How much MacBook is enough MacBook?

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You can also find links with Canva presentations at canva.com designed for work. It's a product name that is just all of the things. It's everywhere. Everything on Amazon is like 60 words long now. We're just better though. Like the way they name phones at Samsung or the way they name products on Amazon's website. Samsung, the Samsung naming conventions are now like performance art. There are just like some words, a galaxy, a number, some other letters. Fine.

They're just riffing. It's like jazz. Yeah, they're just like, here's some ideas we had. And then what the SEO spam, it's just all this technology, all this AI, and all these algorithms. And we're like, what's the best way to win at them?

Just shove all the words in the title field. And then off to the side, there's like Sony, who's just like, would you like 16 numbers of letters together? That don't mean anything? It's very good. It's very good. Anyway, we're all together in the studios. I'm a friend of the I David Pierce is here. Hello.

Alex trans is here. Hello. It's been a minute since we were on the show at the same time. Yeah, let alone all in the same room at the same time. Yeah, wait, how were yours vacations? They were good. Yeah. Very good. I drank a lot of Miami vices, which is really good. Which is when you put a Dacquery in the peanut calado. So pink and light. Incredible. That's a lot of sugar in eight. Yeah. In a lot of it at nine, nine and 10.

But you're getting the fruit. So you're getting your vitamin C. Yeah, that's what you really want. It was good. But we were, you know, when you travel with a small child, you end up on her schedule, like a five-year-old schedule. So you're in bed by seven? Yeah, we were in bed by nine and we were up at six and tampered by 11. Like a five-year-old. And I was like, wait, this might be the ideal way to live my life. Yeah.

Like on this, and then I immediately was like, no, I especially when you're on vacation, though, like being the first one up has real ramifications. You're like, the world is your oyster for like three hours of the resort before anybody else wakes up. Yeah. You get the best cereal, like the best breakfast. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. How was yours?

It was good. I, I moped. You moped. Yeah. Did you go on vacation as a small Victorian chamber? Pretty much. Pretty much. I'm going to do like a larp. Yeah. Yeah, I really, I really needed you some mopping. So I did a lot of mopping. I really, my goal was to like see if I could become one with my couch. Oh, good. For like a whole week. Oh, that's an important kind of vacation.

It like I thought it was great. My dog did not agree. He he was very frustrated with my vacation, but I had a great time. Yeah. Did you watch anything?

Couch time is watching. Yeah. Yeah. I saw girls five ever five ever. Very good. Netflix wants me to watch the show. I'm just not going to do it. You should do it. It's very good. It's good. It is legitimately very good. It's like it's it's straight out of the brain of Tina Fey. So like if you think 30 Rock is funny, you don't think girls five ever is funny.

And I think 30 Rock is very funny. And it's been a lot of time making fun of like a very specific neighborhood in Brooklyn that I used to live in. So I'm like, yes. Oh, that's good. Yes, just. Yeah, it's good. It's good. I went through the whole three body problem with Netflix. You know, I was like, I open Netflix. I was like, I'm going to watch the show. I watched the whole thing. And it wasn't good. And I was like, this is I had the Netflix problem again.

I need to disclose that I made a Netflix show. Our Netflix show is great. I'm like, I'm like, I'm not the one. It's called the future of less so. But I know it was like, that was the thing I did because we won a vacation. I came back in me like several days left. Like post vacation. Oh, clutch move. And I was like, how many spend a certain I was watching watching television. Yeah. Of course. It was amazing. Yeah. And I was like, the show is it's fine.

That's why I switched it off and turned on the new walking dead show. And like, that's just adorable. It's two people being like, what do we kill a bunch of zombies and make out? And I was like, this spoiler people are going to come. I'm sorry. I tweeted one thing about three body problem. They came for you. And I was like, this book has been asked for a million years. What's the problem? It's fine. Anyhow, it's a it's a weird springtime week. Yeah.

I feel like there was a lot of news the past couple of weeks, the government and the tech companies are just doing a thing. And then this week everyone on spring break. I think that's literally true. Like everyone is like, we're just going to stop the fighting. Everyone go drink a Miami vice. We'll come back. We'll get back right back to it after spring. Well, and now on the flip side, we're now what four weeks away from the beginning of like developer conference season.

So everybody is out of filing legal briefs and into planning for like weird AI product announcements. And this is sort of the small doldrums in the middle. Yeah, this is the quiet week where we saw them outside getting a beautiful tour of Wall Street with all of the other high schoolers. Lovely. Oh, yeah. No, this is the New York visit week. Yeah. When's DC visit week? One to the eighth graders last week. It was last week. The cherry blossoms came out and just every 13 year old in America

went to the Lincoln Memorial on the same day. It was unbelievable. So that's this week where they we said that Verge's offices are in the financial district of New York, which is very old. There's a bunch of old stuff you can look at. And this is the week where they're all here. Yeah, they're all like, yep, this small stuff. Tim Cook is like George Washington got hammered in this bar. That's a real thing. He thinks about all time. But there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

David has structured the show into three lightning rounds. All three sponsorable lightning rounds, which no one has yet to sponsor. We get a lot of emails from people that are like, I'll pay some money. Yeah, promises don't pay the bills. Friends. Hit the bell or leave me. We're going to figure this out. I promise you will figure this out. But if you run a large company, we're good at taking a lot of money.

But there's a whole floor of people at this company who's like a huge amount of money. We know what to do when I'm like, someone wants to pay us 20 bucks. They're like, I don't know. Just a cash. We should be on door. But only deliverers like hot podcast. It's like nothing happens. And yeah, three lightning rounds. We should start with there. We did have a big review this week. A few weeks after I came out, we hired a new laptop reviewer, Joanne and Elias.

We got her up to speed. We let her do a thing pad. And then we're like, Macbook Air. Get it done. Yeah. And she did. She had a lot of feelings about the MacBook Air M3, 15 and 13 inch because they both came out. And they're pretty similar. And she was like, they're good Macbooks. They got a little faster. And then she was very upset because they had a gigabytes of RAM.

And I tend to agree with her. But I know some people on this podcast don't well, yes. I mean, we're going to fight about that for many hours. Some people have to say it's okay. It brought me such great joy to watch someone else come and go through the same thing that all of us have been through with the MacBooks over the years, which is this is very good.

It's probably the best laptop you can buy. It is a teeny tiny bit better than the last one. And slightly more expensive in Apple really wants you to buy something much more expensive. Do I give that an eight or a nine? It's like the eternal question of the MacBook Air is like it's probably the best laptop. It could probably it's kind of annoying. What do I do with that? Yeah. And it's just like it's nice to see someone else go through this very intense process.

Because the story of the MacBook Air is like it it rules like it is it is pretty hands down the best all around laptop on the planet. And yet it's a pretty small upgrade over the last one. It has a bunch of the same deficiencies as the last one and they desperately desperately desperately want you to spend $2,500 on a laptop and not a thousand dollars on a laptop. Yeah, very good at getting you from one to the other. That's what I did. Is it? Yeah. Well, I went with the MacBook Pro. Yeah.

You got you just you you let yourself get specked up. I got specked up. I like like the feeling from from the early days of the MacBook Air where you couldn't get the air you had to get a pro if you wanted power. I know I don't I know I could be fine with an air but I have an air for work. This is really like it's important for you to know the whole lineup. So I can either have a pro to run all my Chrome tabs or I can have an air to run all of my Chrome tabs.

But yeah, well and Crusader Kings 3 like it plays it beautiful. So what you're talking about is directly related to the 8 gigs of RAM situation, which is you settle down to buy the laptop. The base configuration should be amazing. The base configuration compared to any other base configuration potentially the best all are on laptop. Like that's a it's a real thing you can make an argument for sure. And then you're like, but if I put 8 gigs of RAM in this it will last for two years.

And then it will die and I'll do this again. So I should put 16 or 32 gigs of RAM into it. And then you're like, I should add some storage to it because it's going to last a long time. And then you are quickly at, oh, I should just buy a MacBook Pro. Yep. Yeah, just spend slightly even more money. And I can just have a 14 inch MacBook Pro. Like off off the shelf, you don't have to worry about somebody like customizing it and them adding a little shipping time to it.

Yeah, because what is it? You go from 8 to 16 gigs of RAM. That's 200 bucks. You go from the base storage, which is 256 to 512. That's another 200 bucks. So already you've just turned your $1,000 or your $1,100 laptop in this case into a $1,500 laptop. At which point you're like, well, maybe I'll just get the 15 inch because it's not that much more expensive.

Yeah. And then you get then you're up to there. And then it is, I mean, it is so perfectly calculated how to get you to buy like the mid spec MacBook Pro. It's just unbelievable. It's beautiful. Yeah. And it is not the computer anyone needs. Like I truly do not believe the premise that if you buy 8 gigs of RAM it's only going to last you two years.

And it won't work. I think like if you're a person who like really heavily uses your computer, sure. I think if you're going to spend money on one additional spec, RAM is always the thing. Totally that. I believe firmly that for most people, for most uses, the base configuration of the MacBook Air storage RAM, everything is fine. Crazy. You're crazy. That's so much computer. This is what I'm trying to put not enough RAM. Go ahead.

Yeah, this is what I'm trying to understand is because like you said this and it was like just lobbying a bomb into chat in the office. Like you're like, yeah, yeah, so mad at me. Yeah, I resisted like telling anybody that you said that. And then you like, yeah, I believe 8 gigs and everybody's like, David, what are you doing? And is it because we're all people who use our laptops a lot and always have a bajillion tabs open that we feel that need for the RAM?

I mean, that's part of it. Is it like I've heard it's I think it's two things. I think half of it is what you just described. I think the other half is we are all literally professionally trained to be sensitive to our computers being slow. And then I look at like my mom who is on a nine year old iPad and like doesn't notice that it's a problem. It just works fine. She taps a thing. She waits a couple of seconds and it opens.

And I'm like, do you know how long some bar has to open mom? She's like, what are you talking? It's just open like it's whatever. I think most people don't spend as much time thinking about how long their tabs take to open as we do. And maybe they should. And I think they arguably should. For $1,100. I'm just going to throw back your vision pro criticism for $1,100 being like this computer is a little slow when it's the fastest.

It's not slow. That swap is immediately noticeable. So the argument that the pro eight gig argument is that the SSD is so fast that swapping to and from virtual memory using the state of the art, blah, blah, blah, that Apple is state of the art. Is imperceptible. This is the argument. This is the argument. And on the new one apparently the storage is much faster. So that argument might be closer to true.

The argument is wrong. Like the story just still slower than the RAM. It might be very fast, but it's still slower than the RAM. And so when you hit the swap, which you can do really easily and I'm acquitted. I gave Ram. I'm going to bet I'm swapped right now. Let's see. What do you, what do you, what do you do to? He's going into the activity monitor. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you had some like weird utility. David is the provider of installers often has weird utilities.

But I have hit the swap. Yeah. If you go to memory, it'll tell you down at the bottom swap use. Sorry, keep going. I'm riveting. Open activity monitor and click on memory. How to. Yeah. All I'm saying is that's the argument. And at this point in 2024. Not a good argument. They should just bump you up to 16 gigs around the center. And then I think this computer would be amazing.

I do agree with that. I think it would be better if everybody had 16 gigs for him. I think it's absurd that Apple charges $200 to go from 8 to 16 when that RAM doesn't cost anywhere near the $100. Most enduring scam. Oh, yeah. I mean, the margins and it's soldered in. So you can't even upgrade it later. Right. Yeah. You can use to the hack was you'd buy it with the garbage RAM. And then you just upgrade it as soon as you got it.

Yeah, you do the thing where you lift it up the keyboard and just you're done it. And now they're like, no, you will pay us $200 or swap and suffer. Anyhow, I'll say it's great computer. It's like the base storage of the iPhone or the base storage of iCloud. Apple's like, how much is just enough to annoy you into paying us more? Oh, no, that's real. But how much? When was it that you switched your family to crooks?

How was that going? It's fine because I bought. Well, I got a lot of 16 gig RAM Chromebooks running out there. Yeah, I bought it. So it's only one Chromebook. Okay. It was the Google. What was the fanciest one? The $1,000? No, it was before. Well, there was the Chromebook pixel. That was the sick one. Yeah, I'm literally googling bought my mom a Chromebook because I might be the only. Hold on. Hold on. I just got that right.

I bought our Chromebook pixel in 2016. It was a $1,000. It has a Core i7 and like 16 gigs of RAM. And it is just rockin. Wow, because it was so overpowered for its time. Now it's a little underpowered to run Chrome. My 2015 iMac. It's such a damning critique of Chrome. It's not great that an i7 and 16 gigs of RAM like barely keep up anymore. My 2015 iMac, which is done now.

Oh, it's over. Wow. It's like the fans are just like on all the time. But it lasted as long as it did. Almost 10 years, 32 gigs per time. If I have one piece of advice for buying a Mac, which is just loaded up, especially because it's soldered in, loaded up with RAM at the beginning, because you can't fix it, you can't upgrade it. Everything else, you'll be fine. Over time, you'll find it. I do agree with that. I also think 256 gigs of storage, unless you do a lot of media.

Like, if you just take photos on your phone and upload them to Google Photos and that's your photo strategy, 256 gigs is plenty. Oh, I disagree with that. I know you do. Well, I'm saying this is someone who has a server at home to offload all my big files. I have a super normal workflow for regular people that everybody does.

But even with that, I'm hitting that 256. The laptop I bought now has 512, because I was tired of hitting the 256 and being like, I have to go to delete this game that I played two times a year, but I really want to have that. What's using up all your storage? It's games. Okay, fair. Then I'll add that to media. That's totally fair. Games are enormous.

You download two games now and you've eaten 256. But absent those two things, there's very little you're going to do that's going to take up that much storage. That's true. My mom has like 100. Yeah. Like it's fine. Yeah. And 256 literally unless you do media, which is huge, and especially now, like, good God, every photo off the iPhone is enormous now.

So like, get as much as you can if that's a thing that you care about and you're going to be in Lightroom doing stuff, which is another case to get more RAM. But if you're just, I firmly believe that most people buy laptops download a web browser and that the end. That is that is 98% of most people's laptop experience now and like maybe office. And for that, the base can face fine. I so firmly believe that.

And he's just trying to lease 1499 on a 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs storage. And then at that point, why not get the 15 inch? Yeah. And then there's a, there's a row. I'll tell you. Yeah, just then you're just at a 14 pro and you're like, you have to 14 pro. Actually, I thought the biggest takeaway from a Jenna's review is that the M2 is still for sale. And that's a pretty good deal if you can spec it up.

Which is funny because this was also in a lot of ways the story of the M2 review was that the M1 is still for sale. And now, I mean, you can buy the M1 at Walmart for what is it like 699 bucks? So this hit, well, I was on vacation. And there was like a furious amount of like conversation about whether Walmart was blowing out old stock or whether Apple was going to make more M1s. And if they're going to make more M1s.

Yes. That seems to be, I don't know that we've ever actually had that officially confirmed, but that is. Yeah, it's every bit of evidence we have suggests that that is the case. It's clear. It seems like it's going to be going for a while. And it's not necessarily like they're making more M1s. They just have a ton of stock. No, they don't. That's not how Apple works. Literally Apple pioneered the idea of not having wearable.

No, no, no, I mean, they have like, they have tons of extra stuff around. That's how we got the iPhone SE. The iPhone SE came because they had a ton of the cases, right? Yeah, sure. Having parts. So they're very good at making very cheaply. Yeah, like they had a ton of those MacBook Air original MacBook Air casings. Right? Same cook as like, what are you doing guys? Show some M1s in them. Send them to Walmart.

I think they are still making them. I think they've projected out their demand and they're still making them. We have that quote from Walmart in one of our stories where the Walmart guy is like, we're going to have these for as long as people want them. Yeah. Which has to be. I think it's a huge warehouse like Steven Spielberg style warehouse. And Tim, Tim doesn't like to think about it. You don't bring it up around Tim. But Walmart, Walmart's like, we'll take care of this for you Tim.

Reminder that Apple made the 13 inch MacBook Pro with optical drive for five or six years after they stopped selling it. Liam gets it. Oh, thank you, Liam. Wow. Yeah. No, this is, what I think is true is I think it's less that Apple has a warehouse full of them somewhere. And more that Apple with that wedge designed in particular is now at like unbelievable economies of scale.

Yeah. And to just throw that away, like to get rid of all the tooling that's really expensive and the processes that you spin up to do this stuff, like there is a group of people who want those and will pay that price. And what I think is most surprising is not that these still exist in that Apple would keep making them. But that Apple is interested in selling a $700 laptop at Walmart.

Like to me, that's a much bigger change than anything else going on here is just this is not a thing Apple has ever done before. And it's like, there's a world in which you would argue it feels like a company running scared trying to make money wherever they can. I don't really think it's that, but it is a definite like strategy change in a way that I think has not been talked about. Yeah, because Walmart is very focused on luxury. Like their whole thing is luxury and not Walmart.

Not Walmart. We take that back. Walmart very confused. Let me read that. Well, I think about Walmart. That's what I think of too. Yeah, that's all switched up. But yeah, like Apple is very well known for being all about luxury. Walmart less so. Yeah, they just do different jobs. And like if Apple wanted to figure out how to sell the best $500 computer, it probably could have it. Probably could have done that 35 years ago. But that computer in Walmart, it was called the iPad.

It has been in the Walmart the entire time. Yeah, my two year, you know, in the woods experience, the whole Walmart was the only store. I spent a lot of time contemplating what electronic products are in Walmart in Catskilled New York. It's iPhones, all the iPhones, including the pros, and it was iPads. And then they just didn't put the Macs in there.

And I have one Mac. And I think the iPad Mac, a $700 M1 MacBook Air, a wedged design, and whatever iPad you can get a Walmart, Apple's just like they want the laptops. Like let's be honest about what people want to buy here. Yeah, they want laptops. People are going to go in looking for an M1 MacBook Air. And there's going to be a salesperson who's like, wouldn't you rather have a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with a magic keyboard and Apple pencil that's $1,400 all in.

And somebody's going to leave with just like a bag full of nonsense. And they're like, I just want to laptop. But not a Walmart. There wouldn't be a salesperson at Walmart. That's true. I did a lot of shopping at Walmart in my two years of pan and liquids living. There was not a lot of salespeople around. It was not a thing. But all I'm saying is to connect the dots between the two of you. The Apple running scared, maybe less scared, Apple finding every dollar it can find right now.

And just squeezing is weird. This is the company that gets rid of its old products. Yeah. Like this is the company that's like, we're going to cannibalize ourselves. And now they're selling three generations of the same laptop. It's weird. Yeah, it's very different. And it changed kind of quietly without like they did. Nobody made it. Nobody knows about it. But now you look in. It's like it operates like a very different company than it did even just a few years ago.

Yeah. And I could probably put killing the extraordinarily wasteful and stupid car project. Yeah. The pressure on the app store, the anger around the app store and I trust stuff. And we're going to sell more products at more price points than ever. Like all in a line. Yeah. Yeah. They saw that like money is not infinite. Yeah. Which it is for them. Historically it has been yes. But it's just weird. It's just like a weird moment for that company.

Yeah. And then there was that, I think it was a Reuters story this week that Apple is now working on personal robots. Oh yeah. It's like, okay guys. Sure. That'll go good. We'll see him when we see him. We should mention by the way, it's on the offline Apple. They rolled out personas that just like float around with you this week. Honda. Or the Vision Pro. You should watch the video.

If the video is on our various video platforms, it's like Wes and V. And they just don't seem happy with each other. I have not wanted to put the Vision Pro back on since I handed our review into V. I was talking to Wes earlier. He was like, I got to go FaceTime some friends and troll him really good. I'll talk to you later. I'm not saying good. Good. I feel like the right use of the Vision Pro. That is the best use. Strong use of $3,500. Yeah. Seven at a 10. All right. All right.

So you have amazing gadgets. Crans, you've got one here. Yeah. Opening lightning round. Oh my God. So Chris Welch, if most of you are not in the verge office, so you don't get to see Chris as often as I do. But he's had this suitcase at his desk for a while now. And in this suitcase, I'd always be like, what is that? I'd be like, it's a TV. He'd be like, don't ask about the suitcase. Don't ask about the suitcase. And he finally reviewed this suitcase.

And what I quickly learned was that everyone has been seeing this LG suit. This LG suitcase TV on TikTok. And so a lot of people are like, oh, Chris finally said it's pretty okay. It's time to get it. Really? But I want to be clear. You probably don't need the $1,200 $1080p. No. 27 inch TV in a suitcase. It's cool as hell though. It is very cool. It just like, it hits like, like he talked about in his review. It just hits that gadget spot where you just like, yeah, want this.

Yeah, it's full-be and clicky and it's a little outlandish. It's a touch screen for no reason. I sat on the floor and played solitaire for like 25 minutes. Yeah. You just can do that because it's fun. Yeah. And I just really, really enjoy the thing. And I think it needs no, doesn't need to exist in the world. But also I'm like, well, maybe I do need one for my bedroom. Because I can't figure out where to put a TV. Maybe I just have a, in a suitcase. And a little suitcase.

The answer is a suitcase. On my bed. You know what I'm going to do. You need a ceiling projector. There's a fan up there. Okay, we're in the fan. I saw it, it's CS, of course, in some like random booth. Like a combo, platter, light, fan projector. Oh, yeah. Well, there we go. Then I'm done. That's what I'm going to get. Obviously, when you're trying to fan on the whole thing, it's very good. Yeah. What I can't just add about this TV is whether I want it to be much better or much cheaper.

That was, because part of me is like, give me the 1080p screen. Give me 27 inches. Make it 500 bucks. Will I buy this thing and take it on vacation with me three times a year? Yeah, I probably would. Or am I like, this becomes, you know, the like basement TV for all intents and purposes. And I want it to be better than this. And I'm so torn between those two things. Because $1,200 for what this thing actually is, is too much. It's a ludicrous.

Both of you have now described wanting this TV to keep it stationary in a room. You're like the basement TV, just like buy a TV dude. No, because you just turned into a suitcase. Just like buy a TV. Yeah, but why the purpose of a suitcase is that you take it with you. Yeah. It's my vacation TV. I will say the thing where they're like, put it in the bed of your truck and watch TV is like. The dream. It is the dream. It is also just the most specific use case.

It's like, I'm going to tailgate with this thing six times a week. And it's going to be worth it. If you are a season ticket holder to something, buy this television. Like that's where I'm at. Chris's basic point was like, we need more gadgets again, which is perhaps direct pull on my heart strings. Well, I think it should be cheaper. I don't think it should be better. I think it should be cheaper.

He made a good point that he understood why it was so expensive because it is such a niche product. And he's like, if they made it better, then it would just be more expensive. It's $1,200 is also expensive. I don't know if I fully buy it, but I don't buy that at all. LG can make a good TV for virtually no money. All they've really done here is provide suit case. They put it in a six suit case. Yeah, it really is just a TV and a hinge. Yeah, like that's not. But you can plug stuff into it.

You can play your switch on it. It's got a touch screen so you can like, you can buy one. You should buy one. There's just something about this one picture in the review where the TV is. Where the TV is on a couch and it's folded up. The suit case is open. It's flat and there's two people on either side of it playing chess. And this picture is both like truly absurd because I cannot imagine regular people ever actually doing this. And also makes me want it so bad.

And you can see that whole conflict in their faces too in the photo. Yeah, they're kind of like, what is this bad chess app that I'm playing with? It's enormous television. But I'm also having a good time. Yeah. Who doesn't have a good time playing WebOS chess on a suit case TV? Speaking of gadgets, my lightning round is the yearly printer review was published. It's a big day for you. Big day for me. This is what I see me did on vacation the whole time.

It was just plan your epic comeback with the printer. So if you don't know, something is happening to Google search right now where various websites, their traffic is declining because Google changed the algorithm. And some of them are, we did a decoder with me about one of them, House Fresh, the Airpure Fire Blog. There's a retro gaming site who's editor-in-chief or owner or someone is complaining to their traffic. And then a bunch of like content farms.

Right. Also. And the idea is to kill the content farms. Yeah. But they are catching some of the good carrying sites. A lot of people catching streets on this one. Yeah. It's something that the internet, as we know it, I believe this to be true. The internet as we know it is about to fall apart. Oh, I really agree with that. Yeah. Something weird is happening on the internet out there.

So my contribution to that is to make stories that pointed out by using the form of the stories, the content farms. It's a very meta art project. Yeah. I think the version should be in our project. So the answer to the question, what is the best printer has been unchanging for a decade? Which is the cheapest brother laser printer you can find. Yep. But that is, like Google cannot accept that as an answer. Because it's not new enough. Because it's not enough. Shopping links.

Because the data isn't semantic enough. How many H2s you got in that piece? I won. Got to have it. And it's just me pointing out that LMS don't know the answer to the question yet. Anyways, I wrote the piece. Once again, we have sold like 2000 printers. It's amazing. Which is just the funniest part of this whole thing. It's like, it's a favorite part. It's easily the funniest part of this whole thing. It's like, what should this actually look like?

It should just feel like just buy this one and shut up. Like, that's all anyone wants on the internet when they're looking for product advice. And Google is like, no. And Google wants you. You have to update the page. So you look at the internet. And you're like, you type in best printer and all the top results are like updated last week to point out. A bad product is the new winner. Or like, we change our methodology.

And you look at the number of sites that one, claim to have reviewed every printer. And then claim to have updated those printer reviews yesterday. And then also get the answer. Like updating it on January 1st, 2024. So that you just say they've updated it in January. 2024. Yeah. It's cool. It is so my big edit to you in this story was to add a bunch of links to the kinds of things you're talking about. And some of it is just truly wild.

And it's like, I feel like everybody has seen these at some point, right? You Google one of these and you go on to some site you've never heard of. And it's basically just like a product name. People on Amazon, like it. Here's what they say. Copy and paste a bunch of Amazon results and call it a day. But like, one of them is on people.com. The eight best home printers of 2024. Yeah. Tested and reviewed. Like, nothing against, I have not even read this piece. I don't know.

But what in the world is people magazine doing caring about printers? Yeah. Like, how is this what the internet has become? That's how they print the magazine out. It's like a CBS news. I think there's my favorite one. And then I realize like the demographic of CBS news might be looking for printers. I don't know the answer to that question.

It's just very odd that if you like look at the architecture of our internet, a lot of people are like affiliate, weird affiliate clicks will pay for everything. And then you just look at what that means in practice, which is trying to game Google search to get those affiliate clicks. And that we're in the death spiral.

Yeah. Well, and one of the things Google has been trying to take away recently is sites that not only do that, but try to hide it, that I'll have a sort of sneaky navigational part of their site that's not in the nav. They never put it on the homepage. You can never find it. It's like parts of these websites exist exclusively for Google. It's not just stuff that is made because you see it on Google Trends, which a lot of people do.

And that's like that's a thing we think about it to think everybody thinks about. Like, nobody what people want to know is fine. But when you go to this deep, deep hole of like we are going to actively wall this off from the rest of our site so that the people who come here on purpose never even find it. It's like that's tough. And that is that is now a game. A lot of people feel like they have to play. People doesn't. You can find it on the people page. Yeah. People.

People's like, what's up guys? We love printers. No, they also love. What's Ryan Reynolds up to printers? Pull cleaners. Sure. That's Daniel Dyer. And Dan Dyer. That's the stuff. Yeah. It's just very odd. It's a very odd moment on the internet. I fully believe that this is not sustainable, like in any way, shape or form. I give it a year before like the Google Fight Internet turns into whatever the next thing is going to be. I think that's probably right.

There was a really interesting that folks at 404 media the other day wrote about a search engine called Kagi, which is one I've used and been talking about for a while. And I just like posted about it and was like, oh yeah, this is good. I've been using it for a while. This is a good story. They were talking about how much better it is than Google. And shocked at the number of people I got who were like, I'm done with Google. I'm out. I'm over it. I've moved on. I finally switched.

And I feel like Google has had this sort of like ineffitability for so long that I just feel starting to crack in a lot of ways. I think there is this sense that Google is not the only option anymore. And I think AI has kind of undone that in people's brains, even though AI is not actually that good at a lot of search things. But it does, it feels like Google being sort of too Google to fail feels like it's slipping. What was the most interesting way?

Recent like search you went to do and Google just totally failed you. I haven't used Google in a while if I'm being honest. Okay. But I still use it and I still am like, wow, it sucks every day that I don't keep my behavior. It's not a straight Google search, but I actually haven't asked for this question because I've been thinking about it ever since this happened. I have a Google, I don't even know if they call them anymore, a circle that runs Google Assistant in my bathroom.

A Nest Hub, what are they called? Are they killed nest yet? A Google home? Yes, one of those. You know, a circle. Yeah. Like a fabric circle with a microphone in it, a Google thing. I shouldn't have the name in this product. It's a little guy who is at the home. It's a Nest Hub. Yeah, it's a home mini. Is that what it is? Yeah. A circle. They're little to little guy. Yeah, a big hockey puck. I highly recommend putting one of those in your bathroom. They're very useful in there.

And I, you know, sometimes I have to play a podcast in the morning, sometimes I just have it set a time. Like all this stuff. And I asked it how long it would take to drive to the airport. And first it answered with a number of miles. And then it said, I can't, and I said, well, how many minutes will that take? And it just couldn't. And then it sent me some stuff on the web. And I was like, all of this AI. Like all of this AI and Google Maps. Yeah, like you have that. You have all of the skills.

If I just asked Google Maps this question, it would immediately deliver me that answer. And you can't. And it's like, well, we just didn't close the loop. Yep. And that, to me, I was like, oh, I should have just tried something. Anything else would have been fine. And I think that that's like the Google loop closing. Hopefully they get better at it. They've had a long time. You wrote about this this week. We're going to get to that. But yeah, that's the last one that really failed for me.

And I was just like, how is it possible? Like, even at this point, if Gemini had just lied to me. Yeah. In the like 45 minutes, I don't know. Pretz Pryor is. That feels right. Yeah, that feels right. Yeah, about 45 minutes. Yeah. I would have been better than just like, I don't know. Yes. Like, there's nothing less useful than asking a robot how far away something is. And it's like 25 miles. And it's like, cool. What does that mean to me at this point? Should I run? What's the plan here?

Just hustle. What's your last one on Google felt any? Yesterday, I was trying to decide. I asked it, should I get an impact driver if I already have a regular power? Oh, that's impossible. That's like too hard. Yeah, it was too hard for it. It was like, no. And I was like, what power tools should I get? And it was like, here's all the power tools for carpentry. And I was like, I just wanted to know what power tools should, like, a nerd who wants more power tools get. You failed me.

I got really upset. That's a really hard. Maybe I would be a hard. Maybe I would be a hard. You've opened, like, that's a Pandora's box question. Yeah. I've seen videos of people arguing that the housing crisis caused people to switch from the standard drill's impacts. Because all the people with experienced building houses got forced out of the market and the kids didn't know what they were doing. Like, you're touching on a third rail of power tools to that question.

Like, somewhere a data center exploded because you asked Google that question. I went, like, I had to go like a couple of links and just, I was like, I need something that's not people trying to sell me power tools. Yeah. And eventually I got like some people debating impact drivers. Like, yeah, if you got a lot of sheet rock, you got to earn out sheet rock. You got a lot of drywall. You got to get up. You get that impact driver. Change your life. And I was like, well, I don't have that.

Our publisher Chris Grannis about to run it here. You're just generally talking on power tools. Yeah. He's going to go crazy. Kick the door open. Well, I just saying that this is my prediction. A year from now. Market. What day is it? April 4th? Market. A year from now. Whatever Google is today will look radically different. Hey Siri. I know I agree. And I think Google knows that too. Yeah. I'm not sure they know what to do about it.

Do you see the, I don't know if it was a rumor or a report, but there was, I just saw us because of something go by. Basically saying that Google is now considering charging for its AI stuff, which I find totally fascinating. Like the actual AI search stuff would be a paid thing instead of a free thing. Messy and complicated. But like, you get the sense Google knows it can't be like this for much longer. And it's flailing in a bunch of directions trying to fix it.

But I think it seems like the internet is getting crazy faster than Google is getting good at doing. The solution. They just need to sell some shit in Walmart. Knock $200 off selling in Walmart. You'll be fine. Yeah. Some other AI stuff for letting around. Microsoft is working at Xbox AI chat bot scoop from Tom Warren. It's just clipy for Xbox. And he's right that it needs to be called Xbox. It does. It does need to be called Xbox. That is correct. Microsoft confirmed it.

We are testing at Xbox support virtual agent. An internal prototype of an animated character that can query Xbox support topics with voice or text. This is the general manager of gaming AI at Xbox. The prototype makes it easier and quicker for players to get help with support topics using national language. It's like, this is great. This is cool. But how many people are on the daily just asking Xbox support for help? Why did I lose it? No, I mean, customer support AI is like... It's done.

It's done. That is good or bad. That is the future of everything. All the robot phone trees are going to be replaced by chat bots. And that's just where we're headed. And that's kind of what this sounds like. I think there is possibly more Xbox could do here. But it just sounds like it's going to be an adorable little customer service. No way. I love this idea of it killing phone trees though. Like if AI kills the phone tree, oh my god. Oh, that's coming. I really, I really get it. Game changed.

It's like just, frankly, just online chat customer service over having to call and wait for a human was delightful. Now all of that is just being replaced by AI bots who are like, yeah, helpful. And my favorite thing is the people who go on to those things like the people who went to the car rental company and asked it to do all kinds of weird stuff. Like this stuff is going to get bad and crazy and weird.

But that is, I think at this moment probably the most slam dunk business use case for all of this. It is just going to eat the customer service industry. Right. Because all of, I mean, working customer support is not fun. You are mostly reading scripts of people. Yeah. Just have a robot read the script. Yeah. I just want to know how they will all respond to me just mashing the zero button over again. Which is all representative human representative. No, thank you.

I feel like I never call a phone tree with the problem the phone tree is designed to solve. Never. It's like, I don't need to check my balance. Like I can definitely do that. Yeah. You know, it's like I need to do something hard. Who calls to check their balance still? Like, why are they offering that still? Because I've never said to you. I called the bank and they're like, you want to check your balance? No, I'm looking at the app right now that told me to call you.

Yeah, I'm going to start calling to check my balance. Yeah. I'm doing. That's like, I'm talking to somebody. Sam Sung says, Bixby is not dead, which is an incredible thing to say. Like, because it implies that everyone thinks Bixby is dead. My t-shirt that says, no, Bixby is not dead is causing a lot of questions. Yeah. A Sam Sung executive tells CNBC that the company is, quote, working so hard to put AI features in Bixby.

Even though they just did a big deal with Google and Gemini is now all over the phone and the phones are running Gemini Mini. Gemini Nano. I'm not great at Google product names today. There is Google product. There is a big award's banquet this week. They ask me awards. I drank a lot of them. Just like Google stuff. Google Circle. Gemini tiny. That's great. You're just right. You're as good as anybody, including most of Google's product managers. Don't worry about that.

So, if you will recall, when Bixby was announced, dog was shoes. If you are not caught up on Verch-Hast's lore, Bixby, the name, sounds like a dog wearing shoes. That's the entire joke. That's it. Yeah. It's a good joke. Like, if you were to imagine, if you were to draw a picture of something called Bixby, you would imagine a dog wearing shoes. It was a butler, too. Yeah, like a butler, like a dog. Yeah, a dog. Yeah. People have sent us pictures, cartoons.

I encourage you to go ask an image generator to make a Bixby dog wearing shoes and send it to us. Long years? Short years. Long, long. Yeah. This is a real floppy dog. Yeah, that's what I thought. Bixby. Yeah. But if you were to recall the original Bixby, the idea was that it would not compete with Google Assistant to do web queries. It would change the settings on your phone. Right. It was designed to do stuff. Never did it. Yeah, never, it was not a good butler. I mean, it was a dog.

Dog's are good butlers. What do we think we're doing? Inherently suck at that. Well, what do we think we're doing here? But now they're saying we're working so hard to make it that, which is fascinating, because they still think that as a thing that people want. I think it is. I think the idea that I can just yell at my phone to do something, like, go download the Ticketmaster app. Way better user experience than what it actually currently takes to go download the Ticketmaster app.

But it just never really worked. But I think we're actually at a point with a lot of this AI stuff where in that limited scope of things your phone is capable of doing, have the system connected out for you, that can work. Like, is it easier to say, turn on Bluetooth and look for this weird name of headphones that I have. Is that easier than going into the menu and hitting the thing? Like, probably not.

But I think Samsung's idea that this is less about like getting esoteric philosophical answers about the world and more about just like getting the stuff done that you do on your phone. Well, it's kind of, right. What we talked about earlier, where it's customer support. Yeah, it basically is. Yeah, it's for people being like, I don't know how to turn Bluetooth on on my phone. How do I do it? Right. And Bixby will appear. Yeah, like Bixby, my phone's in Portuguese. Fix that.

Perfect. I'll be open to Gato. I'll just read it from Juan Jun Choi, executive vice president of mobile at Samsung. I believe we have to redefine the role of Bixby so that Bixby can be equipped with a generate of AI to be smarter. You have to redefine Bixby. Well, Bixby has to have a role. We'll see. So Bixby exists on all the Samsung's other products. You can see how they build an oligosystem. I don't know, man. I feel like we're all racing the shove AI into these moments.

And I think the phone companies are particularly afraid of the rabbits and the humane and the blah, blah, blah. You wrote a piece about this this week. The AI gadgets are coming. Yeah. And I think you mentioned developer conferences. I'm confident we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff in iOS at WWDC. Google, obviously, at IO is going to talk about it a lot. I can't imagine they will, Microsoft will talk about anything else it builds.

No. I mean, and the problem is all of these companies, there's basically like two sides of the world at this point, right? There's the companies that have done well in smartphones, which is three companies. It's Apple, it's Google, and it's Samsung. Those companies are desperate to figure out an AI reason for your smartphone, so that you will keep using your smartphone. Because what they're afraid of is that this new generation of other companies is going to come in.

And they're not going to have solved the whole problem immediately, but they're going to have fixed some part of the user experience. The people are like, oh, this is the thing that gets me past my phone. And I think that's what I'm particularly looking for with what humane is doing, and what rabbit is doing in companies like Brilliant and even Meta with the smart glasses that are getting the AI. Like, can they start to pull pieces of what I do on my phone out of my phone?

And if the answer is yes, that starts to kind of get in the way of this, like, essentially three company ownership of this smartphone universe, at least in the US. And so it's not at all an accident that you have Apple with Siri, Google with Gemini, and Samsung with Bixby, like desperately trying to figure out how to make your phone AI inside of the existing structure of phones, which is very hard to do.

Because an AI that can do all the things I want it to do is literally not allowed in the way that phones exist right now. So it's going to be fascinating. And so Apple is either going to have to say like, oh, Siri can now go download apps for you and do stuff inside of those apps. And it has weird permission that nothing has ever had before. Or it's going to like protect this crazy revenue stream that is the app store at the risk of losing it all to gadgets that come up with a new way to do it.

It's going to be a really fun, like three months. Yeah, pure chaos. Okay, I'm telling you a year from now. Yeah, it's my prediction. In the spring doldrums, there's like a year from now. Whole new internet. All right, wish take break. Just come back. We have lightning around part two. Still available to be sponsored. Call now. All right, we'll be right back. Support for this podcast comes from Canva. They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but you know what you can get built in a day?

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Back. Letting round part two. This one's going to be fast. David point out the first lightning round was almost an hour long. We talked about four things. Classic lightning round. We're just going to go, this is my plan for this one. I'm just going to read the headlines. Oh, okay. And then we're just going to. Oxen and just leave. John Stewart is back on the daily show. Just on Mondays, I think. He had a good segment on AI, mostly being fake ads.

And then he interviewed Lena Khan and basically accused Apple of censoring his previous show on Apple. Yeah. And this isn't the first time he's done that. That's the thing that's what I wanted to talk about on this show. It was like, what's going on with Apple and John Stewart? Because he keeps being like, hey, Apple censored me more than once. It wouldn't let me talk about China. It wouldn't let me talk to Lena Khan. Like, it wouldn't let me do stupid.

Pokes at technology. What's going on over at Apple? And that's a bad sign. Yeah. Well, what's an Apple thing they were buying? Yeah. Like everyone around that. I wondered that too. Like, just don't make a deal with John Stewart. It's like, it's fine. If that's, if that's how you feel, just don't have John Stewart. I don't know. Well, that's what they eventually decided.

Well, right. Yeah. But I think about like, there was the thing Ryan Johnson said a few years ago about how one of the sneaky things about Apple is they'll never let the bad guy have an iPhone in a movie. You guys heard it? You've heard it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think about that all the time is just sort of like a silly quirk of Apple, right?

And there's a lot of things going on with how distribution works. And there's like now Tom Cruise can never be fighting an enemy with a name because it gets associated with the country. And the movie doesn't play in that country. So like, you can move around inside of this landscape and all kinds of weird ways.

This one is just like, it just seems like it was a bad fit from the beginning. And I also, I don't know John Stewart personally, but I get the distinct sense that if you make John Stewart a list of things he can't do, he's going to then attempt to go do every single one of them. Yeah. So I feel like it's almost a miracle that lasted this long with Apple.

But it was very funny to hear him say to Lena Khan. I wanted to have you on my show and Apple said, but Lena Khan is a chair of the federal trade commission and she leads a lot of antitrust efforts. Federal trade commission, not the entity suing Apple for antitrust violations. That's the DOJ, but she's the face of a lot of it. She has a lot of feelings about antitrust in general. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of a lot of things. And the tech companies all hate her. It's like a real thing.

But it's like weird. Like I come back to this all the time, same as you Alex, which is like these tech companies they want they want to do media. And then they get one slice of what it's actually like to do media, which is just having to be OK with things. And they're like, no, thank you. Yeah. But I mean, they're we're seeing their increasing their control in Hollywood. Like that like Apple is doing pretty well.

Apple TV was the second most searched thing during the outage yesterday. Like they they have this power and it is always I think very uncomfortable for me to see any media organization, which Apple now is saying, no, you can't cover something.

And that's been the way it's been always right. There's always been sensors at these companies saying, no, you can't talk about this. No, you can't talk about that. And it felt like in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, those sensors, their power had really started a way. Because we had these different ways of getting this content to people. It wasn't just broadcast television. It was also it was the films, but it was also streaming. It was also cable. All these other ways.

And Apple came in and was like, yeah, network censorship. That's it's cool. And and just brought it immediately back. And it makes sense. Sure. But the last time they were doing it so that they didn't get sued by the FCC. That's why we had networks and sensors for so long. This time they're doing it because Apple doesn't want to upset people in China because it wants to sell phones in China.

And like the motivation is very, very different. And I think that's what makes me the most uncomfortable here. Is that like we're seeing a very large company exert its influence directly on the things it owns. And then saying like we're doing it for very greedy capitalism reasons, which is like fine. That's your job. Your job is to make money. But also if your job is to make money and your job is to create media.

But also if you don't want someone talking about, don't hire John Stewart. That's kind of where I'm at. This is the part about this I find so confusing. It's like there was the thing with Disney forever, right where Disney was reluctant to do something like add Hulu to Disney Plus because this sort of family friendly nature of a platform they call Disney was very important to that company.

And that has I think changed internally over time. But like that's a stance you can hold. If that's how you want to feel terrific. Don't hire John Stewart. And so and so to me it's like the thing that I find strange is not that Apple has these feelings but that it really loudly wants to pretend it doesn't have these feelings. And then goes around just sort of quietly trying to steer everyone in the direction that Apple would like, which is honestly Apple's whole MO with everything all the time.

Yeah, Apple Apple prefers to be sort of the wizard behind the curtain exerting influence without saying or doing anything publicly. This is the closest Apple has gotten to like news programming though like I'm fine if Apple wants to make. Apple wants to be a movie studio and it only makes heartwarming movies about. That's funny. Yeah. You're a great movie studio. Yeah. Nobody's mad at the Hallmark channel for not doing like hard.

It's just curious. But like hiring John Stewart is like we're going to do news. We're going to be topical. We're going to relevant. And you just see most other big tech companies if they tried it and they're all running away from it as fast as like Instagram threads. We don't want to do news.

Like this is messy. It's hard. It gets us in lots of trouble. It's not even when people want Instagram threads. The algorithm is only going to show you content about how to be a tradwife so people can do engagement bait. And it's like what's happening here all day long. Right. And like I think Apple hasn't quite had that realization yet. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think there's also just the concern that if these are also the companies that.

Are the primary owners of how we view media and they all don't want to do news and they don't want to talk about serious issues all the time. Well, that's bad too. Yeah, take a look around the media industry. Let's see how well this is going for everybody. Okay, that's that one speaking of Apple and had trust. Two things. One, the first European alternative app stores have hit because of the DMA.

Not the good one yet, which is alt store, which is going to have the emulators in it. Like an enterprise one has hit, which is perfect. Yeah, of course enterprise software is the first to go. Yeah, would you like to jump through a bunch of hoops to the other B2B apps? We have a store for you. But Kaelin Booth, who's in Europe, we hired them to like look at this stuff. We have a good deep look at it. There are a lot of hoops.

Yeah, let me just read this sentence to you. It made me laugh very funny. It goes like this. You begin by clicking a browser base link to load the alternative store from there.

You receive a pop up informing you that your installation settings don't allow marketplaces from that developer. Then you head into settings, enable the marketplace, return to your browser, click the download link again and receive another prompt asking you to confirm the install. Finally, you can open the store and browse the available apps.

Perfect. Yeah, I feel like I'd screw that up by accident. Yeah. So the argument is Apple doesn't know if it's things are in compliance with the DMA until they release them and the European regulators tell them, which is weird. Right. Like if you're going to be a regulator and you're going to insist that things are designed, we should just say how you want them designed.

It's weird back and forth, but I suspect all of this will change because the way it's designed is they released it and then the European regulators are going to be like, oh, I know. How? And they're going to say this isn't good enough. I think that's probably great. I also, I'm not terribly bothered by making people jump through several hoops to do this, honestly.

Like, I think the thing on the Mac, where if you try to download an app from a sort of non-trusted source being like the app store, it makes you open settings, find a thing, check that box and then go do it again. I think that is like the correct number of hoops to jump through. Like this is the sort of thing you should not be able to do by accident. But if you want to do it, you should be able to do it. You should have to know that you're doing it.

I want to be able to absolutely destroy my phone on accident. That's how I learned how to compute. And I want to maintain that. And I think like kids today, that's, you know, the kids today, they got to learn too. Everybody's got to learn how to just destroy all of their technology because they clicked one wrong box somewhere. And it makes you sharper. It makes you think more. And we got to make people sharper.

I like it. This is how we bring down a number of Iranian centrifuges. Just let the worms proliferate. Malware built there. Yeah, it does. If you ever brought down an entire computer lab, try to download one in P3. All right. Now you're a real man. I think there's a balance there because Andrew has had this model for a long time where you can like jump through some hoops. And the argument is like, I mean, we've seen it in the epic antitrust case against Google.

Like Google knew that people weren't doing his hoops were there. Right. But then you kind of don't want a bunch of people accidentally screenings up. The thing that's really interesting though is AltStore has Delta in it, which is an Nintendo emulator by all accounts, a great emulator. Apple will allow that on its stores. But now you're like, oh, there's an entire use case for the iPhone that's available to now because there's an alternative application distribution model. That's worth it.

Oh, I agree. A hundred percent. Agreed. And I think it is. It's kind of great that that is the first thing because like leaving aside all the legality questions about emulation in general, like whatever. Playing those kinds of games on your phone is so fun. It's so fun. And you're right that it has not been allowed. And it's never going to be allowed. And there was a minute where Riley tested the developer thought he was going to get into the App Store proper.

And then got that sort of ripped out from under him. This is a couple of years ago now. But now we're at a point where like if you want to go through the hoops, you are going to be able to get your phone to do almost anything. And I think that is the right approach. I think it should be hard work to do the dumb stuff you want to do on your phone. Like I think it should be more than one click of one link to download malware on your phone. But dammit if you want to download malware on your phone.

You should be allowed. You should be allowed. And I think that's fine. And I think it is going to be interesting to see from a regulatory perspective how they view the hoops. Because I think if the goal of the EU and the regulators in general is to make it so sort of like opaque in the process that it feels like you're downloading an app from the App Store even when you're not.

I actually think that's a bad outcome. But I also feel like the thing where you have to go essentially check the one box that declares the like I know what I'm doing and I'm willing to put up the consequences. And then you can move on with your life. Feels right to me. And this feels like a little overshoot of that. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I'm very excited. I mean, this is the experiment where we've never run it before.

Like we'll see how it goes. I think there's something really exciting to happen here. David, you've added this extremely fake story about Stephen. I think TikTok without the algorithm defend yourself defend the addition of this. This is a totally fake story. It's not a fake story. Well, this is why I added it because so we got a ton of feedback over the last couple of weeks about both the Appalachian Trust stuff and the TikTok ban.

And we're going to talk about all that stuff on Tuesday's episode. But for this one, my real question is more theoretical than this. Like Steve Nuchin is not going to buy TikTok buying TikTok without the algorithm is not a thing. He's a former Treasury Secretary under Trump. Yeah. Who is not going to buy TikTok. Doesn't matter who he is. He's not going to buy TikTok.

And I think I'm just fascinated by this question. So there are two pieces of news here that I think are related. So one is that Facebook this week rolled out a unified video player for all of its video across platforms. And it's basically all in on precisely TikTok style vertical video. And that plus this thing where it's like, okay, what do you buy if you buy TikTok without the algorithm?

Just let me to believe like maybe maybe the answer is nothing like buying TikTok without without the algorithm. Is that anything? But then we're to point where TikTok has actually gotten more and more transparent about what the algorithm is. And so in theory, you could start to do better and companies like meta have been more explicit about like we're not going to show you stuff from your friends. We're not going to buy us anything except engagement and entertainment essentially.

So it's like you can actually start to kind of reverse engineer TikTok and without this magical algorithm that is so much of what TikTok has become. You're just buying a brand name, right? Like you're buying a license to the word TikTok and that's well and good. But TikTok without the algorithm feels like it to me it's worth like $5.

Yeah. I think I just don't see it. And I think that if that's going to become the question. And I think so far our theory, which is that this is going to lead to nothing. Has pretty much born out. We've basically heard nothing about this since there was all that stuff a couple of weeks ago. I hope he does that. I hope like right now as we were recording. Well, I think the voice of the youth. I think a former treasury secretary Steve Chin.

Well, you get all the content you'd buy all the content. And then you just put any algorithm on top of it. You're fine. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's what you that's what you'd be buying. You'd be buying all the user generated content that is TikTok. I guess that's true. That's that's also all of that content now exists on all the other platforms. That's true. That's that's kind of where I'm at, right? Like if I'm if I'm the Instagram team.

I'm I'm having meetings where it's like what does TikTok have and offer at this moment that we can't. And like the YouTube shorts team I know is asking that same kind of question. Like I know it's all just sitting there. And especially if you don't have the algorithm and the algorithm has been made out to be this like magical thing that is irreplicable. And perfect and understands people better than they do themselves. I don't know that it's that.

I think part of it is just that like TikTok is so shameless about the way that it works. And like Adam Miserie who runs Instagram is like ringing his hands trying to be a good person. And TikTok is just like TikTok shop. Let's go. TikTok is doing things just happened for you. I think they're testing this. It's definitely happening to me where they just start playing an ad at the end of every video now. Oh no. I have not gotten that.

So you're like instead of looping it's just like here's the ad. And all of those ads for me are for the Land Rover Defender. Which is utterly confusing. Like that algorithm believes that it can get me to buy a Land Rover Defender. And all the ads start with the same sweeping shot of the word defender. So it's like I never know if it's just like some weird IT security company. No it's Land Rover Defender. That's where it is. There it is again definitely not buying a Land Rover Defender.

It's pretty good though. Yeah it's just like but they've started doing it. Like they're the platform is getting. They're squeezing more pennies out of it right because of my co-away or something. I feel like the algorithms also just getting worse. Like it keeps showing me this guy going what's up brother. All right, it's got. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a sports person. I don't play mad. You're talking about it. You guys immediately were like yeah. Yeah. We of course.

Maybe that's why. Yeah. I know that now because TikTok showed me that. It's not like the TikTok just made a weird Twitch streamer or a star is like very interesting. It's super weird. All right. Mark this down. That's a story. We'll come back to this in Microsoft. But the story slowly fake. This dude is not buying TikTok. No. No. Last two little regulatory ones. I think it's very funny that the House of Representatives has now banned its staffers from using Microsoft Co-Pilot

because they're putting too much data into an insecure LLM system. Very funny. Yep. Just deeply funny. And then we'll come back to this in more detail. But the FCC has scheduled a vote to restore net neutrality, which is very interesting. It feels like we've already ruined enough things. You know, it's like it's like hard for anyone to get excited about this. We did it. Because they took net neutrality away, I just want to...

There are people out there who are like nothing bad happened when net neutrality went away. And one very specific bad thing happened, which is that AT&T bought Time Warner. Very specific bad thing happened. And they thought they could prioritize Time Warner services on AT&T's network. And then they paid the tax nutter to make a 4-3 grayscale version of the Justice League. Alex, did Batgirl die because net neutrality died? Yeah. Could you draw... I feel like you could draw that line.

I think you can... Because without that acquisition, they don't have all the debt when they get offloaded, which means Zazlove doesn't have to kill Batgirl. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks to Jeep High, you ruined Batgirl. I'm just saying, this man in his stupid mug is stupid oversized, recent pieces mug. And everyone's like, no bad things happen. And it's like actually one very tangible bad thing happened. And there's AT&T had a theory of the case.

It was like, we will buy a content service, prioritize it, and preload tiny little clips of Game of Thrones on mid-range Android phones. Wait. And accept all of that from our data caps. This was it. And then we're going to get Zack Snyder for some godforsaken reason. I know he thought it was the IMAX aspect ratio, okay? I know that's what he was thinking. But the reality is he made a four-three version of Justice League. That's how I watched it on my TV. It was a square. Why?

The more you say it, the more I feel like, what if NetNutra... Like actually that was a good thing that AT&T was allowed to... We got four-three Justice League. Yeah, because it proved that no one wants that. It does prove. I agree with you. I actually agree. The market firmly rejected AT&T's ideas. It was like, no, this is stupid. But we didn't need to go through all that pain. We didn't need to fire all those people. Like the layoffs that occurred, the general pain...

Thousands of people have taken it. Loved upon the American populace. With black and white, Zack Snyder. Four-three Justice League was created. Like we didn't have to... I'm saying, I think the layoffs were worse. The millions of dollars of debt and weirdness... But we all experienced Zack Snyder. Rounds of rolling layoffs are bad. I don't think we need to do them. We should have healthy companies in a functional marketplace. But then also there was a four-three Justice League.

Also very tangible. We had to watch it. We had to watch it. I watched all like 15 hours of it. You had to do it as a journalist. What saved me is because I invest in OLED technology. Oh my God. The pillar boxes weren't shiny. It was so big. How was your bitrate? Horrible! A-Shirt box is a garbage bitrate. Get that shit on Bravia Quart ASAP. And excuse that from your data caps, AT&T.

I'm just saying, whenever anyone tells you, whenever you see the weirdos on the X, like net neutrality led to nothing, immediately reply with a screenshot of four-three Justice League in Grace. I feel like the bin diagram of weirdos on X saying net neutrality led to nothing, and the people who really wanted that four-three movies is circle. They couldn't even, they weren't even like just fill make it 16, just do it. I'm accent-hanced, right? Because we all have those in our house.

You don't have an iMac screen in your house? All that OLED you get. I do like that iMac's enhanced is basically that we took a 21.9 cinema frame and made it 16 right now. It's just regular. It's just regular. Like Disney plus like iMac's enhanced, like what does that mean? It's 16 by 9. Yeah. That's what that has worked out too. It's great. All right. That vote is coming up. We'll probably have Lauren back to cover in more detail.

What it actually means, there's some meaningful differences between this version and previous versions. I just want to point out that again, you live in an America right now, 2024, where backerol was killed. David Zazlov. Can't believe it. Rain of terror continues. We're down to three wireless carriers and Project Gen 5 Sys. All because of the stupid mug. It's a real thing. There's no, by the way, at the same time, the same Adjeet Pi FCC got rid of the privacy protections for broadband carriers.

And any ability to regulate them all? These are our favorite companies, the ISPs. I should note at this time that NBC Universal is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns the Verge and NBC Universal is on the Comcast, which does not love net neutrality, or me, is it happens? I subscribe to Verizon. It's okay. I fire us. It's nice. It's okay. I mean, 18T's subscriber. I streamed Justice League for free. Oh, wow. That didn't hit my data cap at all. Congratulations. This big for you.

My 18T subscription still locked into Max. And so now I only have Max and 1080p. It's very good. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be back. We're back with what David has titled the Everything Else Lightning round. Yeah, it's a kind of grab baggy sponsored by everything else. Yeah, sponsored by Walmart. Did you get a free blue check from X this week? No, no, sad. I hesitate to talk about you on the show. Like, did you get a check? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say. Please exercise for free today. I'm going to say, I'm going to believe completely new to remember what it was today. You went and... Jazz was there. I felt that, yeah, plein of clumsy things, not them. Maybe, like... Oh, you were right. You were, but because you know what are you doing, right?

A lot money is willing to help. Can you add a touch. I feel like some of the news that I'm relating to you has not changed. forecast. I've never seen it before, but various investors and executives are talking about replacing Elon as CEO. That will probably never happen. But even the fact that it is a conversation that has occurred, like in the CNBC orbits. The shine is off. Seems very bad. Tesla stock is generally tanking. Elon is tweeting about the will mine virus

instead of shipping more cars from making X good. It's not great over there. No, I think there was a thing about Tesla that made him kind of invincible for a really long time because it was like the conversation around Elon for so long was like say whatever you want. People are voting with their dollars, right? Like Tesla was on fire. Investors loved it. People were buying it. We talked on this show about how there was

essentially unlimited demand for Tesla's. And at some point in the last year or so, that turned. And I think you can probably blame that on a confluence of things. Not all of it is a lot of people decided they don't like Elon Musk anymore, but I think some of it is that. But like this sort of era of power that Tesla had for a long time seems pretty clearly to be

if not over them under like really serious threat. And as we've been saying, and I think as you in particular, Neelyl, I have said a few times on this show, Tesla is both like a great strength and a great weakness for Elon because of the way it ties into China, because of the way it like has all of his fortunes inside of it. That like what happens to this company is so materially important to what happens to everything else that Elon Musk wants

to do, including the way that SpaceX works with the government. Like it's all so tied up. And so you get the sense that as it is starting to turn the other way, like the spiral happens in the reverse direction too. And it feels like it's getting really ugly, really fast. So we have a story this week. There's a reputation tracking firm called Caliber. I want to

survey a bunch of people. The consideration score for Tesla, which is basically consumer interest in brands, the question they went and surveyed people I would buy or continue buying products and services from Tesla if given the chance. In November 2021, 70% of people said yes, that's down to 31%. Whoa. Yeah. I mean, that everything about that, because we've seen the quality has dropped. We've seen people talking more about that

quality. We've seen people struggling with getting their cars repaired, getting this like customer service is really, really bad there. So all those things that actually do matter to a consumer experience in Elon kind of was like, don't worry about it. We're building the future. Eventually people are like, yes, but I want my car to work now.

Right. I also think this ongoing full-subdriving fiasco that this company just cannot get out of where it refuses to stop calling full-subdriving when it is not full-subdriving and actually what it's doing is really dangerous. Like the public perception on that I think is like decidedly negative at this point, which is really like even outside of how you feel about Elon Musk, the idea that Tesla is like the future of cars in a lot of ways like hinges on that.

Right. Oh, their entire valuation hinges on that. Right. Like I've watched, I mean, I go on CNBC all the time. I talk to the analysts there. You look at how the market values Tesla and it's still built into the idea that you will go to work and your car will like leave your house and like drive itself and be a taxi service. Right. The Tesla is going to be like infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And like, no, it's a car company.

Yeah. Like that's the, but all of the multiple of Tesla is built on the idea that the cars will generate more value than just being an appreciating asset that most people should at least think it was over. Yeah. That's the idea here. Like the multiple, and that's why Elon is constantly talking about AI now, all this stuff. And he's like, like, Tesla's really an AI company because he's trying to get this other thing to happen and get this

other multiple. And it's like the market is starting to just see a car company. A car company that shipped a triangle instead of a trailer pickup truck. A car company that can't deliver like well-made cars. Yeah. Like all the stuff. And who CEO is becoming more and more and popular by the day because he won't shut up. Yep. We have like, I talked to a lot of CEOs. They're not all pleasant people. Like by and large, like very aggressive type A

personalities in the sea suites of American companies. But they know to not. They have people around them. They hire publicity firms and stuff which Elon famously refuses. And like don't tweet. Turns out to be pretty good advice. Yeah. Most especially about the woke mind virus and the great replacement theory. Yeah. If you're a publicly traded company, don't tweet. If you're a publicly traded company that sells electric cars to extremely

liberal people by and large, just doing some light supremacy on the sides. It's not a great idea for you. Yeah. Yeah. Not great for your value. Anyway. It's just a weird time. Like, let's bring this all back around. X now giving the check marks away to journalists for free. Very funny. Yes. Like all the way back around. They're like, what if we've verified something? It's because they need people to use the platform. I suspect it won't

work. But no, if anything, it seems to be like, do you remember that moment right after they said you're going to have to start paying for the blue check, but they hadn't taken it away from people who had it before. And all these people were coming out saying, no, no, just so you know, I didn't pay for it. Yeah. We're doing that again where people

are like embarrassed to have a blue check. Yeah. But the way that it is like, it's a badge of like, you are pathetically still using this platform rather than something you're actually part of. I was going to say it kind of works because then you have to go log in and tweet or excuse me post, I didn't pay for this check mark. Yeah. Like they got you. And your unregretted user minutes go through the roof. Yeah. Yeah. That's enough

you'll on talk for one day. Spotify reportedly having a price increase. They've realized they increased. They look, they increased prices last year. Had their best year ever. They also laid off a bunch of people had cuts. So the increase revenue reduced costs heartlessly, but do it. That does in fact work. Yeah. Usually maths out. There's not a lot of places to go from Spotify. Like I don't think people are like, Oh, Spotify is going

up. I'm switching to YouTube music. No, people should not and are not doing that. I mean, I think to me, the thing that seems to be true is that $9.99 was the wrong price for streaming music. We just kind of decided this. Like years ago, it was just like in the same way that Steve Jobs is just like, what if songs cost $0.99 and everything's like, all right. Like a long time ago, it was just like 10 bucks a month. And it's just where

we are. And it turns out that is good money for record labels. Yeah. And bad both for most artists and most streaming companies. Well, I mean, Spotify did it because that was when they were they were coming into the United States, where you had this really entrenched market run by Apple. Right. And they were like, Okay, we got to compete with 99 cent songs. How do we do that? $10 a month and you get all of the songs. And we are like, yes,

that's sick. Yeah. And I think if there'd been 20 bucks a month, it probably wouldn't have worked. So, but if it had been 20 bucks a month, it might have been a hell of a lot more sustainable. Yeah. I mean, I would say the last 10 plus years of like $10 a month, that's that's pretty good run for the better run than like Netflix. Oh, for sure. Yeah. No, I actually think we as users probably saved a lot of money on on on Spotify's time.

But I think this feels super inevitable to me. And this will not be the last one. I don't think that like it went from $9.99 to $10.99. And now the report is it's going to go up, I think either one or two more dollars. Right. I would not be surprised if a couple of years from now were like 15 bucks for Spotify. What? I'll still pay it. Like music services are awesome. Yeah. I have I have zero qualms with the fact that I have all the music on

earth available to me at all times. But it is it is a bummer to see this. I'm more sensitive to this for Spotify because like it's a bad business for Spotify. It's not Spotify being like we make lots of money, but we want more. Give us more. This is Spotify being like we literally cannot do this anymore. Please give us more money. Yeah. How do you all feel like Apple will respond to this? I don't think Apple will raise their prices at

all actually. I think that any price increases get rolled into Apple one. And that's just what they're going to keep doing. I think Apple music they run it as a loss leader to get you into that bigger. I don't even pay for it. I get it through my Verizon account. And I'm like, all right. Yeah. I think Apple is very happy to let that be somewhere between an okay business and a slightly less than okay business in service of everything else.

Yeah. And they want you in that Apple one. Yeah. As hard as they can be. When all their services went down, it was like people search for the app store being down in a little bit of Apple TV and nothing else. Oh, it was so sad. We were looking at the thing we put in like, we're like, what about arcade? No. We couldn't even like find the line on the graph. We're like, oh, that's a bummer. Which is funny because Apple music is hugely popular.

It is Apple music and Spotify are the two winners in this market by a gigantic market. It's not the one people go googling when they can't get in their rush hours. Yeah. And then they're not. All right. Two stories that are in conflict in really interesting ways. Opening eye has a new voice cloning model. It only needs 15 seconds of audio to clone your voice, fascinating. And there was a fake George Carlin special. They settled

with the estate of George Carlin. They promised not to do it anymore. Actually, a weird drama inside of that story is whether there was actually AI used to make the fake George Carlin special or whether they were faking it, which is interesting. Well, they admit they admitted to writing it themselves. Yeah. How the rest of it was produced, I think as far as I know, at least has not been really nailed down. But the idea that this was like written, produced

and created by AI just flatly, not true. And it's been a really fun thing going around. Like there was this whole story this week about how Amazon's just walk out technology was actually powered by like a thousand contractors in India manually reviewing your trip through to make sure that you paid for everything. And I think it was Molly White who runs the website. I think it's what is it? Web three is going great. Yeah. Who was basically like,

I wish I had been tracking all the times that AI turned out to just be a guy. And then it's really true. And this feels like that too. It's just it's just a guy. It doesn't help that one of them is like from mad TV. Yeah. Yeah. But these two ideas are intention. We've talked about this so many times. Like AI being able to clone a voice or clone a picture that that that that and then you have in doing a faster than ever. You

need 15 seconds of our voices to clone us. Yeah. Which we have generated more of that on this very very podcast. And then it's like, Oh, but we have no controls over how those likenesses are used or any of that is actually being done except for these handful of lawsuits that might bring the whole thing crashing down. Yeah. Well, an open AI strategy has been so far to roll it out really slowly and only with a few partners. And it's like, OK, that's

fine at the beginning. But then what's going to happen is you're going to have a better version of this technology that you give to everybody. So like, what's the plan then? Yeah. It's like if they were saying, you know, it takes 900 hours. So we're only letting a few people use it because it's hugely intensive. I'd be like, OK, well, whatever. But this is like, we found a very good technology. But only a few people can have it. And then

everybody can have a very good technology. What are we accomplishing here? Yeah. But I think, I mean, this is this has been coming, right? Like the the the New York Times, I think it was this week, had a big announcement about how most of its articles are now going to be available in audio form read by automated narrators. Like 11 labs, which is a company we've talked about on the show before is doing like incredible slash terrifying work synthesizing

people's voices. Like this stuff is moving as fast as any other tech in AI right now. And it's getting really crazy, really fast. And I feel like probably should be talked about more than it is in the way that we talk about like generated images and how they're being used in political campaigns and all this stuff. Like you're going to start, you're going to get phone calls from Joe Biden telling you not to vote. Like that's a thing that's

going to start to happen. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it happened. Yeah. And I think like this open AI is typically very good at this. And I think is not usually wrong when it says it built something good, but is not great at playing it slow. Yeah. One story that hit just as we were we as we've been talking on this wordcast, Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube at a conference said, open AI should not train its systems on YouTube, which is not how

open AI is not about the internet. No. And who was it? It was, was it Miriam Arati at open AI who said to Joanna Stern and our friend, Joanna was when they were talking about the video thing Sora that open AI came out with. Joanna was like, are you training this on stuff from the internet? She's like, ah, some training stuff internet, public private. And Joanna was like, are you getting it from YouTube? And she was just like, ah, so

it's like, oh, okay. So you're obviously getting it from YouTube. Yeah. Like, it's not great. No. If Google sues open AI on behalf of YouTube creators for training, it's that's a weird. There's a copyright apocalypse. We did an entirety code or was there a John, you know, listen to it. But there's a potential copyright apocalypse. Yes. This for me is just going to make a video in which he sues open AI for $100 million. And

then gives them money. That would be incredible. All right. We got to end this thing. We're way, way over. But David, you should end by talking about Google podcasts. Well, this is a good, we're circling back around to we're closing the loop on Google not closing the loop. Google could stand to learn from us. So Google podcasts is dead. Although it's actually not dead. It's like ironically, Google has so forgotten about Google podcasts

that it seems to have forgotten to turn it off. Was that it was that that was it's like podcast app? Yeah. So it had a dedicated podcast app. It came out in 2016, been around for a while. It did what Google does to many of its apps, which is like it launched. It had big ideas. It seemed kind of cool. I got a couple of updates. Google forgot about it. Google launched a competitor and then Google killed it. This is the story of Google

apps. And so the the plant here is to replace Google podcasts with YouTube music. And they've been making some moves into YouTube music. There is a I would say strong chance you are watching or listening to this podcast right now on YouTube. Part of the reason Google is investing in YouTube is because that is a fast and massively growing place for podcasts. But it had this really cool opportunity in podcasts, right? The Google I went back and read their initial

thing and in 2016 when they launched this app. And they have these big ideas about discovery and helping people find insights inside of podcasts and doing audio, transcription, and search and all this stuff. And it's like, oh, that seems good. Like why didn't you do any of that? That would have been cool. And instead you just forgot about this app for eight years and then killed it. And YouTube is not going to do that. I think going to release

Google podcasts with Gemini at Google I. Oh my god. They relaunch Google podcasts that I have. That would be incredible with Gemini. They could have also solved huge amounts of podcast analytics and advertising problems that everyone has all over the place. I heard from a lot of people after I wrote this story. I had a paragraph in here basically being like, Hey, Google, if you had just done for audio creators, what you did for video creators

on YouTube, you could have won this industry the same way that you did. And I heard from a surprising number of podcasters who were like, I have been begging slash hoping YouTube would do that for years. Like build the ad tools, do the rev share, let me post my stuff on YouTube and make money from it as an audio creator the same way you can as a video creator. And there are lots of, I was about to say good reasons, but they're bad reasons,

but there are lots of reasons Google didn't do that, but it didn't do that. And it could have. And that sucks. I remember being in meetings our company. It's like Google's coming. We better be ready. I'm like, dude. Yeah. Yeah. They'll get distracted. Don't worry about it. It's like I don't know. But also to everyone who wants to know the answer is pocket casts. pocket casts. If you want a good cross platform podcast app that is not

going to go away, the answer is pocket casts. There are other good ones out there and Tenipods really got an Android overcast, Apple podcasts. But if you want to know the answer, it's pocket casts. All right. Well, end there with that completely un, uh, uncontroversial opinion that no one will be able to write. The lightning round brought to you by pocket casts. No, they got to pay the money. We can't give the stuff away

free. Proceed value. Yeah, right. I just brought to you by anything other than pocket casts. All right. That's it. That's the first cast. I'm going to call it a few stories. Um, Becca did a comparison video of the Fuji film X106 versus the Rico GR3X. I'm saying it slowly because that's just a lot of letters. A lot of Roman numerals. Yeah. That's not good. But it's really fun. I'm desperate to buy these cameras for no reason other than

I just want them. Um, uh, Allison wrote about notifications being bad, which is worth reading. She's right. No takeaways. Yeah. Just like start over. Just like throw all this away. It's bad. Uh, and then Liz wrote about vice, uh, one of the weirdest wildest stories. I think we've done in a long time. We didn't entirely code earth was about the story.

So unless that next week, but the, just of it is we thought we were writing a story about how advertising on the web was like went sideways and couldn't support vice because they shut down their newsroom website. So we thought we were writing like advertising cookies and program. And no, no, we're, we're just writing about crazy people. That's the story. She starts 20 people. She described reporting that story as a hall of mirrors because they'll

hate each other. They're all lying to each other about each other. It's very good, beautiful, including one part where it was revealed that vice headed netchets account. Uh, that was on, on the budget of their digital division. And then two different people to credit for shutting down and vice's response to us was we have not had a netchets accounts since 2021. Oh, there you go. So you're really proud. It's very good. Uh, great story.

I agree that that's it. Oh, by the way, we got nominated for a bunch of web. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the people's for best technology podcast, the big webbie and the people's choice, go vote for us. We'll have a link. Go vote for us in the web. We also listen people. It's, it's so important that you vote for the Verge cast as technology podcast. And decoder is also nominated in business podcast. Neely can have his, that's all

fine. I need you to vote for the Verge cast. It's so important that Neely does not win as decoder. It's so important. Please, they really did. Go, webbies really did a stupid. I'll take the business win, give, give this show the tech way. Yeah, you get to have a decoder. As I'm in both categories. Yeah. Okay. Just look for my face and click on it. That's all I'm saying. It's going to be great. All right. That's it. We're way

over on a slow week. We still went way over. That's it. That's a very fast rock. And that's it for the Verge cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866, Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is the production of the Verge and Vox Media podcast network. Our show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week. Thanks to Candle for their support. Candle wants to make your presentations

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