The MacBook Neo is a winner

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Brendan Carr is still a dummy. We got a lot to do. But all I care about right now is the MacBook Neo. It should be said, both David and I purchased MacBook Neo's for the podcast because we just need an excuse to buy MacBook Neo's. There was no reason for me to buy it. Two days ago was sitting on my computer. I had our dining room table shopping for a MacBook Neo on my M4 MacBook Air. I had this phone to be like, "What on earth am I doing here?" The story we both told ourselves today is that we're doing this A for the Verge cast. B, I'm going to give this computer to my wife, who I came home for lunch today. I showed her the computer. I was like, "This is your new computer and she could not have been less enthusiastic." That's right. Just the most whatever possible response to this new computer. I tried to do that with the StudioSpy XDR. I was like, "I'll buy myself this." Back in your office, you'll have two monitors. I'll do my old one. She was like, "I don't need that." You can't get over that wall. There's nothing to be said. By the way, shout out to, I won't say the person or the Apple Store that I want to, but I went to the Apple Store to buy a MacBook Neo. Again, because I convinced myself if I spoke about the MacBook Neo on the Verge cast without physically holding one, the audience wouldn't think I had any credibility. This is how it worked my way into this purchase. For the go to the store and I bought the laptop and the person at the store recognizes me. I'm this close to buying an XDR. I was staring at it. He was like, "Do you want me to sell it to you?" The second it goes on sale for $1. I'm going to buy this thing. I started joking. $32.98 hit me. He was like, "I get you $1 off." I thought about it. He was like, "Do you want me to go get a manager to get you that off?" I thought about it and then I was like, "What I have foolishly chosen to sell this are stupid ethics policy and I can't take your $1." I'm charlie browned my way out of that store. This suggests that if you try hard enough, you can get any Apple product for $1 less than the retail price. It does seem like there's some pricing flex to the Apple Store. Also shout out to the person and Verge Cast Fan that I ran into at the Apple Store this morning who was very excited to talk about the Verge Cast and the Neo. It was very excited that we're going to be talking about the Neo on the Verge Cast. Shout out to you. That's where David A. Garek knows. Not on the street. No, God no. In the Apple Store. In the Apple Store and it's the ES. It's great times for both of us. It's great. Before we start with the Neo, can I start with just a very big nerd update? Yes, please. Last week I spoke about the kaleidoscope, the very expensive streamer in my house. There were some comments on Instagram that are like, it feels like we're subscribing just for Neely to live as extravagant lifestyle. I just want to point out that it's for you in it. It did not spend $13,000 or some subscribers money on a high bit rate streaming, although I would. I just want to lay that out. The reality is I did not do that. If I had the opportunity, I might. I think we can say, again, our ethics policy requires that when we hit the point that your subscription money is only funding Neely's luxurious lifestyle, we'll tell you. You know what I mean? We'll come on this podcast and be like, we're good. From now on, if you subscribe to the verge, it's both. And we'll do that from the boat. That's great. Not there yet. So it's your review and I just want to lay that out there. We're going to send it back the whole thing that's the ethics policy. In the second piece, and I just want to shout out to all of our people out there, the number of people who reacted to that segment by just saying out loud, this is why I like Torrent Blu-rays. It's off the charts. Like the number of people are like you and your dumb legal streamer caring about high quality, you can just get the Torrents for free. And then there was an argument, a pretty good argument in, I think, both on our Instagram comments and on the YouTube shorts comments of all places about the relative, extremely minor bit rate differences between kaleidoscope and Blu-rays. And the best part of this in this conversation was kicked off by people being like this is why I steal the movies was a deep complaint that Disney, in particular, Disney, cheaps out when it encodes its movies for Blu-ray. And they've, they insist on putting all of the movie onto one Blu-ray regardless of how long the movies are. So like Avengers and Game is three hours, but they fit it onto a single Blu-ray. They'll compress it however much they need to. However much they need to. So in this one case, the $13,000 kaleidoscope is better because kaleidoscope doesn't have to care about file sizes when they re-encode from them. And it was like in this extremely like heated debate about like I stream the movies, why would you pay for this? This is stupid. You can get Torrents are these people who are like, yeah, but for Disney ones, you have to you have to pay for it. This is like when you were like everybody needs, what was it Sony Bravia core just to watch Spider-Man? Yeah, exactly. Anyway, shout out to all the people. That is exactly what I want from the, the verge community is that argument. It's very good. Can I ask a really stupid question? If you hypothetically, and I'm not, this is not legal advice, if you Torrent a Blu-ray, can you, will it look as good as a Blu-ray? It depends on what you Torrent. Well, sure, but like in theory, can you rip a Blu-ray and have a digital file that will play back looking as good as a Blu-ray? Yeah, you can Torrent a bit for a bit Blu-ray. You're going to end up with some weirdness. They call them remuxes because you have to, I'm sure the people in the comments will explain all this to you, David, but you can get a bit for a bit copy of Blu-ray. The problem then is where are you going to play it back? Right. How are you going to play back? And who is going to run? Blu-ray. Blu-ray. Blu-ray. Blu-ray. Blu-ray. Blu-ray. Or, you know, if you're going to stream off your NAS to an app like Plexer and Fuse on Apple TV, will the Apple TV play back uncompressed at most? Or will that get reencoded into 5.1, which is basically what happens right now? So you're just having up with some like, I have got this huge file, I'm going to play it back somewhere. But you can get in the problem. The Blu-ray is Blu-ray has like many use and extra scenes and like you have no navigation for that. Like the code to run the Blu-ray. I mean, you doesn't run anywhere. You've just got a bunch of video files. So there's some weirdness there, but I mean, this is what people are doing. That's it. I love it. I'm very happy that we got from Neil as an idiot who's spending extra money on some money to this is why I steal the Blu-rays to I'm very mad at how Disney encodes its Blu-rays. Like basically in five comments. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah. It couldn't be happy with our. There is a real like piracy is back culture thing happening that we should probably dig into some other time. Like the there was such a long run of like moral conflict over downloading media. And I feel like there is no longer moral conflict over downloading media. I think a lot of people would walk up to David Ellison, look him dead in the eye and be like, I will steal every movie that you make using Warner Brothers discovered. 100%. 100%. It's just going to happen. Yeah. We'll come back around. We there Warner Brothers is going to make an appearance during the line of the year. I believe because you're back. And whenever you're here, we have to talk about Warner and Fairman. For the rest of my life, apparently. Thank you, David Ellison. Yeah, we should we should get to the MacBook Neo because the computer is out. Our review is out. Antonio Dupinato reviewed it for us. The reaction to this thing, I would say, has been pretty universally like rapturous. This computer appears to have accomplished exactly the thing Apple intended it to accomplish. And maybe even more so. Like have you been as surprised by the positivity around this thing as I have? really, I think what I'm more intrigued by is. the positivity around the sense that Apple is having a good time for the first time in years. Like, when you open the box to the Neo, it has the little tab that says hello on it. And like the classic Mac font, like Apple has not been playful in a long time. Like, truly has not. Their TikTok account is bananas, like literally pictures of bananas. Right. Do you see the TikTok they made of just a lime doing a face-to-call? No. No. I mean, it's just like a nonsensical avant-garde, weirdo TikTok that they're making. They started another new Instagram account that, you know, it's just more brand of content. But there's just a playfulness to Apple's vibe around the Neo that I think connects directly to it costs $5.99. The more expensive one is about $6.99. It's colorful. It's fun. This thing is not taking itself very seriously. So then you run into, and it's running an iPhone ship, and as it kicks Ram, but you're not supposed to take it seriously. So why did you take it seriously? And it turns out an iPhone ship with a gigs of Ram, as we have known for a long time, is remarkably capable. We've just been hidden behind iOS. And so if you just let that system be capable, it turns out to be very capable. Yeah. I mean, I think to me, the thing that has been so interesting has been exactly the thing you just described about a bunch of people being like, well, this computer doesn't do X, Y, and Z. And just overwhelmingly, it's like, well, then it's not for you. That's fine. I think people instinctively understand what this computer is for in a way, I think is really fascinating. And we started to see this even over the course of like the 24 hours after it shipped, right? You go from, okay, it's just a cheap laptop. Well, Apple makes the M1 error. Why not continue to do that? And then you start to see some of the things that Apple did to this, right? It is the marketing campaign, and it is the colors. And it is some of the choices they made with the device, not all of which I agree with. By the way, I have some real quibbles with this particular computer here. But it started to really coalesce around like, oh, Apple's actually doing a very specific thing here. And it is, we talk all the time about Apple's ability to sort of have a whole thought, right? And this computer feels like this is not a worse MacBook design to be cheaper. This is like a different idea about a computer in a way that I think resonated with people pretty aggressively. I mean, Apple will tell you, I mean, this was their entire message to us. When we talk, there are executives at the event. They kept saying, we can't make crap. We're not going to make crap. We were just able to make this computer great using the things we had today. I watched that tear down video of it, and it is remarkable at how much it is just an iPhone. Yeah. Like the motherboard is this big. Yeah, right. It's nothing. It's spread out a little bit because they have room. But you can see that, oh, this is just an iPhone with a huge battery and some speakers. It's so striking because you pick the thing up and one of the first things you notice about it is like, it is dense. Yeah. It is a solid piece of computer. And that's because it is just all battery. There's just nothing else going on in there. It's got, it's an iPhone with a giant ass battery and a keyboard. That's the whole thing that's happening there. Does it make you as angry about the iPad as it has been making me? So let's just talk about this now because I think the main philosophical argument has been basically, does the existence of the MacBook Neo just completely obviate the iPad? An Apple would obviously tell you no. But I have a very hard time now coming to the conclusion that if you have $600 to spend on an Apple device, you should buy anything other than this device. Like this to me makes the iPad air, especially if you're thinking about it as a somewhat primary computing device. Like even if it's not your only computer, it's a thing you intend to do more than just hold and watch movies on. If you want to like, my mom is a good example, right? Like my mom uses her iPad a lot to look at pictures to browse the web specifically Zillow. She does New York Times games on it every morning. And she does a lot of like email and basic little things. The Neo is a better, more usable machine for almost all of those things to me. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I want to stay on the positive side. I'm not going to accuse to being relentlessly negative. And boy, am I ready? But I think, you know, I think the right combo for most people is a laptop and a phone. And this is why non iPad tablets have all kind of just sort of, they live in that sort of fizzle about middle space. For everyone knows it's the right category for a bunch of things. But it never hits the way the iPad seems to have hit in certain places. I think this is the right laptop for people whose lives are primarily on phones. Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it. If your phone is your main computer, this is a great secondary computer. Yeah. And I think the truth is that for most people, literally in the world, for most people, their phone is their main computer. And so then you're like, okay, what do I really need? I need a more capable web browser quite often. And then there's a subset of apps that might be fun to use. And then this thing is like, well, here's a more capable web browser. I'm pretty good keyboard and a good trackpad and a fine display. You know, I'm a display nerd. So 100% of SRGB is not where I want to live. But it's like, all that stuff is fine because really what you're doing is like, here's a device that can do things my phone cannot do. You put it up against the iPad and the reason I'm asking, does this make you mad about the iPad is if they just didn't nerf the iPad's operating system, this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago. Yes. Very much so. And this has a lower spec chip and less RAM than most. Yeah. The equivalent iPad to this price wise runs an M4. Yeah. I just reviewed it. Like, it's also $600 and it has an M4 in it. It is vastly more powerful than this thing. And they just will not let the iPad be powerful in the way that this thing is allowed to be powerful. Here's my theory about that. I don't think it, I, I, I wonder about this and I wondered about it for ages and various combinations of people will deny it to my face or insist that it's a conspiracy theory. But really what you want the iPad to do is just run desktop Safari. If it would just run desktop Safari, not weird iPad mobile Safari Plus. They would tell you it is desktop Safari. They are lying to you. Yes. I mean, different people jump out of the world and, and, and both confirm and deny this in the same way. They use phrases like desktop class. Yep. Nope. I just want the one that's very obviously able to be run on an A8 ship with eight days of RAM. Sure can. If you adjust to that, the iPad becomes a different computer. And that to me is the entire, that is the MacBook Neo like at the end of the day, boil it all the way down. And it is not that it can run garage man because an iPad can run garage man. It's not that it can browse Zillow because most people just browse Zillow on their phones. Like, whatever it is that you're saying, it's not that it is a better door to ash machine or whatever apps exist on a phone. It is, oh, the browser is good and there's a keyboard and a mouse. And for everything that hits the wall on a mobile device, that's the exit RAM. Yep. And this thing just provides that extra RAM over and over again. It's very capable of doing all the other stuff that, you know, you have many creators of, now, posted the videos of them scrolling 4K timelines and all the stuff that people are worried about. Of course, it's capable of doing that stuff. But I just, like, I think the reason people are excited about it is it is the perfect companion to a phone. And I don't think that that paradigm has truly existed yet. Yeah, that's a good theory. I think that's largely right. And it is, we've always talked about the upside of PCs and I use PCs broadly like Max Windows, whatever, as the backstop to all of that stuff that there are walls you run into on your phone and on your tablet and on other devices. Some of which are artificially created by the companies that make them, particularly in Apple's case, it just refuses to allow you to do certain things that you want to do. But in part because like the UI doesn't afford it, right? There are just things you can't do on a six inch screen as well as you would want to do it on another device. And so having a larger device as the backup is valuable. It just has been for a long time. And I think you're right that this becomes a cheap and pretty good version of every single one of those things, right? Like Antonio's review basically just goes over all the things it's pretty good at. And it being pretty good at everything ends up being really, really, really meaningful. Especially when you put it up against all of these other Windows laptops at the same price and even higher, which almost always come with at least one sort of screaming problem. The performance, bad battery life, bad keyboards, bad webcams, bad, whatever else. There's almost always at least one sort of huge gacha feature. And the Neo just doesn't have any. And to be able to offer this will do all the things you want to do pretty well for $600 is a huge deal. By the way, did you end up getting the $600 one or did you get the 512 gigs of storage and the touch ID? I bought the touch ID. I don't know why. I don't know. I bought the touch ID and the guy who sold it to me at the Apple store essentially told me I was getting the touch ID. He was like, oh, and you want the 512 and the touch ID, right? It was like, what A, he said these things are absolutely flying out of the store, which I thought was really interesting. And B, it was literally like he assumed I was going to spend the extra $100, which I was anyway, but like it was just, it was just not even a question in his mind. This is how Apple's pricing works. It's genius. They truly clocked me the minute I walked in and they were like, this is the actual price. the thing that's going to be honest with each other. Yeah, they made basically $99 a profit. Yeah. I mean, these are the problems for the other PC makers in the world. One, the entire Windows PC market is basically driven by subsidies. So whether that's preloaded bloatware, those companies pay to preload on the PCs, whether it's the stickers that Intel and AMD pay to put on the keyboard deck, whether it's Microsoft itself doing weird pricing schemes so that co-pilot shows up in your face and starts screaming at you the second you open the computer. Like, there's just a whole bunch of compromise in the pricing that is related to other companies using the computer as advertising. Just straightforwardly, that subsidy drives down the price of PCs. The same way that subsidy drives down the price of smart TVs. Right? A smart TV is basically $0 now and it's because it's a giant advertising terminal in your house. Literally, you can get a TV for $0 with a giant advertising terminal physically glued to the bottom of the TV. Like, that market has reached its conclusion. The PC market is on its way there. So if you're going to get a Windows PC for $600, it's not the hardware compromises that will really kill you. It is the subsidy compromises that make the user experience horrible that will kill you. Apple just doesn't do those things or if they do those things, they do them in a way that drives everyone crazy. We all know what's going on, but they have like, well, we're just telling you that you can use Apple wallet kind of like, you know what I mean? Yeah. And what's funny is that is so much less present on Mac OS than in most other places. Like the call over the phone. It's constantly your phone is telling you about fitness plus and about all the things you can do in Apple music and about all the new stuff that's on Apple TV plus. And I think in part because notifications are just so much less front and center on Mac OS, it just doesn't feel nearly as in your face as it does on the phone. Yeah. And to whatever extent Apple doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff, it doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff. And again, this is like on the margin, Apple does this stuff. Like you can see it. It's present in their products. They are using their own products to advertise their own services in a way that I think is gross. And most people who experience it for what it is know that it's gross. But it's just not the same as Windows. Like they're, you know, they're just qualitatively different. And so like out of the box, you are just getting a nicer experience because it's not chunked up by advertising subsidy. And then there's just hardware scale. Apple makes a lot of A18 chips. All the money isn't in the chip because they've already made 20 billion of them. And so the money is in the other components and you can feel it. Yep. And I think that is just very, very difficult for other PC makers to compete with. Let alone Apple is really good at pricing you and just spending $100 more dollars on effectively nothing with such insane margins on the RAM already that they didn't have to do any pricing games because they can just take a little less money for, they could take a little less profit for RAM. Like what are you going to do? And I think Antonio has been talking about a PC maker. Is not a PC maker's are talking about it. David, you've been making this point. They seem caught way off guard. Yeah, which is nuts, right? I mean, I think the most direct quote we've gotten so far was from a suce, which just had an earnings call. And one of the questions they got on their earnings call was essentially, what do you make of this computer? How do you feel about the Neo? Do you view this as a threat? And this is Nick Wu, the CFO, who basically said, you know, we had an inkling. This was coming. There have been sort of supply chain rumors about this for months. So like we kind of saw this coming. We were surprised. It was as cheap as it was, which I think is really interesting that I think people probably expected this to be like $7.99 or $8.99, not $5.99 and $4.99 at education, which is a genuinely low price for the price like this. But then he says he was talking about the processor and the eight gigs of RAM. And he said, there's made limit certain applications. So I think when Apple positioned the product, it's probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios, because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet because tablets are mostly for content consumption. This just like this just dead wrong. It's just dead wrong. And I think it is so reminiscent to me. I read that quote and immediately thought of Steve Balmer in 2007 being asked about the iPhone. And we actually, we just pulled this clip because it's, I found this on YouTube again. And there was the first comment on YouTube is YouTube showed this to me again 17 years later. So I think the algorithm seems to have spiked this clip again. But let me just play you this response from Steve Balmer when he's asked about the iPhone. The first iPhone, 2007. Steve Jobs goes to Macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that? $500 fully subsidized with a plan. I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine. Now it may sell very well or not. We have our strategy. We've got great Windows mobile devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q phone now for $99. It's a very capable machine. It'll do music. It'll do internet. It'll do email, it'll do instant messaging. So I kind of look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot. First of all, I had a Motorola Q and it was not as good as the iPhone. But also like the obviously the details here are different. What Apple just did is go down in price and what Apple just did is is make something available to many more people with a keyboard ironically. But the response feels the same which is to look at this and say, well, this isn't what business users want. It's like, well, you have officially missed the point here. And Microsoft has been missing this particular point for a very long time. The whole Windows ecosystem has been missing this point for a very long time. That by some mix of, I would call it tech debt and bad product management to be kind. These companies are either unable unwilling or both to actually properly make great products in this price range and happen for a long time. Antonio is working on this story, which I think will probably be live by the time most people hear this. And at one point, he was like, I don't blame PC manufacturers for not having a response to the Neo yet. And I was like, buddy, you have this backwards. Where is this 10 years ago? This has been, this thing has been sitting here for forever. You let Chromebooks eat it alive and then Google kind of forgot Chromebooks exist and Chrome books stopped getting better. That thing has been languishing for forever. And this has just been open PC space for a long time. And it's sort of wild that Apple was the one that managed to fill it like this. A company that generally had no interest in doing this kind of computer for a really long time. Just looked around and was like, oh, we that's not hard. They've got these leftover eye-photos. All right, let me play Devils Advocate. Yeah. Because I agree with everything you're saying. And I do think the PC makers are a little bit boxed in by just the pricing dynamics. Like they don't all make their own chips. Right. They'll also be holding to those chips. Intel being bad is part of the problem here. Yeah, right. But at every level, like Apple has to find the profit at the end of the process. Right. They're like, we put all the parts together and then we mark it up. Like Apple's profit margin, if you look at their results, like is like rock solid between 30 and 40%. That's what they do. Every quarter, that's how much profit they make. And they just back into it because they make most of the components. Right. And so when the price of RAM skyrockets, they can pay more to Samsung or whoever for RAM. And they can kind of like back it out and all the other stuff. If you're a PC maker, if you're an assistant or a Dell or whoever, you don't make anything. So every part in your computer, someone else has to make the profit to make their company run. And so that's actually the chip, which is like usually the most important part of the computer. So you're just start with, okay, we got to pay a margin to Intel that Apple doesn't have to pay. You just start behind the curve, like legitimately behind the curve. And then Apple, by so many chips from TSMC that they get massive discounts on their volume. Right. So you're just like all of a sudden, like you just start way, way behind in the race. And so I don't doubt that this is a very challenging thing to compete with. Just on the fundamentals of the fact that the PC competitors can't remove the margins from all the components and then mark it up at the end to solve the problem. That's fair. Right. But I'm just playing Devils Advocate. I just see that problem and I'm like, whatever. The real dynamic in the PC industry for more than the past 10 years now is that Apple decided it would own the high end. So if you just look at sales of laptops that cost more than $1,000, it is more likely than not that every one of those sales is an Apple laptop. Yeah. They just went and they're like, we're just going to compete on this price and up and we're going to win. And statistically, they've won. And Microsoft knew this. Like when Panos Penet ran surface, he was like, this is my problem. I cannot convince this industry to spend that money and R&D to compete there. So I'm going to do it. And then I will develop hinges and keyboards and track pads and we'll just give it away to the ecosystem so that their stuff is good and we can credibly compete at the high end because if we lose the high end, there's nothing left. Right. And that's what they all did for the longest time. And maybe there's like good high end PC laptop competition now. They made some good progress. There is there. There was been good stuff over the years. There's good. There's interesting ideas and that's it. Yes. - That's the whole bottom has languished. And all of it is like, do you want a 15 inch screen for $700? Here's whatever garbage that we can surround that screen with. And people are like, yeah, that's the thing we wanted. And I think Apple's showing up with the 13 inch screen at that price point. And like no one has an answer. But like I know why the PC market looks the way it looks. It's because Microsoft with Surface recognized that Apple was gonna run away with $1,000 in up. And it was not economically viable for any one company to solve that problem. Microsoft had to do it for its entire ecosystem. - Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the Surface Go over the last few days because that was Microsoft's biggest swing at this price point. And actually I went back and read Deeter reviewed the Surface Go in 2018 when it came out and gave it an eight and a half. Like this is a, there were things to like about it. But it was fundamentally it was a 10 inch computer. And there are a bunch of problems that come with making a 10 inch computer. And I think one of the things Apple understands and got right about this is that 13 inches is the right size for a laptop in so many ways. And especially at smaller sizes, Microsoft got really hung up on doing hybrids that just didn't quite pan out the same way. And I think if you just go back and redo the Surface Go process and they're like, okay, well, what if instead of trying to, sort of over-correct on the form factor here, we just make the cheapest Surface laptop we can and charge it at this price. I wonder what that computer would look like now. - It would look like Microsoft to claim war on its PC partners and never doing it. - This is the problem. - Right there, there always in between the big ports in the market with the Surface. - Right. - That's very true. You made a face when I said 13 inches. What's your problem with 13 inches? - Well, I didn't realize that I had recycled this, but I had a 12 inch MacBook, which was one of my very favorite computers. In fact, hilariously, I brought a heater. I bought it from Deeter. And I, I, here I screwed you on that one. (laughing) In a very Minnesota way, at one point, I was like, do I remember to pay you for this? And he was like, of course you did. And I don't know if that's true or not. So maybe I paid him for it, maybe. That was, it was like a very Minnesota. Like, yeah, you're fine, do I? But I just wanted to sing out of my hands. I was at ages ago. And I love that computer. I think I finally recycled it. But that computer was the perfect size. And when the Neo was announced, I was really sad they hadn't gone one tick smaller. And now that I have it, and we've had this conversation, I completely understand why they didn't. They made the most mainstream computer they could. And 13 inches is the most mainstream size. And that is the right answer to this question. - Yeah, I think that's right. And I will say, the, what the air is 13.6, right? I don't really appreciably notice the difference between the Neo screen and the air screen at this point. - Yep, 13.6. - I do notice the size of the thing. Like the air sort of wears itself a little later to me than the Neo does, even though they're technically the same weight. And the Neo's actually a little smaller in some dimensions. The Neo feels chunkier as a computer to me. What have you made of it so far? You've been using it. I have two grapes I would like to talk about. But I want to know what you've thought of the Neo so far. I think the Neo's a beautiful piece of hardware. And for all the reasons I've said, I think only Apple can really produce it. And I'm really happy that they got rid of Alan Dye because Mac OS Tahoe is a visual abomination. - Is this your first Tahoe experience? - I've used it like academically. - Okay. - Do you know what I mean? - Like at a removes. - Yeah, like I have a computer with Tahoe on it. And I like-- - You touch it through a piece of glass. - Yeah, like literally a piece of the-- (laughing) - Like my work computers, I just don't update them until I have to because I just can't take them down. Like this podcast machine, I don't even know what it's running. Like it just needs to work. And that's the thing it does. And then I thought liquid glass was bad. So I didn't update my main work computer over there. Again, I have another Mac that has it on there, but it's just sort of, it was to dink around. It's like what I put the updates on. This is the first time I've sat down and really used Tahoe with liquid glass. And every part of it is infuriating. And Apple should be embarrassed. And the number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is because I know that Apple has no choice but to fix liquid glass in Tahoe at WWDC. And then you should wait until they rev Mac OS 27 and they undo this ungodly abomination of an interface. It is so bad. Liquid glass on a phone is like fine. It's not great, and I don't love it, but it's fine because you know, a phone is inherently a single tasker. What they have done to delineate windows and the menu bar and items that you've selected on Mac OS with liquid glass is so bad. It goes against every principle of good design. It goes against every principle of just common sense. Like should two things that are different look different are the same, David. Obviously the same. What if you couldn't tell what's what at any time on your computer? What if my cell interface was just like a weird blurry mess? There are parts of Tahoe that are legitimately slow for no reason. When you open control center from the menu bar, first of all, when you look at the menu bar and the top right, every button does something different. So like you click the clock and the notification slide in from the side, you click control center and there's like a very slow fade animation and control center like bubbles in, which is exactly what you don't want for quick controls. Correct. Like it is basically like, oh, you just want to change the brightness. What if there was a Broadway show? Like you don't want that. You just want the brightness toggle to appear. But that's different than the slide in. And you keep going down and then another one's a drop down and then you get all the way to like the Wi-Fi icon and it's a standard drop down. And you keep going and you get to the regular menus and we click on those menus. They don't shade in dark enough for you to tell that you've selected a menu. I'm so glad you're finally doing this. This is actually so happy. I'm not even in the weeds of this interface. I'm going to raise the brightness and pick save from the file icon and all of this is stupid. Yeah. It is, I told you, I didn't want to go negative but I'm telling you the Neo was like, it first made me really happy and then it made me incredibly sad that this thing is, it's like a visual disaster. It got to the point where I did the only thing I can do when I'm so mad at an Apple interface. I just started texting Sean Krueh. (laughing) Who hates it as much as anything. I was like, I see what you're saying. And he was like, yeah, dude, it's bad. (laughing) He's like, if anything, I'm not going hard enough. - The menu bar is actually such a perfect example because it's translucent now but it is still a hard border. And those two things don't make any sense. So it's like, it looks like it should be interactive with everything but it's not. It's still a hard line. But just looking at the menu bar now, like I'm just gonna do this while I'm sitting here. Okay, so you click on the clock and it slides in from the right. You click on the control center and it bubbles in. It really is slow. I hadn't really even noticed it. - It's so slow. - It is like a song and dance routine to be like, I want to turn the volume up. - And of all things that should just appear, that's it. Then you do search and it opens up spotlight in the center of the screen. - In a mode. - Yeah, then you click on battery and it opens up a menu to the left. You will click on Wi-Fi and it opens up a menu to the right. - It's like, it's literally like every single one of these was designed by a different person and none of them ever spoke to each other. - It's just like, Apple is so good at this. Like historically, the thing that they're good at is looking at this and being like, make this make sense and they've just lost the plot here. - My favorite Tahoe thing forever though, is just if you want to understand the problem with Tahoe, take all of your apps and drag them to the same corner and then see if the top left corner is lined up. Spoiler alert, they don't. Apps are just, there's literally no rules anymore for what's going on with Tahoe. Tahoe is very bad. Look, the glass is very bad, but the Neo is still awesome. And I really like, we came out of last week being like, this thing is going to sell huge and I think it's actually gonna be bigger than I thought. I think this will replace the MacBook Air as the sort of default, I don't have any follow-up questions. What computer should you buy, computer for people? - Maybe, maybe. I think we have yet to see. I think it's hard to know at the very beginning. I think all the benchmarks suggest that that is true. All the sort of early reviews, our reviews suggest that's true. I think once people start using them at scale, we're gonna find out. - It's possible. - And the A-G Pro is so tested. Like that chip is mature and good and made it monstrous scale that I don't worry about, like battery life problems we don't know about. I don't know, I just, I have a hard time imagining what it would be that would be the glaring problem. - Of course you have a hard time imagining what it would be. It's so obvious what it would be. And you can't, it's like blocked out in your brain, like Westworld, it doesn't look, it's A-Gigs of Ram. - Oh God. - That's what it would be. It would be an A-G-Unpluged. - Can I tell you how unbelieveable you've indicated I am? We're gonna run a 12 minute super cut of everybody yelling at me for saying A-Gigs of Ram is fine. And then all those same people saying, oh, it only has A-Gigs of Ram, that's not a problem for normal everyday computer users. Yeah, fuckos. - We're gonna see, that's the only question Mark I have is once you, once a million of people buy this thing and they start using it for all kinds of stuff that nobody could possibly foresee, well A-Gigs of Ram swapping to this storage, will it be not a problem, which everyone assumes or will somewhere it's stuff up a lot? - And then, I would just point out once again, Alan dies last vindictive act was to voice this interface. on millions of unsuspecting consumers who just want to spend seven hour hours on a nice computer with touch ID. - They're just out here doing their best. - And I'm telling you, right now, Mark Zuckerberg, you got rolled because you have no taste. (laughing) If you saw this work and you're like, "That guy, "I know everything I need to know about you, man." - So fundamentally, the MacBook Neo is a referendum on Mark Zuckerberg's taste. - That's all I'm saying. - This works for me. That's all I'm saying. - The one other thing I should say before when we should move on from the Neo here is it is a bummer the thing doesn't have a backlight that's not in the keyboard. Particularly because they color match the keyboards. So on the indigo one here, it's actually a pretty dark keyboard, which like aesthetically looks really nice. But even sitting here in decent light, it is hard to see. It's dark text on a dark key. And I think Antonio had one of the lighter colors and said it was a little easier to see on the light keys, what you're typing in the dark. But on this, they're dark keys and a backlight would have been really nice. - And now that's interesting. - Here's what I'm hoping for. - You're not a car nerd, but I'm a huge car nerd. If you go into any car forums, all car forums are sort of dominated by people going on T-Moon, Alibaba, and putting in RGB ambient lights all over the cars. - And there's just a huge market for that for every car. This thing is so modular and so repairable. I'm just waiting for the weird Alibaba market of backlit keyboards for the Neo to show up. Like, it's got a cone. That's what we want. We want weird gamer keyboards to the MacBook Neo. If you're making one now send it to us, we will prominently feature it here on the ProJetSreal. - We do want that. That's absolutely correct. Before we get off of Apple stuff, we reviewed the iPhone 17 E this week. Allison did that. I reviewed the new iPad Air. I don't think we need to talk about either one of them because they are precisely exactly what you think. The 17 E is sort of fascinating because Allison, I think, made the correct point, which is that it's a very good phone. I think as Apple approaches its budget devices, that is the right way to do it. They put MagSafe back. Again, this is a much cleaner, correct set of trade-offs to get to a lower price. But the base iPhone 17 is the best to the base iPhone has been in a long time and the leap is $200. And I think for if your budget allows only the 17 E, awesome, it'll be very happy. But I think the case for moving up $200, especially given the economics of how people buy phones and the way that people use their phones and the primacy of phones in modern life, you should spend the $200 and get the better phone, if you can. It's 100% the flip of what we're saying with the Neo. I think if you perceive the Neo is like, this is a great companion laptop for people whose primary computer is a phone, you should absolutely spend less money in a laptop and more money on the phone. And, okay, 17 E and MacBook Air, or 17 and MacBook Neo. 17 and Neo, that's what I think is right. I think that's the real camera. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, unless there's some specific thing that you need that M5 chip for, which, you know, if you know what it is, you know, it is, go get it. But yeah, I think for most people having a slightly more capable phone is a much better trade off. Yeah, I think you're right. But the other one we need to talk about here is the Studio Display XDR, which you have not bought, but I am confident by the time we do this podcast next week we'll be in your house. The second it goes on non-corrupt sale for even $1, I'm buying this as well. What if I give them the dollar so that they can give you a dollar? What if you buy me? (laughing) I will accept you buying me. There we go. Perfect. All right, deal. John Higgins reviewed it for us. It seems to be the thing we hoped it was. Are you, are you as enthusiastic about this now? Having, we've tested it. We've seen it come out. Like, is it what you wanted? Yeah, it's absolutely what I mean, it's the first new display technology idea from Apple and quite a while. That's out of the MacBooks, right? But it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. It is very expensive. But what you're buying for that is basically a bunch of calibration settings. And so I think I'm curious to see if other display makers use similar panels or similar technologies without all of the added cost of doing all the calibrations and bring some of the core technology at a lower price, which is 100% true of the 5K panel that Apple is using in the regular studio display, which you can now buy on Amazon in a totally no name Chinese case for 500 dollars. Yeah. Right. And we're going to review that too, because I think it's really interesting to see how it's literally the same panel from a 20-inch wall. It's just been around, and now you can buy it and dump a bunch of different configurations. The XDR is a step forward. And so I'm, like I said, I'm going to, I just, again, I saw it at the event and I literally just looked at it in the store and I came this close to buying it because it looks great, like spectacularly great. And it is a step forward. I barely even need this thing because I do almost all my photo editing on my MacBook Pro, which has an, you know, in fact, like this, like it has the same kind of core technology in it. But you know what I keep saying, you stare at screens all day, you should spend the money and the best one you can because they last forever. And, you know, if I can convince myself that I'll have this display for 10 years, it's only three, you know, 320 dollars a year. (laughing) Take this a savings. (laughing) I mean, I will say there are very few technology devices. I would say it's even plausible to say, I'm going to buy this and keep this for a decade. I think the studio display XDR has a strong shot to last a decade on a actual desk. - Monitor screens are so slow forever. TVs and monitors just lay last forever. It is so hard to convince yourself to upgrade. So like I said, the second it goes on sale, for even a dollar, I'm going to buy this thing. (laughing) And not like a corrupt sale. - It also apparently has a better webcam, which is very exciting. - I put tape over those webcam. (laughing) No, thank you. My webcam, all my webcam's in the house are the real cameras of power buttons. - For privacy reasons or for camera quality reasons? - Both, yeah. - You get one with the other. And the idea that there's like a software defined webcam on my computer that someone could come get. - Yeah, this is where I am with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has tape on his laptop. You ever look at a picture of his laptop. He's just tape on that webcam and it's like, oh buddy. You're the guy who wants to put glasses and everybody's face is tape on his webcam. - I know. Yeah. I will say by the way, we keep getting emails from people volunteering to come to your house and take apart your iMac to turn it into a display for you. (laughing) I don't know what your precious ethics will allow on that front, but we have a series of volunteers who are willing to come do this for you at any point. - I think that's allowed. (laughing) - I think that's not, I mean, that's just like, that's just somebody doing their hobby. You know, like that's a good time. - Yes. - I got a big pile, a big part of my journalism career to fixing David Pogue's Xbox when he was the tech column of "The New York Times." - There you go. - This is how it starts people. Go to the Nealize House and fix his iMac. - We'll do my little village here in Westchester County does repair cafes. Maybe I'll just like hijack the repair cafes. I'm like, everyone bring their 5K iMacs. We're making monitors. - Just a parade of 5K iMacs down the street. - Yes. And then the senior citizens who are all there to get their ancient vacuum cleaners repaired will be very confused. - It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right, two more Apple rumors, and then we're gonna stop with Apple for a while. The first, for Mark Ruminid Bloomberg, is that the next set of Apple releases is going to be high-end stuff. Having now done some of the low-end stuff, it's gonna extend up even higher, potentially called ultra-but not necessarily called ultra. It sounds like the foldable iPhone fits into that about which we also have some rumors. But there's just a real movement up in the market here for Apple. And I think this is really interesting. There was also this news this week about Uber Elite, which is like newer cars, fancier rides, just catering to expensive people. And I think that's a trend that is coming in a really real way. Like we've talked about this before, that one of the great cool exciting things about technology is we all have the same iPhone, right? Like there is just the iPhone, no matter who you are, within a very small stratifications, the same technology is available to everybody. We may be headed for a period of that not being the case in a really mainstream way. - I would pay a thousand extra dollars from MacBook Neo that didn't have a good glass on it. I was putting that up in the universe right now. - That may become available to you, but I think that the like, until now it's been, you know, new technology that hasn't quite come down and called like foldable phones are still really expensive, right? But that's not, nobody would call that sort of a mainstream thing yet. And when they become mainstream, everybody sort of assumed the price will come back down. Maybe we're just headed to a point where there is going to be a true luxury class of mainstream technology for a while, which I think is really interesting. And I don't know quite how to feel about it. - I mean, pricing products is kind of like an art in a science and I think what you're seeing is there are some people, I mean, you're just seeing income inequality. That's what you're describing. - Yeah, essentially. - And so some people just don't care about $1,000 of price difference and they'll just spend it. And some people really care about $100 of price difference. And you can hear these companies are just headed, their products are headed in two different directions. - Yeah. - And I think the fold, I think the fold, being the ultra product, it's hyper expensive sort of makes sense. Like you want to price your way into early adopters, you want to price your way into someone who, if they feel like the product is bad and they got cheated, isn't so mad. - Right. - They're just gonna buy another phone and move on with their lives. And I think the rest of the ultra products, you gotta make a case for something beyond, it's the fastest chip. - Sure. And I think once you get away from like Pro, is the designation, which means nothing in Apple World anymore. - Right. and you go to ultra, like you have to make some case for it. It can't just be like it's wrapped in the finest of leathers. Like something else has to happen there. - Right, what's it gonna say? You get like the Hermes version is what Apple has traditionally done. - Yeah, so we'll see. And it's gonna need a new move. - But I can see why you would introduce ultra with the fold. To say this is the best possible thing or the most expensive possible thing. And you're not just getting, okay, so expensive most people can afford it. You're getting, also we don't really know it's gonna work. And I think the rumors are on the fold are like, we don't really know it's gonna work. - Yeah, so the rumor right now, the rumor that came out this week is the outer display of the iPhone fold will be about the size of a small iPhone, which seems like a victory. And then it'll open up the wide aspect ratio will have side by side apps. This appears to be like an exciting new thing that Apple will tell you it is invented. But it's not gonna have the full sort of suite of iPad multitasking stuff. It won't run iPad apps, but it will let you do more stuff. There's, I have a lot of questions. But the biggest thing that is here that I think really sucks is that apparently Apple is going to ditch Face ID for touch ID in order to accommodate the thinner display so that it can have them fold. I think this is a bad idea and Apple should stop it. Face ID is so much better than touch ID. That going back, this happens to me all the time. I use Face ID on an iPad Pro, just like in my day to day life. And then I get the new iPad Air every year to review it. And it has touch ID. And the amount of time you spend on a device that sort of moves in aspect ratio like that, figuring out where to put your finger and how it's awful. And getting going back to that after having your face just sort of make your phone feel like it's unlocked sucks. And it will make this supposedly very premium thing feel annoying. To a lot of users. I'm curious if that rumor is real. I mean, that's the rumor. But if they do it, they're going to do it the same way as the iPad. Right? They'll put it in the power button or the sleep wake button on the side. Yep. Which is maybe not the worst thing on a phone because you got to hold the phone. Yeah, but you're holding what amounts to a double-sided phone and trying to reach. Yeah, like it's just that's that bad. No, don't do that. Yeah, I don't want that. And what if the power button moves depending on how you open it? Where is it going to be on that like there's just a lot of questions. Yeah, and I think not knowing where to tap the thing to unlock my phone is bad. I will say I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro and having both is awesome. It has both the under screen thumb, print reader and face ID or whatever face unlock, whatever they call it. That combination is awesome because. Oh, what if they go with an under screen one? That would be fine. That would be fine. I could live with that. But the fail gracefully from face ID when it works to touch ID when you're wearing sunglasses to pass code if we can't forget how to do it otherwise is exactly the correct graceful scale down. Just starting with touch ID, every time I get on an iPad it annoys me all over again. I mean, we'll see. I have many more questions about this than face ID. I mean, if the grand failure of the iPad is that you won't just let it run Mac apps, the grand failure of the fold is you won't just let it run iPad apps. Yeah, there's a line in Emma's story that she wrote about it. Emma Rothen and team wrote about this. This is again from Mark Garmin of Bloomberg. And Emma writes, "Still, Apple is reportedly trying to take advantage of the phone's larger screen real estate by updating its core apps with a sidebar on the left side of the screen." Like, "Oh, a sidebar!" Look at us. That's what my $1,000 is for. You know, the problem is all these projects started 500 years ago. I know. Again, you know, under one Alan Dye. I want to say, guys. Yeah. Like, again, I think liquid glass on a phone is like, it's fine because you. There's just not a lot of ways to get tripped up when you're just looking at one app at a time. The second you have to at a time, the second in multiple windows and menus, which is what you're going to buy with an iPhone fold. It is nice knowing that whatever augmented reality device meta comes out with will be a disaster. [laughs] Like, do you remember there was that period about four or five years after Steve Jobs died, where there was a lot of coverage around like, you know, this was the first one that Steve Jobs was not person. I wonder if we're going to get the reverse with Alan Dye, where it's like, thank God this is. We are absolutely going to get the reverse. This is finally the last one Alan Dye touched before he left Apple. Apple doesn't leak as a company and I guarantee you the people in Apple are going to leak. Like, the stain is gone. Yeah, we finally took all the code out of this one. [laughs] Yeah, agree. All right, we need to take a break. We have a bunch more gadgets to talk about, including some Xbox, somewhere between hints and news, but lots to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from one password. It's easy to assume that being small means flying under the radar. But the reality is that small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors. Cybercriminals know that leading teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. One password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure. They provide turnkey solutions that can be rolled out in hours, whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. One password is designed to meet small teams where they are. But it's also built to grow with your company. However complex your security needs may get, one password will stay with you every step of the way. 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If you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where they stand apart from other advice. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue. Also, you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads boast one of the highest B2B return-on-adspend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. So get your ads in front of the right people and make your B2B strategy work. You can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/vergecast. That's LinkedIn.com/vergecast, terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. So it's GDC this week, Game of the Lever's Conference, J-Peters and Sean Haust are there on our team, covering a bunch of stuff. And I would say, did you guys talk about Project Helix on the show last week while I was out? Not really. Okay. So Project Helix is this thing we've heard in clings about. Obviously, there's been this huge shake-up inside of the Xbox team. Asha Sharma is now running all things Xbox inside of Microsoft. And hinted is maybe not strong enough, just sort of set out loud, that the next Xbox is Project Helix and that it's going to play PC games. And this is a thing we've been hearing about forever. This is kind of the obvious convergence coming between the Xbox and Windows and kind of all of the things Microsoft is trying to do into a platform strategy that makes a lot more sense. We got a few more details on it this week and I would say more evidence that is tangential to the existence of Helix, but suggests that it is going to be the exact thing that we thought. Microsoft is telling developers that if you want to build next-gen Xbox games, that you should build PC games, which is sort of fascinating. Yeah. This just, this shift feels like it's happening, right? Like there is whatever Xbox is going to be, it really looks an awful lot like a Windows computer. Yeah. I mean, they've announced Xbox Mode is coming to Windows 11 PCs. And they're finally calling it Xbox Mode, which thank God, instead of Xbox full-screen experience. Here's some questions I have about all this. One, you know, the rumors were that Phil Spencer had always been going to retire and this was part of the plan and he was stepping down and that, you know, Sarah Bond who was a president of Xbox was really running Xbox while Phil dealt with integrating Activision or whatever. Whatever big set of dumb issues that he bought when he bought Activision. And then, you know, Tom reported this out that Phil and Sarah had really alienated a lot of people with this as an Xbox campaign and like trying to make Xbox everything but the console and that Asha Sharma would come in and she's like, I don't know anything about Xbox. I'm just going to listen to everyone, which is what, you know, what this is what you do as a new executive. Yeah. And then it's like, this is the exact same plan, you guys. This is the same plan. Like maybe the advertising campaign has gone away. But the idea that we're going to put all the focus on the console, you're just announcing that you're going to build appliance like Windows gaming PCs. And that's the future of your console, which was the plan. It was just 100% the plan. Like what about the plan was so bad that Phil Spencer's long awaited retirement just happened suddenly on a rush. And his hand picked number two was supposed to stick over, didn't get the job. And a lot of people, a lot of theories about like, you know, who's who's taken shots at Sarah, but like the truth is she didn't get the job. Yeah. That's just something that happened. She didn't get the job. So like what about this plan is different than the plan that got one person sort of shoved aside and another person out the door entirely to get the job. Like I can't tell you the answer to that question right now based on what we know. It's a good question. And I think none of this is to say by the way that this is not necessarily the right plan. I think there is still a strong argument to be made that betting on PC games is a smart move for Microsoft in a variety of ways, right? Like we just talked about all the reasons that Apple is kind of eating the PC market from all directions. One thing Apple doesn't sell is gaming PCs. Apple would love you to buy a MacBook Pro and play games on it. It's Apple wants nothing more than for you to play games on your mouth. They don't want that. They want to do. They want to demo one five year old Assassin's Creed game twice a year and be like, we're good at video games. And that's the end of that. No, all they want to do is be like metal and developers like, I don't care about this at all. Please leave me alone. Well, they care about it when they're doing weird free to play loot boxes on the iPhone. Yeah, agreed. But gaming is a huge business. Gaming PCs are a huge business. This is a thing. Windows does really well. There's an Azure play here. There's an Xbox play here. Like it is actually a really interesting bit of sort of perfect corporate synergy to just care a lot about PC games if you're Microsoft. But you're right that that has been the case for a very long time. And it is not super clear what has changed. Right. Something happened where Phil Spencer, who architected this plan, got pushed up the door in a rush. And that's a retirement that was quote long plan. But like, it wasn't like some big celebration of Phil Spencer. It was like, see a fill. And his handpick successor did not get the job. And there was just a lot of reporting about all the problems there. People have a lot of feelings about the cheating at the job. And then there's a new person who's like, we're going to come, we're going to make the Xbox great again. Right. Like, and then there's this. And I just can't tell you what's different. I'm trying. I'm looking at this and be like, okay, like, is it just that this train was on the tracks? And he looks won't even be a thing until next year. Right. They said it won't even be out in alpha until next year. So there's a lot of times, there's a lot of time for a lot of things to change. Yep. But the idea that the Xbox is just an extension of Windows is that's been the plan. There's not another plan. I do wonder if the this is an Xbox debacle is a piece of all of this because there's so much done inside of the Xbox team that has just muddied that thing that you just explained, right? Where like, there's Xbox play anywhere. And there's Xbox cloud gaming. And there's the, this is an Xbox me. And I think it has looked a lot like Microsoft has lost the plot, even if it hasn't lost the plot. Do you know what I mean that there's a real focus function here that is just saying, what if what if this is what they're trying to do? If the Xbox is job is to be the like class leading way to play PC games. And then you can also buy a gaming PC. You can also buy a handheld that's going to run Windows. All the software is the same. You can build one game that will work all across these things. And Microsoft can say, oh, you want a thing that is just Xbox mode all the time to put in your living room by this. Do you want a gaming PC? Buy this. Do you want a handheld? Buy this. All your games will work everywhere. That's not that different if you squint from what they've been trying to do all along, except that the way that they've put it together and the way that they've packaged it and the way that they've marketed it and talk about it has been insane. And so it's just like, what if you took this plan and took out all the parts that seemed like nonsense, but kind of kept the plan the same? Maybe that's what Helix is. And it was Jason Ronald was who is the VP of next generation at Microsoft was an unbelievable job title. Was talking about project Helix and he said it's going to have a custom AMD chip and he said it's going to have quote, an order of magnitude increase in ray tracing performance up to and including path tracing. Terrific. Right. Like what if this thing is just a super optimized super simple Xbox mode only kick ass gaming PC? Do you know how much easier that is to explain than what the hell has the Xbox Ben for the last 10 years? Well, so I have two thoughts with this. One, I'm convinced Microsoft's inability to convince Apple to let them do game streaming is what just like pull this whole thing apart. That's possible. This is the rug pull. This is what you retrench to when you couldn't make game streaming work. Right. If they had been able to do game streaming and leverage Azure and just be like, your phone is an Xbox now. Maybe all this is very different and there's lots of arguments about this. Maybe it was never going to work, but they were never able to just ship an Xbox game streaming app on iOS and be like, here's Xbox. It's happening with the power of Azure. Your phone is not Xbox. There are a bunch of people listening to and watching this who are yelling about latency and controller lag and all of that is true, but the other truth is that Microsoft never really got to try. Yeah, they never got to try. We just kind of don't know. There's a lot of weird ways they try. They try to do the browser, all this stuff. But like, I think that was their plan and they just couldn't do it. So then they ended up back at while it's Windows or whatever nonsense. And then there are other problems. This is my other big thought is their problem is Windows. Fundamentally, their problem is Windows. This thing that they're joking up with bad AI ideas at every turn that fundamentally, and this is like, I'll connect it to the Neo. The great power of the Neo is like, even if you think the chip is underpowered, almost all the apps you want to run are web apps and the browser. So you're fine. Yeah. And it totally I've heard from a bunch of people over the last week who are very excited to buy a Neo explicitly because it doesn't have any co-pilot nonsense all over it. This is like, these are your choices right now. And like, you're just stuck here. By the way, we are going to cover Linux on the desktop here at the version 2026. This is the year we're just going to manifest this is the year of Linux on the desktop. And one of the reasons I'm saying that is, you know, our own reporter, Sean and Tom and everyone else keep saying it is better to play Windows games on Linux right now. This is a huge problem. This is just a problem across the board. So like, maybe this is the plan and it's all going to work and you're going to make an ultra optimized Windows PC that runs Xbox mode all the time. But it feels like what you're going to do then is get you're going to strip out all of Windows. So then you're just you're kind of just making a console again. And maybe the goal is the games can play anywhere. You can download the games on Xbox mode on your gaming PC. But those people are still going to be like, well, I'm running this dumb co-pilot Windows and I hate it. Well, yeah, I mean, I that's why I think Xbox mode ends up being really interesting and really important here. Because if you can make a thing that is sort of Windows at the bottom and Xbox on top, you might have something that can solve a bunch of problems all at once, right? You don't have to rearchitect everything across platforms. You can build games that run everywhere, but you can have something that either when you want it to or all the time, doesn't look anything like Windows and doesn't look anything like Windows is such a feature of so many of these devices like Sean keeps reviewing these handhelds and every time you press two buttons, you end up in a Windows setting menu and it's awful. And so like there's just if they can actually fix the layer on top with Xbox, but still have it with Windows underneath, that could work. That is just nothing about the history of either the full screen experience which has been out for a minute or Microsoft as a company suggests that that's the case. But I think Xbox mode in theory, I think at least helps solve some of that problem, which is why I'm very curious to see how it pans out over the next little while. Yeah, this whole situation is just if you know what's different, you tell us, but it does seem like something was going awry and some plan was deemed not good enough, which led to massive executive turnover in Xbox and a new CEO of Xbox whose first public comments were we're going to bring Xbox back to what makes Xbox great and I'm just going to do a bunch of listening because I don't know anything about video games. And then here's the same plan. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's there's no shot. Helix didn't exist before. Right. Tom has been reporting on Helix for months. Yeah, exactly. So why now why announce the next step of the plan that you thought was bad if you thought the plan was I just don't know the answer. Do you think the plan is good? I mean, just the very basic idea of merging PC games and Xbox games into one effectively one thing to develop for developers and one thing to buy for gamers and treating the Xbox as some spin off of a gaming PC rather than like a whole different gaming system. Do you think that's a good idea or a bad idea? I think Microsoft should sell Xbox. and they should give up on being a consumer company. They're not good at it. I think the only reason they still have Xbox is because it is the one thing Microsoft does that truly resonates with people under the age of 500. Yeah, it's the one thing that every Microsoft someplace kids think is cool. Well, they have Minecraft, like, counts or something. But that's all part of Xbox gaming or Microsoft gaming. They should just let that thing go. I mean, they can't now. They're in a way too deep now. Yeah, the biggest acquisition in their history. Yeah, I don't know. There's just a bunch of mistakes that they made. I think they did all that stuff because they understood that mobile was important and the next generation of gamers would come up on phones and they needed to be in that business. And I'm telling you where someone will write it. Hopefully it's us. The moment that Apple did not let them do game streaming, everything went off the rails. Hmm. And I just feel like you should acknowledge that. And maybe it's time to like Microsoft in its heart wants to be an enterprise company. That's the thing that they are. That's a thing Nadella has made them. He's done an incredible job training that company around. And if you recall, the first thing you did was he got rid of Nokia. And so we're just we're done with this. Yeah, Nokia was a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. Like a lot, a lot, a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. That's true. I just I don't. The idea that you can evaluate this is like, is this the right strategy for Microsoft? It's like, dude, it's been a decade. They've been chasing the dragon for a decade. Like to have maybe just let the games company be a games company and live its own life without either having to be like, this is the thing that will make Windows PCs cool. Or this is a thing that will spike Azure usage. You know what the thing that spikes Azure researchers. Right. Every single day, open AI to something stupid. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. I mean, you do wonder the two things that are really interesting. Sort of the historical sliding doors moments here are that moment. Years ago, when everybody looked at Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and said, okay, this kind of live service game is actually the future of everything. And we can build tons of them. And maybe there will be lots of them. And do you know the ones that keep winning? It's Fortnite, it's Roblox and it's Minecraft. And so many dollars and so many jobs have been lost trying to unseat those three things. That I think there was just a sense of this is going to be a big, huge, giant teaming industry. And it's still just pretty much the three damn games. Oh, yeah. Basically, everyone got drunk on COVID. Like, I don't know how to explain this. Everyone wants to help and spend all their money in their laptop. And every single tech company was like, oh, we're all brains and vats now. We're going to be brains and vats stuff. No one's ever going outside again. No, it's ever going outside again. And we just need to find a way to collect the money that people like that are waving at their laptop every day because that's where all the money is and that's where all the time is. And that's how you got cryptocurrency. Yeah. Straight forwardly. Like, what if we gamble with fake computer money? Like, great. And we're going to get a lot of production markets in a big way. It's where you got huge over hiring and tech companies, which we're not undoing by calling them AI layoffs like down the line and you get all the way to live service games. And like Fortnite is a metaverse. That's where you got the metaverse like Mark Zuckerberg being literally like, I will put your brain in a van. I will ship a vet to your house tomorrow. You just got so upside down because everyone's at home and then people left their house. And live service games have the same network effect problems as any new social network. Right. Like, remember peach? I do remember peach. Did I eat else? Yeah. The railroad. Whatever else. Yo. Like, they're all the same. It's like, no, here I am. No one else is here. I'm out. All my friends are showing Fortnite. Yep. Well, that, yeah. So that's the one piece. And then the other piece is the AI thing, right? Where it's, I think, right as this sense of, okay, gaming is this gigantic industry. It's where people spend a ton of money. How can we tap into that and change it? It was like, do you remember all those conversations were happening where everybody's like, oh, we pay all attention to Hollywood, but gaming is this many multiples bigger as an industry. And that's where young people are going. And gaming is the future of everything. Right as all of these companies were like, oh, we should invest deeply into this like smash cut to AI just takes over the end. And I think it's just an interesting. If that, I think probably wrong idea about gaming being the future of everything had gotten another couple of years of runway before AI had come in and just completely taken over the conversation. Who knows how many more bad investments Microsoft would have talked to. Who knows how much more NFT conversation we would have had. Actually, do you know my favorite like we all, like the world we got drunk on like COVID confusion is my plug for version history. It was Clubhouse, right? The chat app where DCs would be like, what if I said racist stuff and an ephemeral talk space? Like, we ran those stories. That's your next episode of version history. Yeah. Coming out this Sunday, it was me and Ashley Carmen from Bloomberg and Casey Newton from platformer, both of the. Who both works at the verge, both worked at the verge, both covered Clubhouse. We had we had ourselves a time talking about Clubhouse. But yeah, it is all of that stuff is is wrapped up together. There was this sense at one time that the way everybody was going to do everything was going to be different and was going to look like video games. And that was not correct. And so you can see how Microsoft looks at video games at one point and is like, this is actually more adjacent to what we're good at than we realized. And I think that was not correct. Like, I recognize we started by talking about GDC and project helix and whether or not Windows is a good platform for video games on. I'm just ending this segment by saying you can evaluate a lot of ideas the tech industry has right now by asking yourself, does this only work if we're all brains and vats? And the answer is often yes, like the answer is this would go a lot better if you were a brain in a vat and all you could do was use the interfaces provided to you by handful of giant tech companies. They'd be psyched. And whatever Alan dies cooking up at meta. All right. That's enough of that. We, what game are you playing right now? Are you still mad? It's mad no day. It's just mad no day. So now the season's over. You don't have to take the injuries from the auto updates on the roster. Packers are sick if no one's hurt. I'm killing it. I'm thrilled for you. This is great. All right. We should take one more break. Remember getting back. We got some lightning around. So we'll be right back. You know, they said this about a lot of things. Go with the president. You can do some of this shit. I'm doing. That's probably true. President Trump continues to give mixed messages about the war in Iran. Mr. President, you've said the war is quote, very complete, but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it and how long should Americans be able to get here? Well, I think it could say it both. Our clear is what's happening to the US and global economies as a result of this conflict. Markets falling like liberation day, the sequel oil prices up like we haven't seen in years. That means gas prices up. That means other prices will go up. Trump's supposed to be focusing on affordability. His party has a midterm election to try to win. He talked to Republican lawmakers yesterday. So our message is simple. Democrats created the high prices and our policies are totally ending them. And they they're ended and we're doing better. We're even bringing them down further. Self-evidently untrue will the economic fallout of the war in Iran catch up with Trump. Today explain, drops every weekday. For a brief period of time, in the beginning of the pandemic, a time that I'm very sorry to make you have to remember, there was this hot new act that promised to reinvent the way that we thought about social media forever. Clubhouse was going to be the thing. This week on version history, our chat show about the most interesting and important and best and worst products in tech history. We're talking about why Clubhouse took off and then ultimately why it went away. That's on version history available on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause for flavor. Neil, are we doing this? Is it? Okay. It is time. Once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, I missed it last week. I missed it terribly. I'm so thrilled to be back. I wore my bread and cards of dummy t-shirt out in the world, kind of by accident without realizing I had it on. Several questions. What's the car of the dummy? It's customary. I would say there's a little spoon vibe in there. Yeah. Yeah, and a little postal service. Yes. Not quite enough reverb for the postal service, but we're headed in that direction. No, no, Jenny Lewis. Can you get Jenny Lewis to just actually come and be my girlfriend? That was out of choice. Jenny, for listening, and I know that you are. If you could go to Neili's house and fix his iMac, everything Neili will retire from journal. I somehow in the segment where I just rail against an unelected power hundred year crack, I admit to the verga's audience that I've had a crush on Jenny Lewis and so I was like a teacher. We are. Let's be honest with each other. That was a good one. Last week we didn't run on it because we were getting too much AI slop. That was handmade and I appreciate it. Our listener who sent this in goes by the Northeast Valley and I hope that's I hope that's your artist name because that's very cool. Thank you for sending that in. That is very good. All right. What do we have, Neon? David, you live in DC where wearing a Brennan cars dummy T-shirt out in the world might provoke some real reactions. Yeah. Didn't you get any real reactions? I got a couple of. who is Brendan Carr, which feels like a pretty good, he made me think of the like, who's that clown is the sickest man because it implies not just that you're a clown, but you're not even one of the better known clowns. Made me think of that, I enjoyed that very much. And then I got one person who saw the back, which says America's favorite podcast and then a podcast. Who was like, "Oh, do you have a podcast?" And I just sort of ran away. (laughing) - Tina Nguyen, who's our DC reporter, was at an event in, you know, that's like supposed to be very polite, room full of powerful DC people and people whispered to her that they very much enjoy the segment. So shout out to the people with spring to Tina. I know we have listeners out there. I know you're listening, Brendan. All right, I got to you this week for you. And one's just to toss up to you for the thing that you are doomed to do every week on this podcast. So the first one, I think this is very, this is like emblematic of Brendan and how he has no thoughts or opinions or feelings of his own 'cause he's such a dummy. And so like his programming misfired this week. So usually Brendan, who is totally captured by the telecom industry and is just desire to speak speech police, usually when it comes to picking between consumers getting better, faster, cheaper internet and the needs and wants of 18T and Verizon and whoever else, he will pick the telecom companies. - Yes. - Right? Like Brendan is like, we shouldn't put labels on your internet service that tells you what all the fees are. 'Cause that's too much work for your cable company, ISP guys to figure out. So we're taking those away. This is a real thing Brendan is on that we discussed in the second. So this is like, you know, his core programming. Don't protect consumers, protect the telecom companies. In any dispute between telecom companies and consumers, you're gonna pick Brendan's gonna pick the telecom companies. What happens David when the telecom companies fight? And you're the government regulator in charge of the telecom companies? - You say now now children. I love you both equally. Brendan does not realize that his job is to be the neutral arbitrar of these disputes and be the regulator because he's so captured by interests all the time, right? He's just a fundamentally corrupt idiot. - Right. - So this week, Amazon filed a petition responding to SpaceX applying for permission to launch 1 million satellites. So SpaceX applies for permission to launch a million satellites to do data centers in space. Why doesn't the verge do more stuff like that? Can we just apply for permission to look, we don't have to launch a million satellites. Let's just see if they'll let us. - You can feel any way you want about Elon Musk saying I will launch a million satellites to put his data center in space. Whatever they do it, this is one party asking the FCC for permission. - Uh-huh. - And Amazon files a petition response saying, and I wanna quote the petition, this seems to describe a lofty ambition rather than a real plan. Timing is likewise uncertain, deploying a million satellite constellation would take centuries, even assuming the availability of all global launch capacity to do so. And the argument is if you give SpaceX permission to do this, you're gonna cut down on the permission you give other people to do other things. - Sure. - And Amazon is of course very well positioned to say these things because they have their own satellite constellation they wanna launch. They have the money and the resources at the time and the Jeff Bezos to spend the money on lawyers and fight to fight against Elon Musk. This is what you want. Like in our system, you want the two parties who are positioned to fight to a policy outcome to do this. This is why you set up a system of having petitions to protest requests. - This is a good fight that you have. - This is the system working. We ask for permission to do this. Does anyone have any objections? Amazon is like we have an objection. Brandon is a little brain misfires 'cause there's no poor little consumer paying their $80 on the Verizon bill to screw over here. There's no comedian to muzzle with his censorship. There's just two feudal lords battling for his goodwill. So instead of staying out of it and saying, this is the process, we will let the FCC's lawyers and technical experts evaluate the request for permission, evaluate the objections and come to ruling. Brandon, what is Brandon doing? He's posting on X which is owned by Elon Musk and he says the following. Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1000 satellites short at it, meaning it's upcoming deployment milestones rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit. - You know, there's just a kind of post on X that you know they hit the post button and we're just like, oh, nailed it. And you're like, you didn't, you didn't nail it. - You didn't nail it. He picked a winner. The process is you ask for a permission. You file petitions saying I support or oppose this thing and then you evaluate it. You're running a little administrative court and that is supposed to look fair. You're not supposed to be the head of the agency before the process has even begun to play out saying, you suck, I pick Elon and Brandon because he didn't have a consumer to screw over but he has to do something corrupted every turn or violate his weird programming did something corrupt. I'm telling you this is dumb. You can feel however you want about Elon saying he wants to put a million satellites in orbit to build a data center in space. Sure. You can feel however you want about Amazon saying actually this is stupid and we wanna put a bunch of, we wanna launch our own constellation and jump up the skies and lead inevitably to Kessler Syndrome. Whatever feelings you want, all of that is maybe it is a bad use of Amazon's resources to be doing this and they should just pay all the drivers more. You can feel anyway you want about all these things. The thing that I know that you should react to is the head of the agency picking aside before the process has begun to play out. That is just naked corruption. Yeah. And saying don't send me petitions says guy whose job it is to receive petitions. Like, yeah, what are we doing here? Yeah. So I tear a point about he thought the tweet was a banger and it's not. It's very funny that Brendan who oversees our nation's telecommunications provider think that it's a clear black and white trade off for Amazon between filing petitions and launching satellites. (laughs) (laughs) There's only one employee at Amazon who knows how to do both things. Like I don't know man, I feel like the lawyer is getting files with the petitions they want and if they stop it won't affect the satellite launch plans. Maybe the lawyer is also launched the rockets. Yeah, Amazon's a wild place. Yeah, like Amazon's like, "Clawed, launched the rocket." (laughs) What do you think is happening? God. And maybe you think they're being anti-competitive and they're just trying to buy time to launch more of their Leo, whatever. Like, fine. But again, this is just nakedly cropped by Brendan. This by the way ties into the second thing Brendan did. Not this past week, but the week before, and I'm sorry David, this is where you come in. You're gonna make me talk about David Ellison, right? I'm gonna make you talk about Warner Bros. Paramount. So Warner, you know, they decided they'd go with Paramount. Paramount, they actually had a meeting this week, which I'm confident you will talk about in a second here where David Ellison met all the Warner people. But Brendan, who raised a lot of concerns about Netflix buying Warner, said to CNBC that he expected the Paramount bid for Warner to be approved pretty quickly because it's cleaner. Quote, cleaner. Again, just why even pretend there is process. At this point, it's just, they picked a winner. They picked a winner. The David Ellison said he was gonna screw CNN and Brendan Carr was like, great, I don't have any more concerns. And the idea that we have a neutral regulator is completely out the window because Brendan is a corrupt dummy. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show and answer these allegations directly. I will make them to your face at any time. Apparently on the streets of DC, we can go at it. My Brendan Carr is a dummy t-shirt. He's raising a lot of questions. I give you a t-shirt Brendan. The normal listeners made for us. It's a great t-shirt. I only have one because it's a precious fan-made object. But Brendan, I will give you my Brendan Carr is a dummy t-shirt. You can have it if you face me in the Thunderdum with this podcast. A shirtless knee lie against a Brendan Carr is a dummy wearing Brendan Carr. That would do numbers on TikTok. Look, I'm not saying anybody wants to see me without a shirt. I know for a fact, people want to see me without a shirt on more than once. You'd run a car without a shirt on. Anyway, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy America's favorite podcast of the time. It's very good. That does lead right to my first lightning round item, which is this meeting that happened between David Ellison and David Zazlov. The David's, as I call it, it's been a tough time for David's. We're not being represented super well at this moment. It does seem like at any moment you could take over Warner Brothers. Yeah, I mean, the likelihood of you getting to run Warner Brothers is statistically higher than that. It's that's true. But it also seems like David Ellison is just sort of running through the David's now. So like David Ellison might host this podcast at some point. I don't know. He's not gonna do that as well. That's up to great. I happily turn it over to him as long as he wears the shirt. But so anyway, so David Zazlov went to the Warner Brothers lot, I think, to have this big meeting with the executive team of Warner Brothers. This is apparently a sort of normal tradition that they do. Went and he talked about it talking through, you know, that he expects to make 30 films a year, which would be a big number not seen in decades for a single studio. He said really nice things about HBO, which is really funny because out the other side of his mouth, he's talking about how he intends to turn HBO Max into Paramount Plus. That at the end of all of this, there's only going to be one streaming service. I assume that streaming service is Paramount Plus. Sure, whatever. There are a lot of questions about who Casey Blois who runs HBO, Will or won't report to you within this new structure. Like the HBO side of all of this, I think is going to be very messy and very fascinating. - And very bad. - And very bad. And probably it is not going to lead to the next season of things being very good would be my guess. But all of that is to say, then David Ellison takes a bunch of questions. One of the things he said to your point, he acknowledged that the process with Netflix, all of this stuff had been, he called it, quote, a turbulent process. But then he said, and I quote, that part is behind us, which is either flatly not true or evidence of the true level of corruption happening here, right? Because frankly, the fact that Brennan is saying that is kind of just saying the quiet part out loud that everyone has assumed, which is that there is basically a handshake deal with the Trump administration, that this will work in his fine. And that there will be no process, there will be no meaningful review, that this will all just get waved through because everybody agrees politically. And that is the assumption being made by a lot of people who are critical of this deal. And there is just increasingly loud evidence that that is what is going on. - And the thing, the specific thing is not whether or not James Gunn is going to make Superman ever more woke. It is CNN. - Yes. - The specific thing that is at play here is whether or not CNN can be more biased in favor of the Trump administration. Which will be harder and harder to do is the Trump administration gets more and more confused about why we are at war. Like you just can't, you can't, you can't have CNN all day being like, it's pretty good war, right? - Even telling people why it's a good war gets more and more complicated every day as the Trump administration forgets why they're doing it. - It's not going great. - Yeah. - Whatever you think of like, should you let Zack Snyder make a 4-3 grayscale justice league, which again was AT&T's idea, or should Batman be super woke? I don't know. Maybe that's good about, I don't know. Like make the art and let people decide. Like that's how you should do it. I don't think that's what the Trump administration cares about. I don't think they care about Ellison's promise to make 30 movies a year in theaters, which seems impossible to do. - It does. - I will say David Ellison is like a guy who has been making movies. So to the extent that he is like an actual person with some track record in Hollywood, did he do it all with his dad's money? Like yeah, sure, but he has been in this game for a while. But the thing that really bums me out the most is-- - But I'm just saying, even if, like, you can decide that you believe David Ellison, that he's gonna put up dad's money, oracle money to make 30 movies a year and put them in theaters. And maybe that's a good economic decision or a bad one. Maybe there's enough demand for 30 theatrical releases a year. - I would say there's almost no evidence that there is demand for that. - Who knows, man? - Yeah. - Like, whatever, you can evaluate that. That is not what the Trump administration cares about. - No. - What they care about is CNN. And David Ellison has promised Trump that it's been reported. He promised sweeping changes at CNN. - Yep. He did say in this event that it would remain editorial independent, which I would say is also what he has said about CBS News, and that is, do with that what you would like. We have all watched what has happened to CBS News. But the other thing was that he was asked about layoffs at Warner Bros. Discovery. A thing that you like to say that is true is that the only thing that always happens because of a murder is layoffs. It's the one and only guarantee. And he did the thing that they always do, which is essentially promised that that's not gonna be what happens. He's been saying that they see upwards of $6 billion in cost savings and synergies. And he said in the meeting that this is from variety. Most of the cost synergies would not come from layoffs. And I can just tell you with no inside evidence that that's a lie. It's just that there is no way that is not the case. That is where those savings come from. Maybe they're gonna sell one of the lots. That's the thing that's been talked about a lot, right? This is very valuable real estate in LA. That's not where he gets $6 billion. You get $6 billion by firing a bunch of people who have the same job at two different companies. That is what is coming. - Yeah, no without questions what is coming. Actually, I can add a tiny little bit of reporting to this. - Please. - So you and I have spent years covering all of these platforms like the streaming platforms that they're user interfaces and the people who build them, we know a lot of the people who have built a lot of these platforms. And so I know some of the people who built Paramount Plus. And I know some of the people who have built HBO Max. And the platforms that Warner has been using. - HBO Max is like a particular disaster, right? It started as HBO Go and HBO Max. They had two different things. They'd merge them and they'd bring in Discovery. And all of these people are saying, what are you going to improve with Oracle's technology? Because this stuff is pretty good now. - Yeah. - It's just streaming video. - Yeah. - This is kind of like a white label solved problem. And unless you're focused at Netflix levels of algorithmic discovery, which is where your focus should be, you can't just show up and be like, Oracle will make this better. - Right. - The core parts of the platform, particularly in the case of HBO, where they had to go through like massive gyrations to fix the problems. They're like, yeah, the problems are kind of fixed. - Yeah, you can stream Game of Thrones without crashing now. We're good at that. - Yeah, they got there. It took them a long time. - Yeah. - It's been a lot of money, but they got there. And they're like, "I don't care about, again, those folks are like, "what has he been talking about?" Like, this team is good, the product was good. There's nothing to do. So unless he's talking about, we're gonna use the TikTok algorithm to show you a thing, which he's not saying. - Right. - He's just waving the idea that Oracle technology will fix things at a slide deck. There's nothing to fix. So I don't think there's $6 billion of like tech infrastructure debt to repair, or cost savings because you're running too many data centers. It's just gonna be people. - Yep. - It is in every business, it's the biggest line item. So I don't know, man. It's all bad. - Yeah. - It's gonna get-- - It's gonna get-- - Again, much like Alan Di going to meta to destroy it from within, is that buying more or kills you. - True. - And apparently every media CEO has to flirt with the idea of killing themselves in this way. (laughing) - It's just part of the process. You get too much money, and then the universe takes it away from you by convincing you to buy more. (laughing) This is what happened. This is gonna be the end of the else in the family. - Yeah, you're great. All right, let's do one more each, and then let's get out of here. What's-- - Okay, I wanna make this a true lightning round item. - Okay. - Because we're gonna go deep on this in a different way. So last week, grammarly just stole our identities. - Yeah. - You might recall. This is like a huge story. It's fun, fully out of control. So last August, grammarly launched a feature called expert review, where you could like, you know, grammarly like express it itself is a keyboard on your device, where you like type, and the grammarly keyboard corrects your grammar, that's what it's supposed to do. Now what they're saying is they're the last mile for AI. So the AI will always be there watching you type. - No thanks. - I don't know, man, that's what they say. And so there a big idea was that in Grammarly, you could submit your writing to be reviewed by experts, and the experts are like, it's just an AI. And then to make it more compelling, they decided the AI would be me. And you and Casey Newton and Julie Anguin, and all these other famous journalists, Bell Hooks is in there, which is particularly wonderful. Like literally just like new name, any author that's been published a bunch, they're in this feature. I think we can all evaluate how many people use Grammarly by saying that this feature launched in August, and we noticed it yesterday. - That's just about to say. (laughing) - So this is bad. So there was, I think it was Futurism or Wire did an article being like, look at all these famous authors in this feature. And then we went to test it, and instead of getting famous authors, we got ourselves. We got Sean Alster at me and all these other people. So we published this thing that's like, "Hey, this is us." And we asked Grammarly for a statement, they gave us kind of a nothing burger statement. Then they rolled out email in opt out. So if I wanted to not be in their feature, I could eat home, which is not how it's supposed to work. - No, it's like do this magic incantation, and then we will take you out of the product. And then I heard from friends at other huge publishers being like, "How'd you find this?" Or, "Where's Laura's want to know?" You can tell that the legal drums were starting to go. Julie Anguin, who is an excellent reporter filed a class action lawsuit this week, and then Grammarly fully rolled back and said, "We're very sorry, blah blah blah." The reason I'm saying this is lightning round at him is because Shashir Mahotra, the CEO of Grammarly, has long been scheduled to be under code next week. - Amazing. - Like, well before this happened, he was gonna be under code. So he's still scheduled to be under code. I think he's gonna be on the show. We're taping that next week. We're gonna try to turn around as fast as we can. So I'm just gonna stop it here because I want him to come under code. (laughing) - But now it's out there that Shashir, you have to show up. - You gotta show up. And if you don't, then I'll just do that episode of the code or with an AI version of you. (laughing) - Well, I think that one is, it's gonna get weirder before it gets better on that front. And it also, it is sort of a perfectly AI story because it is not actually, it wasn't you. It wasn't even based. It was just like, Neelive vibes in some of the-- - It wasn't in my vibes. - Like the word sounded at all time. - Yeah. - That's not how we edit. And I want to say this is clearly as a guy. As somebody who edits and gets edits, there's no way you can look at, someone's published work and determine what they are like as an editor. Correct. You cannot do it. Not a chance. They're just different tasks. 99% of my edits are me just highlighting a word and saying clunky. You're not going to get that out of my writing. That's true. I'm curious to ask a lot of questions here. The number one question in my mind is, why did you think that you could get to this is what I'm like as an editor from reading my published work? Because those things are not even in the same universe. Yeah. No, it's the whole the whole thing is is very bad. And also like if you use that feature and trust it, I'm very sorry because it is leading you astray in lots of it. It's making a right SEO slot. Every one of the screenshots that you see of like the edits, it's suggesting it's like, oh, that's bad. Like that's actually just an objectively bad idea. And I hate that it's a resource to me, but it's also just a bad idea and not correct in this making your writing worse. It's good for telling you like when you use the wrong tense of a word. And I would not trust Grammarly for much of anything beyond that. Yeah. Anyway, he's coming on the show. We'll see. Yeah. Okay. For my last lightning round item, I have kind of a thing in a half. First, just some super quick follow up from Tuesday's episode. When I was talking to Lauren Finner about all of the stuff going on with the Live Nation ticket master settlement, one of the things we said was that it seemed like the deal meant Live Nation was going to have to sell a bunch of its amphitheaters and venues. It turns out that is not actually the case. There are a bunch of venues that are going to have to have an open ticketing model. So they'll have to use things other than ticket master. But as far as we can tell, it doesn't seem like at this point, according to the deal, Live Nation is going to have to sell any of its amphitheaters and venues. Important update from everything we're talking about on Tuesday. There's also a bunch of like shenanigans still happening with Live Nation ticket master, even though that settlement happened. It looks like courts coming back as soon as next week. We'll catch up on that when the trial starts again. Lauren, poor Lauren is going to stay in New York. For our purposes right now, I want to talk about some big news that dropped today, actually on Thursday as we're recording this. Alison Johnson on our team has been working on her review of the S26 ultra from Samsung. Don Preston reviewed the S26 and the S26 plus, which are exactly what you think. Samsung took its phones and did them again, only now more expensive because of RAM shortages. But the big thing, and we talked about this when Samsung announced this other than the what is a photo apocalypse of it all, the big new thing that got announced in the course of this phone being announced was this thing that Google and Samsung called, I believe, task automation. And this is the AI can just go do things for you on your phone feature. This is what Apple has been promising with Siri. This is what Google has been talking about with Gemini. This is what Rabbit tried to do with the large action model. Like this is the thing with AI. This is what everybody wants to do. They shipped it. It's it's out on the S26 ultra. I believe it's coming to the pixel. Shortly, I have a pixel 10 pro that it is not shown up on yet. But this thing is supposed to be out there. Alison has been testing it. She has had like some pretty interesting experiences with this thing. But it like it kind of works. Your phone can use itself. Let me just read you one paragraph that she wrote just to give you a sense of how it works. She writes, the first problem I gave it was pretty simple order and Uber to the airport. This is like a classic AI use case, by the way. Gemini asked for clarification to determine which airport a good question to ask. Then it went through a couple of steps on its own, adding the destination and opting to skip the step where you specify your airline, which doesn't really matter at my local airports since it's all in one terminal. As promised, the system stopped before the final step and prompted me to review the details before putting in the request for the car. That is a smashing success of a hands-on story right there. Obviously, that is like, I think as we discussed, that is the simplest, most straightforward example of this thing that gets very complicated and very messy very quickly. But she also had it order Starbucks for her. There's just like a set of things that this thing appears to be able to just comment your phone and go do on your behalf. And that is nuts. I mean, when we talked about it, when it was announced, we got a lot of feedback. It was like, everyone's lying. AI doesn't work. My feeling has always been, Google is smarter than that. They know they can't announce broken Siri, which is what Apple announced. Here's a Siri that doesn't work. It's not a choice for them. I think they have very wisely picked food delivery in ride sharing. These are the only two things they're going to try to do at first because they are the most solvable constrained problems. Then you expand to the universe of things. Well, they're also interacting with the database. It's anything with this kind of incredibly structured data is where it's going to be. So I have a question here because Samir, when he was announcing his feature at the event, said, we can do this anyway you want. We can do this via MCP. We can do this. Or we can just click around on these apps. So it's unclear. I know Uber, Dara, has been on Dakota. And he's like, we're happy to integrate with this stuff. It doesn't matter to us. I don't know how they're integrating with this Starbucks app. So it's unclear to me if they're just literally running the app in a virtual machine on your phone and clicking on it. Allison's experience so far suggests that it is actually just like literally scrolling around the app for you, which is pretty interesting. And if all that's running locally, that's bananas. Yeah. So I have a million questions on how this works in practice. But the fact that it's working is the thing. Yep. I actually mean thinking a lot about this because I think the none of this works stuff was very much a feature of this podcast for a long time. And I think it has slowly gone away because this stuff is starting to work. Like a lot of it doesn't. There's still a long road and the gap between some of this works and we have invented digital God is still so vastly enormous that we have to keep talking about it. But like, I don't know. I just keep coming back to sort of that cloud code moment that everybody had over the holidays. It's like these tools can do things now. They do do things. It's just fancy auto correct argument is no longer correct. Something meaningful has flipped. And I think now the questions of like, okay, what does this mean? Morely, how do we talk about it environmentally? How do we? What is the business of all of this? Is everybody full of shit talking about the digital God possibilities? All of that still exists, but I think it's actually now vastly more complicated because some of the stuff works now. Some of it does work and we have to reckon with it now in such a different and more nuanced way because some of it works now. I'm aware that some of it works now and I, you know, you talk to vastly more software developers than I do, but it sounds like the existential crisis in software development is here. It's like fully here. Very much so. Yeah. My hesitation as you're saying this is I think it's all still pretty brittle. Sure. And the promise of this technology, particularly agent stuff, is that it will overcome the brittleness of every other attempt to do this kind of thing that has ever existed before. So go Lexa, there's a version of history, the season on Alexa. Yeah. The problem with Alexa is that it was brittle. You'd ask it to do stuff and it couldn't do it and then people stopped asking it to do anything at all and they were like, I know it can do music and timers and that's where that technology died. And I think this is still pretty brittle. I just think the boundary of things that people expected to do is getting bigger. You're right by your framing it wrong, right? Like what happened was Amazon built a hugely successful machine for playing music and setting timers. They've sold a lot of those things. There are a lot of them in people's house and they are like a meaningful interface for a lot of people to do a lot of things. Like there is a generation of kids that is growing up talking to Alexa that's it's real. It's happening like that. That's a very powerful thing. What Amazon never figured out is to how to a do the next thing and be figured out how to make two nickels rub together. And this is where we are with AI right now, right? The thing where yes, this can write some code for you is real and powerful. There are a bunch of little things again that is starting to do. Like can I order coffee from Starbucks for you? We are rapidly running at a point where the answer is just yes. That's not digital God. I don't know how to be clear about that. It's also not clear that that's anything, right? So we are at I think that fun interesting moment that we were with Alexa all those years ago where it's like, okay, you can there this is something. How much is it? Is the next question? And everybody continues to assume that just because it can do the first two things, it will eventually be able to do everything. The last run we took at this proved that that was not the case. This is where we have a brittle. Yeah, I think we've expanded the envelope of where the brittleness is. Yeah. But there's still some brittleness that is yet to come. Yeah. And by the way, I have been threatening everyone that we're going to do a segment of the show called New York versus San Francisco where we just invite Casey on and then you know, I just have different ideas about AI. I think it might be time to your person. It might be time. I had a meeting just before we recorded this podcast and the person I was talking to started with. I know I'm in San Francisco where everyone is completely AI-pilled, but yeah, we got to do it. What it is. Casey has agreed to do it. We just have to do it. I'm down. I think it's a good idea. And I'll just like I'll be Chicago. I'll just I'll be somewhere in between. Good old Midwestern Dave is here to moderate your versus hair since I love it. It's gonna be good. All right. We should get out of here. We've gone way over as we are on to do. I missed a week. It's nice to be back. I don't like when I don't have anybody to talk to about this stuff. I have to bother like my three year old about technology. He's not interested. But that's it for the first cast. Like you said, in the clubhouse on version history this Sunday, we're not feed-dropping. So to all the people who yell at me about feed-dropping, we will not be feed-dropping clubhouse. Go to the new version history YouTube channel. We're a version history podcast on TikTok and Instagram. Those accounts are small and that makes me feel vulnerable. So please go follow them so I can have some self-confidence again. It's most openly manipulative. - You fat person. (laughing) - It's true. This is where I'm at right now in my life. I said something about liking, subscribe, and I got a comment being like, like, can subscribe is so 2008, and this made me truly feel feelings. Who's Andy Coder on Monday? - It's a CEO of Yahoo, it's a wild console. There's a lot there. - Is everything gambling now and we talked about it for a while? - Spectacular, I'm personally very excited about that episode. I've spent some time with Jim over the last several months talking about the future of everything, and he's a good hang. I'm excited to hear that episode. Remember, if you subscribe to the Verge, you get all of those podcasts. Add free plus everything else that we're doing with the Verge, all of our newsletters, all of our everything. The Verge.com/subscribe. It's a good website. We're pretty proud of it. The email is VergeCastToTheVersge.com. The hotline is 866-1-1. This shows the production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time, Neely. - Procurel.