Apple and OpenAI make a deal

27:07Of course you do. Yeah. I was like, bring me back to that 80s monitor experience. We know. You know, you know. After last week, everyone else knows too. I just sometimes, there's like listeners who might've skipped an episode. Why? But I want, I want them to know as well. Um, so, but they, they're like animated. They look really sick. So you gotta, we did a whole story, um, kind of chronicling a lot of these things and there's a video in there and it just looks, it looks dope. Yeah. Like it, the Susan care wallpaper. She was an original mac designer they have a lot of her iconography it's very cool it's very very cool and then um now when somebody leaves you a voicemail it'll like just transcribe it so it looks almost like a text in your phone so that'll be really cool if the transcription actually works because if it's anything like the google transcription it does not understand my mom interesting it also my my best friend who says mayor mayor the same way that the horse and the the office those came up the same way as siri she was telling me yesterday cannot comprehend that wait she often talks about mayors and horses she often talks about the problem is that they're confused yeah and so it's always like yeah there's a lot of mayors in your area and she's like cool okay so just to confirm you have a friend who calls you and leaves you voicemails about the number of horses in your area in her area and the problem that we have identified is that siri thinks that she's talking about local elected officials yeah it's just checking that i understand i like i said if you're listening that's right up there with magic mouse like let's fix it well it does it struggles with like she was telling me she's got a really strong texas accent and it like like siri does not comprehend yeah but then she's got she speaks spanish and she has like a lovely mexican accent in spanish and it understands it perfectly so a lot of times she's just like i'm just gonna talk to siri in spanish because otherwise it's gonna be like let's talk about elected officials i don't know how to say female horse in spanish but if i did rest assured i'd be doing it right now same i don't know either and I'm going to try to keep it that way for as long as possible.

29:23Don't tell me. My friend will tell me and I don't care.

29:30But there's also more options for charging too so I guess you're going to be able to change how you want your phone to charge. Oh right, like limits to save the battery. Which is nice because we've been able to do that on computers. A lot of Android features here. I would just earn. Yeah. Like everybody. Thanks Apple. I appreciate you bringing parody. Um, so there's still a lot more. I know people are really looking into it. And if you see something cool, like tag one of us, um, mainly David, there's just a lot of like useful quality of life stuff. Like the, now if you, if you paste a link into messages, it'll show you the link preview before it sends the message, which is like, it's one of those things that's like, am I going to send a link that is 90 ,000 letters long or is it going to do the nice preview thing and now you know before you send it there's just there's just a million of those and I think that's great I will say the one I am most excited about is that you can make the app icons bigger and get rid of the label underneath it so instead of saying like having the safari logo and then saying safari under it you can have a bigger safari logo and it doesn't say safari under it it looks nice unbelievable this is the stuff like I really I cannot shake the idea that Apple had a whole two hour long WWDC planned that would have just been all this stuff.

30:49And they would have told us about all of it. And it would have been a very normal WWDC. And then at the very end, they were like, we have to do a chat GPT thing and just like blew it all up. I'm sure that's not what happened. But like, we're finding out about much more of what's going on on these platforms than we typically do after the keynotes. And Apple's the last few years, they were doing kind of a thing, right? Where one year it'd be like small updates, like, they're nice, but smaller. And then the next year would be like, oh, there's some really sick stuff in here. And this year was kind of going to be one of those years where it's like, okay, we had a kind of smaller year last year.

31:21Really sick stuff this year. And then also Apple Intelligence. Yeah. So I think I'm totally in this like theory with you. This conspiracy, David. All of my productivity nerd friends are so excited that you can now see reminders inside of Calendar. I'm like, it's so much done. You guys don't even know. The installer audience is freaking out. They literally are. It's very exciting. Well, what's interesting, Jay Peters, Jay Peters from The Verge, who's back on parental leave, congratulations, Jay. He wrote that the AI upgrade cycle is here for Apple. So a lot of this stuff would have never driven an incremental upgrade.

32:01You've got an iPhone 13. You can see reminders and calendar. You're not buying an iPhone 16. Except now maybe Apple intelligence is going to make you excited to buy a new phone. And Apple's kind of banking on this. I mean, they need to. That cycle has gone down, right? People just don't upgrade as often anymore unless they're Verge listeners, in which case they're like, who? Who is doing that? Yeah, we have eight gigs of RAM. Yeah. Disgusting. Gross. I have more mares than that at home. Which ones? Eric Adams? Who's there? Eric Adams does not have eight gigs of RAM. I don't know exactly what kind of insult that is, but I know it to be true.

32:42No, but the idea that these features that are cool, that we're excited about, I think regular people are going to experience and be happy about the theming. Yeah. Get ready for just a wave of just bananas themes and all the phones around you because people are excited about those things. They're not going to – if Apple gated theming to the next generation of phones, one, that would be outrageous. Two, it would not inspire one person to buy a new phone. Yeah. But if they gate, you can talk to Siri naturally to the next generation of phones and it can do all this stuff for you and we can make ads about it and market these new capabilities that might drive the cycle.

33:18So you can see why they sort of like put all the stuff aside. Yeah, because they did it for that. They did it for the watch. The watch is like the new update is not going to work with the series four and the series five. So it's just like I think iPads, too, are affected. If the iPad doesn't have an M1 in it, it's not going to get a lot of the AI features. Oh, they finally got me. They got you. Or did they? Go get it. It's so good. Zero regrets. Spend all of your money irresponsibly on iPads. I've bought so many speakers this year. I can't be buying iPads, too. Are you kidding me? Your wife's just like, no.

33:54It's no more stuff, please. But yeah, it's very interesting that they're pushing it this way. But they also got me because I'm on an iPhone 14 Pro. And I'm like, OK. You're going to do it. Yeah. And I was going to hold out for the folding one. I just, in my heart of hearts, I fully believe it's any day now. And I mean, any year now, not day, but instead I will get it. Do we think Apple is running out of things to take 30 % of? And that's, that's why we're. I think the European Union is taking away things it can take 30 % from. Fair, which is, which is then it spins back to now we have to keep selling you an iPhone every year.

34:31because Apple has been on this run for good or for bad of saying, you know, hold on to your hardware longer. Like, you know, you know, the thing Amazon has always said, like, we don't make money when you buy your hardware, we make money when you use it. Apple has always been a hardware company, but has increasingly made money when you use it. And so I think they've always pushed you to make new stuff, but or to buy new stuff, rather, but I don't think it has been as existentially important for you to upgrade your iPhone every year, as long as Apple keeps getting 30 % of everything you do but i mean they were still feeling the pressure on this this was like something we'd see earnings after earnings after big iphones they'd be like okay they did it but not as many people bought it this year but it's fine because you know yeah but i don't know that i i think we everybody kind of got used to that and it was it was the services revenue was coming up to i think we got used to that i think tim cook was always probably looking for okay what's that thing that can drive the next well sure he invested 10 billion dollars in a car and is now trying to build like home robots tim's got a lot of plans they don't have a lot of plans yeah they don't have like post phone hardware plans right yeah right but yeah so that's kind of my point is like i think it does seem like apple in a very real way is back to we have to sell you an iphone as often as possible and it feels like the move for a bunch of years has been away from that and now it is like back to that in a real way yeah as someone who loves gadgets i love that maybe that'll be like cool stuff do you think that's why apple made the iphone 15 pro scratch so easily which is why mine is scratch to bits.

35:55And now I desperately need a new one in September. If they would just make a phone whose battery consistently landed, lasted for a whole day, six months into its, I'd be very happy. Yeah. My 15 pro is like, I'm done. I'm out. You want screen time controls. What if I don't turn on? That's good. Okay. Well, we should take a break. One more thing I want to call out. Something I noticed. Then we were talking about customizing control center. See all this. They added one control from one app that I thought was very interesting. thing, which was the Ford Pass app. And you can lock your doors and start your car, turn on the AC right from control center because Ford Pass has a thing.

36:34And then Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, tweeted, we're excited to partner with Apple and blah, blah, blah. I think there's GM walked away from CarPlay towards getting tighter. Are you saying that they're going to make an Apple? like Ford's making the Apple car? You just did the Brian Windhorst on ESPN. Like, let's see. Here's what's happening over here. Do you understand what I'm saying? I don't have it all the way. I'm just, I'm suggesting that if somebody does know this information, they should tell me this information in a way that I can report it. So there's a Skunk Works team inside of Ford that is building good cars instead of stupid ones.

37:16Is this Ford Red? What if that's just Apple? There actually is the Skunk Works team inside of Ford. This is what I'm saying. What if all of those people are just Apple moles? No, I'm saying GM walked away from CarPlay. And the other giant American automaker is like, what if we integrate more tightly with Apple software? And that is suggestive that they might do something else. And if you are a person who might know what that something else is. They're going to bundle a phone with the car. They're going to buy Verizon. Whatever. Look, you know. Buy an iPad, get a Mustang. Here we go. I would do that.

37:54As a person with a used iPad and a used Mustang, there's a super cycle. You know, if you know what I'm, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

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39:23Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going?

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41:42we're back the verge cast in case you missed i don't know what you were doing i just know that there's a button that makes you go from the end of one segment to the beginning of this segment much quicker than we think that happens welcome sponsored lightning round all i'm saying is just keep us keep us afloat we're just going to start integrating ads at completely unpredictable moments of the show there was one we got a bunch of uh tweets from somebody i think it was two weeks ago in the episode you guys see this where the the way the dynamic ads were happening was such that it we hit a pause and then you said we're back and then the ad started it was like it was just a perfect like oh you thought you knew when the ads were in your face the ads are now that's the pop-up ad of broadcasting it was great i enjoyed it very much all right lots and lots and lots of gadget news this week starting with xbox i think but i really want to talk about what's going on with google and android and criminal s david you want to run us through all this yeah let's start with xbox because on on tuesday's episode i promised we were going to talk about the stupid xbox and uh i got some questions about what the stupid xbox is so let's talk about it basically there was a there was an xbox event earlier this week got a little bit overshadowed by wwdc but lots of interesting stuff new games all kinds of stuff but i think for our purposes the two big gadgets that were talked about were uh a new white disc Gliss Series X, which looks very nice and is inexplicably not shipping until the holidays.

43:10It's just like a thing that is should be sitting there. And for some reason, they're not shipping it for eight months. No internal upgrades. It's just got it's just white. Yeah, just give me give me it. Yeah, cool. It's so weird. Anyway. But I think the way more interesting thing is Phil Spencer, who runs Xbox at Microsoft, has been, I would say, like aggressively and loudly hinting that microsoft is going to build a handheld gaming device for a long time and then just said out loud in an interview i believe with ign uh quote i think we should have a handheld too so like there it is he was basically like this is this is a time we're doing software we're talking about games they also talked about bringing more games to other platforms which made a lot of xbox people mad in the way that it did before but he's just they're just making a handheld like it's just coming i think the the big difference here is we've heard these rumors about a handheld from them for ages right like when they were really pushing cloud uh gaming right after the the xbox series x was launched everybody's like okay yeah they're going to do like a cool cloud console and then that didn't happen because the cloud gaming stuff just didn't kind of take off as they wanted right there was that there was also the streaming box and it got killed and so all this stuff got killed a couple of years ago and it's like okay you're you're going to make a handheld now.

44:27Cool. You've been saying that for like half a decade at this point. But the difference now is it sounds like it's going to run Windows. And that rules. As someone who uses these little consoles, that's awesome. Because the current version of like Windows on one of these little game consoles sucks now. What makes us confident that Microsoft can overcome the nature of running Windows on a handheld? Nothing. Have you heard about our Lord and Savior ARM processors? Yeah, I mean, it is the ARM processor. And we think the games, well, I guess you can res them down, right? You're not trying to run them at full quality.

45:02Yeah, like the Steam Deck automatically resses this stuff down, right? And so the idea here is that it would do this. We were hearing rumors about like NVIDIA getting back into the ARM stuff. They used to do the Tigra, which notably powers the Switch. There's also MediaTek. Everybody knows MediaTek. There's a MediaTek processor within 50 yards of you right now. Yeah, probably within like 50 inches. I'm just saying, everywhere you are, there's a MediaTek processor. That TV right there, guarantee you there's a MediaTek processor. 100%. You guys can't see it, but there's a TV there, and it definitely has MediaTek in it.

45:37But MediaTek is also going to be doing the processor stuff and doing ARM processors, and there's even rumors that MediaTek. Just to be clear, they already are because they're everywhere. They want to make good ones. Thank you. Thank you. That is an important clarification. they already make arm processors now they want to make the ones that don't suck and there's rumors that they might be partnering with Nvidia there's something happening there so like the potential for that is the media tech Nvidia combo is like oh boy that dude probably has a lot of money right like that's not a yeah that is Nvidia being like Kevin Hart is that what you're saying right there's a movie called she's out of my league

46:23yeah this is accurate this is accurate but but i think that's kind of all is is what's driving some of this like hype for a new xbox handheld console is there's a lot of potential that could change but they also have to make windows not suck visually like i don't i don't care about how it runs it needs to not suck like just run run the xbox app like done that's it's just sitting there like all that software is just sitting there that's true microsoft could do it and it just hasn't for some reason well i mean theoretically the xbox itself is running a version of windows right remember right yeah yeah it does yes and they just cut it down to run one app well right yeah they could do that again and then all of these other consoles which suck so much with full windows on them could suck less that that's what i really want i'm if you can tell there's stuff already out there that's really sick and the software is garbage so that's the thing right and i think to me the reason this is very exciting is that uh we really haven't had sony or microsoft make a really truly like first class competitive handheld lately yeah i'm sorry yeah in a long time was a in the vita i mean come on the psp was incredible it was i i don't doubt I know that Nita fans are out there.

47:46650 years ago. Fair. Did you watch a lot of movies on your PSP? No, no, no. But it had a Sony disc format, like a custom UMD, I believe. Those are the days. It was right up there with Megabase. By the way, shout out to all the people wandering through Best Buy sending me photos of ULT speakers. There's a Sony marketing person who's like, this is off the charts, and that's because of us. The chart was flatlined below, just to be clear. the chart has gone to five but we're doing it we're making a difference we're just either like that's so weird nobody ever presses the button yesterday six people press the button what's happening here um but yeah that was that was all the xbox stuff uh my guess would be it's there's there's i just feel like if you're phil spencer you don't say that if there's not something happening yeah he is a relatively near future yeah yeah and he's He's been sort of sneaky about this.

48:42He's liked tweets and has sort of intimated that this is a thing that he thinks is interesting. But I think you look at the continued success of the Steam Deck, the fact that Nintendo has a Switch 2 coming that everybody's very excited about. This idea is not going away. I think handheld gaming is going to be the next big thing for a very long time. And it seems very clear that Microsoft also believes that. but they will also happily ship you a white version of the same thing they already have seven months from now if that's what you'd rather have congratulations microsoft phil has been very direct being like we did not do well in this generation of the console wars this is why we had to go buy activision right and like figure out a way to compete we just did an episode of decoder with ash parish about the game market and she was like desktop pc gaming is going down and And then a million people wrote us an email to point out that it's going up if you count the Steam Deck.

49:39Right? Like, that's where the growth is in that part of the market. So if you're Phil and you're like, okay, we're not going to magically start a new console generation tomorrow and win against Sony and its various advantages. We are looking at Nintendo, going to launch a Switch 2. I really hope they call it the Super Nintendo Switch, by the way. That would be great. That will be a dominant moment. Where are we going? where's the action the action is immobile good we bought candy crush settled yep well and and then the action is in these handhelds where we're getting growth against pcs gaming pcs or i think like we can maybe get some action there and also a lot of like the switch's success has been on the backs of indie developers right and and microsoft actually has a pretty good relationship with indie developers they they put a lot of these games out on on their the xbox in general and people are like i would like to play that on a handheld and maybe not the switch right and that would be like Like, oh, I can play big AAA Xbox games that aren't exclusive because Xbox apparently doesn't make exclusive games anymore.

50:38And you can play like Hades 2. That would be sick. Well, I think the exclusive game strategy just didn't sell off Xboxes. Yeah. It's like the other way around. They're like, fine, just play our games on your PS5. Yeah. Buy some stuff in this game. We'll be happy. Yeah, because all the ones that they want to make exclusive, the FTC will be like, I'm sorry, what? Yeah. Now they got other problems. Yeah. anyway i i didn't the idea that they made a white one and they just won't sell it is like this is your big holiday marketing push you're gonna build demand for the white one kills me kills me anyway the the next one uh i want to talk about while we're just rolling through gadgets here is jabra um which put me on a real like emotional roller coaster this week it launched a pair of headphones two pairs of headphones the elite 10 and elite 8 active new versions of it with a very cool feature that i was very excited to talk about on this show and then promptly announced that they're not making headphones anymore like within a couple of hours they were like here's this dope new thing that we made never mind we're out goodbye well they're still making it it's still it's still gonna come but that's it right they're they're closing the door behind them support these for the next few years and on the one hand i'm like okay do i need like ongoing software support from my bluetooth headphone manufacturer like not really but on the other hand like the the last death knells of a company's headphone lineup seem like a silly thing to recommend wait what's the cool feature so the cool feature is they these are wireless earbuds uh and they come in a case and you can plug in the case to an audio source uh you can with a headphone you can plug it into a bluetooth transmitter yeah they're a bluetooth transmitter and so they'll they'll turn any wired thing into a bluetooth thing that then streams directly to your earbuds this would have been great unbelievable like years ago when planes still had no they do not any well you're What are you flying?

52:26Dude, I was on a United flight yesterday, and not only did they have a screen, the screens had Bluetooth, and you could pair your AirPods to the screen. But if you had ever done it before on a United flight, the first thing you had to do was go in and forget it in order to then go repair it. So this poor flight attendant had to give us like a four-minute speech about how to connect your AirPods to the screen in front of you. But it's a thing. You could do it. It was the first time I'd ever encountered that, and it was very exciting. Well, now I'm just disappointed in Alaska and American. United is a trash airline with one good plane was, I would say, my experience so far.

53:02You were just on the one plane. I was on the one good plane. Wait, can I issue a very, very small complaint about Delta? Yes. And actually, in general, a thing that I think should be legal, because I flew home on Delta. Yeah. They had Infinity War, but not Endgame. Because you get on the plane, you're like, I got to kill five hours. And that's sitting right there for you. You nod in and out. Yeah. I was telling Alex I had one too many drinks in the plane home. You know, it was one of those fights that started in the afternoon but ended late in the evening. Oh, yeah. And you're just like, I'm just going to ride this way.

53:31You just go. You have to have both. I think Lena Khan should get involved. You have to have both. Yeah. That is consumer protection right there. Even though I've seen both of these movies. I was like, do you know what happens? I believe, you know, the Avengers do a good job. I mean, that's largely crap. Eli Recaps movies. New segment of the podcast. In the first one, they don't do a good job. And in the second one, they do a good job. Yeah. That was a really good spoiler-free recap. I appreciate that. Well, I did spoil the first one. But if you haven't seen the first one, here's what you do. You get on Delta, because that's all they got.

54:16I'm actually, I was talking to Chris Welch about this story yesterday, and Liz Lopata was there, and she was like, I believe that taking the headphone jack away from phones led to the proliferation of people just listening to stuff out loud on their phones. It's true. That's such a Liz Lopato take. Yes, it is. No, but she's correct. Because of the PATH train, people are like, no. Yeah, she's like, whatever. My headphones are dead. I don't want to dink around with these. I'm just listening. Yeah, you're going to enjoy whatever I'm enjoying and suck it if you don't. All right. New idea for a phone.

54:46No speakers, just headphone jacks. Yes. Yeah, there's your courage, Apple. Don't get rid of the headphone jack. Get rid of the speakers. Give me a power button and no speakers on my phone. Done. Let's do this. I'm ready. It's the opposite. It's like the Schiller nightmare. He's like wakes up in a cold sweat. He's like, what's happening? Speaking of weird phones, the light phone, people love talking about this phone. They do not love buying it from what I understand. They love looking at it and talking about it. David, you saw it. The light phone three. I haven't seen it. I've seen it over Zoom.

55:23But I talked to Kai Tang, the co-founder of the company, and I've talked to him a bunch over the years. The weird thing about the Light Phone 2 was that it was never a huge hit. But also, according to him, it has sold more units every year it has been around. this thing is five years old and it sold more this past year than it did in its first year which i think is fascinating and is not something you normally see from a phone and they're in this position now of the the sort of intellectual idea that i would like to change my relationship with my smartphone i think is bigger than ever we are also more invested in our smartphones than ever and so what they tried to do was basically figure out okay how do we get away from the idea that like what you need is a phone that doesn't do anything at all and give you a phone that just does the right things and not the wrong things and actually that is like the dream of the sort of minimalist smartphone and has been forever and there are a lot of people who say oh why do you need any of this stuff just like have more discipline and be more responsible on your phone to which i say that's a stupid argument uh it's true but it's also like if if if just discipline was the answer to all of our problems.

56:37Like the world would be a really different place. And what it actually is, is like the one good thing about the social dilemma, which is an otherwise, I think, disaster of a documentary, was that it framed the idea as like you against thousands of engineers trying to destroy you. And I think that is like a pretty correct way to think about your smartphone. And so Light Phone's idea is like, how do we just reset that balance, right? So they added a camera, but gave that camera much less to do. They added NFC, but they're only going to do payments with it. They have a better screen, but it's because apparently people were having trouble with e-ink.

57:14One of the things Kai said to me was that the single biggest issue people had with the phone, that 50 % of the reason people returned it or stopped using it was because of the refresh rate of e-ink, which I thought was really interesting. There's just something about it that just didn't work for people. So instead, they switched to a matte OLED, which should refresh much faster, should be much easier to type on should look a lot better uh but should have some of those same kind of monochrome not quite so blaring properties and battery like support right because we'll see about battery the light phone 2 lasted forever this thing is it's substantially bigger so it definitely has more battery but it does run that screen but it's not doing all that much with it most of the time and since it's oled it should only have to power some of the pixels and not the other so i i have reasonably high hopes for this thing uh but at least according to the traffic to our website people are very interested in this thing it looks like i don't need it and i want it i will never use it i know that but i'm still like oh so i would love to get to a place where i could just take a phone out of the house depending on my mood like sunglasses yeah and it would just like have my phone number and take my messages.

58:28And like, I don't think any of the carriers or smartphone operating system vendors or smartphone makers want that to happen. And it's funny because if it did happen, I would buy like six phones. So the reason it's, it's the carriers, I have been like meaning to write a piece and I need to just sit down and write it that the reason dumb phones won't work is because Verizon won't let them. Uh, I've had this moment recently, actually where i i got the new ipad pro and just turned it on logged into my icloud account and all of a sudden i had lte on it and it was like the most magical experience and it was it was my data it's connected to my account that it was just like it was like oh because all this esim stuff works i just have all of my stuff on this new device and it is connected through my account and it's like oh that's how all of this should work and it just super doesn't and even you go a place like Europe where like physical sim cards are much more important and you can just pop your sim out and pop it into another thing and that kind of works it's just not how it works in the US and it sucks and and so as a result I think what light is trying to do is buy a phone that actually becomes your primary device like I think the light phone plus laptop or light phone plus iPad is very much the thing that they're going for they want you to have this sort of simple minimal thing that goes in your pocket that has like music and podcasts and directions and that's about it and then if you want to do more stuff you sit down at something else and i think in a certain way that's actually like a much healthier way to use technology and to think about all of that but it's probably i mean it's not probably it is definitely still not realistic for most people did they show you uh like the photo app that's i just want to know is it showing photos in color or monochrome?

1:00:13I don't know. That's a really good question. I would assume it's showing them in monochrome. Um, because what, and he said this, uh, very pointedly that they don't want you spending a lot of time on your device, looking at your photos. Apparently the thing that they heard, one of the biggest reasons they put the camera on was to have a QR code scanner. And people like to take pictures of receipts and it's just like the little sort of toolsy things you need to do with a camera rather than I want a thing to take lots of beautiful photos. They're like their ideas again like you should not be looking at your screen very often and even when you're looking at something through it you're still looking at it right and so yeah the way he described it is like it's about documenting not about like fiddling uh and so my i again i haven't seen it there's things not shipping till next year which is a real bummer uh but yeah exactly uh but i think the the idea definitely seems to be like get in and get out as quickly as possible All right.

1:01:09I'm utterly fascinated by this but I just am laughing at the idea that the good computing outcome is you have a pretty useless phone and then an iPad and at some point you're just like none of this shit can do anything I'm not doing it's good for a good computer computer computer I'm not looking at this computer computer I'm not doing that's good for that's good phone right now take my calls send my messages yeah you should be able to get there yes but you you can switch between laptops more easily you can switch between phones and some of it's carriers because of phone numbers and where you're gonna route calls and some of it is rcs and i messages and all that sort of thing i mean even switching whatsapp devices is a pain it's gotten better yeah but it's still tough yeah but that is like ultimately the dream and i don't know maybe apple needs to make the cut down phone or just make it easier to put an iphone into a mode like this apple will never do that unless they can figure out the 30 yeah just 30 just like for 20 a month we'll give you a chill phone inside of your phone you know given the interest in the light phone yeah it's real it might work a shot um so all right yeah we should keep going alex the next thing on my list is literally um i should have just put these two links as just ask kranz is any of this anything uh two different chip stories one is basically mediatek are the the flower of the verge uh our favorite chip company uh is claiming it's out here doing qualcomm level things and everybody is out here basically being like we now have fast chips too uh and then there was this company flow computing that just published a white paper being like we haven't made any of these chips but we know how to make chips that are a hundred times faster yeah the the flow thing is interesting in that they're basically saying we want to compete with arm and you you buy our engineering that we have never actually proven and then you go and you engineer and do cool yeah that's my idea too so look if you want to make a chip that's a hundred times faster you just come talk to me and then you do the work yep but but but nila's gonna be like, yeah, that looks good.

1:03:34Yeah. Good job. Good job. I have an idea for a building. If you bring your architect to me, I will describe that building to them and extraordinary. Well, it's kind of like they are the architects and now they're looking for someone to go build the building. Now that's, that's normal. That's much more normal than I think what this is. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it is in a weird spot, huh? I don't know what the concern is. It's one level away from like, we've done it and more like we have an idea for how to do it. Yeah. We know the architect firm we want to hire and it's you and it's you and then also can you find someone to build this so yeah that one is very interesting their their claims are really really big um i know a lot of people are talking about it right now and trying to figure out if it is anything and i think it's a little bit of the verdict is still out there but the idea here is that they have a new thing parallel processing unit that it can be inside or outside the trip um and you can run parallel workloads through that much faster than any other chip that exists today.

1:04:37This is the core of the claim? Yes. But it's also weird because parallel processing is having kind of a moment right now, or people are rethinking it. So there's just, I want to say verdict is still a little out on this. Just because I know enough to be like, hmm. Yeah, I'm going to stay in that headspace until proven otherwise. Yeah. But I think the MediaTek thing, potentially exciting. Like, there's no reason everyone couldn't start making good ARM chips. Like, if this is the thing that's out there, more power to them. Look, anytime somebody is saying, hey, let's compete, that's always good, right?

1:05:18Even though it's MediaTek and they are not known for their super powerful processors, uh this is it's gonna be kind of cool because they're saying that they'll be as fast they'll be capable of doing co-pilot pcs and that means that they have to do their mpu has to do at least 40 tops and while we still don't fully understand what tops means in this context that is still like 40 is the number microsoft gave everybody and so if mediatek can get there when like even apple the M4, they were claiming 38. So if MediaTek can do that, cool, great. Will companies put this in? We'll see. What are your thoughts on Tops in this context, Eli?

1:06:00Wow, you guys.

1:06:05I know what you can do with 13 Tops. I've been given an answer. You go to Fire Island.

1:06:21well there's the title of the episode today uh no no i do i actually have a real non yeah what what is family friendly answer what is 13 trillions operations per second so we had we had someone wrote to us not about the other interpretation of what you can do with an incremental we should say lots of people wrote to us about the other interpretation yeah lots of people made jokes about one thing although i will say that no regardless of context no one has said what you can do going from 35 to 38 just saying that's fair hasn't been proven out yet but hey the raspberry pi has 13 trillion operations per set we're like why so we got an email from scott uh and he's like look there are lots of iot applications where you have a sensor and then you have like something like a camera and you want to know what happens.

1:07:14So the sensor detects emotion in a parking lot and you're like, is that the right car? And you can take a picture of the camera. So the sensor fires the camera and then you got to send a bunch of data somewhere to do image recognition. And if you can bring it down to the edge, you're only sending bytes of data instead of megabytes of data. Okay. That's cool. That's a good one. That's a good one. That's extremely good. Yeah. Good. I'll take it. Here we go. Yeah. I think the idea that there is some sort of like race to put all of like, that's great. That's a great workload. I like, I like it. Yeah.

1:07:48You can see how people can do all this stuff in all kinds of places. But Microsoft is like, this is how many you need. Yeah. And they haven't, they have not done, even that example, we can detect a car. Like that's the, that's fundamentally the example. This computer can now recognize a car in a parking lot. Microsoft has not come up with one of those things on a Windows PC for consumers that matters yet. I can recognize a car in a parking lot, too. So many people can recognize a car in a parking lot. Yeah, a lot of them can. It's true. But Microsoft is just out there being like, you need this many because it's going to unlock what exactly?

1:08:26The future. Down the line. Not right now. Just the future. last thing we should talk about before we take a break uh is this bit of google news that is either a small piece of news that ultimately doesn't matter that much or the like little tiny butterfly flap of something sort of enormous uh and basically the news is google announced that it's going to be putting a lot more of the underlying android stack inside of chrome os So essentially, slowly but surely, they're going to build Chrome OS to resemble Android in such a way that they can build stuff faster that will work on both platforms. I find this fascinating because there are lots of rumors that say essentially, well, I mean, there have been rumors for Jesus, like a decade saying that Google is going to merge Chrome OS and Android.

1:09:21Was that Fuchsia? I can't remember all the codenames. Okay, so there was Fuchsia, which was, I think, even showed up on, like, a random Nest device or something, and then that got killed. But these things have been separate projects that should never have been separate projects. And then there have been rumors that there's going to be some combination of them that gives you, like, a desktop mode on your Android phone that essentially looks like Chrome OS. and it's just all these little pieces are coming together that is like maybe we're actually going to get this cross device single thing combination that we should have had a really long time ago boy do i disagree with you really tell me yeah fight well i mean it all just comes down to like how complicated you want a chromebook to be in the end right so like an android phone is a lot right it has like a full app model it has a bunch of capabilities is it is just a it has interface metaphors galore right it's it's more of a computer actually than a chromebook yeah which initially was linux running chrome yep and the whole model was like all you need is a browser then i think they realized and i and i think that's great i think for a lot of people that is actually what you need yep but then you got to add things like windowing and background apps and blah blah blah blah and you end up being like ah shit we made a computer like now this thing is just windows with the app model instead of win 32 is chrome and then you're like ah but we have this other thing we should let it run android apps oh we need to put google now in here because that's what we decided to announce it i like whatever and you just like end up junking up chrome os and so then you come to this like final place where you're like it's just an android laptop yeah okay like fine but you're just i think you're just so far afield of the initial vision for that product.

1:11:08But the initial vision for that product was kind of bad in that, not like just this is a browser, go forth. I think that was a great vision. Execution was bad because it was always like, oh, the idea was that it's only the browser, therefore it's super cheap. But that cheapness also meant your monitor was garbage. Your keyboard was garbage. Everything was garbage. And so people kept saying, well, I want a more power. Like, I don't want it to be garbage. I would like a pretty display. And they're like, OK, well, that's going to cost you more money. And so it just kind of creeped up. Right. And then you go, oh, what?

1:11:43But it's only a browser. Why would I pay all that money? And then back. It was it was always this this fight back and forth. And so it was I think for a long time it's been like, well, just just make it Android guys. Come on. Like, stop. Stop messing around. You're not doing this other thing. That was a really cool idea that doesn't actually exist in a world where you have different partners who want money for the things they provide you to put into that computer. Yeah. I mean, look, as one of the few people in the world who's ever bought a$1 ,000 Chromebook Pixel, it worked really well when you threw Windows, like high-end Windows horsepower at it.

1:12:19Yeah. Like that Chromebook Pixel had, I believe, an i5. Yeah. Like 16 gigs of RAM. That thing was so good. It was a beast. It was great. for its time. It's still going. My mom still uses it. But no one's going to spend that much money because then you think you need a whole computer. But I would challenge you. I'm looking at my Mac right now. It's running Chrome and then like mostly electronics. Oh my God, the files. That's just screenshots. You can make them go away. Oh my God. It's really upsetting. Oh, that's okay. I'm better now. It was just an open stack of screenshots. But like the only native app really in my dock is Lightroom.

1:12:53And like most people are not running Lightroom. and you just look at that you're like oh this is just a bunch of electron apps fine but i don't think google mean google like what else do i have to say like they never ran the idea to completion and use the ecosystem so now they're shuffling up all those teams right dave burke who ran android for a long time is gone um as that's today that news broke today uh hiroshi who was in charge of the whole thing left right he's he's off finding himself and some other projects at Google. And like they're just shuffling up those teams. And this seems like a natural outcome of that.

1:13:29Yeah. You recall like they a year ago or two years ago, they're like Android tablets are going to make a comeback because of folding devices. Hey, the pixel tablet is cooler than people think. That's that's my hot take for the day. But I will say, I mean, on this one, I think the Google sort of stated reason for doing this is it lets them roll out AI stuff across these two platforms faster. and i think that's fair right like you you look at some of the stuff google's already doing with chromebook plus devices like the it has the journey of ai wallpaper and the magic editor and google photos like that's stuff you want to do on device as much as you can and so building that into the stack for both of those platforms makes a lot of sense uh nila to your point i'm i'm very bullish about this combination for android phones and i'm very skeptical about it for Chromebooks.

1:14:19So I'm kind of with you in that, like the idea of being able to blow up my Android phone, whether it's for Android tablets or foldable devices or whatever, like a thing that gets more Chrome OSC, the bigger it gets, I find very compelling. But a Chromebook that looks more like Android is an experiment that Google has tried many times and it has typically gone very badly. Right. Cause Android developers do not want to put their apps on a laptop in that way. Right. And, and it's, and it requires a huge amount of work to do it well. And when you don't do it well it kind of sucks and it mostly doesn't get done well and i i yeah so i agree i think this is a thing that for chromebooks is gonna be complicated if we are in fact getting the sort of big combined user interface thing that might happen here or google is telling the truth and this is just like the bottom of the tech stack so that they can get gmail's help me write to run four percent faster on your chrome yes which is fine love the idea that they're gonna put like full Android on a Chromebook and then just completely dumb it down.

1:15:21Just like, no, you only open the Chrome app. That would be hysterical. They've been there before. Yeah. You know what's funny about that is the Chrome app for Android is so, so, so much worse than Chrome on Chromebooks that like, what an unbelievable Chromebook downgrade that would be if they did that. Yeah, because they had to make Chrome on Chromebook a real browser. Right. Because that is the application model. It is the best version of Chrome that exists in the world. Yeah, I know a lot of designers who run Figma in expensive Chromebooks. Oh, interesting. And expensive is like a – but they just like don't have MacBooks anymore.

1:15:56They're just like we just run – we live in Figma. We might as well have a Chromebook or some of them have Chromeboxes, the Chrome desktop, and fancy monitors, and that's just the end of that. And it's like that's the application model. And if you bring a browser of that capability to a phone or a tablet, you can't take your 30 % anymore. And that's why the iPad browser sucks, everybody. Yep. All the way around. And that's also why Android tablets have the not great version of Chrome instead of the Chromebook version of Chrome. There's no reason a powerful Samsung tablet shouldn't run full on Chrome.

1:16:30Same business pressure exists. Anyway, that's totally separate. It's fine. 30%. Bring me a suitcase. actually apple uh and google i would pay a subscription fee for a full desktop class browser on my mobile devices that'd be one thing you want to get me to pay a subscription fee for apple one or google one but what if it's the same garbage no it has to be the good it has to be the good browser all right arc what if instead of a browser it's just a chat bot that lies to you Can I interest you in that instead? Is it sexy? All right, we got to take a break, everybody. We'll be right back with Lightning Round.

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1:20:39All right, we're back. I will say that there was not as much horniness in the history of the Vergecast until AI hit the scene. It's true. We've done the show for 13 years. You know, a wide variety of people. David has come and gone from the show. Hi, David. And returned. It's only until AI hit, and honestly, Kranz, that we were just like, butts. They're inherently funny, man. People are giving me beautiful horses. I saw that horse is not beautiful. There's also a shocking increase in the amount of horse talk since Alex showed up. It's the friend. the mayors and the mayors it's time for the lightning round is always unsponsored this is your shot right i look i'll sell out you just tell me what to say you show up no one's fired the gun it's a problem all right david what's your lightning round item uh i think i want to talk about this survey that pew did about how people get news on social media platforms uh we've talked obviously a lot about this.

1:21:47This is like the only thing anyone on threads ever talks about is news on threads because Adam Maseri like keep saying how much he hates news, but loves news, but hates it, but doesn't want it, but loves it. And so Pew did a study basically looking at four platforms. So it was X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, and essentially asked people, do you get news on this platform? And is it like a primary reason you come here? and the numbers are sort of fascinating like in almost every case like i'm looking at this now over 80 of people on all platforms see news content on all four of those platforms so like on on x uh they call it news related content and it's it's sort of like news and news adjacent things and 92 of people on x reported seeing it it was 90 and 91 for tiktok and facebook instagram the lowest at 82%.

1:22:38All huge numbers. But in almost every case, most people said it's not the primary reason they go to the platform. X was the exception. Two thirds of people said it was either a I think it was a major or minor reason to go. But TikTok, Facebook and Instagram all somewhere between like 30 and 40 % of people said that's even a reason they think about going to those platforms. Which I just think is very telling, right? We talk a lot about news. And these companies keep telling us news is a tiny percentage of what people do and people don't actually care and they're not here for news and the only people who care about news are the people who report on the news and everybody should just shut up about the news for once and this was i just thought this was a really interesting uh way of looking at that and pew has also come out and said over and over and over again that for young people in particular tiktok is where they're seeing a lot of their news even if they're not seeking it out that's how news finds them so there's like There's just the amount of accidental news consumption that is happening on social media right now just fascinates me, especially in an election year.

1:23:39All of this is going to get very weird. I just thought it was really interesting. Well, particularly because the news isn't always packaged well. No. Right? It's frequently packaged to get you as upset as possible. Can I just roll this into my lightning round item? Yeah, go for it. so mine is a bunch of Elon stuff so one is just a victory lap for me Elon dropped his lawsuit against opening eye because he didn't have a contract and I super told you so you can't fix a contract you don't have would you say that's a fair legal reason literally when I looked at that post hundreds of comments being like you can assemble a contract and it's like no you can't and if you could you would if he wanted to he would yeah I'm just saying.

1:24:29He didn't. So whatever. If you want to sue someone, come up with a good idea. One. But two, a bunch of stuff about SpaceX this week. The culture at SpaceX, the actions towards women at SpaceX, the sexist culture at SpaceX. In two stories. One, the Wall Street Journal. Big expose. Talked to a number of people. and then the second one, a lawsuit from former SpaceX employees saying it's a culture of harassment. We wrote them both up, right? What you do. And the headline we wrote on the Wall Street Journal one was not as just aggressive as people wanted. And I got tweets about it. And I was like, we have to be really careful when we write these headlines, especially when it's not our reporting.

1:25:17Right? We're talking about a Wall Street Journal story. And if you look at the Wall Street Journal story, the journal story is very carefully reported. And it's mostly about one woman, an intern, who lawyered up with the same lawyer as Elon and SpaceX to refute the story. And she sent a bunch of affidavits in, which confirms some of the reporting of the story. But she's like, none of this is true, which is weird. Like the construction of that story is weird. and the thing you're saying David is like people encounter their news and the thing Alex is saying is that news is not packaged well what everyone wanted us to say was like look at how bad this is and indeed there's a lot of bad stuff in there if you're rolling around your own company being like will you have my babies and then you retaliate against the women who say no like that is very bad when the president of your company who's a woman retaliates against a woman who was helping to plan your birthday party because she suspected that the phone call from the husband to the woman was evidence of an affair as opposed to the planning of a birthday party that's bananas yeah maybe that should have been our birthday party affair situation at spacex bananas um but this tendency to over read the news for maximum emotional value or to assign some emotional value to something, even if that's not what the evidence of the news, like that is the thing social media does.

1:26:48It is in particular the thing that threads does, because that is how you get engagement in that algorithm. So there's no news there. Adam Masseri is like, we refuse. He's like, we just want, you know, people to talk about politics. He's like, we don't want people to talk about politics. We just want them to talk about, you know, things that are not politics, like sports and fashion. And it's like, I don't. Okay. There's no politics in sports. Famously. Yeah. No politics there. And either of those. Nothing about the fashion industry has anything to do with the way the world works. No. Anyhow, all I'm saying is then you look at the threads algorithm and it's like just rage bait.

1:27:22Like that is algorithmically what it will show you. Yep. It's like old rage bait lately. Yeah. And I just like that little bit where it's like are the people that are being serviced here being careful? And maybe we're too careful and we'll accept that criticism. I don't think you can. Our story is written by Liz, by the way. Like the verge and Liz Lopato are too easy on Elon Musk is a very hard case to make based on our work. We are careful because we want our shots to land. And we're especially careful when it's other people's reporting. Right. That's just the way it goes. But I would just say like what social media has done is allowed a lot of people who don't have to practice that care to participate in the media ecosystem, which is great.

1:28:07But it is also like. Weird. I think people are confused. So you accidentally encounter a lot of news, but there's not the part on the other end where it's like, I know how this was made or I am being careful. It's like if you optimize for engagement, you will get engagement. Yeah. And oftentimes that engagement is done to like, it's just really explosive, right? Like it is, it's just, I see it on, on TikTok a lot. Cause I went through and was like, we were hearing a bunch of different news was popping up on TikTok. So I went and like search that news. So now my feed is just all of that news and the stuff, the rhetoric is really heated.

1:28:43The rhetoric is very different than how you would normally report on a story where you would be really cautious and careful without every single part of it. Instead, it's just like, yeah, these people suck. this is evidence let's just get into it and i'm like well no you can't that's not how you cover this stuff and there's a lot of reasons we cover it that way both because we want to be accurate and honest and because we want to like yeah there's just a bunch of reasons to do it and and these people don't seem to have the same concerns well and there's also i think one of the things that really jumped out to me in this pew study was that uh i think across platforms somewhere between like half and three quarters of people said they pretty frequently see inaccurate news on those platforms and at some point the only response to that is just total nihilism right like you just assume nothing is real everything is chaos you can't trust anything you can't believe anything this all came to you by accident right like it's it's killing the idea of like sitting down and reading the news like that as a behavior that people do on purpose is dying because this stuff is just bombarding at you all the time and so like it's hard to be a news consumer now and so i think all these people especially when these things are coming up they're used to that inflamed rhetoric they're used to have this stuff being wrong anyway and so you don't know the provenance you don't know how this stuff works you don't know the story it's just all sort of happening around you and it's like how on earth are you supposed to make heads or tails of anything in that ecosystem wait what is the what is the source of truth right like all these platforms want to say they don't want to be arbiters of truth.

1:30:14Mark Zucker, famously, I don't want to be the arbiter of the truth. But then you need a place to go, right? And that's what media institutions are supposed to be. I'm not saying any of us do a good job of this. Like, that is the thing that we have allowed to wither away in the platform era. But it's stories like this. Like, if you go look at the comments of the Wall Street Journal article, the comments are full of people being like, this is just a hit piece, right? Like, their own comment section is a disaster of people being like, I I don't even read this. I think it's bullshit because we've now conditioned a bunch of people because of social media to believe that everything is overdone or sensationalized or just done for outrage or just done for clicks.

1:30:50And in this case, what you're looking at is, boy, the culture at SpaceX appears to be a disaster. Like from top to bottom, there are a whole bunch of very unhappy women. There are women who have been retaliated against by the most senior women at the company. None of this is like, when I first saw the story, I was like, oh, didn't we cover this already? Because you've seen this story from SpaceX before. Lauren Grush used to cover it a lot for us. And to just see it crop up again, it's like, oh. And now there's all this additional reporting in the journal where it's like, just like, again, if you're listening to this and you're thinking about starting a company, one thing you should not do is walk around your company asking employees if they will have your children.

1:31:35Just don't do it. It feels like a very basic rule that we have to lay out at this time. Yeah. It's not a rule that appears to apply to Elon, against whom there are credible allegations that a woman who accused him of sexual harassment, he responded to by offering her a horse. It does come back to horses a lot. It always does. Oh, on that note, Alex, I actually have a question for you. What's your lightning round thing? My lightning round thing is also related to horses. um yeah because did you guys ever did you guys go to alamo draft house either one of you yeah all the time they just opened one like a mile from me maybe a year ago and it's now my go-to movie theater so i'm gonna be real old right now um in my 20s i spent a lot of time in austin texas which is where alamo draft house started um i went to a lot of screenings went to a lot of parties went to a lot of things sort of new tim league is that the one that's also like a movie museum and they have like the most incredible collection of old stuff from movies the the alamo draft house there i think it is but i could be wrong one of them might be there's a bunch of different ones say they've some have come they've gone um it is great every time i go to austin now i'm like oh that draft house is closed and i once saw people run for their lives because they didn't want to talk to the audience because we were so mad at them about the movie um it was Super cool.

1:32:57Poughkeepsie tapes. But so Alamo Drafthouse, famous, famous institution, one of like kind of the core movie theater franchises and very terminally online. It ran its own blog for years, Badass Digest. It really it was famously huge friends with Harry Knowles, who is like the original movie blogger. We don't talk about him anymore. You can go Wikipedia. Why? And and they have been in a lot of trouble the last few years. There was allegations of labor issues there and sexual harassment and lots of sorts of things. And then COVID hit and they, like every movie theater company, got bodied really, really badly.

1:33:41They filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Whole new reorg happened, got in a bunch of investors. Tim League was still in charge. then last week i believe they suddenly closed a whole bunch of their uh theaters in dallas and that was a real bummer because i was planning to go to them and it was it's fine i'm through it and then this week they announced that sony has purchased them so so yeah alamo is now going to be completely owned by sony i assume you're going to see some sony movies there but you should probably still see all the other ones because like disney still has the biggest market share of films and I don't think Disney like, excuse me, I don't think Alamo is going to be like, no, we're not going to screen a Star War.

1:34:24Well, I think the, you know, Netflix owns a bunch of theaters and they do limited theatrical runs because they got to keep the stars happy. Also, yeah, it's all for awards. I think Sony actually wants to like have a chain of movie theaters. I think it's very different. It is very different. Like Sony is just like, no, we want this to be a business again. and there was a reason it wasn't allowed to be a business and and the ramifications of the paramount decree were huge right like we got independent film we got uh we got more queer film we got more women in films more people of color in films uh there was just like miscigenation was illegal to to show on film and then the paramount decree came out and they started to soften those rules a little it took a long time but there's just the paramount decree was very very important for competition in the filmmaking industry.

1:35:13And the fact that it is gone now has always been kind of a bummer, even though streaming has really taken a lot of that audience. And Sony's like, okay, we're just going to follow back. And it's 1938. Well, yeah, but just to make the argument, times have radically changed. Yeah. There is not a booming theatrical business anymore. It seems to be declining. Does Alamo Draft House even exist unless a studio like Sony shows up? Like Sony doesn't have a streamer. Yeah. They have Crunchyroll. they got sony picture core i was like bravia core wow just like rise up just really hurting yourself there but they were like do you want to watch madam web at 80 megabits per second and i said no sir i do the only way to do that it's going to be at an alamo draft house yeah like at 2 a.m a little drunk no i think the answer to your question eli is no it doesn't and and i think the like the idea that we have to you know protect the movie industry from the big bad studios and theaters is like such a long gone phenomenon at this point.

1:36:12Nope, I disagree. What we desperately need is someone with real money trying to get everyone back into movie theaters. Yeah, but I don't think it should be the movie theater. I don't think it should be the people making the movies. But no one else is incentivized to do it. Like Alamo's issues were not necessary. Like some of Alamo's issues were declining viewership. That's totally true. A lot of Alamo's issues were overextending themselves. They've got a theater in Fideye, and I can always get a ticket to see a movie there because no one goes to see the movies in Fideye. That's all movie theaters now.

1:36:45That's everywhere. That's not true. It's like a handful of blockbusters that get sold out and then no other movies. Like Alamo has famously been very good at programming big events around their other movies. And they were really, really good at it, but they've overextended themselves. They never recover from 2021. and I don't think it necessarily needed to be Sony that went and did this, right? I don't think it should be these movie theaters because they already control, they're already so vertically integrated, we shouldn't just add more on and give up. We should, in fact, say, hey, you shouldn't be able to own everything all the way down because it does actually measurably make the entire industry worse and less creative.

1:37:27Yeah, I just, they didn't buy AMC, they bought Alamo Drafthouse. I know. And I went there so much. Right. Like I, I'm, I'm with you and I'm usually the one who's like the most pro diversified competition on the show. Is this just me being super film nerd? We are diversified though. Like the idea that the movie theaters is this like gigantic business that we can't possibly let the studios back into is just not how it works anymore. Like it, if anything, we should be saying Sony can't own a streaming service. Like that's the, that's the scarier way to take too much control of the industry right now what's already happening in the industry right so be mad about that i mean i am mad about that i just again i just want to remind everyone that the streaming companies that sony owns are crunchyroll and sony pictures core which i use because it's crackle erasure and i will not stand for it that it streams at 80 megabits per second only to sony televisions no it does not sir crackle has long since gone 90 no how dare you i can still make a free account on crackle.com sir do what you watch there's there's the alfred from batman prequel where like alfred i never watched it but apparently he he solves crimes i swear to god crackle no crackle still exists i had i'm literally on their website and i'm not positive it still exists which is telling of those things real but it's here i can watch i can watch you have to name a movie that actually exists.

1:38:53Can I interest you in season one, episode one of Dominion Creek? That's not true. That's AI. You have to give me something that doesn't sound like AI made it. Abandoned, colon, Angelique's Isle. How about that? What about ICU but it's spelled E-Y-E and it appears to have Celeste or Stallone in it. Okay, that's a real person. All of this is fake. I don't believe this website is real. Sorry, I have to stop looking at crackle.com. I'm enjoying this too much oh man okay everybody i see what happened here i just want to point out uh sony exited crackle and sold it to a company called chicken soup for the soul entertainment oh which also owned red box and i think is also in the middle of going out of business i'm just gonna just gonna say that counts as going 90 all right it's not it is SEO honeypot now for self-help content fully gone 90 although it's now David's preferred streaming service from what I understand you watch Ghost Squad it's something called Crossbow Angelique's Isle is my favorite movie when you click on the Crackle FAQ this is a real thing that I did I clicked on the FAQ assuming that it would tell me who owned Crackle but instead it showed me a list of trending support topics and one of them number two on the list of trending support topics in the Crackle FAQ.

1:40:14How many Vizio devices can I add to my Crackle? What's happening?

1:40:22This is real. I'm not kidding at all. The other one is how do I troubleshoot issues with my Xbox Series S. So I think we know a lot about this version of Crackle. Yeah. All right. Crackle has gone 90. That's one thing we've learned about this. I'm with you that consolidation is bad. Yeah. Yeah, I'm mainly just bummed to see Alamo go this way. I spent a lot of time there in my 20s, seeing some of the worst movies. And I got to see Marotos, Maroters, Maroters? Yeah. Metropolis there at a 24-hour movie festival. Colorized, absolutely spectacular. But I also saw Poughkeepsie tapes. And again, we chased the filmmakers out of the theater.

1:41:07because I'm just saying when I was in law school I got absolutely hammered with my friends and went and saw Broken Lizards Club Dread you can have experiences at movie theaters alright that's it we gotta re-underrupt this up we were like 500 years over time there's still so much to say about Crackle we're just doing a whole episode about it we'll do that next week by the way one thing we didn't get to is as we speak the Tesla vote to give Elon his money or not his money is still ongoing it looks like he might win. We'll cover that on another show at another time when that is over. But now we have to rest.

1:41:45We have to go and watch Crackle at 80 megabits per second. That's it. That's the Vergecast Rock and Roll.

1:41:53And that's it for the 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. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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