2023's biggest tech stories

23:32And by the way, I really do believe Apple should make iMessage interoperable. I think everything should be interoperable, but it's just, this one is like it's Apple resolved it without a lawsuit. That's, that's actually probably the most notable thing here. They just cat and moused Beeper out of the game without ever sending the mean letter, which based on what we were just talking about, is like very admirable for Apple. Yeah. They did not use – I assumed we would get a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act letter, but they just shut it down. Yeah. Richard, what do you make of this? I feel like – I've talked to myself in circles now for like three weeks about I think Beeper is right about everything except whether it is and should be allowed to do what it's doing.

24:14And ultimately, that's the only thing that matters to me. But I'm super curious what you think, having followed all of this. That is the stickiest part about this, is that what Beeper is actually doing, they're pretending to be iPhones or Macs. They figured out a way to do that. And Apple figured out a way to undo that. And I don't think either party is wrong. It's great that they tried to do it. And Apple is certainly within their right to say, hey, this device that is on our messaging system is not actually an iPhone or Mac that has been activated. it shouldn't be allowed to do that. And the kind of the solution that they've come to where you are actually using an iPhone or Mac is probably one that I guess Apple doesn't really have a way around and that they could use, but it's so ridiculous.

24:58This is not what anyone wants. This is not a service that people want to pay for as they were suggesting it. And ultimately, I think everyone's unsatisfied. Being an Android user, never having had an iPhone, The most surprising part of this whole news is when I opened up my iPad and found out that I have nine iMessage messages in storage somehow. And I don't know how that happened. So that is a mystery that still has not been solved. And if anyone at Beeper or Apple would like to... I don't know how to say this to you, but I've been using your iPad to spoof iMessage for some time now. I should have known.

25:34I should have known. That explains a lot of weird messages I've been getting. And, you know, the funniest thing about this is Apple, you know, they cave to Europe. They're going to do RCS. They've talked about doing encrypted RCS. They've talked about other extensions to RCS to make rich messages with video and photos better. We're very close to getting what you want out of Apple here, right? Like, to what end does actually making iMessage itself, like, forcibly interoperate with just one app? accomplish very much. Again, I think it would be great. I like Beeper as a user experience a lot. I was able, I piped in like 10 different inboxes into Beeper and it is like a saner way to message.

26:23It's great. No one is obligated to support that, right? And I, that's fine. And, and I think you're right. Like if you boil Eric and Beeper's like moral argument all the way down, what they say is SMS is bad technology and Apple is doing its users a disservice by relying on it. I think that is absolutely true. And I think RCS is the correct solution to that problem, not Beeper, which is the problem, right? Like even the case Beeper wants to make doesn't end in and the right solution is Beeper. It ends in and the right solution is this better technology that we've invented that works for everyone.

26:58Yeah. No, the right solution is to take it back to when we had that one app that had MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger and IRC. What did we have? Yes, Trillium. That is the solution. That is where we need to go. Trillium, Adium, Pigeon. Pigeon. What a world. None of them could spell any words correctly. They all had eyes where there shouldn't have been eyes. All right, so our condolences to Beeper. Hopefully one day there's blue bubbles for everyone. Till that time, you can buy an iPhone and use Beeper on your Android phone. We got there. You won again, Tim Cook, you crafty devil. Other little bit of Apple news.

27:37Lots of smoke but no fire yet on a Vision Pro launch in February, potentially late January. This makes sense. Just if you think about the next few weeks here, it's going to be CES very soon. A terrifying reality. Apple loves to disrupt CES. So saying we're going to have an event in late January, early February, during the second week of January when CES is going. Pretty good timing for Apple. And then they have said early 24 for the Vision Pro since the very beginning. So we'll see. I think, does this thing have a killer? Has Apple figured out what the Vision Pro is for yet? I don't know. The answer seems to be spatial video, right?

28:18Like, I feel like this has been the most interesting thing about the last month or so is we've seen this trickle of stories come out from people who have tried shooting spatial video on the iPhone and then seeing it on the Vision Pro. And that just, at least from Apple's perspective, seems to be overwhelmingly the first thing Apple would like to tell you about the Vision Pro. I am very skeptical. I mean, some of the headlines you see are absurd. People are like, I was moved to tears by seeing my photos in the Vision. It's like, I bet, probably not. That's probably just like the screen resolution being off and it hurt your eyes.

28:55You're like, you haven't had emotional experiences with technology before? That's impossible. I don't know. I'm not convinced that that is the killer app. You just never had a feeling in your life, man. I cried when I watched the movie Best of the Best with Julia Roberts' brother. Like, I'm confident this thing is going to bring me to tears like the first time I tried it on. I've started shooting, I will say, because there has been these very controlled... Apple's been weird with the press. I'm just going to say this, right? They did the Apple Watch thing and this weird background statement to one – like that's weird.

29:31It's just weird on its face. We're going to talk about the CarPlay announcement. CarPlay also wasn't a press release. They gave that to GQ and cool. Like what are we doing? And then this weird thing where like some people get to do this facial video demo and some people – like whatever. Even the Beeper stuff to like call a win for us weird, which it also was. The Bieber stuff, which Apple never in a million years would have talked about. We spent weeks trying to get them to talk. They gave me one quote and have never answered another question about it. What? Yeah, sure. We're in the ecosystem.

30:04Yeah. Sometimes, you know, the light of the sun shines upon us. Yeah. It's all weird. I'm just pointing out, in general, it's been a weird sequence of statements and not statements and whatever. But the Vision Pro one is, to me, is like classic Apple, where they just want people to be talking about other people's experiences, which are good, which is fine. It's like, again, Apple has run the most successful playbook in world history. Keep doing it. But the idea that you're going to put on this headset and have an immediate set of emotional experiences is what Apple definitely wants you to think about right now.

30:45Yes. It's what you should think about. Having an emotional experience through a screen is the best thing possible. Yes. I mean, think about it. What would you rather do? Use your real eyes to look at your children in three dimensions or look at them inside an Apple headset on a screen in three dimensions. Well, if they're not around. I think there's an obvious answer here. I think, look, as a parent of a five-year-old. Actually, they are around. They're tapping you on the shoulder right now as you're wearing the headset looking at them. I'm just saying, as a parent of a five-year-old, there are definitely moments where I'm like, I wish I could just rewind the clock on whatever you're doing right now and experience you a couple weeks ago.

31:22And you can with an Apple Vision Pro. It is only$3 ,500. How have you not bought one already? Look, I've started shooting some special videos just so I have them. I'm very curious about this. My broader point is not positive or negative. It's just you can see when I say, what is the killer app for this? It is not something that is useful. It is something that is emotional. Yeah. Like that's what we're being steered towards. You're going to have a series of emotional experiences with this technology, which is probably the right thing. Richard, sarcasm aside, probably the right thing, right? Here's the thing that's going to help you relieve some memories.

31:59Here's the thing that's going to blow your mind. Here's the thing that's going to be memorable that you're going to want to talk about, that you're going to be excited for buying the more affordable version when it comes out, not here's a thing that helps you get better at work. So you tell your boss to expense a$3 ,500 headset, which is where Meta was going with the Quest Pro, right? And it just, no one could get there. Like no one was like, this has made me more productive. It's kind of what Apple learned from the watch, right? Like Apple framed the watch as very much a successor to the phone and that didn't work.

32:30But then Apple found out a thing the watch was good at that the phone was not, which was all the health and wellness and fitness stuff and just leaned really hard into that. And so all of a sudden it's like, okay, you need this device because it does things your other devices can't do. And I think the problem all the headsets have had so far is they don't really have any of that, right? They yell about like, it's more immersive. And they talk about like the games you can play. But fundamentally, it's like stuff you can do on other screens, just different and potentially cooler. And that pitch doesn't actually work all that well, at least not at the scale you need to work if you're Apple.

33:06But with something like you're talking about, like 360 videos feel like you're living inside of your memories, like there it is. That's a thing. Real or not, like that is a thing I can't do on my phone. Whereas like I have more screens, it's not. And in a world where most of the people don't have actual access to these devices, it's a story that you can tell over and over and over again and they'll be interested in until you can get the price down and the manufacturing up and actually sell them an affordable headset two and a half years from now. I'm just gonna remind everyone that many, many years ago, before disinformation and fake news was a threat to democracy, we ran a fake Super Bowl ad.

33:44We put out a press release saying we were going to run a Super Bowl ad. This got picked up far and wide. We did it to punk the haters. I want to be very clear. There was like three reporters that specifically I wanted to tweak, and we got them all. We also, unfortunately, got the New York Times, which to this day has a story in their site It says like the Verge plans Superbowl ad. Which is technically true. It was true. We bought a Superbowl ad. We bought airtime in Helena, Montana for like$700. And we ran a very local Superbowl ad. We sent a reporter to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Helena, Montana to watch our Superbowl ad and see what people reacted.

34:23And I don't need to tell you that the patrons of the Buffalo Wild Wings in Helena, Montana during the Super Bowl were not moved by our Super Bowl ad. Our traffic did not go up on that day. But in that ad, there is a shot of former Verge editor Ross Miller shedding a tear inside a VR headset. Oh, yeah. And that is the thing that most people seized upon is being utterly ludicrous. inside like the joke inside of our joke was that the verge thought people would cry in vr and like now here we are it's 2024 and apple's like here's what you're gonna do you're gonna weep like a little baby in our headset and it's like all right we weren't so wrong i'm excited like i said i've already started shooting some videos of max in the in spatial video just because i don't want to look at someone else's kids that's not gonna make me cry I'm going to look at David's kid.

35:17Yeah, whatever. He sucks. We should actually, that's, okay, this is going to be part of the review. We're going to send each other videos of our children and see if one another's children can make us cry. Okay, that's cool. I'm going to cry like a baby, no matter what happens. I love kids. All right, last one. Richard, I feel like you've got to take us through the CarPlay situation because it is ridiculous. Last year, in 2022, if you can remember, at its developer conference, Apple said that we were going to get a new next-gen CarPlay, would take over every screen in your car, and they were going to announce vehicle news by the end of 2023.

35:52It is, we've got a few days left in 2023, and they finally said it's coming in some Porsche and Aston Martin next year, maybe. And we've got two mock-up displays of the kind of CarPlay-equipped supercars. and what you see is the CarPlay screen across, even in the dashboard right in front of the driver with the speedometer, the tachometer, whatever you want. It's in the center or maybe it's on the left. It's styled with their logos, with their colors and with their, I think Porsche's houndstooth pattern that they usually have on their seats is now in the screen. I'm not sure if it's any better than what you already have in your car or something you actually aspire to.

36:32But the idea is that if you are a Porsche owner and you're using CarPlay, you'll get a special CarPlay experience that someone doesn't get in their mirror Honda or Toyota or something like that. So you don't have to deal with that anymore. I'm not sure really where we're going with this. Buttons are still better. We had dials and needles, and that was fine to show out your speed in your tachometer. So a couple things. One, a totally reasonable headline on this story could have been Apple announces Photoshop's. Yes. Because these things are not real. I believe they're real. They are. These pictures are not real.

37:09So the Aston Martin one in particular is the interior of an Aston Martin DB12. And it is just a bad Photoshop job. Like the CarPlay display has not been skewed correctly onto the screen of the Aston Martin DB12. And I know this because it broke my brain and I put it on threads. And people started noticing that the lines aren't parallel. Oh, jeez. Like, it's just weird. So that's one thing. The Porsche is a little more confusing. I'm not 100%. I assumed it was a Cayenne. It doesn't look like a Cayenne. Even if you just look at that. So what you have in the Aston Martin is they took over the infotainment with just regular old CarPlay.

37:55Unclear why they had to Photoshop this badly. That's just CarPlay on that center screen. It's not what they showed last. It's not what they showed in 2020. Yeah, I'm just saying, it's just CarPlay on the center screen. And the CarPlay has a handful of climate controls baked into it. What's particularly funny about that is there are hard buttons in the DB12 for climate right below them. So we've accomplished a lot. But you've got a little bit of climate control in CarPlay. And then you've obviously got the speedometer. But CarPlay today can access the center screens of certain cars, like Polestar's.

38:28So we just very little has been accomplished in the Aston Martin screenshot. The poor screenshot. Again, it appears to just be Photoshop. You look at it and you're like, why would you want this? Like, why? First of all, the Porsche is going 205 kilometers an hour, which is 127 miles per hour. Sick. While on a phone call. with a calendar open on the passenger display. So it's like, this is the most dangerous office environment in world history. Don't do this. I think that you misunderstand Porsche customers. Like that's it. And then all of this screen real estate is, again, to my eye, just like not being used for anything.

39:24Right? So you've got a gauge cluster. You've got a speedometer. you've got a row of icons you've got a launcher you have a giant map instruction that says stay on this road you have call controls and then over on the right the massive passenger display you've got two calendar entries a media controller which why is that all the way over there and then more map information and then the weather perfect I don't see the problem here It's like, what is all this? Like, is this, are people crying out for the lowest information density possible in the driving while you're going 130 miles an hour? I'm so torn on this because on the one hand, I think it continues to be true that CarPlay is better than everybody else's software in cars.

40:20Yes. So to some extent - By the way, and you know, I don't think it's good. Oh. But I will agree with you. that it's safe for Tesla and potentially Rivian. Sure. Fine. Maybe. It's better than Porsche would build on its own is a thing I believe very strongly. That said, why do we want any of this? My favorite thing that happened here was this came out right at the same time that VW did an interview where it was like, we're bringing buttons back to our cars because everybody wants buttons. and we tried to do other things and we moved everything around and people said, stop it, give us buttons. So they were bringing back buttons.

41:01That's like a thing that happened. And so I'm like, okay, if this is where cars are headed, I kind of don't think it's the worst idea to give all of it to companies that actually know how to build software. I'm not sure the right answer is Apple, but it's like, if all of my car is going to be is a bunch of screens, I would rather have Apple program those screens than whoever makes my car, just as I would rather have a car company make my car than Apple. But what if we just didn't do any of this? What if we just rewound this idea back like six generations ago and just made cars the better way? Yeah, and we did our best to put software in them that made sense.

41:46Or just less software. Like, I'm almost on the Neel Eye team of like the amount of software I need in my car is a mount for my phone. Maybe that's it. Like when we were at the part where it was just Bluetooth controlling the app on your phone that's playing the podcast and you could just press the same play button and pause button to pause it or whatever. We were pretty good there. Like that's what you want mostly. I am utterly - And your phone on a mount with Google. Yeah, befuddled. So again, I think the Aston Martin screenshot is a DB12. Almost 100 % sure of that. It has to be. It was the only car announced.

42:21Well, no, they didn't announce any cars. This is an important part of this announcement. They didn't announce any actual cars. They didn't announce any actual features. They announced two screenshots, which are Photoshop's, and two quotes from people who work at Aston Martin and Porsche. So I couldn't tell you. They told Car and Driver that it should be in the system that's coming next year in the DB12 in the Volante. Oh, okay. So Car and Driver has. And Porsche said something. They'll have more information when they reveal the Machin, however you say that, the all-electric car. Okay, so this is the interior of the Macan.

42:54That's what you can assume, I think. Because it is not the current interior of the current Macan. Yes. So a new electric Macan will have this. Okay, fine. That makes sense to me. I'm just saying, Apple could have just been late, right? They promised it by the end of this year they would have some announcements. We had heard, I've heard over and over and over again from all kinds of car companies, except for Porsche and Aston Martin, which foolishly I did not think to consider, that no one's going to do this because everyone thinks the future of their cars is recurring revenue in their cars. You can go listen to the CEO of Volvo on Decoder just recently talk about how he's doing it differently, but he still wants to do recurring revenue just for like car insurance.

43:34Everyone thinks that controlling this interface is a big deal. And letting Apple undifferentiate their cars is a big deal. So you can see this middle step is Apple is still going to run all the software, but Porsche gets to skin it. Or Aston Martin gets to skin it a little bit. Okay? But they're not actually cars. Why not wait until you have an actual car? What was the rush to get it out before the end of the year? No one thought it was coming. They could have done a line on the page where they talk about the next car play that says, oh, and it's coming in a Porsche in Aston Martin next year. Right, but instead we have to announce some screenshots.

44:11Do you think Apple, like some lawyer at Apple came running into Tim Cook's office and was like, the watch is getting banned. And Tim was just like, release the Photoshops. Just has them ready. Whenever we need to drown out bad news, we'll just show people weird car play stuff. I'm excited. I'm excited for us to have giant screens full of redundant information surrounding us in cars. You know what's great about driving at night is having bright LED-lit screens at you just in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. All right. That's the end of the Apple chaos. We got to wrap this up. We're going to come back.

44:45We're doing a very fast lighting round. Then we're going to do a year in review. It's going to be great. We'll be right back.

44:54Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

45:29Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.

46:07Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drewski, lift with your legs, man. Santa, Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not that. Of course he did. Right, Santa? You know, my elf Drewski here, he handles the nice list. An elf? I'm 6 '3". What everyone wants is iPhone 17. And at T-Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus's much younger sister. And at T-Mobile, there's no trade-in needed when you switch, so you can keep your old phone. Or give it as a gift. And the best part, you can make the switch to T-Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.

46:42Nice, my side of the tree is slipping. Timber! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade-in needed. with 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers plus tax and$35 device connection charge credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier cancel finance agreement 256 gigs 830 eligible port in a new line$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required check out in 15 minutes or less per line visit t-mobile.com all right we're back we have to do a very fast lightning round fast the note is for me i'm the one who makes the struggle All right, David, kick us off.

47:18For this lightning round, I have six things. No, mine's very short. It's that Bird, the once flying scooter company, is cooked to steal from Jess Weatherbed on our team. Bird filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company has been like all but dead for a pretty long time and just seems to have completely given up. This company was worth, I want to say like$2 or$3 billion just a few years ago. I confess I was all in on this like micromobility future. I still kind of think it could work that like what we need is better public transit. But what we also need is cool ways to get around cities that aren't cars.

48:01And like I think the e-bike revolution is really interesting. I think scooters are really interesting. All this stuff. Bird like really started this trend in a really big way. It just sort of dropped scooters in every city in the world, made a ton of money, raised a ton of money, really did the Uber playbook. It was run by Travis Van Der Zanden, who was a former Uber executive, took over in a huge way, flew too close to the sun, and R.I.P. bird. That's sad. I was just in downtown L.A. By the way, I went to the Emmy Awards because our Netflix show was nominated for an Emmy. Yeah. That's a real thing.

48:33Disclosure, we make a Netflix show. Well, we're going to talk about Warner Brothers. It's coming anyway. Oh, yeah. A disclosure, our Netflix show was nominated for an Emmy, and I went to Emmy Awards, which was crazy. And I sat behind the production team for the Kelly Clarkson show. They loved to party. They were just whooping it up. And statuettes were days over at the Kelly Clarkson show. Sadly, we did not win. We lost to a show about Italy on PBS, which, you know, when you're in the educational informational program category, the daytime Emmys, you kind of think you're going to lose to the show about Italian food.

49:06Yeah. So it was still fun to go. It's still fun to hang with our team. But anyway, so I was at the Amies. Downtown LA. The streets are full of scooters. And what struck me was everyone, if you will remember Bird and Lime, they started with just like consumer scooters. They were like ordering from like AliExpress. Yeah. At massive costs. And they were breaking and people were throwing them in the river. And they were like, we're going to engineer the scooters to you better once they've taken off. And they've done that. And the Bird scooters in particular now look like some Mad Max shit. Oh, yeah.

49:36Like raw, raw aluminum, like totally armored. Like there's like an imposing thing. And it's like, oh, these are the least cute scooters now. Yeah, they weigh like a thousand pounds too. Yeah. And this is the problem. All those things became totally commoditized. And everybody was like, either, you know, we're going to win and then we're going to be able to raise prices like Uber did. Or we're going to figure out how to make the unit economics work so that they stick around, all this stuff. And then some combination of everybody grew too fast and there was a global pandemic and nobody went outside for a year just crushed everybody.

50:08And kudos to Lime and a couple of others that have kind of managed to stick it out and continue to keep on keeping on. But this was always coming for Bird. It was either going to – it really was. Because it was either going to just completely decimate everybody and take over the world, or it was going to run through all of its money really fast and die. And that seems to be what happened. Yeah. So it was less Uber and more WeWork. Yeah, exactly. All SoftBank Vision Fund investments. Yeah. All right. Speaking of things that are doomed, Richard, I believe you have a lightning round item for us. Yes.

50:44The news broke through multiple outlets in the last day or so that Warner Brothers, Discovery, and Paramount executives are in discussions for a Max merger. That was an Alex Coran's headline, of course. Oh, my God. Because we might get Paramount plus Max, Max Plus, or something like that. I hate it so much. If these companies are allowed to combine. Because we have two failing giant entertainment companies that can't really support themselves under their own weight. the only solution that their executives can think of is to combine them. Yeah. Which I don't know what else you could do, but they're probably going to try and find out if this, if this is the solution.

51:22You could try to make good movies. One option that is, does not seem to be in vogue, but it's just a, it's just a thing you could do. You can make a compelling television show for your service that you've rebranded as max. You could stop trying to be Netflix. Yeah. That could be fun. I mean, this is the thing, right? And we've been talking about this for years now, that it was always going to be so expensive and so complicated to compete that there were always only going to be a few winners. And I think at this point, Netflix is one of those winners. I don't see how Netflix falls apart at any point in the near future.

52:04Disney is one of those winners, but is in kind of a weird place. And there's probably not room for many more. Apple TV and Prime Video get to live on because their companies have so much money that those things are not material. This is the real problem, though, but all these executives will tell you, is that they're competing against cost centers for tech companies that have massive profits. So Apple TV Plus is just a cost center. Yeah, it's like lunch for employees and Apple TV Plus. And again, my theory with Apple TV Plus in particular is they make it so that when they talk about services revenue, they don't have to talk about Candy Crush whales.

52:37Because all their service revenue is the 30 % cut of in-app purchases on games. That is Apple services revenue. Amazon does Prime and they spend a ton of money on what you might describe as a produced Thursday Night Football game. It's not the best produced, but it's produced Thursday Night Football game. Because that stuff keeps Prime subscribers around. It is their retention. They know it. But it's still a cost center, right? Like the lifetime – and it's Amazon. They run the math. The lifetime value of a Prime subscriber stays on year after year is very high, and we can take some of that margin out and produce this TV show because that will inspire more people to stay for longer.

53:15I mean, they did a Black Friday football game. Like I don't know if you need a clearer indication of where the money here is for Amazon. Right. If you're Warner Brothers, you don't have some other thing that's making all the money. You just have to go make the thing. and I would just remind the audience that Warner Brothers is the most cursed company in world history when it comes to mergers like that might be true uh the times I you know I don't I'm not this sort of person like runs or any other times but the times had a very funny piece on this or at least I thought it was funny because they had the you know the very sort of normal times business writing of like there's ample business logic for the deal and then they like listed all the reasons you might want to merge.

53:56And it's like, you know, every time any company merges with Warner Brothers, it ends in disaster. Like the AOL Time Warner merger is the most failed merger in history. The AT &T Time Warner merger is a close second. Like the only thing that merger accomplished was a massive layoffs, a shitload of debt, and a grayscale 4-3 Snyder cut. That's it. That's what you got out of that merger. Nothing else. What are we doing, y 'all? Well, the Warner Brothers Discovery merger hasn't failed yet. I don't know. I think, how's your Batgirl going? No, I think, I mean, the problem is the Warner Brothers Discovery thing was never going to work.

54:40It has so much debt. So much debt. And so many holes to dig out of that it's like, since the minute this company existed, people have been asking, who are they going to merge with? which was just, it was just never going to work. And the answer, I think, I mean, people have seen this coming for a long time, right? Like these are two companies that were never going to compete with the handful of giants that are out there, but combined, maybe. But combined to do what? Yeah, exactly. Right. Like honestly combined to do what? To have more content. It's not more content that people, no one's running around being like, I don't have enough content.

55:18Right. I don't even like that word. Like it just implies like being shoveled glurge into your mouth. Just like take the content, like just do it. It's another Tom Cruise movie. You will have it. There's more reality television. I think what people are, what you are looking to Hollywood to do is make really good stuff that is a little bit more scarce. Like if you want stuff with YouTube production values, boy, is there a YouTube for you? You know, if you want stuff at Hollywood production values, there's actually not a lot. And it just seems like there's a race to the bottom here because of all of the debt that in particular Warner has had to take on through its sequence of disastrous mergers.

56:00I don't know. Like these companies are not going to make a great app with a great user experience that makes you feel good about using it that's full of really great stuff that inspires you to pick it over TikTok. And like that's what they're really competing against is TikTok on your phone. And I think that's the biggest problem for them is that when you look at the supposed winners in the space, Netflix, are they winning? Because they're probably going to have to raise their prices again. They do every six months or so anyway. They're throwing on games. They're trying to find some other way to get you to pay more for a slightly bigger bundle until they actually do recreate cable.

56:33Disney. What is Disney anymore? Is it going to have ESPN? Is it going to be something else? We don't even know. So I'm not even sure what the model for victory is for them. They're chasing kind of nothing. It's mergers and golden parachutes. Let's be very honest. By the way, I have not done the full disclosure. Comcast is a minority investor. No, Comcast, by the way, I haven't done the full disclosure. Comcast NBC Universal Division is a minority investor in Fox Media, the Virgis Parent Company. I promise you, not a lot of love from Comcast flowing in our direction. By the way, one of the other lines in the Times piece was, This will give them leverage and negotiate cable rates with Comcast and Charter.

57:15And it's like the dying stars. Yeah. The thing that people are quitting in droves. Good luck. And the companies who are now negotiating by saying we don't need TV anymore because the only place we make money is through internet service. Yeah, perfect. That'll go great. By the way, they just leaked the last four social security digits of everyone who has internet service, maybe. Perfect. Anyway, so Comcast is an investor in our company. we made a Netflix show it's not made in front of an Emmy it's called The Future of You you should go watch it our company makes other TV shows you know I have a Disney account I just went to Disney World does that count?

57:51I think the Magic Man is like neoliberal fantasy okay

57:57that's good okay last one this is mine I think this I think this is actually fascinating on two fronts so Peloton you know they got a new CEO they went through They also went through a big pandemic overhire. They bought Precor. They bought factories. And then they went through a pandemic crash when people realized they could go back to the gym. So they're like reorganizing their business. So I have two Peloton ones. They're kind of the same one, I think, in interesting ways. The first, if you have Peloton hardware in your house and you have the subscription, which is the plus tier of the subscription, you now don't need the hardware.

58:30So you can now walk up to any treadmill that supports a Bluetooth protocol called FTMS and use the Peloton app with that treadmill, which is pretty interesting. And it'll keep track of the same data about how you're running and all that stuff? Yeah, you get your incline speed, pace, and distance in the app, which we'll track it with the rest of the Peloton stuff. This is fascinating to me. They're just de-bundling their thing. You obviously need the more expensive subscription, which very much implies that you have the hardware, but they are debundling it. And then, you know, there's a weird little Bluetooth standard for people to argue about and figure out what supports what because it hasn't really been important yet.

59:08And now Peloton is going to make this weird little Bluetooth standard important. Next to that, their oldest bikes are 2015, 2016. They're getting very old. And so they are no longer supporting the Android versions that run on those bikes' tablets. So they will give you a$500 credit to buy a new bike, which is very expensive. Also, those bikes are always on sale so it's nothing. Or, this is really interesting, they will just sell you a new tablet for those bikes. The tablet is ridiculously expensive. So it's like a dumb bike with a smart TV and you just replace the smart TV. Yeah. There's just a thing happening in Peloton world where they're realizing that the sort of computer part of it can be fully disaggregated from the bike part of it or the treadmill part of it.

59:56And so So in the one sense, they're actual hardware. They're just upgrading the hardware. And there are some arguments in our comments and elsewhere about whether the price of that upgrade is too high. It's normally$375, but if your bike is expiring, they'll give you a$50 credit. So it's$325. That's a lot. To buy a new tablet. That's a lot for what is not the world's greatest Android tablet. On top of the very expensive thing that you already bought and have been paying for for a long time. Yeah, that's a lot. This is a lot. But it is interesting, right? You can just put a new computer on it. And then on the other side of it, you can just get a treadmill that supports this Bluetooth protocol, buy the more expensive subscription, and use your own tablet.

1:00:35So you kind of just see the nature of this company's relationship to hardware-software subscriptions is changing a little bit in a way that you can get to a place where you're paying too much money for a Peloton subscription. And you have neither their treadmill nor their tablet. and their app is just talking to your treadmill on your iPad. And that's like, oh, now it's a totally different company. It just feels like what Peloton always should have been, kind of an add-on, that they didn't need to be the new exercise bike company. But I assume that they registered probably correctly that if they tried to launch with something like this, either the technology wasn't ready at the time, which I can believe to an extent, or if they did deliver it and it did work, that one of the big bike companies would just make their own version and they would get frozen out.

1:01:20But we had to go through this whole 10 years of waste. It's interesting to put it in the context of the streaming conversation. Peloton's real differentiation is its instructors. They put on a show. The shows have communities around them. The instructors have people. The hardware is good. Becky has a Peloton treadmill. I have a Peloton bike. They're really good. We use them a lot. I can see how having them integrated is a superior experience to if I was cobbling together an iPad with something else and needing a Bluetooth protocol to work. Yeah, I mean, anyone who's ever tried to pair their phone to the treadmill at the gym, that experience can suck real bad.

1:01:56Yeah, but what's fascinating about this is, Richard, your point is they could have just made it all about the content. And maybe that would have been better, but I think you need something to sell. Like Apple Fitness Plus is all about the content. I don't think it's nearly as successful as Peloton. And Apple's like, you just bring your own bike, and no one does it. No one cares. So there's something in there that I think is just next to the streaming conversation. Peloton sort of debundling itself in this way is like fascinating. And then there's a wonky Bluetooth standard, which is suddenly going to become more important.

1:02:26And, you know, I can't stay away from the stream. Holiday Spectacular 2024 Peloton Bluetooth. No, the thing I think is interesting about this is like, Richard, I think that arc you describe is like exactly what Peloton should have done and potentially was always going to do. Like no one at Peloton, I'm sure, was like, we can sell$1 ,800 bikes to every single person on earth. They're like, we're going to sell these bikes to as like the luxury item. And that's where we start. And then we become a content business to the rest of people. And that all would have worked just fine, except they absolutely lost their mind in the middle of the pandemic when everybody bought a Peloton.

1:03:03And so suddenly they were like, oh, maybe the market is bigger than we thought. And what it actually was, was just that they did the 10 years of business they were ever going to do in like three months. And suddenly they were, instead of there being 10 times as many people who might buy a Peloton, which is what they decided was the case, it was actually just that everyone who was ever going to buy a Peloton had already bought a Peloton. So if they had shifted right then and been like, okay, we've hit the group. Now we're going to be a content business. Peloton might be in a really different place.

1:03:31But instead, like you said, Neil, I bought factories and bought companies and was like, we're going all in on weird hardware. And what's particularly interesting about that is along the way, the CEO of Peloton got pushed out for making those decisions. And they brought in the new guy, Barry McCarthy, ex-Netflix, who is now running a Netflix framework by disaggregating the service and the content from the hardware. like I said it was just we were talking about streaming I was like oh this peloton there's something right there that's the same thing the difference between them and streaming is that peloton also released a treadmill that killed a child that's which is probably hey that one there uh they're about to release it it's true that it was oddly dangerous yeah like too dangerous and it went away uh and now on their website you can pre-order the new one which is the same i don't know very confusing all right on that uh very dark note thank you richard we're gonna take a break we're come back.

1:04:24We're going to do what I think will be very fun, your interview. We'll be right back.

1:04:33Support for this show comes from Zapier. When people talk about AI, they often talk about the future. How will AI affect the economy? What will AI's potential be in the future? Will AI be able to make popular art? But the more important question is, what can AI actually do for your business today. If you're looking for a concrete implementation of AI for your business, you can try Zapier. Zapier says they can help you and your team actually reap the benefits of AI, not just talk about it. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to your work. Connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the apps your team already uses, so you can add AI exactly where you need it.

1:05:13Whether that's automatically enriching leads, coaching your sales rep, resolving IT tickets, or more, you can do it all with Zapier. Zapier is for everyone, tech expert or not. No IT bottlenecks, no complexity, no AI hype, just results. Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the 3.4 million companies already automating with Zapier and transform how you work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash verge. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash verge.

1:05:55Support for this show comes from 1Password. Think for just a moment about the Herculean tasks that your IT security department has to handle. There's keeping identities, devices, and applications safe. Then there's dealing with shadow IT, securely onboarding and offboarding employees. Oh, also there's meeting compliance goals. The point is, it's a lot. If you want to help lighten that load, you can try Trileka by 1Password. Trileka by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. And it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security.

1:06:311Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150 ,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. Plus, 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. Learn more at 1Password.com slash VergeCast. That's the number 1Password.com slash VergeCast.

1:07:12All right, we're back. So David had an idea to just go through all of our top stories for the year. But then this idea got complicated by the idea of how you would make such a list. David, what have you done? Yeah, so when I raised that I wanted to do some kind of end-of-the-year thing, I was like, how do we sort of pick out the biggest stories of the year? Do we all come with our ideas for the biggest stories? Do we come up with a list and try to rank them? And you were just like, what if we just took the top posts on theverge.com and went through them all and decided, were those actually the top stories of the year?

1:07:48I was like, cool, sounds fun. Horrible idea. We're going to do it, but it was a horrible idea. So we went through, and basically two ways that we measure traffic on theverge.com are through Google Analytics and through a tool called Parsley. They, it turns out, have very different ideas about how much traffic a page is getting. So what I ultimately did was look at both of them, and then I sort of triangulated a list of the most popular Verge stories of 2023. But in order to do that, you have to get rid of all the stories that are just like obviously successful because people search for those things all the time, right?

1:08:25Like a piece of fun inside baseball is that the single most popular Verge URL after our homepage in 2023 was our roundup of the best wireless earbuds. Sure. And there's tons of those, right? We do buying guides. They're really good. They're really helpful. Lots of people find them. Lots of people buy stuff. It's great. Then we have things like explainers. We have an NFT explainer from like two years ago, I think. Yep. That is still lingering as one of our most popular stories. The best part about that explainer, by the way, is it's Mitchell Clark, I believe, wrote it. And it is basically a reason why no one should buy an NFT.

1:09:00It's also the reason Mitchell Clark left The Verge and like moved to the woods. Yeah. He's like, I need to walk around the West Coast for a long time. And he's been doing it ever since. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then there were like some random things that we just left off because they're popular for reasons that are not newsworthiness, like a sort of one-off story that James Vincent on our team wrote about deep fake nudes that for reasons I don't need to explain but are very obvious was very popular on the internet all year. So point is, I whittled all this down into I think an imperfect but like directionally useful list of the most popular stories on theverge.com in 2023.

1:09:39Minus the list of best laptops. Minus the list of best laptops, yeah. Which is a great list. Oh, tons of good stuff. I highly recommend Googling all those things and clicking on the Verge links many times so that they keep being popular in 2024. And so what I want to do with each of these is just go through and basically I want to decide for each of these, does this belong on like biggest stories of 2023 lists? Because a lot of these, they have their moments. People get very excited. There's a huge sort of spike in interest in traffic, and then they die out. Others live much longer. So I'm going to go through and see, does this merit a list of the best, biggest stories of 2023?

1:10:19And the first one, and again, I'm going in a pure list of popularity. This has no judgment. The first one is a big feature we wrote about inside Elon Musk's extremely hardcore Twitter. And there were a few others on this list, including the one where Elon Musk predicted that X will replace banks. He gave employees a year to replace banks. And then there was the whole Zuckerberg-Elon Musk cage match challenge. So I've just boiled all of this down to Musk Twitter X shenanigans. The one thing I'll point out, just having looked at the list, I don't often think about our URL slugs. and the Zuckerberg versus Musk slug had the word world star in it, which is just the funniest.

1:11:02That's fantastic. It was like Musk-Zuckerberg cage match world star, and it just did numbers. And now I've learned an important lesson about putting the word world star in all of our headlines. There you go. All of our headlines. I see why this is the biggest story of the year. It deserves to be here, right? Right. I mean, we've talked about this now at length. We've done a huge package on it. Like this thing catalyzed a reordering of the internet. And maybe you think I'm going too far. I really think that that's true. And the only thing that I'm missing when I say that is also the whole AI Google search dilemma is like right next to that.

1:11:40But this thing just catalyzed a rethinking of the social internet in big ways. Threads is the number one app on the app store. Mastodon is growing. Interest in Activity Pub is growing. Threads is going to do activity. Like all of that massively catalyzed by Elon's purchase of Twitter. Then next to that, you know, that story, extremely hardcore, you know, I'm just like a verge level. We co-produced that story with New York Magazine. It was on the cover of New York Magazine. We made that story with Casey and Zoe, a platformer, and Alex Heath on our team. So it was just like, just from me personally, like a lot of people had to work together in a way that people in media don't often work.

1:12:23together to make something really great. That story's really great. And it is the story of a culture change inside of a company and what it was like in those early days. Tons and tons and tons of great reporting. And that immediately led to not just reflection, obviously interest, but a bunch of other companies being like, what if we were a little bit more hardcore? And you just immediately saw ping pong around sort of tech culture. Yeah, there was that brief moment where everybody was taking a page out of Musk's book and being That was how a lot of people excused bringing people back to the office.

1:12:54They were like, it's time to get serious. Stop being so nice to your employees. Yeah, we're going to lay off a bunch of you. It was a real thing that happened in the wake of Elon. What if we had 50 % less people? And then a bunch of companies realized, oh, that wouldn't work. And Elon was like, what if we did it again? Well, we're going to get to the layoffs in a minute here. But Richard, you sit in the news all day. This is the biggest story of the year, right? I was at a holiday party for my wife's job the other day, and I was telling them kind of what it's like to work in this job. And this year, really for the last few years, a lot of it has been, oh, Elon just did a thing.

1:13:30Over and over and over again. If you are tired of reading the news, I am tired of thinking about writing it and talking about it. The number of stories that we did not write is much longer than the number of stories that we published or that we considered. And it's one of those things where, Neela, I think you're extremely right about all the things that it covered, but it was even more than that. It was security. It was policy. It was international. Even the layoffs, how they happen in different countries across different continents and were affected by different laws. We had the lawsuit. We had the whistleblower who came back and said that Twitter was wildly insecure before and talked about the things that the previous administration was doing.

1:14:08We had the woman who was sleeping in her cubicle. Who then got fired. And later got fired. It was a momentary start. We had, there were just so many things that happened. I can't remember all of them or even one-tenth, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, which is impressive, actually, because that means Elon Musk is the story of the year two years in a row. Because all of the chaos of the acquisition was very much that thing in 2022. So here's hoping we don't make it a three-peat. On that note, let's move on. Next on the list, I would not have put this second, but I'm not surprised it's actually here, is the Vision Pro.

1:14:43Our just initial announcement post was number two. And, Nilay, your hands-on getting to try it. Face-on. Your face-on was also on this list, too. Not surprising to me that this is the gadget of the year, right? Yeah, it's the newest, most impressive thing. It has the biggest ideas. It had the flashiest launch. It's Apple. Apple's always going to be on that list. I'll just do a spoiler way down on this list but still in the top whatever 50 iPhone 15 Pro like it's just there I get it and also people are just really curious you know it's like a new hardware category from Apple what are they going to do better than everyone else I think that some of that interest will carry through the actual launch but you know what surprised me is that the hands-on did as well because it was as I was writing it I was like there's no way to convey what's actually happening yeah you just I'm dancing with architecture.

1:15:42Like I'm doing the thing here where like, I can't take a picture of it. I can't show it to you. I can just write about it around it, you know? Yeah, I was sitting one table over from you at Apple Park in their visitor center while you were writing this story. And you came out and you were just like, I think I just have to write about all the things that happened in a row. And I think that's all I can do. And I was like, yeah, I think that's all you can do. That was what you did. Turned out people liked it. Worked out great. Yeah. All right, number three on the list was, I believe this was Liz Lopato on the last day of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.

1:16:14Her headline was, Sam Bankman-Fried gambled on a trial and his parents lost. But I think, to some extent, A, this is a terrific piece, but B, was the summary of the SBF FTX trial, which Richard definitely belongs on this list, right? Biggest stories of the year? Surely. Over the last year, we saw this kind of coming at the end of 2022 as FTX collapsed, Sam Beckman-Fried went on a massive media tour, and then he was arrested. Right. Like you do. A very strange sequence of events. Arrested and extradited from the Bahamas, and then we had the trial. And it all kind of wrapped up within a year. And I think the verdict came in a year to the day after Coindesk had published this kind of expose of what turned out to be just one of their balance sheets showing some really serious problems within FTX.

1:17:06But Liz, I thought that in particular, this piece dug into the personal side of it, of who Sam Bankman Freed was and what it meant for him to view the world in the way that he did and how that resulted in both the growth of FTX, the way that the investors and the people who backed it were kind of drawn into it. And they've saw an opportunity in this person and in this company. And then what happened after it all fell apart and after he was on trial and why why someone would go to trial on this why they would risk all of this when we all saw it when we all read it and we were like yeah he's going to be found guilty right and he was yeah but how we got there i always think that the tagline for the verges is how technology makes us feel you know which is like it doesn't work in ad meetings like that's where you need to have um we're excited about the future whatever but this one to me is like a perfect encapsulation of that.

1:18:00Like, we're not a financial publication. We're not really a business publication. Sometimes I think we're like a secret business publication. We cover tech really closely, but we cover this very human part of it. We spend a lot of time on that thing. And to me, Liz just found that line in this trial. Her coverage of this trial through and through was amazing. But this one, it just made it sad. Like, yes, he scanned a lot of people out of a lot of money. Yes, all this stuff. and there's just a sadness to it. And if you even read the comments or like to people posting on threads about it or whatever, people caught that sadness and it really resonated with them.

1:18:36Like if you're just a parent and your kid has this big belief and he's on the rocket ride, like you're, you're just not motivated to be like, well, my kid's a shit. Yeah. And there's just something in there. It's worth reading and just like really sitting with. Cause Liz caught it like exactly. And she was in the courtroom every day and she was just watching this happen to these people. And there's something in there that I think is really powerful. It's very literary. It's what I want The Verge to be at its best, even though it was a trial about cryptocurrency scams. Yeah. Yeah, I will say this is a totally unfair thing to say, whatever, six and a half weeks after the trial.

1:19:11But there has been less ongoing fallout from the FTX trial than I expected. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff brewing, but when the trial ended, it felt like a lot of people kind of wiped their hands of it and moved on with their lives. It was like, oh. Oh, no. No, here's one thing I know. Richard remembers the people who - I remember everyone who ever tried to sell an NFT and I will follow them forever. It will never drop. Receipt Swaller over here has not forgotten a goddamn thing. What I was going to say is there actually has been some fallout. We've seen several other executives go down. Binance started the entire run against FTX.

1:19:48They have had a guilty plea to criminal charges. Their CEO is in America and cannot leave because he is a flight risk. There are still things going on. I think we're going to see these echoes just kind of continue throughout crypto and throughout the financial industry. All right, next one. This is just to, you know, take you further inside the Parsley Google Analytics thing. On Google Analytics, this was, I think, in like the top three most popular stories of the year, and it was nowhere on Parsley. So I don't know what to make of that, so I just put it in here. This is Jen Tui's story about Amazon opening up its sidewalk network to give any gadget-free low-speed data.

1:20:23I remember being very surprised at how well this story was doing at the time. It's a good story, but I was shocked that that many people care about sidewalk as a thing. I'm convinced that the words free data are the thing. Oh, that's interesting. Right. Any gadget free data, you get it. Fair. I immediately understood. People are out there in the streets with their chumbies going, like, how do I connect to these sidewalk networks? There was also a sort of weird discussion that popped up around this where people were like, oh, your Echo is suddenly going to give away your internet capacity to whoever wants to use it.

1:20:56So you need to change the thing. That's true. And your ring cameras, a bunch of stuff has Sidewalk enabled. And the idea is that you can build stuff. Like Amazon has trackers, like Tile and AirTag competitive tracking stuff. They have pet tags. And so you need to build this like big mesh network and you would participate in it. I don't think any of this has really come to pass, right? No. There's not a lot of Sidewalk stuff out there yet. This is the first story on the list that I'm like, this doesn't really belong on the biggest stories of 2023 list, which is no slate to Jen. It's a great story.

1:21:28But yeah, I think Sidewalk is a longer-term, super interesting thing. This idea of these local mesh networks is really fascinating, but is not in people's lives and brains. Amazon has a page that's like Amazon Sidewalk Gadgets on Amazon.com. And it's a long list of like FAQ questions and what you can use. And the only products you can buy are bridges. You can buy Echo devices and ring cameras. And there's not one thing that you can do with it. Connect all your stuff. Do nothing. I will say this. The coverage map is looking a lot more filled in. If you click to their page compared to the version that we have in here.

1:22:08So it's still going. But they've also had an executive change for Amazon. So I don't know what the priority will be for this going forward. That's true. Panos Panay now runs devices and services at Amazon. Panos, free data for everybody. Let's do this. Okay, next up, Sony's portable PlayStation Portal launches on November 15th for$199.99. This is the single most surprising thing to me on the list, mostly because the portal is stupid. Well, nobody knows that. I guess that's true. You've done that. See, you do this for long enough. You get jaded. You got to sand that off. You got to look at this with beginner's eyes, David.

1:22:45You're right. People are like, there's a new PlayStation. I'm super hype about it. It looks crazy. Life was so simple in August. Right? They're like, it looks crazy. It's got these weird handle controllers. Like it could also be a Batarang. It's only$199. I haven't been told about the ridiculous limitations of this device yet. I understand why people clicked on this story. $200 PlayStation. On the go. I can tell you confidently. It also only works in your house. Yeah. How to buy the portal not on the popular list. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Yeah, I know you're right. This was exciting at the moment, and it felt interesting.

1:23:22Cloud gaming was a thing people talked about all year. It was like, there was a lot going on. I can see it. But boy, did that. Yeah, look, I'm not going to be like the entire media's editor-in-chief. The difference between The Verge and everything else is we're excited about technology often because I've watched this cycle a million times. People are going to be excited about the PlayStation portal. And like, I know. I know. Right? But I'm not going to like harsh your vibe right at the beginning. Everyone else is like, this is stupid. Technology is stupid. We're not going to do that. We're here for you.

1:23:56We're going to talk about USB-C for a full hour. And if you want to carry around an LCD screen to play PS5 games on, we're here for you. Yeah. I support, I personally support your choices. But technically we're not here for you because you have to be in your house. and we have to be at our house. So we can't actually be here for you. I'm really sorry for you from far away. I would say the next one on your list is exactly the same story. I was just about to say, speaking of cool promises that vastly under-delivered, Google announces the Pixel Fold. Womp, womp. Yeah, that didn't go great. I wanted to love the Pixel Fold.

1:24:32I have a Pixel Fold sitting right here and I still look at it and I'm like, why aren't you better? Yeah. I mean, I would say all of the hardware we saw, the Pixel tablet was also kind of a disaster that year. Yeah. Yeah. Last year, I should say. This past year. The Pixel Fold, I think what people were hoping, and this is a vibes-based analysis, but I think what people were hoping was that Google would have gotten it right in a way that Samsung has not gotten it right, or it would be cleaner in a way that a Samsung device is just a cacophony of capitalism. And maybe, you know, Google, that's not right.

1:25:11But it also is just like not more useful than a regular Pixel phone. Yeah. And it's expensive. Where we landed was like, this thing is$1 ,800 and doesn't make a particularly good case for itself. Yeah. The thing that always amazes me is like, it's just heavy. It's just a big, chunky brick of a thing. And I still have high hopes for the Fold, too. I'm not going to lie to you. And it doesn't even run DeX. Am I right? Look, if you could take a Pixel Fold and turn it into a proper Chromebook, let's talk. You know who I'm talking to. Let's talk. Which brings me to my next story. I love Dex by Dan Siefert.

1:25:48No, I'm just kidding. The other problem with the Pixel Fold is that it's both massively expensive and several months, just a few months later, they brought out a better phone. Yeah. That wasn't foldable and was cheaper. So you don't have the new hardware and the new AI capabilities in the new Pixel. It just folds. And so you've paid all this money and you don't have the best phone. It's just the wrong mix of things. I think the Verge audience wants to love the Pixel maybe more than it wants to love any other individual device. And there's a lot to like about the Pixel, but the Pixel continues to be more loved than it deserves among our audience, I think.

1:26:30and among our staff in a lot of ways. I love the Pixel, despite the fact that Samsung objectively makes better phones at this moment in time. I can't wait to get to the one Samsung on this list. I won't give it away now, but there's only one Samsung on this list. All right, yeah, we can keep moving. So the next one is, VW beats Tesla to the punch and unveils an affordable electric vehicle. This was from March when VW announced the ID2 All, one of the worst names of all time. Yeah, it's not great. Like when you look at a name and you think, oh, that has to be a typo. I should fix that. You did it bad.

1:27:06ID, capital I, capital D, dot, space, number two, lowercase a, l, l, dot. What? That's nothing. Yeah, it's not great. Nothing about this is crazy. This does not belong on the list. Great headline. Exciting times. Great headline. Does not belong on the list. Great headline. Also vaporware car. Yeah. VW, make buttons. That's good. but make cars. I just realized there's no Cybertruck wiper coverage on this list. And I don't know what we're doing here, guys. I gotta, we gotta go. I should have mentioned I took all Cybertruck wiper coverage off because it just would have dominated the whole list. And who has the time?

1:27:42Next one, a pretty recent piece of news. Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI. This one I like very much because this is both extremely deserving as one of the biggest stories of 2023 and extremely not deserving at the same time. A story in which almost nothing happened at the end. Right. But it was captivating in a way that I think no other single news event in our world of 2023 was. I can't think of another moment like that this year. I maintain a list of TikToks that should be PhD theses in media studies. Sure. One day I'm going to publish the entire list. And a lot of them were TikTokers just reading our stories about opening eye drama and then imposing their own TikTok drama narratives on them.

1:28:27which was, it was just like, I could, the thing that interests me about that is like, it was a story that could be everything to everyone. Like no matter what you thought or how you felt, you could take this, like guy got fired, employees like guy, guy comes back and you could just, it's like the hero's journey, man. It's like, you just put any, any story you want onto that foundation. And they did what happened, you know, what happened in there is actually really meaningful, right? Like Microsoft is involved. They were taken aback. There's a lot of reporting now that comes out that's like maybe Sam was lying to the board, but the board can point to any specific instances.

1:29:01There's going to be an investigation. But you're right. In the moment, it was captivating. It was also Thanksgiving. Like literally nothing else was going on. I think it's on this. I think this is one of those moments when like governance of AI like jumped all the way to the top of people's minds for a minute. it at least means the next time we have to talk about it, everyone is initiated into the vocabulary, which is good. Yeah, we like have a shared reality of AI chaos now, which is useful. The thing that struck me about this one is it's the Lynn Sanity story of the list. It is both the one that came completely out of nowhere.

1:29:39I think one of the things that hits me when we have big stories is when I think, oh man, we should have seen that coming. We should have been more prepared or had something ready. Did not see this one coming at all. could not have seen it coming. It just dropped in the middle of the day and suddenly we're reading it all together and we're like, wait, he's fired? Yeah. Did that just happen? It also, as you mentioned, happened when nothing else was happening. So, yeah. Also for me personally, working on the story with Alex Heath while at Disney World, truly one of the most surreal, surreal moments of the year and potentially.

1:30:09If they were ever going to make a sports documentary about you and Eli, it would be that, that weekend. I'm just going to, I'm going to, there are two things that happened to me. the Outer Rim Bar at Disney's Contemporary Resort. One, I talked to Alex about the story a whole bunch, which was just weird, right? My family's there at Disney World, like Mickey's singing or whatever Mickey's doing in the restaurant. And I'm like talking about opening. The second is I went to the bar after that conversation. I sat down and I was informed that there are regulars of the Outer Rim Bar at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

1:30:42And a bunch of regulars were there to watch football. and many of the regulars travel for hours to come to this bar. And I'm like looking around. I mean, it's not, it's just like, you know, it's like, it's one of those hotels where the middle is like wide open and you can, you could see into the brunch spot where like Mickey was singing. And I was like, y 'all come here and like, we love it here. And I was like, I need to get out of Florida. Like I need to go away. If you stay longer than six days, you never leave. It's like, I don't. And there are other cities. Yeah, there are other televisions, people.

1:31:19But keep in mind, this is what was happening to me while we were doing the OpenAI reporting. I'm like a dead certain some of that bled into the OpenAI reports. The whole thing got more chaotic over time, which feels right for your situation. I was like, we all have to get out of Florida, metaphorically and literally. Next up on the list is FDC versus Microsoft. This is the story stream that Tom Warren mostly did during the FTC versus Microsoft trial. And a fun fact... The Activision trial. What is that? This is the Activision deal. Yeah, the Activision trial. The fun fact about this one is that this is the only story on this list for which Google was not the top referrer.

1:31:58Basically, any story that's going to, like, have a long life on the internet ends up getting a lot of traffic from Google because that's just how people find things. Google Discover, Google News. Like, Google is sort of the long tail of internet traffic. This is the only one... on our most popular list, where the number one traffic referrer was TheVerge.com, which meant that people typed in TheVerge.com to go find Tom's news about an Activision trial, and I think that kicks ass. Also, I think if the year wasn't ending now, Sean's coverage of Google versus Epic would have a similar traffic curve.

1:32:33It just happened towards the end of the year. The Microsoft case was earlier in the year. Also, Activision is a little, this was a little sexier deal, I think, in the court case, more was revealed. Yeah. I think one thing that I have taken away from all the trial coverage this year, and it's like a lot of it, it's a little overwhelming even for me, and I love it, is boy, there's just a lot of backroom shenanigans at all these companies. Yeah. We think these companies are just sort of like operating in the marketplace, and they are not. Like, they are constantly thinking of like every possible way they can turn every single deal into an advantage, and that's, yeah, Microsoft won this one.

1:33:10and they obviously took over Activision. The FTC has appealed, we'll see how that goes. But I think Microsoft's, people's perception of Microsoft changed after you read a bunch of their internal emails about how this will happen. Yeah, this was a really interesting one. I feel like this was the kind of thing that just kept being interesting day after day after day after day. So many of these trials have sort of ebbs and flows. But FTC versus Microsoft was very compressed. It happened very quickly, and a ton of stuff happened. And we also learned that Microsoft thinks it would be cool to buy Nintendo.

1:33:39and it became a whole fight about Call of Duty. It was just like all of the biggest, sexiest names in gaming and entertainment just yelling at each other. It was great. Next up on the list, buckle up because El Nino is almost here and it's going to get hot. Maybe the best headline we published this year. Neelai has a theory about buckle up headlines. Oh, it's not your theory. No, it's not my theory. It's Andy Hawkins, our transportation editor. Every time we run a buckle up headline and it does numbers, he just says people love buckling up, which is totally true. Like if you put buckle up in a headline, people are like, I love to buckle up.

1:34:13I need to know what's going to happen. Our climate coverage does surprisingly well. I think we have a young audience. People love it. People like being able to share the stories. Like they're skeptical friends and family. Generally, there's a sense that like this is this coverage is talking to an audience of itself. But Justine, our climate reporter, and Andy, who is her editor, they do a really good job of making the stakes real. And I'm happy the story is like. Yeah, I agree. Justine does a really good job of covering climate stuff for regular people just living their lives day to day, which is cool.

1:34:42Okay, next up we have the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max launch. I'm actually surprised this was this low. Why? It's the iPhone. I don't know. The Verge is founded on the iPhone being a big deal. It's an iPhone. That's true. Not the iPhone. Smartphones. Our early days were like, well, this Motorola phone. It won't.

1:35:08They put USB-C on it. Yeah. And that's most of what we have to say. I wonder if we made this list over a long and a period of time for every year. We could track the sort of dominance of the iPhone by how high or low it is in the list. Because my sense is that it's trending down. Oh, that's interesting. Right. That like the newest iPhone is no longer the most important tech news of the year. has not, and that has been the case for a while now. There was a case, there was a time when it was the most important technology of the year, year after year. Yeah, I think that's right. It's still big. Like, I think to some extent, it's interesting that it's the only SQL device on the list.

1:35:44Everything else is like sort of brand new in some meaningful way. This is the 15th iPhone. Like the Galaxy S23 did not make the list. You know what I mean? The Pixel 8 didn't make the list. So it's definitely in a league of its own in that way. But I do think it's true that I bet it has sort of fallen down the scale on Google Analytics over the last, whatever, 12 years of the Verge's existence. Yeah. The flip side of that is that people are still really interested in the iPhone, which, again, if you kind of look in the broader press or the conventional wisdom or in the culture, there's a sense that people are over it.

1:36:16And then we look at our list, and it's like, oh, this is still very high on this list. Like, being up on the Verge's traffic list represents a lot of traffic. The numbers on all of these are enormous, I should just say. Yeah. Okay, next one. We have a couple more to do, and then we'll get out of here. This is Microsoft's new diskless Xbox Series X design with a lift-to-wake controller. Richard, this was another FTC versus Microsoft thing. Wasn't there? There was that run where we got accidentally a bunch of cool leaks, right? Yeah. A document was posted, I think, from Microsoft that accidentally didn't redact a bunch of things in it.

1:36:49And that revealed some of their future plans. And this is what we saw. The cylindrical Xbox Series X successor that maybe we'll see someday. Maybe we won't. their plans for a future controller, what they want for the Series S, what they want for Game Pass, all these things. And this is the second time that we've seen these kinds of plans for Microsoft. There was a Fort Elisa leak years ago. Oh, yeah. And people just love these. I don't think there was anything that absurd about the, you know, kind of revealed in these documents. But just seeing a console that they haven't launched yet, and who knows, maybe they never will, was ridiculous.

1:37:27Yeah. And Phil Spencer had to put out a statement. He was like, no, this is a thing. We try everything. He was just like, he was very sad about it. The thing looks cool. I will say it looks great. It does. And the thing, I continue to be very excited about the idea of a console that is actually just inside of a controller. And you just connect the controller to a screen and you can play that way. Like, that's the future. Give me that. Sadia was right about everything. And one of the things we learned here is that Microsoft is looking at it that way, too. They found, I think their phrase was that the controller is the hero.

1:37:58and they're like, oh, you know, you can plug your Xbox controller into whatever and play Xbox game. Make it happen, Microsoft. All right, last one. And Sony was like, the PS5 is weirder than ever. Do you like Spider-Man? Here's some.

1:38:15This can only be, you can never put this on its side. Don't even try. Weirdly, no one had issues with us reporting on this one. Yeah, because it was in the trial. I mean, that's just like, whatever. It's like. All right, we're going to, We have one more on the list, but first I'd like to read you a handful of honorable mentions. We had stories about layoffs that were huge this year. We had a story about the Steam Deck that Sean wrote that was very good. Ironically, he wrote it before the new Steam Deck came out, but it was a big year for the Steam Deck. Sean, the Steam Deck, and theverge.com. It's just beautiful.

1:38:47It just all comes together. It belongs together. Just don't touch it. Leave it alone. I agree. Josh Jezzo's piece inside the AI factory about like the real human labor behind AI was hugely popular. Really, really good story. It's been in a bunch of like best things of 2023 lists I've seen recently. Go read that if you haven't. Chris Person's thing about modding his soda stream was really high on the list, which kind of made my heart happy. And then Man of Chicago Lewis's very recent story about SEO experts, which pissed off the whole SEO community. Thank you all for reading our story. Loved that.

1:39:20But the last one on the list of the biggest stories of 2023 and one that I think absolutely deserves to be here. Samsung caught faking Zoom photos of the moon. What is a photo? I'm doing it. It's happening. I mean, this is it. This is proof forever that we get to talk about this as much as we want. Yeah. Here's what I'm going to say. And I look, this is only half a joke. All right. I love Liam, our producer. But any good podcast needs tension. You need to be fighting against someone who won't let you do what you want to do. And Liam is the one who says, I can't talk about what is a photo for an hour and a half every week.

1:40:02That's it. We're sticking it to the man. Every click on a what is a photo article. It's a vote against Liam. No, don't. Liam is wonderful. No, no, no. I'm just joking around. But you need the tension. Big content is trying to hold me down. I actually love this story because it is a what is a photo story, which was genuinely like an ongoing news story all year. It's an AI story. It's a like transparency and what we understand on the internet story. It's a like what are your gadgets supposed to do for you story. It's like it kind of has everything all in one fake photo of the moon. And also the best thing about it is it requires you to understand that every photo of the moon is the same photo of the moon.

1:40:40Which is genuinely kind of mind bending. Like the thing about it that is the most interesting to me is like the stakes are zero because you can never take a different photo of the moon. So like it, you, I could fake a photo of the moon today by just copying in a picture of the moon. And it's, I haven't lied to you because the moon definitely looked like that at that time. I love it. Let's just talk about it for another hour. No, we have to go. That's my list. This has been dug into in 2021. it was a story that came back around and will probably come back around again there was a feature from 2021 where Input Magazine talked about the fake detailed moon photos and they kind of explained it then but they didn't explain it enough and that was why we had to do this all over again but I will say a lot of people try to give Samsung an out it's not really faking it's like, no you don't understand Samsung is taking the longest possible route to putting a clip art moon in your photos.

1:41:41You don't need all this AI. Just be like, it's the moon, right? Here's a selection of photos of the moon that you can have because they're all the same photo. Your stupid eyes and dumb camera aren't required for this. Just print out this photo. I really love that as a product that it's like every time you take a crappy picture of something, your phone is just like, it just like looks on the internet and it's like, here's a better photo of what you just, would you like this one instead? We're so close to it. Fireworks, concerts, just do it. The Eiffel Tower? Yeah, like somebody already did this.

1:42:13You're good. But the thing is, the difference with the moon is that no one in the world can take a different photo of the moon. Like the Eiffel Tower is always changing. There's like dust in the air. There's people around. There's French people whizzing by with berets and cigarettes. The moon is just there, man. It's been the same. just give people a photo of the moon. I love it. Every time you take a picture of the moon, your printer starts and a picture of the moon comes out.

1:42:46It's amazing. All right, that's it. That's my list. Biggest stories of 2023. It's a good year. Yeah. It was a pretty good year on the virtual icon. Yeah. We had a good one. Thanks to everybody for listening to our show, which has been going on now since 2011. And then before that, even longer. We've gotten a lot of notes recently about how many people have been listening to this the whole time. Tell your children. Initiate a new audience. It's going to be great. No, we had a great year. SAP was great. The Verge persists. We've got a huge year coming, both in terms of what we want to cover, what we want to do, the features on the site we want to release.

1:43:23I really do think that there's a new internet coming, and I want The Verge to be right at the forefront of it. So I'm really excited about next year. I'm happy to work with these guys. I miss Alex. Say hi to Kranz if you see her gallivanting around the skies of America on Santa's sleigh. And that's it. Happy holiday. That's VergeCast. Bye for now.

1:43:45And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

1:44:31red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call stainsiety. But now you can break free from your stainsiety with Shout's Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later. Just breathe and shout with Shout Triple Acting Spray. Learn more at shoutitout.com.

1:44:58If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, then it's time to think outside rows and columns. MongoDB is the database built for developers by developers. It's asset compliant, enterprise ready, and fluent in AI. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building faster at mongodb.com slash build.