The Vergecast - Twitter accepts Elon Musks' buyout / Snap Pixy drone hands-on / Apple releases fix for Studio Display

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Liz Lopatto discuss Elon Musk buying Twitter and what's next for the social media company. Senior reporter Alex Heath joins the show to discuss his experience with Snap's selfie drone. Managing editor Alex Cranz refreshes the crew on the latest in E Ink tech. Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company Elon Musk’s Twitter plans are a huge can of worms Twitter CEO tells employees no layoffs planned ‘at this time’ following Elon Musk buyout What Twitter employees are saying about Elon Musk Jack Dorsey says ‘Elon is the singular solution I trust’ for Twitter’s future How Elon Musk and Twitter can really fix free speech: act like a messaging app Jeff Bezos is already testing Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech by trolling Twitter policy chief faces wave of harassment amid Musk criticism Crypto is winning, and Bitcoin diehards are furious about it Snap Pixy: hands-on with Snapchat's selfie drone Snap CEO Evan Spiegel thinks the metaverse is ‘ambiguous and hypothetical’ The Black Shark 4 Pro is all-in on gamer stereotypes  Apple releases fix for Studio Display webcam in latest macOS beta Apple’s DIY repair service is now available in the US E Ink Gallery 3 tech brings us closer to the perfect tablet Sonos joins Matter but hasn’t committed to supporting the new standard The F-150 Lightning is finally shipping — is Ford ready? Government surveillance, Elon Musk, and free speech, with EFF executive director Cindy Cohn  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we get into the implications of Elon Musk buying Twitter. Alex Heath joins us to tell us all about the Snapchat flying camera, and Alex Kranz joins us to give us yet another update on E-Inc. That's coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool companies. in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and report.

for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Vertcast, flagship podcast of tiny flying cameras. They're everywhere. Watch out. I have your friend, Neelai.

David Pierce is here. I am your friend who will always go into the water to get the drone after you let it fly too far in the battery died. There's like a small economy. If you go to like beach vacation spots, there's, have you noticed this? There's a small economy of like drone repair places around that just have like extra propellers. It's like the new version of people who like make a lot of money by fishing golf balls out of ponds on golf courses. It's like if you go into a large lake, there's just drones everywhere and me scuba diving together. Just get them. David has made another week. Congratulations, David. Thank you. You survived your first week at the verge.

It's a minor miracle, honestly. Soon though. Just watch out. Liz Lapato's here. Hey, Liz. Hey, it's good to be back. Elon has Elon. So Liz is here. A little later in the show, Alex Heath is going to join us. He's going to talk about the new Snap Pixie drone, which is very cool. Also, Evan Spiegel did some dunks on meta and the metaverse. That'll be fun.

And then later on the show, Alex Cran is going to join us. A bunch of gadget news to talk about. But rather unfortunately, the entire tech press and maybe the entire world has been subsumed by Elon Musk. Again. Again. Liz, you have a newsletter called This Week in Elon. You used to call this Meltdown May. Yeah.

This is like a very Liz Lapato phrase that in May, everyone goes nuts. It's almost May. I feel like Meltdown May gets earlier every year. Like, you know how there's that Christmas creep that happens in department stores? So we're almost a Meltdown May and everybody has already melted down. So congratulations. We're ahead of schedule. Elon Musk has accepted, he's going to have total control of Twitter when this thing closes, which, by the way, the deal's not.

closed, he's not in charge yet. There's like three to six months of like whatever goes on wrangling, dealing with regulators, whatever. So, you know, there are definitely people who are still, I think, hoping that this isn't a real thing. But for the rest of us, Elon Musk has purchased Twitter at 5420 a share, blaze it. And the letters of credit that he secured money with are all dated 420. Of course. Incredible. Truly incredible. The commitment to the bit. I mean it sincerely. If you're going to, if you're going to be that guy, like, be that guy. And I, like, part of me is genuinely sort of appreciative of the fact that he has, like, truly leaned into the bit as hard as he has. Yeah. I mean, it tells him a lot of cars. There's that.

Yeah. So we should talk about the structure of the deal real quick. And then I would say the tweets this week are, uh, bad. They are of some value. Is that the word you're looking for? Maybe I meant low value. I didn't say what I meant. I just. said of value. All right. So the structure of the deal itself is like pretty strange in that none of these people are normal. And by that, I mean inclusive of Jack Dorsey, including the rest of the Twitter board.

There is a company inside of Twitter full of smart, caring, well-meaning people. They have historically been run by nut jobs. I think that's just a fair thing to say. Yeah, I think that's right. There's just absolutely some of the strangest people in the world. have run Twitter. Different sorts of nut jobs. Like, it's a,

everyone has been like their own unique brand of nut job, but I think nut job is more or less accurate. Yeah. So there's a part of me that's like, whatever, just another nut job. Right, but I think we can see inside of the deal,

in the deal itself, and then what has happened this week, that huge contingent of smart carrying well-meaning people is rightfully somewhat like, this makes no sense. Do we all have jobs? What is going to happen? Then there's all of us who are just like,

Alex Heath and Casey Newton have been saying this to me all week. Like, it's just like Trump again. Like Elon tweets and then everyone has to react to this one guy on Twitter. The difference is that soon he will own Twitter. So that's just complete, like it's a new level of mania for the people of poison Twitter brain, of which I am one. I don't mean to cast aspersions. I have poisoned Twitter brain. But that's just been like a full throat mania this week.

Well, and I think one of the things I've enjoyed about this week has been. Liz, you over and over being the barometer of whether or not this tracks as normal Elon behavior and kind of by and large deciding that most of this does track as normal Elon behavior, like the crazy tweets, the memes like over and over, the world is like, this is insane. And Liz just comes in and is like, nope, this is Elon. Yeah, this is who he is. So let's start with a deal itself. So they filed the merger agreement.

Elon has a new company. It's a long list of companies. This one's called X.com. presumably named after one of his children with crimes, which is pronounced H, actually, but whatever. He's got a new company called X.com. That company is going to get funded by the banks and then merge with Twitter, from what I understand. Yeah. So the other thing that I think maybe is worth mentioning about X is that before it was his kid's name,

it was also what he wanted to call the company we all know as PayPal, and PayPal was a product. And he actually got pushed out of PayPal because he didn't want to let go of X.com. because he'd bought it for a lot of money and thought it was cool, even though consumers definitely did not think so. So this is, X is an important letter for Elon Musk, X Holdings. And Sean O'Kane, formerly of the verge now of Bloomberg, has written for us about how Elon could, if he wanted, assemble all of his companies into one gigantic conglomerate known as X. So there's that possibility off on the horizon.

But the thing that I think most immediately worth noting is that this is, you know, a leveraged buyout, which means that there's debt. So we know that $13 billion is going to be lent to Twitter. We also know $12.5 billion is going to be lent to him by banks and secured with Tesla stock. And then the rest of it is coming from him. So what this means, according to Bloomberg, is that loans could cost as much as a billion dollars a year in servicing fees, which is a lot. That's like 20% of the company's annual revenue. And you got to remember, Twitter didn't make money last year. So if I'm an employee at Twitter, I figure that, like, they have to cut expenses and employees are an expense.

And so I'm suddenly very, very worried about my job. On top of that, compensation for a lot of these Twitter employees includes RSUs and stock options. So what happens now that this is not a public company anymore? How are you getting paid? So there's one little comparison here, which is SpaceX. It's a private company, but does compensate its employees in stock. And then there's this complicated process by which the employees can sell stock back to the investors, back to the company itself. Maybe he'll do that again.

But SpaceX makes a lot of money because it has like fat government contracts to launch actual Rockets, which is like a real service that you can provide humanity. Twitter sells advertising for like weird websites. SpaceX also does the kind of work that not a lot of other companies do. Like if you want to leave SpaceX, there are other jobs you can get. But if you want to leave Twitter, there are so many more other jobs you can get that like it's just such a more transferable company and set of skills that I think my guess would be your bar for this ownership structure is insane is going to be much higher at SpaceX, just because because of like the work, then it's going to be at a place like Twitter where you have to

figure a lot of folks pick a place like Twitter based on things like comp and office locations and things like that. And now like that whole calculus is just going to change for people. Well, and another reason people pick Twitter that we have heard about for years is like Twitter is for all of the mania at the top of Twitter. Twitter is like a pretty mission-driven company. They do think that they have this enormous public service to the world. They Mike Madsenik at TechDirt when it's out like Twitter's lawyers. are in court all the time defending the free speech rights of its users, defending the rights of its users to be anonymous, fighting back against requests for data, fighting back against

requests for subpoenas to uncover who the users are, where they are, where they tweet. Like, Twitter does a lot of that work that is completely invisible, but it's pretty mission driven and it's all inside of what you might call a trust and safety apparatus that Elon seems to think is stupid. That seems to, like continues to say out loud on Twitter that he thinks that's stupid. Yeah. So we should get to that in a minute. I just want to like, but that's a huge issue here. Like a lot of Twitter employees are thinking they might want to leave. And to Liz's point, you're going to have to generate a billion dollars in a year to pay off a bunch of the debt, especially if you're Elon Musk and you secured a bunch of it against Tesla stock, which definitely cannot go down because that is all of your wealth. So that's just a huge swirl of stuff. Then there's like in the deal itself, this is what people are saying. And Reuters had a really weird headline on like what is basically fanfic. I don't know what else to call this. Like, They're like, Elon Musk is probably going to walk away from Twitter. And you read it and it's just like someone being like, he should.

I think he should. But the headline was like very direct. And there's all these reasons that he should, which is like the risk in China to Tesla, the debt that Liz is talking about. If he walks away, he gets a billion dollars. Those are the breakup fees. And if he walks away from Twitter, I think he has to pay in, right? Yeah. Yeah.

If he walks away from Twitter, he has to pay a billion dollars, which depending on how much of a headache everyone chooses to make. Twitter for him before this deal closes might seem like a nice price, who can say. I think that there are definitely some arbitrageurs out there who think this deal isn't going to close. But I got to be real with you guys. Like, I've been watching all these people being like, this can't be right. Elon's being so weird. And it's like, no, this is, this is pretty classic, actually. This is this is, this is normal. I've seen him behave like this before with Tesla and just sort of managed to do things anyway. So we'll see. But I do think that one of the things that's worth keeping an eye on is how many people stay. Because not only is that like a potential like cost cutting measure, like making it so unpleasant that people leave, I do notice that we're in a pretty hot market for tech talent right now. Not just because of like the sort of general publicly traded whatever, but also because a lot of those folks are moving over to crypto. And there's just like a lot of jobs out there for people. who have tech skills. And so if you're working at Twitter and you like really believe in what

you're doing and then Elon Musk buys it and sets everything on fire, yeah, maybe you do take that call from a headhunter and, you know, see what happens. So I think that leads right into Elon's behavior this week, which, again, in the scheme of Elon behavior, kind of in the pocket, you know, maybe a little closer to meltdown may than not, but still in the boundaries of what we've come to expect, but has led to just a lot of bad outcomes, especially for people who work at Twitter. And, like, he is effectively directed online harassment at Twitter employees, which is unacceptable. Like, that's the verges position on online harassment is that's unacceptable. And then he's issued a lot of what I would categorize, like, baby tweets for babies about free speech. Like, like, you took

your first class in college about laws. You're like, here's how America works. And then, like, you have a lot of thoughts about free speech. Like, basically, in that realm of intellectual sophistication. So he's going to buy Twitter. He's obviously getting, and we know this part Elon, there's like an army of boys who send him memes, and then he like looks through the memes and then he like posts whatever memes he wants that he thinks are funny. This is a real thing.

Oh yeah. People send him memes all day, and then he like picks and chooses the memes. Do you think there's a person in the middle? Like does Elon Musk have like a meme triager? No. This dude is in his own DMs all day long. You know it's true. I think it's probably right.

I think that, as those of, all three of us are pretty Twitter-addled. So I feel like we have to just pause and respect the fact that Elon Musk does reply to his own mentions and just to randos in his mentions, which I've seen his mentions. They are a firehose of nonsense. It's wild. I don't know what he's doing in there. I would not be in there if that were my mentions, but good for him. Like, he actually does use the product, which has historically been a problem with Twitter, is that many of the people who lead Twitter do not actually use Twitter. Yeah, I want to end this on like, what is the positive case for Twitter here, which is perhaps someone who cares about the product will be in charge of it.

Sure. But in the meantime, he's saying a lot of things like it should be free speech. If people want their speech restricted, they should ask their legislatures to pass laws. Anything that goes beyond the law is like beyond the will of the people. And I'm, you know, it's like, I can't help it. I'm like hitting reply, like quote tweeting this because my brain is Twitter poisoned. All of its bait. I know it's all bait, but there's something really important to pull apart in that framing of social service, like social media services and free speech.

And like the CEO of Reddit, the former CEO of Reddit, Sean has been tweeting with this endlessly. And then they all end in him hyping his new startup, which is about planting trees sustainably in forests. And you can see how running Reddit made him be like, what I do is now I make forests. But the line for a social media platform cannot be if we screw up at all, there's a legal shit on our platform. Just like imagine running your business on like the bleeding edge of legality. Right. So like it, because we know the content moderation scale is all but impossible. So you're going to screw up.

And really the question is just how much are you going to screw up? So even if you cut it down to like you only screw up half of a percent of the time, if the line that you have drawn is, but that speech is, but that speech is, illegal, you're effed. Because you're no longer falling a foul of the own, of the rules that you made for yourself. You are now running a foul of the law. And it turns out a lot of countries have a lot of laws that are very conflicting with one another. And if you follow one, you're probably breaking another. And this is, it just, it doesn't get easier as time goes on. It's an impossible, even in the United States, and it's an impossible line to draw between I hate the president and boy, I wish the president was dead. Like the context of those statements really matters. They're the things that

the secret service will get involved in. And if you're like, we're just going to follow the law, like, you better know which particular cop in which particular jurisdiction is looking at a tweet on a particular day and saying, your shit's illegal. We're coming to shut your company down. And then you bring that to a country like India, which is made laws that require these companies to have people on the ground in offices, if they want to operate in those countries, specifically, so that they can go to those offices with the cops and threaten them in person if they don't censor things. So like the ruling party in India, the BJP, has basically said there are some journalists we don't like that are critical of us. Take that content down. That's not free speech.

I think we can all agree on that. But that's the law in that country. And if you're like, we're just going to follow the law, now you're putting your employees at risk in that country. And so when I say these are like baby tweets for babies, like the reality of the work in all of the countries in the world means you have to have some buffer away from we made a mistake and the cops are here. There's just there's no way you can do it. Like that's beyond like copyright infringement, right? Like you can post whatever you want on Twitter. But you know what like an important check on your free speech rights is works that other people have copyrighted? And like you can't just share that stuff.

But you don't think about that in the context of the First Amendment. But when you're like, we'll just have the government expand copyright law. Like, you actually end up in that conversation really fast. So I just like all of his tweets about free speech and the political center and pissing off the left and right equally, they're literally the things like freshmen in dorm rooms say that are completely divorced from the reality of running a platform like this at scale. I think also it's maybe worth noting that we've already litigated this with. Twitter? Like, maybe I just have, again, been on Twitter too long, but I remember the Arab Spring, right? Where Twitter, I think, was actually running a foul of some country's laws by allowing activists to organize on their platform. And that was when Dick Costolo, who was the CEO at the time,

declared Twitter to be the, what was it, the free speech wing of the free speech party or something? Yes. It's like half disputed if he actually said it or didn't say it. But he, like, definitely endorsed that statement. And so a couple of years later, we all remember there was GamerGate, which was a big online harassment debacle. And that was sort of the beginning of Twitter, beginning to think differently about what content needs to be moderated, because it turns out that if you're running a social network and you don't moderate it, a lot of people will leave if they have to deal with too many jerks, you know, like, and Twitter's not a big social network. Like, It feels big because there are a lot of journalists and politicians and other sort of gas bags on there.

But, you know, most people are not actually using Twitter. And if it becomes unpleasant to be on Twitter, well, you know, there's TikTok, there's Instagram, there's Facebook. No. That went away. It could come back. Now's the time. Google. This is your moment.

No, Google has YouTube, right? Which they have pivoted. If you really think about YouTube, it is two things. It is the second largest search engine in the world after Google itself. And it is also a very unique kind of social network. Yeah. Right. So there are places you can go.

Like you can go to Reddit. You can go to like places and places and places online because online is infinite. Where if you, if you make Twitter a more unpleasant experience, fewer people will be there. And it will be more of the unpleasant people, which then means that you are running into the problem of, oh, this may be is illegal more often. Yeah. I keep describing it is we have 100%ed the content moderation story at the verge like five times. Like we have started at the beginning and got. got in the end. And Addy was like, this is like DLC for content moderation. Like, let's just

see what happens now. Like, it's all the same. But like, to me, the issue here is that, and it's Elon, and we know he's smart. And we know that he's a great engineer. And he is great at man. He's great at attracting engineering talent and then pushing that engineering talent to do things that other people in the industry won't do at high levels of risk. Human beings are not an engineering problem. And I think he's with a lot of these. tweets and a lot of this idea that, you know, he'll piss off the left and the right equally. He is approaching people in society like you can engineer a solution. And the answer is like you absolutely cannot. You just can't. And if you have this notion that there's a middle,

like today I think he said he wants to optimize happiness for the 80% of the people in the middle, which is another tweet that is pure bait. And I would like everyone to congratulate me for not immediately quote tweeting that tweet and just taking the bait because I thought about it. And I was like, I know what's happening to me. And I went outside and I looked at the grass. Yes. Yes. I did it.

I was like, I'm going to go out there. But if you're like, there's 80% of the people in the middle, you have fundamentally put yourself in the position of deciding where the lines of acceptable discourse are, which is not an engineering solution, right? You are deciding what is the left and what is the far left and what is the right and what is the far right. And if you're making those kinds of calls, you are now definitely a content moderator. You're going to do the job of content moderation. You're going to say this tweet is bad, and I'm going to piss you off. This tweet is good. We're going to let it go. This tweet is great, and I want it to

maximize happiness. And I just don't think that anything that he has said reckons with the idea that this is not an engineering solution. It just cannot be. Like, I don't know, I have a four-year-old. She wants to, like, organize us all the time. She's like, you go here. and you go here and we're like, no, no, no one's going to listen to you. But great leadership, kid. Like, lean in, but like, you're four. Like, we're just not going to listen to you. Like, it's like that. I think he might think it's an engineering problem, though. Like, it seems, the two challenges I always have with Elon Musk are whether to believe him about the things that he tweets, because I'm not, like, much of the time he does not believe the things that he tweets, he just

finds it hilarious to cause a ruckus on Twitter. Yes. That aside, there is clearly a thing. Like, his MO is just like write a thing on a napkin and figure it out, right? He's like, I will tunnel under the earth to fix traffic. And it's like, what? And then he's just like, I'll figure it out. And then like has enough money and cashet and smarts to sometimes figure it out often enough that people keep giving him the things he needs to try. And I have no indication that this is any different from that.

The difference is he's like buying a large thing that already exists. Like it would be very interesting. I almost wish he had decided to pour $44 billion. million dollars into starting a new social network and like watch him try to reckon with all this stuff from the ground up because I think it would go really differently. Whereas in this case, he has to take a thing that exists and has structures and expectations and people who use it and people who work there and rules and decide whether to blow it to bits or not.

Because I just don't, I don't know what other choice he's going to have here at some point. I would say that we have tracked a lot of these social networks that have started from the ground up, the parlors, the truth socials. They all end up in the same place. They all start with Twitter is bad. They censor us too much. And then they all publish a terms of service. And then they all realize like, oh, crap, like the bad guys are here.

The spam bots are here. Like the porno guys are here. We have to cut our terms of service down to moderate some of this bad behavior that keeps regular people from using the platform. And so you're just kind of immediately in a place where if your line is what is legal, you have created infinite risk for yourself. because it turns out you don't control everybody in the platform. I just interviewed the chief innovation officer of the TSA and decoder. And I was like, what's with the checkline? Why am I taking?

And he's like, we can't just have a goal line defense. But if your line is what is legal and what is not, and then you've got moderators and AI and whatever, like you have only a goal line defense between you and infinite liability because you don't control the people. So then all of these services, true social gab parlor, they all ended up in another place, which is like we have some rules.

And then the rules kind of keep escalating. And no one uses. our product. And no, it uses the product, because once you have the same rules as Twitter, you've lost your differentiation. Right. Your Twitter minus people being there. So we're talking about engineers and people here. And one of the things that I think is underappreciated, this is maybe the spiciest thing I'm about, like the thing I'm about to say is maybe the spiciest thing I've ever said on the verge cast, which is saying something. But if you're thinking about what happens when engineers try to deal with people, fundamentally what we're talking about is the USSR.

where the engineers built a nice system for communism and the people didn't really follow it. And so the people were rounded up and killed. And like, I'm not kidding. If you look at the government of the USSR historically, like it was a surprising number of engineers, like a surprising number. And so one of the things that I think a lot of other platforms have gotten really smart about is discovering that there are people with PhDs in sociology and other helpful humanities and soft sciences. and hiring them to figure out what people are actually doing on their service and how to cultivate that into a healthier kind of place to be. Because you don't control the people, but you can, for instance, create environments that encourages them not to constantly dunk on each other. You know, you can encourage better social interactions.

And so as you're thinking about this as a problem, like this isn't a problem you solve with engineering. It is maybe a problem you can solve social engineering, but those are two entirely different things. Yeah. By the way, I would say that's a good point at the Soviet Union. It is also true that no matter what system of governing human behavior you devise, they'll all work if everyone will just do everything you say. Like literally the problem is no one will ever do what you say. Right? Would there be, would we have had a pandemic if everyone would have just listened for a while?

Like, no. But like mostly we just didn't listen. Yeah. Like, that's the answer. So, I think, like, Elon's just going to run into the reality of human nature. Sure, it's a private company. He might be able to control the employees. But fundamentally, he's not going to control the users.

I want to say one more thing in our producer, Liam, who, by the way, is the person who opened the show today. That was him on the cold open. Liam is telling me that we're beating a dead horse. I want to say, actually, two more things. One, Elon keeps saying he's going to open source the algorithm, which it's a fine thing to say. it will not accomplish what I think people want it to because he's also going to change it. So, like, you can open source the existing one, but he wants to change it and reduce the moderation.

Also, like, just publishing the algorithm so people can see what it's doing is not actually open sourcing it. But he's not going to release it under some free software license so that Parlor can then use the Twitter algorithm and contribute back to it, like Unix or something. It's just like we're just lost in like a flurry of definitions here that mean nothing. I also want to say, like, this does nothing. Can I just be, like, this does nothing. Like, even, like, let's say it is open source in the best possible way, right? Like, the question that you as an ordinary user who is not a programmer or familiar with this kind of algorithm is like, why, why am I being shown this thing? And the code will not help you.

It won't help you. It won't help you. Yeah. The system has to help you because we have to execute it. Well, and we have overwhelming evidence that says even the people who make those algorithms don't understand how they work. Yes. Like I wrote it and I don't know why it's showing you that tweet. Like that, how am I supposed to understand as the user?

Twitter just like this today, as we are like today, Twitter said that it had overstated its number of users for three years. Like they just counted wrong for three years. Okay. Yeah. These people are the people who wrote the code. They're the people who know it the best. And like they still aren't getting it right. So that just like there's a part of me that's like what you want is a button that says why didn't my tweet do numbers.

and a lot of times the answer is going to be because no one gives a shit. And like I know, again, poisoned by Twitter, right? I know that if I launch some spicy dunk on Elon Musk, it's going to do great. If I'm like, here's some backwards corner or trademark law that just inch towards a new kind of, like, I know it's not going to do well. Like the answer is like no one gives a shit most of the time. Yep. So we'll see if open sourcing the code and getting that button are related, but I think right now they're not. The last thing I want to say, and this is really.

important to me. Elon has directed harassment towards Twitter employees, particularly Vigad, who is the head of policy at Twitter. He's posted memes of her. He's responded to articles where, I mean, she worked at Twitter for like nine, ten years. And our company sold out from under her to a guy who thinks her work is worthless. So she was emotional in the meeting. Elon responded to it and said one of her big decisions with, by the way, Jack Dorsey oversaw, which was blocking the New York Post from posting the Hunter Biden laptop story, which, again, I point out, Twitter said that decision was wrong and then changed the policy. It's a real thing that happened.

But he's targeting her. And so her mentions are garbage. And it's full of harassment. It's full of stuff that, like, you know, it's full of people saying go back to India, which is like a thing that I get from time and time. But what's true, and it's like an iron law of internet harassment, bullies after always pick on women and they always pick on women of color. And Jack Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter and oversaw all those decisions and was in all those rooms. And he's not picking on Jack. he's picking on her.

And I just think if you work at Twitter, and she was seen as one of the few adults in that entire stack of crazy that was like running a real program that was trying to make it better, and then you guys picking on her and not Jack, who was her boss,

who was in charge this whole thing, that's not a good sign. And like, that behavior is unacceptable. And like, he should, I know he's a troll and I know he's goblin mode. But like, that's the red flag of like, you're a bad person

when you do shit like this because you know what's, going to happen. And I don't think he cares, and I don't think this is going to convince him. Maybe some Elon Stans will yell at me in my mentions. But that sign right there is the sign that whatever Twitter turns into next will be more of that and not the thing that he wants, which is 80% of the people being happier. It drives me crazy. Sorry. Okay. There's like a positive case that he'll like take it over and like we'll all realize that working for Elon for free is a bad thing. And we'll all stop using Twitter. We'll all start using Twitter less and like more social networks will

flourish, but we'll see. Before we let you go, Liz, you wrote about the other subculture on the internet that we love the most, which is Bitcoin. Tell us with that. Oh, yeah. So I was at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami Beach. I had a weird time, man. I had a real weird time. Because, you know, cryptocurrency is more mainstream, I think, than it's ever been. People got into NFTs. And I thought, okay, well, you know, all of this comes from Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoin was, was the first one from which everything else comes. So I went to the Bitcoiners conference thinking, like, you know, I might, I might see some enthusiasm, especially because, you know, we'd seen with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, people actually did use cryptocurrency to transfer money to get money out of Ukraine, to

donate. I was like, ready for there to be a big victory lap for the, uses of non-state currency and what happens when you don't need a bank. And instead, everyone seemed real mad, like, real mad that people were getting into crypto and not Bitcoin. And they didn't, you know, seem super happy or welcoming. So I was really surprised by that because I thought, you know, there would be sort of a maybe a bigger tent. Like, oh, you've all gotten into crypto. Well, the best crypto is Bitcoin. Like, that felt like the sales pitch to me, but that was not the sales pitch I saw. So please go read this on Theverge.com.

I spent a lot of time on it, and I hope you like it. It's a great story. Also, this got to give it a lot of parties, which is really. And I will say that dynamic where, like, for years I heard, and I'm sure you heard the same thing, Liz, that there was this feeling that, like, it was like Web3, blockchain, crypto, Bitcoin, like, call it whatever the hell you want. There was like a rising tide lifts all boats, things, right? They were just like, we're here to blow things up.

And now it's like, it's like, it's. splintering and everybody, everybody believes in their own strand of the future and is furious at all the other people who disagree. And now I get, I get people who are like, why would you even cover Bitcoin? Solana is the only way forward. And I'm just like, I can't, I can't do this yet. I'm not ready for this yet. There's a real cyclical nature to a lot of techniques right now. But you should read the piece. Liz did get to go to a lot of parties. Yeah. And I mean, like, the other thing is that I just want to mention here is that this is an internet community, right? Like, you know, if you're transacting in the dollar and you're in the U.S., like, that's just like

what you pay your taxes in and what your boss pays you in and all of that. But like, if you're in Bitcoin, you're there because you chose to be there. Like, this is an imagined community. And so the strength of the community actually really matters. And that was part of the reason why I went to so many parties. So invite me to your parties. Let me see your community. I love to go to parties. I love it. Well, Liz, thank you so much. We got to take a break. We'll be back with Alex Heath. That's in a minute. We'll be 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. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to website design. Their Design Studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help?

Then no worries, because you're never left to fend for yourself. Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over.

There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories, so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours,

especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. Okay.

We're back. Alex Heath is here. Hey, Alex. Hey, you've had an eventful week flying tiny drones. But right before you came on, Apple's quarterly earnings dropped. Hey, everybody. Apple's doing great. Third best quarter ever.

So we got to talk about that real fast. Then I want to talk with a trend. David, take us to the numbers real quick. Yeah, so the basic numbers are Apple continues to make deeply hilarious amounts of money at pretty much everything itself. It did $97.28 billion in the quarter. That was about $4 billion over what it was expected to make. iPhones are up.

Services are up, but about as much up as Wall Street expected. So it's just climbing the way it's supposed to. The other products revenue is up from a year ago, but down from what Wall Street expected. I don't know what the hell to make of that. The one that's most fascinated me is the iPad revenue is actually down from a year ago, while the Mac continues to just, like, go through the roof. Like, the M1 Mac seems to have just totally, like,

breathed life back into computing. They made about $10.5 billion from the Mac in the last quarter, and about $7.5 billion from the iPad in the last quarter. So, again, all gigantic amounts of money. their gross margin is 43%, which is ridiculous, and Apple continues to make all of the money you can possibly imagine so much money in fact that they actually authorized a $90 billion share buyback on the stock, because that's just what you do when you have all the cash in the known universe is.

You take your own company private. Exactly. One quarter at a time. Funding secured. Yeah. Funding is secured, actually. Yeah. So I think the only one to really pull out there is I've had, like, you just kind of

look at the numbers, right? The iPhone is getting ready for a refresh. Yeah, it feels right. The Mac, totally revitalized. The Macbook pros are great. I mean, their only problem there really, and again, these numbers just dropped, so we haven't quite heard the earnings call yet, is whether they have enough chips. And you kind of look across the industry right now, it's getting harder to buy everything. For sure. But Apple has been, at least, as far as we can tell from the earnings, more resilient to that than most. It's like, I mean, Tim Cook remains the supply chain wizard of the universe. And even they have said it's been a challenge,

but it's not hitting them the way it seems to be hitting some other companies. Yeah, but that feels like, right now it's like really hard to buy a Mac Studio. Right. It's just like kind of just down the line. It's hard to buy the iPad mini. So there's just like a bunch of places

in their product portfolio where it's hard to buy stuff. But I will point out the iPad down, was down year every year, 14% revenue last quarter, down 2% this quarter. We've talked about this kind of endlessly. It doesn't feel like the iPad thesis

is getting stronger or more focused? Agreed. Just more expensive. And I think part of the challenge for the iPad has been that it is like it's creeping up in price. It's getting more and more powerful. The technology is incredible. But like the explanation for why a person should own an iPad basically has never changed. And at some point, those two things that are just going to run into each other. And it like truly my my hottest take about the iPad is you go, you look at the iPad, you play with an iPad pro and a magic keyboard.

And then you say, wait, how much does this cost? And then you buy a MacBook Air. I believe that to my bones, that it's like if you just want a nice keyboard and a screen and long battery life, can I introduce you to an M1 MacBook Air? There's my response to that. It's not really about that specifically, but Alex Cranes will be on the show later, keeps threatening to shift the verge to air table from Asana. And I'm like, that's great, but I'm the boss. So I just need to use Outlook on an iPad because that's what bosses do. And like, that's the entire argument for an iPad is like, your boss.

or like the CEO of your company needs a computer that's so dumb that all I can do is use Outlook on his iPad on like a plane and that's how most that's that's the market for iPad. So that you can send two word emails with no capitalization and no punctuation that just says things like thoughts

or question mark that's really good. I've never just sent the question mark in Slack I've never sent an email. I'm going to start. Yeah, it's like four year olds watching a Disney Plus and then like masters of the universe and that's the iPad market. But yeah, I mean Apple's doing great. I think I'm constantly watching the C that services revenue line is really important, right?

Yeah. It's the future of the business as iPhone slows down and iPhone continues to slow down. But there's like regulators swirling. Yeah, I mean, and for now it's on like I think what you would track is like a pretty good trend line. It just continues to grow at a relatively steady, healthy clip. It's growing faster than Facebook. I'll tell you that much. Yeah, there you know.

You know, just also want to point out the Apple cloth, you know, really crushing it. way up over expectations. Margins are insane. Martins are like 70%. That's true. The rest of Apple's margins are like 10% and the cloth is like 96 and so it evens out. It's actually like, you're right, it's like 96%.

Well, you all don't know about Alex Heath as he started his career. It's like a hardcore Apple blogger. So give us your insight, man. I'm rusty. I'm rusty. We'll do a few more of these. All right. So that's Apple.

We got to talk about it drop right as we started. But what we actually have Alex here to talk about is the new Snapixie drone. You also spend some time with Evan Spiegel. This drone looks delightfully fun. Yeah, it's cute. I would say that was the, we were shooting at a really cool museum slash arcade thing here in L.A. Viren and I, and the reaction we heard from the person, you know, manning the front desk was like cute. And like we heard that a couple times as we were taking it out and trying it.

And yeah, this is not going to light the world. on fire, but it's, it's a self-flying drone that takes off from your hand, lands back in your hand, does that reliably well. It doesn't have great camera, great battery life, but I think also kind of represents what Snap does consistently, which is like Trojan horsing big ideas into really toys. That's one of the things I'm curious about. And A, I just want to point out before we get too far away from it, that the fact that someone looked at a drone and said it was cute is like a massive accomplishment for example. Just that alone is. That alone is. is something special. But I think part of what I have always been fascinated about with Snap is they

like fully buy into this idea that like if we just start with stuff that's fun, we'll sort of figure out all the serious world changing stuff to do with it later. Where did this one start in that front? Like Evan kind of made it sound to you when you guys were talking like it was just sort of a goofy thing somebody made one day. Yeah. I mean, they have been thinking and wanting to do a drone for so many years and that may not be like obvious to people. And I asked Evan like why now. And he was like literally just like, we finally got to a place where we were like, this is good enough. We should probably just release it. So they'd been tinkering with it.

And they actually looked at buying this Chinese drone company called Zero Zero Robotics around the time of the IPO. And they bought another small drone company many years ago. They've had teams working on this. That's right. There have been rumors about this forever. I forgot about that. Yeah. I contributed.

I was kind of the main contributor to those rumors over the years. It's not obvious, right? I mean, this is primarily an app that sends disappearing photos and text. And so why would you do a drone? And that's kind of what we got into when I talked to Evan. What was the case for it? Well, they call themselves a camera company. And that's kind of like meta, calling itself a metaverse company when that doesn't exist.

Except I think in Snap's case, it does actually exist. It's just not how you traditionally think of like a camera company, right? This isn't like canon. You know, Evan made the point that he always makes that Snap opens to the camera. That is a choice for a social media app to do, to not open to a feed or even your chat history, which is the main reason people use Snap. It's always open to a camera. And as we kind of got into it, I realized I think that thesis is because the camera is kind of increasingly become how people express themselves, especially through mobile phones. And so Evans' original insight was cameras were being used to capture memories, uploading into albums on Facebook later or whatever.

and with, you know, really around the iPhone 3G, really when, like, smartphone cameras started getting pretty good, they became used for talking, right? As he said. And now he's saying, you know, the camera is an AR tool and he's really gung-ho on air glasses. And the drone is just a different camera perspective that does what a smartphone can't, which is, like, capture you without, you know, your handout and without you needing to hold a phone. It's not obvious, but, you know, Snap consistently does stuff that's not super obvious at first. Yeah, I mean, and I guess, I don't know. I think you've used spectacles a bunch too, and I think I've used it intermittently. And it's like, I feel like with all of these snap experiments, my thought is always like,

okay, I get it. The goal is to like find new ways to capture sort of new perspectives of your life, right? And it's like the spectacles was like the inside out version of that where like you can see what I see. The drone is the sort of outside in thing. But I just keep coming back to like part of the appeal of the phone as a camera is you already have it there with you. And the AR glasses thing is a big enough lift on its own because it's another thing.

you have to, but then, like, you, you were wearing the drone like a, like a sash. It was, like, clipped around you. And I'm just like, ah. That's a little drone purse. Yeah, I loved it. I mean, fanny packs are a thing. I think, yeah, if you're like on, I could see you taking this on a hike, you know, I didn't have it.

I went to Joshua Tree around the time that Snap reached out about this and I didn't have, it didn't work out where I was able to take it. But I would totally take it for something like that. Or just even, like, at a party, like getting a group shot, it's really, because of just how it just like literally comes out of your hand and just goes up and comes back. And it's just not intimidating. Evan talked a lot about how, like, they spent a lot of time on the propeller design because they wanted it to have a friendly noise.

Everything about this device was like, let's make it as friendly and cute as possible, which, like you said, drones, you know, are, you know, and Evan said this too, like, they're mostly thought of as, like, dangerous. They're like things you need permits for. And this is still technically a regulated drone, but it weighs like 100 grams. I mean, it's like something you can literally put in your pocket. Yeah, I have a Mavik Mini, which is. friendly you know and like I just took it on a trip and I took it out and I flew it and like all the

kids ran away. I was like the whole point of this was taking pictures of you. Like all the children just like scattered. They're like that's not as cool as I hoped it was. And this thing is like cute and like we have this incredible video montage of you holding its hand. Yeah. Which like maybe one of the best videos ever made just to get it back. You have to like wave at it. Yeah. So there's just like a lot of video of you of like Alex like gesturing like with like love. in your eyes because it's cute it's great David I think to your point about sacticals I have this thesis which I've been like working out in the show for years now which is the second you put a computer on my body it's got to do a lot of stuff right and so like

even the first generation Apple Watch I was like I don't like I have to care for this piece of junk now like it doesn't do anything and now like you know they rebooted it around the third generation they made the interface better they focused it on like fitness and notifications they just made that product deliver a ton of value to you in exchange for you having a charge of a bunch and literally strap it to your wrist. And the wrist was like already a place where you accepted a gadget. So they were ahead of the curve and even then it was like pretty hard.

Every time you put on spectacles or any of these other glasses, the Facebook glasses or whatever, it's like, I gotta wear this thing on my face to use it. Like that's too much. And I think that's why everyone thinks AR or mixed reality will overcome that hurdle, whereas having a tiny cute drone with you, it's just like in your bag. And it might be one other kind of camera, but Alex, it does seem like they're successful in sort of dramatically reducing the cost of having this thing around. Yeah, absolutely. I think, and Spiegel agreed with me

that this thing is going to have more of an appeal than, than spectacles. They already sold out, I think, on their website. It's now notify me instead of being able to place an order. And Evan was like, we probably should have made more. We just kind of underestimated demand for this thing. And also, like, the supply chain got crazy. So they probably just didn't make enough. And they haven't even really committed internally to, like, future versions and, like, the contours of exactly what that will look like. But this is really just, like, an experiment for them.

And that's kind of how spectacles started. And it was interesting. Actually, we talked about spectacles because I also tried their new AR spectacles last year. We did a big story on the verge about that. And you can't buy those. So those are only being seated by Snap to AR lens makers. So Snap's kind of quietly making this divestals. developer ecosystem around this device that people can't even buy yet. We were talking about camera

glasses specifically, right? So V1 of spectacles with the just shoot stuff and don't have displays in them. And now meta has the Rayband stories. And Evan's point was actually interesting. He was like, you know, we basically realized after doing a couple versions of just camera glasses that the market for these things is actually very, very small. And it's constrained to like hardcore enthusiasts who just really want a first person POV of something. It's just not something that like most people want. It doesn't clear that barred entry. And, you know, he thinks like this drone is potentially a little more attractive to like, I hate using the word normal people, but, you know, people who wouldn't want to wear cameras on their glasses necessarily. It's like existence is much more fun in the sense

that like if I'm standing there using my spectacles, you as a person I'm with get nothing from the experience, whereas like a fun drone that flies around and lands on my hand is like a neat thing for everyone around, which I think kind of goes a long way, especially. if it's not big and scary and going to injure me. But my worry about it is like just from a pure like gadget perspective, it just kind of sounds like it sucks. Like the camera, it seems to be fine, I guess good enough for like the kinds of things that you're doing.

But the battery doesn't last that long. It's thin and light, which makes me think it'll probably like break or fly away in a stiff breeze. I don't know. Like as an actual thing, like it's, a lot of money to pay for sort of a silly novelty you can show twice. But like, as an actual, like gadget people might buy and use for real, like, how do you think it stacks up? I see using a max once a month, I mean, unless you are a YouTuber or like a hiking enthusiast that wants to

capture every. Dude, this is like the ultimate TikTok dance on the side of a mountain camera. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Right? You like, you carry it up there. It's small and light. It's cheap. It's what, two and 30 bucks? Yeah. Right. And you like fire it off and then you like do some social media stuff. I mean, like, you don't have to pilot this thing, which is the greatest part. Like, it tracks your face, and it just has these, like, six pre-programmed flight patterns, like an aerial or reveal, like kind of the normal stuff. And it works. It's just, it's reliably works.

Like, the fact that it's that light and works and doesn't just, like, not track you correctly is an achievement. You're right. Like, the quality of the camera is not amazing, but it's great on. It's fine, I would say, on a mobile phone. You don't want to look at it on, like, a TV. But you're going to, like, auto-crop this vertical and share it on a story anyway. It's not going to be seen in, you know, more than 1080 p. This breaks my heart.

But I mean, we've just lowered the expectations of quality across the board. We're like super compressed audio, but now there's more channels. By the way, this video quality is great, but it's in the sky. Like, help. Yeah. All you're doing is sharing it with your friends. Who cares how it looks? And, you know, it's something that really just struck me, like, writing this and talking to,

I talked to Evan a couple times for this is like, Snap is just really over in its own lane. And it's really just actually focused on, like, making people. people feel good. And like, I feel like that's a quality in social media companies that we don't see anymore. And, like, Twitter is consumed with Elon, free speech, like, all these very, you know, what Neil I was just talking about, all these really big topics that are very, like, serious. Facebook is very serious and also trying to will this thing into existence to, like, get out of the pressure that it's under right now. It snaps over here just like, here's a drone. Here's a cute little drone. And, like, oh, by the way, we're growing faster than Facebook and we have more

users is on Twitter and you never talk about us. So they're just this very like fascinating company and Evan tends to like buck trends or do things early that then everyone copies. So they're always something I pay attention to. Well, and he was also kind of throwing shade on what meta is doing in particular, right? Like to you and it seems like to others, like he is not quiet about how he feels about the metaverse. He's not a metaverse fan. No, they're there, he's really influenced by this concept that Snap actually had this in-house philosopher named Nathan Jurgison who has this thing called, yeah, called digital dualism, which is just this idea that like, you know, the digital world and real world aren't actually separate. They're blended and like good tech will blend

those together in like a human way. And AR is like it's, you know, he was talking about like the camera is important for us to focus on because it's like egocentric. It's how you view the world. And we think wearable technology will increasingly become egocentric looking through the camera. So it's just positioning where he thinks like the puck is going, so to speak, knock on wood. in terms of like that. Well, David, you had this, it was about Twitter, but I think it's actually really applicable to Snapchat. You're like, Twitter's solution is to become a messaging app and act like a messaging app.

And Snap is still, like the core of it is still a messaging app. Yep. Yeah. Where stuff goes away. And it does have a feed. It has Discover. It has partnerships inside of Discover. I feel like somewhere in Box Media, there's a partnership with Discover, so I will now disclose.

Probably at a company of our scale, there's a partnership with Snap Discover. I don't know what it is, but take that for what it's where. Right. There's publishers in it. There's content in it. There is an algorithmic feed that you can kind of go into and like find stuff. But the heart of it, you open to a camera and it's a messaging app for your friends. And they can stay in that lane. And then they can do the advertising growth in the algorithmic discover feed that grows their revenue over time. But they're not distracted by it in the way that the Twitter's and the Facebooks are. No, because they're also not really focused on it. I think the long term focus is these AR lenses, which started again. And like I write in the story about that. this Eames quote that Snap uses a lot, toys or preludes to serious ideas, but like these air lenses that started as like vomiting rainbows and puppy dog ears, now can like solve a math problem. They can like let you buy clothing in a lens. They can send someone to a creator's website. You can see where this is going. They're going to be full-fledged advertisements. They're going to be

commerce engines. And guess what? Snap has camera kit where it's putting all these lenses across all these devices. So like Samsung integrated in the camera, the Google Pixel, for example, that's all just like discovery for their AR inventory. And they're kind of inventing this AR advertising engine that I don't think people fully appreciate yet. And when that all kind of like clicks, it's, I think it's going to be one of those moments again where it's like the stories moment where everyone's like, oh, that actually was like an original idea that now everyone is going to copy. I think what Snap has figured out is how to let people talk to their friends and then find these like non-invasive and in some cases actually useful ways to get in the middle of that.

And that's what Snap is trying to do with shopping where like now I can, you know, virtually try on clothes and send them to my friends to see what they think. And that's like a real thing that people do. And instead of just saying, you know, here's a new tab where you can buy stuff and trying to create a new destination for you to shop, they're like finding ways to do this incredibly sticky thing, which is let people talk to other people, and then be a part of that in these, like, additive ways that also make them a lot of money. And I think that's going to work. Yeah, it's very tactile, whereas meta's over here, like, I'm literally going to invent something that won't exist for

a decade, and I'm going to build an entire platform from scratch. Snap's very, like, iterative, focusing on the building blocks. And they're, they're doing it actually ahead of everyone. So, like, they already have, like, a developer ecosystem around air glasses. I just reported meta won't have its first real air glasses until 2024 where they'll start maybe trying to get some developers engaged. So again, Snap's like ahead and it's a matter of whether that will give them like the actual strategic advantage. They've shown that they can be very durable as a business and they're doing well. So I think we should give them a little credit. But I mean, it's it's also like this stuff is early. I mean, they say AR is already here with Snap, but I don't think people think of it

that way. And the point about it being tactile is like a good one. Like just from like a gadget perspective, It's a tiny drone that can't fly very well in the wind. It shoots pretty oversharpened 2.7K video. The colors in that arcade you were in, it was just like, I don't know. Alex is red now, right? Like from a pure, the battery only lasts 20 minutes, we think, they won't say. It appears to be 20 minutes. Like from that perspective, you're like, oh, this gadget's fine.

But then from just like you back it out, you're like, what do people want to do? They want to make the stuff they see. right and so you get these like kind of shots are like you know it's i think it's wild that like half the kids in america have like ring lights in their house now right like you're backing out into a tool that lets you accomplish a big sweeping shot or you can be someplace and you can't put a tripod there but this drone will help you get the shot you want and it's cheap and it's accessible and it's fun to use and like the user interface and the top is a dial instead of software menus and buttons that right there is a huge innovation in drone interface technology right they just made that thing

friendlier than any other drone I've ever seen. And so you kind of back at ass you like, this is on pure gadget terms, it's not great. But as a tool that lets a lot of people make a thing that they were not able to make easily before and it's cheap and accessible and fun. And if you break it, you're probably not going to like hate yourself. Like that's kind of incredible. And very few of the other companies, save TikTok, have realized making it easier to make stuff makes a lot of people like you. Yes, that's exactly it. It's focused on creating. Whereas Facebook and Twitter are really focused on consumption and then like how do I get you to like consume more and that's a very different worldview that Snap's always had that I think sets it apart and just to like get to like kind of the you know we've talked a lot about this I think looking ahead. Yeah, this is like a goofy little fun thing. But you know drones are already being used for pretty advanced 3D mapping of the real world right which can then have all kinds of AR implications right. You want your AR game in a park with some. someone using the glasses who's elsewhere to look real and have occlusion and depth,

but maybe that area is not mapped. What if you could fly a pixie up, map it, and it comes back to you, right? There's a lot of ideas in here that could tie directly. You know, I just reported that Snap bought a mind reading headband company in France that they eventually want to integrate into the spectacles. Like controlling this thing literally with your thoughts is like not out of the realm of possibility, even as weird as that sounds. And I actually tried to get into this with Evan, and it was the only time in the interview when he went off the record because he recognizes that other people in tech Zuckerberg are watching what they're doing and copying it, obviously, down to like renaming companies now.

And he didn't want to say like what the long-term strategic thing of this is on the record. So we're left to wonder. Alex is like, but I know. But I know. Yeah. One of the things that I think is interesting about that, though, is, One thing Snap does not have a good track record for so far is getting things out of the toy phase. It's really good at making fun toys.

But like it has it has struggled to get older users. It has struggled to find other use cases for spectacles. This is a toy. And I think like one thing I think like I've been looking for for a long time is like when does that turn? The shopping stuff. The shopping stuff you wrote about. That's a step in that direction, I think for sure. But like it seems to me at least so far like Snap's user base is aging.

with it in a really powerful way. Like, people are not leaving Snapchat as they get older. But I'm not sure that, like, people who were not previously using Snapchat because they were too old for it are coming back. And maybe Snapjust doesn't care. No, they lost the Instagram stories generation and they know that. But they've still got this incredible beachhead with, like, 17 to 24-year-olds that's, like, honestly unrivaled in the social landscape.

And they're growing mostly internationally. So, like, they're huge in the Middle East right now, growing huge still in, like, Europe, parts of Europe, South America. And they're following like almost the Facebook playbook in that way, like focusing on Android, carrier deals, that sort of thing. And the idea of the product, ephemeral messaging, right, with like a cool creative component is like a, that's an idea that people all around the world, I think, resonate with clearly in their growth numbers. Because all their growth is coming from outside of North America mostly right now. I would say that that focus on young users also keeps them fully away from all of the politics noise around social media regulations. Yeah.

Right. If you're like, we're for kids, your expectations are content moderation, like, from the jump. No one's like, Snapchat should be a politically neutral Twitter warfare situation. You're like, no, this is kids. Like, we are going to pay attention to everything that happens on this platform in a serious way so that your kids can use it. And I think that's like, it's really insulated them from a lot of noise. Well, it's also the product design. They don't have like a feed.

They don't have a feed of like your crazy uncle and Trump and us and everyone else like all together, right? They have Discover, which is a feed. They have Spotlight, which is their TikTok competitor. I'm curious about kind of content things that will happen there and if they'll get any pressure there. But the core product is ephemeral. It's WhatsApp. It's ephemeral chats. Like, WhatsApp doesn't get caught up in a lot of this either on the content side because you can't see it.

Right. And so that's the product design, the choice they made. And Evan has told me this over the years. Like, we just studied U.S. law. And it's like, if you're going to broadcast to millions of people in the U.S., you have to meet certain regulations. And you can and can't say certain things. And you may be sued for defamation and all these things.

And they designed the product kind of to mimic how humans have already kind of structured how we should be able to talk to each other. Whereas Facebook was like, yeah, you want to talk to millions of people? Go for it. We'll figure it out later. And so it's just a different philosophy. So the drone is cool. It's hard to get. I would say, you know, the toy conversation around the drone is really interesting because that's usually what you say about like new categories of products.

But this is a toy inside of a deeply mature product where, like, like the XFL has drones on the field following kickoffs. Like entire movies are shot on drones. Nothing says mature product like the XFL. You know what I mean? It's just like there's like really expensive Hollywood drone ops. Like the category is well beyond these are all toys. But this one is a toy.

It could lead to much more potentially their stuff. Let's talk about meta real quick because they just had their earnings. You cover them closely. I noticed I did a command. on the earnings report, the word metaverse is only in there once. If you look at the transcript, it's in there 11 times, but mostly analysts being like, Mark, what's up with the metaverse? He said this really interesting thing.

He said, the metaverse is positioned to have a great year in 2030, which is amazing. Hopefully we're still doing the first broadcast in 2030. We can come back to this. It has been eight years since Mark said the metaverse would have a great year. They're under a lot of pressure, right? They're doing okay. They beat expectations. They're just spending a ton of money and something that's not going to pay off.

They're the kings of sandbagging guidance for earnings. So they basically just cleared a very low hurdle that they set themselves. But yeah, I mean, the thing that stuck out the most to me was him saying we're going to slow our investments, which is like, you know, he came out with us. And then Casey before in the year last year saying like, I'm going all in the metaverse. I'm going to spend $10 billion. And then it's going to ramp up every year forever, basically, right? And it's like burning the boats, we're spending it all.

Like, this is it. And the tone on this call, like you said, Metaverse was mentioned once. He started at saying, like, we are taking a, he talked about like, you know, business strategy and like margins and stuff you don't usually hear Zuckerberg talking about. And that's because the business is like, if you would have gone back to like 2015 and done all this, I think the investing community would have given him a much longer leash here. But like they just reported their slowest revenue growth since they went. public. Last quarter, they lost daily users for the first time in the Blue App. So they're just under tremendous just core pressure to the business from Apple, from TikTok, et cetera. And so spending all this money on this thing that he is saying openly will not really be meaningful for

a decade has investors nervous. And the stock is down almost 50% since the meta rebrand. And that kind of says it all to me. And so yeah, it's that tricky balance. And I wrote about this when I wrote about their AR glasses roadmap recently. This is the great test of, you know, how much leash does he have to do something like this and invest at this scale when like the first product in 2024 is going to be a niche, you know, very expensive thing. And they're not even expecting to have low tens of millions until like almost the end of this decade in terms of like smart classes. And that's like a question still of margins. It's like, are you actually making money on that? Like, where's the economy around that? It's just an it's a, it's an unprecedented pivot. He did say one thing.

that I thought was fascinating on this. And you've reported this before, but he actually is like, they're saying now, they want the product to replace your laptop. Yes. So that's Cambria, this high-end mixed-reality headset that's coming later this year, that, by the way, Apple's headset will work very similar to, in terms of mixed reality, having, like, the ability to pass-through video, high, like color, high-fidelity pass-through.

And yeah, they do see, and I've talked to, you know, Michael Igerbrash, their head of research and others about this, They do see VR hitting that kind of like desktop, laptop curve in terms of sales in the coming years. And the bet is that AR glasses will be mobile level scale eventually. But again, that's like a decade. Their only move in the middle seems to be reels. Like, I get the distinct sense that the next five years is just going to be Mark Zuckerberg yelling reels as loudly as he can on every earnings call. And that's the stories thing all over again.

And I actually have pretty good faith that they'll figure the real thing out. And that thing will recover. The real threat to blue is using young people and the fact that their user base is dying, you know, literally. And so that's the main. I mean, yeah, that's the main problem they have is and they can't buy the next snap. They can't buy Discord. They can't buy TikTok. And so they have to actually invent stuff.

And, you know, I'm being a little mean. They do invent stuff. But I think Reels is the bet for the short term. That is the monetization. And like, because they said that video accounted for over half of time spent in the blue app already, which like means the blue app is kind of already become YouTube to a degree, which like like a shittier version of YouTube. I don't know if you guys have looked at the watch section of Facebook. No. It's bleak.

No, thank you. Yeah. And one of the users they lost. But especially like as they're able to build all this stuff across all the different apps, I think you're right, that just on sheer like audience size alone, they're going to figure out how to make reels work. Yeah. You can spend the plates enough and put new things out enough to like. keep things going. It's just a matter of like that lost generation I wrote about when the Facebook papers came out because they had all this data where like young people just are skipping

it. They're just not getting on Facebook and that's that's the real. Because they're on Snapchat and TikTok. That's where they are. Discord. Yeah. Exactly. I see a lot of TikToks now that are like screenshots of Instagram stories. I'm like this is getting weird. The snake is eating its tail now. Yeah. And Instagram is just reconstituting itself as real all over the place. Like I see it. I just I think a challenge for all of them is they're competing against TikTok, which is a ghost, right? Like, I don't know if TikTok makes money.

I don't know if Bytance is subsidizing that whole thing. I don't know if they're holding back at inventory. Like, who knows? Like, maybe the Chinese government is just propping up TikTok to slowly destroy faith. Like, we don't, we just like can't see into the revenue of that company because it's not a public company in the United States the way that these ones are.

You guys remember when the Trump stuff was happening with TikTok and they were like, we're going to set up an algorithmic Transparency Center where you can come in and look at the algorithm. Yeah, they open source the algorithm. That's what happens. Yeah, they were the original open sourcing the algorithm that didn't happen. But speaking to the algorithm and then maybe we can move on is that Mark actually spent

a lot of time in this call talking about how he's basically going to crib the TikTok algorithm and that's the future of like algorithmic consumption online, which is they, at Facebook, they call it unconnected content, meaning it's not a friend that's sharing this. It's just something random that AI is recommending. But he's basically saying we want to attract all the top AI minds who aren't already working at TikTok to build this thing, which is going to be basically our version of this. And that was TikTok's original insight, was that you didn't have to load your friend graph or with Twitter, follow a bunch of stuff to see stuff. It was just like recommending things to you constantly and getting smarter as it went. And that's where he was saying the blue app is going.

So I think we can expect to see the blue app really start to look more like a random kind of learning. what people want from Facebook. Yeah, can't wait. The ability to go arbitrarily viral with stuff that you thought you were sharing to your friends. Yeah, that's, yeah.

I don't know. That to me is like one of those, people sign up for TikTok knowing that they're in the virality casino. And like, that's a change on par with like, people thought the news feed was a big deal when it was still just your friends. But it was just a list of all the stuff your friends are posting.

This making Facebook a virality casino is infinitely more dangerous. I love. Virality casino. Virality casino. That's a slot machine. Yeah. So let's see what happens. And like TikTok is like sometimes you get money when that happens.

Like yeah, there's literally the dynamics of the platform. All right. We got to take a break. Alex, this has been great. I look forward to you flying a pixie drone the next time I see you. Can you launch it off the satchel? No, you have to launch it out of your hand. That would be incredible if it was like under a coat and you're like,

Wabha! Straight out the fanny pack. I love that. If you figure it out and you'll let me know. That's my big plan. All right, Alex, this is great. We'll be right back with Alex Kranz. Support for this show comes from Whatnot.

Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people

in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy, and they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

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

Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. org. That's clod.aI slash vergecast. That's Claude.

com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. We're back. Alex Cranz is here. Hey, Alex. Hey, I'm excited to talk about cars. Well, you both threatened me with like an e-ink segment, so we'll just see what we can do here.

Cars that have e-ink. We did that one time. There's lots of gadget news. There's been a lot of gadget news. There was a lot of stuff that happened this week. There was a phone that has sexy, clipy on it. This was a mistake. It's just, it's clippy.

It's a gamer phone called the Black Shark 4 Pro. And it has its own like Siri that happens to look like an anime woman. And she helps you figure out things on your phone in the settings. She's sexy Clippy. I feel like this presumes that Clippy wasn't already sexy, which I take issue with. Yeah. I'm sorry. I mean, it was the clip, right?

The clip was great. Yeah. Yeah. Who hasn't thought about Clippy in their private moments? Alex showed up. We're like completely off the rails. Stop objectifying Clippy. Sorry.

Sorry. We should probably start by talking about the Apple stuff because there are a couple of Apple things. But also, Nilai, your countdown is over. The countdown is over. Apple released. Well, sort of. It's at least restarted, I think. So I looked at my studio display and it's a review unit.

So you got to send it back. And I thought, well, this is just never going to happen. So I put it back in the box. And I put my other, I use a TV for Zoom. my TV back and I was like, no, I can see everyone again. And then the next day, Apple's like, we're doing an update for the studio display camera. But the update is inside the macOS 12.4 public beta. Which is wild, right?

Which is wild. And then the update itself, the firmware for the studio display, within that is in beta. So it's updated, but not, none of its final. Did they know that you put, like, could they see on the camera that you, that you'd put it away and they're like, all right, this is it. This is when we roll it out. If you think Apple has not been bugging Neely's house for years now, like, you're kidding yourself. Yeah, they saw that I unplugged the Thunderbolt cable to like ship it. Yeah. The light switch went off in someone's office in Gupertino. It was very much like, uh, in back in my youth when I smoked those

dirty, noxious, wonderful cigarettes and you'd be waiting for the bus. Yeah. Like, it was, it was that. Like, I felt it as I was putting it back in the box. Like, oh, this is definitely going to happen now. So to get the update, you got to get the new version of macOS, which, by the way, for a monitor firmware update is an awful lot, as David was saying. So anyway, so we download the update. You have to update the laptop. I used MacBook Pro. And then after that laptop is updated, and you plug in the studio display, and then that gets updated because that is itself a full iOS computer. Except for it doesn't do its own firmware updates. Except it doesn't do its own firmware updates. Very confusing. All of it's in beta. So we plug it in, we test it. I would say it went from a three to a four and a half. Ooh, that's probably fair. It's just, it's not good. There's no world in which it's good.

It's not good. But it's better. Yeah, it's better. It doesn't look hopelessly broken. Right? So before it looked hopelessly broken to the point where I was like, Apple, I think your camera's hopelessly broken. Right.

And I would say that process of them believing me, because Apple does not normally ship hopelessly broken things. It was like a day. And I was like, no, it's hopelessly broken. And then, you know, other people were like, this looks broken. And then they like issued the statement. Like, yeah, it's not behaving as expected. So the new update is supposed to fix noise reduction, framing, and contrast. I would say it does what it says on the tin. The noise reduction is dialed down. The framing is backed out and the contrast is upped. And I think the framing is backed out because they've been cropping in on this ultra-wide lens on a 12 megapixel sensor. So from the jump they've just like tied one hand behind their back like 12 megapixels but what if we only use

three and so they've just like backed it out a little bit to give themselves a little bit more data and that they're improved the contrast if you have perfect light it looks it looks not broken in the way it was broken if you like average light which is what i tested it with you're like this is a little bit better and then you feed it through zoom or you put it on youtube stories or whatever we put it on and everyone's like this looks exactly the same the end we have not updated our review because the bait that's in beta right so maybe it'll change again it could change it could get better it could go to like a 4.75 it's the same camera setup as like an ipad like it should go to like seven that's one of things i've been trying to figure out because the the when this came

out the like overwhelming response was was basically what you said right it's slightly better but it's not good or even like in the realm of good and that a bunch of people started to say maybe it's just that it's bad hardware and that can't be the problem right like it's it's not not using like the dslar that you normally use but like it's it's a good we know what the hardware is right and it's good it's at least better than this i really do think it's that they wanted to do center stage so like we know the sensor right it's a 12 megapixel sensor f2.4 lens we know the a 13 is good but i think because they went with a wide angle lens they have no choice but to constantly be cropping so if you have center stage off you don't get the full

wide angle. You still get a crop to make it look normal. And if you have center stage on, it's cropping and moving. Right. So at no point do they ever get the full benefit of the sensor. So I don't know that, like, I don't know, maybe. Like, it's hard to know because you can never get that full picture. And I don't think Apple is ever going to be like full widescreen. Like this camera can now see, like, maybe they should do that just so we all shut up. It's like a choice of a way you want it. It's not using the same lens, though, as the iPad, right? They're using different lenses. The newest iPad, the ninth generation iPad, has center stage that has an 813. I'm assuming it's very similar hardware. Maybe we're all just comparing it to the wrong thing.

But, you know, like, Renee Richie, who is very knowledgeable at these things. He's like, the ceiling for this thing is the ninth generation iPad. Like, the hardware is that thing. Like down to the 1813 inside. Like, yeah, this display is basically a gigantic iPad that can't update itself. So yeah, I don't know. We'll see. My take on it is like there are people who have it and love it. and they love this display, and this will be like, people will stop yelling at you that your camera blows, and you'll be a little bit happier. And if you didn't love it, you thought it was overpriced. Like, there's no way that this will bridge the gap.

The way that people thought it would, which is like there's an iPhone camera in your webcam. Like, that takes you to $1,600. I think that's what people are expecting, and this is not going to do that for you. Do you think there's a way that software will ever get it there? No. So just hold off.

I really think that the, if this thing didn't have center stage, actually had that standard front camera at a normal field of view, maybe. But also, keep in mind, it's like video. So it's not doing all the iPhone level HDR. So I don't know. I think Apple just kind of backed themselves into a corner. And to David's point, like we did ours, a lot of other people did theirs. It's slightly improved.

It doesn't look hopelessly broken. It's not great. Meanwhile, I go to Amazon.com and put a Samsung M8 monitor into my cart and just stare at it probably twice a day. it's going to be so disappointing. I'm okay with that. You know that thing is basically just like a Samsung TV, right? Just do it.

All right, we should, we just keep moving. So the other Apple thing that happened this week was the DIY Right to Repair repair repair program launched, which... I found it super disappointing. Yes, okay, good. I'm very glad you said this. So basically, I'm glad that it exists, and I think one thing that's very cool is it is now very easy to find repair manuals for Apple products. That is a gain, an unambiguously good thing. But like just to me like really all you need to know is that the Apple repair website is self-servicerepair.com and has no indication whatsoever that it is an Apple thing.

It 100% looks like a scam. Yes. I had to ask people to be like this doesn't seem like it could. Like I understand that you put it out and that we all got it from official channels. But like are you sure? Like this is the website? And the stuff that you can buy is about what it would cost to have somebody fix it for you. Like the appeal seems to be if you are a repair shop or you're a person who wants to fix things and you live very far away from an Apple store.

This is reasonably convenient and that is it. It just kind of feels like Apple did like the least it could do. So by the way, the reason the website looks weird is because it's not Apple set up a new company called Service Parts or Tools Inc. Spot. Spot. Which is just like everything looks like a scam. Yeah. And then you have to put your serial number in.

Yeah. Once your I. I am EI, I had to think about how that's spelled. Because I always call it I'm A in my head. And I don't know if that's actually how you say it. But yeah, once your I.M.E.I. And it like, it wants to charge you, I think only a few dollars different than what you would pay if you had somebody else repair it. Yeah.

And like the fact that you can rent a bunch of tools is very fun. I intend to get a bunch of tools and break every gadget I own. Have we ordered a bunch of tools to rent? I believe Sean ponied up and did it. Yeah, there will be tools arriving at Sean Hollister's house here someday. He will be destroying a phone. Yeah, we have the fire department on retainer. It's going to be fine.

The tool case that you can rent is, it's a Pelican case. It's 20 inches wide. It's 47 inches high. It's a lot of tools. It's a tall. It weighs 43 pounds. And then the website notes, the cases have roller wheels to aid in transport. I definitely, when they first announced this, and I thought, okay, what would a really good version of this look like?

It was like, all right, the batteries and stuff without the huge markup so that I can make the repairs myself and save some money. And they've completely gotten rid of that. There's, apart from being like you're in an area where you cannot get access to a quick repair, there is no reason to do this instead of just like taking it to an Apple store. in dealing with that, which is terrible. I guess that's a reason. There's two reasons that I think this are good. One, Apple's doing it, which their arguments to not do it in the past have all been like, you'll kill yourself.

You idiot. Yeah. Right. This will be dangerous. The batteries will explode. Right. The face ID will be compromised. All those arguments have now been put to bed.

They know that phones need to be repairable. Did that happen in parallel with them turning the phone into a shopping wall? their services revenue growth going like this instead of depending on upgrades it may have but whatever they're doing it then i think there's you know having the choice to do it yourself allows people to tinker with the devices which is good and like more people knowing or even attempting to do this i think is like net good and then there's the ecosystem of repair centers where you could buy all the real parts and then go to the local kiosk and have them do it for you and yeah that might net out to be more expensive, but you'll end up with genuine Apple parts.

Right. That ecosystem of independent repair, I think, is important to have in the world. Yes. Yes. 100% agree. Like, the fact that you can just buy a Taptic engine for $39 is unusual. And there's a part of me that just wants to just buy a lot of Taptic engines. Just to have them.

Just what if I had some. You can finally turn your, the studio display into an iPad. That's what you should do. That's what this is for. That's why Spot Inc. exists. So, people can. So I agree. And I think the criticisms where it's heavily gated and it seems like they don't want you to do it.

And like the pricing is such that you should just go to the Apple store. Like all that's real. But the fact that they're doing it and they did it in response to both consumer pressure and regulatory pressure is like kind of unambiguously. Like that's good. And then the regulations are, it seems like they're going to come. Yeah. And they're prepared for that moment where it's like, okay, now I can just buy parts. Like it's ultimately good.

They just put a big Apple tech. on it. Yeah, they do not want you to do this. Right. It's just very clear that it's one of those things that like if Apple wanted to do this in a good new like customer friendly kind of way, it could have and it chose not to. And I think I do think it's not like Apple hates its customers. I think it's like Apple is trying to actively discourage you from doing this.

It just can't do it quite so loudly anymore. And I guess I understand that impulse. I just kind of think it's a bummer. They didn't buy fonts for this website. Like, this website looks like a Squarespace default template that will definitely steal your identity. But, you know, every step is one that we should celebrate the steps. It's even just the fact that their homepage is self-servicerepair.com slash home. Annoying me for some reason.

Like, it can't even just be the website. Like 1,000% this is a Squarespace template. Do they outsource it? Like, who was the person? Yeah, to spot ink. To like someone's nephew. It's, yeah, it's Tim Cook's nephew is the CEO of Spot Ink, and he got a sweetheart contract. We should find out who runs Spot Inc.

If you work for Spot Inc. Get at us. Firstguess at Theverge.com. Theverge.com slash home awaits you. Alex, tell us about E-ink. Oh, my God. This is get ready, guys. Buckle in.

We've got four hours to go. Oh, God. No. So earlier this month, E-Inc, which is a company, and they want you to call it E-ink, they announced that they had a new color E-ink called Collido-3. And it looked very much like colito-plus, the previous generation. Which you all remember.

Everyone knows. You may remember colito-plus with SWEPA-N-A-Nature. This is huge, huge. This is earth-shattering news, which is why we absolutely didn't write about it, because it was not earth-shattering news. Then this week, they said, oh, actually, we have another competing color E-I-I-I-I-I-N. ink technology that we do called Gallery, and Gallery 3 has come out. And it actually looks really, really cool. Is it going to appear in anything you will own? Almost certainly not. But it looks

really, really cool. Because it's instead of like color E ink up until this point has gotten to like 4,096 different colors. So many. Yeah. No, it's almost as many colors as my Apple 2E. The Game Boy Color, I think, did more. But this other one does $50,000. Apple 2GS. Yeah. I think my Apple 2GS said that many colors. See, like, we're there.

We're at the precipice of big technology. So in another 35 years. Innovations. 35 years from now, E-Inc is going to be incredible. But yeah, so Collido did that. And this new one does $50,000, which is like, that's actually cool. That's math. That's a lot more than, that's more than 10 times what gallery can do color-wise.

It just happened to be really slow before now. And now, instead of taking 10 seconds to change a page, every time you want to turn a page, it'll only take one and a half seconds. Whoa. I'm like, I am so excited about this. Like, that's, look at that. That's a huge change between. We're almost a milliseconds.

We're this close. you're about a second and a half away from milliseconds. About 500 of them away, yeah. We got a ways to go, but we're so much, like, Gallery 4, we could be at one second. Like, this is crazy. I just can't believe, you know, when I, the way I felt when Collider Plus came out, I didn't think that I could ever match top that high. You could top it, and now you can.

Now, like, greens will actually almost look green. Reds will look approximately like what you think are reds. should look like. Not really, but closer. All right, Alex, you had your time. We gave this to you. I just want to say, I think you just perfectly described why E. Inc. has not been more successful when you said they made one thing and then immediately made another thing that is competitive, but slightly better. And you know they're going to keep selling both of them plus all the old stuff. And then in another six months, they're going to be like, look, 50,000 and four colors.

But now we're going to keep making all of them. Well, no, so gallery, gallery was for signage up until. now because signage, they don't care about refreshing. And like, yeah, 10 seconds. Yeah, they're like, who cares? It's a guy at best by like updating all those little signs by hand. He could not care at all. So, so this is like it moving into the consumer space.

No, it's it edging one small, tiny step closer to the consumer space. We will see one, at least one, I bet. Chinese Android E-ink tablet. Can I just read from Alex's own story about this? Everybody go read it right now. Cheers are some quotes. Resolution is also crummy. The effect is noticeable and frankly unpleasant.

But the colors. They're not good colors. There's so many more colors to look bad now. It's got like, like, it's like that little kid who can't like play football. That's the little kid. No, it's fine. Look, we all have our things. I do O-Ran and Dish Networks 5G Network.

You do E-Inc. And now we're going to do matter. We all have our doomed technologies that we care about in the show. So let's talk about matter. Matter, you know, the smart home standard, in quotes, that everyone has signed up for. And I think this next story really tells us where we are. Sonos has joined Matter and then issued what I would say were a number of standoffish quotes about what that means to us. Yes.

So they joined Matter. The connectivity standards alliance put it. out of things, saying we love it. Look at all these people. Sonos. We're like, oh, Sonos doesn't matter. You're going to support it? And here's their statement. Our membership in the Connectivity Standards Alliance allows us to learn about emerging standards and evaluate whether they provide for true interoperability at the platform or operating system level, which we consider vital consumers and competition. They're just like, we don't trust you. And then they issue a follow-up statement. Our active engagement matter is at an early stage and we look forward to learning and

evaluating it in a constructive way. This is like when I pitched E-Inc Tablet. for the whole office. This was your response. Yeah. I look forward to learning and evaluating your bullshit as much as I care. Yeah, this is, this is Sonos doing the least it possibly could in joining matter. It's like, and I sort of admire the move because it's like matter is clearly like the thing folks are getting behind, right? And if you're Sonos, you're like, we want to be part of this, but what is this? Is this anything? Does it exist? Will it ever ship? Who knows? Right. And so and so for Sonos, they can just, like, they're just sort of like standing next to the pool looking sideways

at it while everyone else is in the pool. But Sonos is like, we're here, we're at the party. I came. I'm going to stand right here and speak to no one, but I am at the party. I mean, they definitely could have done less, right? Like, they could have created their own Spot Inc. website talking about Matter. Like, there was a lot of things they could have done. Sonos loves matter.com slash phone. Like, they could have done that. Really, really, really just laid it on thick. But no, this I would not get excited about Matter on Sonos if I was a Matter fan reading this. This is like the Dieterbone Memorial Matter conversation.

Like, there's no one here to make us be excited about it. Oh, I'm excited about Matter. Are you? Yes. It's the only possible answer. If Matter doesn't work, we're just hosed. Like, if Matter doesn't work, let's just give up on the smart home and move on with our lives. Cool.

It's just, it's going to work because it has to. And I think that's where this whole industry is. My sense is that's what Sonas is doing here is like, okay, we're either, there's either nothing or there's matter. So we might as well try a little. We'll go to the party. Yeah, they're like, we're going to sort of wave at matter from over here. But they're going to drink ice water and leave early. Well, you know, I credit this show with bringing the word vaporware back to the public consciousness.

It had drifted. Someone should do the analysis. It's us. We did it because of cars. The rule is vapor till it ships. matter is like inching towards if it gets delayed one more time, I'm just going to say it's paperware. Yeah. No, I think I think it's there already. Like the people who need to be involved are involved. And that is the only good thing you can say about the state of matter at this moment.

Because when did it get delayed last time? It got delayed like until the end of this year, right? It was delayed in March to the fall of 22. Right. So whenever you believe fall begins. So that's Sonos TV that you're going to get. If Sonus is going to make a TV, which is my prediction, which is what I think they should do, the matter is critically important to them, right? Yeah. Then the TV can integrate into all the other stuff and, like, you get your smart home displays on it. You can cast to it because there's a cast standard in matter that Apple will definitely not support.

Like, all the stuff. Yeah. If you can, if this thing works. Yep. But the fact that Sonos is like, we don't know. I don't know guys. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. We should do one more thing and then we should go. And that one more thing is we should talk about a thing that actually did ship. which is the F-150 Lightning, which you have some experience with now, Nelai, and have some thoughts about after talking to Ford's CEO. Yes, I haven't seen the car yet. I mean, I'll see it soon, I think. Other people on our team have seen it. People have driven the prototypes, but it actually is rolling off the assembly line.

So it is no longer vaporware. You did it, guys. Yay. We're very proud. They're definitely not going to make enough. They've made 1800s so far. They want to get to $150,000 a year. and that they think that will take them a year because they don't have the battery supply.

But I will say in this interview with the Ford CEO, Jim Farley, you know, we hung out for 20 minutes on a video conference. We talked about the car, how excited he is. Can you make enough that at the end? I was like, hey, Ford announced that it's going to shift sync its infotainment system to be Android-based and use Google services. There can be a long digression here about what that means because it's not Android Auto, which is like a whole different division of Google. it's Google Automotive Services, which everyone calls gas, which in the context of a conversation on EVs,

is very confusing. Because the Ford CEO was like, the gas team is great, and I was like, who are you talking about? So that was just very confusing. So Google Automotive Services, and then you get Google Maps and all this other stuff,

but it's Android-based thing. It's rebuild sync, da-da-da-da. They were supposed to ship that next year, and he was like, that's delayed by a few months, but we love working, again, with the gas team, very confusing. We love working with Google.

And then I asked him, well, if I buy a lightning now, can I upgrade it to this new thing? And he said, no. And then he was like, but next year, right, when we ship the thing, they'll have it. I would say that Ford was not expecting their CEO to say this information. And there's quite a lot of back and forth over what cars next year will get the new version of sync that runs Android with Google Automotive Services. Isn't that how it always works? That this is like, they're like, we made a new thing. it'll come to all of our cars 22 years from now.

Yeah. So my understanding is that it will first come to the newest cars. So anything that gets the full upgrade. The problem is Ford makes some of the hottest cars in the industry right now, and all of them are brand new. So like the Bronco is brand new. The Mustang Machi is brand new. The F-150 is only two years old and the lightning is brand new.

So it's just unclear to me when this thing, like I have a Ford right now with sync, and I just have committed in my heart that I'm never buying another product with sync and like I want the Android one I want Google Maps in my car, all the stuff and it's just like pretty unclear so the interview is great

I think his, he's got his head on the shoulders he said the charging experience for Maki is a C plus and they need to make it better you know he's said his competitors are doing a better job like that's the stuff you hear from a CEO where like okay you're not just full of yourself like you're building the battery supply, you're building the chargers, you're admitting the products can be better.

I talk to a lot of CEOs. Sometimes that doesn't happen, you know. But I believe him in that space. I just think that they've made this huge bet on Android in the cars. And it might be a lot farther off. Well, and a big part of that is car companies figuring out how to do software updates, right? Which like sounds like a small thing, but has historically not gone super well. It's the worst thing they can do. Right. Like I went, I was looking at used cars and they said, and I said, oh, can I get car play in this? And they said, well, yes, but no, you have to actually come back and we have to install a $400 module in your car. And I was like, well, no, I don't want to buy that then. Because I could just, yeah, it's like, it's dumb. It's just, yeah, the updates are really, really bad. They're really annoying. Sometimes they will just won't work. Sometimes they'll break the car. There's all.

whole line of like Subaru's. This is something Farley said. So they hired Doug Field, who was formerly at Tesla, and then he was at Apple. Apple did not ship a car. The ultimate vaporware car is driving in circles in the spaceship right now. So he came in and he was like, you know, Ford has Blue Cruise, which is their level to driver assistance. He basically can't see you driving.

They shipped tons of cars with the hardware. They didn't ship the software. And so software's over the air. And he's like, Doug came in from that background and like simplified the process of shipping Blue Cruz. Previously, it required three separate updates and no one was doing it. And he's like, we cut it down and people started using it, which I think from our perspective, like a consumer technology or computer industry perspective, you're like, yeah. You shouldn't have to update your laptop to update your monitor. Yeah. But like from the car perspective, they had just like no idea

that that was too much. So I think there's at least inside of Ford, that's a measurement they want to do. And the test that Farley said that he was looking forward to is the entire. user interface of the Maki is going to change. They're going to push some massive update. And he kept comparing it to an iPhone. And I was like, the last time that happened was iOS 7. So like, do, don't do that. Like, don't make all the buttons look like text.

But I think their, Ford is going in that direction. I think Farley is like forthcoming with their challenges. And he's like aggressive in dealing with them. But I do think this shift to Android for sync, like, It's going to show up on, like, a Ford focus or something in, like, I don't know, South America. And that's, like, it's, it's going to be in, like, one tiny car and one tiny market. Yeah. At first.

Like, it seems very obvious. They're going to. It's very TV's trying to make their own software again. Like, it's going to be the same thing where you just get really annoyed the entire time. Just be prepared to be annoyed. We'll see. I, so hopefully Ford is going to clarify this. Because I do think that they were a little surprised that he was like, it's delayed and it's going to come to the lightning.

So hopefully get a clarification. But read the piece. It's not a Decoder episode. It's just a written interview. Like I said, I think he's a pretty forthcoming CEO. All right. We're way over. Yes, we are.

This show is bonkers. It's been great. Thanks to Liz and Alex Heath for joining us. You can tweet it all of us. Alex Heath is Alex E. Heath. Alex Kranz is Alex H. Kranz. Liz is M.S. Lapado. David is at Pierce.

I'm at Reckless. Decoder this week. We actually, I said last week, we're going to have the CEO of UiPath, but we scooted up our interview. with the executive director of the EFF, Cindy Cohen, for obvious free speech on the internet reasons. And then next week, Alex Cranz has a little Vergecast mini series, The Vercast Creator series.

It's coming next week. It's going to be great. It's going to be super nerdy. That's going to be super nerdy. That's what we're here for. We'll be back next week. That's it. That's Vergecast.

Rockroll. Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. And if you'd like to the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan.

That's it. We'll see you next week.