretty good citizens of this. They have worked with the protocol. They have played by the rules. They have been, you know, useful members of different systems and actually part of meetings rather

than just like coming in and dictating how all this is going to work because platform's huge. But at some point, somebody has to just look at it and be like, here's what this is for. And I still don't see that. And I worry even talking to them that they don't know what it is. and until someone decides what it is, it's going to keep kind of being nothing. And part of me is that, like, at this point now, we're two and a half years into the sort of post-Twitter era, and it doesn't feel like we've made progress.

And I'm sort of like, what if we just had an answer? Like, I don't even care what it is. Just pick one of the things and start doing it in a, like, powerful mainstream way. And instead we're kind of like we're half answering 100 different questions. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. And this is what I think is so strange about the current state of the Fediverse. In some ways, it feels like there are more Fediverse products.

And in some ways, they feel more siloed to me, right? Somehow we've ended up in a universe where I can go on these different networks that accomplish the same thing that are all allegedly interoperable. but most of which are basically just the one network. And I think with threads, it's like, just do it. Right? Like you have this technology. You have a giant team.

Just do it. Right. And I don't quite know why they haven't. I think maybe this is because they haven't quite figured out how they want to interact with the Fediverse, what they want their Fediverse input to be. And, you know, this is the thing. thing, right? It comes from a very big company that has its own interests, and there's a lot that they have at stake there. And so it makes sense that they're taking a slow approach, but I think

that also just makes it so much more complicated for every other player in the space, because you just don't know what they're going to do or when they're going to do it. And I think, you know, this does feel meaningful to me. It feels really meaningful to me that they are continuing to build this, that you actually will be able to get Fedverse stuff. And it's just one of the things that was like, oh, it's in a sub-menue. Right. It's a... It just feels like it's very hard for me to imagine Mark Zuckerberg, who is desperately committed to get people back on Facebook and integrate ads everywhere, also being super enthusiastic about the idea of more interoperability with other platforms, right? And I just, I've hit this point now where like, as far as I can tell, which is frankly not very far, to do the Fedoverse inside of meta is like one of those things you're doing and kind of hoping Mark doesn't notice. and that's just never where you want to be with this kind of thing.

And so I think I sincerely hope I'm wrong and I sincerely hope there's a lot more coming. But this is one of those things that like I'm psyched this is as far as it has gone, but it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like enough to me yet. Yep. All right. One more and then we're going to go. All right. And this one more is a thing we just published today.

We should say we're recording this on Wednesday because it's Juneteenth on Thursday. and today Antonio DiBenedetto posted his review of the Framework Laptop 12 device that I have been personally very excited about. And boy, is it exactly what I expected to be. So this thing is like the framework laptop, it's $800. It's cool and pink and colorful and pastel-y. It's very repairable and upgradable, which is Framework's whole thing. this was designed to be the like fun approachable version of what so far has been like a very nerdy brand of computers and it's like it's awesome but it's not very good all at the same time and that is like exactly what

I assumed it would be and kind of a bummer honestly this is exactly what I expected and I think like what it needs to be right like if if if you haven't seen what the framework laptop 12 looks like like please Google it. It is the most delightful looking laptop. It really is. These pastel like pinks and aquas. It is like one of the most fun pieces of tech that has come out in a long time. It's great.

I think if you would just replace this with like a normal beige boring thing, you'd be like, okay. I think so much of this thing is the ethos, right? Like it is repairable. It is upgradable. And it is fun. And you know what? Is it a perfect laptop?

Absolutely not. Right. But I know like it couldn't have been. It was not going to be. No. But I think you can buy this thing and feel good about it. And I love that. Like I love that they delivered on, I think, what they were promising here.

And there were a lot of things that framework didn't do well here that are actually pretty easy to do well, which I find sort of encouraging, right? Like the webcam is pretty bad. And the speakers are extremely whatever. and it needs more RAM and a better processor, right? Like, A, the beauty of this thing is you can upgrade some of those things yourself over time. But B, those are things that a company like framework can just go do better next time. So I think to me, I look at this and I'm like, okay, this is not the thing that I wanted it to be. The performance isn't amazing.

The keyboard isn't amazing. There's just like a lot of sort of near misses. But they all feel correctable. And I think Antonio's takeaway was very much like, this is a great idea. This is a thing that should exist. This will appeal to lots of people. It just,

A, we need framework to deliver on the upgrade path here and make this thing last a long time, which the company has done a pretty good job of so far, but also, like, stay at this one, right? Like, keep making adorable laptops and a couple of them from now, you'll have one that's awesome. Like, you know what this is making me think of actually is,

do you remember the Google Pixelbook? That was the very thin, like, kind of white and gray laptop that Google made. I loved that thing to bits. That thing had some fans. One of my absolute favorite laptops of all time. And the only downside of it was it had a just big giant monster bezel and looked sort of cheap and ridiculous as a result.

And I was just like, God, I can't wait for the second one of these when they have like another generation to rev this and fix it. And then they never made another one because Rick Austerlo hates me personally. And this is the thing. It's like you're on the right track. You've done the hard part. Go do the easy parts. And then this thing is going to be awesome.

And that is like, I really hope Framework Six to this because there's something very, very cool here. I'm excited. Framework has been like kind of on a roll putting out some cool hardware. And yeah, if they can keep at this and like keep doing this on a regular basis, oh man, it's going to be really fun.

And I do feel like we've spent 10 years waiting for somebody to make like a fun, not overpowered but not underpowered, just like solid across the board, $800 laptop. We've waited, like Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times with various devices, hasn't gone really well. Dell keeps trying weird stuff that doesn't work. Like, this is a thing that should exist. And it feels like framework is like closer to it than anybody who's been in a long time.

And I would very much like it to work. I just want a pink laptop. Like, I don't think I knew I wanted a pink laptop. until I read Antonio's review and I was like this this color scheme like really works for me it really works yeah all right we have gone way over Jake it's been a delight to do this with you this is good I'm now like nearing the end of my time on the verge cast before I go on parental leave and I'm starting to have real like graduation sadness it's like I'm never going to see my friends again this is this is this is

terrible we're taking your keys away it's been not going to be allowed back in the zoom I honestly think it's possible that I'm just never going to be allowed to do the verge cast again. Everybody's going to realize it's much better once I'm gone. And it's just going to be four hours of Brendan Carr as a dummy every week. And that's just what we're doing here. But as always, thank you for doing this. We'll have lots more next week. More stuff on MV&Os. There's some Tesla stuff potentially happening this weekend that we will cover in one way or another next week. But until then, keep it locked. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at

866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcasts Network. Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.