Musk and Altman go to court

But this became like the darling of CES because its big idea was we're going to use AI to do things on your behalf. We're going to supplant the smartphone. This is going to be the future of everything. Um, it wasn't. All of these devices, including this one, were very bad and couldn't do anything, and we all kind of left them behind. But in the two years since then, two things have happened that I think are really interesting.

One, the world has kind of come around to what this device, the R1, is trying to be. Way back when Rabbit was talking about this idea of a large action model, which is essentially just agentic AI, teaching AI systems to go do things on your behalf. The tech across the board for all of that is still fairly primitive. And for the most part, you want to do it on your smartphone anyway. But Rabbit's big idea about how AI might work was actually pretty prescient and ahead of its time in that sense.

The other thing is, genuinely kudos to the rabbit team. They just kept working on this thing. They redesigned the interface. They built a bunch of new apps. But the one that has really made this thing useful for me again. is the magic recorder. And basically all this thing does is record audio. There's a pretty good microphone on this thing actually. So it's a decent recorder to like put on the table or carry around with you or whatever.

And then it does some AI summarization and transcription and then sends you an email. And that's the sort of thing you can do on your phone. It's the sort of thing you could do on your laptop. There's a million different devices for it, and you really don't need a standalone device to do anything that the R1 does.

But there's something about this form factor and being able to walk around and hold it like I'm a old timey doctor dictating notes. I use it when I'm like walking around the kitchen to take notes on the stuff that I need to get at the grocery store, and then it emails me a grocery list.

And there's just lots of little things like this that I don't want a dedicated device for everything, but having it for certain types of things, especially a voice device, so I can use it to set timers, I can use it for simple reminders. Having this thing just sitting here on my desk that isn't my phone has actually been kind of great. Kudos to Rabbit. More on this to come. I think there is an interesting story in what has happened to Rabbit over the last two years. So we'll get back to that.

But kudos to Rabbit. All right, today on the show we're gonna do two things. First, we're gonna talk to the Virgis Liz Lapato about the open AI Elon Musk trial that's going on right now. You're hearing this episode probably on Tuesday. The trial started with jury selection on Monday. Liz and I talked on Friday. There's a lot of stuff happening and a lot of moving parts right now.

It felt important to talk about this trial because there's big stuff happening. It involves huge names in the tech industry. And there are some really interesting things that might come out of it, no matter who wins. So we're gonna get into that with Liz. Then Sean Hollister is going to come on and break down all of the news from last week's framework event. Framework is this company that's been around for a few years trying to make more upgradable, more repairable laptops.

And in general, has done a really good job. And I think this year represents a bit of a turning point for what framework is up to. So Sean's going to come on. We're going to get into it. We also have a hotline question about small laptops. So you know I'm excited about that. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, um I'm gonna go do my grocery list. That was a real example. So time to take the rabbit out, see how it does. This is the first cast. We'll be right back.

I can't figure out whether this trial is going to be interesting between Elon Musk and OpenAI because it's interesting and important and instructive for the future of AI, or if it's just going to be a mess of Shenanigans, essentially, right? Like is this actually a court case or is this just a show that it is somehow going to jury selection? What's

That's money they may not have to pay, let's say, Oracle, um, you know, on their obligations. So there that that is a possibility, but you know, I many of the lawyers I spoke to for this story were like I If I were taking this case on contingency, I would not take it. Like if I were, you know, if I if this were on contingency, I would not get paid. Like this is happening because Elon Musk has the money to pay someone to argue a losing case. And so

I'm basically just expecting like mudslinging and gossip. And you know, if we if we get more chaos than that, like I'm I'm not gonna say no to it. Sure. But, you know, like it's it's to me it's mostly like uh it's meant to embarrass and maybe humiliate Sam Altman. Um and open AI's lawyers are s sort of also notoriously nasty. Um so We'll see.

Um and he storms off. And he had previously made this commitment, I think, for a hundred million dollars, and I think he had only paid thirty. So he kind of leaves open AI on alert. And this matters because one of the approaches that open AI like famously took and has gotten us to where it is today is like the very expensive approach of just buying as much compute as possible. Um that you know, just throw compute at the problem and that'll fix AI.

And so they're they have these like very expensive scientists. They need to buy very expensive compute. a their big funder has just walked off. And uh so they open this for profit arm. Um, they wind up making a deal with Microsoft, and that is sort of the genesis of open AI as we know it today, because the thought was that uh without a return on investment, it was going to be much harder to get people to donate the amounts of money that they needed.

Shitty, I think, is the word. AI project that is uh creating nude images of people that are non-consensual on Twitter, and it's got problems with like. Child porn. Um, that's that's his thing. He folds it into SpaceX, which is his functional company. Um, and now SpaceX is about to go public. And then there's also been rumblings about anthropic and open AI going public.

um and like trying to figure out how to make profits finally. Um so this is sort of this moment where you can see the field starting to change. We're like at this point where they can't keep giving AI away for free anymore. And also like there just needs to be some sort like because it requires so much money, there just needs to be a huge cash infusion. And so that's what they're going to the public markets for.

Um, like that is already like it's distracting, it's expensive. And like at this point in time, you know, open AI should be really prepping for IPO and instead they have to deal with this distraction. Um, and then on top of that, you know, anything that comes out about Sam Altman that maybe discredits him means that, you know, there may be agitation for him to step down again.

Um and that again potentially really s puts the company adrift. Um so Basically, any sort of negative information that comes out in this trial about OpenAI or Sam Altman lets him kneecap a competitor, but just the trial, the fact of the trial itself. is enough. Um, again, because it is expensive and it is kind of a w a way of wasting time for these people who he's like, I guess, really angry at. And if you look at what he's asking for.

He isn't just asking for money, which he's like been like, Oh, uh you should we should donate that all of that to the Open AI Foundation. You know, it's not for me. I'm only asking for money because otherwise they're not gonna let me like run this case. And like I don't totally believe that, but whatever. Um, but the other like remedies he's asking for are ones that I was told he is unlikely to get, but he wants uh Sam Altman to step down and I think be banned from running companies for a while.

So there is just a you know, a a real sort of vindictive streak. And like the other thing that's worth knowing is that like this is one of four lawsuits um that Musk has filed against OpenAI. Um and it's also uh This guy loves filing lawsuits.

The man loves a lawsuit. He he will sue anyone over anything real or perceived. Uh and he seems to just feel like, well, I'm paying these lawyers anyway. I might as well make'em do something. Uh which sure, like knock yourself out if if you if you like a lawsuit.

Go for it. What is your read on how surprising it is that this thing is actually, as it stands right now, on Friday, April 24th, going to trial? You've been reporting on this and writing about this like Is is it as surprising to everyone as it seems to me that anyone took this seriously enough that this is actually going to trial?

you know, uh, legal legal drama style. But that's that's that mostly doesn't happen, you know? Like so the fact that it is, you know, a question of facts rather than a question of law is the reason we're in front of a jury. And it's just because the facts are so strongly lined up against uh must. that everybody's surprised that we're going forward because most lawyers would be like, This is a waste of my time.

In particular, Elon Musk's goal is just to get put a lot of damaging information about his opponents out there through legal filings. Um, to some extent it seems to be working already. What what has happened so far?

emblematic of like, you know, what we're getting here. Like some of the things that we're getting are details that I think are interesting to people in the tech industry, like Ilya Sutzgeber being like, Oh, we can't treat open source AI as a sideshow. Like this is potentially something that it, you know, we need to take very seriously. Um, and you have moments of like discovering that Musk was like, as he stomped off, going to try to start recruiting people from OpenAI, like poaching them.

So there are, you know, like there's like some of this like inside baseball that I think is gonna be really interesting to people who work in the tech industry and obviously we'll be covering that. But for me, like I'm here for them like insulting Jeff Bezos casually. Like uh a bit of a tool is I think um what what Musk called him.

Yep. Is this likely to be the same thing where just every name you can think of in tech is probably going to surface in some embarrassing text message or email?

Like that's incredible. After everything this guy has been through in court, he's like still putting incriminating nonsense in his fucking tech. Okay. Um so you know, like it's it's

Zuckerberg's already caught strays, I'm sure there are more because he and Musk seem to be pals. Yeah. Sam Altman knows everybody. Like that is sort of famously one of the things about him that makes him, you know, unique in the bay is that he is just like really connected, in part because of his sort of previous time at Y Combinator.

And so I imagine we're going to hear things about leadership at NVIDIA. Um, I think we're gonna probably gonna hear things about, you know, open AI's assorted partners. Like obviously Microsoft's a part of the suit, so we're gonna hear from them.

Um, but you know, anybody that they might have partnered with or that they had explored partnerships with, like that's also potentially something that comes into the case. And so that's everybody, you know, like that's a number of these like Um companies like Core Weave that are making deals with OpenAI for compute. Uh that is places like Amazon and Microsoft that are, you know, big, big companies that we're thinking about investments.

That is potentially anybody who is thinking about an investment in open AI. So I'm like, all right, which VCs are gonna be catching strays here? Because like You know, those are also people who potentially can be very embarrassed by stuff that comes out, um, i just in the course of like having this discussion of like what happened on this timeline.

we've tracked a bunch of really interesting moments in the history of OpenAI, particularly Sam Altman getting fired. I mean, it's it's really interesting to me the timing of this next to that big New Yorker story about Sam Altman which raises a lot of questions, I think, about his fitness to lead the company and a lot of questions about the the information being shared a around him and potentially by people like Elon Musk who want to take him down, the like dossiers being

created at by Oppo researchers. Like, I mean it's it's literally like in the way that Silicon Valley, the HBO show, is way too real about the tech industry, like it's all these are all just succession plots. Every single one of them is just a succession plot about other companies. And it just feels like the risk right now for Sam Altman reputationally is so high. That you can sort of see why Elon Musk likes smells blood in the water, right? That it's like if if I can just

take him down. A I will I will win in my heart in a deeply like blackhearted way, but also I can in a very real way take down a competitor right before SpaceX goes public. Like Part of me thinks that you're right and this is going to be easy and OpenAI is gonna win the case pretty open and shut and just walk away and go about its business. But it also does feel like OpenAI is tenuous right now in a way that this could go sideways even if they win the case. I don't know, am I overthinking this?

Um, and like there's a point at which Altman actually thanks him for like looking into, you know, these allegations. Um Where he's like, uh well, at least somebody like looked into it and said, like that's not real. Yeah. Um it's really hard to prove a negative, but like if anybody's going to find, you know, misconduct like Ronan Farrow is pretty good at it.

Um, I imagine in that process he started to turn up this stuff where it's like, well, Sam will say anything to keep people happy. And like That is in and of itself pretty newsworthy. Like that is a thing that is a problem uh if you want someone to be trustworthy. Like this the thing that I thought was really interesting was like this description of him as being simultaneously like people-pleasing and a sociopath. Which is like that's quite a combination.

What I wonder is, again, why anyone would allow this to go this far. Like I keep there is such a real chance in my head that we're not gonna run this segment because they're just gonna settle and this is all gonna go away. Part I I do you think that's a real possibility?

Um with virtually every important company that's in the space. And so if they, you know, are forced to disgorge money, uh, that's a problem for their financial commitments. If they are forced to get rid of Sam Altman and they have chaos, again, that may that may trigger, you know, um stuff in their contracts that may potentially like slow down their ability to, you know, come through on the things that they're supposed to be doing.

uh may hinder their ability to fundraise because that is really the thing that Sam Altman is best at. Like he's not like a tech guy in the way that some of these other people are tech guys, you know. He's he's a finance guy, primarily. Um, and so if you kick over open AI, to me the question is, okay, what happens to the rest of the the industry? Because SpaceX is about to go public. So let's say we kick over open AI and then there's like a panic in the AI sector.

What does that mean for the SpaceX IPO? Like, to me, the funniest possible outcome is that Elon Musk wins a Pyrrhic victory. takes out open AI and then absolutely shoots himself in the foot for his SpaceX IPO by doing it.

And we've seen some of her texts too, right? Where she's like, Oh, how close do you want me to be? How friendly should I be? Do you want me to like, you know, get information for you? And it's just like So this is somebody who is extremely close to Musk, who has had her texts brought in to discover it.

And like I'm thinking about some of the stuff that we saw from Theranos that was like, you know i the humiliating texts between Sonny Balani and Elizabeth Holmes, like I Love You My Tiger or whatever, that had no bearing whatsoever um on the case, but that we all like got to read anyway. So depending on what's in those text messages, and it seems like there's some very real stuff about Elon Musk's business in there, because like not only

Uh is this woman like, you know, the mother of his his children? She also is involved in a number of his companies. Like I believe she worked at uh Tesla and Eurolink. Um so you know, who knows what's Um, so that's that's again like the uh you gotta keep in mind there's this IPO that's about to happen. Um and anything that comes out about, you know, XAI, for instance, is potentially an issue. Like

I'm like just sort of imagining, like I don't have any evidence that this is true, and maybe we won't get it. But let's imagine that like somewhere in the text. She expresses reservations about um, you know, uh an AI model that goes on to be incorporated into XAI or autopilot a Tesla. Sure. That is something that is you know, pretty important to a lot of people who are invested in those companies.

Um, so th that's that to me is really the risk for Musk is that there is some damaging information in his sort of bank of information that he hasn't like fully prepared for or fully like thought about like how much he can hurt himself here. Like there can potentially be blowback.

But at what point does that tip over? I have no idea. And if it feels like if we're ever gonna find out, it might be very soon.

Horrible. But, you know, like the the positive case, of course, is that, well, this is potentially going to be one of the most important companies of our time, so we should let the little guys get in on it too. Um, but that those people are not maybe not already in business with Elon Musk. And so, like if you are just thinking about this from an investment perspective, you're not bought in on his whole deal, you're not one of his fanboys, you're not an investor in Tesla.

And you start to hear things from this trial, you might be like, mm, uh-mm, I don't know about this. Like, I don't think that's a good place for me to like put my money or for me to put my funds money or for me to put some, you know, the retirement counseling managing.

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was was the star of the show. Tell me about this laptop. You were at the event, you saw it, tell me about this laptop.

It's just never done that before. Never. And so I think to me, just like even reading your story, it was like the first impression you get is like, oh, they made a great one. Like the the MacBook Pro, I think, is is a reasonable standard of like really excellent high-end laptops. Is it is it that nice a piece of hardware?

of a like feel, which and even there, Apple laptops, I don't like how like the the the deck like pulls and carves into my wrists when I'm trying to type on it. I don't love that. But Whenever we've said, wow, a Windows manufacturer finally got it, this is up there with the MacBook. Framework is finally there too. Framework is finally in that place where this chassis feels like it can go toe to toe with anything else out there, and the touchpad may be better than the Windows laptops by V.

That's strong praise and it's very preliminary. Very preliminary. Like how long did I play with this thing? Not long enough to be like, I'm going to use this touchbed every day and love it. But my first impression was silky smooth, nice. the cl the haptic click feels like a proper haptic click, whereas most Windows manufacturers like kind of tried to copy the thing Apple did and maybe didn't quite get all the way there. Like they put some serious thought and effort and money into this and

Yeah, we're we're on that trajectory now. Maybe it's there

High performing, highly functional, no compromises window lap windows laptop that gets better battery life than the MacBook Pro. And I don't know a lot, but I know that that doesn't exist in the Windows world. So what what is happening here? What is framework doing that is is trying to walk this balance?

AMD had some stuff that came close, but this is this is even better. When you combine these things together, that laptop was definitely beating all the MacBooks, was beating all the ARM stuff. When you combine that with a big battery. Now but this one They're saying it'll do 20 hours of 4K Netflix, and they say that's a smidge more than the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

13.5 inch laptop, 14-inch laptop. We're talking pretty comparable here, more battery life than that. When you go up to like a 16-inch MacBook Pro, you got a bigger battery. Anyhow, Core Ultra 3. You want me to go through the specs? The Core Ultra 3 in here. is a very efficient chip as we've seen in that Dell, we've seen in some other machines. It can also be a very powerful chip with graphical potential when you got 12 of the XE3 graphics cores in there.

I saw some Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven running at the event with some uh artificial upscaling and things like that, but it looked good and smooth at over sixty FPS on a machine that's very thin and light. This is you know, one point four kg. Um it's got this customs screen.

two point eight K resolution, it is IPS not OLED, but IPS is pretty good, and it has that variable refresh rate from thirty to one hundred and twenty hertz when their thirteen inch laptops were stuck at sixty hertz before. Right. So all of a sudden, things are gonna feel smoother because everything feels smoother when you graduate beyond sixty hertz.

And they've got this LP CAM2 memory, which is the compression mounted memory. Before you got like sockets, I stick it in the socket and I put it down and it snaps into place. And that is not

the best and most efficient like electrical connection you can have. You want memory paired very closely to the CPU on the motherboard for best results. And so what Apple and some other companies do is they'd say, well, we're going to solder it on there. You can't replace it anymore, but we are on the motherboard.

Now you can be on the motherboard with LPCAM2 memory by putting three screws in it and sticking it down very tightly to pads that are right on the board. And so this memory's fast, it's low power, it's efficient, and It's also efficient because it's connected directly. On top of all of that, there's PCI 5.0 storage, which is like

Much faster than PCI 3.0. Your storage was probably already fast enough, but if you want to go up to 14,000 megabytes per second, you can do that with an SSD now, and maybe it won't make your laptop overheat. It's a pretty cool laptop as far as we can tell.

There are side firing speakers. We never loved the speakers on this. They were pointed a weird direction. Now they go at the sides. Do I know if they're any good? I don't because it was loud in there. We'll see. Sure. And the most exciting thing is that all of the refinements and changes, including some I haven't talked about, Can go back to all of the previous framework laptops if you buy these parts. Because all of them Can slot in.

You can't take all of them by themselves. Like if you want to put a new bigger battery in your original framework 13 from, I don't know, 2021. You can do that, but you have to also put the new bottom cover on so you have enough space for that battery. If you want to get the new touchpad, you also have to get the new keyboard and you put those on as a set. But

All of it. You can take that old laptop. You can put the new motherboard CPU in memory. All the stuff. You can bring it along for the ride, which is wild that no company's ever done.

Screw all of the people who already bought our product. And then you have you have broken your original promise to your original customers and the whole thing starts to fall apart. I feel

You and I have tracked a lot of hardware companies, and there's this really fascinating thing you go through as an early hardware company where you have no leverage, you have no money, and so you essentially call a bunch of factories in China and you take whatever parts they will give you.

And and that's that's how you make your first product. You you build a thing around the parts that are available to you. And then the next time you get some scale, you get some brand recognition, and then you can call those same people and you can make like Some light customizations. You you can tweak a thing here and there. You can maybe have them make it slightly differently. You can reserve the best one instead of getting the leftovers.

And then if if you keep iterating on that long enough and you get big enough and successful enough, you get to start dictating the parts that you make. Right. And that's that's when you become powerful. And it's also when you get to start making the things that you want to make.

And it seems to me that this is framework hitting that point, that that now framework is in charge of its own destiny, like all the way down to the metal in a way that it never has before. And it seems like Nurav kind of alluded to that with you.

It's true. To some degree, yes, they made a custom display here. They've never been able to do this much before. To some other degree though, like they they are working with specific companies that do still control their destiny. This wouldn't be possible without working closely with Intel, not only on like the CPU, but on the motherboard and the RAM, putting all of that together in a package.

He said, you know, they worked with Micron to secure access to the RAM and some other memory companies'cause you have to have a supply of these newfangled Cam2 memory modules. It's not just a standard part. Lenovo has them too, but uh, you know, now now so does framework. I don't know for sure that they're not like, hey, Lenovo, can you send some of your other memory modules over here? And I do know some companies, some very small companies.

that have kind of used like the leftover capacity at an apple factory that's m that's, you know, taking making metal shells for things. Could be that framework is using some leftover capacity Apple doesn't need. But I don't know. They've been here six or six years. They they look like they're here to stay, right?

m with bravado and confidence. Like th this company seems to be firing on all cylinders in a way I did not really expect. What's your read on how it has managed to find its way through the chaos we keep talking about on this show?

nobody's actually had a chance to replace laptop one yet. Let's see if they're gonna do it in laptop three. Laptop three comes out, we're like, It's two generations. They've done the thing nobody else has done. Then they did it again with the sixteen inch.

Okay, this this company is really onto the thing. They know this and they are building an audience that trusts them. And they're being very transparent with this audience about everything from RAM prices and, you know, how much it costs them to the suppliers they use for the components. They don't just say, you know, we've built this wonderful new

you know, Wi-Fi chip that's in this, you know, that's in this framework keyboard. They say, we are using this particular component from this one of our suppliers that the nerds in the audience will know and recognize and say, yeah, you used a really good component. We are nerds too and we get it.

Uh, that is something that there's been far too little of in this industry. And so that that kind of um I don't want to say radical transparency, but this transparency is a breath of fresh air. It makes this audience feel like they are being listened to, that they have a voice, that they are supporting a movement instead of just supporting a company. And so when they're playing to that audience, like they were in that event in San Francisco.

You know, they they they brought in fans, not just journalists, to cover that event too. And and I don't I don't mean like influence. Like I did not see these fans roaming around with cameras for the YouTube channels like I see at Samsung. I saw like people who were like just walking around, asking questions, trying gadgets, and occasionally coming up to me and saying, hey, are you Sean Hollister with the verb?

You want to talk about this? That that was fun. That was fun. I don't get recognized very often.

MacBook Pros are generally screens for creative professionals who need to work with accurate colors and things like that. And while they say all these are color calibrated out of the box, to a per unit level, by the way, which is also amazing. Uh they're talking about a hundred percent of the SRGB color gamut, which is this small one, not Adobe RGB, not DCIP three.

So if you want, if you're a creative professional working on your next film, you're probably not gonna do it on this screen. You're probably going to plug in an external monitor to it that has the specs you need for that.

I think that's who Apple wants you to think its customer is more than its actual customer base. But like that's that's what Apple means by creative. I think it's actually it it's sort of instructive to hear them say this is for developers. Which also I think maybe helps explain one of the other fascinating things about it, which is there is a there is a Dyed in the Wolf Linux version of this. Because Sean, this is the year of Linux on the desktop. I don't know if you've heard

I want for text clarity. It's not what I want for beautiful graphics, watching movies, things like that. I'm sure I can do all those things. I'm sure they'll be fine. But this is like, oh yeah, if I'm gonna spend all day looking at text on a screen This seems like a direction to go.

Um walk me through the price really fast and then then I want to talk about the couch keyboard. But walk me through the price because even frankly, even in your story, you seem slightly confused about what this thing actually costs.

16 gig of memory, uh, five twelve gigabytes of storage. You can get the DIY version of that for twelve hundred dollars. But I will warn you, um, good thing about DIY is it's not really DIY with framework. It's like All you have to do is add the storage, the memory on your OS.

It's only if you need to configure more things you go to the other way. Anyhow, so fourteen ninety nine there. But sing's.

Can get pricey too. If you want a new motherboard CPU, you're looking at 450 for the uh, I think it's 450 for the core Ultra 5 level, but you're looking at 800 for an XS. So out of your, you know, your your tw twenty one hundred dollar laptop, eight hundred of that is motherboard CPU, not including the memory. Right. So

the more and more likely to last you longer than whatever you buy from somebody else, especially in the Windows world. Right. And I think this has been one of the things people have been excited about. Apple, I think, is kind of in a league of its own in terms of like building and supporting computers for a long time right now. The idea that I can get that in the Windows world and have real faith that this thing is gonna last me five, six, seven, eight years. is pretty powerful.

The Logitech K400, everybody's couch keyboard, is a piece of jaunt. It's also thirty-five dollars. And I was I was actually very edified to know that everyone hates that thing as much as I do because it is it has a it has a trackpad on the right side, it has clicky mouse buttons, it has a keyboard, it sucks all the way across from left to right. It is junk. But it works and it's$35. And Framework just like decided to build a better one just for funsies? I can keep.

There are a few others, but but that's pretty much the bifurcation here. And so that keyboard has the Logitech keyboard has. Old school, like very squishy, terrible membrane keys. Feels like junk to type on. It does have real buttons underneath the touchpad, but they also feel like junk. The touchpad is old school. This this was designed in like twenty eleven.

typing feels better. I d I got like around ninety words per minute on my first try with it and I barely practiced my normal typing speed, I've some verge commenters asked, is around a hundred and twenty. So yeah, that's slower, but again, this was my first time ever touching this. Yes.

I can just throw it on the couch and have it be my couch keyboard. He's like, I'm betting this thing is not thirty five dollars. And I think I'm willing to pay more, but I don't think I'm willing to pay a lot more, which makes this challenging for framework. It is.

Um, and I don't know how far that idea goes, right? Like keyboard is sort of uniquely well suited to do something like that. But to just be like, well, we made a good keyboard, let's find other uses for good keyboards. Is is a cool way of product thinking that I think we don't see out of a lot of laptop manufacturing.

Which I think you're going to love. I don't know if you saw it, if you if you read my story, because I didn't have a picture of it in there, but it's in the video. They have built what I call the anti-dongle.

So it's flush, no longer sticking out of your laptop or or or desktop. Only works if you're a frame time work uh owner of computer user, but still anti-dongle. I love it.

Uh I I'm not I don't usually consider myself a fan of companies. I'm a fan of individual products'cause many companies, you know. their next product won't be anywhere as good as their last one and then I don't want to be rooting for a a product that wasn't well designed. But framework, it's hard not to be a fan when you love tech like we

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Kate says, as a highly satisfied owner of a Surface Go two purchased back in twenty twenty, truly the most ironic here to have bought a highly portable computer, I think it's a real shame that this product category never ended up taking off.

Um Kate describes the way that that they use the thing for travel with the dedicated bridge keyboard. Shout out Bridge, which made good keyboards. Um liked the 1920 by 1280 IPS screen, uh, and then basically winds up to um what happened to this category of PC and why hasn't this worked?

And Sean, the reason I bring this to you is is to go all the way back to the very beginning of the frameworks discussion. You said something to the effect of we can kind of do good performance and good battery life now. And that suggests to me that maybe what we can do is slightly less good performance and even better battery life.

which is what something like the Surface Go always needed, right? Like the Go's problem was it was it was an adorable little thing that just sucked. Like it was it was underpowered and and didn't do the things you needed it to do in order to be a successful computer. But was it just too early? Are we are we coming back around to where something like the Surface Go could be what it was always meant to be?

We now have Snapdragon, like Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops with amazing battery life. We have the MacBooks with their ARM silicon and amazing battery life. We have handheld. with that have that even with powerful chips have gotten decent battery life in less, you know, computing, uh less less like volume than you need in a in a Surface Go.

The battery density is starting to get a little bit better. The framework la uh device we were talking about has higher battery density than frameworks put in a laptop before, like eight hundred and fifty milliwatts per I can't remember that some number. It was a cool number.

Intel was and is flagging. AMD is is coming out to sort of eat Intel's lunch, but is particularly focused on like high-end, high performance things. And Qualcomm is desperately trying to figure out how to make something other than smartphone processors and can't figure it out. Like not that long ago, that's where we were. And then it seems like kind of all at once. everybody figured it out all at the same time, for sort of the same reason.

What explain that kind of like big bang moment that seems to have happened.

Um, it comes out and it just upends our concept of what laptop performance in battery life could be overnight. And I think that's might literally be the headline we put on the story at Heingartenberg Ruther. And it it upends this whole concept overnight because we expect that it's going to have this tremendous performance penalty. or battery life penalty or something, because it has to translate software that was designed to work on Intel Max.

into software that works on ARMAX, but they figure out that translation the same way that Valve and in its Linux community, figure out how to translate Windows software to run on a handheld device with Linux. Right. Like we're we're we're transporting software from one realm to another through this tunnel. But this time the tunnel is good. The tunnel is so good that performance actually turns out being to be better.

Because the chip, you know, has it doesn't require as much cooling. It's more efficient chip anyhow. And without that performance penalty, it's like, look how far we can run. And so they run very, very far. And every other company needs to react to that. And they need to react to that. quickly. They don't react to it as quickly as they want, but they up their game.

And Intel just now is coming into its own. AMD came into its own a little while ago. Uh it's it started having um better mu better battery relief than Intel, and it also started having uh excellent m mobile graphics. So the integrated graphics in the laptop suddenly those were

Qualcomm, which had been trying to do the phone thing forever and failed until Apple came along, was like, okay, now we get it. They start bringing out finally some chips that'll do the Windows thing on arm pretty well. There's still some abilities, but they do it too. And now NVIDIA is about to do this as well. There's an N one and an N one X chip coming.

The NVIDIA ARM revolution is about to happen. They're finally gonna have their own processors in devices when the only thing I think that's been powered by an NVIDIA CPU that anybody would know about is the Nintendo Switch. And so now they're gonna do that there too. A lot of other things ha help happen along the way that help. I mean, uh it really helps AMD.

For those integrated graphics that they got a uh the vote of approval from Sony and from Microsoft. They make it into the Xboxes for two generations running, more if you count like the PS five Pro and Xbox One X versus, you know, one S and all that. All the incentives are aligned. Apple's shown this pathway. Everybody's following the pathway. And it seems like

It's good it's all working great. All the chips are performing better than they have bigger leaps in not necessarily in performance, but in battery life than ever, and the performance is getting steadily better as well.

We're it it does feel like we're almost there. I feel like I have said that before and I feel like I've looked very stupid, but it feels like we're almost there. And I think our our friend Kate might get what might get what they want.

are kind of pointing people, pointing companies away from let's bring out exciting consumer devices right now and instead focus on where they know the the money is in AI, in enterprise. So I don't want to say that I ex Expect it to happen soon, but with the trajectory that we've been on, I wouldn't be surprised if it's sooner than we expect.

The VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced. by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. We will be back on Friday with more news. We're doing version history this week, so go subscribe to that feed. We're making some really fun episodes right now as we speak. But we'll be back on Friday with Ne Lai talking through all of the news. We'll see you then.