The Vergecast - Wordle and the App Store clones / FTC’s Meta antitrust lawsuit moves forward / PCs big year

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Russell Brandom discuss the FTC proceeding with an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, the success of Wordle and its app clones, and more RCS drama. Verge deputy editor Dan Seifert stops by to chat about this week's gadget news and the state of the PC market. Stories discussed: White House to launch COVID test-ordering site ‘by this weekend,’ reports say White House hosts tech summit to discuss open-source security after Log4j Google calls for new government action to protect open-source software projects Judge says the FTC’s Meta monopoly lawsuit can go forward Meta’s real antitrust problems are only beginning Want the ‘TLDR’ on a site’s terms of service? There’s a bill for that Apple says App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion The App Store clones are here to profit off Wordle’s success The Wordle clones have disappeared from the App Store Wordle copycat creator apologizes for ripping off the popular free word game The real beauty of Wordle is how its emoji results tell a story Alleged Apple App Store scammer AmpMe lowers prices and says it’ll investigate its ‘consultants’ Google exec says Apple is ‘holding back’ customers who text Google says Apple ‘should not benefit from bullying’ created by iMessage lock-in It fills me with glee that Canon printers now think Canon’s own toner is fake Apple’s $19 polishing cloth is back in stock online Ford doesn’t want the F-150 Lightning’s launch to be plagued by scalpers Tesla removes 2022 production date from Cybertruck website The PC market just had another big year thanks to pandemic demand TSMC earmarks record $44 billion for chip manufacturing expansion in 2022  The pandemic has blurred the lines between laptop categories Sony Xperia 5 III now shipping in the US, almost nine months after initial announcement The Nvidia Shield is getting Android 11 and other upgrades Sony says it’s still making new PS4s, but most stores aren’t selling them Google’s Android 12 update has been the rockiest one in years Ford doesn’t want the F-150 Lightning’s launch to be plagued by scalpers Wear OS will work better for lefties... eventually Tesla removes 2022 production date from Cybertruck website GM is creating an online used car marketplace Buy Nothing exploded on Facebook — now it wants a platform on its own Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Dieter Bone is on vacation, but Alex Cranz, Russell Brandem, and Dan Seifert joined the show. Talk about the wordal drama, a little bit of Facebook antitrust, and we go through some gadget news. It's a good one. That's a Verchast. Come up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for news. 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 Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Dieter Bones vacation. Yeah. Congratulations, Dieter. He did it. He's on vacation.

He's on it. He's not here. He's posting pictures of power tools to his Instagram stories. I think he's spending his entire vacation in Home Depot. I'm very excited. I'm trying about RCS, but. Yeah, it's true. Like, the news cycle has dragged Deeter back into Twitter several times.

Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. Dieter is off this week on a very well-deserved vacation. Alex Cranz is here. Hello. Russell Branden is joining us. Why, hello? And a little bit later, Dan Seifred's going to join us. We'll talk about some gadgets.

So, you know, it's a slower week. There's still some things to talk about. I'm going to start bringing back the hits. Deeter's out. I'm just playing the hits. I'm like, it's like journey without Steve Perry. I'm like, you're just doing it. I don't have any new ideas.

It's been 23 days since the president of this country promised a website where you could order a COVID test. President Biden said there'd be a website where everybody gave a free test. He said on December 21st, the day that we're recording, it's been 23 days, the day you're listening, it'll be 24 days. I will say, and Russell, I'm curious, I've been watching you and McKenna talk about this. There was a report on like PBS. that the website would be here this weekend.

And then today, President Biden remarks today said next week. So potentially this thing is coming. There is a difference between this weekend and next week. Unless you believe the week starts on Sunday. Yeah. Russell, my question for you real fast is, is it just like a holdup in their Squarespace account? Like, is that why we're not getting it yet? Well, I mean, I do think there is legitimately like a non-technological issue in that they

want, they are ordering all of these tests, right? Like, they ordered a hundred million, and that sounds like a lot, but it's not actually that many, when you think about, like, how many people are in America and how often one needs to test. And so it is like, I think they want to have some of that supply lined up. Okay. But also, I do worry, like, this is the way people talk about something when they have not actually done it, right? Like, Like, oh, I'll do it this. It'll be in this weekend. Oh, it's next week.

And so there is a real, particularly after the Trump situation and with the withering ongoing scrutiny of the Verge cast, I think there's a lot of pressure to actually deliver on this. Well, I mean, also the surging COVID cases in America. Like, not to say that the withering scrutiny of the show is not the animating factor in all American political life, but the pandemic is still happening. And like, I just, I can't say that by the. administration is in like a great position right now in terms of pandemic response. They've not done well. And this website is like the dumbest symbol of the whole deal. Right?

They're like, we're going to give tests to everyone. A website is coming. And like, I don't know. Well, Squarespace, wicks.com. Like, I read website service ads every week on the show. Yeah. That's not the problem. The problem is the supply.

And the problem is the logistics of delivering the things. And if they were just open about that, I feel like they could have stood up the website and started taking signups from people the day after they announced there would be a website. And that's the part that I just don't understand. Well, I mean, it is true that as policy editor at the verge, like the day that they launched the website, I am going to take a hard, pitiless look at it. And the extent to which it's screwed up, I'm going to be on the website within the hour saying, this is screwed up. Why did they launch this garbage? you know, why not fix it if you're going to launch it? And so, like, I do think there's, they're under a lot of scrutiny. There's no, there's no way around it. I think the bigger picture

story for me is, and maybe this is like the hopeful spin on it, but I do think there is like a question throughout the pandemic of whether the government is like actually capable of doing things, specifically the U.S. government. But like, I mean, this in some ways was spurred by like, Jen Saki saying, what are we going to do? Mail tests to everyone. And everyone said, yeah. It's like, no, actually, this is, in fact, people do expect the government to do this. That would be a good thing for the government to do.

And there is kind of a shift in stance. And you hope that at some point, we turn some kind of corner. And we're like, actually, this is a trillion-dollar enterprise. We should be able to, like, identify and meet needs for the citizens of the country. No, no, no, no. We conquest for oil. That's what we do here in this country. Can you tell where my formative political moments were?

Whenever it comes out, I'm like, oh, I was in college during the Iraq War. That's it. That's my only frame reference. But look, hopefully they stand up this website. I just, we're going to dunk on vaporware cars a little bit later in the show. Like, I would just encourage anybody making a tech product. You announce it right before it ships. You don't just let people wait for your vaporware.

Like, you're buying this problem. Hopefully it stands up. Hopefully it doesn't crash on the first. day, government websites, notorious. I mean, you have a lot of optimism and hope in your heart. Does that sound like optimism? Where are you? All right.

Hopefully they launch it. It's supposedly coming this weekend. If not, we'll just keep counting. Hopefully you have access to testing, which is fundamentally most important thing. All right. Speaking of the White House, Russell, you are the policy editor. It's true. There's some policy action in the world.

The White House held a security summit, a bunch of open source vendors, big companies. What's going on there? Again, it's generous to call it action. So log4J was this bug that, you know, it was in fact pretty nasty. It was basically every network system you want to log the stuff that's happening on your network in case someone's doing some offarious stuff. You can go back and find it or even just like things are breaking. We want to see what's going on. But logging functions aren't very exciting to code.

And so everyone basically uses the same one. Like we made a single open source logging system that is perfectly fine. and it's the one that most people use. And so it was a bug in that, which was very, very scary for people because there's no sort of central repository of how many people are using this. And thus, basically, it was assumed everyone was vulnerable and it was this catastrophic thing. So now the White House has sort of invited people from all of these big companies, along with the heads of various sort of tech adjacent government agencies to talk about how

important open source security is and how we're going to sort of fix it. So it's Apple, Google, Amazon, meta slash Facebook, IBM, Microsoft is sort of all the, all the heavy hitters. And so the joke with open source software is, right, these incredibly important libraries are maintained by volunteers that no one really knows. Yeah. And they're really important. And people fix them out of their hearts. And that's a very reductive joke. I understood it's not always the circumstance. But that's always been like the danger with open source, and the pushback is we should control this more tightly, which then cuts against the whole principle and ideals of open source. Where do you think that tension is right now? Well, I mean, it's wild for me because when

I was a baby cybersecurity reporter, we had heart bleed, the open SSL bug, which taught some very similar lessons. And it gave rise to, you know, all. All of these same companies were like, look, we'll throw in 100 grand a year to hire some actual people to look at this stuff. And we have the open source security foundation now that is going through looking at these. I mean, I think it's less about control and more about kind of the infrastructure problem, right? Of let's identify the stuff that really needs a security audit and we want to be very, very careful on.

And, you know, when some new version of the logging software comes out, because they say, hey, we found security issues, install this one. Like, people will update it and install. It's not that hard. It's more just keeping an eye on the worst things that could break and sort of breaking them in a controlled setting before they break in the wild. So, you know, when Hartfleet happened, I don't recall that any sort of policymakers being like, we must convene a summit in issue of policy and talk about the supply chain of software

in the United States as a critical cyber vulnerable. And now, what's the difference? Why is it happening now? I think there's a sense, particularly after ransomware, that, like, the government should be on top of this. I would say objectively, more expertise in the federal government than there was when Hartlead happened. There are smarter people to get in that room. And I think there's a sense that, like, actually were not fixing all of these problems on their own, like, ransomware being a classic example. and there is a role for like the government in at least coordinating.

And I'll say, I mean, this is the other thing we hit about this is that Google said, yeah, we want this to be a private public partnership, which previously it was just a bunch of private companies giving money to the open source security foundation. And like, that was kind of fine because we didn't assume that like the U.S. federal government was necessarily going to play a productive role in any of it. I don't know that we've, that's necessarily paying dividends yet, but anyway, they're trying. How long until you think this pays off? Like, I mean, that's like the real question here, right? You've got, I don't know, it seems like we hear about bugs at this level fairly often. They do get patched, log for JA got patched fairly quickly, but they keep happening. Like, how long until this doesn't seem like a forever problem or it's a forever problem

with a known management? It's really that second one. Like, I guess if the question is, when will things constantly stop breaking? on the internet, the answer is for as long as there's an internet. It's been 23 days since Russell promised things. It's constantly right. Yeah. But I do think, and we already sort of saw this with Log 4J, where like the FTC was very

aggressive in saying, like, hey, we now have a patch. If you don't patch and you get hacked, we will come after you. Like, we are using our force as a consumer protection agency to make sure that this thing gets secured and sort of everyone does what is understood. to be the correct cybersecurity response. So, I mean, that's something. I think we're starting to standardize the response to these things. It's a very big boulder and a very sort of large hill, so it's going to take a minute.

There's other policy news in the world. Well, we'll do a whole section on Wardle Discourse. Just do you wait. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like reality television. We're going to talk about the one moment of action. Stay tuned.

In and out of every commercial break, but you have to wait until the last five minutes. Yeah. That's a horrible way to, like, hype ourselves up. I'm not here to make friends. It is what it is. The worst line given to us by any reality programming is top chef making everyone just be like, whatever. F it is what it is. Here's my horrible flon.

Okay. So, you get a horrible flan. The FTC. So the Trump FTC tried to sue Facebook. They wanted to break Facebook up, Instagram, WhatsApp. They were not successful. said you haven't alleged sufficient facts to prove Facebook has a monopoly for personal social networking, which is a very odd market if you really think about it. Biden, FTC, led by Lena Kahn,

picked up the case, said, no, we're going to replete it. They added some data to show that Facebook is big, and the judge is letting that case move forward. That seems like all they had to do. Yeah. It was such a low bar. There was this question when it first broke of like, you know, these cases are really hard, right? And like, it's very conceptual. challenging to be like, this is the personal social network market, and this is, this is like what that looks like and what the clear edges of it are. And it sort of wasn't clear if, like, it was a conceptual problem or if they just literally had not done their homework. This is what, this is the language the judge used, by the way, as he was like, now they have done their

homework. And it really seems like he just wanted some comm score numbers where they're like, yeah, it's dominant. Like, well, we're going to argue about it in court, but like, this is our basis for saying that. And like, that was pretty much, like, I was surprised by how little was different that that was able to sort of tip the scales for the judge. Yeah, I mean, it really is just some data asserting that Facebook. It really is just like comm score numbers that says Facebook has been. Was there really no data before? Were they just like, it's big? Yeah. Earlier Russell was like, this government has competent people in it. I would point I think it comes down to that.

I mean, the Trump administration kind of did things for political purposes. Right. I don't feel uncomfortable saying that they were often motivated by politics instead of policy. Although this was the FTC. I mean, like, a lot of those people had been in from before Trump. I think part of it is, like, it has been a long time since the FTC sued to break up a major American corporation. Like that's... Oh, they just, like, didn't know how, is what you're saying?

I think they didn't know how, and if it's the Republicans leading it, their heart's kind of not in it. Yeah. And like... It's like, they assembled the IKEA and they were like, oh, this one piece is backwards. They've got to take this whole thing apart. Yeah, exactly. And they just walked away. I sort of buy it.

I guess I'm a little more skeptical and cynical because I watched how the Trump administration pursued AT&T Time Warner. To your point about their heart on being in it, their best argument against that combination was effectively a net neutrality argument. And they couldn't make it because they were anti-net neutrality. So they had to make all these other arguments and they just got their asses kicked. But the whole point of it was to scare CNN. Like the dude was just mad at CNN. And I think a lot of this Facebook animus from that administration was pointed at Facebook moderation policies.

Right. It's just kind of the way that that administration works. So it didn't surprise me that they didn't make the case well. it surprised me at how little more how little additional work the Lena Con version of NFC had to do to get to the next bar.

The end result though is that they still have won virtually nothing. Right? They're just allowed to go forward. The judge is like, this is a high bar to clear. Like you might not win. Yeah.

Yeah. I was kind of surprised by like the tact they took. The thing they want to break up is specifically they want to carve out Instagram and and WhatsApp, right? Like, they don't want to get rid of anything else.

They don't want to, like, deal with the whole ad duopoly or anything like that. They're just focused on Instagram and WhatsApp. And that just kind of surprised me because I would have not seen that as, like, the real harm of the Facebook monopoly. Yeah, I think it's interesting. Casey has made this point in Platformer, and especially in the one issue of platform where we syndicated, that there's a lot of ways to think about Facebook, but Facebook right now is facing so. much competition. Yeah.

By the time this court case happens, whether or not Facebook owns Instagram might be totally irrelevant. Like, TikTok might have succeeded in destroying Instagram by the time this case resolution. The judge threw out another claim about Facebook API interoperability and data sharing because he's like, they stopped doing it in 2013 anyway. Like, why are you mad about this thing that haven't done for years? So I do think there's just a lot of that. And I also think, like, you mentioned advertising.

Like, at the same time, Apple just sort of unilaterally was like, cookies are dumb. Yeah, like Facebook's ad business is taken ahead. So there's a lot of actual market competition coming for Facebook. So I think the FCC is saying this acquisition was illegal and we're going to try to create competition by breaking these companies up. It might be too little too late, but it certainly sets a tone for how they're going to think about everything else, including all of its VR acquisitions. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do. So, like, Casey made the point that, like, the fact that they're scrutinizing the VR.

acquisition is potentially a bigger deal because it's sort of forward-looking, which I think is true. But I also think, like, we're living in the tech space and we're very sensitive to, like, sort of small variations where, like, TikTok gets a little bigger. And, like, it seems like it's on the rise. And this is understood to be a threat to, like, projecting out, like, five years in the future, Facebook. But, like, it still is just the giant in the room. And it still does own the top three social networks in the world. I mean, if we're calling WhatsApp a social network. But, like, it still is just this massive thing. And I think the nature of the FTC process and antitrust processes generally is that they move really slow because you're trying to do this

big complex thing that has, rightfully, for the same, like, Time Warner reasons you're describing, like, we don't want it to be a good way to just punish your political opponents. But, like, slowly setting those guardrails is really important. And I do think it's still, like, a world in which Facebook has to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp is still a way bleaker future for them than a world in which they kind of squeak by and, you know, maybe have to pay a fine, but don't get the worst consequences from this case. Yeah, I feel like we don't talk about, like, you know, the main Facebook blue app on the show ever, right? We talk about the, well, the company's not called meta, the meta company. But the, the,

main Facebook blue app, like, you know, them adding a feature to that does not merit our attention. Like, we ignore it, but it's still, for many people, the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Like, even for people in this country, certainly for people around the world, especially in other countries with kind of different internet access regimes, Facebook is the internet. Yeah. And so, like, what they do is important.

I just think their positioning of themselves now is meta. their acquisitions in VR are much more stopping that stuff early the way that the government may or may not have stopped Instagram early, like has a better chance of being successful policy-wise than trying to break up Instagram at this moment in time. Like earlier I said this government was competent. I just met that like they're not nakedly motivated by politics in something like they're good at being lawyers in that way. in it. Like, that's what I mean by competence in this, in this regard. I don't mean that they're going to be successful at this because they're, they've got home runs on their hand. Yeah. I mean, this, this was the big thing that, like the big other ruling is that Facebook had tried to sneak in in this dismissal motion. Like, by the way, Lena Kahn can't even

argue this because she was mean to us earlier. Yeah, she wrote some articles that were mean to us. And, and we got like this thorough, thorough sort of reasoning from the judge being like, no, this is a ridiculous argument. Like, obviously, anyway, yeah. Google was making the same argument, too. But, like, they wanted to be like, so you've tweeted about us before. You may not be in charge of lawsuits against us. And it's like, no, actually, that's what you want.

That's what you want. You want people who are knowledgeable about a subject. Here's my idea for the American justice system. It's the movie Minority Report. And there's just some people swimming in pools. And you call them and be like, should we break up Instagram? And then who knows what's going to. happen.

That's just not how the thing works. But at the same time that this is happening, and we're talking about Facebook's past, meta, the company that exists in the present, is on a buying spree of VR companies. Yeah. Most notably within, I think Alex and I both supernatural fans within makes it supernatural. It's $400 million. Which is enough to like trigger FTC review. And so they're like, nope, we're going to look at this.

I like within, I like supernatural. I've had the CEO, Chris Milk on Decoder. I think he's very smart. And I asked him on decoder, like, isn't your opportunity to wait until Apple has a headset and then you make an app for two platforms instead of being controlled by Facebook? And he's like, yeah, I don't know. And then like money talks, you know? $400 million.

Yeah. But that's, to me, that's the danger, right? Right now there's but one VR application store. It's on the Oculus Quest. Obviously, there's some stuff on the PC side, but the mainstream consumer VR application stores. It's on the Ackless Quest 2. It's great the Deter is in here because he wouldn't even have to just recute, he'd have to throw his computer at the window for this conversation. But I miss you, Dieter, every minute of every day that you're on here. But this one's good.

But Facebook has perfect usage data. Yeah. Right? They know what apps are leaving the store. They know what acts are being used on their headset. They have perfect telemetry. And they're just buying the winners. So that when Apple shows up with another platform, they've got all the winners. They've got all the killer apps already. And Apple have to start. from zero. Now, Apple is very capable of overcoming that burden, I think. Right? They've got a huge user base. They're not Facebook. They're not Facebook. They don't have the baggage of the Facebook brand and the meta brand or whatever. They've got developers who love them. But it's still like Facebook. You can see them just spending the money on the moat. Yeah. And I think the FTC is saying,

no way, you can't do that is seems fairly smart. It seems early. And it seems like, regardless of what happens in this Instagram case, when they go to the within case, one argument that FTC we were able to make is we didn't stop Instagram early enough or provide enough scrutiny, and we ended up in this situation. And we don't have to do that again. Yeah. I mean, I will say the most interesting part of all of this to me is, like, it is nice if you are funding VR companies that you have this clear exit strategy of, we're going to get big enough that will get bought by Facebook, right? And in a world where you have aggressive FTC action, not just on this, but on all like emerging, emerging technology spaces.

And you can't just say, like, well, Facebook is spending a ton of money to try to get a lead on this entire category of product. And so they're going to, we're going to try to get some of that money by developing one of these products. I wonder what happens to that investment. Like, if we just see kind of a crunch in the, I mean, I don't know. This is very second order effects, which are like really difficult to predict. But I do wonder how that changes the VC math.

Yeah, I've definitely heard this argument before. And the flip side of the argument is actually Patrick Spence from Sonos has described this argument to me many times. He's like, that creates, but if all anyone has ever doing is getting acquired, you've got a kill zone of innovation around the companies. Yeah. Because only one idea will get acquired or one company will get acquired. So there's a whole range of stuff that the companies might do that's not worth investing in. And like, yeah, I mean, I think it's a big back and forth. I just, don't you think, like, being a software developer should be a business that you should run, not just a thing you make so that a bigger company eats you?

Like, I think that's, like, the ultimate question is, like, most of these companies get founded not to be run as good businesses, but to get eaten by Google or whatever. Or Facebook. Meta. And I think it would be better if we just had some more companies. Like, well-run, large, like, that's just like, it's a very simplistic way of thinking about it, but that's just a head. But I was speaking of Sonos, they won big patent ruling against Google. Yeah. In their case at the International Trade Commission, Google had to, like, turn off features on Chromecast because they were ruled to have violated these patents.

Well, it was really weird how they violated them, too, right? Like, I believe this was a story where Google hit up Sonos and they talked about maybe working together. And then Google was just like, thanks for all this cool info. We'll talk to you later. Yeah, basically. This was a great meeting. Yeah, it was like, how do we get assistant on the Sonos? and then Google's product roadmap was like a bunch of Sonos tech.

Yeah. And Sonos was like, great. Are you going to do the assistant thing? Google's like, what? And, you know, the story is much more complicated in that. But eventually, you know, Patrick's position is Sonos is an old company. It has a huge patent portfolio. And the reason you have a huge patent portfolio is to create leverage.

Yeah. And people either steer your stuff or don't give you the deal you want. So I'm eager to see if Google, like, they can either re-engineer everything to get around Sonos's patents or they can just pay the money and license the patents and so give Sonas the deal terms it wants to maybe like run two assistants at once, which is the thing Sonas wants most of all, is to run Alexa and Google Assistant at the same time on its speakers. If they could run Siri on it, I would not be in my current quest to get rid of my entire Sono setup to buy like very expensive bookshelf speakers.

I've gone all in on HomePod minis. It's upsetting. Wow. They're just. Wait, when you say how many home pod minutes? I mean, caveat, I have a three-room apartment. So is it four? I have two.

I'm thinking about getting a third one, but I feel like it's just going to get activated, never get activated, because it'll be too close. It'll be right next to one of them. But it's great. And Sonos is like, I'm no longer as invested in Sonos as I once was, emotionally speaking. Wow. I mean, I understand. Way off topic here.

That's fine. I'm just saying, like, here's this, like, swirling policy debate about what big companies get to do. And, like, one of the things they got to do was just, like, run over a small company. Yeah. And, like, part of the, one way to run them is just buy them. Another way is to just, like, throw money. I think Mark Zuckerberg called it, we'll go into, like, kill mode. Yeah.

When they were discussing whether or not they would buy Instagram. This came up in the documents. This is, like, in the FTCAs. Mark's going to go into kill mode. Is that what he's doing in the VRC? space going into kill mode. Imagine the legal trainings after this where they're like, just talk about being competitive or wanting to provide the best.

Try to avoid phrases like kill mode. I feel like they're probably like, Mark, just don't email. Right. So let's say you're Mark and you're on meta. You've got perfect data in the store. You see everyone's using Supernatural. You also have inside of it Facebook move. Yeah.

And you can go and you can buy Supernatural for $400 million, nothing to Facebook. or, and if they say no, you can be like, all right, we're just going to give something that looks like supernatural away for free and build it into Oculus move. And that's like, well, that sucks. Like, at that point you have no choice but to sell. And that's kind of what Google did to Sonos, right? They said, we're just going to take your tech and there's nothing you can do. And Sonos at least has some recourse. I think one of the pieces of the puzzle for all of this is like, what are the responsibilities of the platform or owner or so much do they get to buy? They shouldn't buy anything.

If you're the platform owner, you own the platform. That's it. Like Microsoft taught us this 30 years ago or whatever. Like you can't just be sneaking. I thought that was like another lifetime ago. Are you kidding? Another lifetime ago. Who was president?

Like George Washington president. And Microsoft lost that case. Like who cares? All right. We got to take a break. And we're going to come back with some, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with some hardcore word old discourse. It's going to be amazing.

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I'm very excited. Okay. So you get like slots, right? There's a word and you have to guess it. This is like, green... When we used to have Paul Miller try to describe a picture to us, it's like a segment. All right, go ahead. There's slots.

Okay, okay. So as I understand it, everybody gets the same puzzle every day and it's a bunch of empty squares and they have to put the right letters in to get, dispel the word. and it's the same word for everybody, right? Yes. You've got it so far. I've got it so far. And you have like a certain number of guesses on each letter?

No. You have six guesses at words total. A total? That's terrible. That says one word a day. You get six guesses at what word it is. Okay. And you, but then the green, I thought the green and the square is like how many times you

guess on each slot. No. So I would give you a yellow square for this part of the answer. It's correct. It's all in the wrong direction. So you guess a word. Okay. And the letters turn green if you have the right letter and the right position.

Okay. Yellow if you have the right letter or the wrong position. And gray, if it's the wrong letter entirely. Okay. So those grids that you're seeing all over Twitter are like the little, actually James Vincent I read about this day. They tell a little story of frustration. Yes.

It's like a box score. How you're guessing and like when you got it right or wrong. So you want like just a single row of green is perfection. Yep. That's all the right letters and all the right spots. And then the game is over, so that's always at the bottom. And then you've won, and then everyone shares it. So this guy is a developer.

He's in New York. He's from Wales. He made the game as like a love letter to his wife and just like put it on his website. And the game goes viral. So it's all over Twitter. But it's just like a free game every can play on a website. It's like I was talking to our deputy features editor, Sarah Jong. It's like a perfect little encapsulation of how we want the internet to be or how we thought it was.

Like a guy made a game on his website. I enjoy the game and I don't have insight. into their relationship. But I will say it potentially sounds like a bad gift. Like, I made you this word game on the internet. Like, all right, dude.

Like, take her out to dinner. Come on. You're in the panty, baby. We got to change it up. Like, this is the equivalent of when somebody shows you a YouTube video and says, hey, I want you to watch it. And then they loom over you while you watch it.

And you have to, like, respond to it. Like, she, this poor woman had to do the exact same thing. But it sounds like it. It sounds like it was more successful. I try to get Becky to play Wordle and she took one shot at it and she was like, no. And just like set it aside. However, if you are a certain kind of like SAT nerd, this thing speaks to you and it has gone viral, as many things we live in a bubble.

It has particularly on viral within the media industry, but like whatever. The New York Times has written about it. It's everywhere. But it's just this like little freeware game on a domain power language. Co.uk. Like, it's not a commercial product at all, and it's gone everywhere. So then immediately, the ruthless economics of the app store came into play. All these clones have appeared.

A bunch of clones went into the iOS app store. That's one that we've spent most of our time, but I'm sure there's ones in the Play Store, including one just called Wordle, that looks exactly like Wordle. My favorite one. And the guy is, like, tweeting. Like, look at how many people are telling. I'm letting my game. And like, he's like to the moon because he's added like IAP and like a subscription

program and like word old premium. And it's like, what are you talking? Like this thing was pure. So everyone's getting mad at him. Like all of the lions of like Mac software are like screw this guy. And then you've got the whole narrative around Apple and its app store that's like from the epic trial from everything where Apple is like we have to be in total control of the store to protect people from scamps.

And it's like, well, here's this huge scale. Were you guys not like, did you not like go and match his URL on his website with the website with the wordal website? Like, it feels like it was very low, very easy due diligence to do here. So I think this is like part of the, this is where I think it gets really tangled. Yeah. You know, like the guy's immediate defense was, well, this wasn't trademarked. Which like definitely makes like as a IP person, like that makes you sound like such a goon. Like, if your immediate response is like, I was not legally prevented from doing this thing that is everyone has outraged by.

It's like, you might have missed it. He's just one of those guys that spends all of his time on the Reddit, am I the asshole? Like, he was just like, fund, like, legally I'm not the asshole. Here's what I've done. I've started using your name and I've locked into your bank account, but nothing, there's no trademark on your name, good sir. Well, and one of his defenses was, well, look, I offered to give the guy a share of the profit. and he never got back to me? So there's a lot of these clones.

There's like the one that like particularly because the guy was tweeting was so higher. This gets pressed. We write about it. Everyone writes out everyone's mad. Apple takes all the clones down. Including worder. So now we know that Apple at like a policy level

agrees that it made a mistake, right? Like the outcome is they took all the games down. So now it's not like, oh, you snuck through a loophole in the store. It's a they just missed it. And I, there's like a lot of angles here. Right. can you copyright or trademark or otherwise provide intellectual property protection to a game mechanic? And it turns out there was like a game show in the 70s. It's basically wordal.

It's called Lingo, I think. Chuck Woolery was the host, yeah. Chuck Woolery. So we got that Woolery tie in. Yeah, you know, it's actually in the app store rules. If you recreate a game that Chuck Woolery hosted, anyone can copy it. So people are talking about this with like 2048, which is kind of a rip off of threes, but for like you have to expend less mental energy. I have two 2048 apps on my iPhone right now. And I have no idea which one is the real one. They're indistinguishable.

Well, so here's how I knew the difference between threes and 2048. Threes was like a beautifully crafted game. And it was its own sensation. This was years ago. And we wrote about 2048 and three's many times over the years. With threes was like well engineered. The first time I downloaded 2048, my phone got hot and my battery died. And I was like, well, this is what you get.

Like, the end. I think here, right, there's all of the, there's all the discourse around what legal protections, games have, game mechanics have, names have, whatever. That's all like outside the realm of the fact that Apple insists on total control of its store. And one of its rules is don't copy other apps. Like, you can go look it up. It's one of the rules. Right. It literally is like, be original.

There's no law in America that's like, you must be original. Not yet. That's the Kanye platform. Vote Patel. Patel, yeah, 2024, be original. But I just don't think like those legal arguments make any sense in the context of Apple's insistence on total control. And then the fact that Apple, it's so easy to, this was almost the expected result that someone would scam this guy's idea or his virality and turn it into an app store success.

I keep thinking of Flappy Bird, when the guy took down Flappy Bird and immediately there were like 12 Flappy Bird clones, most of them looking the exact same. I'm always kind of baffled by the idea that Apple maintains, insists it has total control. So I can distinguish the Flappy Bird case. Okay. This is a real law school. I'm ready. Mr. Patel, can you distinguish the Flappy Bird versus App Store case?

the Flappy Bird guy was like, my game is poison. I'm ruining the lives of people around the world. I will not be, I will not be complicit. And that was true. And that's how he felt. And so he was out. And so other people just like rush to fulfill the demands. Like what is Apple going to do in that case?

Be like, we shouldn't have built it. Who is this guy to deny us the experience of Flapybird? Who made him God? Just Oppenheimer, making the bomb. So that's just a little different. Like here, I think the biggest open question, and it's, like, fascinating is, like, the wordal guy hasn't said anything about how he might wish to capitalize on the viral success of his game.

Maybe he just has his phone off this week. Maybe he had his wife have, like, gone out for a week, having a nice time, and he's going to get back. Well, it's got to be costing money to, like, run the server, right? Yeah, but if he's, like, got his computer off, he's going to come back and be like, what is my server bill? I like to think that this is. his wife is like furious at him because of this because it was a bad gift. And she's like, look, just don't, just let's not ever mention the game ever again. And he's like, okay, I'm sorry,

I'll make it up to you. And then all this happened. And he's just trying to keep a low profile, happy home. And so that's probably why we haven't heard from him. Yeah. He's like, I can't, I can't get into this wordal thing again. I don't want to know. Honey, my, my bad gift went viral. I think, I would suspect the end result of this is that thing becomes a real product and, like, is monetized in some way. And I think that actually cuts against, again, I think one of the reasons people like this and one of the reasons I like it is it's a freeware game on a website. It's not an app. There's no mechanics. It's not begging you to buy extra moves.

Is there a little, like, banner at the bottom that you always accidentally click on? Nothing. Nothing. Someday, the real move is to monitor. the word. So the will all log into Wordle and the word will be like Honda. That's actually, that's actually pretty brilliant. Okay, so that's the wordal discourse. It is ongoing. I will tell you if you're in your head, what you're thinking is, but can you monetize a, or can you protect a game mechanic? The answer is, no one knows the answer to that question.

Right? Like, that's a challenging legal argument to make. Because he didn't copyright it. No, because it's not like written down. Like, it's very challenging. Like, there's not a, none of our existing IP regimes, like, fit it perfectly. Yeah. Like a game mechanic. So you have to, like, invent one or, like, shoehorn it into another one. It's, it's, yeah, we can't do it here.

I'll just die. We're not doing it. We're not doing it. Other weird discourse of the week, the Wall Street Journal, thundered onto the scene years late and was like, teens don't like green bubbles, which if you've been paying attention to this show or The Verge, we know that green bubbles cause social dynamics and groups of people, particularly young people. We did a whole episode of Why Did You Push That Button with Ashley and Caitlin years ago. And like the lead was like a guy on Tinder who's like, I keep getting rejected

when we move to text because my bubbles are green, which is ice cold. It's amazing. So we've, We've known for a long time that green bubbles, blue bubbles, cause social dynamics, especially with younger people. The Wall Street Journal's headline was like, teens are bullying each other because of blue bubbles. Good. And once you bring teen bullying in, like all bets are off. So then Google, Hiroshi Lockheimer is like, Apple should stop enabling bullying, which is great.

I mean, you know, take the shot. I just realized where you're going, and I'm so excited to get there. Well, it's just like, I get it. eventually some politician is going to be like, iMessage enables bullying. What we should do is make encryption illegal. Like you can just see how once you add bullying to the mix, like no one can make any arguments and what you have,

like the FBI will like live in your bathroom. Like the argument, poor Dieter has been screaming for RCS for years. And all he had to do is be like, actually teens bully each other without RCS. That's all. It's the only bad argument you ever have to make. Only one.

So Hiroshi, who I don't think is trying to make this argument entirely, he is saying we shouldn't bully people. They clarifies what he meant is we shouldn't hold people back. What he really wants is RCS. I mean, we're just here at this point of the discourse now, right? Like, we've gone all the way to teen bullying is a problem because RCS doesn't exist. At some point, and now I really do misdeater, I'm just curious why the carriers, which can force Apple to run lies about the status of their 5G network on display on your screen at all times. AT&T is like, yeah, just call it 5GE.

That's the rule. You want on this network? It's five. Put the logo on there, Apple. And Apple will do it. Why none of the carriers have been like, yeah, it's time to support RCS. Like, just turn it on. I think it's one of those things like there's this kind of knowledge when you're interviewing

certain celebrities, some of them have questions you're not allowed to ask. Like, for years, you were not allowed to ask Jody Foster. She was gay because we all knew it, but you weren't allowed to ask it. And I think it's like the same thing. This first cast has taken a deep term. But I think it's the same thing of like they're not allowed to ask Apple about RCS. It's just like you walk into the room. And there's a handler and they're like, so RCS don't even use those three letters together.

Like real, what was it? Like, that's what I'm thinking there. Don't ask Tom Cruise about Scientology. Yeah, exactly, exactly. There's just like certain things you're not allowed to ask them. I will say I am not sure that RCS is going to solve the teen bullying problem. And more broadly, like, I even think people still make fun of Android users in unfair and hurtful ways. I once witnessed, I live actually next to a high school.

And I witnessed a group of teens making fun of one of the teens because she listened. to SoundCloud, that this was like, oh, like Spotify is like actual music, but SoundCloud. And she was like, guys, it's for the mixes. But that didn't do anything. But I'm just saying these platforms, like the cleavage points between the platforms, it's always going to be a cause of social division. Yeah, if you can give the teens a reason to bully each other, they're going to do it. I just think that messaging interoperability is like one of those things where all you need is a handful of teens to be like, I had green bubbles and I was excluded from school activities. And then I swear to God. I'm excited for this congressional hearing.

I'm not saying Apple needs to build IMS for Android, right? We have the documents where Federigi and Schiller are like, no. Like, no, that will, like, the locket is important to us. Like, we have the emails. Yeah. I'm saying that in the current. encryption debate, you just like, you give them the teen bullying. And then like any politician is like, what we need to do is turn off encryption. So parents can read all of your text messages. It's like, what just happened? I mean, the thing is, they're rebooting DeGrosi.

Like, this could be a plot line that could bring all of this to a head. That's what you need. Yeah, little proto Drake being like I got yelled at because I got green bubbles. Yeah, all the shows in my youth did like a very special episode about drug usage, blue bubbles. just like sweeps the teen show landscape. All right, we'll see. Next week we'll have Dieter back on. I'm curious, that's what RCS and teen bullying are.

We'll hold it for next week when he's back. We've got to take a break. Russell, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Dan Sefer will be on right after this. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront,

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That's W-H-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-C-com slash sell. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that.

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Hey, we got like a real grab bag of post-CES gadget news. Got some car stuff to talk about. But I want to start with my favorite gadget story of the year so far. And I recognize it's only the beginning of the year. But I think this one's going to stay in the lead for a long time. So as you know, there's a chip shortage. One or two. The chip shortage has expressed itself in many ways.

Maybe most notably, like the blood sport of acquiring a PS5. However, Canon can no longer find the appropriate chips to enable the DRM for its printer cartridges, like its ink cartridges. So now they're shipping the cartridges without the DRM chips and just instructing their own customers on how to defeat DRM and Canon printers. And it turns out all you have to do is click OK. It's just very good. But the printers are, when you put the cartridge in, the printer's like, no, that's a fake toner.

Because they don't have the DRM. It's great. I hope they never find supply for these chips. Like destroy that supply. Everybody who's doing that, pivot to something else. Pivot to PS5 chips. You're fine. So it's a button isn't okay.

It's close. Oh. You just feel like just close this. Just close the pop-up window that comes up. It turns out you don't actually have to worry about this morning at all. We've been lying to you to sell the cartridges at a markup the whole time. I hope they never, ever solve this problem. The other thing I'll note, as you know, the chip shortage led to a dramatic reduction in supply of Apple's $19 polishing cloth.

Oh, my God. Shout out to Alex Heath. The cloth is back in stock, I believe. Heath is purchasing one. We're going to make him do like a two-hour. video review of the cloth, the most important product Apple is ever sold. I'm just upset he didn't report this out. We should have made him write this first, Mr. Fancy Facebook reporter.

No, you're writing about cloth, man. Okay, let's start with gadgets. We just came out of CES. We're starting to write some of our CS trend stories. Dan, it seems like the story of PCs is just on a radically different trajectory now than we thought it would be a couple years ago. Yeah, I mean, laptops are so hot. I mean, which is like an obvious thing to like any of us that have just like come out of the past two years and are still in it.

But, you know, the, it's real. You know, sometimes you wonder if I remember, I don't know, a year ago or whatever. And like, you wonder if those stories that like there's so much demand for laptops, people are buying up Chromebooks and buying up laptops and buying up PCs and stuff like. You wonder how much of that is real. And now we like, after two years of, you know, successive massive massive growth in the PC industry, it seems like it absolutely is real. And it doesn't look like it's going to slow down, which is kind of interesting. Depending on who you talk to, they wonder if, like, you know, was it peak laptop in 2021? Or are we still going to be seeing lots of, like, huge growth in this industry over the next year as people, maybe, maybe one, some theories have been floated that, like, maybe in 2020 you bought the laptop you could find because you needed something immediately.

But you don't love it. Like, you had to get the Chromebook because it's not great. And now it's like, okay, well, you're two years later, you've lived with it. Now it's like maybe you're ready to actually get the laptop you want. That MacBook Pro that you wanted is now available. And so, like, you're out buying it, which seems to be a thing. So, yeah, it's kind of wild to think about that. Like, we were spent, what, five to ten years asking what's a computer?

And it turns out a computer is just a laptop. Sorry, Dieter. You're on vacation. You cannot rebuttal that. D.E. They're going to listen to this and, like, drive to your house. No, Monica has a great piece coming out of CES that, like, you know, the design cycles for hardware, 18 months-ish.

We had Brack and Darrell, the CEO of Logitech on. He was like, yeah, about 18 months. And now the products that we designed for work from home are coming out. I think that's true across the industry. So Monica has a great piece. And she's like, all these laptops at CES are meant for work from home or for creator stuff or for a permanent home office, which is the thing people are talking about. And at the beginning of the pandemic, they were just selling enterprise laptops or whatever they had on hand because there's no supply.

Now they're not just selling what they can make. They're selling stuff designed for it. And it means kind of our traditional laptop categories are all out the window. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely right. One of the points from Monica's piece is that people want more powerful computers for a variety of tasks, even if they're not necessarily gaming. It used to be that if you were buying the most powerful computers because it was specifically for gaming, it had a crappy key. board, terrible trackpad.

Maybe it didn't have a webcam. Like for a couple of years, our favorite gaming laptop just didn't have a webcam. Guess what? CS 2022, that very laptop now has a webcam. And, you know, like, and people are demanding more powerful devices because they are sitting at a desk and they're plugging it into a big monitor and they are doing multitasking a lot more than maybe they used to be because they are relying on it for eight to ten hours a day to do their jobs.

And we're seeing that paired with. with a great keyboard and a great track pad and, you know, hopefully fingers crossed better webcams. We'll see when we get them. They're probably still terrible. Webcams will forever be terrible. But like, at least they're there now, which is an interesting divide. So like now you've got computers that are maybe just as powerful as a gaming laptop would have

been a year and a half ago, but it's designed for doing work or maybe doing both because you work on it and then you also play games later on it. Can I say, Monica Spee says this great quote from Alex Cho, the president. of personal systems at HP. Gamer's game because they want to connect. It's like, gamers game, baby. Like, bring it on. Gamers be gaming.

Yeah, it's good. I think it's utterly fascinating to see that. The emphasis on portability in laptops is like slightly waning. That Macbrookmich. I bought one. It's definitely heavier than my old one. But it lives on a desk almost all day long, and it doesn't matter, and it can do what I want it to do.

I'm staring at one that's like sitting at. in a vertical dock on a shelf behind my desk. Like, I don't even, I sit this desk eight to ten hours a day and I don't even touch the thing. Like, it might as well be a desktop computer. Yeah, because there's no M1 Pro Mac Mini. There you go. Yeah, that's what you're waiting for.

That's great. You're missing out. That's a beautiful display on that little computer. I thought about, and I was like, why would I buy a display that's worse than the display on the computer? That struggle is real. So the flip side of that is we, of all this is there's lots of demand. there's going to be supply.

TSM set aside $44 billion for ship expansion in 2022. We just had Cristiano Amon, the CEO of Qualcomm. He said he thinks ship shortage stuff for them anyway will be over by the summer because they've already pre-allocated supply. So it just seems like the tech industry has kind of figured itself out. And now we've got a bunch of products that were designed for the new normal, which is pretty fascinating. Did you see that elsewhere at CS?

You know, this was a weird CES. What we saw was this CES was very falling back on like what the traditional CES type of thing was in that it was like a lot of laptops announced and a lot of TVs announced. And then we saw a lot of things that were like maybe we were expecting to be announced and kind of like got pushed out. And so maybe they didn't announce it a CES because their product wasn't ready or, you know, they didn't attend CES because, you know, very valid reasons just like we didn't intend in person. So it was kind of. kind of an interesting CS in that respect. TVs were huge, were very popular. Some of our most popular articles over the CES week were about the new TVs, about the fact that LG finally is coming out with a 42-inch OLED and that, you know, the QD OLED and stuff like that are addressing a lot of the complaints that we've had with OLED technology, which has been really great so far, but isn't as bright. So QD-O-LED makes it brighter. So that's, I don't know if that's like really tied to like the pandemic, though. Other than maybe people are just sitting at home watching TV all the time because that is your theater,

your home theater. Like, you know, maybe there's like a three line you can pull to that. But I also feel like new TVs are always going to get better and people are going to be interested in newer, better TVs forever. Did we see anything like about, so we know that laptops are changing and we're even seeing, you know, she talked to Logiteg and we're seeing like peripherals and stuff are changing. What about the furniture? The home office furniture.

Is that like, did we see anything at CES like better? standing desks because they all look the exact same right now, and they all look like they belong in our office in Manhattan. I mean, there's some nice ones looking out there. You can get wood table ones. I've got a wood one. I mean, I don't know. I didn't, I don't know if we saw money at CES specifically.

And it's like one of those things. That feels like one of those things where like that is the experience that we missed by not being on the show floor and not being in those weird halls. is that there might be some companies with some weird new standing desk design that, like, fits in your home. But, like, they're off the radar. And the only way you're really going to know about them is if you walk by it, it'd be like, what is that weird thing? And unfortunately, we didn't have that experience this year. It was very much, you know, remote.

So possibly, but we didn't see anything standing out, obviously. The gaming companies, I think Razor recently announced the desk. I'm not sure if it was at CES or before. They did announce one with the computer built in. Yeah, I mean, like, that's like, that's razor. Yeah, yeah, it's razor. No, I just, I'm really curious to see, like, I love that we're kind of, there's, was this immediate transition in the laptop space.

And I keep thinking about, like, you know, in the 90s, everybody either had a computer in their kitchen or they had it in that weird hutch. Bring back computer rooms. Computer did. Bring it back. Yeah, the weird little hutch in the room. Yeah. And, like, where are the hutches?

Where, like, I don't want to have to look at, I mean, I have to look at, I don't, I don't have a place for my office. I have to look and I miss a hutch. Can I tell you one of the longest running feature pitches I've had at the verse that literally no one has ever taken me up on? And if you're listening to this and you're a writer and you want to do this story, just like, let me know. Okay, there is a flat pack furniture association in this world, right, where all the flat pack furniture makers get together, they have conventions. It's a real thing. Does IKEA all show up in like full black, like, I want to know. We're the big dudes on campus. Like, I want, I've been like, we should do a story about like whether like the people at souder woodworking are like sit around

me and I was like this fucking Ikea guys like like like is how competitive is this industry give me the personalities is there like a number one flat pack furniture designer guy dresses like the Johnny Ive the flat pack furniture and he's just like a dick to everyone but he's got the best idea like get me in there and I've pitched a story so many times and everyone's like what is wrong with I want to know the answer it's like a billion dollar growing industry let me in there man like you know like uh some stuff is easier to put together than other stuff if you've ever moved house you like had this experience you're like oh this like these instructions make

sense like got through it and then other stuff is like so it's 900 screws that's what you got right do those people feel bad that they're like I'm just horrible at designing flatback if you if you if you're a writer and you're listening to this and you want to do that like 15,000 word dive into the drama and agony, a flat pack furniture. Like, let me know, because I've been, I've been looking. I mean, I want to read that. I want to read that.

I don't want to write that story or report that story, but I want to read that story. I just like, I just love thinking of the idea of like a rock star flat pack furniture designer, just like walking through the convention and everyone's like, oh my God. He's like, he's obviously, right? He's like obviously Swedish. Yeah. He's got like a little entourage. He doesn't have to wear the name badge.

They just let this person in. I don't know why it's a him. It's her. Who knows who it? Yeah. But she shows up and like everyone's like hush tones and like one person tries to talk to her and like an assistant's like no, no, no, no, no. Do you know how few screws and dowels she put in her last piece? You don't talk to her.

It's a honey meant. It's there. It's got to be there. No one will do the story. Okay. There's a bunch of like wacky Android news and none of it's good, but we're going to like talk through it. Well, I'll say this, Android 12 is out. The rowout is super rocky.

Yeah, it's been a rough few months. What's going on? So Allison Johnson did this great report. Actually just went up today. One of the things that we had observed over the last few months was that Android 12 updates had been really rough. Samsung released it and then pulled it. One Plus released it and then pulled it. Google itself released it and put it on the pixel sixes and those release.

And then they're really buggy. they release an update in December that had to get pulled. And it's just been like a mess all around. And there's this weird tension between Android enthusiasts who really want updates really quickly. Like as soon as that update is announced, they want it on their phone. And the manufacturers who actually delivered their updates earlier this year than typical, except they were a hot buggy mess.

And so it's like, which one do you want? Do you want, you know, this update to be? be, you know, six weeks later than you desire, or do you want it to work? And so, like, you know, it was this weird tension. And so Allison did a lot of research. She compared the timelines to prior years. It turns out, like, Android 12 was actually released by Google a month later than prior history. But Samsung released its version of Android 12 earlier than it had in the past. And so there was a weird timing dynamic. But the gist of it was, and she spoke to Michelle, who listeners might remember from

XDA developers. He used to be the editor-in-chief there, kind of like an Android expert. And the point that he kind of made was that this is one of the biggest updates in Android's history. I think the biggest update since Android 5 or 6, he said. And there's a lot of things going on. We see a lot of visual changes, but there's also a lot of

under the hood changes. And the potential for problems is just exacerbated when it's such a big update. And then you combine that with the timeline changes and things like that And in certain circumstances, like with One Plus, they were trying to merge a code base of their color OS and their oxygen OS together and with Android 12 on top. And it just like kind of collided. And they had to pull their update before.

I'm not sure if they re-released it at this point. But it's just been like a really rough few months. And so that Alice's report does a really great job of like kind of explaining why it's been that case and laying out the timelines of like what the last few months have been. And for the pixel six, Google said they were going to release this. this fixed update in late January. We're still waiting for it. And this update that was supposed to come out in December, added features for Google's new wireless charger that goes with the pixel six.

So, like, unless you got that update in December before it got pulled, which very few people got it, you can't utilize the charger fully and stuff like that. And there's other weird bugs and hiccups that need to be addressed. So it's just been, you know, not a great update season. It's very exciting to get a new Android update, especially one, with Android 12 that like brings as much change to the table because OS updates for smartphones can be kind of stale at this point. Like there isn't a whole lot of difference year over year.

Android 12 is different. Like it is visually a very different thing right away. But it's bringing some pain too. My sense reading Allison's piece, which is excellent. Everybody should go read it. It was almost like Google kind of said, fine. You want fast updates? Like Samsung was like, fine, you want this?

I'm going to give it to you. Here we go. We're going to go fast. See, that suck, didn't it? They're just like tempering expectations. Yeah, I mean, like, Samsung specifically in prior years, has had a pretty long beta cycle of a couple of months, maybe three months or whatever, before releasing the final one. And this time, it was like four weeks of beta and boom, we're delivering it. And, oh, whoops, we broke a bunch of folding phones in Korea.

Oh, that's why we do those six months of beta. That's actually good. Okay. I said there was more Android news. So Android 12 rushed out, maybe too fast. 2021 came and went. Microsoft did not deliver Android 11 to the Surface Duo at all. We have no idea what's going on there.

I think we know that the Surface Duo is just not a high priority for Microsoft is what the answer there is. They said they were going to do it. It's an expensive phone. At the same time, Nvidia put Android 11 on the Nvidia Shield, including the one they shipped in 2015. Yeah. Now that you love to see. This is my favorite thing about the Nvidia Shield. Almost all of them use the exact same guts, the same processor.

Like, they haven't really upgraded the processor since that 2015 one. All they've done is shrunk it. So it was like they apparently made a processor so, I mean, it was too powerful for the TVs at the time. Like, it was totally unnecessary power. And it's just like, oh, wow, when you think about power in your smart home product, especially your smart TV product and you give it power, it has a much longer life. something for all TV manufacturers the world over to take note.

Our Samsung TV runs on a hamster and a wheel. He can complete one task per minute. No software updates will ever be provided unless it's to deliver advertising to you. Smart TVs. But this is like a big update for the shield. It's weird because the shield is very popular in like super nerdy home theater circles.

So this is like kind of a big deal. Alex, sometimes I forget your newer to the show. Yeah. Oh, the shield owners listen to the show. I love you guys. They're aware of us. You're my favorite. Nobody ever wants to talk with me about shield and slacks.

Oh, my God. See, I knew this was perfect. You should have just said this in your interview. Yeah. I'll talk about the shield. I'll talk about the shield people. You guys hit me up. We'll talk about how excited we all are.

I, like, honestly, one of the highlights of I've been out of town for the last few weeks. And one of the highlights of returning home is I'm going to be able to put Android 11 on my NVIDIA shield. Oh, it's good. It's great. Is it the shield your go-to? Is that your main box? I switch between it and the Apple TV, just kind of to feel alive, just to experience. I will say that I've almost entirely given up on our Chromecast with Google TV.

It's rough. I gave up on mine. I had three of them. I've replaced all of them with Apple TVs because I'm done with it. Yeah. I will say that the Apple TV, the user interface is not as good as the Chromecast. There's a reason I was like very into the Chromecast. It was great.

Well, and it's got live TV built in. Like poorly. Yeah, no, that was good. One click to get to Peppa Pig. I mean, that's a game changer for a parent, man. But it not working is not a game changer for your three-year-olds. Peppa's all in purple, and she's making terror, like monster sounds bad. So we went back to the Apple TV.

But maybe I'll break out the shield. Get that, bust that shield out. It's pretty good. Do some G-Force now? It'll be great. Big news on the shield front. It's going to support 4K HDR streaming for GForce now, which is pretty cool. But then on the other, on the flip side, right, it's Fortnite's back on the iPhone

through G4 now, which is amazing on the web. So the slow advance of cloud gaming continues. All right. One last Android thing, and then we should talk about cars. The Sony Xperi 5-3, nine months after it was announced, it's not shipping in the United States. Oh. It's like the ultimate vapor where success. story. You can buy last year's phone today.

Yeah. Speaking of vapor wearing cars, Tesla removed all mentions of 2022 from the cyber truck website. We went on about this last week. The number of EV announcements that have no dates next to them is out of control. I will say that

someone tweeted me that apparently when Elon one person of the year, Martha Stewart asked him about cyber truck ship dates at the event. Look, she's got to clear the brush on her property. She needs something to put it at. And so at that event on December 13th, 2021, he said to Martha Stewart, the cyber truck will be in production roughly a year from now, which implies 20, 2023. They just hadn't updated the website.

And I don't think anyone was paying attention to this interaction between Martha Stewart and Elon at a Time magazine cover party. So like, sure, maybe the decision was made earlier. But in any case, it shifted back. How limited is Martha going to be if they don't deliver in 23. She should have broken that news on her blog. Yeah, I know, right? Martha. Put it on the site. I love that she asked about it. Tweet it on the site. Martha is very online. We, uh, Caitlin, Tiffany wrote a feature of Martha Stewart for us ages ago. And it turned out Martha was like very online. Anyway, vapor or a car. The other kind of like piece of this puzzle, which I think is interesting. And I, this is one of those like impossible questions. Ford is allowing dealers to,

to tell people who buy the F-150 Lightning that they cannot resell it for a year because they do not want people to buy it and immediately scalp it, which is something like, sure, we've seen all over the place with PS5s and Xboxes. To do it with a pickup truck is like amazing.

It's just like fascinating. I don't know the answer to quite. I don't think scalpers are great. So this is not a Ford policy. This is like your dealer could do it and Ford will be like, cool. You don't have to agree. It's just one of those like...

I kind of hate it. like Ford's like putting it out in the ether. Like maybe this is a good idea. Well, we've seen it before with exotics. They did this with the Ford GT, the 2017 edition, I believe, the one that they redesigned that makes it look modern as opposed to retro. If you bought it, you couldn't sell it for two years. You were like signed an agreement saying you would not sell it for two years. And Ferrari does things like, you can't buy the new Ferrari unless you own an existing Ferrari. So it's kind of interesting to see those strategies make their way to the most mainstream vehicle ever made, which, you know, maybe there would be scalples. But the funny part is, like, I don't expect,

like, scalpers to be the ones putting markups. I expect dealers to stick markups on these things. Like, like, when you have a dealer market, excuse me, they can charge whatever they want to sell the vehicle. And if there's a lot of demand for a vehicle, they will add markup to it to make a higher profit. So, like, that's where the scalping is going to happen. Well, so, right, I think, the idea is Ford doesn't want its dealers to do that, but it wants to protect dealers from scalpers who will then, like, nothing makes a car dealer matter than being forced to sell an SRP and then having the car flipped, which is like a thing I've heard about with like mockees and stuff. Like that's a real thing. The Bronco, like Ford, in particular, Ford isn't

like the lucky position of having like a number of hot cars right now. Yeah. And so like the Bronco, you can still get a first edition Bronco, which is not making ages ago. Just because there's like some guy who bought one the first day and is now like $300,000. And he's just waiting to see if it happens, right? Like, or the people selling rev four hybrids for $100,000. I respect those guys. But those are dealers. Like, that's a dealer being like, maybe we can pull this off.

I think, like, that dealer model, I was treating with this like a couple days ago, people are like, well, this is why Tesla has a direct sales model. But the difference is right now it's like impossible to buy virtually every Tesla. Tesla. And Tesla can just like unilaterally raise the prices, like whatever. So I don't, like I said, I think it's one of the hardest problems to think about. Like my instinct is like, you bought it. You could do whatever you want with it. I drove off this lot. I could sell it five feet down the street if I want to. It's my car. But at the same time, I think it's really like in PS5 world, we think it's really unfair to all those kids.

You just want a PS5. The best way to buy one is to spend $700 on eBay. It is really unfair to all those kids that will want an electric F-150. Those poor babies. It's really unfair to all those kids, like me, a mid-late-30s guy who wants an electric F-150 and doesn't want to spend $200,000 on it. I'm just saying as long as basically the market for electric cars is like a bunch of vapor, I think these things are just going to keep happening. Right.

Like there's just not enough supply. You can't just like spin up a car factory and make more cars. like that's a years out process. So as long as we're in this weird moment where there's no actual EV transition happening, we just keep pretending there is one with like renders of electric cars. Like this problem is going to keep happening

and actually acquiring the cars is going to be almost impossible. I'm happy to destroy the universe. Or excuse me, I am happy to destroy the environment to not spend $100,000 on a RAV-4 hybrid. See, like that's the problem. I am the problem. That is a rational, personal, economic decision.

Very content to say, oh, $70,000, or what is it, $50,000 more? Or I consider you to contribute to the destruction of our planet. Goodbye planet. What's the number? Is it the $10,000, like, Prius superiority premium? Like, it's not $100,000. Like, that's the big question. Yeah.

What's the number where I'm like, oh, maybe the environment matters slightly more than my wallet? Yeah. The person driving the $100,000. Raff 4 Prime is like, they've got like the huge sign on the back that's like, I paid $100,000 for this gas mileage. But they probably got it from like Bitcoin. So this is just them like trying to make it up. Just imagine the vanity license plate. 100K RAV4.

You could do it. It's eight characters. You could do it. All right. We're going to end the show right there because it's just like fully ridiculous. I want to call it a great story from one of our newest reporters, Mia Sato. She wrote about Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, and now they are making an app and a platform of their own with all of the attendant community dynamics and app dynamics that you might expect. It's a great story.

I encourage you to read it. Like I said, Decoder this week, Cristiano Amman. Next week, actually speaking of cars, we have VW Global CEO Herbert Dice runs all of UW. That was a wild conversation. He wanted to talk about Tesla, but I don't think he's not supposed to, so he kept on referring it to as our American competitor. It was great. Highly encourage you listen that. We'll be back next week with the Virtuecast.

Deeter will be back. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Dan is D.C. Sefert. Russell is at Russell Brandem. We love your tweets.

Please talk to us. That's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. I'm so excited for these Shield fans.