All eyes on Samsung's thin new foldable

29:10And first I go, that's crazy. I didn't know we could measure that, like, on the skin. Antioxidants are on your, like, I didn't know that. The next thing I go is, I don't know what to do with that. Like, that sounds so cool, and I don't know what. Okay. So, are the runners psyched for this? No. Here's V's runner, not runner, but here's V's health tech soapbox. So, is it very cool that, so they introduced this new bioactive sensor last year which has a bunch of different colors of leds normally it's red infrared and green but this one has stuff like purple yellow blue and that's supposed to enable like new things so the way the antioxidant thing works is that it uses a combination of um a few of the sensors i think like blue yellow maybe another one and you actually have to take the watch off for this this Pass.

30:04Future to work. Pass. All right. You have to take the watch off and you put your little thumb on it. And then it reads the carotenoid levels in your skin. And carotenoids are a type of pigment, basically, that are, it's a type of antioxidant pigment in, like, beta carotene. It makes plants, like, orange. It's the thing in carrots that make them orange. It's the thing that makes bell peppers, like, red and yellow. And so when you eat, they get into your skin. You know, if you have too much carrots, you might turn orange. So it's picking up carotenoids in that. And, you know, I'm there in this roundtable with the Samsung execs talking about it.

30:46And in my head, I'm going, okay, well, what if you eat berries? Because berries don't have carotenoids in them, but they have antioxidants and they're very good for you. Is that going to show up in your thing? Because I went and I did the demo and it said I had very low antioxidants. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. I had so many berries over the weekend. It's because there's no carotenoids or like very low levels of carotenoids in there. And because it's reading it from your skin, it could take as many as a couple, like two weeks for it to actually show up. So fundamentally, what this thing is doing is saying, are you eating enough fruits and veggies?

31:19You already know the answer to that. If they had advertised this as a carrot sensor, I would have been so much more excited. Like, let it be dumb. Let it be silly. Let it be unimportant. as of like right now all the smartwatches they just keep adding sensors that and then being like we don't know what to do with them here they are here's more quantified like if they had just said carrot sensor great like everyone would be like cool this like that it works as function we we first off i need you to test this i will i will be a lot of carrots can you test it on a carrot what oh my god what will happen i'll try okay we'll see what happens i'll just like smush a carrot into the sensor.

31:59That's a thing I'm going to do. But yeah, so my main beef with this is that we all generally know that you should eat more fruits and vegetables. And so all this is telling you is whether or not you're eating fruits and vegetables to an adequate amount. And I think we all deeply know in our hearts whether we are. So, I mean, they were saying that fevers or drinking alcoholic drinks could cause your score to lower. Well, you know that fevers and alcoholic drinks are going to maybe cause your data to dip. Like, wow, wow, wow, thanks, thanks. I think some people might enjoy it and find it useful, but I'm sort of like, duh.

32:42Squircles, antioxidants. I'm going to say a confusing year for the smartwatch lineup. Gemini's on there, which I still think will confuse people because it's replacing Google Assistant on the watches. and now you have generative AI on your watch. What are you going to do with generative AI on your watch? Samsung is very focused on diets, basically, because the examples they were giving me were like, start a run for exactly the number of calories in a slice of pizza. And I was like, that's diabolical. Does it have access to your health data? Theoretically, yes. Yeah, this is the zone. Theoretically, yes.

33:24It could. It could. Yeah, like from what I can tell, the Gemini aspect of it is that it can handle more complex queries that might require multiple apps in a sequential order. So you can say something like, find the coolest coffee shop near here and message the location to Allison. And it'll do that directly from the wrist, provided that you are logged in to all the relevant apps. because in the demo space, I was trying it like away from the people who had the guardrail demos where it would be guaranteed to work. And I was like, hey, there's a little one with Gemini. Let me see if it works. And it was like, well, you're going to have to log into YouTube music to make this play.

34:05So I was like, oh, okay. So you have to log into a bunch of stuff. You know, that reminds me of what Apple's Craig Federici said. He was talking to Joanna Stern from Wall Street Journal, and she asked him about OpenAI buying IO, which is Johnny Ives' new hardware startup. And, you know, they're working on some sort of AI device. And Joanna's like, well, what do you got? And Craig says, hey, I think we have a really personal device already. And he's like, you know, pointing to the Apple Watch. And so there is something there, right, where Apple is sort of pointing to actually the trajectory for AI is a wearable.

34:40And Samsung is, you know, big asterisk, but like maybe, maybe getting there first. sort of sort of getting there first yeah i've gotten a few demos so i got a demo with google earlier this week as well for and i was just like give me ideas for what and i would love if our listeners also had ideas to send me because it's such a fundamental difference in thinking like writing ai prompts you're kind of teaching your brain to have a different language and putting it on the wrist when your muscle memory is so strong to just like oh i need to look at the thing let me just grab my phone. So now you're teaching yourself a different muscle memory.

35:16You're like, I'm not going to grab my phone. I'll just ask it on my watch. When would I do that versus just pulling out my phone, which is faster. And so I think that's going to be an interesting tension to kind of work with while I review it. But I'm not saying it's going to be bad. I'm just going to say, I think I don't know personally how it's going to work for me yet and what part of the generative features will be most useful. So we'll see. Do you talk to AI or do you like to type? I like to type. So my thing is like, and you know, it's different for different people. I know low and blind vision people really value the voice aspect of it.

35:59But for me, I don't want people hearing my stupid questions. It's embarrassing. I have some very stupid questions. I don't even want to hear it myself. I would rather just keep it quiet. Yeah, and like the thing about Gemini that they're saying is that it's natural language, But then now I have to undo my muscle memory of how I talk to assistant. When you talk to assistant, it's like, hey, and I'm not going to say the wake word because we've had enough of our listeners say you said the wake word. So like, hey, AI assistant, send message and then you have to dictate it. So like I think one of the things that you're supposed to be able to do is like be like, oh, I'm late.

36:36can you send a message to this person telling them I'm going to be late and make the tone polite or apologetic? And that's a thing that you can do, and it'll just write the message for you and you don't have to dictate it. And I'm like, cool, but I'm kind of used to dictating it. So it's really, I think people are just going to have to be open to changing their muscle-like memory, and then changing muscle memory is really difficult to do. So I think that's the big challenge with Gemini and the rest. That's real. Okay, there's one other Samsung thing that was like around the event, but I believe it was not at the event, which is there was a big leak that they're having a trifold foldable.

37:16And they didn't say anything about this? I was ready for it. She was. This is what I want to see. They've done kind of a one more thing. But I guess that was at the January Unpacked. They did it for the ring. They did it for the Edge. I was like, pleased. They were wrapping up and Allison just has her thing up and she goes like, I don't believe you. I know. I was like, you can't fool me, TM. But yeah, they fooled me. So there's more to come in Samsung foldables, potentially even this year, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like they told some Korean press, I think, that they have it ready.

37:57They're just like hanging on to it for a minute or something like that. That's fair enough. It would be extremely Samsung to be like, here's one high-end foldable. Here's another that like embarrasses it. But so it's nice. It's nice for them to take a little break. All right. We should go to break. When we get back, we're talking about Apple, Meta, X. Unfortunately, Mecca Hitler. We'll be back. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who won't give up the peach fuzz currently posing as a mustache on his upper lip. Get him an electric razor. Amazon has early holiday deals on gifts everyone wants.

38:37Like the latest kitchen gadgets and toys. And some they don't even know they need. like that razor. Grab him a mirror too, so he can see how pretty he is without that dirt on his lip.

38:51Every great company's story is defined by moments when their founders make bold decisions. These are high-stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rolov Boeta, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make or break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcasts.

39:56Thank you.

40:04All right, we're back. There were a bunch of really big executive changes this week at Apple, at Meta, at X. Grok went absolutely off the rails. Lots to talk about. I want to start with Apple, where their COO, Jeff Williams, announced plans to retire. this is really interesting because jeff williams was i guess until uh tuesday you know one of the leading people who was seen as a possible tim cook successor if it came to that right and i think this is happening in like the most apple way possible right it's a long slow thing i mean does apple do anything quickly i don't think so they're very intentional about everything right so yeah no but jeff williams he's always in those like big presentations at the iphone event like he's one of those he's maybe not craig federighi where he has his own hair meme at this point where you go to dub dub and they're referencing his hair in the filmed parts but he's pretty well known if you're into apple so that's a big one and i think like as coo coo is one of those, I think, quieter, but actually mission critical positions at Apple.

41:19Like Apple is, in many ways, it is a supply chain company, right? Like Tim Cook was the COO before he was CEO. And I think he has in many ways reshaped Apple around that role, right? Every single product is, you know, how do we make sure there are exactly three versions that we are optimizing the parts and we're using what came last. And, you know, it makes sense that they would have seen Jeff as the possible next guy. And I think, like, the going, you know, speculation from what I've seen is that perhaps Jeff Williams is a little too old, right? He was 62. Tim Cook is 64. And so if Tim Cook is going to step down at some point, I mean, I don't know.

42:08He could Berkshire Hathaway this and, like, you know, stick around like Warren Buffett until he's like in his 90s, which like, you know, if you're a shareholder. I mean, Tim Cook is secretly swole. Is he? Is he really? He's there. If you look up the Slate article from the past, it's like it's an investigation into how swole Tim Cook is. He's very swole. He like famously exercises a lot. Oh, my God. A lot of the Apple Watch stuff and the health stuff is because Tim Cook is like super into that stuff. So I don't know. He doesn't look like he's aged. Do we know his workout regimen? I think he wakes up at like 4 a.m.

42:44and works out. I don't know the exact of it, but if you look real close and zoom, he's very modest in his attire, but if you zoom in on those biceps, I am a believer that Tim Cook is swole. So he could be good for a while. He's good for a while. I think he's good for a while. He's a healthy dude. How swole was Jeff Williams? You know, honestly? No Slate articles? No Slate articles. investigating Jeff. Unknown level of swollness. Yeah. No, that is one of my favorite articles, though, is Tim Cook swole. I come back to it every once in a while just because the beat I'm on. And also because when I see him every year, I'm like zooming in with my eyes and just going like, yeah, no, I think I think he's swole.

43:28He's real swole. Okay. So, well, I guess now we know why Jeff was passed over. I mean, right. This is what one assumes. If you don't retire if they're like, hey you might be ceo soon right yeah yeah i it to be clear like it's not like there is a rumor that that tim cook's retirement is imminent but like you know he's he's been doing it since 2012 it's a long time long run um and i think apple uh you know because they move so carefully surely they're they're planning this in the background so their new guy they're bringing in sabi khan um who cook called one of the central architects of apple's supply chain like they're clearly trying to be like nothing's changing we're all good everything is safe since safe hands right um he's you know this guy again has been he's he joined apple in 1995 jesus so right this is like this is a still a jobs era guy who they're bringing in um i mean supply chain stuff is really important right now with like the the ever looming tariff situation going on and i don't know No, I think you have Apple fans who are kind of split into romanticizing the Jobs era and like the vision of the Jobs and Joni I vision of it all.

44:40And then you have other people who are like, no, Tim Cook's the guy who gets it done. And he's a guy who knows supply chains and that stuff's boring, but that's what makes money. So I think having Sobby Khan there, it just feels stable at a time where supply chain is a thing that we think about and something that investors are super invested in. is having a stable supply chain. So I think that is a signal there too. The Trump and tariff stuff feels like part of this too, right? Like they are, they're actually, this thing has been running very smoothly for a very long time. And now Trump is saying, hey, tariffs on everything.

45:18And so Apple is scrambling to move things around. Supply chain is actually more important than ever. There's a lot of work to do. If you're Jeff Williams, yeah, maybe there's a good time. Maybe there's a good time. It's like a cat and mouse game, right? Because they're like, ah, tariff on new country. And Apple's like, ha-ha, we moved to this other country. And then they'll go, aha, tariff on that country. And Apple's like, aha, we'll move to this other country. Or like, that's what it seems like. They will find a way. They'll find a way. And so they need a supply chain guy to know what country to move the factory to.

45:50They love a supply chain guy. They love a supply chain guy. Okay, they do love a supply chain guy, which I think is interesting because uh you know the the going rumors of who who uh might succeed cook again like some years out whenever this happens um i believe it's it's mark german at bloomberg um says that john turnus who's their hardware guy is the leading contender right now which is very interesting right um that that feels to me like there's potentially a very different shift in a world where he is leading it Because Tim Cook, at least like my read on it, is that he is not a product guy in the way that Jobs was and probably not a product guy in the way that Ternus is.

46:31Yeah. And arguably, that's what Apple needs, too, because we're at a point where I think I was talking about this with Todd, our reviews at WD editor, where the iPhone is like, what, 17 years old. There are people who can vote and fight for our country who don't remember a world without iPhones. So it's like not a new product or technology anymore. So I think, you know, with the AI hype, everybody's looking to what's next. Maybe you want a hardware guy in there who can really shape what the next vision of that's going to be. So maybe if you think about vision versus maintenance, maybe it's like a thought process with Ternus is going back from maintenance to vision again and doing the stuff that made Apple splashy to begin with.

47:17Who knows? I'm not a business forecaster. I don't have like a crystal ball, but I think that's maybe something that Tertus has. Yeah. And then didn't they change like the design team now reports directly to Tim Cook, too? Yeah. So I don't know if those things are related, but it would make a kind of sense to have like. I don't know. Like Tim Cook is also surprisingly into sneakers. So like, you know. Tim Cook is a hype beast. Is this where we're headed? He's swole. He's a hypebeast. He's swole, and he had these custom designer sneakers a couple of conferences back, and it was in the Hypebeast article about how he had these special, I believe it was Nike's.

47:59And so, you know, on the face of it, Tim Cook has his uniform. You wouldn't tag him as the design guy, but he's into sneakers, and he's swole. Maybe they're making some sneakers. Maybe there's multitudes to Cook that we haven't. Tim Cook is going to retire. Yeah. from Apple, take over Supreme, and have a whole second career after this. I love it. I believe it. You're hearing it now. You have to do a hard pivot. Yeah. Yeah, he's just going to be on the board of Gentle Monster, which is that sunglass company from Korea with the really interesting silhouettes. He's just going to be a fashion icon.

48:40I would love this. I love this. I really want, like, Cook is the driest executive, like, in public. And if like, you know, steps out and is like, I'm going to live a different life now. I think there's like a quiet. He's earned it. A quiet fire to Tim Cook. This is my fan action. Quiet fire. Oh my gosh. So the next big piece of corporate change up happened last week while we were off, which is that Mark Zuckerberg finally announced his big AI super intelligence group. This is like it is a super group of AI researchers, which I want to maybe I think I think sounds cool when you put it that way.

49:19Does it? It also could sound like the AI Avengers, but it is. It's the AI. Oh, no, that's terrifying. And famously, when the Avengers created AI, it went well, right? That's not totally the plot of Ultron. That's not, you know, famed, beloved, critically acclaimed Avengers movie Ultron that everyone loved. I didn't know that. They didn't. They didn't. They hate that movie. I didn't know that was a movie. You know what? That's the correct answer. It's all right. It's all right. They made a, yeah. So this is weird. This is a little wild. Like, Zuck is sort of just like power tripping here. And first, he paid$14 billion to buy half of scale AI, which is mostly, it appears, that he can hire their CEO, Alexander Wang.

50:15Wang is becoming Meta's chief AI officer. And then he's just paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to individual researchers. He's just going around to every AI lab, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and giving people these incredible offers that just boggle the mind that you would pay somebody this much to convince them to come over, which tells you two things. Number one, it's hard to convince people to come work at Meta, right? Hayden Field, our AI reporter, just ran a story where she talked to some people who got some of these offers. And the thing they told her was, yeah, we care about the mission, which is why we're staying at, you know, the ones who turn this down don't want to go to meta and have to do whatever they want us to do.

51:06Oh, boy. Oh, you know, they're going to get paid OK anywhere. But Zuck is just spending boatloads of cash to build this, you know, huge team of super capable researchers. Right. He's got the former CEO of GitHub. He's got a co-founder and the former CEO of Safe Superintelligence. He got people from Anthropic, from Sesame. It's all over the place. And these dollar figures are mind boggling. And what's really interesting is like, okay, okay, I get it. So you now have one of the most capable AI leadership teams in the world. the idea is you will go and build some sort of fancy ai i think super intelligence whatever you want to call it with that um but but there is sort of a question right like the technology exists or much of it does people are building it is it these specific people or or like are they do you just buy the people and therefore you get the good ai i mean that's obviously what his his strategy is he's just throwing money around he's just like i've got money come work for me do the thing and uh i think he's getting grifted on some level because i no hate to any of these people getting these what 300 million dollar over four year packages like get the bag i love that for you this is your time uh but at the same time you look at that cost and it's just like are you getting your money's worth how much did you spend on that metaverse gambit bud i mean this is what i'm thinking about right where it's like okay let's think let's think about the last time zuck sort of like went ham and spent a ton of money on some initiative that we're like i don't know if it's gonna work out for you it is the metaverse yeah there's still no legs in the metaverse so where did all that money go i they announced the legs they announced the legs but Did the legs ever comp?

53:02The legs never shipped. Can I tell you something? Nobody signed on to check. There could be legs. Like, that's, you know, he made the wrong, but also, it's not even that he made the wrong bed at the wrong time. Like, that, you know, I feel like you could have easily foreseen that when talking about the metaverse. It's that he put in a boatload of money and it was bad. Yeah. Yeah. And like, they're kind of doing that with Llama already. And this feels like, number one, it's funny. They've for months been talking of Llama, how great it is. There was that scandal a few months back where they ran a special like optimized version of Llama to like game some tests.

53:43Right. If you've used meta AI. Which I have. How is it, V? Not great. I mean, on the one hand. So I mostly use meta AI through the glasses when I'm testing features or whatnot. My favorite thing about it is that I can make it sound like John Cena. Oh, it's not bad. It's not bad. Yeah, but that's my favorite thing about it. Yeah. So, like, I've tried the live AI, which has its pros and cons. I think the multimodal thing is really smart. But the live translations, for example, that was not – I tried – sorry, Allison, I have to talk about Amelia Perez again. Oh. That's my favorite. I tried months back just like seeing like, oh, could I use this to translate content that I'm watching?

54:31So I put on a clip of one of the terrible songs in Emilia Perez and it got some of it. And then others, but it was just so it was John Cena just saying very wrong things about the Spanish. So, yeah, in my experience, not great. It sort of feels like there's a moment coming. I don't know if it's like the chips are down or it's like what's the game where you have to get a chair? You have to like musical chairs. Musical chairs. It's like musical chairs and everybody's like, OK, it's about time to figure out this AI stuff. Like Apple, they're like, can we build it or should we just buy a company? And there's a little bit of that going on.

55:11And Zuck is like, I'm buying all these chairs. I'm covering all my bases. So I spent all the stuff on the metaverse and apparently that's not what people want. So I didn't spend everything on AI. So money. Here you go. That's what this feels like. There you go. Thinking about the Ray-Bans is really interesting too because they're right now it's like it's this very simple product and we're like, hey, these are nice headphones. And they are really bullish on actually their AI glasses. And is it right? Like, in fact, they have to build the AI. They do, in fact, have to build the AI. So, you know, there are communities that really do love the meta glasses and the AI in them.

55:54Spoiler alert, that's what my next host episode on Tuesday is going to be about. But, you know, by and large, most people are not really thinking of it in that way. But I do every single time I write them as smart glasses. I've got a good relationship with the PR people at Meta. But they're like, would you be open to calling it AI glasses? And it's like, no, they're smart glasses. But so like the reason I tell that story is to say that like they are super bullish on glasses being a vehicle for AI. They really believe that glasses are like what are going to get people thinking about AI. And, you know, Google's kind of jumped on that train, too, with Android XR.

56:36So they still got to build the AI first. So we'll see. Yeah, it is not a bet in a vacuum. And it's like so easy to think of it that way. I think particularly because like OpenAI, like it is, it exists as a website. Like it is a bot on its own. That's it. And Meta is trying to productize it. Yeah. And the product is okay. And the AI is not okay. Yeah, this is going to be, I think, Just one of the clear, like give this a couple of years, obviously, but it is going to be a fascinating experiment to see if you can just buy your way to a great product. Because I cannot remember. Obviously, people will just buy companies.

57:20I mean, it's funny. Actually, a lot of the big company acquisitions do not work. No, they don't. There is a culture clash. Right. I'm thinking of like Google buying Motorola, which like and then selling it a few years later. Right. So this is sort of a version of that. He is just buying what he thinks is all the best people and who by all accounts are supposed to be incredibly talented researchers. Can you buy your way to the best product? We're going to find out and it's going to be really interesting to see. And if it does not pay off, like, yeah. At least this is a better bet, I think, than the metaverse.

57:58Yes, I think that is fair, right? Like there is a product to be had here that people want, that some people want. The question is, can they build something? Llamas is aggressively fine. I think that's the best way to describe it because I've been using a bunch of them. And is it the best one? No. Is it the worst one? Also, no. Yeah. It's safely fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of AI that is not the best. Oh, God. The other big change this week happened at X, where there was also some Grok news to discuss. So, ex-CEO Linda Yaccarino announced this week that she was stepping down. Elon replied with a, I'm going to say, terse tweet saying, thanks for your contributions.

58:52Who could have seen this? When Linda posted about her announcement, she was like, you know, look at all that we've done. We've done such a great job. You know, we made it the everything app. We've like cracked down on safety. We've done free speech. And Jay Peters on our team just looked at all these things. He's like, actually, like under Yoccarino, none of this stuff has happened. I remember using the X app as an everything app, you know, just yesterday. I ordered a pizza. No, that's not true. She lasted longer than I thought she would, though, because I thought like when she was announced that I was like, oh, this will be over.

59:28six months and she lasted four times that. So, you know. That's true. Yeah. I just might be me, but I don't know if I could have lasted as long as she did. Yeah. Given circumstances. We think she just got fed up, right? I think she just was like. That's the thinking. I think she was just like, yeah, I didn't sign up for this. See, I don't. It takes a certain type of person to volunteer to work for Elon. And she was pretty gung ho about it up front. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she was. She was. So I don't know. I'm very, very interested in finding out what happened there. Do you think she knew about the whole Trump turn that he was going to do Doge and all of that?

1:00:09Do you think she just finally went like, I signed up for stuff. I didn't sign up for that. And she's just finally been like, okay, and I'm done. I mean, she spent a lot of her time, I think so, right? Because she spent a lot of her time defending him. and her job when she came on was advertisers are fleeing this platform because everyone hates elon and he keeps saying inappropriate stuff right yeah and so you know and she uh you know didn't quite get that like there are some that the platform still exists it's there but the other thing is that when she signed on x was an independent company it is now owned by xai which means there are even you know she was always the CEO and it always felt like it was in air quotes like Elon owns the place Elon runs the place X also announced a new head of product recently they put Nikita Beer in charge he was the co-founder of TBH which Meta bought and I believe then shut down and also Gas which was acquired by Discord the apps as I'm told I believe are for teens and so I did not use them You know what?

1:01:23That's just being age appropriate. Teens are the teen apps. Teens are using gas. I'm not sure about that. I can't prove that. So X, you know, it's got some, it's got some, they didn't announce a new CEO. They didn't, they didn't say anything. They're just like, Linda's gone. Okay. And then in the background of all of this, Grok, I kind of, there's something about x as a platform right now where it just there's sometimes there are rainy days and thunderstorms and you're just like oh yeah the chatbot that lives in the platform is being racist and calling itself mecca hitler today and you're just like well where does it like oh it does that sometimes and it's like that this is the point we have gotten to with x where we're like number one it still it still functions number two yeah you can just ignore mecha hitler like they'll deal with it it's fine do you remember when we used to call like back when it was twitter we used to be like this is the main character of the day yes and now grok is the main character of the day as mecha hitler but don't love that i it the mecha hitler thing is um perhaps the more the lighter part of it.

1:02:40It was being like actively super anti-Semitic and racist and offensive and just like going off for a couple days and eventually they like shut it down. This all ends with Elon hosting a live stream to announce Grok 4 which may or may not be live at this point. It wasn't unless I checked. It's I don't really get it. Like X as a product is I think bewildering to me at this point like i i think the grand proclamations of doom i guess i would argue did not quite yeah there's like a ton of people who are still on x surprisingly like the the 10 seconds i'm on there every so often i'm like oh right so and so i used to follow they still be posting up a storm on x so that's you know it's still there people are still have not left, which is wild to me, but yeah.

1:03:38And like, you know, I don't want to, I shouldn't give them too much credit for this, but like Elon fired most of the company. And like, it's still you know, the website is still online most of the time, right? Like okay, okay. They've got that. Is it succeeding? Not, right. The thing it has succeeded at is creating a whole bunch of competing platforms, including threads, which there was data out this week, that it is like nearly catching up on mobile app usage. Wow. That's absolutely wild considering how awful Threads is. Like, I'm sorry. Like, I go to Threads for very specific things, which is K-pop, because apparently my algo there is just like, all you care about is K-pop.

1:04:20And I'm like, are they wrong? They are only partly wrong. I care about other things. But I'm just like, that's my entire feed on Threads is just K-pop from, but like K-pop news from five days ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what you go to threads for. That's what you go to threads for. Five days ago. I wonder how much of it is meta just aggressively pushing people to threads, which has been. Oh, it's so aggressive in Instagram now. Yeah. Scrolling through, you're like, oh, do I want to look at a threads post from three days ago? I think I'm good. Threads also very aggressively pushes the like for you page or whatever it's called.

1:04:56Yeah. The discover page. whereas you know other platforms are nice and give you options or let you choose your phone right that i go on threads and i get freaking sucked in because it is just like showing me all this stuff from people who i don't follow and it's like this is why facebook succeeds yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not actually saying it's bad necessarily but like yeah i see i see why it's doing okay um and somehow they've got enough stuff they don't have a mecca hitler though i well you know what Zuck just spent a lot of money on okay okay we might have Mecha Hitler down the line but how close are we to Mecha Hitler that's a new metric for uh oh god for your AI that's dystopian yeah and on that happy note it's time for a break when we get back we are rebranding the lightning round get ready for it morning Zoe Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you teach me Sildana I couldn't possibly at T-Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them it's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system impressive let me try at T-Mobile you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys you heard them T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition check them out see how much you can save versus the other big guys at c-mobile.com slash switch.

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1:07:25All right, we're back. So I have a problem. I have a problem with the lightning round. I don't know if you guys know this, but Neelai and David, every week, they've got the lightning round. They've got a whole bunch of stories. And the point of the lightning round is you get through all this. It's fast-paced lightning round, right? What happens? Goes long. Yeah. Goes long. They don't get to all the stories. They got to cut them. That ends today. Okay. We are changing. The lightning round is done. We are changing it. It is henceforth known as the thunder round. Oh my God. Let's do this. Okay. Here's what's going to happen.

1:08:04Unlike the lightning round, the thunder round gets stuff done. It keeps moving. We've got 15 stories, 15 minutes. and I have given Eric Gomez, our producer, the power of lightning. Oh, thunder? That one's wrong. Well, you have one, you have the other. Yeah, okay. He's got the power of something to make us move along. And he is going to come in with some rolling, some crackling thunder, some crashes to keep us moving if we go a little too slow. I love this. I love this. So ready. I'm ready. I'm going to jump a million times. All right, people. Let's do this. The first ever Thunder Round. We're going to get through all of them.

1:08:50You ready? I believe in this. Okay. Story number one. I really want to talk about this. Allison, you covered Project Indigo, which is this Adobe camera app for the iPhone, right? Yes. It's kind of a beta product. It is a camera app. It's made by Mark Lavoie, who some people may remember as like the brains behind the pixel camera the idea is it's computational photography but it doesn't make your photos look like hdr hell um is how i would say the sales pitch is and i played with it it turned my phone into a um a piece of fire i don't know it's it's very beta it heats your phone up oh my god not a great um like everyday camera amazing photos like loved it so much story were so yeah like they had It's such intense mood and like a vibe.

1:09:43Contrast. Like beautiful. I've liked really, this doesn't happen at all. The entire Verge newsroom stopped and was like, what are these photos? Yeah. From a phone? Yeah. I have not seen phone photos like this in years. Yeah. Mark Lavoie really feels like the guy who Google let get away. Yeah, I know. What did they do here? And he's like a fellow at Adobe. What a gig. Yeah. You just hang out, make a camera app. Making the camera app we all want. Yeah. So was this like, were these like specially curated, the photos that you posted? Because like they were incredible. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So next story, we're going to move along here.

1:10:25Ikea announced a lamp with a speaker in it. And it looks cool and it connects to Spotify. The main thing is they dropped Sonos. This is the correct move to drop Sonos. You like this? Like Sonos has had kind of a, Sonos has had a year. the app has not been great and i think you know if you think about what most people use they're using bluetooth and they're using spotify so just go where their people are make it cheaper you don't have to have like a whole licensing issue with uh sonos for this and sonos is like you know it's it's are they doing great sonos and ikea always felt like a weird pairing to me right it is the highest end of of connected speakers and the like lowest end of stuff for your home i mean i love ikea Yeah, that's not enough.

1:11:08Oh, yeah. And Ikea is more expensive than they used to be. But, yeah, it's just. No, but that is like a weird dichotomy. And, like, Ikea's foray into the smart home has always been about simplicity and keeping things affordable. So, kind of. The speaker's cute. The speaker is cute. Not bad? Or that's not the lamp. There's a lamp. I would buy a bunch of these. Wow. I want some not bads. I was just shaking out. The thunder god does not appreciate speaker talk. V, do you want to take this one? Yeah. So Perplexity has launched a Comet web browser. So a web browser for Perplexity, which is the AI search engine, which fashions itself as...

1:11:50I always get confused by the pitch for Perplexity over the other ones. But the whole idea is that it's researching things in real time. So you're supposed to be able to trust the results more. Sure. It has a web browser now. Love it. Have either of you used either like Gemini and Chrome or Dia yet? I haven't used Dia, but I'm a longtime user of Arc and the original Arc. So like I get the whole AI browser thing. Yeah. So my, okay. So AI browser is super hot right now. They also, OpenAI is supposed to be launching an AI web browser too. My whole thing is like, they don't work yet, right? Like I tried Dia and I'm like this, it's just a permanent chat bot tab.

1:12:30Like why? what am i like i'm like pretty on board with like chat gpt being useful but it's like you just you just added a tab to my browser yeah i get it they're trying to they're trying to beat google they're trying to replace it and to do that you gotta be the default a different version of ai overviews i feel which is it's more aggressive it's much more aggressive ai mode yeah i will say like sometimes in the arc browser when i have like a thing that i'm looking up and it gives me the summaries. I'm like, oh, it's helpful to have summaries. But now I've got to look it up and make sure it's accurate.

1:13:02Yeah, so you've got to check it's work. Yeah, it's work. AI mode is like, what if you could talk to and interact with a page of search results? I'm like, hmm. I don't think I've ever wanted that. No, no, that's what I asked for. Yeah. Cool. Oh, right. Okay. Sorry. I brain froze. But anyway, so yeah. AI browsers, they're not. Not sure we like it. Not sure we like it. Allison. All right. E-ink. Okay. Okay, e-ink is on a laptop for some reason. So there's a laptop, but instead of a touchpad, it has an e-ink e-reader for AI apps. I hate this. Why? I hate everything about this. This felt like they were just trying to find an angle on their own.

1:13:45Like, they were like, we could put an e-reader on the trackpad. Yeah. And they're like, nobody's going to buy that. What if we put AI next to it? Yeah. I hate this. Why would you want to read on your trackpad? No, I don't. There's no reason for that. And then also just, okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to quote Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. Whole ass one thing. Don't half-ass two things. This is two half-ass thing. I have an e-reader. I have a laptop touchpad and AI is in everything. But I don't want to read on my touchpad where my fingies go. No. Because sometimes you're eating. Sometimes you're eating.

1:14:26And then you're going to get it all smeary. And then it's going to be on your AI e-reader in the middle. Just get a folding phone. Then you have a bunch of screens. I don't know if I'm going to go that far, but yeah. Get a$2 ,000 folding. Whole ass one touchpad. That's my spiel. There you go. I support that. Okay, okay, okay. Next thing. Did you guys see or can I say did you not see Lorde's new CD, which is transparent? transparent and uh okay so it turns out when you put a cd into certain cd players i mean they i guess they they all use infrared to read it but it seems like some of them maybe also use infrared to register that a cd is really going in and um they can't see it and so they just eject the cd and they won't put it in um andrew marino on our team went out and these things are sold out but he managed to find one and he tested it about the cd players so you have like a clamshell one where you just like put it in and close it um or i guess maybe like a disc tray yeah that will work but otherwise these lord fans are really upset because you know what fair they paid for this music and now they can't listen to it on their car cd which you know like that's one reason to buy a cd if you have a car that still has those things so i totally get what they're saying at the same time it is kind of cool it looks transparent cd okay i'm moving on with this one because i don't want to get crashed um a federal appeals court struck down the ftc's click to cancel rule this week this is bullshit that's what yeah this is yeah this is this is the thing that was gonna let you cancel your gym membership this was this is this should be a bipartisan issue if there was ever a bipartisan why did they look i does anyone like it when you're trying to cancel a thing and they're like actually you have to call an email nobody likes this nobody wants this this was a bipartisan It's devastating.

1:16:15This is absolutely devastating. We should have gotten this done. Who's responsible? Yeah, who is responsible for this? Why would they, like, I'm sorry. Okay, they said the FTC did a bad job making the rule. So it's not like they can still do it. It's just like, will the new FTC do it? Oh, great. No, they won't because, I don't know. Maybe I'm being mean, but I feel like it's capitalist to be just like, no make it hard for them to cancel because then we can get revenue because these people can't remember just cancel their subscriptions I tried to cancel pet insurance once and it was the most I just gave up and paid another year for pet insurance oh my god no that's a lot of no you had to like write a handwritten note mail it call their CEO it's good news for your pet I suppose yeah he was alright oh that was Oh, my God.

1:17:09He was dead. Thunder crash. Okay. Vicky was moving. Okay. So, Nothing's first true flagship phone plays it a little safe because, you know, Nothing. We know Nothing for—oh, God, you got to stop me with the Nothing puns. Oh, no. But Nothing has something going for it, which is that it's known for its forward design, and this is not cool. Yeah, it has. So instead of like all the lights on the back, that was like the glyph thing, which looked cool, wasn't super useful. I didn't find it super useful. It has a little tiny like programmable like LED thing, sort of like the Asus like ROG phones where it can be a little icon.

1:17:53It can be an emoji icon for like a certain app. It makes more sense to me because you could assign different notifications to different glyph patterns. And I would be looking at it like, I can't remember if that thing lights up. Do I have a phone call or what? This is like a more clear, like you could put a little poop emoji when the phone rings or something. I don't know. People were hating on it. I don't know. I think it's a good idea. They demoed it with like a spin the bottle thing. Oh, that's dumb. Okay. Hear me out. I'm actually super in favor. It's the carrot sensor. They're just like, they're like, no one is going to use this.

1:18:31Here's your carrot. And I love it. I love it. Maybe they should have just put a little more whimsy into it. I don't know. I think people have expectations. So this didn't meet their expectations of what they wanted from nothing. I guess. They wanted something from nothing. They wanted something from nothing. That doesn't work. We deserve this one. We deserve that one. The crash. Yeah, yeah. the government is still suing Apple for antitrust yeah good yeah yeah no I'm very pleased to see that's still happening Apple Apple tried to get it dismissed and the judge was just like yeah seems like they've got a case like you know they didn't like rule on it in any meaningful manner they're just like so litigious right like they do this all the time with everything i mean this is well okay so this is the government was like hey apple like your entire business model is anti-competitive and apple's like that's not true and the judge is like let us at least find out yeah so that's it that's good that's good i want to see this play out i think like there are huge repercussions uh potentially so it'll be it'll at least be a fun time in court yeah yeah all right my turn so adding calendar events with a screenshot is ai at its finest hard agree oh yeah someone also testing the death data of ios 26 it actually works now agree um yeah for the most it does the thing that you want it to do it's it's kind of like oh yeah so on ios 26 you take a screenshot of something and uh you'll get a little prompt uh it'll say add to calendar and it'll use generative ai too and it it already did a version of this, but it wasn't, it was pretty like, find the date, use the email subject line as the calendar thing.

1:20:18And that was kind of the end of it. I will say Gemini does this a lot better. Like we'll add multiple events. We'll ask you follow-up questions like, did you want to add this or this? And it understood time zones. Oh, that's a big one. Really good. I think it's a win all around i'm like free us from the tyranny of calendar apps yeah that's what i say about that yeah sold good yeah absolutely sold on it hey we beat the clock yeah wow don't push it now i'm raced for thunder oh no they just want to keep us on our toes now we've made eric too powerful how's second generation vision pro might launch this year according to bloomberg um supposedly they're just gonna do the pretty much the exact same thing put an m4 chip in it um i mean it is the vision pro is is just it is a mac on your face and uh yeah it's it's rough when it's 3500 and and an m1 and it's a heavy mac so this is the other thing supposedly they're gonna do some sort of new strap which like i feel like everybody i've talked to about the vision pro is like you gotta get a different strap you gotta get a like first so there's two staff straps now there's the solo knit and there's the one that looks like a harness i forget the name of it right now but I keep switching between both of them.

1:21:37Neither of them help. It's just I can't. I, you know, I I'm not calling the people who believe that, like, you can wear it for hours liars, but I have never been able to do that. So, OK, I'm going to keep us quick on this next one, too, as we as we move forward. NVIDIA briefly became the first four trillion dollar company this week. The thing that's interesting here, Apple was the first one trillion. Apple was the first American company to$2 trillion. Apple was the first company to$3 trillion. NVIDIA wins with$4 trillion. It's AI, right? It's the AI. It's the AI chips. The chips need to... The times have changed.

1:22:16Apple is merely a$3 trillion company. I'm a shame. Our thoughts are with Tim on these trying times. These trying times. He has his biceps to keep him company. Okay. Do you know Cameo still around? I did not know they're still around. Cameo not only is still around, they launched a new app this week for tracking your friends' birthdays. It's a calendar, but it only does birthdays. Do we need that? That's dumb. And Cameo is doing it. Why? I don't know. Oh, I guess is the idea that then you're like, oh. Oh, it's my friend's birthday. I should get them a Cameo from that random select. Oh. Yeah. Okay, that's kind of genius, but also, no.

1:22:55No. I will say, and like apologies to, I don't know, all of my friends, everybody I know. I only remember birthdays because they're in my calendar. Oh, yeah. If they're not in there, I don't know that you were born. I'm an astrology nerd. Like, it's how I cope with everything now. So I just find out people's signs and then know the general time of when their birthday is. You just get a sense. I just get a sense. They're like, oh, you're a Gemini? Oh, you're a birthday past. Like, that kind of thing. That was true. That was right. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. It's good. It's working. It's good stuff.

1:23:27So Apple just added more frost to its liquid glass design. That's because it's liquid ass. I'm not a fan. Oh, she said it. Wow. I'm not a fan. Okay, here's my hot take. I think it's kind of okay. Like, I've kind of gotten used to it. No. I have bad eyes. Like, I have truly awful eyes, and anyone who's ever read my smart glasses review or anything that has to do with vision know that my eyes are garbage. These are garbage eyeballs that my parents gave me. I legitimately had a really hard time reading. And obviously it's dev beta. It'll be different when it comes out. I'm pro more frost, but then it's not glass.

1:24:04Yeah. No, it's frosted glass. It's frosted glass. I had to put the little outlines on all the buttons, which make the whole transparency thing not. Because if you go into the messages, you can't see any of the buttons. Yeah. And then there's just like a slap. It's terrible. I don't like it. You guys know what? I watched Minority Report for the first time, literally for the first time this last week. Oh, wow. And they're putting all the glass in front of glass. I was like, there it is. We made it. We made it. We did it. The future is here now. And, yeah, it seemed like everything worked out nicely in Minority Report.

1:24:34Oh, yeah, it was good. Technology is really good. Good to hear. All right. We've got two more? Two more. We're going to make this. Oh. Is it my turn? Yes. Yeah. Nintendo is ending its cost-saving Switch game vouchers. I didn't know there were Switch game vouchers. How do I get one? And I can't anymore. So I guess, V, did you ever use these? I did not. These were like, okay, these were, people love these things. They were such a bargain. It was this weird thing where Nintendo was like, if you subscribe to Switch Online, so you have to be a member, but for a hundred bucks, they'll sell you a voucher and you can use it to get two full price Nintendo games.

1:25:13And so you could lock in the price of a game at$50 basically, which if you're going to buy two Nintendo games, like, yeah, great. You're saving like$20 or more, particularly as you're like, these things are creeping up in price. This is their like, Tears of the Kingdom or whatever the next Zelda is, is going to be$90. Okay, last story. We made it. We're doing it. HBO Max is officially, drumroll, HBO Max again. Thank God. The world is restored. We're safe. I actually. Not from Eric. Not from Thunder. Not for thunder. But we did it, everyone. We did it. We made it through all of the stories. I'm going to declare this first version of the Thunder Round.

1:25:57Mostly successful. I think it was successful. We made it. We made it. I feel good. We accomplished what we set out to do. Exactly. There you go. There was thunder. Yes. There was perhaps a lot of thunder. There was some aggressive thunder happening. I feel like Eric maybe got a little thunder happy. That's it for the Thunder Round and that's it for the Verge cast. We'd love to hear your questions and feedback. Do you like the Thunder Round? I hope so. Email us at vergecast at theverge.com or give us a call 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Andrew Marino, and Travis Larchuk.

1:26:37See you next week.

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