The Vergecast - Twitter rebrands as X, and Samsung's Galaxy Flip 5 and Fold 5 event

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss Twitter being rebranded as X. Allison Johnson joins the show to discuss everything announced at Samsung’s Galaxy Flip 5 and Fold 5 Unpacked event. Also: we read your emails! Further reading: Twitter is being rebranded as X Elon Musk just changed Twitter’s logo again — sort of  Can Elon Musk really use that X logo for Twitter? For Elon Musk, X equals everything  Twitter Blue’s former lead talks about Elon Musk, X, and sleeping on the floor Twitter Japan will be called simply, Japan Threads is rolling out its Following feed  You can’t just leave Threads in the Following feed The Galaxy Z Fold 5 is last year’s phone with a new hinge The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 gets a big little screen upgrade  Samsung goes OLED all the way with the Galaxy Tab S9 tablets The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 series is all about the bezels  DJI Air 3 review: old ideas, new package OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all Seven major automakers are teaming up on a North American EV charging network T-Mobile says its ultrafast 5G capable of up to 3.3Gbps is rolling out now Boost Infinite’s $25 unlimited wireless plan is now on Amazon Prime T-Mobile’s charging a $5 fee for in-store bill payments My first MP3 player had everything I needed  Looking back at the original Chromecast, which just turned 10 years old Japan’s indie game scene is growing up How to build a better search engine than Google Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Skylar 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 and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of rebranding your company from one name to nothing.

It's great. That's what you want when you have a company is to pick one of the most common letters for naming things for teenage boys. It's great. I'm your friend, Neal. I'm in a hotel room in San Francisco for this episode of The Vergecast.

I'm going to try not to look at my laptop because I think it will look bad on the YouTube video. So Alex Kranz is here. Hey, Alex. I'm your friend who's really upset that their college nickname was stolen by a social media company. It's fine. That was your college nickname? Yeah, it was like, it was a dumb joke when I had to rush sororities. You get tired of

introducing yourself, so I'd be like, just call me X, it's faster. And it was a terrible joke, but it worked. And then everybody called me X, and then people thought I really wanted it, like, and it wasn't a joke. Oh, no. Elon and Joy. Were you super straight edge in college? No. I was in a sorority. Fair enough. David Pierce on vacation this week, Richard Lawler coming back in like a hero to step in. Hey, Richard. Hey, I have takes. I also, for a moment there, thought that Alex's college nickname was Orchid. Which is going to be weird, but. Yeah, for my second year in college, I went by Google Plus.

Yeah. No one liked it. It was just the thing that I did. It was my punk rock name. Stop stealing our names. Come on, guys. All right. A lot to talk about this week. There is the big rebrand from Twitter to X. A number of people have asked me to explain trademark law, which is a blessing and a curse, really. me. Then there's a huge Samsung event. The Flip 5, the Fold 5 hit. Allison Johnson's going to join the show. Talk about that stuff. A bunch of lightning around stuff to get through. And then we asked people for consumer debates last week. We've gotten so many responses to this. I do want to point out

that some people told us straight out that they have very strong preferences for windshield washer fluid. I love all of you. We have some people who go by color. They're very strong proponents of blue. A lot of people loving Rainex. Oh, Rainex has a hive. I didn't know. I didn't know. And we poked that hive and the Rainex people came to us. And then at least two people were like, what are you doing just to use water? What? Strident emails from people saying you should just use water. I don't know what they're talking about because where I live, it gets cold outside. It won't solve the problem for me. many months of the year to spray more water onto the snow-covered windshield.

Just covering it and sheets of ice every time. Just straight icicles shooting out of the windshield washers. But yeah, the Rainex people, very strong. This is a real email we got. Rainex is the only acceptable washer fluid. It is orange. Don't be blue. Your choice is the original or the bugwash.

That is a strident opinion about what color. I'm telling you it's all based on colors. Anyhow, we got more to come later in the show. We have a massive list of ones people sent to us, X versus Y. I suspect we will be talking about this for months to come. It's going to be pretty good. But let's start with, I promise we'll move through this quickly, the weirdest news of the week, which is Elon sort of flippantly renaming Twitter to X,

basically by tweet, Fiat. Like, he just tweeted it into existence and then everyone had to pretend it was the plan. Richard, you've been on top of this. Tell me what's going on here. It kind of started this weekend. Elon has been talking about rebranding Twitter as X. Pretty much since he started to take it over. He made, hit this X company, its parent company a while ago.

And then this weekend, he just went ahead and did it. He said, we're X now. He hadn't changed anything. Everything on the site still said Twitter. And even now it still kind of says Twitter all over the place. But he says that they're not tweets anymore. They're X's or I don't know. I don't know how you pronounced that.

I haven't really gotten that far into it. We've got a logo that is a letter X. It might just be a font. It might have changed a little bit. We don't know it's gone. He changed it back and then he changed it to another thing. It got wider. It got narrower.

But this is where we live now. It's X. It's not Twitter. It's X. Even though it says Twitter everywhere. The domain is still Twitter. No one knows what to call it tweet anymore. There's some argument that you have to call them Zietz.

No. That's what the people say. I know I'm a big proponent of calling them all tweets, even the threads and the other ones. And I've come around. They're all posts now. Now the Twitter's dead. They're all posts now.

I'm not calling them Zietz. Don't come at me with that. Well, your argument makes more sense now. You can call anything a tweet now because they don't care. But that's like, I'm just like having to be like having to differentiate and be like, oh yeah, did you see that thread tweet? Did you see that X? Oh, right.

Did you see that post? Yeah, like, I'm like, okay, I guess posts it is. You guys wore me down. I'm like I couldn't hold strong. Yeah. Much like everyone who works at X now, they couldn't stop him. We've talked a lot about how Elon has said he wants Twitter, now X, to be in everything app along the lines of China's we chat.

That's a big concept to unpack. But I just want to call out Linda Yaccarino, who is the CEO of X, nominally in charge of this company, had a tweet thread, an X thread about what she thinks this thing is going to turn into. Alex, I just want you to read it to us. It is incredible. I'm not going to read the entire thing, but I'm going to read the entire thing, but I'm going to read one of the relevant posts because we're not calling him tweets anymore.

Tweets are dead. X is the future state of unlimited interactivity. Centered in a audio, video, messaging, payments, banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI,

X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine. Now, I understand that Linda was the former head of advertising for NBC Universal. This is ad copy. It's like, I think everyone understands. She was the former ad exec.

Once you're everything, you are nothing. I just, I believe in focus more than anything. What this reminds me of more than anything, I swear to God, the first thing I thought of when I read this, is the speech that Big Brother gives in Apple's 1984 ads, where he's like, with the information purification directive, we have achieved total world domination. You will be free from the show.

shackles of conflicting thoughts, like, Workers of the World Unite. And then the lady throws the hammer through it. And they're like, we made the Macintosh. Go watch that ad. Which side of that story do you want to be on? Like, the Big Brother side or the lady with the hammer? Like, we're the lady with the hammer. That's where the verge has always lived.

I love that they just like announced that they basically want, like, some sort of monopoly. They're like, we are out to build a monopoly for everything and control all things. And it's like, well, that's actually a bad pitch. I mean, it's a great pitch if you can pull it off. But this idea that you're going to start by rebranding the company to X, and then you will somehow with AI. But, like, you know she's a marketer because she's, like, powered by AI.

That was the best part. Like, a minute ago, she would have been, like, powered by NFTs. X will be the future state of an air, like, whatever it is today. 5G. 5G. Tell me your marketing executive without telling me your marketing executive. Yes, X is a self-driving car. Like, whatever it is.

centered in audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking. You know what's not in there is tweets? Centred in audio? Isn't that messaging? I don't think that's messaging. What are you talking about? This is the best app to watch the Super Mario Bros. Moving on.

Is that one? Just incredible. And Linda will be at the Code Conference this year. Julie Burson's going to interview her. That's in September. We're very excited about it. Many questions to ask. But you just look at this vision for what they want X to be.

It's funny to make fun of it, and it is a lot of marketing. But you can see why they're saying this. This is WeChat. Like, there are apps like this, super apps all around the world. Facebook pursued a super app model for a long time. They have discovered that in the United States market in particular, you need multiple apps. You just can't do it the way that you can do it in China. I think Lyne is an app like this in Japan.

There's other countries where this model works. So you see why you'd say it. You want to mess. messaging app that does payments and banking and hotel reservations and all the other stuff that we chat can do. It has an extensible plug-in architecture. There's actually a long argument that the cell phone market in China is more competitive than anywhere else because the application layer is in WeChat. So it's easier to switch between platforms because then you just download WeChat and run everything in WeChat and it doesn't matter. And you can pick like a camera or

a form factor or whatever because at the end of the day, all your apps are running in WeChat. You can feel any way you want about that, including that the Chinese government is almost certainly scanning WeChat at all times because it's like an oppressive. Whatever. But that's the argument, right? That this exists somewhere at scale and makes them a lot of money and has all kinds of weird downstream effects on like gadgets. Cool. You have Twitter. You're starting from the base of Twitter, which is so creaky right now you had to impose rate limits on the API. And it kind of doesn't work. And it's like full of. of like weird blue check spam. Elon's doing anti-vax conspiracies like this week. He's having a great time. How are you going to get from here to there? There's no plan as far as I can see. Well, I think the first step is that you reveal that your executives will allow people to look into the back end of people's accounts. Pretty much it will. And that's how you're going to get that trust for people to use this as a banking and payments app. Like just to say that we're going to do the files.

And we're going to let people have administrative access and look into accounts whenever they want to. I mean, that's true. That's what you want. Again, if you're playing as we chat, you're like, how do we do some Chinese government stuff? That's like the selling point. Let's, let's begin. So that's that. That's like the broad strokes. I think that he did it to get attention. I think Elon is a master of getting attention.

I also think that he makes all of his Twitter news on the weekends. Say what you want about him. Like, he's obviously not, doesn't give a shit about Twitter Monday through Friday. Right? He's like worried about his companies to make money. And then like the white wine starts flowing on Friday night and Twitter's plans changed by Sunday evening. Like that's the news cycle we're in with pretty. pretty enforced consistency. I think he's good at getting attention. I think that he sees what's happening

with threads. We can talk about threads in the following feed and stuff they introduced, but he's got to keep continuously recapturing attention for Twitter because that's the entire game he's in. So I'm going to change the name to X. Screw it. We're doing it tonight. Send me some logos. It's a great way to capture. It has kept him in the conversation, even as threads rolls out a following feed. I think in a few weeks, we're out a web app. That's what Adam is saying. By the time threads rolls out a web app, Elon's going to be like, it is a self-driving car. X is making a self-driving car. I've merged it with Tesla.

Like, that's just where his brain is to capture attention. I just don't think he's got the capability to do any of this stuff because he fired everybody. He has zero capability to do it. And it's like, okay, you renamed it. You're capturing attention. Is that attention turning into users and or money? As measured by user seconds in the app. Yes.

Oh, is it? The statistic that is so great that absolutely no one other than Elon Musk uses and no one seems to understand exactly what it is. But judging by that statistic, yes, he is winning. I mean, I think my big question is, can he use that X logo for Twitter? I mean, you have to explain this to the people. All right. You just queued him up. We're arguing all over the internet.

He's got this logo. What is it? Can he actually do that? We're 11 minutes in and we're at IP law. Okay. So I just... Speed run. This is my...

Again, this is just what I do. This boulder's going up the hill. please, I beg you, if you're a Vergecast listener, before you type the word copyright, trademark, or patent into a text box in the internet, just ask yourself, do I know what this word means and if it applies to this concept? I beg you, because this is exhausting. So we talk a lot about copyright law on the show lately because of AI. That's one thing.

Then there is trademarks, which are for business, right? They signify the origin of goods and services. That's all they're meant to do. You buy a thing, it has the name of a company on it. You know that company exists. You trust them. they're a market tool, right? And there's lots of rules about it. They are not copyrights. It's a totally different thing. So I just want to start there. This is like a whole different

world, whole different body law, a whole different set of legal standards. It's just the relationship is like, can you own an idea? And then people like lose their minds. I just want to start there. Totally different than copyrights, totally different than patents, different standards, different ideas, different whole thing. Okay, so trademarks. Like many different people can own the same trademark just applied to different goods and services. And the standard is likelihood of confusion. Will people get confused by seeing this stuff? Then there's stuff like distinctiveness. Is this mark distinctive such that in the market when people see this trademark? They will understand this is coming from you and then not be confused that might be coming from somewhere else.

So X, the letter X, is not very distinctive. You have to do a lot of work to make it distinctive in a particular category. Rude to my college me, though. Yeah. Like, when you hear the letter X, what you think of is Alex just at a rager in the basement of a sorority house. That's what you should think of, yeah. Chugging Everclear out of a Fiji bottle. And if we repeat it enough times, we can say you can't use the X trademark because everyone associates it with that image of Alex Kranz.

Let's do it, guys. Make it happen. But that's the entire game. Can you make people associate this word or this logo with this company and this product? And once you can, you can go get a trademark. And there's ways to short-circure that process. You can file what's called like an intent to use application, this whole thing. But the core idea is, is there an association between this word, image, logo, whatever, and this product and company?

So Twitter, very distinctive, from the jump, the logo, very distinctive. There's not another thing called Twitter. So they file the trademark for Twitter. They say, we have an intent to use it. Over time, they build up a huge amount of equity in the brand, such that if you, you launched anything else named Twitter, they would be able to say there's a huge likelihood of confusion. People will think your Twitter product comes from us, Twitter, the company. You can't use that trademark. That's the whole game. So X, there's lots of things named X. There's lots of

companies named X. There's lots of products named X. Famously, Elon's other companies have X's in them. It's great. He can use it. Just no one else can stop him because there is so much latent noise around the letter X. Then, Richard, I think what you're getting to is the logo might just be like a Unicode character or the X from a foundry called Monotype. That seems really unclear. Like, Unicode will let them do it, but if it turns out they're actually using the monotype character, they got to pay some licensing fees. That's just money. That's fine. You can solve that problem. It might be a lot of licensing fees. That might be a huge mistake for a company like Twitter that's in trouble, but it's a money problem. It's not like a legal problem. Then there's the last piece of it,

whichever one has gotten completely wrong in just horrific ways, is that meta and Microsoft have trademarks on things with X's in them as they relate to social networking. And so when you file for a trademark, you have to say what the trademark is for. So I could file for a trademark on the letter X as it relates to selling fruit by the roadside, and it would have nothing to do with the trademark for X as it relates to social networking. So you go and you list a class of what you want to do with a trademark. so you can get definition in the market. This is going to relate this to that.

So if you, very famously, the Apple logo on the side of NYC taxis, the city of New York and Apple had to define the class. They did negotiate to say this logo is about taxis and like taxis being eco-friendly and not about Apple the computers. Fine. It's a negotiation, but you just make the definition and you move on your way. Here, Microsoft had one for mixer that was just, it's the logo X. So they trademarked the logo, the drawing.

And if you use that drawing or anything that looks substantially like that drawing, you get in trouble. But they're not using that drawing. So it doesn't matter. Then if you will remember, Microsoft launched Mixer, remember they pulled Ninja over, try to get everyone off of Twitch. Mixer failed. Ninja went back to Twitch. Microsoft divested this whole thing to Facebook gaming and assigned this logo to Facebook as part of that deal. So now, META owns this logo as it relates to social networking, but it's just the logo.

It's not the letter X. It's the drawing, not the letter. Meta owns another thing called X. It doesn't matter because they're just logos. So everyone's getting confused about the letter X and what it protects, and it's really nothing. Like, at the end of the day, he's not going to use those logos. No one's going to confuse this X logo for that logo. And so many people are already using the letter X for everything else that his problem is actually making anyone associate the letter X with the thing that used to be Twitter as opposed to all of the other things that are named X, which is probably a bigger problem than his legal challenges.

So this is why the Twitter Japanese account is just called Japan currently instead of ex-Japan, because X-Japan is the name of one of those famous bands in Japanese history. So I've seen people report on this. I do not know enough about Japanese trademark law. They definitely have it called Japan. So I think there's still a lot of confusion there, but I know the ex-Japan lead composer was like, he can't call it X-Japan. That's the name of our band.

I'm looking into it. And I think that's kind of where we're at. And Twitter, notably, is not calling Twitter Japan, X Japan anymore. They're just calling it Japan. But there's a huge difference in Twitter handles and trademarks. Right, right, right. Ex Japan, the band, might have a trademark in Japan for the name of its band, but that's for the name of a band. Right. I don't know if they have a trademark on social networking company. Like, you can probably start a company in Japan called X Japan, because it won't be the band. And this is the thing that everyone gets confused with the trademark law. Like, as long as people aren't confused that one thing is the other, like usually trademark

law lets you have the same name for two things. Could you? Yeah. Like if I went and started a car company called DMX, I feel like someone's estate would probably have something to say to me. You could definitely start it. I don't know if DMX has a trademark registration for DMX cars. Like, that's the trademark law is just not like copyright law.

It's not the same thing where like any copy gets you in trouble. It's like narrowly, if you start DMX cars, I love that we're using this example. If you start DMX cars and like you have nothing to do with DMX and you don't trade on any of his likeness and you don't use his lyrics and it's totally different. And you say this is distinctive and he doesn't have a trademark registration in cars. You can probably do it. You should talk to a lawyer. I'm not giving you this legal. I don't think you should start DMX cars.

More hassle than it's worth. So your legal advice as my lawyer is that I can start DMX. DMX cars, I just can't use the tagline, it's dark and hell is hot. Yeah, I think that's bad. Like, you will get in trouble. Like, the standard is likelihood of confusion. Is it likely that by using the name DMX cars, people will be confused that DMX has anything to do with it? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think anyone should find out the answer to that question. I'm just telling you what the standard is. So if you're in Japan, I don't know what the standard in Japanese trademark law is. I'm just telling you that it is almost certain that you can start a

company called ex-Japan because people will not confuse the company for the band, right? I do not think that has any relationship at all to Twitter handles. If they wanted to take the ex-Japan Twitter handle, they could because it belongs to them. And we know that they think this because they just took the ex- Twitter handle from some guy. And the guy was like, that sucks. And he's not a world-famous band. And so they're not in trouble. But they couldn't have taken it, like if they had taken it from the ex-Japan band, they just would look like monster jackass. Even more worse monsters than they are. Like, you know, like I don't, I think that's what's stopping them.

Not the law, the trademark law of Japan. It's their platform. They can take any handle they want. And there's really no relationship between the handles and the trademark law. There's like some minor relationship. Like the platforms will respect trademark law to keep, to keep impersonation off their platforms. Like if someone shows up and makes a verge handle and starts tweeting and it looks like, Like, we show up to the platform and say, this is our trademark. That's impersonation. Like, make it go away.

Twitter notably a lot looser on the impersonation situation than it used to be. So, like, I just think, like, everyone's getting these concepts, like, fairly mushy and confused. The handles and the actual trademarks, no relationship really whatsoever, unless Twitter decides there should be a relationship. And then the trademark laws of different countries are slightly different. but all of them are pretty focused on you're in the supermarket. You look at the label. You see Kellogg's and you know that that is actually from Kellogg's and you have a relationship and that's market information you can trade on.

And if you go out of the supermarket and you go to a clothing store and you see t-shirts made by another company called Kellogg with a radically different logo and it's a radically different product, you're not going to associate with Serial Maker. And so both of those companies can have those names. Fine. Like that's basically fine. And I think that's the situation Elon is in. And everyone just wants to find a gotcha.

But the gotcha here is that it's a shit name that means nothing. Like the market will handle this problem. Here's my next question. They're famously using something that looks a lot like a very specific unicode for X, like a unicode symbol for X. Generally speaking, you get yelled at if you use somebody's logo in like your name or something like that because it's their logo. How does that work if I decide to use that X?

as the end of like my name. Just I wouldn't ever do that because that's dumb. Oh, like the Unicode X? Yeah, if I use that same Unicode X, if it starts being comes associated with this other thing, even though it's like openly licensed and theoretically anyone can use it, if they copyright it specifically, if they like copyright that logo specifically for them,

what happens if we start using that Unicode or does the Unicode X have to get rid of it? They trademark. They trademark. Oh my gosh. It's so confusing. This is the thing. It's driving me bonkers. Imagine being me on a plane.

Just freaking out 35,000 feet while this is going down. So can I use the X or am I like? Yeah. I can use it at any time. Yeah. Like they can't stop. Unless you're holding yourself out as X, the company. They're not going to be able to stop you.

They can send you letters. My favorite letter that we ever got. Richard, I don't even remember this. We used to run a cycle called Engadgett mobile. It was pink. So Engadgett was blue. and gadget mobile was pink. What was in gadget HD, Richard? That was yours.

A gray, I think. It was gray. And so it was hot pink and T-Mobile, when they started using Magenta a lot, sent us a letter that was like, we own the shade of pink. And we're like, no, you don't, bro. Also, we're going to publish this letter. And then we bought, and like, Ryan Block and Peter O'Hus published the letter. And then they were like, oh, that was really stupid. Our lawyers

will never do that again. And that was the end of it. And that's like, how it goes. So we can all use the X anytime we want, the one, the Unicode There's not a situation in which you typing a letter implicates their trademark. Right. But if I, like, use it as part of my name on a whole bunch of different social media apps, like, I start using, because you can use, you know, Unicode symbols and a lot of different ones, they all print it. And I start using that X. Could they eventually come after me being like, stop it? Like, if you started using the Netflix in for your first name, for some reason that was in Unicode. And you started using that all the time. Wouldn't Netflix eventually be like, hey, stop? I don't know why the Netflix N would be in Unicode. It would just be the letter N.

Hypothetical. Hypothetical. Not everyone takes their logos from Unicode because that seems stupid. I guess you've now landed on the answer to your question. Yeah. The Unicode X is just X. You know how like emojis are not standardized? They're just Unicode and they're meant to represent something like, right?

Car. And then like Samsung and Apple have different cars. Unicode just represents letters. Like, here's a character. And then your typeface on your computer, your font is like, okay, that's an A. I'm going to represent this A. There's not like a Unicode font. So this X that they're pulling from that's in Unicode, you can render it in any font you want.

It just because of the way the lines work, it looks like a thing. Yeah. But it's just a, I mean, it's like literally a series of numbers that say to a computer, make this character. and then between that instruction and you is the computer saying, okay, in this font. Okay. It just happens to look like the logo of this company that will presumably be trademarked at some point. Yeah, I think it will be very difficult for that. Like, especially if the design is, if they were just like the letter A conceptually is our trademark, that's this X as it relates to Unicode, right?

So, like, who the hell knows? It is remarkable, and I know we're going to get emails about this. People are going to say, like, we're spending so much time talking about this dumb thing. It's so dumb. And it's, one, I am a sucker for a trademark law conversation. So here we are. Welcome to our show. This has always happens.

Two, this is the dismantling of what was one of the most influential information networks that has ever existed. And so you have to talk about it. Because what Twitter meant, like what the word Twitter meant to make this about trademark law, what that word meant, what the word tweet meant to people conveyed so much meaning. This celebrity tweeted an apology. You already know the whole story. I don't even need to say a celebrity. I don't even to say what the apology was about. I don't need to tell you that it was a screenshot and notes app.

Right? Like the meaning was, the word was imbued with meaning that had emotional resonance throughout the culture. that has been dismantled. And it is worth discussing why that is happening and to what end. And I think the end is nonsensical, right? It's an audio video platform that will enable banking and put AI in your bones or whatever the hell it's going to do. But the thing itself was important if it gets there. But yeah, the people freaking out about trademark law is like, at Engadgett, I wrote so many of the stories that I just had the middle part of it in a text expander.

I was just like TML and it was just like spit out 150 words of trademark law explainer. Emma's going to ask for that tip. Like she's going to be like, you still got that boilerplate for me. I did it. You know, in Apple versus Samsung time, I wrote so many patent law stories that were effectively just explainers about how patents work, which we won't do here. But we're just in that time when the idea, like how to own an idea is very complicated because that's all the internet is.

There's a bunch of people sort of ephemerally sending ideas around without any like limit on scarcity. And that just like the AI copyright conversation is like a big deal. Here in trademark law, it's like people search the trademark database and they're like, meta already owns X. And it's like, okay, let's step back to figure out what trademarks are even for. And you just have to start at the start. And that brings us to now where we've got all these things.

He's sort of changed the name. He has mostly changed the name has changed on Android, but not on iOS as I'm speaking. Maybe by the time you hear this, it will have changed in the iOS app. Twitter has tried to push businesses into buying more ads so they can stay or, our X has tried to push businesses into buying more ads so they can stay verified. We had Esther Crawford, characters coming back from past seasons, suddenly pop up, talking about what it was like to work at Twitter until she was fired and sleeping on the floor and how Elon listens to whoever just happens to be around and takes random ideas.

Is there anything else we haven't discussed? The one thing I want to point out is threads rolled out its following feed this week. Great. It's cool. It immediately showcases how little volume there is on threads. Like, I follow a lot of people on threads. everyone's still posting on Twitter. So that hasn't happened yet. I think it won't happen until they roll out the web version,

which both Zuckerberg and Adam Aseri have said they're going to do. Emissary in a response to Casey, Zuckerberg in response to Lauren Good. So Verge alumni network out there getting us what we need. But if you don't have the web version, it's very hard for true posters to keep up the pace. So I think that's like coming. But you can't leave the app stuck in the following feed.

It's not a sticky preference. It defaults you. If your app gets pushed out of memory, or reboots in any way, or even it seems like just whenever it feels like it, it'll drop you back into the algorithmic feed, which is just a pure pain in the ass. And they should just make that setting sticky. And that's just respecting user preferences. Like, I don't feel like I'm being a diva about this. It's like, I set the preference, leave it alone. Like, my car is not like, I've moved the seat around to what I think will be more appropriate for you. It's like, just leave it. It seems

very simple to me. It's a real, it sounds, it seems like what you want is the Nugget account. Like, here it is again. All right, we should take a break. That's been a lot of ex-talk. Again, if you're mad at us, I'm just telling you, Twitter was massively important. I'm very excited about the reset moment of the internet. If you listen to other episodes of the show, you know, I think there's a reset moment on the internet.

I think search and AI, Sundar Pachai this week said the search genitive experience is the future of search. That's the clearest and most crisply he has said that. That's a big deal. We're in a moment of reset for the internet. taking a second to talk about the thing that was before you go on to the next thing, I think it's fine. Also, you can just hit skip on your podcast player because right now we're going to talk about gadgets in a serious way with Allison Johnson. Because it was Samsung event this week. We'll be right back.

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Alston Johnson has joined us. Hey, Alson. Hello. Big Samsung event this week. Lots of noise around the Samsung event. Samsung's finances are in disarray. They had earnings as well. Profits are down.

There's some data I saw that said iPhone sales in South Korea are up, which is weird. Not great to lose on your home turf. But the phones look good, right? It's the flip five and the fold five that launch is unpacked. What's going on here? Yeah, I guess the big story is that they fold flat now. So, yeah, we got a new flip style and fold style phone. They finally figured out how to make the hinges fold totally flat.

And the flip five is really, is the one I'm most excited about. I think it's the more interesting kind of update of the two. It comes with much bigger, like still small. but a lot bigger cover screen. It's 3.6 inches now, which is just going to totally change what you can do with the phone as opposed to the really tiny screen on the flip floor. So that's a big story, I think.

Was it really that tiny? The previous line. Yeah. Because one of the cool things is you can frame a selfie and use the rear-facing cameras and get a preview. I held up a postage stamp to the preview you get. It's the exact same side. as a postage stamp. It's like so hard to see yourself. Okay, never mind. That is tiny.

Yeah, yeah. Like the screen itself wasn't bigger than a postage stamp. Like, not even a good postage stamp, the little ones. Not even the like forever stamps. Like the old school ones with no barcode. Yeah, the full five is like an extremely minor update aside from the Hinge thing, which is exciting. But that's, that's even saying a lot. I mean, the Hinge thing is. exciting though, right? Like, like, this is a big deal because everybody was a couple weeks ago, pixel. We got that with a pixel fold and oh my God, it's so flat. And it's like, well, we're certainly going to get this. And we did. But Samsung's been doing this a lot longer. They've got a lot more other stuff that's polished in that way. Like, you haven't gotten a hold of it yet, right? I am awaiting my review. And it's no, they were supposed to be here yesterday and we're having conversations. I should get phones tomorrow. I'm

anxiously awaiting. But you're pumped. You're kind of excited to like check it out and like see how this works when it's flat and made by someone who's been doing this a while. Yeah. Yeah. That's a thing. I mean, like the pixel fold. I really like the form factor and really like that it folds flat. But when I was using it, I just kind of kept having these feelings of like, oh, well, Samsung is like doing this a little better. There's more multitasking. There's just more customization. And You definitely just get the feeling like Samsung is way ahead in foldable. So when they do make that little upgrade, it's just kind of like putting a stamp on something that was already pretty good. Yeah.

So it is exciting. Well, like a little boring. Samsung just isn't constrained by having to run Android. Like their ability to just mess with the software to support folding is just Google has to do it for everybody. Right. You can see Google's very careful. They're trying to like make standards, make it universal so that anybody makes a folding phone kind of gets it for free. That's their job, I think, is the OS Fender.

Like that's they have to. Samsung's just like, I don't know, Bixie's going to make the app bigger. Like they just don't have to give a shit. And so they, I think they're able to experiment more or iterate faster. Just watching the little bit of the keynotes that I've been able to see, they're just able to take bigger risks with like, what does it mean for the screen to get bigger? So Samsung can force Instagram into making an app that fills up your whole screen and Google can't. Or they'll put the option to make it bigger or run to Instagram side by side, you know, like somewhere in the deep in the menu settings.

They're happy to put something in the menu settings for you to do what you want. Why are you more excited about the flip? I maybe just coming off of the Razor Plus, the Motorola Razor Plus, which has the really big cover screen. It was kind of a light bulb for me. It felt like, oh, I finally get what these flip style phones can do. Just with being able to interact more with the front screen, you can write texts on it, which you couldn't do before with a smaller cover screen.

You can go into the settings and let it run full apps for you, which is like not generally recommended. But if you're a sick, if you're a sicko like me, you could do that. And then that's where I was just having a lot of fun, like finding things. Like, you can run Google Translate on it. And it's not a super experience, but I can like type in a word in Spanish and just get a translation without like doing a whole thing on my phone. So I'm excited to see what Samsung's take on this is. And if they're, I have a hunch that like their software is going to be ahead of Motorola's here.

but I don't know. I'm just excited to check them out side by side. Are you going to watch the Oppenheimer trailer on it? I guess so. I haven't watched it at all. See how big it is. I'll flip it open and watch Barbie after that. There you go.

As Christopher Nolan intended. It's funny. So you're saying like it's a lightbulb moment with the Motorola one and now the Samsung one. Isn't that just having a phone? Like the whole point of the flip phone factor to me was like, I will close this and my phone will go away. And now you're like, okay, they solved it by putting a giant screen on it. And I can use my phone without opening my phone. I have to be missing something.

That's a fair point. But here's the thing. So I've been wearing a smart watch. Yeah. Cutting edge technology here. And I'm just finding there's like a middle ground between stuff I can do on my smart watch where I just like. I just want to see a text and, like, dismiss it. And then there's the things you want your full phone for.

And then the cover screen is, like, in between these two things where I can't, like, Google translate a word on the smartwatch or I can talk to Siri. And I don't know. I don't want to do that. So that's where I was finding it was really interesting and helpful. And I think more of those kind of use cases will emerge. It did have the effect of, like, you don't get sucked into scrolling. Instagram on your phone because it is just terrible.

Like, you can tap on the Instagram notification and just mindlessly you'll start, like, looking through stuff. And you realize, like, this is awful. I either need to stop or open the phone. So that's where I was like, aha. Were you having moments of like, I am not going to open this phone? I will feel guilty if I opened the phone. I did.

Yeah. I mean, I had plenty of moments where I was like, yeah, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to just dive right into the Instagram feed. How is Samsung software at switching you from that little screen to the big screen? Because that's been like these phones are effectively mid-range phones, right? It feels like the seamlessly of moving between modes has been held back by the sort of mid-range Qualcomm chips in them. Yeah. And Samsung's a little further ahead here too.

They have the 8 Gen 2 in this one, which has been very good in all the phones I've tested. Yeah, I think they're still figuring out what do you what do people want when they when you close the phone? Do you want to keep running the app that you were running? Should should it prompt you to open the app? Motorola has a setting where you'll just get a little icon on the cover screen when you're using an app on the big screen. You close it. It'll kind of be like tap this to keep running on the outer screen, which I thought was clever and pretty useful and you can ignore it if you don't want to do that. I think they're still figuring it out, and it's definitely different kind of, you know, app by app. So we'll see what Samsung thinks. And then the difference with the Fold 5 is that it really is just a phone on the front, right? And then you, like, open it and then you have a tablet. Is there any relationship between sort of like it's a phone and it switches, goes down to a widget on the flip and it's a phone and it opens to a tablet on the fold?

Like, those are two wildly different paradigms, but it seems like they share some, like, conceptual behaviors. Yeah, I think they are really kind of splitting a little more now. Like, the fold format feels like if you want phone plus, rather than, like, a little bit less phone, then you want the tablet one. I mean, our good friend, Dan Seyfert will recommend a fold tablet style for you. That's how he watches Oppenheimer, actually.

That's his favorite way to watch every movie. I guess. It haunts me that he does that. With Instagram running on the side. Yeah, it's, I see the appeal and I appreciate it for stuff that I'm like sitting on the couch using the phone, you know, closed. And I'm like, oh, I need to do this thing that I would normally go get my laptop for. Like I need to make an Amazon fresh order and it's just like obnoxious to do it on a small

screen. Yeah, those moments where you're like, either I need to put this phone down and go get my laptop, that's when you fold it open. And you're like, no, I can run two things on the same screen. I can have, I don't need to be like tabbing between apps. I can figure out where I'm going to have lunch and Google Maps and read the restaurant website. I get all that and I respect it and it's very cool. I'm excited about the flip. The flip also costs a lot less.

It's like a thousand bucks. Because I'm excited about those things, but I'm not $1,800 excited, which is how much the fold and the pixel fold costs. Yeah, for $1,800 I'll get off the couch and go look at my laptop, I think. That's enough money. So I think it's an interesting moment for the flip phones. Just being at that $9.99 price point is like we're used to paying that much for phones or like having our carriers pay that much and paying them back with our contracts.

So I think those are positioned a little better to take off. And I'm curious how the how the kind of like minimalist aspects of the phone are going to appeal to people or I don't know. Maybe we all just do really want phone plus. Maybe we all want more phone all the time. Everyone just wants bigger screens. That's my theory. Yeah. Although even in this case,

you're like, you know what really unlocked these flip phones for me was when they added bigger screens to the front. It's true. All of tech is figuring out where you make the screen bigger to make people buy the next one. Is the inside? No, this time it's the outside. Like, that's the tech industry.

Next time around the back will have a screen. And then I'm sold. Do they say anything about durability? I mean, this is what people are afraid of the most with these phones. Yeah, it's kind of a little more the same this year. the new hinge has a slightly different structure that's supposed to take impacts a little better. Personally, that's the other thing I'm worried about with a folding phone. I'm worried about a speck of dust getting under the screen. But they have gotten better generation after generation. They say it's still rated to like 200,000 folds, which is like five years of use.

And it's IPX8 rated, so they're both fully like water submersible. But it's just a question mark. four years down the line, how good is it at, like, holding up, you know, how's the hinge? Did you get, like, a little bit of dust underneath and ruin everything? That's the question mark. Yeah, that IPX8, that X is not dust protected. Yeah. It's, like, very obvious, like, we're not going to make that promise. It's just a nope.

There's some other stuff that happened at Samsung. What else do they announce? You know what is dust rated? The new tablets. Oh, my God, Alex. Wasn't that the best segue you've ever heard? It's good. Yeah, sometimes you've got to just do it like a truck.

Just rumble into the frame within Samsung's tablet. You know what's really dust-rated? IP6-8, baby. These new, they're S-9s, right? That's the new name of these. They are outrageously expensive. It sounds like, and everybody else is releasing cheaper. Android tablets. Are you excited about them at all, Allison, as like a person who uses Android more than I ever will?

No, I'm a terrible person to ask about tablets. I literally just bought like a three-year-old iPad for my toddler. And that's like the most I've thought about tablets in the past few years. I think that's like most people at this point, right? Like most people are kind of, we're happy to have them. We want them, but they're not something when people, people are. get enthusiastic about unless you're really concerned about dust rating and waterproofing on your new tablet, in which case. And these have OLED screens, like OLED displays. There's the Tab S9, which is 11 inches. The Tab S9 plus, which is 12.4 inches, and the Ultra, which is 14.6. And at that point, do you just buy a TV? Oh, you buy a laptop? Yeah. I mean, so this is the, and Google has made some like new investment in Android tablets. Like they're talking about it again, right?

They've got the pixel tablet. Obviously the foldable phones, particularly the fold and the pixel fold. The point of those is you put them at a tablet mode. So there's like a lot of action on the side of the house. And you just look at these Samsung tablets and you're like, these are little laptops, especially at the bigger sizes. They've got all those sort of iPad Pro Surface like docks. adapters and keyboard, all the stuff is there.

And then you're like, but I'm using not just Android, like Samsung S-Pen Android. Maybe some people like it, send us emails. If you're like a hardcore S-pen person and you trust your workflow to that, that just feels tenuous to me. Even though Samsung's been doing it for years, it's like, I'm going to get backed into a corner of Samsung's weird pen ideas. And then if they ever go away or Samsung pulls the rip port and changes it, like, like, I'll be unsettled.

Like, I'm, I don't like that. Going from the little tiny pin to a proper stylist with an iPad is going to, like, blow those people's minds. I won't even, I won't, like, part of the reason that I won't put my workflow on the iPad is every year Apple's like, here's a new multitasking idea. And they just, like, rip it out and replace, you know, it's like, or they glue stage manager onto it. And I'm like, I got work to do.

I can't be on this journey with you. Call me when you settle down. It does feel like these Tab S-9s, like, they've kind of settled into a lot of it. Like, the changes here are pretty small. They've seen to have figured it out. They seem comfortable with their price point, even though it's more than everybody else. But they've also been at this price point in this space for a lot longer and more consistently than other Android tablets. Yeah, I'm just putting at the call.

If you are a hardcore Samsung tablet person, and you saw this and you thought, one, I need to switch from an iPad. add to the S-Pen ecosystem. Like, I want to hear, for you in particular, I'm looking at you straight through the barrel of the camera right now. I want to know you. Right into their soul. Just please reach out. Or if you are an existing, like, S-Pen person, and you're like, oh, shit, I got to upgrade.

I just want to hear from you. Like, what's it like in your brain? Is it cool? Like, let me know. I'm just, like, dying to know. I think we're past that point even with the market leaders. Like, I don't think people are dying to upgrade from one surface to the next. I think their surfaces break or they get slow and then they just get the new one.

Allison, I think that's your point about the iPad. Like, at this point, you cannot tell me what a new iPad can do that my existing iPad can't do. Yeah. It's going to run cocoa melon just fine. Exactly. And I get it, right, like with some of this Vision Pro stuff with Apple, like, there's a whole suite of the iPad app ecosystem is the foundation of a bunch of things for Apple in a way that Apple's good at managing the ecosystem. And on the Google side, the Android proper, like they are making this investment in tablets.

I think they see a slow step path that way. I'm just very curious, specifically Samsung tablets. Like, if you're hardcore into Samsung, like, I just, that's what the verge is for. You got a pixel tablet. Get out. Don't email. How many members are in R slash Samsung tablets? Is that even a subreddit?

Is there like forum drama in the R slash Samsung tablet subreddit? Like, I just want to know. All right. I can't transition this one as well as the last one, but I do. What's an IP 68 rated? I don't know the IP 68 rating on the new Galaxy Watch 6 series because there's more than one. There's not a pro right now. There was a pro last year.

But there is a watch and there's a classic. and the big thing Victoria is oh so excited about it is they've got rotating bezels. Yeah, bring them back. Yeah. They're huge. Just the classic though. Just the classic?

Yeah. Which is the one that's $100 more? And it's bigger. It's like comes in like a 44 and a 47 millimeter, which I don't got the wrist for that. No. My wrist can't support that. Like I got to go to the gym a lot more if I'm going to wear the watch that big. Like that's rough.

But it seems cool. Vee, I know is like she's just terrifically excited about it. And it sounds like other watch fans, Samsung watch fans are excited because they can't have Apple watches. So this is what they have to get excited about. I mean, they're cool. They look cool. The round, like, I love a rotating vessel. I think that's just like, it's so funny that I love it.

Like, I think the digital crown is so silly, but I'm like, rotating bezel. That's what sings to me. Because it's like, it reminds you of when you get that first watch, with a rotating bezel as a kid did it have the click. Oh my gosh. Oh my God. That's a good click. The digital crown is annoying with fingernails too.

Like I have to really get my fingernails on it. And you ship your finger. Like if you have pain on your nails, it'll chip a little. And then you're like, why should I even manipulate this stupid crown? I'm going to go get my phone. Yeah. If it only had a rotating bezel, like get on this apple. It could be square.

It works. So the big new feature is not these new funny. watch faces that are extremely creepy. That's not it. That's also there. You know how big things are unsettling? Like things that are slightly too big are unsettling? That's these watch faces.

It's just a little, ooh, I don't, hmm. Yeah, they're just, I'm like, I'm looking at this seven on this watch face. I'm like, I don't, too big. Too big. Too big. I don't want to look at it anymore. What if it's just a quick glance at your wrist? I mean, that'll keep you from, like, looking at your watch all the time.

No, they've kept the hands at the same size. Actually telling the time on this face in particular is more difficult. The numbers are big and the hands are small. It's a very odd choice. It's going to be like this checking your watch in meetings. It's going to be great. Famously, using hands to check the time is so intuitive that you can have big hands and no numbers. Rarely do you see big numbers and no hands.

It's going to be fine, guys. I think it's cool. Yeah, some of them have mouths that I don't like. They all, yeah. It's all about how you get attention in a Best Buy. It's like you're walking down the aisle, there's like a big Apple display that they co-brand, there's whatever, there's like all the carrier noise. And it's like, does that watch have a mouth? It'll work.

That's the word. It'll super work to get your attention. All right. We've got to end this. We've talked about watches with teeth for too long. We'll be right back with a lightning rat. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront,

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. We're back. We're going to do a quick lightning round. And then I just want to read some of the responses we got

to consumer product turf wars. I will tell you we're going to talk about DeWalt versus Milwaukee on the Vergecast today. It's going to be incredible. But we got some great responses, and I want to talk about them. But first, let's do a little lightning round. Cranes, you're up first.

All right. Open AI has been working on a system to detect AI written content, and it's not going well. So they said, we're just going to stop doing that. The blog post, they put up a blog post silently. They didn't even tell anyone about it. They're just like updated.

the blog post where they had announced this tool, and they're like, we've discontinued the tool because the tool doesn't work very well. They're like, never mind. Nope, not doing it. And yeah, so that's a little disconcerting because there's a lot of, obviously a lot of use cases for where it'd be nice to quickly check if something is written by AI, but it turns out that's a lot harder than getting in AI to, like, write stuff. I feel like I am good at detecting when something is written by AI.

Yes. A friend sent me, this is so horrible. A friend sent me an obituary for a friend of theirs who had passed, and it was very clearly written by AI. And it said things like, he worked in the Atlantic Ocean. And the guy apparently would have thought this was absolutely hysterical and would have found it very, very funny. But it's just like, somebody take a pass at that. Yeah. It's one of those things I feel like it comes from editing so many people so many times.

You start to recognize people's phrases in their styles. It's sort of human-like in that way in that everyone has favorite. phrases that they don't even know they have, and it has that. Yeah, particularly chat. Chat Chapti has like tropes and construct, like you can, you can, it has a style. It's a boring robotic style, but it has a style. And like Richard said, if you, if you were in the business of constantly editing other people's writing, you start to recognize style, like very quickly.

Like, I think I could probably read the verge of that bylines and get it 90% right who were at one, right? Like just on a day-to-day basis, I can, I can tell you when Liz's, Lepado has written something. Next week on the verge cast. It's just me guessing of violence. I can probably pick David Pierce out of a block of copy in two seconds flat. Like, I've edited David for so long.

I know David so well. I think a lot of our listeners can, like, read us into our writing, and it's a note we get a little. So you just do a chat GPT now. It's just funny that open AI can't do it. Like, they're like, we can't do this. The robot can't see itself. It's like a very funny outcome. It's very good.

All right, Richard, what's your lightning round? This charging network announcement from seven automakers, we've got BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Bens, and Stalantis. They combined, they said they're going to put it, they're going to build 30,000 charging locations by 2030. The first ones shouldn't be here until next year. But like some of them, they're planning to put along highways and kind of high traffic spots are going to make sure that there are places where you can go get food and do other things while your car is charging. and just kind of revamp the North American charging infrastructure. Are they using the Tesla, the NACS connector? Are they doing CCS?

They will, at least right now, the plan is to have both the CCS, the combined charging system, like the older style that most cars have so far, and also the NACS standards that Tesla and most of these, at least some of these automakers and several other automakers have said they'll use kind of starting in 2025. Yeah. Well, I guess they have to support their existing cars. I guess they need CCS. It's just a weird time.

for all of this infrastructure. Like, we were thinking about buying a new charger for our house. And I was like, which standard do I, like, do I buy the one for the car I have now or the car I might get in it? It's a very weird time. Real micro mini USB. Well, like, but like a mini USB cable. Like, I'll just buy this cable.

It was like $3. I'll do some e-waste and, like, move on with my life. This is like, I need to spend $500. And it might only, like, it's only going to last this car, you know? Very strange. Okay, Allison, what's yours? Mine's a two-parter. So Wes wrote up some T-Mobile News, which is like, cool, exciting T-Mobile News.

They successfully, they have reached speeds of 3.3 gigabits per second with four-carrier aggregation. And this is like in the wild, their actual working 5G network. They can do this because they have a standalone network that they bought from Sprint. not from Sprint. They bought Sprint. That's true. Cool. So like, cool, yay. Good job. Team Mobile. The other news that Sheena wrote up earlier this week is that they are now charging people $5 to pay their bills in the store. So if you don't, if you can't pay online or if you don't want to or whatever reason you have, you go into a T-Mobile store to pay them money for your phone service, they're going to charge you.

extra money to do that. So there's the dark side of T-Mobile news. Do they explain why they're doing that? They call it a payment support charge. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's innovation. It should be called a boomer support charge.

This is just, I say this, my mom, I think, is a T-Mobile customer. She definitely was like, I'm going to the T-Mobile store today. And I was like, you go more than once a month. What's happening? there. I go to the Verizon store, like, more than the average person, and they're not that busy. Like, I think they can handle a few boomers coming in to pay their bills. I don't know. All they need to do is add a credit for every single time they get hacked and leak your information. And then no one will get charged this for, like, the next two or three years. I could just ease it in.

It would be great. I wish we had any data on how many people are going in these stores to pay their bills. Like, they're obviously trying to deter you from doing it. It must cost them more somehow. I, I guess, I think. I don't know. Maybe there's not that many. And they're like, you know what? This is an extra like $500 a month for us. Why not? They're there. But like, what are they doing? They're just load, they're like loading your profile on a tablet that they're holding at the store and like punching in numbers. Like I don't know. Take your card. Yeah. Or your cash. Yeah. I will never forget. This is not about T-Mobile. I'll take any chance to Dunk in ATT I can get at this point. a long, long time ago I was complaining about something with AT&T.

And an AT&T spokesperson called me. This is ages ago. I'm out of my own background policy. This was like on background they called me. I was like a little baby reporter. And they dressed me down because they're like, you do not understand how complicated the AT&T billing system is. If you want to make any changes,

it requires 60,000 people to work for a year to change the font on this website and like propagate the billing. system changes. And I was like, oh, that sounds right. And now I'm like, oh, they were just sliding me. They probably weren't. And I can tell you why, because again, reaching into my own past working at Comcast, I don't know if it's still like this, but within 10, 15 years ago, it essentially was still a DOS system that the billing system ran on. And then they came out with another system that was on top of that. But you've got, you're talking about a billing system that was written in like Cobalt or something. So they cannot change anything. I think with T-Mobile, it's, they

don't want to have anyone spending time doing this in store because they want them upselling you on phone. Yeah. Have you seen this case? Also, they're really trying to push people into auto pay because like those direct bank authorizations and those kind of auto payments, it's good for their bottom line. And also, it's cheaper than like authorizing a card doing a check or even handling cash or something like that. Yeah. So they're just really trying to push auto pay. I just think all the T-Mobile employees actually have to be COBOL like programmers. And that's why they're charging the extra because it's to offset. It would be more secure if they were.

It's the COBOL bonus that they're like, there's one wizard and they owe him more money every year and they're like, we got to fund this COBL bonus. Yep. Who knows? Alison, while I have you here and we're talking carriers, can I get a quick Jenna five-sysus update? Oh, yeah. We mentioned Sprint, so we got to do it. So T-Mobile bought Sprint.

We brought our nation's carriers down to three. We were supposed to invent a new carrier out of Dish Network. What's going on? Do we have a fourth carrier yet? We do not. We still have Project Gena 5Sys, which is still kind of in beta. They say that they met their June FCC deadline, which was like 70% of the population they need to cover. The one in, I want to say 20, yeah, I think next year is like the big one, which would be, it's a certain amount of covering like a certain amount of the places where they hold spectrum licenses, which is trickier. and more expensive, I guess. So the short answer is no. Something I did write up this week is that you can sign up for Boost Infinite through Amazon Prime now.

So that's what we got. That's good. That's really the big three carriers quaking in their boots because you can sign up for Boost Infinite with Amazon Prime. All right. My lightning round, just a really quick one. Viren reviewed the DGI MAVIC Air 3 this week. It's a new drone. And he actually sparked a really interesting conversation on.

YouTube, in our YouTube comments, about how drones have gotten kind of boring. Like the innovation cycle of drones has started to slow down. And we're kind of the same place with phones, where we're just talking about pretty incremental camera upgrades every year. And the actual part of, like, the camera can fly by itself is no longer interesting, which is just a remarkable place to be. Go check out that YouTube contract. It's like really good. Viren is very proud of the review. It's a great review. He flew the drone into a storm, which you're not supposed to do. The shots are beautiful. But it's just a really great example of, like, the community that we have on our site and on our platforms, just like talking about a thing altogether. Really great. Like,

super into it. And that brings us to fighting. Yes. I got too excited. Sorry. So last week, we were joking about the cyber truck and whether or not people had strong opinions about windshield washer fluid. It turns out they do. Okay. Whatever. We're going to set that aside for like a full, I can't even begin to evaluate that situation, except to say you should not use plain water. I just can't. That's a thing? Don't do it. Yeah, a bunch of people emailed us.

The only answer is plain water. And it's like, maybe if you live in the desert, I don't know, man. I live where it gets cold. Mountain Dew. Coca-Cola. Coke heavy. Just spray that on your car. It's going to be great.

Then we asked all of you to send us what your favorite, like, verses are. So there's iOS versus Android. We said you can't do that too. easy, just pure engagement rate. Like you walk out in the street and you say iOS versus Android and like 100 people form a circle around you and start arguing. Mac versus Windows, it used to be the thing. I think it's declined.

We're like, what are the other ones? So we got this one. I haven't evaluated it. But Rob tells us that VHS versus beta is still going. Yes. Wow. Which is incredible. I'm super into that.

This one is pure Vergecast bait. Richard, I'm dying for your thoughts here. Chase tells us, I'm in a lot of. a discord for the AMC A-List subscribers, and the fight between IMAX and Dolby fans is so intense that they make you choose forum flare to show which side you're on. And then he says, the answer, of course, is IMAX. Of course, there are fan boys. Of course there stands. I've never actually been to a Dolby Theater. Like, I would have to drive like 30 miles out of my way to go to a Dolby Theater. Will I do it? Yes, because I need to get into this battle.

Andrew wrote to us, I said apparently Bose versus Sony noise canceling, just like four mores left and right. Like how can you have an opinion on this?

You, it's Sony. The noise is canceled. Sony. Okay, DeWalt versus Milwaukee Power Tools. We should do an entire episode on this.

Like, people really care about this. I follow a TikToker who's like a Ryobi power fan and it's just a gadget blog for Ryobi tools on TikTok. Like an old school gadget blog. If you're a longtime

I'm a brochurecast listener, you know that the tool guide, G-U-Y-D, is one of my favorite blogs. It's still going. It is just old school and gadget for power tools. It is incredible. Chainsaw Journal, my favorite trade publication. It's good. It's good. I'm just telling me it's good.

There are more. Ableton versus Free Lute Studio, apparently a hardcore battle. Did we get Canon versus Nikon? Canon versus Nikon. Incredible. Cannot believe I forgot about it. Although, I will say Canon. I'm a Nikon person, so I'm going to say this.

It seems like they have figured it out in a way that Nikon is not. I feel like it's one of those, the Mac versus PC thing, where it's like, everybody's just, you've picked your side by now, right? Like, are people switching between Canon and ICON? Isn't it more mirrorless DSL? I don't know. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like in the mirrorless world, it's like Sony and Canon, right? They're the winners in their like pro space.

And then they're sort of Nikon. and I'm just like rooting for them. They are. You can do it, buddy. They're not rooting for themselves. They don't appear to be rooting for themselves at this point in time. But that's a great one. I think my favor is Shimano versus S-Ram to bite components.

That's Dieter. I don't know if I'm not if I'm not if I'm 100% of that's Dieter sent that to us, but that sounds like Dieter sent that to us. Yeah, Dieter is just a little ghost, ghost email. Richard, what's yours? Mechanical keyboards versus ones everyone else in the office tolerates. especially as we're in these hybrid workplace. Very good.

Very heated to be. All right. We got a lot of these. Keep sending them to us. These are good. As you know, Liam's dream is that we make entire episodes, like, diving deep into these subcultures. I love getting these emails because it's really fun to hear people's explanations. I will say the best one we got this week was Vergecast versus Waveform.

I think that's very obvious. It's way for. No, it's the Vergecast. Come on. We love them. That's great. Competition is the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, driving force of interest on this show.

So I love these. These are really great. If you know why VHS versus beta is still going and you want to pitch crans on writing 1,500 words on it, by all means. I kind of know a little bit. I have a vague idea. There's still like a really, part of it's like archival purposes and stuff, and there's a whole subculture around VHS tape still because so much stuff got released on VHS that didn't

get released on any other platform. And BetaVax actually has higher resolution. It's like higher fidelity. And so ripping and stuff like betas are superior to rip, generally speaking, than VHS. But the ripping technology for VHS is better. This is all Chris Person and I talk about in our DMs. I don't understand 70% of our DMs. It's great.

1,500 words on the website. VHS versus beta is still going. I think it's important. This is why the verge exists. I just, I cannot be clearer about what our purpose here is. We write about the Samsung phones to pay the bills so we can write the VHS for the beta story. Like, very clear what our, like, flow is. I demand it.

I must know. It's good stuff. Yeah. All right. Send us more. If you have, if you can possibly explain the Rain X thing to me, it's just very good. Like, this is what the internet's for. Lots more of these.

Send them to us. Again, Liam's dream is to do an entire episode on these. They're really fun to hear. It's really fun to hear your opinions on them. Just Vergecast to the verge.com. We love it. That's it. That's the show. I gotta get out of this hotel room. I've been in it for like 95 hours straight. There's lots of stuff on the site you should read. We wrote a look back at the I River MP3 player, which is like a true gadget nerd MP3 player. Great blast from the past. The Chromecast turned 10 years old. Sean Hollister wrote about the original Chromecast referencing the review of the Chromecast that I wrote that I had completely forgotten. He's like, Ezra and Eli Phil said. I was like, did I say that? Incredible. We have a great piece on the indie game scene in Japan. Pan, which is really cool. And then our Google coverage, we're really covering Google search a lot this year, really thinking about what it means for the internet to be architected around Google search and how that might change as AI rolls out. Our very own David Pierce wrote a story

about NEVA. It's a profile of NEVA, the paid search engine that was meant to compete with Google. It's a bunch of X Googlers. And it couldn't do it. And that's a story from beginning 10, a startup to failure of a startup, really unpacking why Google is so dominant in all the ways that it uses its dominance. Really great story. Really fun profile. to read. And just like I said, a marker of something that's changing. So just go read that story. Look at our Google coverage.

If you have ideas and how we should cover Google and Google search in particular through this manner of change, love to hear those too. Okay. Allison, thank you for putting up with us. Richard, thank you for feeling in for David. That's it. That's Vergecast. Back and roll.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.