The Vergecast - Twitter is a mess, Apple 'Far out' rumors, and this week in streaming

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss this week in tech news.  Further reading: Apple’s ‘Far out’ iPhone 14 event is happening September 7th  What to expect from Apple's iPhone 14 event  Next-day streaming of NBC shows like Law & Order and SNL jumps from Hulu to Peacock next month YouTube TV update will reportedly let you watch four channels at once HBO calls House of the Dragon its biggest premiere ever, with nearly 10 million US viewers Twitter’s former security chief says company lied about bots and safety Twitter whistleblower to testify in Congress over damning security revelations  Elon Musk vs Twitter: the weird number at the heart of the drama The SEC asked Twitter to explain its user metrics after Elon Musk complained Twitter CEO calls Mudge Zatko’s whistleblower report a ‘false narrative’ Twitter is a mess — but in the Elon Musk trial, it might not matter Exclusive: Sonos’ next flagship speaker will play sound in nearly all directions Ford hikes the price for the 2023 Mustang Mach-E by as much as $8,000 Peloton CEO thinks losing $1.2 billion is ‘substantial progress’ EV prices are going in the wrong direction Starlink lowers monthly internet prices by 50 percent for some Sony’s new DualSense Edge Wireless Controller takes on the Xbox Elite Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of audience measurement. We get into DAWS, M-DOWs, R-DOWs, F-Dows, I think is a real theme of this week. Hi, I'm your friend Nelai, the host of this ship. David Pierce is here. Hi, I count as precisely one user.

That's the only thing I know. No one's ever monetized you in your life, David. Alex Cranz is here. I'm just feeling bad for David, never being marked. monetized. Yeah. What is a daily user if you're not a monetizable daily user? Do you even have value?

Get out of here. We don't want you. A lot going on this week. There's an Apple event that is officially announced now on the 7th. We've got to talk about that. Speaking of MDOWs, Elon versus Twitter, reached new heights of absurdity this week. There's a bunch of gadget news. Chris Welch has a big scoop on any sono speaker we should talk about.

EV prices are everywhere. The Peloton CEO is doing metaphors about ships. All in all, it's shaping up to be a perfect forecast. Yes. You know when the CEOs are. doing ship metaphors. You're in for a ride. Let's start, though, with Apple. Oh, they're streaming news. Alex put a bunch of streaming news in here. I did. I mean, this is just a chef's kiss of a rundown. I love it. Let's start with Apple, though. The event is called Far Out. We are assuming,

based on long historical record, this is the iPhone 14 event. There's a lot of rumor, speculation that feels very solid, that we'll see a watch in the mix. What are we thinking here? Maybe two or three even. Three? What would be the three? Oh, no, I guess it's just two. There's the new watch and then the, the gigantic new watch. It's different sizes. That's why you're thinking three. The Apple Watch Pro Max Ultra.

Wait, so there's an update to the watches that we know and love. Yeah. Right. So that's two watches because it's two different sizes. Okay. Yeah, so I was right. Three watches. Is it one watch or is it three watches?

No. Okay. So wait, wait, wait, wait, let me just, this is my theory of the case here. The iPhone, every size of the iPhone is a different iPhone model. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's how they've done it. The iPhone Mini and the iPhone 10R and the iPhone ProMet.

They're all different. Yeah. And they're primarily distinguished on screen size. So they're different models. The watch is a not that. There is the Apple Watch 4 and then the Apple Watch SE or whatever and they each come in two sizes. Yeah. Which is actually a very interesting split in Apple's lineup.

It's more like the MacBook than the iPad or whatever. So I think it's two watches, right? We're expecting a regular update to the Apple Watch and then this like sports. oriented. Like the Garmin competitor, you can shoot it with a gun. Don't shoot it with a gun, please. Some YouTuber right now is taking notes, being like, I got an idea for a video. Just cocking the firearm, getting ready to go.

Yeah, yelling at their previous. Like, get in the garage, find the guns. We've got to get ready for this Apple Watch to come out. Find me bullets. Oh, my God. But yeah, so, yeah, there's going to be this other one, and it's meant to go after the Garmin, folks. It's meant to be for, like, rugged outdoor enthusiasts who all love their garments. passionately wear these ugly devices and hopefully the Apple device will be a little bit.

I'm sorry to every Garmin user, but you know your devices are ugly. But they're ugly in a way that now has become a brand. Yeah. They're like crux. Yeah. Like the, well, even the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch we all kind of thought was maybe ugly. And then we're like, no, the Apple Watch is cool.

So it's very much like that thing. Did we get, I'm not sure we got to that point. I think it's just like we just decided it's fine. It's just there. It's just like a, it's like you have a large glass rectangle on your wrist. Like, I don't know that anyone is going to look at it and be like, that is a beautiful object. But like, it's fine. It's good enough.

And I feel like Garmin, it took a while to get there. But it now like, it has this connotation of like, yeah, I wear an ugly watch, but like, I'm faster than you. Yeah. And every time I see a Garmin person, I'm like, that person can climb a mountain. Yeah. Which may or may not be true. I haven't done any research to validate. I don't just walk up to people.

I'm like, I've noticed your watch. What's your top speed? I think every garment owner wants you to assume they've climbed a mountain, regardless of it they have. Again, this is like why you buy vehicles for offroading that don't ever go offroote. Like, okay, fine. So we're expecting a big sports watch. Here's my question about that, because I think that is fundamentally more interesting than the iPhone at this point. Because it represents an entry into a new category for Apple, which is traditionally when Apple has the most new ideas.

And then over time, they have to whittle those down to reality. I submit to you the Apple Watch itself, which, as you will remember, was announced with enormous fanfare about the digital crown, which Tim Cook likened to the mouse and multi-touch in terms of input devices that would revolutionize the world. It's a wheel. And I never use it. You don't feel revolutionized? Well, I mean, literally I feel revolutionized when I turn the dial. I mean, who hasn't turned the digital crown and thought to myself, this will revolutionize computing. on the order of the mouse.

Anyhow, the big watch is like a new product category for them. It can't just be more Apple Watch, right? They've got to do some new sensors. They've got to do some new activity proofing. They've got to add new sports to it. They've got to make the battery last a lot longer. That's the main thing I hear from Garmin. The Garmin owners, I know in my life, say two things about the Apple Watch.

One, it just looks too delicate. Even if it's not too delicate for the things they do, right? It's like waterproof, it's dustproof, whatever. They think it's too delicate, and they've got their garments, which look like tanks. And then two, the battery life isn't good enough for camping or whatever it is you want to do with your garment. So those feel like the two things Apple has to solve from a hardware design standpoint. And on the software side, you've got to make it easier to use while you're running. Like all the things, like Garmin's interface is like dead simple compared to an Apple Watch.

I mean, I don't know if they're going to do that. It's got a two-inch display. Like that's the rumor, right, that it's going to have a two-inch display. It's going to be huge. I wonder if maybe they're not competing with Garmin as much as offering a really sturdy counterpoint to Garmin. Like rather than saying, we're going to do everything Garmin does but better, maybe they're going to be like, we're going to do everything you want your Garmin to do, but totally differently isn't that cooler.

Yeah, I kind of think the move here is to make the Apple Watch do more stuff. And they're going to like put a big screen on it, which is going to help with battery life just because there's just more place to put batteries. So I think to some extent, like, that problem will solve itself with better chips and more space. But then on this big screen, like, if I'm Apple, I'm going way further down the road of, like, how do we make this a totally self-sufficient device with this? Oh, interesting. You don't need your phone.

You don't need anything else. Just like, take this thing and climb a mountain. I don't know if that's where they're going, but that's what I would be doing with this. It's like, how do you appeal to, like, the ultra power users and the ultra fitness people is, like, give them this giant thing that does not need another device to be useful. That's what I would do. Let me unearth some David Pierce history from your interregnum between stints at the verge. The Dark Days, we called us.

David, for a long time, was one of the most notable traders at theverge.com. And he left us to go to a technology-oriented print magazine. This is a true story. It's a great magazine. We all know it. We all love it. I refuse to name it, like Voldemort. And while he was there, he wrote a big feature on the Apple Watch,

whose thesis was, this thing is going to replace your phone. No, no, no. That was not my thesis. That was not my thesis. That was Apple's thesis. That was not some grand theory of the case. That was what Apple told me over and over and over on the record was that this device, the headline of that story was iPhone killer. And Apple hated it.

And I was like, do you know what the problem is with this headline is it's the story. It's what you said on the record. Like, here are the quotes. I recorded them with my reporter. I didn't even get to the middle of my version of the story before David corrected me. No, but this, sorry, keep going. No, I think you might understand why I brought this up. I have a feeling where you're going with this, yeah.

Well, so Apple pushed back against the story after it came out. Yes. Just go read it. It's a good story. David's excellent writer, even though he worked for the enemy. But I was back. We love him again. The story came out.

It was great. There was pushback from Apple. This is not actually what we're doing. doing the two things are together, for obvious reasons, right? Apple's saying they're going to cannibalize the phone when the phone is their biggest source of revenue is not what they want. Apple thinking in its mind, oh, this thing will grow to be independent of the phone. And then its total market will be as big as the phone market as opposed to just a percentage of people who have phones. Makes all the sense in the world.

That's right. But they haven't done that. The watch got a little bit more independent in its app model, like a little bit. The app stopped being remote controls of your phone apps. But that's kind of where it's, they added obviously cellular connectivity. But that's kind of where it's stopped. And it's been stopped there for a couple years. So, David, your thesis is now big screen, big battery can go a couple days.

They obviously still have cell connectivity. They're going to make the turn. I mean, it seems like this is a moment you could do it, right? Like Apple has spent the last couple of years getting developers to move more of their stuff onto the watch. So it's already more self-sufficient than it once was. Like for the longest time, you couldn't like download Spotify things for when you were away from your phone and on a run, which was just like absurd, right? But a lot of those problems have been solved.

That was like a Spotify thing too, right? Like it was one of their deals, I think, with Samsung where the agreement was you can't, you can only do downloads with us. You can't do it with any other companies. Yeah. And there were like a million versions of that, right? Whereas like, for me, it was podcasts. Like I listened to podcasts when I run. And none of my podcast apps would download.

podcasts onto my watch and it's just like, this is dumb. But anyway, so they've solved a bunch of those problems and the processor is getting better. And I think like one thing that's really happened is a lot of people now have wireless headphones, which can in theory connect directly to your watch. And voice dictation is now very good. And I think like the biggest thing you have to solve if you want this thing to be self-sufficient is communication, right? Like that is the thing most people do most of the time on their phones. And so it's like if you're ever going to start to push, now it feels like there's more of a case to actually. start to do some of that stuff than there was.

But the problem is the wireless headphones aren't very good. Like, they're good enough, right? They're good enough to listen to when you're, like, going on a run or walking your dog or whatever. I use my AirPods daily. But they still have a lot of pain points that you don't have with a phone, right? Like, earlier today, I was trying to do an AirPods huddle with our how-to's editor, Barbara, going great.

And then we both had on wireless headphones and both of our wireless headphones decided to stop, like, connecting to our devices in the middle of the huddle. Perfect. And, like, I was easy. I could put them away and just say, hey, I'm on speaker. Let me continue to make this case a deal while we talk. Great. If I'm on my watch, I have to be like, hold on, hold on.

Like, do I go speaker on my watch? That works in the house. Doesn't work and, like, out in public. But no speaker works out in public. Yeah, speaker's bad everywhere. Right. But you take your phone and you can put it to your ear and then jam your your other finger into your other ear.

For sure. And be like, what's that? I see. You can't do that with a watch. No, that's totally true. By the way, just to put this out there for people, if you ever get a phone call you don't want to take. I'm not saying this ever happens to me.

One thing you can say, regardless of circumstance that no one can check, is, hey, I'm on my watch. Can I call you back? And everyone immediately understands that they should hang up the phone. It's pretty good. And then it's just a matter of how badly do you want to burn that relationship. But hey, I'm on my watch. can I call you back? Everyone's like, oh, yeah, no, please.

Please don't do that. I don't want to talk to me. It's explaining a lot of our conversations, Neely. So I think my question is like, okay, so you add some download. You've got a big battery. Yeah. And the Apple stated reason for not allowing a lot of these things to happen is we're protecting the battery life. Yes.

There are other quieter reason is we want to self-preference the music app instead of Spotify. And Spotify tried to turn a weakness into a strength by saying you can, we've signed a deal. to let you download on Samsung, and it's like, you're just dancing. Whatever. But that's come to an end, right? Like the Spotify app is more full-featured. You can do things on the watch now

that make it feel like a true app platform. Yeah. Yeah. So now you get a bigger battery. It can be even truer app platform. Do you want when you're going off-grid to run up the mountain to have a fully featured Slack app on your watch? Because that is like, what did I replace this for?

I don't want to do that when I'm down on the ground. Right. But what I'm saying is you can put your phone away. Your watch is on your body. So it's like you're solved this problem of getting rid of your phone. And then you've created an entirely new class of notification management problems that are literally strapped to your body. It's terrible. Yeah.

This is like the fundamental problem of the watch, which is that the thing that it was originally pitched as is like it frees you from your phone actually sucks because what I can do is leave my phone somewhere else. And that's good. And if I don't want to get notifications, I just don't look at my phone. A thing that buzzes my body is harder to ignore in that sense. And this is like going to get even crazier when we start getting into like AR glasses and all that stuff. But I think that is like the fundamental unsolved problem of the watch is basically how to like ratchet it up and down depending on what you want it to do. And you just can't. That's what the digital crown is for.

No, it's a focus mode. It's all about the focus on. Oh my God. If they add focus modes to the crown. Oh, God. That's probably coming. It's happening. Yeah, you turn the volume up on life and you roll it back down.

Let me just throw an idea of both of you. Stage manager for the Apple Watch and you scroll through the piles with the digital crowd. No, you know that thing? Like I do the thing where when I'm talking to someone I want to like indicate that I'm paying attention. I flip my phone over on the table. Yeah. It's like this is how much I'm paying attention to you. It's still here.

It's not out of my sight. Right. Because that would be insane. But it's upside down. It's like you pick up your watch. She's like roll the screen. Making eye contact as you slowly roll the crown. All right.

So those are the watches. We, I'm very curious to see what happens with this bigger sport watch. I think there's a big opportunity there for Apple to reinvent a bunch of it. Right. Because it's bigger displays that you do wackier things in software. And then this new use case of targeting Garmin means they have to capture those users by trying to appeal to them. So I'm excited about that. We should talk about the phones.

It's funny that I like they're going to, what they're going to fix the cameras. Not fixed. Let me say again. It's funny that I'm like, they're going to make the camera slightly better. They're going to process her faster to no purpose. People are trying to read into the invitations and assume that we're going to get astrophotography. Have the invitations meant anything in the past like five years? No, but what if it does this time?

Like I think that's the fear. Everybody's like, no, we got to say it's doing something because we want to be able to be like it called it. Yeah. I don't know. We should do a retrospective on that. Actually, go back through the last like 20 invitations and try to figure out if they actually turned into anything. Because if not, it is a truly masterful ongoing bit from Apple. Yeah.

Liam, we have to cut this whole part. This is too good a story. No, keep it. If you're out there and you want to write this incredibly tedious story, send us an email. We'll pay you to do it. No, it's a great story. It's a lot of invitations to look at it and be like, hmm, did this blob actually mean anything?

It's like look at all the AR blobs once again. But it's the same like the phones, there are two things I would say that seem potentially interesting. I don't know. I think the rumor is there's going to be either less notch or no notch and potentially just a smaller like whole punch for all the sensors and cameras and stuff, which I don't know. people are excited about, I literally, I have reached a point where I absolutely have no feelings about

notches. And if they could make it bigger and I would say, okay, and they could make it smaller and I would say, okay, and then just move on with my life. The one I think is potentially very interesting is the always on display, which is another one where it's like, I've seen a lot of people start to do interesting stuff with lock screen widgets in iOS 16, which I think is going to be very cool. And that plus a display that's always on, it's like, I think there could start to be some interesting stuff that like what can your phone do when you're not even touching it is a pretty interesting idea. But that may end up being as much an iOS 16 thing as an iPhone 14 thing. So I don't know. But that's the thing I'm by far most curious about. So always on screen plus the new

widgets that they're doing in iOS 16, which include things like live updating sports scores. You kind of get a little like always on widget display. You can tie that to a Mac. That seems like fascinating to me. I'm assuming that's only coming to the pro models. Is the pro going to be the one to buy this time? I mean, I always buy the pro because it always seems like I've never been a pro person, but this is the year that seems like it's the pro is going to be like demonstrably better other than just like the one slightly better camera that it normally has.

I haven't updated my phone since I'm on, I'm still on the 11. So whatever is coming out, I'm going to be getting some variation of it. You've been to, the 11 had, I think, one of the wackiest iPhone cameras of all time. It's not great. taking some extremely Samsung photos this whole time. That was like, that was the first one that had SmartHTR, right? Yeah. And they just, they were like, what if shadows

didn't exist? Just because my dog always looks so surprised. Like, he just doesn't have any like contour to his face. Every time I look at photos from that year, I'm like, what was going on with this camera? It's time, Alex. I'm so excited.

So we just run out. The rumors are always on display in the pro, 48 megapixel rear camera that all obviously do pixel to get it down to 12 or whatever. Larger sensor to collect more light. Great. Notch situation. Maybe a processor upgrade.

That is like if they actually significantly upgrade the camera in that way, add the always on. Sure, it makes sense. Here's the one that I think is actually going to generate all the sales. You all know my theory about big cheap screens. The regular iPhone 14 will come with a max version, a 6.7 inch display version. So it'll be cheaper but have the big screen.

Cheap big phone. and it's like, oh, this is when they win. Right. Like, this is the one, this is going to be the mon. Like, we can all complain about phone sizes, all we want. I think we have an Allison piece on the site today. Like, as we speak. Nobody buy it.

Yeah. Don't reinforce this bad idea. But people vote with their dollars, man. And they vote for big cheap screens. Don't do it. They can walk into the store and be like, that 48 inch OLED TV looks beautiful. In this TCL series four that has never even heard of the word black is huge. I'm going with gray.

Let's do the grays. Like every time. The motion is so smooth. Every time. Like, big cheap screens always win. It is the law of the universe. And so to me, that is actually the whatever. Like, you tell people the pro has a better camera, but they look at bigger screen for less money.

And they're going to pick the bigger screen every time. Yeah. But like, that's what we're looking at, right? Oh, maybe some AirPods. Oh, I've been on the iPhones. Yeah, yeah, I was going to bring kind of the airplanes. But on the iPhones, it looks like that's what we're looking at. And then, yes, AirPods.

We're getting some new AirPods Pro, it sounds like, maybe. I think there's a decent chance AirPods Pro end up being, like, the thing people are the most excited about, about the new launches. Especially if they can add some of the, like, fitness stuff into it and whatever sensors they're going to put into it. It's like they might add the fins that are in the beats, which will make them fit in a lot more people's ears comfortably. like that that might be the kind of thing that everybody comes out being like oh those phones are cool but like oh my god I'm gonna buy the hell out of those AirPods like I this might that might happen I love the current ones like I'm on my second pair of them because at some point all AirPods just stop right you all have this experience they just stop working oh for me the law is I will lose them on the 90th day that I own

them they will they just poof out of existence I see I haven't lost them I'm convinced there's some like cash in Bluetooth that doesn't get automatically cleared. So all Bluetooth headphones have like a limited lifespan because of this cash. I've been told this is probably not true. But I can convince because like 18 months in, it's like, okay, time to start looking for some new ones. So I'm very excited because I'm at like 19 months right now. Oh, no. So this is for me personally, huge news.

You're extremely made up cash theory is pushed to the limit. Yes. I gotta make it. I can believe in me. So these AirPods, you know, some fitness features because they might have motion, sensors in them, some of this wingtip designed to hold in your ears better. Here's the big one. There's hints that they'll support lossless audio. Title.

Title, this is your moment. Well, Apple needs it as lossless now. To do that, you need to get beyond Bluetooth. And this is where Apple makes the turn and does proprietary wireless protocol for the AirPods. If it doesn't suck, like, I tend to be totally against proprietary stuff. But Apple has made a much better Bluetooth radio than anybody else out there, right? Like, it just is hands down better at communicating with your device. Because it is proprietary.

Yeah. And so if they want to go even more proprietary, and it means I don't have to be like, hold on, Barbara, let me smooth this huddle over to speaker phone. I'm in. Yeah. And I feel like Apple has made very clear that it does not give one. single crap about connecting your AirPods to your Android phone or your Windows computer. And I feel like Apple is going to be perfectly happy to be like, this thing will work with your Apple devices and nothing else. And you all can go screw yourselves.

Can you imagine if they cared? They care a lot. They're like Bluetooth is, we're serious about it. Anybody's Bluetooth works. They have to pretend to care because European regulators wandering the capitals of Europe are like, oh-oh, like constantly because of interoperative. I don't know what they're saying. I think that's what they do. I'm trying to think of how to say codec in French. It's like, it's great.

Everyone loves saying it all the time. That's what they talk about in France. It's cheese and interoperability between codex. Anyhow, they have to pretend, but they've also like insane lock-in on the phone because of their headphones and no one else can compete in the headphone market against Apple because is the proprietary nature of AirPods. I'm going to tell the audience now that our producer Liam is insistent

that we get through the show in an hour this week. He wants us to do it. And so he's put a timer on the screen that has now turned red, which signals that we have to wrap the iPhone preview segment up. Please address your complaints to Liam about the giant red timer. I think you would love to hear from you.

It's okay. We're going to have plenty more time to talk about Apple, too. Yes. We got to go to the event. We're sending an army this time. It's like five of us are going. So we'll have much more on Apple to come when that event hits on the 7th. All right. We're going to take a break. Come back. We'll talk a little bit of streaming

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We're back. Got some Elon versus Twitter talking about, but let's start with Stream wars are like back in full effect because of whatever is going on at HBO and whatever is going on in Netflix. Which real quick, let's start with HBO. HBO plus Discovery, Discovery, Warner Media, whatever it's called. Again, the slogan is the stuff dreams are made of, which literally sounds like they found some dirt. I don't know what's telling you. There's gold in here.

It's like the corn kid on TikTok. Like that's what he would come up with as his tagline. I know the quote is in reference to a classic movie, but just imagine having to walk into that company every day. And people are like, the stuff dreams are made out. Tap the sign on the wall that's like the stuff dreams are made up every morning. And it's like, I'm an accountant. Like, what am I supposed to do here? Okay.

But they're in a really strange spot, right? Tons of debt, firing people, more layoffs to come. Their market cap is down. Right. bought Warner Brothers at like something over $100 a share like 109, and right now the combined company is trading at 14. So weird times over at that company. They, I think they're going to, there's a rumor today, I think in Puck that the new streaming platform will be called HBO Discovery, which is not the right name. It's, HBO disco is right there.

It's super right there. They could just call it disco. Just, yeah, Disgo. Disgo would be fine. It's horrible. That's like, that's 100% the fake version of Disney Plus. But they had, they had House of the Dragon this last week. It's here, Alex, it says here that it was their biggest ever premiere.

It was their biggest ever. 10 million people, like, tuned in to watch it in the United States. I think what's going to be really interesting is how many people tune in for episode two. Like, most of the reaction was, yeah. That was some Game of Thrones I watched. And it wasn't like super enthusiastic, but it also wasn't super like, this is horrible. So CBS made an entire business out of making that kind of content and like being the most successful linear broadcast network in history. So it's certainly possible that everybody can be like, yeah, I'll keep watching this.

Yeah, I mean, if you can run Law and Order SVU basically the same episode over and over for 25 years, like, why not Game of Thrones? And that appears to be where we are headed. Yeah. But I will say, like, did you guys see that video that was going around that somebody shot in New York where they were looking into the windows of an apartment building and you could see all the TVs changing at the same time because everybody was watching House of Dragon? That was a cool moment. Do we verify that that video was from now and not from actual Game of Thrones? No, it's possible. It's fake. I don't care. I hope it's real.

And if it is real, it's like, it is definitely true that, like, the House of the Dragon, it's up in, like, the Stranger Things territory of like there are like a handful of shows that I feel like everyone I know pays attention to. and this kind of got there on the first day, which was pretty impressive. It was pretty weird. Like Charles, our entertainment critic, and I both got screeners for the new House of the Dragons. And we both watched it. And we were like, yep, we've seen it all. And so we watched it. He wrote his review.

It went up. Great. We completely forgot about it. And so like Sunday night, I was like, why is Twitter like kind of quiet? It's because everybody was watching House of Dragons. Like, I just forgot the rest of the world was tuning in. See, that's what you want. Maybe that's HBO's entire promise is we can quiet down Twitter for an hour a week.

Yeah, we will shut it down. And that's their service to America and the world. Twitter's like, no, stop. Don't do that. The one thing about House is right and I'll say, whatever, it's a Game of Thrones show. It's fine. There was horrifying scenes, as you would expect, truly disgustingly horrifying scenes. Horrifying wigs.

The wigs like. Yeah, there's some wig issues. It's bad. There's a sad guy with a naked lady, like everything you expect from Game of Thrones. Like I've just described almost every episode of Game of Thrones. You have. The CGI budget is like, but the show is theoretically more expensive to make than Game of Thrones. That's what they've been saying.

Yeah. But that opening flyover scene where the dragon goes around the tower, I was like, this is a cutscene from a PC game from 2012. I had exactly, literally, I would have put the year like two years later, but I had exactly the same reaction. It's like, what am I looking at right now? This is an Assassin's Creed cutscene that you just showed. But like, where did the money? See, I'm assuming the money went to the CGI. Because, like, it didn't go.

Like, the costuming is like, eh. You got to pay the dragons. Dragons are expensive. Like, the wigs are bad. Like, this cast is not, like, I'm not seeing this cast just pulling in big numbers financially. There was one time when they were walking up a staircase and there was like a, you know, a chandelier burning with fire. Yeah. It's totally in the background.

No one else noticed this. I rewatched it three times because the fake smoke from the fire was that, like, blocky pixelated smoke of like fake smoke. And I was like, I know we can do, it's 22. Like, this looks like an N64. Yeah. I hope they do better. Although I will say like GPU shortage is a visual aesthetic.

It's maybe coming around. Yeah. All right, David, you want to talk. I have to surprise you with this YouTube TV story. Yeah. So, okay, so there was this YouTube TV story. There was a report that YouTube TV is going to let you watch four channels at a time. And it was a, like, a private thing that YouTube told a bunch of its partners. They had some new ideas about shorts and stuff. But this struck me as one of those things we, like, we put it on the site. I was like, oh, that's, that's neat. And then it was, like, gigantically popular as a story. This is, like, one of our most read stories this week about, like a relatively small feature that is on YouTube TV. And I don't understand why it was so popular. But apparently you do. I do. Because I looked. College football Twitter ate the story for breakfast.

Like hundreds and hundreds of people were like, F yeah, YouTube TV. This is all I've ever wanted. And they definitely did it for sports fans. Yeah. But it's like this one, sometimes a story finds an audience in a way that you will never expect. And this one just landed on college football Twitter.

And everyone's like, we did it. Is it like specific like divisions? Is it just all college football Twitter? I didn't look that deeply. I think the thing that's interesting here is, College football is a sport, you have access to multiple games at once all the time on Saturdays. Yeah. Right?

So like going from channel to channel to see different games is relatively easy. And it's an easy jump to, I can see how this feature would help me watch more college football. Cannot do that with the NFL, right? It's very hard to get access to lots of games in the NFL. So Sunday ticket, the Steam-powered app that I use to watch Packers games, has some multi-screen feature. the ESPN app has multi-screen features, but they don't actually have the content. It's very rare that you're going to watch,

you're going to open the ESPN app, watch whatever, they have Monday night football now. I think it all changed. They have Akeman on Monday Night Football now, right? Yeah, that's right. They just paid a crazy amount of money, yeah. And Joe Buck.

So it's very rare they're going to open Monday night football and then also be like, what else is on ESPN? And it's like curling. Right. Like it just doesn't seem like that's the split-screen experience you want. I will say the World Excel Championship, starting ESPN2, which is something that you can, you can just go watch on television.

It is incomprehensible. It's like people being like, did you see that formula? He had that in his back pocket the whole time. And it's like, did he? That's a thing? It's a real thing. I felt the same way about watching it that I did about watching ballet, which is sitting there and being like, I'm confident this is very impressive. And I don't understand any of what's happening.

Like, I'm sure this is good and hard. I just need another beer if I'm going to keep watching. That's basically how I feel. We should do a live react of you watching both ballet and the world Excel champions. And people have to guess which one I'm watching. Yeah. What's the look on David's face? All right.

So that's streaming. Let's talk about Twitter and Elon. A lot going on with Twitter and Elon this week. Less Elon, though, right? Mainly Twitter? Well, there was a hearing on Discovery. Then there's a whistleblower. David, do you want to take us through it?

Sure. And to your point, Alex, one of the big open questions of the week was how much this was about Elon. Because basically the very short version of what happened is Peter Zatko, who is better known in the hacker community as Mudge, this like long term beloved white hat hacker who everybody believes in, who was briefly the head of security at Twitter, then turned whistleblower. And there was this big disclosure this week in which he basically said Twitter as a company is like a total security disaster. Like too many people have access to too much stuff. A bunch of their stuff is not up to date. They're just not running correctly. He was like this whole thing. And then Barry, in there, he also said, I think in as many words, Twitter is lying to Elon Musk about its bots. So that became a whole thing. But then sort of aside that, there's also this big open question about, like, Twitter as a security nightmare, which has FTC implications because Twitter has basically promised he had its act together in the past. And it brought back all this stuff from two years ago when all these famous people's accounts on Twitter were hacked by what turned out to be like a

couple of teenagers and then used Bitcoin scams to not make very much money. It was like the worst attack of all time. But they did it. And yeah, he basically was like, Twitter is a mess. And I said so internally. And they fired me for it. So I have no choice but to say it publicly. And then Elon Musk showed up and was like monetizable daily active users. And now here we are. Okay. So unpacking that a little bit inside of Mudge's filing with the SEC. He did it through a law firm called whistleblower aid. So it gets formal whistleblower protections also means he's really not talking to that many people. Right. Here's the filings.

You can deduce from them what you will. That means the filings are a fun read. They really are. It's everything. Here are all of his feelings, including feelings like Twitter is a for-profit company. And it's like, yeah. Yeah. Nailed it.

Accurate. So there's this part of the filings where Mudge talks about monetizable daily active users, which is the number Twitter reports and its earnings because it's the number that counts. And it's a made-up number. No one else uses this metric. Twitter uses this metric because it only makes money on ads. So the number of users that it has that are potentially seeing ads is the number that is related to how much money it can make, which is what investors care about. So that means if you use other Twitter clients, you're not a monetized while daily active user because Twitter ads aren't coming in through there.

You're not getting promoted tweets and all this stuff. It means that bots don't count because bots don't buy anything. Bots don't log into Twitter. Yeah. And so you just got this like mushy definition of what it monetizable daily active user is. Right. Twitter's claim is that 5% of its monetizable daily active users are bots. And that's the number it cares about.

interacted with Twitter can probably attest to. It is weird because what it says is basically Twitter is saying, out of all of our users who aren't bots, less than 5% of them are bots, which is like seems transparently accurate, right? But then Elon Musk is saying, well, other people use Twitter who are bots. And Twitter's like, yes, that's so like everybody is just sort of talking past each other about different things.

And Twitter is saying, well, A is true. And Elon Musk is saying, well, what about B? and Twitter's like, well, I don't know, A. And we just like... And then Mudge is like the Kool-Aid man. All of you are liars and thieves and the bots are everywhere, right? Pretty much. And one of his lines is like, Twitter executives get bonuses for growing users

and they don't get bonuses for reducing bots. Right. Which on the first cut, it seems like a totally reasonable thing to say. And then on a second cut, you're like, well, of course they get bonuses for growing the number of monetizable users. That's how it works everywhere. Because that's what makes them the money. Yeah.

And if they hold it at 5%, then they can have infinity bots as long as the number of money, the money number goes up. So Elon obviously sees it on this. He's making a lot of noise. I think fundamentally, the Mudge whistleblower complaint

actually validates Twitter's version of events in terms of bots. Not all the other stuff. Not all the government of India has installed agents inside of Twitter to spy on Indian Twitter users who might be dis-like, that's very bad. Not the too many Twitter employees have password access to everyone's DMs. That seems very bad.

By the way, Twitter, for its part, has said, all this is a false narrative and lacks context, which is what you say. I feel like they could have just searched on Twitter for what executives say when accusations are made against her company and just copied and pasted it. And you say, this is a false narrative. Yeah, it's a really great way to cast dispersions without actually refuting anything. false narrative doesn't mean anything and lacks important context means like we're trying as hard as we can.

That's okay. To be fair, that's what Twitter is saying. Yeah. And then Elon is seizing on this being like, everything I said is true. And then there was a discovery motion in the Delaware Chancery Court, our favorite court in America. By the way, there's an amazing Twitter account called Chancery Daily, which has just been a daily news account for the Chancery Court for years. And they're like, welcome to the Thunderdome.

Because it's a light speed hardcore court. And so like this Twitter account's absolutely worth a follow because they think the whole thing is so funny. So they have a hearing about discovery. Elon's lawyers request everything. They're like, we can't trust anything Twitter's ever said. We want all the data from the fire hose. Twitter says that's ridiculous. David, I believe the court said Elon was a big dummy.

Yeah, the court essentially sided with Twitter. There was this amazing line where they basically said, if we were to do what Musk and his lawyers are asking for, Twitter would have to produce trillions and trillions of pages of evidence and data points on, it was like every possible thing that 200 million users could have maybe done. And it was basically just like, this is lunacy. We're not doing this. So essentially what...

The specific phrase, by the way, from the court, defendants' data requests are absurdly broad. There you go. It's good. Yeah, so essentially where they landed is basically like they're going to give Elon Musk and his lawyer's access to the process that Twitter runs in order to make these determinations, which seems to be, I think, probably what Twitter would have expected. Because Twitter has basically been through this process, like, we do a magical process to figure out how many

spam bots there are, but we don't keep any data and we're not going to tell you anything about it, but you should definitely trust us for real. It's totally fine. So, like, Twitter has definitely obfuscated in the course of trying to figure out how these numbers work, which I would remind everyone is actually totally immaterial to what happened. And Elon Musk had a lot of time to do due diligence and waived it and we don't need to do that again. But no, it's important. Explain that a little bit.

That's actually, that's my favorite part of all of this. He's doing a good job of convincing everyone that bots are important, but they are not. No, the crux of this deal is that Elon Musk, who initially said that fixing the bot problem was one of the reasons he wanted to buy Twitter, agreed to buy Twitter and signed a binding agreement that had nothing to do with spam bots. There were no bot contingencies in the agreement Elon Musk signed to buy Twitter. He waived like the right to even care about it. Yes.

So all of this is totally immaterial and seems to be Elon Musk basically trying to negotiate down the amount he's going to have to pay to walk away from this deal. Like that seems like by a wide margin, the most likely outcome here is that he will write a very big check and walk away. Who knows? Because it's Elon Musk always assume the most insane thing is going to happen. So I assume this will go to trial and he'll end up owning Twitter. Like, who knows?

That is the most insane thing. But anyway, where this landed essentially is what it seems like the judge is saying is Twitter needs to be more transparent about the process it runs. But Elon Musk cannot ask Twitter to basically give him everything that has ever happened to anyone in the history of Twitter, which I think is reasonable. I would point out that most of Elon's wealth is in Tesla stock. And we didn't cover this because it's not a new with us. Tesla had a three for one stock split like today, which was announced ages ago. Right. Well, and he just sold a bunch.

He sold like billions and was like, it's, it's for reasons. Don't worry about it. Everybody's got this. It's my Twitter money. It's my Twitter money. So we'll see. I mean, there's just a lot tied up in Elon's finances in the market and all the stuff that is like, oh, it's like my CNBC brain, not my Vergecast brain. But David, I agree with you.

The outcome here is he pays a lot of money to walk away. Like, I don't think he wants to own Twitter in the end. No. I think Twitter maybe has taken a hard look in the mirror. I'm like, we are a shit show. What if Elon? Bias. So we'll see.

But Chance Re Daily. Like literally this account is having the most fun. It's my new favorite Twitter follow. Also, David and Addy and Liz write this week in Elon, our pop-up Elon Musk newsletter, which has quickly become a must-read because there's so much Elon going on lately. So much. Yes. I think today Starlink and T-Mobile have an event, right, where they're announced some kind of partnership. Mm-hmm.

And Starlink also is ran. randomly lowering the prices for some people. Like, I think Thomas Ricker got an email where Starlink was just like, your stuff's cheaper now. And he was like, neat. Yeah. And that was the end of that interaction. I did not get that email from Starlink.

Aw. But yeah, it's just the Elon Musk chaos is relentless and is never going to go away. Addie's most recent version of this week in Elon, which is about all of this monetizable daily active user nonsense is very good and clear and a good read. We'll put it in the show notes for sure. All right. The clock is red again. Liam has turned his camera on.

He's smiling, but it's that smiling that means he's mad at you. You know the smile right before they eat you? That smile. We've got to take a break. We'll be back with a little bit of a lightning around. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,

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which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Slightening around time. Liam has started the clock. The best part about the clock, I have to say,

is I don't know how long it's set for, so it just turns red. It goes yellow first and then orange. Whenever Liam gets bored, he just ticks it to red and says, Shut up. Three minutes of this is enough. We're done.

Burge cast over. All right. Lightning round. Alex, what you got? Well, Chris Welch found yesterday. I was in the office with Chris Welch. And he said, hey, Alex, check Slack. There's a scoop you need to edit.

And I went, oh. And then I clicked and I was like, hey, Chris, you wrote a scoop. That's what happened. So he got a scoop, a little scoop magnet getting all the scoops. That's not a word. Is it? Scoop magnet? It can be now.

Chris Welch appears to just live inside of someone. Guys, we're on the clock. Okay. Who knows when this is going to turn red? Sorry, Liam. Any minute. He's going to turn a red as soon as I finished talking. New speaker. Basically, it sounds like Sonos is going to be, Sonos is working on a new speaker. That's all the reporting that Chris Welch got. And it looks like it'll probably replace the Play 5, which is the like kind of its flagship speaker that hasn't been replaced in years. I think it's the only one that hasn't had like a big update. And it's going to have a lot of speakers in it firing in a lot of directions. Instead of just like speakers firing one direction, as most of them do, this one's going to fire like forward to the sides up. So it'll also have some utmost support. Yeah.

And it looks like there's just going to be a smaller one as well, more like the Sonos one that will do the same thing with the upfiring speakers. So it feels very atmos intense. And it's going to be called right now it's code named the Optimo 2. Which really implies there's an Optimo 1. Yes. It does. We don't know what that is, unfortunately. What I can't figure out about this speaker is where it goes. Because it's like if it's going to do this sort of firing in all directions thing, it's like, it's very sort of home potty in that sense.

And so it's like maybe it's a, you know, you put it next to your TV and use it for music. Or is it like a semi soundbar thing and it does surround sound all by itself? Like, what is this thing going to be? I think it's supposed to do all of the things. Okay. Like what he was looking at, a lot of the stuff he's got and suggests that this is going to be one of the best sound. speakers they've made. Sonos is very good at making speakers that sound really, really good. And this one is something that you'll be able to put, you know, use it as that soundbar,

get three of them up front and you've been in a subpoofer and you've got 3.1 surround sound, right? You'll have 3.1.2 surround sound. Right, because you've got the, the utmost upward firing speakers. So I think that's the plan here is, is most of the money that Sonos is making nowadays is in that home theater space. That's really where it's moved. It's moved away from speakers in every room of the house to TV. Let's do that better. And this could theoretically help that without having a big, ugly soundbar. Every now and again, I find myself reading our site like a reader, and then I have these moments. So there's a line here. The Verge has viewed early work and prognus images of Optimo, too.

And I was like, wait, that's me. I viewed those images. You did that. You saw the images. Chris and I hooked with them together. So the home pod is like a really interesting like case, right? Because it had all these, the big home pod, not the little one. And all these drivers in it and Apple was really intent on doing beam forming. It would measure the echoes in your room in real time. It would use the walls and like send some frequencies at the walls to create a like a faux surround sound. And like they said a lot of things about the home pod.

In the end, it was just a nice sounding speaker. It did sound good though. was a ridiculous product, but it sounded really good. Yeah, two of them sounded infinitely better than one, which I think was their miss. Fair, yeah. It was like, it was fine. My thing about the home pod was always, if you are the sort of person who has the capacity to listen to a home pod and a sonas five and whatever else, like in a line, you'll put

the home pod in the top two. But if you are not doing that specific exercise, you cannot tell the difference between them. Fair. Yes. Right. Like expensive speakers of that class

are all just kind of different and all kind of the same. This feels like not that to me because I think it is aimed at that big

atmost music market that is a differentiator for Sonos. Very few products do Atmos music. So we'll see. I don't think it's actually targeted at TV stuff.

And then I think that might yeah, they've got sound bars for that. And that's like they're big soundbar sales are down because TV sales are down and you buy a sandbar when you buy

TV and rarely people upgrade their sound, but the clock turned yellow. I'm freaking out. Oh my gosh. Go, go, go. Keep going. Keep going. I think this is a music speaker, like a high-end music speaker to do like Atmos audio, which I think is it will be interesting for Sonos to try to convince play five

customers upgrade. So now we're going to have Led Zeppelin's descend from a wire above our head. Jimmy Page just sneaking up behind you. Not behind you. Above you. It's all anybody's ever wanted. By the way, USBC line in potentially on this device, which is wacky. All right, I'll do, what's my lighting round?

Oh, I got to talk about Peloton. All right, let me just read you this quote. There will be no further discussion because the clock's yellow. This is the CEO, the new CEO of Peloton, Barry McCarthy. He's writing a letter to shareholders. This is how the letter ends. In high school, I spent three months working on a cargo ship. After midnight on my second voyage, I was asleep when the alarm for the general quarters woke me.

My reporting station was on the bridge. End sentence. Next sentence. Fear is a great motivator. A long story. The ship is leaning. The captain's trying to turn the ship around. We saved two men's lives at night.

They've been lost at sea in the Mediterranean for several days. A fortunate happy ending. Peloton is like that cargo ship. We've sounded the alarm. Everyone's at their station. we continue to add new inputs to evolve our go-to-market strategy to restore growth. When will the ship respond is the question. Our goal is fiscal year 23.

Does he think he just invented the idea of a big ship being hard to turn and that that's a useful metaphor for business? Like, has he net? He just. But he's been on a ship. How many of the guys who've done this? I've been on a big ship. I just know that when big companies, wait, what was the burning? Who was the burning platform, Nokia guy?

Hold on. Oh my God, the clock's yellow. Go, go, go. Are you talking about Stephen Elop? Yes. Long-time Vergecast listeners will remember the last time we discussed ocean metaphors for companies. It was our boy, Stephen Elop, who left Microsoft, became the CEO of Nokia, and then sold Nokia to Microsoft in a move no one saw coming. He steered the ship.

Can he elop again? But he sent a memo that was like. two people are standing on a burning oil platform in the middle of the frigid sea, and their choice is to be engulfed in flames or jump into the frozen ocean, and we, Nokia, are using Windows phone, which in this metaphor was the frozen ocean. Big, big burning platform vibes from Barry McCarthy. Anyway, we'll see. Palaton's lost like a billion dollars this quarter, and they're like, we're on track.

Very good. It's a real like, like trust the process move. Like there was this NBA team, the Philadelphia 76ers, who sucked so bad for like six years. And they were like, trust us, we're going to be good eventually. And then they weren't. Is the spoiler alert at the end of that's different. I believe the process there was they threw a lot of games to get draft picks and then blew the draft picks. Correct.

Okay. Just checking. Uh-huh. Yeah, you have to do a good thing at the end of the process, which is what Peloton. Fear is a great motivator. Yeah. Especially on a big shit. You've got to read this.

It's just like the hardest cut in the middle of this paragraph. Terrific. All right, David, what's yours? Mine is this news that came out just before we started recording that Ford is hiking the price for the 2023 Mustang Mock E by as much as $8,000. And this is part of a bigger thing where there was a study that the average price of an electric vehicle has gone up like almost 50%. And this is bad for like a lot of climate change.

We need more electric vehicles reasons. but it's particularly bad for me because I have to buy a car. And every single day it feels like I just like watch more of my money disappear into the car buying process. And I haven't even bought a car yet. It's not great. Well, one, you got to buy a car for the end of the year because the tax credit situation next year is going silent.

Oh, yeah. So I'm also like, I got to do it. I got to go buy an EV. Yeah. Are you deaf doing EV, David? I don't know. This is like an ongoing debate with my wife because we don't really, we don't have a driveway. So our like overnight charging infrastructure is less than ideal.

But like two years from now, David is going to feel really stupid if I don't buy an EV. So I don't know. I'm, I'm torn. That's why I leased because I was like, I really want EV, but I live in New York City and it's not great. Yeah, the clock turned red. So we're talking about Alex's lease. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

So yeah, I got, I got gas on it. It's great. Burn in seconds on your lease deal. Never mind. Keep going. What kind of podcast for nerds is this? Wait, it's this podcast. nerds.

Well, so you got to buy one because we got a great explainer from Andy. That's getting way more complicated, especially if the cars aren't made. Like, fewer cars will qualify next year because some of them aren't made in the United States, like the EV6, the BMWs. And then a few years from now,

if the batteries aren't made in the United States, nothing will qualify. So there's like a race. I was at a car dealer today this morning, actually, because I'm I decided that I should not buy a, like, a $10,000 beat or BMW. It may buy something that it might put my family in. I really like imagining you every morning just swinging by and they like, they see you coming and they're like, oh, Eli's here. And you like know all the people at the dealership by name now.

They hear him coming. Watching a car dealer go from thinking that I'm an easy mark to being like, oh, my God, dude. This guy. The problem is they have no cars to sell. Just this week, Jeep, which has still not shipped the hybrid Grand Cherokee, sent everyone hats. Did they announce it again? They've announced it again. This week, they've sent everyone hats who would pre-ordered.

Somehow the clock went from red to blue, which is, I don't know what's going on. It's even worse. I just screw it with a snap. I hope it starts strobing. But you got to buy a car before any year if you want the credit because next year is going to go sideways. But there are no cars to buy. Also, Ford going up by $8,000 when they are now guaranteed to get more $7,500 tax credits, every dealer is going to say that the price went up, but just cross it out. You're getting it right back.

And I think that's fairly cynical on Ford's part. Yes. We'll see. But the problem is that you can't buy any of these cars. Like, what are we even complaining about? There seems to be no better in sight. Like, it's the chip shortage keeps going. The people are, like, everybody bought too much stuff. It's like we're, this doesn't seem like it's going to get any better, like, shortly.

The problem with EVs is not so much the chip shortage. It's battery shortage. Ford has no battery capacity. Yeah. That's the problem they need to solve. That's actually why the future tax credits are pegged to battery manufacturing in the United States. Because the government's like, we know you need battery capacity. you better put it here if you want these credits.

Yeah, the chip shortage has started to go away, right? That's tough. I don't know the answer to that question. I ask people, the CEO of Arm is going to be a decoder soon, the podcast that we don't talk about on this show. Never heard of it. It took me the whole episode this time, Liam. Liam's not to turn the clock writing. David, where did you work?

What was the magazine you worked at that were not allowed to name? I don't know. Who can remember? So long ago. Let's see. If anybody can sell me an electric car, please, buy all me. Whatever it is. As long as I can plug it into something.

He'll bring you on the decoder. Sell him and sell him to like your car. We're going to do a whole episode where a car salesman just has to deal with me. It'll be maybe our best episode ever. Sold. I love it. Like, listening to the sound of a car salesman or a salesperson, listening to the sound of a car salesperson's voice when I ask exactly which version of adaptive cruise control a car has is they're just like, I don't know, man. And then I say something like, can you take a picture of the cruise control stock and send it to me?

And they're like, what? Because that's the level of what happened to you. And then you say things like, oh, well, when the Ford CEO was on Decoder, he told me, they're like, what? It's real bad. Anyway, that's our show. The clock is turning all kinds of colors now. Liam's gone from smiling to frowning. It's gone.

It's a very cute frown, Liam. That's it. That's the show. You can tweet at us. David is at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Krenz. I'm at Reckless. You can go read that story.

the iPhone killer, which David just had another emotional reaction to when I said it. You really were in a world of shit for like a month after that story. Oh, it was, yeah, yeah. It helped to have quotes. I'll just tell you that. On the record quotes. I didn't say it. Yeah.

Kevin Lynch did. Why are we, why do we hammer home about being on the record so much? Because it's not our fault. Yep. All right. That's it. There's a bunch of great stuff on The Verge. We have more coverage coming up of the upcoming Apple event.

What's next week on the Wednesday episode, David? We're off next month. Okay. What was this week on the Wednesday episode, David? This week, we spent the whole episode talking about the stream deck and buttons because the Vergecast loves buttons. Yes. And it was a very fun episode.

And even if you don't have a stream deck, you should listen to it, although there's like a 40% chance you'll end up buying a stream deck at the end of it. Yes. It's very true. Someone sent us a picture of a rack-mount streamback, and now that's all I want in the world. Incredible. That's very good. All right.

That's it. We did it, Leo. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast. app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at verge cast of the verge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters,

and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.