The Vergecast - Updated Macbook Pros, Microsoft Surface Go, and this week in Elon

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay and Dieter discuss an Apple event they were invited to this week for Apple’s updated MacBook Pros. Along with Paul, they dive into how creatives are using these machines, and what these new specs are. Another laptop announcement from this week is Microsoft’s Surface Go. The crew runs through their demo with the computer and discuss how it compares to the other Surface devices. And continuing with our trend, we also have a new edition of “This week in Elon Musk,” hosted by science editor Liz Lopatto. There’s a lot more in between that — like Paul’s newly sponsored segment “Hearrings” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:36 - 10 years of app store 05:12- Apple’s new MacBook Pros have the latest Intel processors and quieter keyboards 21:58 - Apple worked with Blackmagic on a new external GPU 33:09 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 38:20 - Microsoft’s $399 Surface Go aims to stand out from iPads or Chromebooks 45:49 - Magic Leap is shipping its first headset this summer 51:56 - Justice Department appeals ruling in attempt to block massive AT&T–Time Warner merger 57:24 - Paul’s weekly segment “Hearrings” 1:00:23 - YouTube TV goes down (again) during World Cup 1:02:43 - Xbox One is getting Dolby Vision support 1:03:32 - Apple will end its photo printing operation in September 1:06:55 - This amazing new web tool lets you create microsites that exist solely as URLs 1:08:09 - This app reads Wikipedia to teach you about the cities you’re driving through Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, the network that you're listening to. I'm trying to be professional today. You started out pure Adderall, and then you went like... Doubt. The Adderall to Doubt spectrum there was deep. I was thinking about it today as I was walking in the office. What if the Verge cast was like a regular show, like a good show? we'd have like an intro

you know like this week on the Vergecast sponsored by blah blah like that and I'd be like hey everybody welcome to the and then I thought I would do it and I just utterly failed anyway I'm your friend Nelai Paul Miller is here hello Deeter Bone

not your friend we have like a dent show today so there's not a lot of things happen but all the things that happened were deep so it's not like a grab bag it's like a very focused deep

dive in the things. We have Liz Lapato is going to do this week in Elon for us, which makes me very happy. This week in Elon, I think, will become the truest recurring segment. I feel like Elon heard this weekend Elon. It's like, well, I got to give him a week. He's like I got to do it. And then, you know, it's not like us to call it the sponsors and give him free stuff, but Paul's segment is sponsored this week, which is incredible. Just you wait. You're going to want to buy so much quality product. Yeah, it's going to be great. Very soon.

Okay, let's begin. So a lot of Apple news this week. It was a 10-year anniversary of the App Store. Apple celebrated by releasing slightly faster laptops as far as I can tell. No, they did a whole thing. There's 10 years of the App Store. They did a whole piece. Apple does editorial now, which is like a very interesting thing for them to do.

So they did a whole thing about what apps look like. We did a whole thing about what apps look like, a bunch of Macs that said, here's my apps have gotten uglier and less information dense over time, and I think that is absolutely wild. And that from all of the things that we looked at over that 10-year period, the one screenshot that stuck out to me, I think Dan tweeted out. It was in 95 Mac, I think. The Facebook app used to show you five posts on a 3.5-inch screen, and now it barely shows you one. Right.

And everything else is like interface corrupt. I don't know that I agree that they've gotten uglier. They've definitely gotten uglier. Yeah, I don't agree. They've gotten more refined in like one particular way. Are you saying you missed the felt? What's ugly? They have far less character.

They all definitely look the same now. And that sameness, I think, is, it's more refined in one axis. But on another axis, it's definitely a little bit. It's all on brand in a way. Yeah, everything is, Kyle Cheko is a great writer. He's written for us. He's written for East term this airspace. Like, everything looks like an Airbnb in a nice city.

Everything everywhere is this weird minimal aesthetic. And that's every app too. And that loss of character to me is like just looking at all those screenshots really came through. But anyway, that's not really the Apple news. I just wanted to intro the MacBooks by saying it was 10 years to the App Store. I will say one thing about the anniversary is it made me a little bit nostalgic for that period right before the app store when people were making a bunch of homebrew apps and we figured out how to get them on the phone. We played lights out and the tap tap revolution game.

There were like there were a handful of games and apps that were native that you could get. if you knew what you're doing. And it really felt like you were in the cool kids club, and it didn't require a ton of work to get into the cool kids club in a way that if you want to hack an iPhone now and do something that's outside the bounds of the app store, man, have fun. That's like, that's not as easy as it used to be. And like there's tradeoffs there. It's more secure, et cetera, et cetera.

But nevertheless, it's the barrier to entry to like hack away on the thing you own is much higher now. Yeah. And the excitement about. jailbreaking the first phone did not come with an entire body of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and concerns about Russian election hacking that they just, it just absolutely does now. Yeah. It was a sweeter, innocent time. Yeah.

Dieter was our competitor at that time. I don't even remember this. I was. A fierce competitor over there at the Mobile Nations. I ran a database of Homebrew Software for the Palm Prix, not for the iPhone. Wow. Anyway, what you were going to say something? Well, I just wanted to say that I celebrated the anniversary by downloading a clicker game last night.

Me and my roommate played it competitively for about five hours straight. I got Paul back. All right. So I just, to me, that's where the app store is at. It's like, this clicker game is so good. It's so refined. There's been years of clicker game ideas, and this is like a melding of them and taking a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and it'll pinch it in its beautiful and seamless. And then it asked you for a $40 net purchase to go to the next level or wait 30 minutes.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, no, no, no. No, no, no waiting. No, they've got it down. They've got it down. I believe you. What is the clicker game called?

Almost a hero. That's not the ad for Paul Segment. That's a real endorsement. Come at me with your almost a hero prestige. All right. Here's the real news. New laptops. Dieter was in town.

We went to the Apple event together yesterday. It was, I think Deeter used the phrase shock and awe to describe this event. So usually when a company spec bumps a laptop, they put out a press release. Maybe they'll send you one. but you understand what's happening, which is that Intel released new processors. Right. And then on some timeline,

they got put into a laptop. If you're a PC manufacturer, that timeline is like 20 minutes. If you're Apple, it's four years. But on some timeline, there were new Intel chips and they were placed into your laptop. Yeah, no, that timeline's super important

that if it were par for the course for there to be a new Intel chip and then a beat and then Apple releases laptops that have the new Intel chip, They absolutely could have just done a press release, but they don't do that. So they had to do something bigger. So Apple had a huge event space here in New York.

They had this just series of incredibly impressive people who use Macs in their creative work. So we met the director of the Despacito video and his editor who were super cool. We met an 18-year-old who code an app to help his autistic brother communicate better using icons. that read words to you. Super cool. It's an incredibly impressive kid. We met another 18-year-old who she's going to Stanford in the fall. She started an academy to teach kids how to code.

And she built a VR app that helps you have empathy for people with schizophrenia. Just like the most impressive people. We met the guy who produced a bunch of songs with Alicia Keys and Alicia Kara and Rihanna. One of a bunch of Grammys. Is that why the trumpet isn't the Virgin's Leaf? guy. That was a young guy who has a record deal and he showed us how he writes trumpet music. I mean, he has like a pop. He's like a pop guy. But he's like, I'm going to write a trumpet solo in real time with you. And he showed up like looping logic and recording multiple

tracks and like comping him together. We saw a molecular, I mean, I can just keep going. This was a long time. There were 12, there were a total of 12 different demos. And it was, they said, it'll probably take something a little over two hours. We ended up being there for over three for sure. Yeah. And nothing against these people. They're all incredibly impressive. And every single one of them, there's a like a verge story to write about them. Here's how technology is enabling this really cool neuroscientist to map how brains work and see elegans using Unity. That's cool. Here's a, here's an artist who's making gigapixel photography using like a robotic camera tripod. Super like,

Here's a scientist that has taken all of the dirt cheap parts that are getting made by the millions for smartphones and repurposing them to create portable air quality monitors so that people can strap them on and go about their day and it measures where they are

via GPS and then they can down to like the block identify where the worst air pollution is and then use that to identify the sources of that air pollution. Beautiful. I mean, come on. I mean, it was what. And so we're in these demos. They've all had the new laptops for some time, unclear.

And you can't really come at like a genius 18-year-old and be like, did the faster laptop really help you? You just have to be like, you're wonderful. And I hope that you are put in charge of something very soon. And you can't really. So it's like that kind of still did. We also can't ask them, aren't you glad Apple waited to get it right? And then so I just, I just,

I want to make it very clear that the demos and the people we met were incredibly impressive. And that verge world of technology helps you make culture the culture, like, right in our lane. Yeah. But that wasn't the story. Right. The story was that there's 8th-gen Intel processors in a laptop that looks exactly the same as the old laptop that runs the same software. with radion graphics. With radion graphics.

Radion graphics. And now there's a T2 chip that manages the boot sequence and touch ID. And you just connecting those things, I looked at all the coverage, was just hard. Our friend Lauren Goodm was there. Quieter keyboards. So that's the main thing. So I just want to set this stage. I do want to talk a little bit more about the T2 chip on the Vergecast that I did in the post

because it does deserve more credit than we just, then we've given it. But I just want to set this up. So before we go to meet all these. impressive people. You know, Dieter and I are sitting on a couch and Lauren was sitting across and they were just going through the specs. Like, here's the laptop and then we're going to be always impressive people. All of us are just like keyboard. Talk about the keyboard. And they're like, we made it quieter. People love the keyboard. We made it quieter. And like, like, Lauren and I like looked at each other and then both like deferred. Like, are you going to,

are you going to ask? And Lauren's like, did you make it more reliable? And they were like, you know, not a lot of them break, actually. People love them. It's about the same. We think it'll be able to the same. And both of us were like, we looked at each other again. Like, would you like to ask the follow-up? Because we could have just, like, attacked. So that's the story with the MacBook is they've had problems with the keyboard.

Casey Johnson, the outline is, again, a person who's been driving this story. There's a class action lawsuit about the keyboard. They have a four-year repair extension on these keyboards. And their answer is it's not that. big of a problem. Most people love them. The size of the problem from Apple's perspective, it's like on a vast beach of laptops, it's like one or two tiny grains of sand. But it turns out that one or two tiny grains of sand can really ruin your experience. I want to keep your keyboard from working. Well, I mean, they sell a lot of laptops. So even on a, on a, on a relative

basis, right? You're like, it's a fractional percentage. But it was an absolute basis. It was a running joke. It was a meme. It was so obvious. Here's how much Apple didn't want to talk about this issue. Not only did they not address the repair stuff, towards the end of the event, I was like, okay, so you made it quieter. How'd you make it quieter? What'd you do to make it quieter?

We don't want to talk about that. It took all the sand out. Yeah, they were like, we're sure someone will tear it down and figure out. Which is actually a correct answer. Like, someone else can do that work. We're not going to tell you. But that, to me, is like, the real split. There are so many things to talk about with the actual.

product. And in many ways rightfully, Apple sees it itself as a company that doesn't just make laptops. They make these like tools that enable people to do great things. And they want to focus on that. But it's so interesting to me this whole context because this is, what I've

been arguing is like that just Apple needs to put a, make a box that holds an Nvidia GPU and a modern Intel process. Just buy, go to New Egg, go to PC Part Picker and make a computer for professionals.

And the idea is that professionals use their tools in novel ways. They are creative and focused and expert and they can figure it out. And you don't have to design their entire experience for

them like you might want to do with a more consumer product. But very few laptops are constructed that way. So this is an event about laptops. And I will say throughout all of these demos, we saw a bunch of stuff that Apple doesn't usually show anybody. We saw a lot of professionals getting into that file system and just doing a bunch of file

system stuff and like moving a bunch of badly named files from one window into another. You know, like they were doing, they were showing us of the work. Yeah. And so I appreciate that. And I appreciate that Apple is like clear about what the Mac should do versus what the iPad should do. And there was no there's no babying of the computer usage here. We were seeing real people who actually do the work.

Apple was very insistent that they hadn't paid them. They all just volunteered to come be a part of this thing. And they were showing us how they do their work. So that's great. I just think the actual computer is not, like that's not that story. Right? Like Deeter and I always argue about instruments versus tools. You made a great video, great processor video,

but I should call it your technology instruments. And to me, this whole event was the best argument ever that they're just tools. You could take away the laptop they had and put in a different laptop, and they would probably get to the same end result. Right. And I think that was the big disconnect. But we should actually talk about the laptop. So, Deider, you want to start with the T2 chip? Sure.

I guess it's a random place to start. So the T2 chip, the thing that they did beyond the Intel processors, which I guess we'll get into later, is they took the internals of these things and made them basically operate from like a system level in. similar way to the way the iMac Pro works, which is that there's this T2 chip. And it controls the touchbar. It controls the encryption on the SSD, which means that you can have faster encryption because they can do hardware encryption stuff. It does a bunch of other, like, random security stuff. And that is the thing that allows them to just add a bunch of extra, I don't know,

security and just moving stuff around in there. So they did that. It also, I think, is the thing that allows them to control the, true tone display. So it's basically, I think it's basically a little iOS chip in there. So that gives them true tone on the display and also on the touch bar. That's great. I love that.

That's like the most Apple thing. Right. They're like, we have another LCD. Yeah, I was talking to, I think I was talking to Sam Biford. And my notes said, my notes from the meeting were like, oh, and there's true tone on the touch bar, L.O.L. Like, because I didn't care. And he's like, no, thank God.

Thank God. It would be so annoying to have a true tone display, not a true. don't touch par. And then, yeah, I don't know, like higher levels for max RAM, better RAM, higher levels for max storage. That higher RAM often takes up more power, and so they increased the watt hours on both the 15 and the 13 inch, significantly more apparently on the 13 inch. But they're saying that the overall battery life is going to end up being a wash because

of that higher power draw. What if you get less RAM, but... Do they put less battery in if you get less RAM? I don't think so. No, I think it's just the batteries. The battery is a battery. But they didn't fundamentally re-architect the thing. So they made the keyboard quieter, but presumably you've got to completely replace it if it breaks.

They didn't add new ports. They didn't add face ID. They didn't change the screen so it has fewer bezels. They didn't add touch to the screen because that's never ever going to happen for us. No 4K screens in these laptops. Yeah. And I think no, the color profile thing, it's still not the full gamut. I mean, it was just fun for me.

That's the compromise I would make if I was building a laptop custom. They did say, which I think is really interesting, running True Tone has a minor effect on battery life that the bigger battery will compensate for. And I think it's because they're actively controlling the brightness in a super aggressive way. Yeah, it's just like a lot. Yeah, we should get into the processors. But the main thing that's interesting to me is how aggressively Apple is focusing on talking to pro users. It's the behind the Mac campaign. They had the iMac Pro.

They had the whole long thing that we know we promised the Mac Pro is coming. We've got these new MacBook pros. But they didn't update the 13-inch MacBook Escape that doesn't have a touch bar. That's the same. They didn't update the MacBook Air. And I didn't even mention that they didn't update the Mac Mini because why would they do that? They're having rumors that there's updates for that stuff coming. But what's fascinating to me is the thing, the most successful Mac of all the

time, I firmly believe, is the 13-inch MacBook Air, right? Like, I don't think you can really argue with that. It is, it was the best laptop for at least half a decade. Do you think they thought the MacBook would be the, I'm just going to point this out. The MacBook Air is on sale today. They canceled the 2015 MacBook Pro, which is the MacBook I have. On sale as in like deals, deals, deals? No, you just buy, you just spend $1,000 and buy a brand new MacBook Air.

Right. today. Yeah. You will not get a retina display. It's like, this thing is crazy. What's the processor in that? I mean, look,

it's 1.8 gigahertz dual core Intel I-5. Wompomp. It's not a fast computer, but they still sell it because people still want this thing. Yeah. Anyway. All that'll come hopefully in October.

It better, because that's the big question to me is at what, all this pro talk is great. I love pros. We're going to have pros look at this laptop and we review it. We're going to get into it.

But if you want a good $1,000 Mac, the question is, does Apple really want to sell that to you anymore, or do they want you to buy an iPad? Yeah, and I don't know the answer to that question at all because the iPad is still not quite there. I think they know that. There's also a rumored iPad refresh coming this fall, and it's back to school time. So it's really weird to not put out a... Oh, you're right. It is back to school. Oh, man.

It's really weird to not have the computer for back to school. It's not like Apple doesn't know when Intel comes out. with new chips. I just don't see how this is so hard. Refresh your laptops when Intel releases new chips. Is that bowing and scraping the Intel? Is that like hurt their pride? Yeah. I do think that Apple wanted to not have the expectation that they have to refresh their Macs every year. Like I really do believe that Apple doesn't think that the newest Intel chips every year, year and year out is a must buy. They think that their Macs can see. still be good with a slightly older chip and they don't want people to have the mindset that if it doesn't have the latest chip, it's therefore bad.

But I also think that they've taken that philosophy a little too far. But let me, that point is well taken. And I understand why, because you presumably have to do the work to, like, update the computer for the new processor and that work is costly. But they're the richest company in the world. They will one day at the rate they're going have literally a trillion dollars in cash. I don't think this is really difficult hardware to support either. Yeah, that part is confusing. It's just generally confusing to me.

But I think it comes down to they know who the Mac users they need are pros. Because pros make the apps. They make the videos. They build the halo around the brand. Right. They can get, you know, when they do the behind the scenes, when they do the behind the Mac campaign and Grimes is in it, she's using a Mac. and like that creates an Apple Halo. The consumers they don't need that they already have

are the people who are just buying iPhones and like hate their Windows laptop. Maybe they'll sell you an iPad. They don't, it's like there's just not enough action at this part of the Mac. Even if you look at Mojave, Mojave is like dark mode and finder stacks and file management systems.

Well, most of these pros, they were shown, so you said unity, but there was like logic. I just wonder how much of it is like, are you hostage? Are you a Mac hostage? That's what I really want to know from people. Are you a Mac hostage or just like this is what I vastly prefer? No, so they got asked a bunch of those questions because, like, again, what else are you really going to ask? Like, why do you like your Mac?

Genius? Yeah. Like, what else are you going to do? And, you know, all of them said something along the lines of, I've always used Max. I love Max that the neuroscientist told us, like, I've had Apple products since my 2GS Steve Wozniak Special Edition. And then he, like, looked around as like, does anybody know what that is? And some of us were like, I'm big. I know what that is.

So, like, all of that was cool, right? Like, they were in it. And some of them told us, like, I think it was the molecular biologist said she had a PC, Like basically a gaming PC to do some of the rendering she does. And then the Apple people are like, time to go on. So it wasn't that. I think they honestly prefer these tools. And once you are, you're not held hostage by a tool that you're really comfortable with.

It empowers you because you don't have to think about it. And that was like a message that they were all sending. But again, it's like we've slid back into talking about this event instead of the laptops. So like the radion GPUs. Like, they released an EGPU that they developed with Black Magic. Black Magic. And it is a very confusing product to me. It is $6.99.

It has four USB-3 ports on the back with USBA connectors. It can obviously power your laptop. It has like two USBC plugs on the back. Yeah. And I was like, but what are these USBA connectors for? And they're like, we wanted to build it so it would just support the Vive. Like they built it so that you can run the Vy off of it. And I was like, why don't you use NVIDIA cards?

Like, it's always AMD. Like, where's your Nvidia card? And their answer was AMD is really in the metal, which is their graphics subsystem. And so, like, we do really tight hardware software integration with metal. And I was like, but, you know, Nvidia has drivers, right? I mean, that's the other thing where, I mean, it's pretty wonky, but that's the other thing where Apple is really ostracizing developers. I mean, the world has basically converged on Vulcan, and Apple has decided to go its own way with metal. and like developers are like writing like shims between them and they're doing a lot of extra work

that seems like it wouldn't have to be I don't know it seems like it won't have to be necessary but but Apple could at least do developers the service of officially supporting Vulcan so developers don't have to duplicate all their work like if you're if your idea is that you're creating computers and software to support people to get things done hey guess what people are making things with Vulcan. Support Vulcan and now they can accelerate it on the Mac. Now your products can help people do the things. Like it's

like Apple's way of helping you is oh you have to write for a different shader language. I don't know. It's just stupid. Well, what if this is better? It very well might be.

Yeah. It's not. I don't. I really, I have no way of technically comparing metal and Vulcan. But Vulcan is a standard. Yeah. And metal is Apple's little baby. It is. But they did point out, Nvidia can release drivers and support EGPUs, and Nvidia can do that if they want. And it's all officially supported in New Mojave now.

And so, like, that's like a thing. Like, when Apple talks about iOS products, they do not talk about open driver support. They don't, right? Like, I think they have a sense of what the Mac is in that way. It is the thing where you can buy a box and plug in a GPU, and if the vendor writes a driver, it'll work. At least that's still there. I think there was a moment when people really worried that Apple was just going to leave all of that behind, right? And they're just going to close the thing and focus on the phone.

And Mojave's idea of let's pour iOS apps to the Mac instead of turning the Mac into iOS, I feel like that was a really good signal to me in that sense. So, Deter, you're always talking about the future of computers. And it's funny just talking about this right now, the lack of processor updates, the sort of $1,000 hole in the middle of the lineup, this is just where that ARM Mac would land, right? You've got the big Intel workstation, eGPU situation at the high end for pros, and your consumer product is Arm Mac with great battery life, better performance than the low-end Intel CPU's, this ability to run versions of iOS apps that you're already familiar with. And this is the zone, right? Is that what they're just waiting for? The question there is how long is that going to take?

Because I've had this idea that they don't like the way that the Intel chips are constructed, that they're unhappy with Intel. They don't trust them, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's lots of reasoning for that. We've talked about it in the past. But how long can they hold out until the Mac software ecosystem is ready for those arm laptops? Yeah. I mean...

I worry about that. They've got a long time without having a really good $1,000 laptop. Like, I love the MacBook. I'd love it. But it is just a little bit too underpowered. And I don't know. They'll spec bump it. It'll be fine.

But it's just kind of dangerous place to be fallow. It's precisely the place where the MacBook Air was dominant. It's the most important part of the laptop ecosystem, I think. And they're just consistently playing a losing hand there. And if they're thinking, we're just going to lose here for a while until the arm MacBook comes out, man, there is a lot writing on that arm MacBook, like a lot. And that's another year away, right? At best, it's a year away. Yeah. I don't know, man. It just seems, they seem content with it. I mean, they're going to keep selling iPhones and iPads and they're going to make money hand over. I mean,

if you think that's the future, then why even play the medium hand? Why have to support, you know, a generation of consumers who bought this product that you were never really invested in? When you can just sell them a MacBook air with a USBA port and they won't complain about dongles. That's true. Oh, they told us, I asked about the USBC ecosystem. And they're like, it's simple. Which is amazing.

No. They were like, there's three cables you need to understand. Just three. They all have the same connector. There is your charge cable that comes with your MacBook that just charges it.

There is USBC and there's Thunderbolt. And this is very serious. And it's like a Venn diagram. So the power cable, the power cable is just a power cable. The USB cable is a USB cable and a power cable. And the Thunderboat cable is a Thunderbolt cable and a USB cable and a power cable. And they're like, just buy the Thunderball cable.

If you're worried about it, just buy the Thunderball cables. That's more like nesting dolls than VIN. I don't know how Venn diagrams work. Typically Venn diagrams are two circles overlap. They're super sets. Super sets. Nice. Nailed it.

But they were like, yeah, if you're worried about it, just buy the Thin Diagrams work. Thunder. So they're just by the most expensive cable and you'll be set. Right. And then how do you plug in your iPhone? Every one of these, every one of the MacBook pros they showed doing demos was Dongle City. Yeah. Yep. Every single. And like part of it's a little unfair because they're all plugged into TVs. TVs. HTML outs. But every other thing was a dongle too. Except for the one guy who's like, I love this. I love, I love just having one kind of port and I just plug everything in and I understand it. So that guy was good. Yeah. He was happy. All right. Did you know, last things to say. Do we know how much these things cost yet?

Yeah, you can spend anywhere from I think $1,800 for the $1,600 to $6,700 for a maxed out 15-inch. Just to clarify, though, are you saying that Apple should wait a year for an arm MacBook Air? Or are you saying that Apple is going to wait? Are you making a prediction or a suggestion? I am saying that Apple should update the little MacBook with the best. Intel processors it can find ASAP. It should cut the price and make it the default MacBook error replacement if it believes that those processes are good enough.

If it doesn't, it should just put a retina screen on the MacBook error and put new processes in it and call it a day and just let it be weird for another couple years. I would be very surprised if they released an ARM MacBook next year, that to me feels way too early. Like, I don't, like, it'll, they'll have a weird software platform issue if they do it that way. I think they'd rather have a weird hardware issue of which, which match should I get? There's not a great, like, middle of the road Mac to buy than have a weird platform

issue. So my hunch is that the arm MacBook is actually two years away. I, so my argument for one year away is they show the pros all this love now. Yeah. Everybody who's going to use Photoshop buys a new computer because they've been, you know, blanketed with affection. And then next year when the Armac comes out and a bunch of things don't work anymore, it doesn't matter because you already just bought a new. Because love will have found a way. Right?

And the only people who are buying that thing are the students and, like, they'll get Microsoft to port Word for iOS to it and it'll be fine. Yeah, I mean, every day it gets easier to port things to arm. and software that's written expressly for the Mac is typically written in Swift or Objective C with X codes. It's already going to run well on Arm. So it's basically the C++ software you have to worry about. And a lot of that is already getting ported to Arm or compilers target Arm. I feel like it's not as absurd of an idea as it was once upon a time. I don't think Apple will have to do as many engineering jumps as Microsoft had to do to get Windows on Arm.

But what that's going to mean, if they do it next year, just last point, if they do it next year and, and, and, Eli, your point is correct. And Paul, I think your point is correct. The thing that doesn't fit in that works well in arm framework is some of the heavier duty stuff like Adobe, everything Adobe makes. You know, like Unity, like, there's a bunch of like pro stuff that will not work well on an arm laptop unless they wait a little bit longer. And so that's going to mean that there's going to be a much sharper, brighter dividing line between the, regular Macs and the pro max. And is that the world that Apple, like, if they, the longer they wait, the fuzzier that line gets, and the better off the platform will seem. But if there's a bright, sharp line between what works, you know, even a little on a regular Mac versus a pro Mac, that to me seems like not great. I think that this all comes down to, does the A12X or whatever emulate a core M fast enough? Because that's how they got through it in the past.

And knowing what I know about the core M, the answer is yes. You can buy a baby MacBook with like an M3 in it, and that thing is not fast. They can just get to there. You're probably fine. All right. Let me read this ad. And then Liz is going to do this week in Elon. Then we're going to talk about that surface.

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or download the app once again that is transferrised.com slash podcast. It is the wise way to send money. Hey, this is Liz Lapato, the science editor at the verge, and welcome to this week in Elon. So, as you almost certainly know already, there were some boys who were trapped in a Thai cave, a soccer team, been sort of a fixture in the music,

media. And last week, near the end of the week, Elon Musk said that SpaceX was building a kid-side submarine to help rescue the trapped team. So they were using a long metal tube that might be, let's say, a refashioned part of a Falcon 9 rocket, which is a kind of recycling that I would not have expected from rockets, to be honest. But essentially, what they had done is they had converted this part of a rocket into an escape capsule. The idea was that the device, you know, would be small and it would have oxygen in it and the kid could lie down inside and then be taken out by divers. So he flew over to Thailand with this capsule. But according to reports from the Guardian and ABC, Musk was politely told that it was not necessarily going to be of use. The actual

quote was, although its technology is good and sophisticated, it's not practical for the mission, according to the command center who was overseeing the rescue. But, you know, Elon Musk has responded to this, of course, on Twitter to say that it was meant as a backup option and he was just glad that the boys got out. And he has left the device there in case it is ever useful in the future. So that is the submarine, but that is not all. Somebody tweeted at Elon, hey, what about Flint? You know, there hasn't been clean water there for a very long time. What are you going to do something about that? And then Elon Musk tweeted back. And so he has essentially pledged to try to help make sure that homes in the Flint area have clean water. What he said was literally, please consider this a commitment

that I will fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contaminant. nation, no kidding. And that was Wednesday. So now the Flint's mayor is tweeting at him to talk about, you know, what the problems are there and saying she'd like to get in touch. But that is an ongoing story and one that I expect we will be following. But that's, of course, because this is Elon Musk, not all. So there's been a bunch going on with Tesla lately. Let's go in chronological order. There's a trade war happening. Donald Trump has put a bunch of tariffs on Chinese goods. China has retaliated, and so that trade war has made Tesla's much more expensive in China. If you are trying to purchase a Tesla in China, the cars are going to go up. The cars are going to be more

expensive. But an interesting thing is that Elon Musk has just signed a memorandum of understanding to build cars in China, essentially. It's a quote-unquote cooperative agreement with the Shanghai municipal government to build the third gigafactory, the first in China, and they aim to be able to make 500,000 cars per year there and what is the biggest market for electric vehicles in the world. Now, what's interesting about that and the reason why I bring the trade war thing up is because this allows Tesla to potentially get around the tariffs. Because those cars are being produced in China, they're also being sold in China. There is no tariff on the cars.

So that might bring the price back down. But this is sort of a long-term plan. I think they aren't planning to build the Gigafactory this year, and I don't think they're planning to build it next year either. But this is potentially one way should the tariffs stay in place to get around them. And of course, that's not all. Tesla is also, it was announced today, they have delivered its 200,000th car in the U.S. And what you may or may not know about Tesla is that there is a tax credit for electric vehicles that you receive

until you get to the 200,000th car, and then it begins to tail off. So if you are thinking about buying a Tesla in the U.S. and you want to receive the full $7,500 federal tax credit for an electric car, you should do this sooner rather than later because that is going to be phased out. Between now and December 31st, 2018, you can still get that tax credit. But after that, if you get delivery of your car between January 1st and June 30th and 2019, you only get a $3,750 credit. And then July 1st through December 31st, 2019, it's 1,875.

and then after that the incentive is dead. I think that pretty much wraps up this week in Elon, although it's been so eventful it's possible that I'm forgetting stuff, which means that if you really want to know what's going on with Elon Musk, you should go to the website, Theverge.com, and check us out because all the news is there. Elon, man. Just a lot. Just a lot.

It's a busy guy. Where does he find time to tweet? I love it. I can't get enough of it. Although I will say that the Flint thing, the mayor of Flint, Michigan, tweeting and Elon like, please call me so I can tell you what we need. Yeah. That was a real turn today. I'd be fixed.

I really enjoyed the submarine thing because I was just like browsing Twitter kind of like brain dead and I just clicked on a video. I'm just like watching people take a tube out of a pool. Yeah. No context. And so I had no idea what was inside the tube. So there was a guy in the tube. I was like, yes.

Oh, Elon. I think this week in Elon is going to be a fixture on our show. It's hard to, it's hard to do anything else. Anyway, Dieter, Service Go. Yeah, so, Surface Go. This is maybe one of the most divisive gadgets amongst a bunch of verge staff to come out in a little while. So it's a 10-inch surface. It's got, I don't know, Intel Gold processors.

I don't really know what the deal is with gold. Pentium gold. Pentium gold. It's a key, bring back Pentium. It's an Apple-esque choice as far as. Intel processor age. Let's just say that. What I will say is that Pentium Gold 100% sounds like a retirement community for Intel executives.

That's all that is. Where do you live? I live in Pentium Gold. Pentium gold. It's like it's their rewards program internally for reporting bugs. Yeah. Anyway. Or if you buy 1,000 chips from Intel.

Yeah. They allow you to retire. Pentium Gold. Oh, my God. Anyway. But the base model has, you know, whatever the processor is, four gigs of RAM, 64 gigs of storage, $3.99, but you've got to pay another $100 for a type cover, or $130 if you want to get the cool Alcantara type cover.

And if you want the stylus, that's another $100. So once you start specking this thing up, it very quickly gets to be, you know, $6.50, $700. At which point you're like, why don't you get a pro? I get the bigger one. And so, like, to me, this thing is fascinating because I'm obsessed with, like, trying to make low-power computers into, like, the main computer for a lot of people. Can the iPad do it? I think Windows is more interesting in some ways because it does let you do the full stuff.

So I am very fascinated by this. But a lot of other people are like, yeah, no, Windows on four gigs of RAM, no, thank you. This is a failure. This is a Surface RTL over again. And I honestly, like, I don't know how to decide what to think about. this thing until I start using it. This is Windows S as well, right? Yes.

It ships with Windows S. And you could upgrade it if you want to. So that might mitigate the RAM problem, but it still sounds pretty dicey. When I saw the photos of this, I was like, oh, Microsoft's shipping their arm Windows computer. Yeah. Yeah. Why isn't this arm?

I have no idea. Because they're not ready for it. And it also seems kind of expensive for the, you know. parts that are in it. Yeah, but I think what you're getting is, you know, the beautiful engineering and the Surface brand and the blah, blah, blah. Yeah, otherwise it's not just parts. I mean, if you want this form factor, you can just like go buy an ACER, right? I mean, Microsoft's whole thing with Surface is like pushing that market forward. So if you're just looking at a spec sheet and you're trying to maximize value for dollar, like there's a whole ecosystem of vendors that

will do that for you. It's just tough for me because as someone who I really enjoy the 10-inch, iPad with folding keyboard form factor. Yeah. And so, and I felt like my iPad pro was pretty expensive. I bought like a refurbished one so I could get more storage for less money. But it felt pretty pricey to me. And I haven't even bought the keyboard cover because I'm borrowing the Virgin's keyboard cover. Because I get to pass that because it's $130.

But Microsoft is, it's not that. I don't know. I feel like they could really like dagger in the heart of Apple. Like, see Apple, you don't have to charge this much money for this form factor. But maybe you got to. But I think, again, that's where your Dell's come into play. Right? If you don't have to do that work and you just sit at the premium, like you can charge the premium.

But don't, I mean, man, I really, I'm sorry to anybody who doesn't like excess Apple talk. I feel like the Apple $1,000 win with the MacBook Air was that they were, it was premium at a competitive price. Yeah. Like there was a moment when that was a good deal. So here's my question for you. Man, I wish John I was here. Because there's a scale. Is this just a netbook?

Is this just the world's fancies? It's $400, which was the classic neckbook price. That time of screen. I've always felt like a tram. True. EMCC. What was the name of the processor that was an? every netbook.

Adam? Yeah, it was the Adam 230. It was in like every netbook. I used to have a macro to just lay out netbook specs. I'd be like, a new netbook has arrived, and I would literally write netbook specs and hit return and lay it all out. My netbook moment was I was live blogging at E3 and I had to do live blogs back to back. And that was before you could really get like an external battery for your MacBook.

and I wasn't going to have time to charge. I didn't have two MacBooks. Yeah. So I went to a Radio Shack and bought a horrible netbook to do, like, live blog number two. I used to know them all by heart. I used to know the EPC range by heart. This is the worst. See, that's the true netbook runs Lannix.

That's, in my heart, the netbook was the wrongest thing you've ever said. It was a moment. There was a moment there where we were like, oh. No, that was the first EPC had a weird. Linux rolled on it. And they're like, wait, what if we put an operating system people want to use on here? Because Microsoft had to bow down.

Microsoft got freaked out by the success of that little Linux. Little Linux, buddy. Man, we used to cover a notebook slot. Anyway, so here's my question. Is it a netbook or is it a Chromebook competitor or is it an iPad competitor? Or is it none of the above?

iPad Pro competitor. Yes, with a much slower. processor. But I don't know. I think they want to, this is their play to like get in schools. Like they know most of the schools are just going to buy the Dell or the ACE or whatever, but they want to use this as a Halo product for schools to take on Chromebooks. Like to just show that you can get all the Windows stuff.

And there is a price point that is like available to you as a school. I think the thing that makes it the iPad competitor is actually hilariously Windows S. Right? The reason that Windows tablets is conceived of as iPad competitors have never really gone anywhere. They're like two and ones that can kind of be a tablet is because Windows itself has historically not been great at being a tablet operating system. An S is that it provides that set of limitations around the interface in a way that is much more structured. You can't accidentally open a full-on Windows desktop app if you have a S app, like a store app.

I don't know. Like, that to me is the thing. Like, they want to, they want to restrict this experience and then give you the, you can walk through the door to the other experience if you want it. But to me, this is, you see what people are doing with the iPads. Everybody, like, everybody who has an iPad with a keyboard is like, if only could do the one more thing, and this can obviously do that. Yeah.

Right. But it's still Windows. So you've got to constrain the experience, so it's a little bit friendlier. Yeah. Is that, I mean, I know my brother-in-law bought one instantly. He was like, I've been waiting for this and instantly bought one. It's just a great four-in-fact. I kind of regret buying the Surface Pro 4, honestly,

because I don't use it quite enough to justify having that full machine. And having this thing be smaller is actually pretty tempting. Yeah. All right. So here's the other thing we've got to talk about. Yeah. Magic leap. This summer, which I have learned technically in late September?

Yeah, they got time. They got time. Yeah, they're shipping. And they've been doing live streams. I don't know if anybody's been paying attention to this. They've just been like casually live streaming magic league demos. Okay, so I watched, I skimmed around because I was looking for it, because they showed some clips of like captured from hardware of like tech demos that looked frankly awful. It looked real cheap.

Like they looked like you were running iPhone 3G graphics, you know. But obviously, you know, everybody's worn it has been. like kind of blown away by like the sense of presence. So I'm sure it's better when you're wearing it than like looking at it from a Twitch stream. But it does seem like that you know, this is like it's like the creators edition, right, that they're releasing. So it's kind of, I mean, because Oculus Rift released a developer version.

And it was really interesting watching the stream because it was clear they were talking to people who want to develop for this hardware, but have literally no idea what this hardware is because Magically is so weirdly secretive. I found a blog post trying to, so MagiLeep released a demo, a unity scene so that you could in VR pretend like you were wearing Magic Leap so that you can develop your game for Magic Leap. And they had a simulated field of view and someone's doing all this crazy math to try to determine what Magic Leap's actual field of view is and they still really couldn't come up with like a like a definitive answer. So I think based on the demos I've seen, which are honestly like Twitter video clips of long

Twitch streams. But like Magic Leap is tweeting. They're on their own clips. What they're showing developers right now is how to get objects in the AR scene to interact with reality. Yeah. And so the demos are like low polygon count. Like they're crappy.

And it's like a little monster like throws a rock. and it like hits the wall behind you and explodes. And all they're trying to get out is you can do this. Like here's how this works. Like here's how to think about it. What they are not showing off is like high-end graphics rendering. Yeah. What they're not showing off is what they cannot show off is how this actually looks in their

light field display. And I think there was a dig headline. I think John Gruber picked it up. The dig headline I think is really unfair, which is like, we've now seen Magic Leap and it's incredibly disappointing. And like I am a noted Magic Leap skeptic because they, are incredible at getting just the wildest puff pieces put out in the world. Like, pitchfork did one.

Why? Like, what are you doing? And all these pieces never actually say what it is or how it works. So, like, I'm noted skeptic, although I've heard from some part people who've worn it that it's real. But they're not yet revealing anything beyond, if you're a developer, here's how to begin to build applications inside of this mapping system. And what I'm saying is it looks like this product. Obviously, consumers are going to buy this product. because they're releasing it widely,

but it's going to, this is, it seems, I mean, they're naming it in such a way that you would assume it's intended for developers. Yeah. To build for the real consumer magically, which is dangerous because that implies that the real consumer magic leap will be somehow significantly better, as Oculus was significantly better between the developer version and the real version.

Yeah. At the end of the day, though, is it, like, what Oculus is doing now, is it that much of a leap over what the developer version could do? Yeah. You think so? Yeah. The original, what was it the, yeah, the developer, I forget all the names, is like, DK1 or whatever, DK2, those were much lower resolution, way less ergonomic,

not nearly as good tracking, because they, like, they added, they like changed up the way their sensors work. They changed so much before they released the actual true. thing even in terms of step change. Like you could, if you wore, I think we had DK3 in our office for a while. And if you wore that and you wore the final one, you're like, this has been refined. Right. You weren't like, this is a radically new experience. And I think that's always the challenge with these public developer things.

We're like, you can put it on, you can see the endpoint. But you have to be very charitable about whether they're going to get to the endpoint. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see. I just, it's weird for me to read these like very negative. headlines about Magic Leap and me noted skeptic being like, wait, you're

actually being too skeptical. Like, they're just showing this like basic thing that developers can do inside of their system. And what you absolutely cannot show is whether this light field technology works. So first of all, just talk about Oculus, disclosure, my wife works for Oculus.

To me, the big question isn't necessary. It's how big is the field of view, all that? It's also, what is this software platform? Will they actually get enough support for it because I don't know of any software platforms not named Mac, Windows, or iOS that are doing super hot in terms of consumer adoption and getting developers to make consumer apps.

I guess you could put Oculus and Vibe on that list now, too. But then the, I don't know, the most hilarious thing to me is this AT&T partnership. Like, AT&T is like they're going to sell them when they're ready for consumers and they're going to exclusively provide the wireless service for them. But it's very clear looking at the PR for it that the entire deal with AT&T doing this and making an investment of Magic Leap and blah, blah, blah, blah, is simply so that they can be the exclusive wireless carrier to have these things in their stores so that they can get customers to come into an AT&T store so they can look at cool stuff and they are. It's like a Santa Claus. And then buy an LGV-30. That's exactly right.

Sorry, just random, I don't know, I'd pick that phone. Scoop, it's a good, scoop. So, by the way, breaking news, while we've been podcasting, I've been waiting for this to you to say this. Department of Justice filed to appeal the 18th D-Time Warner merger, which is incredible. Hey, it's incredible. What do you, come on.

I don't say you give it a break. I'm saying, law, yours. They can't stop it. They're like, we got these laws. We should try them out. I mean, the Trump administration is like, everything's, cool any merger can go through except this one because the president hates CNN like that's what's happening here and it's wild because the remedy now for a deal that has closed is that they would

have to separate yep right that like they let it they didn't file in time to block it's from happening it happened no one heard a word about it and now they're if they win on appeal they have to undo the merger. You think that what happened was they were like, you know what, we lost, it's fine, we're just going to walk away from this. And then they, we actually talk about this. They heard, they read the stories about the leaked meeting between HBO and AT&T executive where the HBO exec was like, we got to make some more stuff.

Yeah, the head of the DOJ is like a Game of Thrones fan. He's like, I don't like this plan at all. I don't know, man. He's tried to protect Calisi. I mean, it's wild. I don't know what their theory of the appeal is. We're going to have to read the filing. But it's happening.

But I will say this. When we talk about AT&T, it just occurred to me the other day. And this came out of the head of Warner Media, which is what Time Warner has been renamed to inside of AT&T, which they would have to undo. Well, there's no more time. There's no more time. Because Time Inc. is a separate company that is not owned by another magazine company. So Time has gone. Warner's all gone, except for the DOJ might bring back.

Anyway, and the reason they changed it was they didn't want the association with Time Warner Cable. Yeah, who would? Time Warner Cable is when he renamed Spectrum. Like, this whole thing is gone. It's just a memory hold. But even at this meeting that the head of Warner Media had with HBO executives, which was reported all in the world. So first, the New York Times ran a big piece, and they were like, they had some quotes, and the quotes are crazy. He's like, we need to make more profits.

The next year of your life will be like childbirth and be really painful. And he's like, my wife hates it when I say this. All this is insane. He should listen to this person who actually had the children. She lived it. And he's like, what I say to her is

but we love our kids. Like all this is horrible. This is all true. This is all true. Are the kids Westworld and Game of Thrones? Anyway, so the times runze. People freak out. Peter Kafka at RICO.

gets the whole audio, runs along transcripts. It's obviously the tone of it is a little different, you know, when you have the long transcripts. But there's this piece in the middle where he describes what can only be thought of is a super villain plan, which is we're investing in our 5G network, which will then enable autonomous cars, because they'll be able to talk to each other. And when you're in your autonomous car, you're going to have extra time. And during that time, you should be able to be able to talk to each other. you should be watching our streaming service, which is also enabled by 5G.

And now it's like, and you're wearing your AR headset. It's like, this is just a wild supervillain plan. And at the end of it, you go to your job at AT&T because we've bought every company in the world. It's crazy. I like someone who thinks of autonomous cars as ad inventory. Well, that was the LACO's big thing back in the day. And LACO, it turns out, run by

supervillains. Yup. To me, the biggest thing out of that meeting, it wasn't the, you know, the confusion about, like, are they going to try and turn HBO on a Netflix?

Like, I don't think so. It seemed like it at first, but it seems like they, what AT&T cares about is they need to own hours a day, but they don't need HBO to be the only thing that gets them hours a day. But the other reason they want HBO is so they can collect more data. And the phrase is that that allows us to create,

quote, alternative models of advertising, unquote. I don't know what that means. It means they're going to show you ads for the LGV30 inside your magically headset while you drive around your AT&T car. All of it's terrifying. I cannot wait to read this appeal. We'll have full coverage of it. I'm going to read an ad, and then we're going to have the Pulse segment.

And then we just have a bunch of other stuff. This is from our friends at TechMeme. We love TechMeme. By the way, The Verge, almost since its inception, Number two site on TechMeme. So, of course. Anyway, TechMeme has a new podcast called the TechMeme Ride Home.

It's like NPR's Marketplace, but for Tech News. Just look at your podcast app for the Techeme right home. Please subscribe to it. Techmeme.com is great for visiting several times today to find out what you miss in World of Tech. They're just taking what Tech meme is in Distilling in the podcast form. Same news, headlines, context, about what happened today in the World of Tech.

It's a daily show Monday through Friday, posts around 5 p.m. Eastern every afternoon. It's only 20 minutes long. It's just the top stories in World of Tech, top posts about those stories. Top tweets and conversations. The host is Brian McCullough, who also hosts the Internet History Podcast. Internet History Podcasts running for four years now.

TechNeme is his new show from our friends of TechName. Go check it out in your podcast app. All right, Paul. This is a big one, man. I know. You do this segment every week, but this week, what's true? Here's the thing. Every week I do a segment with the same name.

What's your segment called? It's called The Hearings. And Hearings is spelled. like the plural of hearing, but with two R's. This week is very special because this segment of hearings on the Verge cast that I do every week, and it's always called the same thing, is brought to you by darn tough Vermont socks, a vertically integrated merger of Premium Marino and your feet,

made in the USA and unconditionally guaranteed for life. Use promo code Verge at checkout for 20% off your first order at darntuff.com. And look, I can't tell anybody what to do, but you should really buy socks. So, hearings. Hearings is the earbuds that are earrings. Okay. Right? They're called Swings Bluetooth earrings.

Yeah. It's a Kickstarter, obviously. Yeah, of course. and I want to love it, but I can't, because it looks so completely impractical, because they don't, they're not just like hanging from the earrings and you take them out and you put them in your ear. You like swivel it up, but it stays connected to your ear, which it seems just like if it would pull on your earlobes, if you have the wrong sized earlobes, I don't know. Also, these look impractically small for like the battery life that they're promising. Also, it's like any of like these true wireless, they have to, they have like a charging case so that you've got to take them out of your ears to chart. I don't know.

I love it in principle, but I'd say a swings and a miss. Wow. As earrings, they don't look great. Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert. I'm just going to say this. Our wonderful intern McKenna Kelly wrote this post. She is great. She's super into it.

That's really? That's why I feel extra bad for... And to be honest, the great thing is that I don't have pierced ears. I don't have to make this decision. Yeah. I'm just saying McKenna, who is in it. Yeah. She's like, I'm ready for hearings.

It's feeling it. Wow. So her next task as an intern is clipping Bluetooth headphones to reiterate. It's hearing, plural, two R's. What's sponsored by? Darn tough socks. All right. We're going to work on the ad execution over time.

Darn tough for months. Mott socks. We're going to get better at this. Marino wool. Stop it. But your feet are so sweaty right now, but they won't have to be. I mean, I know I asked the advertisers to sponsor the segment. Now I feel bad.

You've got a few more weeks of this coming. If you were interested. DarnTuff.com. Stop it. You've given them enough. All right. A couple of things in the grab bag here. YouTube TV went down during the World Cup.

I watched a bunch of YouTube TV. It is by far, I think, the best streaming TV cord-cutting service out there. It's just well-made. But going down during the World Cup is not a good look. Also, I don't think it looks very good, and it only streams in stereo. So it's just a lot. I don't think there's a streaming TV service that handles the full range yet. I have the highs and the lows with YouTube TV during the World Cup during the Croatia game.

because I was, I, I, it was down, it was like, I whatever, I'll deal with it later. And then it came back up. And then I was a full minute, minute and a half ahead of the people that were watching. And I think I had Fox Sports. And so I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden I like jumped back from my desk and threw my hands in the air. And everyone turned and looked. And I was like, nothing.

Just like quietly sat back down. And then they all like turned and stared at their screens and then saw the goal. It was amazing. We have a lot of Brits on the Verge staff. Yeah. So we're a little quiet. Maybe too many Brits. We have one person from Croatia.

He's very happy. Yeah. He's very happy. Yeah. I was just not sold on the streaming TV bundle thing. I tried YouTube TV for the Olympics, and I just got tired of trying to, like, tell it that I want to record all of the Olympics. So it's like, well, this is not working as a DVR. And then for like, for live sports, it's really easy to. to type in literally any sport.

So name a sport that you know about. Football. Okay. Whichever version of football that you care for. Okay. Well, let's say the NFL. You type in NFL, Streams, Reddit.

Yeah. Just see what happens. I know what happens. Although right now, because there's a streaming protocol that's kind of like torrenting. So it's a peer-to-peer protocol. So it doesn't go down during the big game.

It just puts a lot of burden on Comcast's infrastructure. It worked beautifully for me, but also there's a warning that says like soda player, which is like the popular app to play this on Windows. That's like a virus right now. So I feel like

it all balances out. All right, next in the grab bag. Xbox one, getting Dobie Vision support. Now there are three things that light up all the lights. The Apple TV in the future, Atmos and Vision, Chromecast Ultra, the thing I've been using, Atmos and Vision. Xbox One.

Got them both. Not the NVIDIA. I thought NVIDIA shield did all the lights. NVIDIA shield does HDR10. They have promised the software update. I'm so disappointed. Yeah, but I'm buying Xbox 1X. Yeah, I can tell.

It's happening. You're going to go 1X, you're not going to go 1S. 1S is so cheap. No, but I want all the 4Ks and the... Fine. Non-interliest, you know, the words that the game would say. I want all of them. When the new Madden comes out, I'm definitely...

I'm letting this PS4 for... Yeah, well, and also, like, winter's coming up, and you're going to need something. to heat your house. Yes. It's very efficient. One little piece of Apple news that makes me sad. They're ending their photo book operation.

They're no longer I'm printing photos for people. I'll only even bring this up because Apple photo books used to be just like a default gift in my family. Because they're great. And they're like well made. And everything about photos, Apple like makes the world's most popular camera and their entire photo ecosystem is like out of control bad. It like it makes me sad. I used to use I photo. I used to use I Photo at events because it was so much faster than anything else.

It's so weird. It was probably my number one tech support issue over the past five, ten years was my computer is full. I can't do anything anymore. And obviously V-RAM, right? They can't get any virtual memory allocated because the hard drive's full. Obviously, that's why nothing works. But it's because of their photo collection. But Apple never made a way to keep on having a photo collection.

but not be on your hard drive and it'd be like seamless. They do it now. With the cloud. You gotta really trust that ICloud. There should, five years ago, I should have been able to buy a hard drive at Best Buy, plug it in and say, this is my backup drive. Keep some thumbnails on my computer and store big old stuff that I don't look at on this.

And now you can do that with the magic of I cloud. Your backup drive is somewhere in North Carolina. Solar powered data center. powered by love. No, it's just, like we have Max. You're the kid, right? Yeah.

And it is just remarkable to me. I care about photos now. All these mobile phones are great, but like our little Sony RX-100 just takes a better photo. And then I put it into a system, I put it into a computer. And I'm like, this Apple Photos thing is like,

not great. So now I have Lightroom. And now I'm just a pro photographer. And it's like just a little bit of caring about how my photos work. led me into this entirely pro workflow. And it's like, it doesn't have to be this way. But anyway.

Yeah, I need to spend a solid, I don't know, week to actually get good at Lightroom. As good at Lightroom as I used to be at Apple Photos. Apple Photos doesn't maintain when you switch from editing one photo to the next one, doesn't remember that you want to maintain the aspect ratio when you crop, so you have to manually choose it every time. I've been asked them to fix it for three years. They haven't done it. And that is the thing that is kicking me off of photos into Lightroom more than anything else.

else. Lightroom, CC, the sort of like cloud lightroom. Coolest thing about it, this is so over the top. This is like you have to be such a ridiculous gadget person. The coolest thing about is you can use the Apple Pencil to do edits on the iPad Pro. So like my phone and I just like like doing it. There's no reason for me to be doing this. So now my workflow is like I take the photo. I pull the card out. I put it into a laptop. upload everything in the lightroom, wait for it to go into the cloud, pull it down on my iPad, and then color. It's very satisfying, completely ridiculous. But, like, Apple could have been there. Yeah. And they just weren't.

I just gave up on taking photos. I didn't want to be the person that solved a photography workflow. Yeah, the problem is the baby cannot be responsible for her own photography. No one will remember her. She's great. You suddenly are like, I got to figure this out. I better figure this out right now.

She is bigger every day. All right, Dieter, you have written here, the web lives, I am telling you. The web is not dead yet. I'm telling you. Okay. We shouldn't spend too much time on these, but there's a service called

itty.biddy. Dot site, which I love. It takes an entire web page and then encodes it directly into the URL, and then you send that URL to somebody, and the webpage doesn't have to be hosted on a server. It can all just be rendered locally,

because everything on it is encoded in the URL. It's amazing. It turns a webpage into, like, an attachment. What does it even mean to be a website if there's no site? It's just, like, a thing you send to somebody. Well, then you take that long URL, and then you put it in, like, a tiny URL type of thing. Yeah.

Now it's not even, like, gigantic. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know. That's it. I just think it's really clever. And if you just sit and think about like going to a website and then realize that there's no website for this thing, it's just like a URL attachment thing, you end up like spinning in circles for a little while. And it's a really enjoyable spin and I highly recommend it.

Iti.biddi. And then the other one I wanted to talk about, I just think it's like this amazing mashup of like cool new web technologies. sort of. So there's glitch, which I don't know if we've talked about it too much, but it's a great little app platform, and the old dash runs it. And somebody made a cool little glitch app that as you're driving, the map updates

and reads you a Wikipedia article of something that you're near. And so that's cute. That's cool. I just think it's super funny that the tech lead for the Google AMP project made a cool little web app using glitch. I like take those two giant trends in the web, and then they just

like happen to intersect this week. Yeah, I really think there's something. I've been, I follow Anil Dash on Twitter, and he's always tweeting fun little glitch things. We went and visited a glitch. Yeah, it's really inspiring to see people like make things. Yeah. Like, it just reminds me of what the web felt like growing up. It was like, it's full websites made by people.

Yeah, glitch is really cool. I mean, Paul and I, their office is next door to us. We just like went over and had lunch with them. It's so cool. they had this cool feature. This is like community building is really hard, especially at scale, and they think really hard about how to do it. But they have this cool feature where if you're working on a project on glitch and you need help,

you just like push a button and it tells everyone else like, hey, need some help. It's like a little hand-raised emoji. And then people come and help you. Yeah. Yeah. That's super cool. We should do something bigger with glitch. Don't take that idea.

If you're another tech website, tech me right home. I'd see you. All right, that's it. I want to tell you just at the end here, your version. cast listener, you like the verge. We're running an audience survey right now. Just go to the verge.com slash survey. We're just getting, it's been like two-ish years since our last big redesign.

I'm not saying we're going to redesign and set again, but that was the last time we did a bunch of user research. We're just doing it again. All felt this time. Skemorphic verge. Oh, hey. Yeah, that's right. Easy. Anyway, go take the survey.

It's just for us. We're not sharing this data or something or anything on that. It's literally we're trying to figure out where people get it. I looked at the results today. 86 people didn't know we had a website. This is just a fact. They're like, where were you not aware of the Verge? And it's like most people were not aware that like some RSS feed publishes to LinkedIn.

Some people didn't know we had an Instagram. 86 people did not know we had a website. I feel you. That's great. That's great. Yeah, it's wild. So anyway, the verge.com slash survey. Go take that.

We'll share some high level data when we're when we get it. wrapped up and all sort of out. Not in a public way, just like in an interesting fact-oided way. Again, the data is just for us. It's not for any nefarious Russian actors. It's just for us to make the verge better. We'd appreciate it. Also, Converge with Casey Newton is running right now. That show is amazing. Just go listen to it. Every episode's a gym. So good. You can also follow us on all the social. Find us on Apple Podcast. Give us those stars. You'd also listen to Recode Decode with Karr Swisher, Recode Media with Peter Kafka. Wonderful shows. You can also tweet at us. I'm reckless. Paul's future Paul. Deer's

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smash that subbutton, fam. Thank you. Wow. Do it if you have it. Ring the bell? Ring the bell. All right. That's it. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Promocode.