How tariffs will change your gadgets

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Hey everybody, it's Neelai. Before we start the show, I just want to say we were nominated for a Webby Award, which is very exciting. We would love to have you go vote for us. We'll put the link in the show notes. Once again, we'd love to win this Webby. We'd love your support. Go vote for us at the Webby Awards.

Hello and welcome to Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of adding Greek letters that cancel each other out to an equation to make yourself look smart. Who among us? We're very lucky in that we have an audience where you can make that joke and everyone got it and they... they got it on multiple levels. Like, there's a realistic chance the Vergecast audience is like... I should make this equation more complicated, like in your day-to-day life.

it's like the the thing where it's like did you ever have those math problems where you just sort of in your brain you just like know the answer but then it's like show your work and i'm just like i'm gonna just make up a bunch of things that happen between here and there

It's six. All right. I know it's six. I'm not going to tell you why. It's six. It's six. It's not important why it's six, but it's six. Leave me alone. And the answer is crash the world economy. All right. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Richard Lawler is here. Hey, good to be here. There's a lot going on this week. David keeps mumbling we have too much show. We have a lot of show. We're going to talk about tariffs. We've invited Tobias Butler, who is...

the sole proprietor of a gadget maker called Toonshine, which I love. We've talked about it in the show before. I wanted to bring someone on to talk about the real impact of tariffs, so we invited somebody who makes hardware. Really cool hardware that I love to talk about what's going to happen to his business. That's going to be fun. We've got a lightning round. We've got a podcast for the podcast that people love. It's Microsoft's 50th birthday.

There's a lot going on there. So I'm saying we have too much show. Like if everybody could just stop. David, the Nintendo Switch 2 is also out this week. And then on top of that, sometime this weekend. TikTok is going to get banned again or sold directly to Jeff Bezos, which he will operate then from his yacht. Do you know how long ago the Switch 2 announcement feels to me right now? As we're sitting here, it was 20...

eight hours ago, give or take. And you could convince me it was like in January at this point. On top of all of that, we're going to do a full hour on the fact that I once again recommended Brother Printers to the internet and what that says about the state of the media ecosystem. So buckle up, five-hour Vergecast. We should start with Microsoft because on the day this show comes out, April 4th, Microsoft will turn 50 years. Which makes me feel like an ancient wizard.

That is just an old, old number. You were just graduating from college when Microsoft started, right? I sat Bill Gates down. I was like, listen here, young pup. No, it's incredible. Microsoft is one of those companies that we once covered as sort of An upstart at Challenger, now it is an institution. It is the infrastructure that all the other companies run on with Azure. We covered the Balmer era. The Verge started.

Like with Windows Phone. Like the idea that Windows Phone would be a meaningful competitor provided us an awful lot of traffic. Including some of our most contentious reviews of all time. When we would write, hey, this Windows phone is not very good. Oh, yeah. Boy, people had feelings. The Lumia comments were like nothing I've ever seen on tech websites. Yeah, for a long time, it was the most comments we ever got was on a review of the Lumia 900 or something.

They're gone now. We switched commenting platforms so you can't. And I think that's good. I think that is probably for the best that you can't go back and read this. Like everyone, you know that right to be forgotten? Everyone can just forget that. But here's what I want to do in honor of the birthday. We don't want to go too far into the history of Microsoft. We published a list of the 50 best consumer products Microsoft has ever done.

I think most people think we got it right. There's not as much heat as you'd expect. There are some people who vehemently disagree with our ordering. But the stuff on the list, I think everyone agrees, is the right stuff. I was sort of impressed that we managed to get to 50 and I look at most of these 50 and I'm like, yeah, sure. It's pretty good. There's only a few that I'm like, I don't know that this belongs on any best of list of anything.

But for the most part, Microsoft has a better run at this than I anticipated, honestly. I was talking to Jake, who made this list with Tom, and he was like, look. you know lists are there to be argued about Because I was like, I want to add more stuff. Like, put this in an honorable mention category. Wendell's Media Center. I'm going to say it. Wendell's Media Center. Yeah.

All right, so here's the thing. Richard and I were there during the Windows Media Center days when we were at Engadget together. Microsoft would ship you a PC with a cable card decoder in it. There are people listening to this show, young people who do not understand that Microsoft thought it could turn a Windows PC into a cable box using middleware and hardware developed by a consortium of cable companies that were forced to do it by the United States government.

And they thought that this would work. Like a lot. They super thought this would work. For years. For years. We spent a lot of time on that. We all invested a lot of time into that idea. You would call the cable company and be like, I need this code to activate a cable card in my PC. And they would just be like. No, no, we're not going to do that. There is something to be said for Microsoft just has a series of ideas that it just keeps doing over and over. And one of its ideas is...

Television. That's as far as that idea ever goes at Microsoft, it seems. The only reason we talk about CES every year is for years, Bill Gates would show up in Las Vegas. and give a speech where he'd be like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put a PC in the living room. And this idea is called convergence. And then soon there will be a PC in your living room.

and then he was like what if it was an xbox and he was like what if the xbox was a cable box what if the xbox had ir blasters and that didn't And eventually we got to, what if we put basically a Raspberry Pi in your living room and it ran Roku software? And everyone's like, oh, that was way better than a full-on PC. But this is real. It drove the tech industry for you.

Richard, formerly the editor of Engadget HD, an entire subsection of Engadget that we created because Microsoft was like, what if we put a PC? So Richard, I told you you had to pick from this list.

your favorite microsoft product not as you can't pick media That's you doing honorable mentions. See, that's how the media does the censorship. That's what's going on. So I will turn it back on you. And I will include Microsoft's most successful effort at bringing a PC into the living room, the Xbox 360. The time it almost kind of worked because Netflix happened. HD DVD drive did not so much work, but the Netflix app came out on the Xbox 360 very wildly.

and that whole red ring of death thing and all the xboxes that they had to take back and fix we're just not going to talk about Yeah, set that aside. HDDB and the Red Ring of Death. We set that aside. 360 was great. 360 also notable. Because it was a skunkworks project inside of Microsoft under an executive named Jay Allard, who was given special permission to not use Windows or Intel. so it was a custom operating system on custom chips and that's why it was

Wow. This is a true story. And no one at Microsoft went, oh, if you need special permission to do this. we might have other bigger problems. Like that's... No. You know, I think many people at Microsoft did that. Well, sure. And then they, they, they got rid of their CEO and they got a new CEO who solved a bunch of problems. Yeah. That was also where they got, remember the career concept that's on this list.

It was a concept video. I don't think they ever made a project. I don't think they ever made it a product that was just a big book. Like you could open like a notebook and write in it and it was a tablet and it was supposed to be an iPad killer. Also Jay Allard saying, what if I didn't have to use Windows? And that was a bridge too far, my friends. They had been burned by putting windows in the living room so many times they let him do the Xbox 360. But when he was like, what if...

I made an iPad that was good out of not Windows. They're like, death to you, sir. And that was the end of it.

All right, David, what's your story? So I... Did not expect to feel the feelings that I felt about this particular one, but... The one on this list that I most went, oh, as soon as I saw it, was the Surface headphones. Did you all ever have the Surface headphones? No. No, but they had the wheel, right? They had the wheel. So they sounded like... fine but they had unbelievable battery life when unbelievable battery life in uh like a set of

wireless noise cancelling headphones was not a guarantee. And they had the dial. One side was for volume, and one side was to dial up and down transparency, basically. So you could change how much of the world you could hear. and how much you could just be sort of ensconced in noise cancellation. And still to this day, that is by a mile the best interface on a pair of headphones I've ever seen. Everybody else is like weird buttons on the side that you can't find, or they do the Sony.

touch stuff that's just a nightmare like microsoft just did it right the first time and i think they made two pairs of the surface headphones if memory serves uh and then just stopped Because that's what Microsoft does. Why keep doing our good things when we can make more windows. But I loved those headphones. I still have a pair around here somewhere. I'm sure they don't work anymore. But I used those for a really long time because they were super comfortable.

And just being able to like walk around or be on a plane or whatever and just sort of spin it back, talk to somebody, spin it forward. failed to make a mobile phone. And the entire headphone industry requires you to own a phone in order to make a successful pair of headphones. Whatever.

I'm just saying. I mean, there is that. That's your answer. Yeah. I know there's going to be some people who tell me that Sony and Bose are doing fine, but that's just because Apple keeps forgetting to rev the AirPods. This is real. And also the AirPods Max are heavy. Anyway, the Surface headphones, legitimately good. Love a wheel. Very Microsoft to be like, what if?

there was a mechanical moving part on these headphones. We gave up. If they had just put a cable card in your headphones, everything would have been fine. Okay, so I'm going to pick two.

They're kind of like both honorable mentions. They're both on the list. They're just low on the list. Wait, I'm sorry. So Richard can't cheat. Richard did cheat. He provoked an entire conversation about cable cars. Which admittedly is very easy to do on this show. Richard, we're doing tariffs on Eli. This is what's happening. All right, so I'm just going to pick the one that I think everybody expects me to pick, which is the Zune. The ill-fated but beloved Zune.

A product that gave us the word squircle. It's a real thing. A product which boldly asked the question, what if this was brown? It's true. Those are their ideas. Let's make it brown, and instead of a click, we'll have a squircle. Not great, but introduced the design language that would become Metro, which is now everything. And I still, to this day, have a limited edition one of 5,000 Joy Division Zune, which comes in a giant box.

that you know has the unknown pleasures art on it it has every joy division song on it and every now and again i i open the box when you open it they had peter savile design the box joy vision you order designer so you open it and it like lifts up It's not elegant. It's like a big cardboard box and like a bunch of, now it's old, like a bunch of brittle cardboard is like creaks at you, but it like lifts up and you can like look at it.

and then you close it and you put it away until someone puts Zune on a list of 50 Microsoft products and you remember the fact that you paid too much money. Is that one of those things that you like kept in the box because you were like, someday when Joy Division is the biggest band in the world, this is going to be worth something. One day, my daughter will come home wearing this t-shirt and I'll be like, you know.

I have a Joy Division Zune. Have you ever listened to one of these songs, End Lady? That's, yeah, your Heinecube was selling for like thousands of dollars on eBay. So, you know, wait it out. It could happen. That's true. Although I will never, the Heinecube is like in the Vox Media office. By the way, once again, thank you, my friend Gabe, who I effectively stole this back from.

It's there. It's fine. It's there. The Joy Division student lives in its box in my closet. That's very precious to me. Okay, so that's the main... But the one I insisted be on this list. Is Microsoft Word 5.1 for the Mac? which was such a good word processor that when it was replaced by Word 6, which sucked, people kept using it for one full decade. They were like, nope, I'm not upgrading to Word 6. I'm not going to Word 2001 for Mac, all the ones. There was this weird period where Microsoft...

The years that they revved the Mac software were different than the years they revved the Windows software. So you'd have Word 2000, and then the Mac would be like, Word 2001. This made no sense to anyone. But people just kept using Word 5.1 for a decade. I encourage you to look at the screenshot. It is archaic. It's in black and white. It was a perfect piece of software. Like a legitimately perfect piece of software.

I was just going to bring up the screenshot because it's actually like, if you haven't looked at it, and again, I encourage you to, we'll put it in the show notes. If you were to draw a cartoon making fun of how ridiculous word looks. with like billions of buttons and everything. There's like 14 scroll bars here. All of it is completely inscrutable.

And then there's like three lines of text. Like if you wanted to make fun of the design, this is perfect. Every one of those buttons. If you look at every one of those buttons, you know exactly what they do. And they're right in front of you. And there's not a single bit of wasted or hidden. There are five things here that you could convince me all make the space bigger between lines. No, but they do in different and meaningful ways.

I'm telling you. Also, you click the buttons and then the thing happens. And then you click the button right next to it that does the other thing. This is why it's perfect software. Because everything happens. See, I got to disagree with you there, man. We have to embrace debate on this show. We got to go in that direction. How can you go Word 5.1 and not Microsoft Excel? Ooh, I think Excel's got to be on this list, but like as a concept.

Not as an individual version. No, not actually using it. Just the idea. The idea of Excel. Excel is not on this list. And I think the fact that we put... Clippy at 50 and Bob at 49 and did not put Excel on is a statement I'm very glad that we made. I don't think anyone noticed that Excel's not on the list. All right, that's the show, everybody. We got to go. I guess Excel technically is business software, not consumer.

That's my argument for you. All right. That's Microsoft. Go read the list. Let us know what you think we got right or wrong or what you'd put on the list. Congratulations to Microsoft for inching ever closer to oblivion. Can you tell I'm thinking about aging? That's what's happening. But congratulations, Microsoft. Presumably, they'll be around for another 50 years because they make software, not hardware. And I don't know if the terrorists will.

All right. Let's talk about the Switch 2 for a minute. I think Ash is going to be on the show. Ash Paris is going to be on the show real soon to go in depth. She's actually played with it. She's got a number of hands-on impressions. You should watch her YouTube video. But we should still talk about it. David, what's going on with Switch 2? Yeah, first of all, Ash, the YouTube commenters have been loving Ash these last 24 hours, and it's delightful.

highly recommend watching uh she did a social video and a youtube video they're both very good she and andrew webster have both used the thing and both came away from it i think like pretty excited they it's We finally have details on the thing that we wanted Nintendo to make, which is just a Switch, but better. So there was a direct... This week, which is what Nintendo calls its periodic product announcements. And we got...

A bunch of new specs. We got a release date. The thing's coming out on June 5th. It's going to cost $450, which made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings, and we should talk about that. For now. Well, it's going to cost $500. Yeah. $630. Give it time. By the time it ships, it'll be $11,000. Well, you're going to buy the Mario Kart bundle version, right? You're not going to buy this and not get Mario Kart. especially because Mario Kart on its own is $80.

But anyway, Richard, I'm going to list all the specs I can remember off the top of my head, and you're going to fill in the rest. Ready? So big changes. It has a 7.9 inch screen, which is substantially bigger than before. The thing is the same thickness as the previous switch, which is nice, but it is like noticeably physically larger.

1080p screen, not OLED, which, again, made people feel feelings, but there will inevitably be a Switch 2 OLED at some point in the future. That's what Nintendo did with the Switch. I'm sure it'll happen again. New Joy-Cons that attach magnetically instead of the kind of wacky sliding mechanism that they've had before.

There's a new whole video chat system. There's a camera, and they're also going to do third-party cameras that are separate. Microphone in the thing. You can talk and chat all at the same time. Lots of focus on online. There's new controllers. All kinds of new stuff, but it's just a big rev on the switch. And Richard, you were saying right before we got on that there was chip news, right? I missed the chip news.

Yes. Nvidia put out a blog post the day after Nintendo announced the Switch. A. Confirming that it again has an Nvidia chip inside of it. Because this is Nintendo, they didn't really go into details on specs, but they went into far more detail than you would generally expect for Nintendo. confirming that it has DLSS, NVIDIA's technology for kind of rendering things and downscaling them to make them look better. You know, using scaling in AI to make things look better and smoother.

um than the hardware kind of should be capable of some people call it fake frames i think it works really great in some situations in others we'll see but it's also going to be capable of real-time ray tracing. The chip has NVIDIA's RT cores and Tensor cores they use to do all this kind of AI magic. Probably has some relevance to the things they're doing with video and with audio, like there's a mic.

on the device itself so that you can have it set up in the dock and use it to chat. So I'm sure they're doing noise canceling and all the other features that we've seen from NVIDIA over the years within this thing. So I am very interested to see how it performs really. It does seem like This may this may not be like a huge high end.

processor system that they're getting from nvidia but like this device actually has kind of a lot to do uh and and one of the things ash and andrew were saying is like a lot of the games that they were playing felt bigger and more detailed and like they are games designed to be run on much more powerful hardware than we have in the last version. And so like the

It was a Tegra chip inside of the first one, right? Yeah, I'm kind of wondering about that chip overall, because it was a Tegra, and that's all related to the fact that NVIDIA thought it would be a smartphone competitor.

to qualcomm and that just didn't pan out right and so that was the chip back then and now you know they're saying it's a custom chip we should talk about dlss a little bit in this context because it's kind of fascinating to see it brought to a mobile device in this specific way where you get

all like the better visual fidelity that ash and andrew have talked about and maybe that's just because of dlss like maybe the games haven't been switch two-ified they're just getting upscaled by ai by this chip There's usually that's like, I wouldn't say it's power hungry, but it's, that's power intense.

right to run all of that after you've rendered the game which is not something we've seen i think really in the mobile context which could also contribute to the fact that it has a i think a shorter battery life than the switch one from what we've seen from the specs So it seems to me like this is a little bit more of a dock-friendly machine than the original. That was my read, too.

And I do wonder what Nintendo has learned from the first Switch that made it think that, because that was my exact reaction too. And even the way that they talked about it, this is much more like a thing they expect you to play. on a table or in front of a television or something else. Even the mouse gesture thing is not a thing you do when you're sitting on the couch playing video games. I assume what Nintendo has discovered...

is that it is like a sometimes portable device, but a mostly docked device. And I think if you're... If you know that or you can assume that, you get to lean on power a little more and battery life a little less, which I think is the opposite of what Nintendo did the first time. Like, especially for 2017, what it managed to get.

out of the battery was reasonably impressive. And it does feel like they flipped that balance a little this time, which I think is probably the right call. I'm dying to know. It's funny, we talked about Windows Media Center. All the stuff they're adding to it, the mouse mode, the camera, the video chat... It's all getting away from what made the Switch in particular such a huge success. Here's this dedicated device for playing games.

the best games that you know the console makers have or at least the most well-crafted games that are pretty singular experiences with franchises people love not it's a mouse Right. And like Nintendo is very good at like weird interaction paradigms. Like they did the entire Wii for God's sake. But like there's a part of you're going to play Mario on the go. And then there's another part that's like. We're going to talk about the C button a lot because that's the video chat.

And that just seems like now we're competing with phones and there's no reason to do that. Just to be clear, by the way, the video calls are optional. You have to buy the optional camera. If you just push the C button, it's voice calls. But this thing is very...

social in a way I think is really interesting and like I was going back and watching all the old first-gen Switch ads, and they're very much like people out in the world playing on this console together like hand your buddy a joy-con and you can like hang out on the beach and play games and this one is like

You're in your living room, but you're still hanging out with your friends who are not in your living room. And it's like, there's just something that happened in the eight years that is both like, Nintendo's probably right. I think there is something that happened in the eight years between the Switch 1 and the Switch 2. It was called COVID. It was a whole thing. We all stopped going outside. And that was when they designed their system.

That's a really good point. That if you rewind to the beginning of the like, what is the Switch 2 meetings, it was probably a bunch of people sitting on Zoom calls. That's, yeah, this is the first of the great COVID hardware wave is like super interesting. The mouse in particular gets me is like, here's this big interaction paradigm that requires you to have a death. Like, how are you going to use this mouse? You're going to put it on a desk.

Ash was not a huge fan of this mouse. We'll see how it plays out. It just seems like the switch is getting a little bit bigger. Right. Like conceptually, it's going to do a little bit more stuff than it did the last time, which is maybe good. Like that's the story of products and that's how products are developed.

i feel like the switch was as successful as it was because it was relatively inexpensive it had zelda and mario and all the rest of the animal crossing and ultimately it wasn't trying to do more than the things you need And I think that's what we're going to find out is whether this is the Wii, where it brought people together with kind of a new control dynamic that the other video game systems weren't doing so much then, or if it's the Wii U, where it costs too much.

and the add-on they put on it isn't something that anyone wants. Do you think there's a real risk that this is the Wii U? Because I really don't. Like, I look at this and I'm like, this is, they're doing some weird stuff, but fundamentally what everybody wanted from them is a better Switch. And like, it really looks like this is a better Switch. Do you think there is actual, like, this was a mistake possibility here?

If this thing breaks $500 because of tariffs in big ways... Right? If it's, we're now at $449. If it gets to $500 because of tariffs, I'm like, oh, it sucks. You know, whatever. If it gets to $600 because of tariffs, that's pretty expensive. right and then you still gotta buy games and all this all these you gotta buy the camera uh you gotta buy a new all this other stuff is gonna start happening that'll make it too expensive for where it should live and that then i think

You have to decide how much you love Mario. It might not be the Wii. It probably isn't the Wii U. It might be the 3DS. No, that's all. I think it's going to be the Switch again. That's your prediction is the 3DS? Or maybe the 2DS. I don't know. I can't remember which one. Game Boy Pocket. Game Boy Pocket. Game Boy Pocket. Every time it comes on the show, I will remind our high school listeners, it fits perfectly into the slider case with TI-82. Something that I learned in 1998.

Every part of that reference will make no sense to people in high school now. I love it. No, they still sell. There's a store in our town, in our little Westchester town, the stationary store. stationary store is just a racket that sells TI calculators to high school students. That's its only business. Are they still like 150 bucks? Yeah, they still cost exactly the same.

Unreal. And it's every high schooler is required to buy one of these calculators and they all buy them at the stationary store and I'm just there, you know, once a week being like, you know, Game Boy Pocket slides right into that thing. Can you imagine when tariffs make the TI-83 calculator like $245? That's how you know that I'm old, is that I'm saying TI-82 and everyone else has got the TI-83, which is slightly nicer.

TI-82 had a square case, which covered the Game Boy Pocket better. The problem in... I'm sorry to my high school math teachers. The problem is that when Ryan Navratil turned on the Game Boy, it still dinged. And then your calculator and Game Boy were taken away. playing dope wars wasn't good enough for you you needed a game boy

Did you ever code your games right into the calculator, Richard? Of course. Hell yeah. Come on. I dealt so much fake drugs on my graphing calculator. Are you kidding me? All right. Speaking of dealing drugs.

Let's talk about TikTok. The foremost scourge of our nation's youth. Lots going on in the TikTok story. This weekend is the deadline. Saturday is the deadline. The deadline that was self-imposed by Donald Trump after the actual deadline that was imposed by our nation's Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. So Trump takes office. TikTok was banned. which means they just shut the app down as a stunt.

trump said i'm giving you 75 days here's a waiver from pam bondy the attorney general that says she won't prosecute you for breaking this law Everyone said that was good enough, which is weird all into its own. Totally weird. But here we are at the end of 75 days. There's a rumor that Trump is going to do something called TikTok America, where he creates a sovereign wealth fund out of stolen Bitcoin.

As near as I can tell. And then that will buy a huge chunk of TikTok. ByteDance will remain on the cap table, which might be illegal because the law says they can't control the app or the algorithm. So I don't know what's going to happen there. The thing that I have been predicting would happen has apparently happened. Amazon has sent a letter saying they would buy TikTok. The founder of OnlyFans wants to buy TikTok.

Perplexity keeps insisting that it is a serious buyer for TikTok and sending extremely petty notes to Kylie whenever she notes that that doesn't seem realistic. Really? Yeah. They are like, no, we're for real. And there's just nothing you can say to an upstart AI company that really wants you to believe it can buy TikTok. And then there's Project Liberty, which is Frank McCourt and Alexis Ohanian and Mr. Beast. And they've got whatever idea about putting TikTok on the blockchain.

Don't forget Applovin. Oh, and Steve Wynn somehow is involved in that. I'm sure Vergecast listeners are aware of Applovin. I'm excited for more people in America. to wake up and be told that a company called app loving now.

It's a lot. That's a lot. What do you think is going to happen? Okay, here's where I land on this, which is nowhere. I think the thing that I have come around to is I think it is true. that there is the money out there in the United States to buy TikTok in a way that would satisfy everyone.

Right. Like I'm increasingly convinced that there are actually lots of people who could gin up the money to make this happen relatively quickly. Like it's it's every investor wants to be part of this. That's increasingly clear. Jeff Bezos just has to sell a support.

Not even the big one. Right. What I've learned by watching OpenAI is that like $100 billion is not that hard to come by. Like you can just get it. You can have $100 billion if you want $100 billion. So I think that part I actually am. I thought for a while it was going to be impossible, that there was just nobody who was going to be able to do it for a mix of like financial and antitrust. I no longer think that's the case.

And I think it's pretty clear that the Trump administration would happily just bend its antitrust rules for whoever it blessed as the new owner of TikTok. There is still... Still to this moment, absolutely no evidence that ByteDance or China is interested in their part of this deal. Just none. Especially now that the tariffs have happened. Right. If what you need is the blessing of the Chinese government to do this. Why on earth does that seem more likely to happen now than it did?

yesterday or or three months ago or a year ago or the first time trump tried to do this like if anything it seems to me the likelihood of this being possible has gone down over time for that reason and so i think I think ByteDance might be willing to call the administration's bluff again. And just shut down. If I had to bet, I think it goes dark again. Richard?

I think that the most important thing here is that we're having the wrong discussion about TikTok. We're having the wrong discussion about ByteDance, China, the Trump administration. The discussion we need to have is that we should buy TikTok. This is number one crop chasing opportunity. $100 million is not hard to come.

Any of us will ever have in our lifetime. You see, everyone's putting in bids for TikTok. Why haven't we? We need to put in a bid for TikTok. We could own TikTok. This is like, let's buy a bar. It's that conversation because we're getting to that late hour. we could just buy a bar i've had that conversation so many times in my life oh yeah

Absolutely. We're going to start a band, buy a bar, and buy TikTok. Okay, having been in a band, don't start a band. Don't do that. You will come to a point in your life when you have played the Metro in Chicago, you've reached all of your dreams, and the only available next step... is to spend time in a van with the people in your band, going to mid-sized Midwestern cities, and you'll be like, that was the wrong choice. Just saying.

But at that same period of time in my life in Chicago, we would walk by an empty bar, like on the corner by my house. And we would be like, we should buy that bar, man. That could be the spot. Buy the bar. Buy TikTok. It's historically a bad idea. Most of them go out of business. I feel the same is true about our bid for TikTok, Richard. I'm actually curious why there are not more bidders. This is a historically important asset in the American media ecosystem.

I'm honestly curious why we haven't seen the New York Times or News Corporation or whoever. Viacom out of nowhere. Paramount Plus is now TikTok, right? Where is that energy from the media conglomerates that all are desperate for distribution? Where's Netflix? Like this is all stuff that would make sense for a bunch of these companies. I understand why Amazon wants TikTok because TikTok shop represents an entire marketing channel that connects to purchases that Amazon does not have.

That is a meaningful, I don't know if it's a competitor, but it's just a place where people go to find stuff to buy. Oh, it's definitely a competitor. Amazon has been desperately trying to do TikTok for years. And with essentially no success. And so like, instead, if you just took TikTok and just plugged in the Amazon logistics system behind it, it's actually the cleanest.

fit of almost any of these things that I think of. Amazon has the cloud services to make the infrastructure work. It has the business angle, which is all the shopping stuff that you just talked about. It works. Amazon could buy TikTok and the whole thing would make sense immediately in a way that it. It's much more...

There's much more of sort of an underpants known thing happening for a lot of these other companies. But I also think, I mean, the answer to a lot of these questions is because Trump won't allow it to happen. He is so at the center of all of this. I don't know if that's true. Trump wouldn't allow Netflix to buy TikTok? You think Trump would allow the New York Times to buy TikTok? Applovin, which is just a mobile advertising company that everyone has to say Applovin.

He's like out here being like, we'll do it. Why not? Like perplexity is like, we'll do it. Like why? Honestly, why wouldn't Netflix, which desperately needs a discovery mechanism. Right. They all do. Why wouldn't, why aren't they in this mix? Why isn't Apple in this mix? Like it's, it's just interesting to see how many people must have kicked the tires, right? They all have big M and a departments. They all have big, big business development departments.

It's funny to see how many people are like, no, that's too messy. Social media is too messy. But you can see how any number of media organizations desperately need distribution, and they're just not in the game. And maybe $100,000 is too hard to find. We just need to do Quibi again. Where's Cats? Where's our guy? By the way, we should turn it into Quibi. In all fairness to every cat's impression.

not a sentence i thought i would ever say uh vertical micro dramas are apparently very popular in other countries around the world we should do a story It's their time. If Quibi had been free, it would have worked. Season two of Golden Arm is coming. I can feel it. Quibi was always 090. That's my prediction. And that's life.

Quibi was just early. I will point out, we are having exactly the same conversation on who will buy TikTok, except now there are some bids, but we're having the exact same conversation today as we did 75 days. And the deadline is tomorrow. As you're listening to this on Friday, the deadline is Saturday. It's the fifth. And there's still absolutely no indication that it's for sale.

Like, this is a bunch of people standing outside of a house being like, I'd like to buy that house. And the person inside not selling the house. You can't buy a thing that's not for sale. And there's no evidence at all that it is for sale. Yeah. Again, and it's just funny because the number of people who should be beating down the door to buy this thing should be by all rights much higher than.

Yes, I do think I mean, we've seen this before, like when Disney kicked the tires on Twitter. And I think I think there are a lot of companies who understand. the mess that is social and just are not set up to do it. Netflix buys TikTok and immediately becomes a completely different kind of company. And I think it's not crazy to sign up for that.

But it's not just a thing you can do. Right. But every single time we have some streaming executive on Decoder or some product person from one of these companies on Decoder. i get notes from product people around the industry they're like you don't understand what they're all saying in every meeting at disney paramount plus at max's why can't we have a youtube Yeah. Like they're all staring at the thing that is going to kill them.

Down the line. At Disney, there are meetings where they're like, why don't we have a YouTube? At Max, there are meetings where they're like, why don't we have a YouTube? Because they see the thing. And there are obvious reasons they don't. But in this one case, they could buy a thing that's almost. Yeah, no, it's certainly the closest to just going from nothing to something that has been available maybe ever. Yeah. And yet.

Yet it's going to be app loving everybody. No, no shade app loving. It's just a very funny name. And I'm dying for the TikTok conspiracy theories that will occur if a company named app loving by. Why is this platform? TikTok by Applovin has a really great... We'll find out. Either TikTok will exist next week when we do the show or whatever.

We're going to buy it and it's just going to be Detroit Pistons highlights and trucks jumping over stuff. We're buying TikTok and it's just us forcing Richard to purchase and rehabilitate a bar. Yep. That's it. Like, you've got to find one. You've got to do the TikTok thing. You know, like the time-lapse video of, like, tearing down the drywall and putting it back up.

We're going to make Richard install gray floors in one of those like bronze chandelier things. It's going to be great. I'm excited for it. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to start talking about terrorists. It's going to happen. We'll be right back.

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We have to talk about terrorists. We do. It is the only story, like in the biggest way. Usually with politics, we have to draw some line to like phones. here's why the verge is covering politics and i want us to cover politics we do it We cover policy very deeply. Like usually you have to make an argument for politics and policy in our stories, right? We cover consumer tech.

There's a line to politics and policy, and I want us to explain why we cover things like the FCC or why we cover things like the National Institutes of Science. or the National Institutes of Health. Like there's research that gets done at the federal level. There's policies at the Federal Trade Commission. All this stuff affects the gadgets we make. Tariffs is much different because the prices are just going to...

And the supply chains that create all the hardware is going to go sideways. And there's not a great argument for any of these tariffs right now. So Trump announced them. The stock market literally crashed while he was speaking at the White House. You just saw the numbers go down. I watched CNBC today. People I know, the anchors at CNBC, just openly confused.

uh, Carl Quintanilla, who's a great anchor at CNBC, a friend, he said, you're burning down the house to cook a cheeseburger, which is an incredible quote. That is good. Uh, Steve Mnuchin, who is a treasury secretary in Trump one, uh, said.

to sarah eisen i believe don't think too hard about how these tariffs are calculated i mean that's the thing like i think when you say uh there's not a great reason for it i think that is that is actually like far too kind like this is this is pure nonsense and and it's not What we have seen from the reaction, like, you cannot find someone who can give you a measured reason why this is a good idea, right? You can find something.

You can find ChatGPT, which will deliver you the calculation that is used to calculate tariff rates. Well, but that's the thing, right? And it's insanity all the way down because it's like... You rewind back through the campaign and everybody was like, well...

Trump clearly doesn't understand how tariffs actually work. It's just like a thing he likes to say. It's like a hobby horse of his. He won't do them. And then immediately took office and started doing them. And everybody's like, well, they won't be as bad as he thought. And so over and over and over, the people who. like believed in him as an economic driver for the United States were like, he won't do this. And then he did this and it was so much worse than anyone.

anyone thought it was going to be. And then the more we've learned about why it is the way that it is and how it was calculated and how it was created and how it came to be, the more the only possible logic has become none of this makes any.

It is true. The United States trade representative put out a fact sheet about the tariffs with a formula in it. that was supposed to explain how they calculated these tariff rates. And the formula contains a bunch of Greek letters, two of which, when you back them out to the numbers, just cancel each other out. What you have is a trade deficit divided in half to calculate the rate. And then the floor is 10%. And the rates, the tariff rates are against.

Islands that have nothing but penguins on them. But it's so important to keep saying that's nothing. What you just described is nothing. And they're described as reciprocal tariffs against countries that have no tariffs on us. No. None of this makes any sense. These are not trade deficits. It's countries we buy things from.

Like that's, those are not the same thing. It's like there was, I saw a thing this morning that was like, you don't have a trade deficit from your dentist because your dentist doesn't buy anything from you. You buy things from your dentist. It's just nonsense. And we're at a point now where it's like we've gone way beyond.

Even like even now, the Trump administration being like, this is about fentanyl crossing the borders and this is how we punish the countries who allow this to happen. That seems reasonable compared to where we are now, which is just. They went in and they were like, oh, well, we have a trade deficit with them. Let's tariff the opposite of that and that'll sort it out. That's nothing. So I want to say there's been a lot of reporting, including from us, that it's the AIs.

that come up with this kind of math. And it is true. ChachPD comes up with this math. Claude comes up with this math. Grok. important one in the Trump administration, because that's Elon's, comes up with this math. Gemini will come up with this math, but if you switch to Gemini 2.5 Pro, which everyone got mad at us for ignoring last week, but now I'm using it because y'all yelled at us. And you ask it to show thinking on this prompt. It's basically like,

Like, it's like literally the second one, analyze the user's premises. The user assumes tariffs are a simple direct tool to achieve balanced trade. and that a single calculation method can achieve this across countries. countries and then it just scrolls down and it gets to a place It says address the easy way request. And it says, given the complexity, there is no easy way to calculate tariffs that will precisely balance trade. The premise itself is flawed. So look.

I'm not saying that they used AI or not. I'm just saying maybe they should have used Gemini 2.5 Pro, which would have gently let them down. It's tough. I'm generally suspicious of the like, they wrote this official document with AI argument. I think like... People are dumb is usually a more compelling outcome than like the Occam's razor is people are stupid, not people used AI.

This one is really, really, really hard to disagree. Like you put it in and over and over, people have run this experiment over and over again. You can get it to give you that answer. as long as you ask a stupid question. Which no human economist will give you that answer. No, this is what I mean. The reaction has been so universal that it is unreal.

Anyhow, look, this is going to affect the price of iPhones. It will affect the price of the Nintendo Switch 2. We have a piece trying to guess how much the price will go up in the Switch 2. It's a debacle of epic proportions for the auto industry. That's a quote we ran. in a story that Andy Hawkins wrote. We're going to track all this fallout across the board. There's a chance that Trump just walks them all back. That's a thing that he does all the time. There's a chance that this is all just...

a weird racket. We, we've been calling it gangster tech regulation. He just wants people to deal. So he, he does this gangster stuff.

We'll see how this shakes out. But I actually wanted to make this real for our audience. I think you can go get a bunch of... pie in the sky tariff coverage everywhere. But we cover people who make But small companies, we love an indie hardware maker here on the show. So you might have heard me talk about a company called Toonshine before. And the founder of Tinshine is a guy named Tobias Butler. I've read notes about tariffs from him on the show before he's emailed me.

Was like, I should write a story about the Toonshine and tariffs. And then all this news happened. And I thought to myself, oh, we should just have Tobias on the show. So let's bring them on now. Tobias Butler, you are the founder, you're the sole proprietor of Toonshine. Welcome to the virtual. Thank you, Eli. Glad to be here. So as Tobias knows, I have a Toonshot. I love it. Explain quickly what it is.

So Tuneshine is a lo-fi album art display that uses this kind of pixelated, very tasteful, almost artistic screen to automatically show the album artwork for the music you listen to. Works with Spotify, Apple Music, and Sonos. I definitely recommend like if you're listening to this on a podcast app, checking out a picture of it. It's a very visual experience and often it'll kind of click with people. But yeah, it's basically supposed to add this nice ambient.

artwork to decorate your room and it connects with the kind of music you like and help represent that visually in your space. So I started talking to Tobias because I demanded features and he delivered them. So I will point out that Tobias, you just added Shazam support. to the tune trend so if you're listening if i'm listening to vinyl at my house i can just push the button and the album art shows up there it's choice i love this thing

Cool. Really appreciate it. It's just you, right? There's no one else at the company? Yeah, it's just me. Increasingly, I'm kind of doing some things with contractors. I've just recently... Got set up with a contract manufacturer based in the U.S. in Chicago, doing contracting with fulfillment companies to actually mail things out, which is great because that means that I don't have to be home every weekday of every week.

TuneScience will still go out to people. But as far as the product development, coding, marketing, admin stuff, that is all me. And there's a part of the story which I am very taken by, which is he worked at a tech company. And you quit to start this company, right? Yes, that's basically correct. I quit kind of thinking, okay, I have like a little bit of a nest egg enough to sort of explore different options because I sort of thought, okay.

kids yet. My budget is still pretty flexible. Maybe I should just see if there's other things that I like that aren't. web development, which is basically what I was doing before. And I basically discovered that I did want to continue to do coding, but I really wanted to give Toonshine a try. was just giving me good indications that it could be a business, not only that I would be able to start and had the skills enough to get pretty close, but also that

It was something that people were wanting. My friends were asking about it. And I love music. I'm a musician. I studied music in school. So working on a music product just sort of made sense. So that's why I decided to give it a go. This might be a really stupid question, but it is like before.

The now times. Is... When you go to start a business like this and you're like, okay, I'm starting to source hardware. I kind of know the thing I want to build. Do you have to become a tariffs expert anyway? Is that a thing that's on your mind as you're starting a company like this? Prior to the first Trump tariffs, which applied a 25% tariff to a lot of things, so I've always had tariffs on the circuit boards that I was getting from China.

and the LED screens, which I think are also in that classification, or at least among the classifications that get those things. you are thinking about this. However, If you're trying something out for the first time, especially if it's your first time doing this as a hardware founder, there's going to be so many unknowns anyway that that is probably just going to be one of many unknowns that you encounter along the way.

I think people who are maybe on their second or third go are probably thinking a couple steps ahead on this, which of course is much harder to do now that things are changing like twice a week. So it's a mixed answer. Let me ask you just a really reductive question because I have the product and I like it. I see that it's thoughtfully created, but at a very abstract level.

It's a circuit board, a microcontroller, some Wi-Fi chips, and a display. And then I think you make the case. I actually discovered this product because there's videos of you on TikTok making the cases. And I was like, well, that's cool. I'm assuming the wood for the cases is not tariffed yet. but it might be soon we'll find um So I, for a long time, I was doing the assembly.

myself but I don't have a CNC machine to actually carve the case out of the material I am going to continue to there's going to be some special editions limited runs and I will continue to assemble those at home just because I think it's very I like having that physical connection to the product. And while I can't scale up enough to do all of these things, I think people really like knowing that they bought something that was...

you know, not artisanal. I'm, I'm really just screwing it together, but they like having that connection. Right. But those parts, right. Wi-Fi, chip, controller, circuit board, display, all of that was coming from China before, right? You weren't getting that domestically. And so you're paying some rate, and the rate might have gone up because of Trump one tariff. But you could basically go to suppliers and say, I want to buy this stuff and get price.

Yes, yes. And the easiest way to do that is to get on Alibaba. People are super responsive. I, you know, you hear this. Simone Yetch, the robot creator, was talking about this recently, where you reach out to a bunch of manufacturers in the US and Europe and your response rate is really low. I think some of that is just because...

They are not as optimized for small clients. I think some of that is just a company culture thing that's pervasive here. But if you go into Alibaba, you're able to find these manufacturers. buy from them, get samples, and everything is consolidated into a single app. It's sort of a weird janky app, and they're a little bit iffy with their push notification policies, but...

you can talk to everybody in the same app and it makes the whole thing very streamlined. So I emailed you when the first round of... tariffs in this Trump administration was happening. You said, my prices will go up and down. I'm not sure what's going to happen. Now we're here in the second round.

who knows what's going to happen what's going to happen to tune china your price is going to go up is the company still sustainable yeah so i was kind of before i was fell asleep last night you know i'm i'm doom scrolling a little bit and i'm just like oh no like

Maybe I am. I'm going to have to raise prices. And when I double checked my numbers this morning, because I just put out a video talking through the effects I think it might have. It looked like what actually came out to was. basically a 10% increase in the price of each manufactured tuneshine. And the reason it's not the full like 54% increase that is going to be applied is the tariffs from China.

uh is for a few reasons one is that some of this stuff was already tariffed in fact much of this stuff was already tariffed uh so the increase is more like 25 ish percent not the full 54. The other thing is that the labor cost like that, you know, the most expensive parts of the Toonshine are screen, circuit board, and labor at the moment, the way I'm manufacturing it. Labor cost is not tariffed because that's done in the US. So that is not included in the...

And the third thing is that I actually did recently meet someone who might be able to move some of the parts into their spot in Wisconsin with very competitive prices. So I'm getting samples there. I think that's pretty unusual. I was kind of amazed. There's not a lot of PCB manufacturers in the US. People talk about how I think like.

Starlink's SpaceX stuff is like one of the biggest PCB facilities, but in terms of just... quick low volume uh and by low volume i mean like a thousand to three thousand ish uh manufacturing for pcbs is not very common but this guy has given it a go and um

I thought that was exciting that I might be able to beat that. So all of that together amounts to a smaller increase than you might think based on the 54%, but it's still an increase and I'm making orders of a thousand. And so if it costs 10% more, that's... like thousands of less dollars in profit for me for each batch of Toonshines that's coming in. And all the indications are that it could still be profitable. But since I've been scaling up in each order of

products that I make is bigger than the last and it eats into the profits I've already made. And because I had legal costs associated with filing a patent, then I don't know for sure yet, but it looks like it should still be okay. And especially if I can get a little bit more efficient at marketing, which is my second biggest cost after manufacturing.

then I could potentially make up for that. So if I'm getting more organic social reach or if I'm doing better PR, then that helps because I'm less reliant on paid marketing channels. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it. It seems like... Part of the challenge here is the not knowing of it all. Even just in the last two months, we've gone back and forth so many times. And you talk about ordering these parts and like...

It's not like this is a thing you can do on a sort of day-by-day basis, depending on the state of the economics of it all, right? You're having to make... sort of months long decisions at a time right like how do you even do that in a moment like this where everything is up and down from like 15 minutes to 15 minutes yeah i mean

The uncertainty is definitely a huge factor. And I think my reading is that a lot of the stuff that's happening with the stock market is related to uncertainty as much as anything else, because we just don't know what's going to happen. For me, there are some funny day-to-day things. If I'm getting parts shipped over the ocean, for example, the delivery times can be very unpredictable, but often this is a much cheaper alternative.

So I literally had a package that I think like got delivered yesterday. And I don't know if the timing perfectly works out, but the tariffs did seem a little high. So I was like, darn, like if I just arrived one day earlier, I could have saved like 400 bucks.

But what I think about really, like, I can sort of plan this stuff out. But as I was saying, when you start this stuff, there's so much uncertainty. And I think about the people who are starting Kickstarters, and they're trying to... make their best guess at whether they have a viable business model.

because there's kind of an epidemic, I'm sure you've noticed, of people who raise a bunch of money on Kickstarter and then ultimately realize like, oh, this business doesn't actually work though. And so products lose support. I think there's a much greater risk of that now because...

You have less certainty about how much money you want to raise on top of all the uncertainty you already had. Your prices might go up. You... I think it just adds another factor on top of all the other risks starting a business that might make people think twice about whether they want to turn their little...

home-built DIY Arduino or Raspberry Pi gadget into a real product, which is a bummer because I would love to see more diversity in hardware. more power to like smaller hardware players to experiment with all these ideas that are out there that aren't really seen as much in a very homogeneous hardware market. That seems like the important part, right? You are living a version of the American dream where you had a job. You said, I have an opportunity to start a company. I can open the Alibaba app.

and connect with a bunch of suppliers halfway around the world and start a business. And now there's a regulatory environment that might make that surprisingly harder. Do you think you would have started Toonshine right now with the tariff uncertainty? It's hard to say. I might have tried to price it differently. The way my initial strategy was working with the pricing is that... I would read things online that were basically saying, take the price of your materials and multiply that by four.

and that's what you should sell it for i am not doing that Which has interesting side effects where I basically am very resistant to selling in retail environments because they immediately want to buy your product wholesale for half of the sticker price. And for me, that basically puts me underwater and I can... sell direct to consumer better than that anyway. But when I was first making these, I kind of had that attitude of like, well, more likely than not, if these sell...

I can get the price down some way. I can take the time. Once I know that people will buy them for the price that I've set it at, then maybe I can scale up. Maybe I can find a different supplier. I can get better at this and that. So through that process, I already brought the price down a lot. It's going back up now, but... I honestly, since I came from the software world, I'm not so certain that I would have had the foresight anyway to be able to

incorporate this into the overall calculations. I was just sort of thinking, all right, I'm going to start small. I'm going to sell 50, then I'm going to sell 100 and then 200, 500, 1000. Price comes down a little bit each time and we're getting more and more into healthy business territory where I can look ahead of the next year and be like, yeah, this is probably going to work. As I said before, there's so much uncertainty with these things, having another thing thrown into the mix.

does not, I think, make it more likely that people will try experiments like this. Why not just throw it in and raise the price? I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of people who are just like, ah, tariffs, everything's more expensive. Why not do that? It's a good question. I think... I think part of it is just the fact that I'm somewhat new to this and I think I'm maybe a little bit more nervous than many people would be about.

my customers' loyalty. I thought about that when I was switching to manufacturing outside the house. And I did get people who emailed me who were saying, oh, this is a bummer. do you actually have any that you still made with your own hands that i can get like literally somebody asked me to like sign one which was funny but and send it out to him So I do stress a little bit about customer loyalty.

I think I've done a pretty good job of building that by just trying to be really transparent, talking about how this process works, trying to be like the opposite of whatever corporate sheen you usually get from marketing communications. So maybe I've built up enough goodwill where people would say,

hey, like, yeah, this is still fine. On the other hand, I get some repeat customers, but not a ton. And so those people, I wouldn't necessarily have built up that loyalty to. So I mean, coming from a... I used to work at change.org where we would just A-B test everything. It's a little harder to A-B test a price. I kind of wish I could do that, even though it's maybe a little ethically questionable.

At least for now, I want to try it out. I think that $200 as a starting price, it's already a somewhat expensive gadget. It's a very niche thing. I'm not pretending this is like a... toaster or microwave oven or anything. It's an art piece basically that you can get from your home or not. $200 is, I think, a pretty fair price, but it is a bit high, and so I want to keep it there.

I hope that it works out basically. I think I bought a walnut one that you actually did make by yourself. You said two things. that are really interesting to me. One, you said American and European manufacturers kind of don't respond. They're just like not in the game the way that the Chinese supply chain is just in the game all the time. And then you said, there's a guy in Wisconsin who might be in the game now.

The point of the tariffs is to get you to move your production to Wisconsin, right? The point of the tariffs is to get more of the supply chain in the United States. Do you see that happening? Right. I mean, you obviously have at least one person in Wisconsin who wants to help you out. Do you see more of that? Is that ecosystem actually developing? My experience with this is somewhat limited, but the.

As you said, the Chinese supply chain is just so well set up for this stuff. There is absolutely no American answer for Alibaba and just how easy it makes the overall process. Maybe there are individual suppliers out there. that can compete on price, especially with the tariffs. And maybe they do respond. But having everything so streamlined, it feels like you're kind of going back to the previous century when you are trying to do things with American manufacturers.

It's not out of the question that maybe someone's out there trying to build the American Alibaba. That would be awesome. If someone's out there and feels that spark, you have my full encouragement. But there's a lot of stuff that's also just not made here. I mean, the ESP32 microcontroller that I use. It's a Chinese company. Maybe something using the TSMC factory in Arizona or wherever that is is going to come up and make a competitor to that.

How long does that take? How long does it take to build the ecosystem of libraries that support this operating system and all of this stuff? I think some people make these LED screens in the US. They don't have pricing on their website. It's one of a contact us for sales sort of deals. But it's lots of obstacles because they just really have a...

system for this that's modern in a way that we do not. How long do you think it would take to build that system here? I don't know. I would say that's out of my wheelhouse, but certainly, almost certainly longer than a single presidential term for one.

I asked that question because I think that's the answer. Go ahead, David. The Alibaba of it all, I think, is really fascinating and is a piece of this that I think is not getting... talked about a lot that it is that this it is just so much easier and faster and more straightforward to do the kind of stuff you're talking about.

on alibaba and in china than just about anywhere else so i i am curious like where that puts you sort of long term like let's assume the the tariffs are real uh it feels to me like you have a couple of options one is like hope everybody moves part production to the US. One is like find new parts that they make in the US or two is just figure out how to incorporate the cost.

Is the answer one of those? Is it some mixture of those? I think it will be a mixture. I mean, I ultimately the the PCB people in Wisconsin, I didn't switch to them because I was like, I'm going to buy American made, but more because I think that. contract manufacturer i was using i think they were getting pcps made in india and i actually didn't check how much the terrorists were going up on india but i think they were 10 but still i switched because

They were able to beat the cost when they incorporated shipping and when they incorporated that tariff. They were able to beat the cost. They were also able to make a 3D printed part and they were down to bundle it together. They were even down to do some... uh electronics engineering for free to throw that in which is huge because you know for these

500,000 here, that really adds up at the point that I'm doing this business. So I think it'll be a mix. And maybe I just kind of put a call out on my Instagram and TikTok where I was saying, hey, if you know people in the US who might be able to do this, like... Sure, I'm open to it, but I haven't seen that. I mean, I used to be getting Cardboard boxes with foam that just protected during shipping. Price in the US, $18. China, $4.

So that's 350% more. I would be a bit surprised, but it doesn't mean it's not out there. The other thing is that I just by the nature of my business, I think I do have a little bit more flexibility. I don't have people on payroll yet. I'm not even on payroll yet. Hopefully, hopefully this year, but I don't have people on payroll. I like if you're Apple.

And they'll probably maybe be able to get some exemptions, but like this, you know, if it is a 10% or 20% increase in your, the price for your items. That is like billions of dollars. That represents tons of people's jobs and an entire big corporate strategy ocean liner that needs to be turned.

Whereas for me, I do have a bit more flexibility because it is just me. And so I don't have to fire people because of a 10% price increase, which is great. Maybe it means that I'm... skipping on the the fancy four pack of beer and instead drinking pacifico a little more but uh the it's it's more flexibility yeah Tim Cook switching to Pacifica was actually the most obvious. Yeah, that's his first thought.

Put this in a range for me, right? There's tariffs went up and maybe your costs go up 10% and you're drinking, sadly, some cheaper beer and that's fine. And then what's the number that says this is no longer sustainable? If my manufactured costs went over $100, that's sort of, that's kind of game over. I mean, it's certainly without raising the price.

I don't know. Maybe there is a market like maybe, you know, maybe in a couple of months people will be like, well, like my TV was like $900 and it used to be $400. So a Toonshine for $250 doesn't actually seem so crazy. But if it were over $100, I would be very surprised if people would be able to pay what would make sense.

to to make that sustainable certainly with retail because i if i kept it at 200 and i'm paying 100 i literally would make zero on each retail sale unless i get like a good deal i'm only in one store right now and she's sort of a friend of a friend and she gives me a little bit more than 50% of the cost. But if I'm aiming to be in Urban Outfitters someday, I don't think they're going to cut me a good deal. And that suddenly goes off the table, I think, if my manufacturing costs go over $100.

Tobias, what do you think is next for Toonshine? What are you looking at? I'm really going for consistency this year. I just placed an order for 1,000, which is my biggest order yet. And now that the manufacturing and the fulfillment is out of my house, I'm just trying to get that running on a kind of clockwork basis while I can add new features. So I really want to support more home music servers this year.

Rune, Logitech Media Server. People are always emailing me more and more bespoke media servers. I want to support as many of those as I can. Trying a special edition, maybe some colors. Just got some samples in. and maybe a big one, maybe a vinyl record-sized one. So those are the things that are on my mind.

Right now. As soon as you said Rune, a bunch of Vergecast listeners started like fist pumping at their phones. The Rune in Plex audience here on the Vergecast is strong. I see you Rune fans. When you make the big one, let me know. Built-in microphone for the Shazam. That's the game. That's sort of maybe it. $5,000 TuneShine with an AI microphone in it is what I'm looking for. It's got like eight mics.

so that it knows which direction the music comes from for some reason. Why not? I love it. Tobias, thank you so much for joining the broadcast. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Bye. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with Lightning Round and America's favorite podcast for the podcast. We'll be right back.

All right, we're back. It's the lightning round. Does it need an ellipsis? There's been some debate about whether it's unsponsored dot dot dot for flavor. or if it's just unsponsored for flavor. So, I don't know. You tell me. I will tell you that the decoder tagline, which is big ideas and other problems, is an impossible-to-say tagline. Like, it looks really good.

with that built-in ellipsis right big ideas and then every week i say it i'm like uh this sucks so i might just be having like it's hard to say you try saying it so i might just be having a response to that ellipsis I think the pregnant pause is like good. Right. It's unsponsored for what flavor? Like that makes sense to me, but I don't know that you want to formally. You tell me. Maybe it's like big unsponsored.

Little for flavor. That's the vibe. The reason I keep saying it is to cement in the listener's mind the idea that if something is sponsored, it lacks flavor. Which is the entire media now is just branded content. Right? It's just everything is sponsored or paid for. And I just want you to think every time you see that, you just think there's less flavor.

It's good. It's also a way to make sure that this show never makes any money ever again. So we're, we're doing great, but we don't lack for flavor. Richard just sighing. He's like, what have I signed up for? All right, it's time. Oh my goodness. Richard, have you been here for this yet? America's, it's a top two podcast within a podcast. Again, I keep getting emails about Munch Squad on my brother, my brother, and me. And trust me, I hear you. I love it too.

But it's time for America's other favorite podcast of their podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's honestly, I'm thrilled for you. And this is the part where we just sort of sit quietly and Eli talks for like an hour and a half. It's great. It's my favorite part of the show. Uh, people have asked me if I write these and the answer is no, I just start yelling and that's, that's how much it builds up with me within me week after.

All right, this week on Brendan Carr is a dummy. Two things. One, last week we pointed out that he's threatening all kinds of companies, that he will investigate them and not let them do deals unless they cancel their DEI program. because he just likes making threats. And so this week, T-Mobile closed a deal with a fiber company called Lumos. They're doing a joint venture about fiber, but only after it dropped all of its DEI page.

This is the dumbest story in the world. T-Mobile had a bunch of pages up that outlined, quote, a culture of fairness, respect, and inclusion. They were online until March 26th. They took them down. Deal got approved. Bing, bang, boom, we're closed. And because this is the current world and this is a printed car, the pages, they changed the pages.

they don't say dei anymore the url that said diversity gone many of the groups that were listed that championed diversity gone but they're just kind of different people They say stronger together now instead of diversity and inclusion, which literally all that does is it doesn't get caught in whatever scraper the AI tool is doing on their web.

Like what we've learned about Doge is that Doge is just like running a bunch of AI checks to see like when they use words like probation and diversity and like trans anything. And this is the same kind of thing. They're like, oh, we're just going to 404 a couple of webpages. Don't look over here at these webpages, which are different. Because they say together and not inclusion. So it's fun.

This is the level of stupidity we have reached to. And apparently it worked for Brendan Carr. There are words you just can't say. I want to be very clear about this, David. And it works. That's the worst part. That's all Brendan Carr wanted. It's true. The Transcontinental Railroad is woke now. That's what you need to take away from this. You know I'm right. You know that's how it's going. So that's one that happened, right? And that's just naked corruption of the dumbest kind.

Like there's, there's just stupid, but it worked. And that's just the nature of corruption. And am I saying that telecom companies aren't inherently kind of stupid and corrupt? I'm not saying that. I believe telecom companies are inherently kind of stupid and corrupt and whether it.

promising the chairman of the FCC that upon leaving, he will get a plum job as president of the lobbying organization for our nation's wireless carriers, which is a real thing that just recently happened to Ajit Pai, or saying we're going to remove the word diversity and replace it with the word... stronger together. It's all just corruption, and that's fine. Stupid, a little bit racist, but the sort of corruption we're using. Then there's Brendan just saying things that are demonstrably untrue.

in ways that are quite honestly easy to check. So this week, the Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives... said they were very concerned about Brendan's general censorious attitude, and they wanted an investigation. So ranking member Frank Pallone from New Jersey, ranking member Doris Mitsui from California, and Yvette Clark from New York wrote a letter.

To Brendan, saying, we write to express deep concern over your actions to target and intimidate news organizations and broadcasters in violation of the First Amendment. These troubling actions assault the constitutionally protected freedom of the press and violate the FCC statutory prohibition against engaging in censorship. directing FCC staff to devote time and resources to bogus investigations.

constitutes a violation of the law, gross mismanagement, extreme waste of funds, and an abuse of authority. I just want to point out that that's what it sounds like when you write it.

Nilai is what it sounds like when you just yell it into a microphone. I'm very mad about it. It's the same thing. They're just saying the same stuff you've been saying. It's the same thing. It's all the same stuff. So they shared a letter with the Office of Inspector General, and they are asking for an investigation. Brendan is furious about this.

oliver d'arcy at status who is doing an amazing job reporting on brendan carr i should say and often gets comments back from brendan which is fascinating uh asked brendan about this and carr in response accused the democrat of weaponizing the country's communications laws against Republicans. Because he is the one being accused of weaponizing the communications laws. And in response, he's saying, even asking you about this and saying I'm injuring the First Amendment is weaponizing those laws.

And then he points out in classic Brendan Carr fashion, and then he claims in classic Brendan Carr fashion that everything he's doing is fine because he thinks the Democrats who preceded him were doing it worse. so he says if your last name was soros You got special streamlined treatment on an expedited basis by the previous FCC. If your last name was Musk, then you got millions of dollars worth of awards revoked.

For partisan political reasons, if you were a conservative outlet, then your FCC licenses and distribution deals were held up or subject to government-backed cancel campaigns. This is demonstrably untrue. Like, fully and completely untrue. Because one... If your complaint is that the previous administration was corrupt and politically motivated and biased and unfair, that does not mean that you should do it too.

It just doesn't. It means you should be better. It's actually an admission of guilt. It says, I too am corrupt. You're saying these people were evil, so I'm going to do the same stuff. That's bad, right? That just makes you a flunky of a different stripe, but you're still a flunk. Second, if your last name was Musk and your licenses got revoked, that's because Starlink was trying to defraud the government into getting grants by saying it would provide service to like shopping malls.

Like they were, they were making fake maps. You can read it's on our site. We covered all of this. Ars Technica covered all of this indeed. The reason Starlink wasn't getting awards for these rural broadband programs is because they were saying they were going to cover densely populated suburbs with shopping malls in them, not rural America. Which Starlink cannot do.

It doesn't matter if they can or can't do it. They were looking at the maps and saying, no, that's not correct. This is not what you should be doing. So then Carr goes on to say, for those that have benefited from the two-tiered system of justice that prevailed during the Biden years, even handed myths may feel like discrimination, but that does not make it so.

This is also just fully warped thinking, right? If you think that there was a two-tiered system of justice in the Biden administration, you don't pull the pendulum back by investigating broadcast outlets in violation of First Amendment. That is absolutely wrong. It is censorious. It goes against the American system of justice. And it is so outside the realm of authority for the FCC that it boggles the mind that I talk about.

This is not what you want the Federal Communications Commission doing. You do not want Brendan Carr, who is unelected, saying that he alone can control what is distributed over the air. Because he understands what public interest is and he can reopen investigations that. like many, many, many former FCC chairmen and commissioners from years past have said or inappropriate.

This is not what he wanted to do. And then on top of that, I have done a lot of reporting on this over the years. And I know that what he's saying about the Biden administration is fully bullshit. I know that. Because the problems in the Biden administration were that big telecom companies made the Biden FCC corrupt and ineffective, so it could not forcibly open up.

our nation's networks they could not open up cable companies they could not do network They could not get the votes to regulate our systems to make sure that they respected free speech by being open to all. It's not Republicans or Democrats that prevented this from happening. It is the big telecom companies that got together and made it impossible for Biden to nominate Gigi Sohn to the FCC, completing his commissioners of Democrats.

so they could pass votes. We did a whole decoder on this. And in that decoder, the star witness on that episode of Decoder, we talked to a ton of people, you can go listen to it. The star guest was the CEO of Newsman. who is not a Democrat. Chris Roddy, the CEO of Newsmax, I'm telling you, this man is not a Democrat. We are not aligned politically on a number of things, but he came onto our show. And said, the problem is the big cable company.

are trying to keep Gigi Sohn out of the SEC so that there are not votes to open these systems up and actually protect access. Here, let's just run the audio. Here's Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, talking to me on Decoder last year about the actual problem in the cable industry under the Biden administration. The cable industry is a bit of a racket. And the big broadcast companies are part of the racket and they benefit it. The people that get screwed are the consumers, the cable customers.

And so the way the racket works is if you own a lot of television stations that a local cable company needs, your ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox affiliate. They basically have you over a barrel because if they don't give you your channel, people are going to go to another cable system, right? What Chris is saying there, and what has been true for years, is that if you are... Fox and you want Fox News on a cable system, you have all of this leverage because you also have Fox and you have the NFL on Fox.

And so you can go to cable operators like Comcast, Disclosure. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, although they hate the fact that I'm talking about this and I've been talking about it for a decade. You can go to Comcast or Spectrum or whoever else and say, do you want the NFL? You have to pay us a very, very high rate for Fox News 2. Because if you don't, we're going to take the NFL.

ABC does this. You want ESPN? You got to pay a whole bunch of money for ABC Family. They all do it. Comcast does it because they have NBC. There's a reason they all vertically integrated all of this content because they wanted leverage over all the distribution. That's the problem. So you look at where the alignments are and it is not Republicans.

It is big companies and small companies. That's why Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, supported a very progressive commissioner that was nominated by Biden because she wanted to break the control of the big company. That's why Rupert Murdoch and all of his empire went to war against that same commissioner of the SEC.

and made sure her nomination would go through. Again, you can just go listen to this episode of Coder. It's totally fascinating because the lines are so scrambled in ways you would never expect. but it's big versus small. And so Brendan is babbling, is running his mouth about the two-tiered system of justice in the Biden administration and how conservatives are punished. And in reality, you had the owner of MSNBC, Comcast, and the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, totally aligned.

There wasn't any daylight between them and how they wanted Biden to regulate these systems. You had small companies like Newsmax saying, no, we actually need access. We actually need the regulator to step up and open the door. And just on its face, you can see that Brendan is lying. He is concocting a justification for his own bad behavior out of nothing.

And we are sitting here with their seats. We've done the reporting for over a decade on the FCC and how it works. And I can tell you that it is almost always big versus small. It is very, very rarely Republican versus small. And I just think that Brendan is making... a political project when it should be.

When it should be about everybody having access to the internet on a fair and level playing field. When it should be about ISPs not being able to throttle you. It should be about cable systems being cheaper. It should be about prices going down over time. It should be about Americans paying lower prices for faster speeds.

We pay the highest prices in the world for some of the slowest speeds of And instead he's making dumb political bullshit because it lets him use power over and over and over again. He wants to find justifications for him to assert authority over things he should never have any authority over whatsoever. So every week I say this, Brendan, I know you listen. I'm dead sure of it now. I know you get Google results for your own name.

Come on the show. Come talk to us about this. The people want you to. Come on Decoder. Come on the Vergecast. See if you can make sense of this. See if you can justify your own power-seeking behavior because it's just every week it's getting stupider and stupider and we can all see it. That's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within podcast.

That's good. That's good. I'm glad you wrote that out. That really... Can you tell that I... It helps. The writing helped, I think. Yeah.

All right, we need a palate cleanser. Wait, I have a TV I want to talk to you about. Okay. You may remember from, was it last year that you came on the show and told us the story about being at the TV shootout? Yeah. The best thing I've ever done in this entire job is going to the TV shoot. So and this is like Richard is the perfect person to have here to do this with us. There is a new. It has been upgraded. The one that won.

There's now a new one. Sony, they've announced a new one. Okay, fine. And they only announced it at an event in Japan. So we sent former Verge editor Sam Biford to this event in Japan. Sony has announced a number of new TVs there. They don't do their TVs at CS anymore. They just do them later in the year because they know everyone will pay attention to them anyway. So they did the mini LEDs a few weeks ago, and then they just announced the Sonia Bravia 8-2.

This is the name. You gotta love Sony. You absolutely have to love Sony's naming schemes. It's so bad. Right, they have the Bravia 9, but now they have the Bravia 8 too. I can't tell you how little census. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Bravia 8 II replace not the Bravia 8, but the A95L? Yep, that's correct. So the Bravia 9 is a mini LED. You got it. And the Bravia A2 is a QD OLED that replaces the A95.

When we buy TikTok, I think we should just rename it to a string of letters and numbers that have nothing to do with anything. This makes no sense. By the way, the regular Braviate is still on sale. That's just a regular O. So you have the Bravia 8, which is an OLED, the Bravia 8-2, which is the new flagship QD OLED, and then the Bravia 9, which is mini-LED.

I don't know, man. It's 125% of the peak brightness of the A95L, 150% of the Bravia 8. So it's just basically the same idea, but brighter. And then if you remember from that whole TV shootout conversation. That is very much not about features, right? Like HDMI ports or whatever. It's just about image reproduction and how closely it can be calibrated to match a reference display. The reference display is made by Sony.

so everyone thinks this is unfair but sony makes all like they have dominant market share and reference displays in hollywood so it makes sense that they're the winners Anyway, now they're just openly saying this TV will look most like this reference display. So they've just taken it fully on that they have this advantage. They say it looks great. Sam said it looks great.

We'll see. They say it's going to be cheaper than the A95L. The A95L is very expensive. It's $5,000, so the 77-inch one. And that's as big as it gets. TVs are getting real big now, and the A95L is still 77-inch. So my guess is they're going to make one bigger one that's more expensive, and the 77 will come down a price. Richard, be honest. You have tickets booked to go to Japan and buy one of these. Just tell me this. No, I'm just going to buy three tickets and have the TV come to me.

Oh, I like that. Okay. Just a full row of- You heard about the tariffs, man? I can't be out here wasting money. That's just being smart. Can I say the best part of the story? Which is not the Bravia 8.2. The best part of the story is that Sony is also introducing a new entry-level TV in the United States, which is called the Bravia 2.2. What? It's Bravia 2 numeral and then 2 Roman numeral.

It's the Bravia 2, 2. It's great. I mean, it's spectacular. The sequel to a TV that was not sold in the US. So no one would even know what the original Bravia 2 was. They didn't sell the original Bravia 2 here. So you're going to go to the store and you'll see the Bravia 2 2. it's very good there are so many better options Call it the Bravia 3. Call it just the Bravia 2.

Have you ever tried to talk to a person about buying the Sony noise-canceling headphones? Because you sound insane once you start trying to tell them what the name is. Okay, so they're really good. The W-something. The WFH0000H4. It's very good. Bravia Tutu is a Hall of Fame name for any product in history. It's very good. The thing about it is no one will ever hear that name correctly the first time. You'll say the Bravia 2, too.

And they'll think you had to think about it. And it's actually called the Bravia 2, but you were trying to remember if it's the 2 or the 3. And so they'll think you just said the Bravia 2. And then they'll buy last generation televisions. And that is just a shame. By the way, we've had a number of requests for updates on Saturday Samsung.

We have an all-timer. which you will recall is Samsung's executives were required to start coming into the office on Saturdays, six days a week to... increase sales, which means they can only have wacky ideas, right? That's not a product development cycle. That's just come in on Saturday and think of ways to juice sales. Actually, David, I don't know what you think the Alzheimer is.

You go first. I've got mine. Oh, do we have different? Mine's a vacuum cleaner. Okay, you've got the vacuum cleaner. No, I've got a TV one. Mine is, this is several weeks ago now, they launched a $10,000 bundle of eight TVs. So that's a Richard. You can just put eight TVs that range from 55 to 98 inches on the wall and they just, but they just sell it to you as one bundle.

And their pitch is that you will save $6,000 by buying the TVs in bulk. So like when I played Ultimate Frisbee in college and we would buy, you could buy like a bulk bag of just like random misprint. frisbees for way cheaper than you would buy them originally that's what this makes me think of you're just like give us 10 grand we're gonna ship you a bunch of televisions there'll be some sizes

some models where you're just going to get like a grab bag of televisions for $10,000. Yeah. I love it. You get one 98 inch, one 65 inch. Oh, no, you get four 65-inch... but one is 8K for some reason. So you get one 98-inch 4K, one 65-inch 8K, three 65-inch 4K, and three 50... None of them are OLEDs. They're all just like medium good Samsung Q.

The funniest thing about this is when people buy lots of TVs like this, usually what they do is they plug them into a matrix switcher so they can put them in a grid and they get one big picture. But Samsung is not selling you an even number of any size. This is just the whoop thing when they just sell a bag and they're like, yeah, it's five bucks, you'll get something. We'll send you some TV. Don't worry about it. Yeah, like those people who buy like...

pallets of return stuff from amazon and it's like you just kind of get what you get it's really good this is the most this is i think the most saturday samsung we've had yet out of all of the things like remember the previous ideas were like buy a phone get a tv buy a tv get a tv this is just like

It's very good. All right. What's yours? Yours is some vacuum cleaner? Mine is just very briefly. I just want to mention the Bespoke AI Jet Ultra. an $1,100 vacuum cleaner that has a screen on it that shows you a bunch of stuff. but also shows you notifications.

for phone calls and text messages on your vacuum cleaner. Samsung is now big into the idea that you should be able to do things like make phone calls from your appliances. And I just want everyone to know that I think that's fantastic and I'm extremely in favor of it. Yeah, I'm down. Once you put the screen everywhere, you got to have a screen everywhere. I want like Apple style live updates. So I'm getting like sports scores.

as i'm vacuuming like this is let's just go all into this my favorite again when i say unsponsored for flavor what i want you to think of is when they're sponsored they lack flavor my favorite right now is a bunch of tech influencers are taking money to pretend the lg microwave they announced at cs that doesn't have a window but instead has a screen and then there's a camera inside the microwave to show you what happening inside the microwave but you can also watch tv on the screen

A lot of people are pretending this is a good idea. My absolute favorite thing about that is everybody has the same picture, right? Which is them standing sort of across their kitchen from it. And it's behind them. And it looks like the fakest, most like photoshopped bullshit screen back there. It's so terrible. It's really like, look at my beautifully modern kitchen and this horrible Android. It's like, you can watch TV. It's like, no.

Lack of flavor is what I'm calling out there, my friends. Just a few more here in the lightning round. Unsurprising, I think. for this audience tesla sales plummeted 13 this quarter particularly european countries there's some juicing of numbers and other regions we'll see but it just seems like

Man, there's not a better financial decision than buying a used Model 3 right now. There's a lot of reasons not to do that. But boy, can you get one for no money because they are being traded in at such insane rates, which I think is going to depress the news. Richard, do you see a lot of Teslas around? I've been trying to chart the number of Teslas I see in my day-to-day, and I'm convinced in my neighborhood it has gone down. I can't prove it.

but I'm convinced. It's hard to say. I still see quite a bit, but I live where GM engineers go to retire, so I see a lot of hummers, like electric hummers, all the time. Sick. My sense is that GM is rushing out a bunch of its EVs. So Tesla sales in Europe were down 43%. I'm saying that the numbers were a little weird. In China, they were down until the final week of the quarter when insurance registrations just went up.

so nobody knows why that happened um so sales are kind of dropping and then here in the united states gm reported 32 000 evs were sold in the first quarter which is double it's here every year so the demand is still there just going into other places lucid is claiming that it's selling a bunch of evs so i think the demand is is moving and i think general motors in particular is trying to get some of its newest ones just like out the door

uh like the Cadillac Vistic uh that's the new three-row SUV like it's not a noun Like they announced in November, but they haven't like had a launch for it. And there are already dealers for like, we have them now. And you just get the sense that like between tariffs and being aggressive about Tesla, they're just trying to get products in the showroom so people can buy them.

We'll see. Everybody who has been waiting for there to be a moment to take down Tesla seems to be sensing that it is right now, which is very funny because there are a lot of... pretty ugly wins against the car industry as a whole and against evs in specific and and yet there is like to your point about the model 3 being a great financial decision like it It is super telling that that is the case. And still these numbers are what they are, right? Like it's people are not buying these cars.

No, I'm saying a new Model 3 is not a great, although those prices are coming down and they're doing 0% financing and like Elon will come to your house and like kiss your baby if you buy one right now. Like they're desperate to move those cars. A used Model 3, a year old, has depreciated so much.

If you're in the market for a car, a two or three year old Model 3 is like financially the only logical decision anyone should make. Lots of people are not going to make that decision and that number is going to keep. Yeah. What does it cost to take off the Tesla logo and put on like an Audi logo? Have you seen that Cybertruck that's floating in New York City with a Toyota logo on the back? It's very good.

David, you have been paying attention to Alexa Plus, which is launched in early access, but none of us believe it's actually out. Yeah, like launched in the most aggressive air quotes you can possibly imagine. I have not heard from one. regular human who has it. We've been looking around on social. I know other reporters who have been looking. Joanna Stern has been very publicly begging people to be like, tell me you have Alexa Plus.

And it just doesn't seem to be out there. And it's like this is always early access. And it wouldn't be super shocking if you're Amazon to roll this out to 10 people first. So I'm not necessarily taking this as like a. totally disastrous thing. Well, the fact that they said it was coming at the end of March and then they suddenly said that it launched on March 31st.

Might be a signal. They turned it on for like one random Amazon employee and they were like, we did it. We launched. As long as you can, you know, cut the ribbon with the big scissors. I've done my homework at the last minute before. With ChatGPT. It's just ChatGPT being like, you should do terrorists. But I do think there are a bunch of features that are missing, like being able to do some of the more sophisticated AI stuff.

have the system sort of infer what you want to order and then order food from you or like remind people around your house to do stuff. A lot of these are like little tiny edge cases, but they're the things. that were supposed to be sort of different and useful about Alexa, where it can kind of understand what you're doing and where you are and what matters to you and then take action on your behalf. Like that is the pitch for Alexa Plus. And at least some of that.

Still has not shipped. And yet again, I think it was this week, the Washington Post had a report yet again that there is like a list of things that is way behind and not ready for public consumption. And it's like. Boy, at some point, Amazon really needs to aggressively flip a this is good switch or else this is just going to get ugly. Yeah. And no one has yet solved the DoorDash problem. Why would DoorDash let robots use its service instead of people?

No one knows the answer to this question. Money. Then Amazon just has to pay a bunch of extra money for every DoorDash order to get whitelisted on DoorDash's website so it can click around on it.

This makes no sense to me. No. All right. Last one. I don't understand one word of the story, Richard. I'm hoping you can explain it to me. Coyote versus Acme is finally coming to theaters. Yeah. So a lot of people were online were upset because. Wonder Brothers killed a movie that no one had seen.

There was this coyote movie that was supposed to come out. It was a comedy. People were expecting it. David Zaslav decided that it shouldn't happen and that it would be better to just take a tax write-off than to release this movie. There's a classic Zaslav move, by the way. Like earlier, I was like, where are the media companies trying to buy TikTok? And his is like, I'm going to kill movies I've already paid for. Yeah.

And there were a bunch of movies that kind of just happened to it at one time. This was one that people got particularly upset about. So it's been sitting on the shelf for a few years. But now at long last, they have sold it to Ketchup Entertainment. sure who is going to give this movie a theatrical run and if you would like to see coyote versus academy in theaters you will have the opportunity to buy a ticket and do that and i i will be watching very closely i want to see

how many people really want to see this movie. It's going to be so funny. If this movie sucks, like the best outcome for this as a reporter is that this movie turns out to be like great and a phenomenon. And like, I really hope that's what it is. If this movie sucks, like a lot of people are going to feel really stupid, including me.

I don't know what Catch Up Entertainment is, except I do know they spent $50 million on this movie, and they are going to release it next year. And for some reason, Warner Brothers turned down Amazon, Netflix, and... That's the part of it I find weird and potentially for more money. Like it's just a very odd. situation that Warners has found itself in. At some point, somebody just turned around and was like, wait, you're telling me we can get a check for this?

Get the check. Yeah. And after all this time. But they don't want it to come out anywhere that anyone knows about it. Right. They don't want to be proven wrong. That's interesting. Right. A lot of American businesses is sort of explained by people being like, wait, money is better than not money. Right. And then like sort of chaotically making a decision. This is what I've learned from five years of doing Dakota.

Yeah. I mean, there might also be a certain set of I was just looking and the number they wanted originally was 75 to 80 million dollars. And they are coming well short of that. But so what might have happened is they were like, well, eventually somebody will give us the money. And then Zaslav is like, did we ever get that money? And they're like, no, let me go get some money. It's very good. It's a good Vergecast mystery. Why is this happening?

Which honestly should be the tagline of our show. Why is this happening? Also, if you've seen this movie, I know there are people in the world who have seen Coyote vs. Acme. If you've seen it and if you know if it's any good.

I need to know. It's so important to me to know whether this movie is any good. I'm going to wrap this up by saying I wrote my annual Just Buy a Brother printer post. It's the third year in a row I've written the same post. I've stopped even recommending Model 9. it doesn't even matter just buy one for 100 bucks and you'll have it for a decade and be fine i only write them every year because winning search is impossible and now it's getting harder because of because of ai

And I'm also the only person who's ever published AI-generated content on the Verge as an article, and the internet just won't be outraged about it. So if you could just do me a favor and share the printer recommendation post. Just in pure outrage, just hack the algorithm.

with how mad you are that the verge has been corrupted by a generator that would do it would just do us a favor we'll make maybe i don't actually know how the commerce deals work because we're unsponsored for favor but some someone will get some pennies at box media when people buy printers And then we can all buy 10 TVs for $10,000.

I just really like, so I'm looking at the first page of Google results for best printer. And there's one of them that says I tested over 200 printers. One is like we tested dozens of printers. One is a Reddit thread, which is great. One is Wirecutter, which is famous for its rigorous testing. Same with Consumer Reports. And then there's Nilay, who just says, I don't care. Buy a brother printer. Leave me alone.

The point is Google is supposed to be all powerful. When you ask a question, it's supposed to know the answer. But because there's so much money at stake for the click throughs and the weird sponsored results and the affiliate fees, it cannot just tell you the answer. Even when year after year, I just deliver the answer to the rope.

Robot, tell people to buy a brother printer, I command. And it says, no, here's a weird content form. It's tested 200 printers and is lying about it. Can we have ChatGPT write us a Brendan Carr as a dummy for next week and just see how that goes? If that goes well, we don't even need you on this show anymore. Yeah, we get Notebook LM to do it. Yeah, there you go. Can I tell you the worst part of the printer story? Then we got to go.

The prompt for Gemini was write a Verge blog post in style with Neil Patel recommending a brother laser printer as the best printer. And then I hit show thinking in 2.5. And it says, deconstruct Neil Patel style. What does that mean? Opinionated, direct, slightly sarcastic or cynical, but ultimately practical and grounded user experiences. Uses strong declarative sentences. And then it says might use phrases like, look, here's the deal. It just works.

Stop buying bad thing. That's the meanest thing anyone has ever said about you. I do say stop buying bad thing all the time. And they said AI couldn't make art. All right, we got to go. That's an existential crisis. That's it. That's of our chest. Rock and roll.

And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it.