Apple mysteries and Google trials

25:20And it's heef. It's heef now. All right, we got to take a break. That is enough iPhone stuff for a week. We'll be back with Addy Robertson to talk about US via Google, which is a big deal. We'll be right back.

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28:00All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addie. Hey. So there's a big trial going on in secret. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like the government does not want us to know that the other part of the government is suing Google. I think that's kind of true. I mean, I just think back to like the Sam Bankman-Fried trial starts in a couple of weeks and there's tons of people talking about that. There was the Microsoft Activision Blizzard trial. There was the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Like we've had a run of these very high profile cases. Apple v. Samsung. we've had a run of these over the last few years and this feels by far like the one that is getting the least attention despite being potentially like the most consequential by a million miles yeah it's very strange i think it's because google's just really good at like flying under the radar because even with the the google v epic no that's what i meant yes at apple v samsung i mean that one happened too like they all happen right like apple v epic was a big deal yeah Google the Epic, we were like, yep, now they're doing it.

29:01I mean, Google has also been trying to keep as much of the trial under wraps as possible here. So just... Unlike their phones. That's very good. So just to lay the stage here, then I want to add a talk about what's actually happening in the trial. It is impossible to cover this trial. There's no audio stream of it. There was an audio stream very briefly. Yeah, of just the opening arguments, but none of the witnesses. there's barely a schedule if reporters go into the courtroom they can't have devices so they have to take all their notes longhand it is just ridiculous yeah like the government might get to a place where it breaks up google and the process by which that is happening is basically impossible and opaque because we cannot just cover it unless we send someone to the courtroom every day for nine weeks to take notes with a pen.

29:54And a scroll. Which we are thinking about doing. And obviously other larger competitors like Bloomberg and the Times are doing. But you just contrast that with all of the other trials. And for some reason, these decisions have been made. I don't know. I find it very frustrating, obviously, because I think about Google all day, every day. But this is the trial where, you know, Google putting out memos to its own employees saying, we do not use words like lock-in. Yeah. Or scale. Or scale. Yeah. Right? We don't use the word leverage when we talk about search. Like, they're instructing their own executives how to email each other.

30:29They're in trouble for destroying evidence in this case. Yeah, there's that amazing message where Sundar Pichai, the CEO, popped into a Google chat group and said something to the effect of, like, we should talk about this. Can we turn off history for this chat session? And then that's obviously the last message anyone can see. And, yeah, I mean, Addy, my impression, and this is based on very little except just thinking about incentives here, is that Google has everything to gain from burying as much of this trial and process as possible, right? Yes. I mean, with the caveat that it's not going to matter if a judge is like, we're breaking up Google.

31:07Google is still getting broken up, even if it is in secret. And again, to be clear, that's one of the less likely outcomes. Yes. But yeah, I think that it benefits Google to not have to deal with a lot of the arguments being made here, as it would for really most plaintiffs, like as it would for Apple in Epic versus Apple. And then there's also a lot of other companies implicated here. Like, obviously, this is about Google's deals with companies like Apple. And so Apple has appeared and tried to like it's tried to get its executives out of testifying. So there's really just a lot of companies here and a lot of very sensitive information going around.

31:46And so on one hand, it's not really surprising that they would try to keep a lot of the secret. But on the other, it also means that you don't hear as much about what the Justice Department is saying Google is doing. Yeah. And the case fundamentally turns on these deals, right? So the case was pretty wide ranging. It's been this has been going on for three years now. Yes. 2020. The first suit was filed. Yeah. And so it's like all things as it approaches trial, it's been narrowed down to a handful of issues. The most, I think, important and relevant one is Google's deals to be the default search engine on the iPhone and other platforms.

32:21So, of course, the Justice Department wants Tim Cook to testify. And Apple's like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing it. But that makes sense. They want to do that. But just again, I'm just coming back to this. This week, while Apple was announcing pretty light refreshes the iPhone, that captured all the attention. But the trial in which the Department of Justice is saying the deal in which Google pays Apple money to be the default search provider on the iPhone is anti-competitive and illegal is like totally under the radar and impossible to cover. And I just think that's weird. I think there's also it's also just easy to be sort of cynical because we've been seeing these cases try to make a dent in companies for years and years and years.

33:04Like there was this entire gigantic, ostensibly bipartisan tech lash starting in really about 2016, building up 2017, 2018. Nothing happened. Yeah, I just I think it's really easy to look at this and go. It is very, very hard to win an antitrust case. the Federal Trade Commission, which is not the one bringing the suit, but which is part of the Biden administration's attempt to get antitrust to happen in the U.S., it has had a couple of really high-profile losses. Epic versus Apple really, it means that Apple is going to maybe have to do something that Apple has been fighting tooth and nail to not do, but it's still basically determined, look, Apple can just charge these fees.

33:44I think that it's very easy to look at this and worry that just nothing's going to come of it. Yeah. Yeah. That was what I was going to say. I think cynicism is the right word here. People are cynical. We've seen this happen so many times. And not just in tech. You've seen it happen in a lot of places where it's just like, okay, so when is the government going to actually do something? When is this going to happen? We're just going to continue on. And this is like a really good opportunity for the government. And even the government seems like reluctant, right? Like they could probably make this a lot more public.

34:17They could make this more of a show. And it might be in their best interest to, like, get the public support behind it. But even the government is playing it so safe. You're like, if you're playing it that safe, are you really going to do it? Well, there are many branches of government. Three, I'm told. There's three. So, you know, I don't know why the judge in this case, Judge Meta, is logging it down the way he is. Obviously, Google wants it that way and there's requests and there's private stuff. But, like, not having audio streams of the witnesses seems – I just don't understand that at all.

34:48And then there's the DOJ, which is, you know, they're prosecutors. They're not supposed to do it that way. Yeah. You know, it's like there's a little bit of a gap there. The thing I would give you is the same week we did watch the European government successfully pressure Apple into changing the port on the iPhone. And that's a good outcome. And even in our videos, like our hands on video where we're like Apple changed it. The comments are like the Europeans changed it. Yep. People understand the mechanism by which the change was made. And that's what we've been talking about in the U.S. for the last couple of years, right, is that like a clear part of the FTC, which, again, is not involved in this particular trial.

35:27But what they're trying to do is sort of lose in such a way that it eventually we have to legislate answers to this. And it's like what the EU did was make laws. Yeah. Like there was no big court case about the lightning port. They just made a law about common chargers. And it feels like that's if our system works better, it might be different. So the EU has made a lot of laws about Google search. So many. They have done more aggressive enforcements about Google search than would ever be contemplated in this company. Down to designing the startup flow of an Android phone. And Addy and I have been talking about this for years.

36:06None of it has worked. Like Google is dominant in Europe. When you open an Android phone, it asks you if you want to use Chrome. It asks you it has a browser ballot and a search engine ballot, right? And everyone's just like, OK, we're going to pick Chrome and Google because I bought an Android phone. What else do you think I'm doing here? Duck, duck, go. Adi, do you see any similarities between that version of the European enforcement, which has been unsuccessful, and what is happening in this case? I mean, that entire thing you've just said is kind of Google's argument. is, look, even when we don't get the default placement, even when we don't do this thing that the Justice Department is saying is illegal, we win.

36:48So clearly, we're just the best. I just want to say that is my absolute favorite thing that has been happening in this trial so far is Bing is everybody's punching bag. Google's argument is essentially, Microsoft makes Bing the default on Windows in the same way that we're the default in lots of places, And still overwhelmingly people choose Google because Bing sucks. And the government's case is, well, Bing sucks and nobody uses it and that's Google's fault. And it's very funny to me that like it's a shame that there's not a better product to argue about here. And I think it just kept coming up over and over and over.

37:29And like in a funny way, if Google wins this case, I think Microsoft is going to have been a huge ally for Google in winning this case. Because what Google is saying, and Adi, I don't know if this was your impression, but listening to the opening arguments over an AT &T conference call, which was very funny for an antitrust trial. But the overwhelming thing Google kept saying was like, we are not the company with infinite resources that is able to do whatever we want and outbid everybody to do everything because Microsoft exists. Microsoft is also a trillion-dollar company with limitless money to do whatever it wants.

38:01They keep trying to put Bing in front of people. Windows exists. Microsoft has a long history of doing antitrusty things. and Bing still sucks and nobody uses it. And I actually think like of all of the Google arguments I have heard so far, that is by far the most compelling to me. I don't know, Adi, did you read that differently on the first day? Yeah, and I think that the Justice Department is trying to counter it by basically saying the reason Google is so good and is so untouchable is because we all agree here, Bing, it sucks. They're not that strong. But the thing is that Google gathers, has so much data from searches that it basically got this flywheel effect of just being able to get default placements.

38:42So then people type things into Google and then Google learns how people search for things and then Google could deliver better results. And then this just keeps going. And even though Microsoft has tried to do things, it's tried to set its own defaults. It has partnered with Yahoo, a thing that's come up to do a data sharing deal in order to get more queries that that just hasn't been enough. Yeah. One of the things that Judge Meta asked, I think like within the first hour or so of testimony on the first day was he asked the DOJ lawyer, how long has Google been a monopoly? Which I thought was a really interesting question.

39:15And I think the answer was it has been illegally protecting that monopoly since 2010, which assumes that it was a monopoly before that. Right. But I think he was saying it's been it's had really heavy market power since about 2007. OK. Yeah. And then, yes, it's been illegally maintaining the monopoly since 2010. Right. And so that's the DOJ's argument. But what I think is really interesting there is like obviously Google came out in 1998 and no one is debating the fact that Google, at least for a long time, was vastly better than everything else and won purely on the merits. And then what we're debating now is did it go from winning on the merits to buying merits and essentially making it impossible for anyone else to do to like Google what Google did to AltaVista and everybody else 25 years ago.

40:02and that turn and trying to figure out like where it happened and what it looks like is I think why we've come down to these default deals because ultimately that's the question right it's like Google's out here saying there are a million ways to find information on the internet and the DOJ is saying like general search which they keep calling it is this different thing from what TikTok is and what chat GPT is but they have to figure out like okay when did Google go from just objectively being the best search engine and so everybody uses it which is not illegal to being the best and making sure that no one else can be, which is a much trickier thing than what Microsoft did, which is just boot Netscape off the internet.

40:38I don't know. It just set us off down this kind of odd path where it's almost not obvious what everyone is arguing at any given time no matter what side they're on. This general search thing is ridiculous. The FTC, they've done a bad job in many of their cases. They did the entire Activision trial and forgot to mention cloud gaming. And then they lost. And then they were like, in the background, we're going to appeal on cloud gaming. And it's like, that was the argument the whole time. Here, the DOJ, I think, is getting suckered into this. Like, every antitrust trial comes down to, like, what is the market?

41:16Let's have an increasingly esoteric debate about what market is being dominated. And then, obviously, Google is like, the market is the use of computers. and we are but one tiny fraction of why one might compute, sir. And then the DOJ is like general search, which means fucking nothing. And the answer is like, no, it's searching the web. There are a handful of products that search the web. People use them all day long. And there's one search engine that matters in the web. To be fair, that is what their definition of general search is, is a thing that searches sources beyond one site on the web.

41:53Right. Right. But that even that definition is like it just it's so not like if you try to explain that to a normal person, you'd be like, all right. So there's there are sources beyond one site. Right. Like I'm not even going to say the word web to you. And I would just say if you just look at the web today, we've talked about so many times. It is so obviously influenced by Google's wants and needs that you can't not say this thing is dominant. It is the only incentive structure that exists on the web really is Google's wants and needs because that's how people get traffic to their websites. OK.

42:28Like just start – and the DOJ has just been suckered into this conversation about general search and whether the kids are using TikTok. And like that's totally different. I mean if Apple changes the default search on the iPhone to be TikTok. Horrible experience. And it's like that's so just generally nonsensical to think about. The kids love iPhones. The kids love TikTok. Munge them together. All these other searches that we're talking about in the category of general search that Google wants you to consider, I would just say come back to the thing at issue, which is the default deals on these platforms, and say, can you replace them?

43:04Could you replace the default search on the iPhone with a YouTube search? Yeah. And, like, no, basically. You need web search. And Google's protection of that web search, there's the data argument that they've been making for a long time. Like everyone's making Google has the most data they can do it. But next to it, Addy, are these like vertical search engines like Yelp and these other companies that are like, we're much better in these very specific domains. And we can barely even get to a customer because of Google's deals. Yeah. Which was a bigger part of the case originally and then got trimmed out of it.

43:39And so is not coming up in this as much. Do you think it'll come up later in these 10 weeks? So the Department of Justice is making its case first, and that claim was part of the state attorney general suit that's going to come up later. But it also got cut mostly from that suit. So I think we're not actually going to hear nearly as much about it as we could have, even though those search engines come up. Which is a bummer because that feels like the real issue, right? Like the fact that they're doing these exclusivity deals is on its face totally like monopoly behavior. But also in this case, Google is actually really good at search.

44:14So, of course, like it's like, let's say you ask Siri to find you a plumber. Yeah. Right. In a competitive world, Apple goes and makes a deal with Yelp or Angelist or whatever. And they're running that search on a specialized service. Google's deal means like that's all going through Google. OK. OK. Then, yeah, no, they're a monopoly. I don't know if that's good or bad. I'm just saying, but that's sort of the shape of it. And Addy's right. It's been trimmed out of the suit, although. Well, no, the part that got trimmed out of the suit was not the thing you're describing. It was the idea that when you go to Google itself and you're trying to find a thing on Google, Google makes it hard to find these places like Yelp or TripAdvisor or whatever through Google specifically.

44:59So that got mostly cut out of the suit. And the judge sort of rightfully was like, well, Google is allowed to do whatever it wants on Google. But there is that vertical search thing. From what I read of the decision, the judge is basically like, I need to see more evidence. We'll get more evidence at trial and I will decide how big of a deal that is. And so we'll see what the states do. But you just look at all of the things Google does. And again, it's instructions to its own people to not talk about doing those things. Oh, that seems illegal. I don't think that it is necessarily illegal, but it is certainly the kind of thing you can bring up to say it's shady.

45:34Yeah. I mean, we don't leverage anything is like a very funny thing to say. So, Addy, what's been going on this week? It's just been Google's chief economist, Hal Varian. Have we learned anything in particular? So the first day was after opening statements, Hal Varian, where they really honed in on the idea that we're going to go to the metaphorical tape and look at all of these emails that Google execs have sent about how important scale is and how important data is. And then there were these internal arguments where Varian wrote this, did this interview with CNET where he says, look, the argument that data is like the be all and end all and that Microsoft has to make this deal with Yahoo to get data, that's bogus.

46:15And then there was this internal fight where people were just saying, look, that's ridiculous. No, data, obviously, if they had the data we did, we would be they would be incredible. Like they would be much better than they are now. So there's that. And then this was also where we got a lot of the we at Google, we do not say market share. We say query share. We do not bundle. We do not tie. And then beyond that, we've also there's been a behavioral economist that they've brought that the Department of Justice has brought up to emphasize the quote sort of power of defaults that that's been their first expert witness.

46:46he spent a bunch of time on the stand. And so that's been a lot of presentations, both about stuff Google has said internally, which echoes sort of the variant testimony, and just experiments and other data that has been collected elsewhere that just says, in general, people choose defaults. Yeah. And I do think if you wanted to boil this case all the way down to one question, it's the power of defaults. Like, do defaults matter is in a big way, it seems like, what a lot of this is going to hinge on because Google's argument is they matter a little, right? It's why we pay for the defaults. Like Google cannot in any kind of reasonable way say defaults don't matter at all because it pays tens of billions of dollars a year to be the default.

47:31So it's like all that is fine and good. But the two arguments it makes is that defaults don't matter that much because people choose Google even when it's hard to or even when there is a fairly level playing field. Because Bing sucks. Because Bing sucks. And also that we only pay to be the default because we're the best product. Everybody tells us we're the best product. That's the only thing that matters. The end. And then the DOJ is out here saying, no, you are the default. You pay to be the default. So we can't even reasonably start to answer the rest of these questions. And that's what all the little search engines will tell you.

48:03That's what all the failed competitors will tell you is that we don't even know if we could have beaten Google or tried or caught up. There's no runway. There's no way to even get into this space. Right. You just wrote the obituary of Neva. Yeah. And Neva has already come up a bunch in this trial. And Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of Neva, who used to run the whole ad business at Google, is going to take the stand during this trial. Like that is a key part of the argument is like defaults are so important that because Google pays all this money to be the default, we don't exist. And that's like if the DOJ can prove that it might win.

48:35And it's very hard to prove that. It seems to me. There's also the argument that But specifically, it's not just small search engines. It is Apple. That one of the things that hasn't come up really in testimony as much, but was part of the opening statements, is that Google has been basically paying Apple to not build a search engine. Yeah. I mean, every year at WWDC, Apple does something that hints at an interest in doing more searches. Yes. Right? And every year, we get the new version of iOS, and it's like, pull down, and now you can type this, and this will come up automatically. Yeah, you can do image search and spotlight now.

49:10It's like it's right there if you wanted to do it. It's right there. And then every year we get some notes from some Googlers like Apple's coming for us. And it's like, no, they're not. Right. I'm very curious, you know, if they do put Tim Cook and Eddie Q and the rest on the stand. We're going to get Eddie Q. As far as I know, not getting Tim Cook. Full Hawaiian shirt Eddie Q on the stand. Right. The question I would ask is look at all this marketing about privacy. Look at all this marketing about not tracking you. and look at the billions of dollars you take from the largest ad tracking thing that has ever existed in human history.

49:43How do you square that circle beyond just taking the money? Because I don't think Apple's ever been held to account for this. Certainly people have tried asking and they're like, people love Google. And that's the end of it. Like Google's available in the App Store. The App Store has created more economic opportunity for people than ever. And it's like, where did you go? Come on home. One place that has already kind of come up is with Mozilla. and Mozilla is another company that says a lot of things about privacy and the open web and believing in the internet and also takes a lot of money from Google every year to be the default search engine in Firefox and Google's case and this has actually worked in Google's favor fairly well so far it seems is that Mozilla at one point stopped using Google as its search engine provider signed a deal with Addy was it Yahoo I think it was Yahoo okay and then went back to Google for exactly that reason because that's the face everybody makes when they have to use yahoo search and so google is like they had choices and they picked google hilariously the department of justice's counter to this is that yahoo could have been viable but it was so expensive to beat google that they had to lard down their service with ads that suddenly made yahoo search awful and that's why yahoo search it's the bing sucks argument right like are all other search engines bad because of google is such a weird question but is like kind of core to a lot of this case Yeah.

51:02Like there are no other good search engines. Is it because Google is great or because Google has so aggressively it's defeated everyone? It probably is both right. Like I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, which is why it's going to be very hard for Google to lose this case, it seems. Yeah. Even if they do, you just have to look at Europe where for over a decade now, the princes and princesses of Europe have shaken their pitchforks at Google and said, we will undo this dominance. And the people of Europe have said, down with the king. Nay, good sir. They have Googled for news about that happening.

51:40We shall continue Googling. No, absolutely not. French Revolution, the whole thing. This is, it's very complicated over in Europe. There are still kings, I'm told. Princess and princesses everywhere. Just everywhere. No one knows why. My people have run away from them twice. I'm Indian American. Anyway, we're going to cover the hell out of this trial. We're going to figure out how to get into that corporate basically every day with a series of quill pens and parchment because that's how the government wants us to cover USB Google. David, could you take the parchment and have it so it goes out of the room as you write?

52:18Oh, that's fun. Oh, that's good. And then Addy can just be on the other side. Oh, I like that. OCR-ing the parchment. My thing is I'm going to bring in increasingly less technologically advanced devices every day until it's okay. Until the judge is like, fine, bring a Chromebook. If I come in with like an e-ink notebook that I can write on, is that electronics? Like, what are we doing? Are we good? If I'm not touching the screen, it's not drawing any power. Bring in a remarkable, too, and just be like, what? This is what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay, so fun detail when you go through the battle detector in the courtroom, you have to take out all your cables.

52:47Oh, no. This is not a fun place to be if you have as many cables as I do. Yeah. I was like, Neil, I can never go there. No, I'm not allowed in there. It's not going to happen. Again, we're covering how this trial, there's going to be a bunch of big witnesses on the stand. And we're going to get as much coverage to you as we can. I think it's a big deal just because no one pays attention to Google Search. Like we have been running this series about Google Search and what it means and Google turning 25 all year. We'll link it in the show notes. David's Neva pieces in there are Google Reader pieces in there.

53:18We have a bunch of SEO stories coming about the culture of SEO. I think they're going to be really good. And what has been apparent in doing those stories is that Google hates it. When you talk about search as anything other than like water. They're like, what? Search is just the oxygen of the internet. It's just around you at all times. It keeps us all healthy. And it's like, no, this is a business, a business that you ruthlessly protect and instruct your people to never discuss in words that sound ruthless. And that gap, I think, is what this trial – even if the government loses, the trial will narrow the gap in the perception of Google search as just a benign thing that happens.

53:55Right. In a very, very ruthlessly run business. And I say ruthless. I don't mean that in a negative way. I think Google does a good job of running its business and making a lot of cash on Google search and then funding a bunch of shit. It shuts down two months later. Right. Like that's the engine of Google. It's basically its only business and then a little bit of YouTube and then a little bit of Google Cloud. But like it's search that funds a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. And Google wants you to think about it as this like inevitable thing that just sort of has to exist the way that it does in order for the internet to work.

54:26Like you're saying. They want you to think it's water, and it is like a series of very specific choices that people made in how this thing works. And if nothing else, we're going to learn a lot about the choices. Yeah, and we'll do it with quill pens and parchment if we have to. Okay, we got to take a break. Addy, stick around. We're going to take a break. When we come back, I need you and Alex to explain what is going on with Unity to me. We'll be right back.

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57:10Okay, we're back. The show is way over. There's gigantic drama with Unity, though. It has gone completely off the rails. They changed the pricing structure in the middle of the Apple event. Yep. The developers are very mad. It's escalated to, like, inappropriate levels or canceled events. What is going on here? Okay, so Unity is one of the biggest game engines out there. It's really interesting because Unity is used in, like, most mobile games, a ton of mobile games out there. So Apple's up there saying, we love gaming. Well, they hate Unreal. And meanwhile, this is happening with Unity, which is a big game engine for iOS.

57:48They are raising their prices specifically if you sell enough product, then you're going to have to start paying them for every download. Every install. Yeah, every install. So Monica and Allison are just going to bankrupt companies every time they review new products. Because they install the games on all these phones that they review. So basically they've walked some of it back. But if you're making – I think if you're a smaller developer and you're making like over$200 ,000 a year from your game, you're going to have to start paying these fees. And if you're a larger developer and I think it's over a million a year, you're going to have to start paying these fees.

58:24And these fees like are fairly small. What is the argument for per install fees? Money? But like certainly – has the union made any argument? No. That's part of the frustration here. The frustration is less about the money being asked for because a lot of the developers are like, yeah, if this is a cost of doing business, that's a cost of doing business. This was communicated to us in the worst way possible. In the middle of like a big Apple event, it gets communicated. There was no prep. Usually they'll go to like bigger developers and be like, hey, we're thinking about charging you more money.

58:56None of that happened in this case. And Unity is really like digging in on this. Every single time we'd get another thing, we'd get another report from a game developer saying, oh, we're going to just delete our game rather than have to pay this, which is what the Cult of Lamb developers said. I think they're still going to keep their game up, but. And there are a couple of really specific big problems, too. The first being that it's not even necessarily clear how they track installs, that they're basically saying, yeah, we have this model. It's totally data compliant with data regulations, totally not privacy invading, also totally accurate.

59:28And also it totally won't if somebody decides they hate you and they want to run a giant like install bombing campaign to drive up your costs. It will also totally not include that. But no one has really figured out exactly what that means. And second, that installs are just not a thing that inherently makes developers money. So they're charging for this thing that doesn't actually tie directly to revenue. Right. And that's what's got people pissed is this thing just feels really, really egregious to them. It feels like it came on really, really quickly. And there's zero communication. Unity's just saying, yeah, we know you pay us every year to use our engine.

1:00:03Now you have to pay us more. Oh, you've had this game you developed on this engine for the last 10 years. will either learn a new engine or cough up the cash. And that just feels like extortion. It's not legally extortion, but it sure feels like it to developers. How real do you think the threat is from all these developers who are saying basically we'll leave Unity instead of pay these fees? Ash is looking into that. I think for a lot of them it's not realistic. It's got to be a gigantic amount of work. It's a huge amount of work. So for most of them it's probably not realistic. But a lot of them are saying, well, I'm never going to develop in Unity again and I'll probably pull those games, right?

1:00:39Life is long. Yeah, if you're a big developer, you can afford to pull a game that's made you a little money and you don't want to pay anymore and go off and do something else. So it's kind of wild that Unity did this and the theories are, everybody's got a theory on why they did it. The most common one is they like money, which is fair. A lot of people think it might be because of Genshin Impact, which is huge on mobile and makes a lot of money and Unity would like something like that. And has been established. Allison Johnson downloads 650 times a year. Yeah. Very true. So here's a question I have.

1:01:13So you mentioned the iPhone. Addy, Apple is pushing into spatial computing with the Vision Pro. They basically need game engines to make a bunch of Vision Pro stuff. And Unity is core to that. Unity is a big deal in that world. It's big as meta. And Apple hates Epic, which makes the big competitor. Right? Like Unreal is not going to show up on Apple platforms as the alternative to Unity. Right. Anytime soon. They're different engines. Like Unity is better for Monument and Valley and smaller games like that. It's graphically intensive, but it's not like that photorealism. You don't see that as often in Unity games as you do in Unreal, which makes sense because that's also less like taxing to the processor, which is one of the reasons Unity is so popular with meta.

1:01:57Also because deals were made and stuff like that. But it's still one of the relatively, you have fewer options for developing 3D and spatial games than you do for developing 2D games. And Unity is definitely one of the huge 3D options because there are plenty of games that are 3D but not photorealistic, including a lot of VR games. Right. Yeah. So I'm just wondering, in the midst of all of this, just turning the screw one time, you've covered VR more than anybody that I've ever met. This has some huge impact on how Apple's relationship to developers is going to go as they roll out the Vision Pro, right?

1:02:31Like, if all the developers are mad at the main engine, where else are they going to go? It's a very good question. And it's partly a question Ash is actually doing reporting on right now. Like there are alternatives that you can use. One of them is Godot, which is an open source engine, which is very tiny and is very hard. But yeah, it's a good question whether that's a thing that makes Unity feel like it can flex. Right. That's kind of what I'm wondering. Where is this leverage coming from? Like if you're like, we're going to piss off everyone, usually it's because you can't. Like your Reddit.

1:03:03I was just going to say this is what Reddit did. Reddit's like, we need more money. We're going to piss off everyone. But where are you going to go? Yeah. And they just waited. And some parts of Reddit are still just a mess. But they just waited and it's fine because where are you going to go? Who's the competitor? And there's just an echo of that in this Unity conversation, especially as it relates to iOS because the thing that is the natural competitor is at such odds with Apple at the corporate level. Yeah. I'm going to be really curious to see how Apple responds to this over the next few weeks because it happened in the middle of their event.

1:03:37Yeah. I wonder if Apple even knew. as Apple was talking so much about mobile gaming. Yeah, it just, it feels like, I don't think Apple knew or that probably wouldn't have happened that way. It's also not particularly good for Apple. Like it's not great for Apple if one of the bottlenecks for their platform is suddenly taking a big fee from developers that Apple doesn't see part of. Yeah, only Apple gets to take fees. Apple doesn't like money changing hands if it doesn't take 30 % out of that money. All right, well, we're going to keep covering it. It sounds like Ash has a lot of reporting in the works.

1:04:05We'll put that on the site. It's a big deal. like Unity canceled events. There were death threats over this. Yeah. Which again, I will point out is inappropriate. Don't do that. So it goes. That's life on the internet for you. There's a bunch of stuff on the site that isn't Apple or the Google trial. Bose just overhauled its entire lineup of headphones. The Spectre Fold is out, which is a foldable 17-inch PC, which is a very cool monoclonal. Weird laptops. I love a weird laptop. And the workers of the big three automakers are on strike this week, which Andy wrote about. And a million new video games.

1:04:35And a million new video games. Nintendo Direct and the Sony State of Playware this week as well. On top of that, it continues to be September. Just relentlessly September. That's the name of my new album. Relentlessly September by Nelai Patel. It's avant-garde, but I think you'll like it. We've got a bunch of events coming up. The Code Conference is at the end of this month. Here's the news. Virtual tickets for the Code Conference are now on sale. All the main tickets are sold out. So you can, if you want to watch the Code Conference, go to voxmedia.com slash code, and you can sign up for a virtual ticket and stream the thing.

1:05:08Mike Krieger from Artifact is coming. He's ex-CTO of Instagram, now the co-founder of Artifact, the news app. David just wrote about it. They rolled out links. Yeah, they want to be like the place to share cool stuff on the internet because Twitter used to be that and now Twitter's dead. And we love that. So Casey's going to talk to Mike about that. And then, I don't know if you've been paying attention to a little company called Disney. Lots of weirdness in Disney World. Lots of weirdness in Disney World. Lots of weirdness in... Mickey Mouse is coming to code? Disney, Bob Iger has been hinting that he might sell ABC, get rid of a bunch of stuff, partner with ESPN, all this stuff.

1:05:45Byron Allen, who is the owner of the company that owns the Weather Channel, we invited him because they're doing a bunch of AI stuff on the Weather Channel, climate change, AI, whole thing. Turns out he wants to buy ABC for$10 billion. It's like him and Nextstar. So both of them are smaller companies. they're less known for being Disney. They're not Disney, but it's a big deal. Yeah, so Julia Worson's going to interview Byron Allen about what we thought was going to be about using AI. Now it's all ABC. Help people in local communities deal with climate change. But now we're going to talk about whether or not he's going to buy ABC.

1:06:19There's a bunch of other great speakers. I'm excited about it. Also next week we have a Microsoft event and an Amazon event because this just does not stop. And there's a YouTube event. And a YouTube event. Oh, wow. Made by YouTube. There's a calendar. We'll put it in the show notes. We made a calendar so you can just subscribe to it and then you can follow the events with us. It's going to be a crazy month. We're excited about it. Okay, that's it. That's the Vergecast. We've gone far over. You're looking at me expectantly. No, we're just... We're just vibing. Liam is looking at me expectantly.

1:06:46Oh, I see. It's like a tetraprism of glares. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:06:55And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. shoot us an email at vergecast at the verge.com. The verge cast is a production of the verge and the box media podcast network. The show is produced by me, Liam James and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

1:07:28Support for this show comes from S.C. Johnson. We've all been there. Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10 % chance of rain. Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table to enjoy a sip of your latte. Not ordering the red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call Stainziety. But now you can break free from your Stainziety with Shout's Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later. Just breathe and shout with Shout Triple Acting Spray. Learn more at ShoutItOut.com.

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