Apple's chip bumps, big and small

31:00Oh, my God. It's incredible. A big calculator on it. I love this thing. Like, I mean, I'm here with a giant underwater camera bubble. Like, give me a gadget, right? Lenovo now has two different versions of basically this exact same laptop where they're like, what if the screen was twice as much screen? And one, the screen just like rolls out from inside the laptop. Yeah. That was like a month ago. And now they're like, wait a second. the screen's always out it just folds back so one it's always outside one it's inside it doesn't matter either way it's still just a giant super tall screen um and it looks just genuinely utterly insane uh to like have this little thing in front of you that you type on with a enormous screen but it also looks amazing and i want it more than anything so lenovo i believe has been the like foremost proponent of tent mode for laptops.

31:56Yes. For years now, like a full decade, Lenovo's like, look, the way you want to use a computer is in tent mode. Remember the Yogas, the foldable, the two-in-one tablets they were making, like the service competitors? If you will recall, the thing that they wanted you to do with a Lenovo Yoga was tent mode. It was so flippy. I loved it. It was so flippy. And so this new concept that Jake is talking about, you can fold it back and put it in tent mode so you have a what looks like a laptop but then the screen is folded back over at an angle so it's a tent and someone sitting across from you on a table can see what's on that screen i love i love the brain that yeah whoever you are like show yourself i want to hug you that thought okay here's how people should use laptops with other people yeah here's what i need you to do i need you to sit across from me while i look at my laptop but then I'm going to fold the screen back over in 10 mode and then you will look at this screen while I look at this screen and we're going to make eye contact.

32:55I just tell you, their product guy told Antonio on our team, he said that the thing they compromised on was that they wanted to put an entire smartphone screen to replace the trackpad, but that was too far. Yeah. Oh, that was too, yeah, that's just outlandish. They couldn't make that happen. A screen. If you're out there regularly using tent mode, you know, maybe you've got a 10 year old Lenovo Yoga. Like, well, whoever you are, if you're out there and you are either regularly using tent mode or. You heard me describe this and you are like thinking, I got it. I got to get a laptop that can tent.

33:33Let us know. You know, the email address is open. The phone lines are always ringing. This is the funny thing about this space to me. Like I don't want more innovation in laptops. Which is kind of my question, right? Maybe an insane thing to say, but I think the thing I've come around to is like, I think laptops are just a solved problem. Like I think we've, cause we've been at this for a while and there have been a lot of ideas. There was this time, I think it was, it was either Acer or Asus. I think it was Acer flipped the trackpad and the keyboard. Do you remember this one? They had, they made a thing.

34:04Yeah, keyboard in the front club. We did, this was a recurring segment on this show. Yeah, it was a whole thing. We'd be like, keyboard in the front club. here's another one of these yeah it was like that was the closest to success this concept has ever gotten and then everything got really flippy and then every the razor was like what if they folded out and lenovo was like what if it rises up out of nowhere and and everybody is like no actually what if the battery lasted longer like what if it was just laptop but battery and then like and i think that's fine like we're we're what we're 30 years into laptops now like i think i think we can look at those and be like okay this is we know what this thing is supposed to be let's leave it alone and go do something else and where i am with tablets is like i just don't think we're there yet so i push harder on that because i'm like we can't we have not finished what this thing is supposed to be but with laptops i'm like i think the macbook air is probably my longest held like default recommendation that is like if you just want a laptop and i don't want to have any more questions for you i'm going to tell you to buy a macbook air and that's been true for 10 years i can't I can't say if you're saying that with affection or disdain.

35:08Like, if you want to get the fuck out of my face, buy a MacBook Air. I have a MacBook Air that I love to pieces. Like, it's affection. Like, and it has been, I think it's frankly kind of damning of the rest of the PC industry that nobody else has figured out that what people actually want is a laptop that is, like, light and thin and lasts a really long time. No, wait. To be fair, they have. They just have horrible branding problems. Right? Like, what is the default Windows laptop that competes with a MacBook Air is a rich topic of discussion. sure and the problem is the dell xps 13 which they killed which is god right they just won't like stick to a brand that makes sense now they're like here's what it's called it's called the double dell pro and it comes with a side of fries you're like i don't want that like i don't understand what this is uh you know hp had a line of computers that we thought would be then they changed the logo and they're like now that's gone and apple to its credit radically changes the product over time but it does just slowly iterate the products in the same names and you can argue about whether there's too many products or whatever but like they've just built brand equity in the name so much so that johnny i've tried to kill the macbook air and he couldn't right if you will recall um because and again they tried to make huge changes to how a laptop works and it sucked they're like what if your laptop didn't have any ports and the keyboard was bad so that we could make it thinner and everybody said no thank you like we just figured it out we know what this thing is supposed to be again this this was kind of my question about all this for a thousand dollars a 13-inch macbook error it it seems virtually impossible to compete with unless you need windows unless there's something driving you to use windows and then you have a huge menu of options but there's not like all even like should apple put a touch screen on this thing is like yes i think i think they should merge ipad os and mac os and they won't they're just not going to uh they're going to sell you a weird ipad error and they're going to sell you a MacBook Air and that's fine.

36:58And I, there's something about this one in particular where they, they revved it a little and they brought the price down and they added some RAM, which I think you should turn off Apple intelligence and take advantage of that. It just makes this MacBook Air, like a particularly strong expression of it, of Apple's dominance of this particular price point. I think it's very hard to compete at this price point with, with this new air. Yeah. Yeah. It's as a, as a thousand dollar computer, it's about as compelling as I think is possible to do at this moment in time. And that's why I think as a$2 ,200 computer, the new M3 Mac Studio is the one I'm going to buy for no reason whatsoever.

37:36This thing is a deal. I'm willing to have this conversation with you, but only if you can explain to me what the hell is going on with the chips in the new Mac Studios. I don't think they can make an M4 Ultra. I think that's what's going on with the chips. The way these chips work, early and i think their names are getting a little confusing just a little yeah right because i what what's the difference between m1 pro and m1 max m m1 ultra like or now m4 m3 like what they are really what they really mean is we have fused two or four chips together and so there's something there that is too confusing for people to understand because the way that's expressed is in core counts.

38:17So you're like, I will configure an M3 Ultra Mac Studio and your choices are 28 core CPU, 60 core GPU, 32 core neural engine, or 32 core CPU, 80 core GPU, 32 core neural engine. And you're just like, I don't know what any of that means. That it's just like a meaningless set of numbers. Obviously one is more than the other. But then you step back and you're like, the cheaper model is the M4 Max, which has a 14-core CPU and a 32-core GPU and a 16-core Neurology. And you're like, oh, is this just half? But it's a totally different chip family. I stopped listening so long. I'm really sorry. None of this makes sense anymore.

38:59They should change these names because what you have is a chip family and you're taking the core chip and then you're literally fusing another one onto it or you're fusing three more onto it. And I don't think that tracks. That's not how people think of anything. No. Like, what are the core capabilities of a single chip in the new M line versus three of the old one? That's literally no one outside of Apple's chip team thinks this way. It also, like, we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the sort of internal math of Apple's naming system. And the fact that Ultra is more than Max. Got it.

39:36Good on that. But the fact that Ultra is so much more than Max that Ultra on the last gen outweighs Max on this gen so that an M3 Ultra is more than an M4 Max. Complicated. I don't know. I just tuned you out, too. Okay, here's what I'm saying to you. As everyone knows, everyone in America is aware, I am thinking about buying a new computer.

40:01As was announced to you, Coors, are you in the market for it? Breaking news across every cable news station. I have often considered buying a new computer. I think that was on 60 Minutes this weekend, right? Yeah, they did that great John Oliver segment, and then I sat down and was like, I don't know, you guys, it's a 2017 iMac. The fan runs all the time. What do you guys think? So I've been thinking about it. I've solved my monitor problem, which is I'm going to buy a cheap monitor while I wait for the new studio display. And in the meantime, I might break one or more iMacs trying to convert it into a monitor we got a couple of emails from people with uh non-scary sounding solutions to that by the way we're gonna have to we have some stuff to try okay well that that's a whole other show so i'm like i'm gonna buy this new mac mini so you open the configurator and what's the first thing you're gonna do you're gonna you're gonna upgrade to the m4 pro because obviously my photoshop needs are intense sure right it's a lot of filters i photoshop and patel I take screenshots of David and I draw mustaches on his face every night.

41:04And I need 20 GPU cores to do that. Sure. So then you're like, I'll stick with a base M4 Pro. I'm not going to upgrade for$200 to the next step up. That's too much. But you're like, I can't sit here with 24 gigs of RAM. So I'm going to spend$400 on 48 gigs of RAM because 36 is not offered for some reason. reason and then you can't 5 12 gigs of storage is not acceptable so you have to go to at least a terabyte and then i'm not going to sit here with a gigabit ethernet port i'm gonna get 10 gigs of ethernet my home network is 2.5 right so like at the very least i need that and then one day i'm gonna get one of those crazy fiber connections i gotta be ready for the future i'm at 2100 2 ,099 dollars i've configured a mac mini to 2100 like instantly checking really quick what was your starting budget uh the starting budget is 599 so you can like blink at the mac mini configurator and get it to be very expensive or you can open the mac studio page and the base model mac studio is two thousand dollars you're like it already has 36 gigs of ram i'll upgrade to a terabyte of storage it already has a 10 10 gigabit ethernet card i don't need to upgrade this processor because i don't know what any of these numbers mean 20 200 yeah i think this is an obvious choice i and i think america needs to know if the i don't know i look cbs in a lot of trouble with brennan carl already so i don't think they're gonna allow me to come on and configure a mac but i'm open to it there's like a whole biz ops team at apple that just got a raise listening to this podcast like just that thing that you just said they're like well we did it we have one i do tend to keep computers for a long time like i they they sit on the deck i mean this is why i'm thinking about i mean i'm gonna find a way to justify this mac studio but i think this is a staggering deal for the mac studio which version was the staggering deal the m4 with 10 gigabit yeah the m4 max is basically already configured the only upgrade you really should do is to a terabyte of storage because 512 is like it's almost like we're getting to the point where if you do enough stuff on a computer just the system and then like swap to the internal drive and a bunch of applications will eat up 512 yeah so you should go to a terabyte yeah by the way i mostly do emails and slack i'm just saying uh i'm gonna convince myself to buy this computer i think it's like truly i think like compared to specking up a mac mini which a lot of people love to do or I mean the Mac Pro at this point is just like completely off like I don't I don't know what the point of that thing is right now they need to update seriously I'm impressed with the studio the approval rating on the studio in general seems to be like through the roof like I don't know I don't know I've never heard of anyone who bought a studio and is like bummed with the experience that they got from it yeah Apple appears to have like really gotten this thing right I mean I should just buy one here on the show I think you can expense it if you buy it live on the Vergecast, right?

44:06And that's how that works. It is strange that they rev the Mac Studio so deeply and they haven't touched the Mac Pro, which is now just running an M2 Ultra. But I guess it's if you need PCI slots. That thing is eventually it's going to be a studio with more slots. Like it kind of already is a studio with more slots. That's basically what it is. And that's fine. There will be a few people who need that. A cooling system designed for Intel chips that required nuclear power. Yeah, sure. It is very funny and by the way, in all of this that, you know, we've talked about Apple and collagen so much. The entire AI revolution is running on giant NVIDIA cards, and Apple and NVIDIA hate each other.

44:39And there's a very obvious thing for the Mac Pro to be able to do, and they will never do it. There's just a personality conflict that will prevent the one Mac that can accept PCI cards from plugging an NVIDIA card into it, and it will never happen. They will add touchscreens to Mac and put macOS on an iPad two decades before they allow NVIDIA hardware to run their computer. Like, it's just never good. Everyone has to be dead. Like, generations of people have to be dead before Apple and NVIDIA can mend their fences. I kind of think you're right. I, like, I want to find some, like, would DraftKings take that bet on which one happens first?

45:18Because I would very much enjoy being involved in that wager. But I think you're right. It's not small. There's a long version, a short version. The short version is there were some MacBook Pros that had NVIDIA trips ages ago, and NVIDIA screwed up the thermals so that they would basically come unglued, unsoldered inside the computers. Oh, boy. And I think NVIDIA wanted Apple to pay for it, and Apple obviously, never. Generations of people have to be dead. That's what I'm saying. Like, your children's children may see an Apple computer or an NVIDIA chip. Fair enough. I mean, I should just find one right now.

45:48By the way, the maxed out Mac Studio is$14 ,000. That feels low. Like, that's fine. You're like, let's do it. Yeah. That and the new MacBook Air. They're deals. They're deals. Nothing but a deal. 512 gigs of unified memory on the Mac Studio. Yes. For$14 ,000. Got to upgrade that. Price per gigabyte. That's off the charts, man. That's so good. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with a tech lightning round. We'll be right back. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who won't give up the peach fuzz currently posing as a mustache on his upper lip.

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46:46Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

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48:30I think on a tablet, 64 gigs is actually basically fine. Like, what are you downloading under your fucking iPad? Movies. No, no, you're wrong. Wait until your kid needs to take a plane with an iPad. Yeah, but she doesn't need 4K. Yeah. Bluey is A-OK at 480. Do you know how many episodes of Louie there are? Do you know how many episodes of Paw Patrol they are? Have you ever sat with a six-year-old and argued about which episodes of Paw Patrol to put on their iPad before a 90-minute flight? You're just like, all of them. Just all. Just give me the library. I'm done with this conversation. All the kids, they're supposed to get the$350 iPad.

49:07They end up getting one terabyte of storage. It's real. Pre-loaded Paw Patrol. We're back, everybody. We're back. We're just rolled right in. People wonder what happens between the segments. While someone else reads the ads? That's what happens. All right, we got a tech lightning round. There's actually quite a lot of small tech news. I want to start with this one because, David, I feel like we've run the Dig is Back story 50 times. It's probably right, yeah. It's been back several times. If you recall, Dig was one of the early news aggregators. When I worked at Engadget a million years ago, we would argue about what story should get a Dig badge.

49:45So if we saw that traffic was going up on a story, we'd put the dig badge on it. And the reason we'd argue about it was, I believe the dig badge at the time was a flash object. So it would slow down the entire website. Oh, wow. But we'd be like, we're getting a lot of dig traffic. Like, it's worth it. Dig did send a lot of traffic. Like, it was a real, it had a pretty long run there of if you were at the top of the dig homepage, like, it crashed websites. And you'd want to game it. So if you saw that you're getting some traction, you'd be like, we should put the dig badge on this story. So people can click, I dig it.

50:20Some of you listening have no idea what we're talking about, but it was like Reddit. It was a meaningful competitor to Reddit at one point in time, and then it went away. And now Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, maybe going to bring it back with founder Kevin Rose. And David, you talked to them. yeah so the the one difference between the many comebacks of dig and this comeback of dig is that this is the first one that kevin rose who created dig is actually doing so there's something meaningful there and he's doing it with alexis orhanian who's the co-founder of reddit and uh it's really interesting because talking to them about it it's basically like kevin in particular has been has had many opportunities to do dig again and i think for a variety of reasons chose not to, but they are all all in on AI and the idea that it can be a tool for helping moderators do stuff and helping sort content and helping like summarize stuff and help people build stuff within these communities.

51:17Like the next turn for social networking is basically like, what if we were nice to our users, which is a surprisingly rare thing in the social world right now? And what if we were able to build the tools that moderators in particular actually need? I think the theory is super interesting and there are definitely a lot of people out there who have fond memories of digs so they're going to get to trade on that for a minute. But they're also like the thing they're trying to build is pretty unformed at the moment it's very new. They're very early in trying to figure out what it is. But I like I don't know I'm curious about this in a way I didn't expect to be.

51:54I was a huge Dig user back in the day. Loved it. It was a really important website. And I think really early to those sort of social news aggregation ideas. I think one of the big reasons that it failed was that it wasn't Reddit. It didn't figure out the community element. And Reddit did. and I think the problem that they're about to encounter is that what they're basically describing doing now is making it Reddit but with some AI and cool, maybe. Like I love, I have very, very fond memories of Dig but it definitely sounds a little, like you're saying, unformed right now in terms of exactly how that pans out.

52:37But it is true, like Reddit moderators have a lot of challenges and it is a lot of work to keep those communities together and not breaking rules and happy. And I think if you are able to take some of the friction away from that, maybe there is something they can do that makes it a little bit better and smarter. And obviously Alexis's involvement here, you know, gives a little bit of sheen to it. Do we think Reddit's good? This is the thing I think a lot about. And I'm sort of serious. I think a real thing Reddit has going for it is that it is the only game in town in a pretty meaningful way. If you want to do things like you can do on Reddit, there's really nowhere else to go.

53:13Wait. I disagree. Really? There's still a giant ecosystem of old school forums that exists. And there are weird companies that run the underlying software. So every car in the world has a forum. That's fair. But if you want to do a bunch of that in one place, I suppose. Yeah, if you want to talk about cars, there are other places to go. But I think part of the appeal of Reddit is that it is both a bunch of individual communities, but it kind of puts them together in a meaningful way. Yeah, though I do wonder, like, I'm not, listen, there was a dig Reddit rivalry back in the day, and I chose my side and my side lost.

53:49And so I've still got a grudge there. I do wonder like, how much Reddit users are using the Reddit homepage, the r slash all feed. Whereas dig dig was a homepage, you visited the homepage, you know, if they lean into that, again, that is a different type of product than Reddit, where you're going to specific communities, or curating a very specific subset of the Reddit. of communities that speak to you. And I do think, you know, they have proven, you know, phenomenally strong at that. I think Reddit has like kind of come and gone time and again over the past like decade. And I feel like it's, you know, maybe stronger than ever right now.

54:27So I don't know, I would say that Reddit is good, is very good at what it is doing. And I think it's kind of hard to beat. Like Neilai's right, there are these super nerdy forums for specific niches but a lot of those forums now just take place on reddit and i i think for a mainstream audience like there is nowhere else you can go all right so here's the company i'm obsessed with it's called vertical scope they're in canada they seem very sweet i should get them on decoder in some way um they own avs forum which is why i think about them all the time because avs forum is the real thing it reddit has not even bit into one ounce of what avs forum represents if you're like a home theater nerd you're listening to the show you know what avs forum is uh they also own toyotanation.com uh bensworld.org guitars 101 and uh something called ifish.net uh which is like a two truths and a lie kind of situation like one of these is not real also something called uh dog forums um it's real they have uh 101 million monthly active users across the city they're not right like they're big it's 1200 sites that they were on their forums um but you're right if you go to avs forum there's not some connectivity to ifish.net right there's not this like overarching i'm on a social platform that has subreddits there's just this big software and then obviously what they do is they want to answer across all that stuff um i think that's really fascinating and i think the really interesting thing about dig and jake you you were a dig user so i want to like dig was about sending you away right it was about curating the internet and there's a quote in david's piece where they're like we don't want to be just like an rss reader with a like button reddit is about the content on reddit like yes there are links on reddit yes they embed youtube videos all this stuff but reddit is really about the stuff that is happening on reddit totally and a big problem for almost every sort of a curator of links in the internet now including us is that all of the action is on social platforms.

56:26There are not as many cool things on the web to link to as there used to be. Yeah. Which is just a weird thing that is currently happening. And so like, I wonder is the new Dig, Jake, as you think about why you picked Dig in the first place, was it because it was aggregating the web and it was like showing all this stuff or is it because there was a community on there? No, it was because it was aggregating the web, right? Like if you were a tech nerd, if you went to dig.com, you would get everything you needed to know. It was the place to be. and, you know, it was a light touch website, super fun to be on there, but it was not about community, not at all.

57:00And I think, again, like ultimately, I think that was one of the reasons that they lost, right? Like AMAs could not have evolved on Dig in the way that they did on Reddit. And I think Reddit's ability to create those communities and to have homegrown content is what empowered it to, you know, become so valuable and become such a special place. And so this new dig is, you know, we should say we have not seen it right. Right now they just have like a landing page that says coming soon. There's supposed to be invites going out in the next few weeks or something like that. But, you know, we fundamentally don't know exactly where it's going to land on that spectrum between just being a news aggregator and being a more community centric, you know, Reddit type of thing.

57:43and I think just looking at the internet that exists today it seems very unlikely that they would create something that is just you know the original version of dig where it is just collecting a bunch of links and sending you out right you sort of need that community element at that point it's like okay well where's the daylight between this and reddit it's ai tools for moderators yeah david did they tell you anything about federation or social web or anything like that i asked about that and uh the response was basically it's a thing that they're interested in but it's so unsettled that it didn't make sense to buy into any particular system right now which i actually think is a pretty reasonable argument like should you at some point want to be part of this federated system if you are dig and want to like build tools for communities yes if you're a tiny team trying to get a product off the ground should you be making giant bets on activity pub or at proto right now probably not yeah um did you see that tap bots which made tweak bot which was great and they made ivory from aceton they have a new one for blue sky called phoenix that they just oh yeah and it's fascinating and they should but they're a small team and basically your entire announcement for their blue sky app is like an apology they're like we know you want us to keep doing ivory but they were small so we're And I was like, try this one.

59:04And we don't know which one's going to win, but we promise we're not abandoning this one. And I was reading. I felt really bad for them. I was like, you don't have to apologize. Like, no one knows what's going to win. There's even a line in their post that's like, we think Activity Pub is probably going to win over the long term. But all the action's on Blue Sky right now, so we should probably make an app for that. And it's like, guys, everybody gets it. No one knows how this is going to shake out. It seems like it will be the future in some way. but it is true that all the users are using at protocol and all of the engineers like activity pub to win then that that's just going to take a while for it to play out yeah it's tough and i think it's the thing i'm hearing from a lot of developers right now is is that same kind of thing where it's like okay i don't want to build myself out of the possibility of doing either of these things uh but i also don't want to spend a lot of resources supporting them which i think right now is probably like the prudent way to think about the internet sorry i'm just investigating what's on ifish.com it was just closing tabs it's the ifish forms like if apple made a fish it would be called the ifish that's this is what we're talking about here no it's uh ifish.net i'm sorry um ifish.net is uh the world's biggest fishing forum fantastic i thought it was about keeping fishes as pets but uh that's a completely different community that's not allowed wildly different

1:00:33that's my fish some of there's a on the ifish.net forums there's there's a sub forum called life in general it has 1.3 million posts just saying people just want to hang out like it turns out people just want to hang out they You don't need any AI to do that. Yeah. One more piece of news on this before we leave the social stuff behind. There was some news this week that Discord is potentially starting to think about an IPO, which is kind of fascinating. Discord has been through some weird ups and downs as a company over the years. Almost got a, was like kind of maybe sort of getting acquired by Microsoft at one point.

1:01:13That didn't happen. Has been, has had lots of ups and downs for content reasons. It's a weird time to go public. strange i feel like end result for discord given that like if you just look at the trajectory of slack slack went public it was public for like 30 seconds didn't really go great and now they're owned by salesforce and it's like it's fine um so i don't know like discord is fundamentally the same thing but like for gamers they just wait neither discord nor slack enjoy that comparison no they hate it and you're like guys have you opened your apps so what slack will tell you is yes we yes but we enterprise authentication is uh right and so is is the the gamer market bigger than the enterprise market like i'm well it's i think there's there's the consumer market so like discord here you know it's just a big consumer market that might pay them directly right that's true but yeah i think we're we're in the age of all of these social platforms being like, we're companies or there's space here.

1:02:17Like everyone is pretty frustrated with the four billionaires who run all communications in America. What if, what if we tried? And it helps if you have a billionaire of your own, like a couple of them. In fact. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that one of the things that Kevin said about dig, which I thought was really interesting is like, I kept pressing on like, how big do you want this thing to be? And they seem really interested in not trying to like deliberately not trying to go out and build another, you know, many billion dollar gigantic company, which is like a thing you can say when you're already fabulously wealthy from other means.

1:02:50Like this is the kind of thing that they're like, maybe without the pressures of being a public company to go, you know, screw over our users to please our shareholders, we can actually do more interesting stuff. And so I think there is a real like boutique nature to a lot of these projects that I think are really exciting. And I think if this dig thing goes well, it'll look like that too, would be my guess. Once you go IPO, then you have shareholders who want money. Right. And I wonder how Discord will respond to that. Other stuff, nothing has new phones, phone 3A and 3A Pro. Have you seen the AI button on the side?

1:03:23Of course. Yeah, that's necessary. That's the big new feature. I think it's called the essential button. That's not confusing at all. I feel like we put the nothing phone on the list, but actually the phone I want to talk about is this weird korean prototype that allison saw at mobile world congress well that's right like nothing made another phone you know they it does ai things no that's fair i do think i i left it off the list for today because allison and don presson who are at mwc are going to come on the show on tuesday to talk about all of this stuff uh but i do agree the ai phone is maybe the single most interesting gadget of the entire week well i just i mean it's nuts like it makes a 3d avatar of you and watches everything you do and then it fills out forms on the internet for you which is whatever apparently wants like people look at forms the internet and they freak out apparently just every day panic in the streets just throwing their hands in the air i don't know how to fill out these forms we have to collect all of society's information to make an avatar of myself that can do this but it's wild because the screen on the front is bifurcated and the top of the screen is an avatar of yourself i don't understand it i'm looking at this picture now and the more i look at it, the less it makes sense to me.

1:04:32Actually, is that a second screen? I'm just going to read you this paragraph. What is happening? The idea is that you go around downloading your personal data history from websites like Meta and Google. Also, your medical records and financial data. This is encrypted into a, quote, personal knowledge graph that is broken up and stored across multiple third-party cloud servers that theoretically only the owner of data can access. And then all of this is used to make an AI avatar that acts as a virtual assistant. It also looks like it's running Android 6.

1:05:05I mean, part of the charm of MWC is like, what version of Android is this, really? I'm so excited for this. You should talk to Allison about all this on the show when she's on, but the company claims that in order to do the demo where they have the phone buy car insurance, they actually bought a car. I guess they keep buying the car insurance. okay i actually respect the hell out of that yeah it is like the most insured car in the world now it all looks very silly and then you know as with everything there's too good to be true element they say this phone will be sold globally on may 1st for 365 dollars i don't know man i i'm dying to hear an allison and don't have to say it when i'm on the show but it truly may be the most interesting gadget of the week yeah i i agree i guarantee we will never see it again but but I'm glad we saw it once.

1:05:56And that counts for something. The best part of the whole thing is that, I guess, in Korea, they did a blockchain-based vaccine record system, but crypto is so toxic that they apologized for it in the briefing. Good Lord. And they were like, it's not a cryptocurrency. It's just a database. It's really slow. Very good. Volkswagen ID.everyone, which is one of the worst names ever. Volkswagen's new EV. It's super cheap. And Sean O 'Kane, former Verge transportation reporter, says it's going to be the first Volkswagen to run Rivian software. If you remember, Volkswagen invested a ton of money in Rivian.

1:06:35They spun off some weird middle company that will make software for both companies. And here we are. The first. It's 20 ,000 euros. It's like$2 ,100. It's cute. And I think the idea that it's running Rivian software is super fascinating. You've used it. How is Rivian software? It wasn't enough to get me to buy Rivian. Yeah. You know, like, I'm like a fancy car person. I'm older now. What about a Rivian for a fifth of the price, though? Like, that to me is the whole story of this thing, right? It's the$20 ,000 of it all that makes this thing interesting. That's true. Like, a Rivian right now, you buy an R1.

1:07:08It's like$100 ,000. And it's like, there's no software that will get me to spend that much money on a car. Right. But on a much cheaper car, like the R3X. Like, I basically have convinced myself that I will buy an R3X when it comes out. Because it's cute and it'll be cheaper. Yeah. This is very much in the same mode. You know, Rivian's whole thing is the same as Tesla's whole thing or whatever. Instead of having tons and tons of subsystems in the car, they just have one or I think it's that they're down to some small single digit number of compute units. So they basically have built a computer in the car.

1:07:35They've re-architected how the cars work, which is the point of all that software. So that's what Volkswagen is really investing in because their attempts to do this were a disaster, like famous in corporate history level disaster, Volkswagen trying to do its own software. What I can't figure out about the ID.everyone, which again, like you undersold how stupid a name that is for a car. It's in all caps and one is a number. Yeah, it's awful. What is the thing? By the way, there's another one called the ID.toAll. But all is in lowercase. Something about. So ID is in uppercase dot two number lowercase all.

1:08:10Something about EVs has made everyone at auto companies lose their minds. They're like, what if all the designs were insane as if they were from thousands of years from now and they were named completely incomprehensible things? so i understand it on the design front i really do because if you are building an ev you really want a low coefficient of drag so you get all these weird tylenol capsules just floating down the highways um and then you don't have to build an engine or you don't need an engine bay the way you needed to before you don't need a transmission tunnel down the center of the car like you just get to you have a skateboard and you're like what crazy stuff can we do and the designers at Hyundai were like a lot of crazy stuff.

1:08:53Yeah, actually. The names are, I don't, there's no logical reason for the names to be this bad across the board. And they're very bad. But is there something magical and repeatable about this that it is$20 ,000? Like it feels to me like it should be a bigger deal that somebody is actually able to make this thing at this price. I think the real story here, and I'm just taking a shot, is Rivian already built the software and Volkswagen, like they have a big business in China and the Chinese EV market is super mature. And I think that has allowed them to build a car with some more costs. And I think there's a reason we're talking about this car coming to Europe and not to the United States right now.

1:09:36So like a lot of the investment has been paid for, which is really why so many first generation EVs are so expensive, right? You're paying off a huge initial investment. But if you're Volkswagen, you paid a bunch of money for your Rivian investment, They're like, here it is. Like, here's our CD-ROM. Make the car good. And then there's huge investments across the entire Chinese ecosystem. Actually, one of the, we should do a story on this. Somehow I will assign this story on this, off this broadcast. One of the most fascinating things that is happening right now is that car YouTubers are discovering that Chinese EVs are sick.

1:10:06I've been noticing this. There's like a run of these videos. It's like one of the best TikTokers around. Like one of my favorite TikTok channels. He just did a bunch on Chinese cars. Like he opens one. I think it's the L1. And he's like, if this car was in America, Tesla would be cooked. Like, that's the opening to the video. Wow. And then he goes through it, and the car is sick, and it's$53 ,000. And like, yes, is there a massive Chinese government subsidy to develop those cars, produce those cars, to do the EV? Yes, there is. The economic system that developed that car is vastly different than the economic system in the United States.

1:10:39But the car is done. Like, it exists. And the market is huge. and Chinese automakers are, they're like branching down a different evolutionary path now. Like here in the United States, we have a lot of hybrids. Like I have a very cranky Jeep hybrid. In China, they're all doing range extenders. So they have gas engines that run at fixed RPMs that just charge the batteries when you need more range, which is, that's how a diesel electric locomotive works, right? They're just like headed off down different roads because the core EV power train is like done. And like, we're not, we're nowhere close.

1:11:12we have tesla and it's like well someone will throw an egg at your car like it's not a choice um but i think it's like one of the most interesting stories is you know like for a car and driver to do a big package on chinese cars you know they it would just be different like a traditional magazine like that just has to like attack that problem differently car youtubers just need content right and they're kind of like out So here it is. Like, here's another weird Cadillac. It's 50 ,000 pounds. Like, whatever. They're like, look at these other cars. Look at these are weird. And there's an entire universe of cars that are weird, like have like buttons that American cars don't have in them.

1:11:54And they're kind of drawn to them. The Chinese companies have done a good job of making cars that look like the future in a cool way and not, like you said, Tylenol capsules. Like, some lessons to be learned from that. Look, I don't know. the economics of social platforms are weird. The economics of the creator economy. We're, I don't know if the Chinese car companies are paying all the car YouTubers. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't want junkets they're taking. I just know that you watch the reaction to these videos and it is astounding. Right. Like the, the one I'm describing from forest went viral.

1:12:24Like Kara Swisher shared a car video. Like, what are we doing? My cousin and my uncle sent it to me. Like it went viral in a different way. Right. Cause the car inside of that video is compelling. and his point is we can't have this car like we don't have access to chinese cars this way and everyone because of tariffs because all this stuff they're like oh american manufacturers can't compete that's not what you want to that's not what you want the comment section to be filled with right like you want the comment section to be filled with you know like fuck you gm forever or whatever like just it was just not present there right and the part where it's like what you normally see in an EV comment section.

1:13:03It's like, I'll never buy an EV. The range extender solved that problem. Kids are like, oh, you can just fill this thing. You like gas? Just put gas in this part of the car. It could be fine. We're far away from the Volkswagen. We started, now I'm just ranting about tariffs. A preview of what's to come, my friend. All right, last item in this lightning round, and then I promise you, 90 more minutes of iPad Air conversation. Microsoft shut down Skype. I'm sad. Jake, are you surprised by this? Um, no, no. I mean, I, I, I would love to know in the last time people use Skype was, um, I, I was looking back at some of the retrospectives.

1:13:41There were like five Skype redesigns. I didn't even know happened. There was one that was like so experimental. It like didn't even have an interface. Like it was like some weird, like Neo Snapchat thing. It's great. Nobody even knew this happened because nobody was opening up Skype. And, you know, it's really sad. Skype was, you know, a very foundational pioneer in, you know, voice calling in the VoIP space. I remember like using it very early on and you would pay like, you know, cents and be able to make a phone call like crazy from your computer to a real phone. And it felt incredible. It was like the coolest thing ever.

1:14:23People used to call real phones back then. This was don't worry about that. But like, you know, Skype Skype was was kind of mind blowing. And it really had this incredible life as, you know, a chat app to and, you know, a voice calling app of its own. And, you know, Tom Warren has a piece up on our site right now looking back at sort of what went wrong. It was sold to eBay for a while. eBay sold it to Microsoft. Microsoft paid eight and a half billion. I think it was in 2011. And that was right around the time things started going wrong. which is not to say it was Microsoft's fault so much as mobile was exploding and Skype was a desktop service and this sort of ultimately and I'm just stealing Tom's remarks here led to this situation where okay the pandemic comes around and everybody needs to do voice calling and video chatting and nobody went to Skype and everybody went to enterprise software because it just like it never quite made that leap okay so I think I think all the facts you just said are correct.

1:15:26And I think the story you just told is dead wrong. I honestly believe, I've spent a lot of time the last few days thinking about this. I think Skype might be one of the most bottled, botched acquisitions in the history of the tech industry. Like, I think you could make a case right now that Skype is still the best loved brand name in its space. Like people, I think, still have better feelings about Skype right now than they do about just about anything else. Because they stopped using it. Sure, but like... Like looking back, I mean... Yeah, like I stopped using my creative Rio MP3 player and now I love it, but...

1:16:03No, you don't. I love the memories associated with it. But that's the thing. Skype was a decade ahead of its competition on almost everything and had a bunch of like complicated tech debt and foundational stuff and... I'm sorry, it was a diamond Rio. I apologize. Yeah, there you go. Go ahead. Which is, yeah. Yeah, you're not not helping my point here. This is great for me. Okay, I think Microsoft bought a thing that to your point, Jake, had some tech debt, had some problems, was behind. But also like the mobile revolution was the VoIP revolution, right? Like mobile made WhatsApp happen. There's nothing that WhatsApp has that Skype didn't sit on for a long time.

1:16:45Skype had a bunch of like technical problems. It did peer-to-peer stuff because of the way that it was architected early on and it would have had to. But Microsoft undid that. Right. This is the thing. It's all just there's no reason this didn't work except that Microsoft screwed it up. And Skype had a bunch of correct ideas about not only what Zoom and Teams and Meet would eventually do, but what like the whole messaging ecosystem was going to become that it could have been. Skype could have been Zoom and WhatsApp simultaneously. It was just sitting right there for it. and it just absolutely threw it away because of, as far as I can understand, just total corporate disasters.

1:17:26I am also determined to get to the bottom of what actually happened here inside of Microsoft. If you know and want to talk to me about it, davidattheverge.com. I have until May 5th to actually figure out the answer to this story before no one will ever care anymore. And I am desperate to figure out what actually happened here because something stupid happened inside of Microsoft that made all of this fall apart. and I cannot figure out what it is. And also just the fact - Sachin Adela was like, we own Skype? Honestly, that might've been part of it, right? There's like a big leadership change and like we're gonna do something else.

1:17:58But even at the beginning of the pandemic, the fact that Microsoft decided to build a thing called Teams and turn that into its product instead of just doubling down on Skype, weird. Like, you know what's a crappy brand for talking to your friends? Teams. I feel the same way about Google Meet. It's like I get on for like my fantasy football draft and like, oh, should we jump on meat? And I'm like, no, I don't want to go to work. Like this sucks. We just ruined this. And like, I don't know. Skype Skype had all the ingredients of being like an actually central thing to the Internet for a really long time.

1:18:35And Microsoft just let it die. Yeah. This reminds me that in the middle of the pandemic, Verizon bought blue jeans and they tried to make everyone think blue jeans would be a thing. For so much money. For so much money. uh i i think skype had some technical problems that made it easier to start with teams or to start again with teams i will never forget you know teams basically killed slack right that the introduction of teams and the bundling of teams in office is what drove slack into the arms of salesforce um and i will never forget someone at microsoft was like you have to understand everyone thinks we're making some like work chat product teams is a video conferencing product like that's what it is and that's why people are using it that's why and you're like but that's skype you did that already yeah uh and they were just very convinced that fundamentally they were they were initiating people to use microsoft video chatting services with teams because people thought it was slack and slack was all the rage but they were actually competing with zoom the entire time i don't know man i i'm sad i we made a lot of podcasts on skype over the years i still think by the way skype has the best to say the best audio and video quality of all the services um but i haven't touched it in forever like yeah because why would you yeah there's not like uh whenever whenever i appeared on cnbc for cable news hits i would always tell them to use skype because they supported skype and their engineers would be like what like you don't want to just you don't want me in zoom and a big zoom looks bad i'm like oh yeah and they would later it'll be like you're right uh we can't get anyone else to use skype video.

1:20:10Yeah. All right. We should take a break. We're going to come back. There's politics in America. You might have heard. We'll have a little lightning round to wrap things up. We'll be right back. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

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1:21:37You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. All right, we're back. The lightning round. Unsponsored. Extra spicy. I'm going to figure out what that means one of these days. David, are there tariffs? I don't know. Don't ask me impossible questions. This is not fair. Can we talk about iPads? Schrodinger's tariffs. I can explain the iPad so much better that I can explain tariffs. I think the answer, well, the answer is yes and also no.

1:22:12It is very much Schrodinger's tariffs. So China tariffs are real. That's a thing. But then there were going to be tariffs on Mexico and Canada, but not for automakers. But now not for Mexico. And I think that's where we are. unless there's been news since we started recording. But I think that's... But all these are on one month delays. Right. So April 2nd is now the date that is apparently like circled on the tariff calendar. They were already, by the way, delayed for a month. I just want to point that out. TikTok is illegal. Oh, yeah. That deadline is coming up in one month. That's also going to be that week.

1:22:51Oh, man, the first week of April is going to suck. The rubber's hitting the road for the Trump administration, right? Yeah. They have all these ideas. They can't possibly delay these again. then laws are just a concept concepts of the law the tariff lawsuits have to be coming um to tariff are a big deal you know you might be wondering why is the first class talking about tariffs the ceo of best buy is like the prices are going to go up on everything we sell because everything is manufactured abroad or uh you know the apple loves to say this with the iphone like the corning makes the glass in america and they ship it over here and the chips are made over here and that that all comes to china to for final assembly and it's shipped back to america And by the way, we're hiring 500 billion people in Houston to build Apple intelligence servers because everyone loves Apple intelligence.

1:23:36And you're like, oh, they're trying to point out that their supply chain is global. And so every product we cover is just deeply and meaningfully implicated by tariffs. To the point where we've been asking these companies now for over a month, like, what are you going to do? And they're starting, I think the chaos is starting to, I think initially they didn't want to say anything. like jake i mean you've been running the story basically initially they were just like no nothing like yeah just nobody would respond to us at all and we just kept sending emails um and then yeah finally uh people have been starting to just be like well yeah the prices are going up like my favorite and we talked about this a couple weeks ago but like eight uh i think it was acer's ceo was just like well yeah it's there's like a 10 percent tariff the price will go up 10 like there's just just math um and it's yeah it's it's sort of unavoidable if they actually do, if they go into effect, which I think like the big question is knowing whether or not they're in effect at any given time.

1:24:33I think what's been really interesting the last few days even has been that I think this time those folks thought it was real. And so, because like if you rewind to like the campaign, nobody believed Trump about tariffs, right? Like this is the thing all the banks have been saying since is like, oh, we didn't think he'd actually do it. And then he's like, oh, I'm actually going to do it. And everybody's like, well, we'll see what happens. And then it got paused. And I was like, haha, we told you this is never going to happen. It's going to be fine. And because everybody's like, well, why isn't the stock market tanking?

1:25:09Tariffs are going to be a disaster. And then it didn't because nobody thought it was going to happen. But then this time it started. It felt real enough to people that A, they started talking to us and B, things started to change. Like the Best Buy CEO, one of the most interesting things I thought he said was not just our prices are going to go up. He said they're going to go up in the next couple of days. Like they were ready for it. Like they were going to start making these changes quickly because this stuff happens quickly. And then you get this pause again based on, as far as I can tell, nothing.

1:25:42Like it's just the same. We had a perfect phone call and now I'm pausing tariffs for a month thing every time. and uh it's just now i wonder what all of these companies and people think again is like okay is this now just what we're going to do this this threat is going to loom for four years but never actually become real in a meaningful way or does it get more real and more scary each time and they are continuing to like batten down the hatches even more right and then there's other ancillary components of this like the de minimis rule that allows shein and timu and a bunch of other companies to ship packages from China under a certain dollar amount with no customs or tariffs.

1:26:24And that already off the books, but delayed again, because there was no infrastructure to actually check those packages and make people pay for anything. Like, look, you can argue with the policy of any of this, right? Like, sure. Maybe we shouldn't have a diminished rule. Maybe we shouldn't undercut American retailers by allowing Xi 'an to, I don't Well, there's a lot you could say about that. You need an infrastructure. You need to execute, right? Like, plans are great. It's all in the execution. And they are not ready to execute any of this. Over and over again, we see that. And then, you know, the various leaders of Canada and Mexico are like, we made a graph that says criminals down.

1:27:03And Trump is like, pause for a month. And like, I just don't. What are we doing? Car prices are supposed to go up by as much as$12 ,000. I have no idea what's going to happen to the EV market. that thing about the Chinese EVs, that's a tariff story, right? They don't exist here because we've just made it impossible to trade those vehicles here. You start tariffing regular cars at these rates, maybe you actually do end up with a bunch of Chinese car makers being like, yeah, we can compete now. Yeah. By accident. Cheap Chinese cars plus tariffs end up being cheaper than expensive Canadian cars plus tariffs.

1:27:35I had not realized until I read a story Andy Hawkins wrote about this that cars are already at record high prices. like however this shakes out on on this front it seems like we might be due for some weird upheaval in the car market here look if not for the other baggage the only car anyone should buy is a two-year-old model three like the most appreciated cheapest car in the world that like won't break down because there is a there is a sign in my neighbor's yard two doors down that just says sell your tesla yeah and i'm starting to see those pop up all over my neighbor they're all they're all over the place and the bumper stickers that say i bought this before elon was crazy like it's a real it's a really fascinating thing happening in the tesla universe right now uh if you see there's the great 404 media story this week about the cybertruck owners club forum just like breaking down over how many how many how much people hate their cybertrucks because you don't get to put the i bought this before he was crazy on a cybertruck right you're Like, no, he was doing a lot of this stuff.

1:28:37Speaking of Trump and Musk, just some weirdness around Doge, the reality of what Doge is, and the lawsuits are all kind of colliding. So I think last time we talked about this, they officially named an administrator of Doge. This woman named Amy Gleason that no one has ever heard from. Who was, I think, wasn't the story that she was on vacation in Mexico? when she was named. Yeah, when she was named. Good stuff. And then Trump gave the State of the Union and he pointed at Elon, who didn't know what to do with his hands. Like, he didn't do a Nazi salute. So that's a win. You know, low bar. We hit it.

1:29:13He just sort of was weird with a water bottle for a while. He was just like, what should I do it? Weird dude. And he said Elon is in charge of Doge. Elon is the head of Doge. It's being run by Elon. The amount of seconds between that statement and it appearing in court filings about Doge being illegal, zero seconds. Like, literally in real time, filings were updated and submissions were made being like, the government is lying to the court about who the administrator of Doge is. It's Elon Musk. Look at President Trump telling Congress that Elon runs Doge. So then today, Trump had a cabinet meeting with Elon present, reported in Politico, where he told the cabinet that they were in charge of their agencies and Elon had no authority to fire anyone.

1:30:00And it's like, guys, the judges aren't stupid. Like, they are getting the letters. I don't know if people really recognize this. The letters, the emails he's sending out being like, what did you do this week? They're hitting the judicial branch. Oh, sure. Like, federal judges are getting the what did you do this week emails. They're not dumb. like uh so i don't know if this is going to work but i the the sort of like legal reality well the lawsuits are starting to catch up is basically what i'm saying and now we're at the point where you know musk had a meeting with the like republican senators where like let us pass some laws to do this for real and trump has to like do this charade where he's like elon doesn't have a job and everyone knows he's in charge of doge i i think i think some of these lawsuits are going to break against elon and trump in a big way soon it's it sure seems like it and i think the the bet they've been making all along is that they can just be two three twelve steps ahead and it won't matter right that that what they've done will be hard to undo and they'll be on to the next thing anyway and that one kind of seems to still be working.

1:31:15If the judicial system is going to remain four crises behind Doge, Doge is going to keep getting what it wants. And that continues to be the playbook as far as I can tell. Yeah. On that same playbook, there's all this reporting about the FAA being ordered to cancel this Verizon contract for connectivity and work with Starlink instead because SpaceX is going to fix everything. We just did a long decoder with Andy Hawkins about what's going on with the FAA. So SpaceX denied this study. They posted on X. Quote, recent media reports about SpaceX and the FAA are false. SpaceX is working in coordination with L3 Harris Tech.

1:31:53That's the main contractor. That's the one that Elon said was single-digit months away from catastrophic failure. And the FAA to test the use of Starlink is one piece of the infrastructure upgrades so badly needed, along with fiber, wireless, and other technologies. Starlink is a possible partial fix to an aging system. There is no effort or intent for Starlink to take over any existing contract. That's just fear uncertainty. They've signed a loan agreement with L3 Harris. They've provided Starlink. So basically, they've gone all the way from Trump saying, I've asked Elon to fix air traffic control after a plane crash.

1:32:25And Elon being like, I'll do it. They're single digit months away from catastrophic failure. Here's some Starlinks to fix it. Verizon being like, that was our job. Yeah, we're already fixing it. And now SpaceX being like, we didn't do anything. We gave them, we bought some Starlings at Best Buy. Deeply confusing stuff. Again, you need a plan. These are all great ideas. You need to execute. And they have not laid out how to execute. I was going to unclear, is L3Harris' system actually like months away from failure? Or is that just a thing that Elon is telling us? Andy has been asking Pete Buttigieg this question.

1:33:00Because if they're single digit months away from failure today, that means they were only a little over a year away from failure when he was the secretary of transportation uh and he has not yet answered our questions but you would think we would know if the entire united states air traffic control system was a year away from catastrophic failure you'd think we would know it does seem worth saying that the only evidence we have in either direction so far is what elon musk says and uh that should be taken with the requisite grits of I honestly wonder why SpaceX put out this statement. I think maybe a lot of people assumed they were going to fix air traffic control and they don't want that responsibility.

1:33:43Yeah, I don't think that's a super fun job. SpaceX also has like quite a bit going on at this particular moment in time. Yeah, there's more here. Trump wants to screen everybody applying for citizenship. He wants to screen all their social media. Sure. I mean, it just it's more incursion in the speech like that. This is a thing that Trump administration is very fond of doing is like saying some speech is good and some speech is bad and then saying they support free speech. And then the Senate has stripped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's enforcement powers over what it's general enforcement powers that would have covered X turning into a payment service, which.

1:34:26Well, you know. A little light corruption is like, you know, it's the stuff that life is made of, you know. A little light corruption. It's my favorite Broadway musical. That's what keeps it exciting out of these United States. Speaking of speech, I think it's time, David. Is it not time? Oh, my God. America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. I will say I got some notes last week saying we're minimizing Brendan Carr by calling him a dummy. Because he's not stupid. He's evil. And my point was that he's too dumb to make his evil seem fun. I also think being a dummy and being stupid are not the same thing.

1:35:04Yeah. I feel very strongly that Brendan Carr is not stupid, but I do feel very strongly that he's a dummy. Let me make a comparison for you. Ted Cruz, very smart man. Some very bad ideas. You listen to Ted Cruz talk. He's like, he makes it sound compelling. Like, no one likes to type, you know what I mean? like he's like, let me weave you a story about Supreme court precedent. And then you're like, Oh, that's right. And then you're like, wait, I thought about it. Now all that was lies, you know, Brendan can't do it. Like he's not smart enough to do it. He just says whatever nonsensical censorship idea that he has.

1:35:42And I'll give you this example. He was on stage last week after we taped, he was on stage with Ben Smith, who's the editor in chief of Santa for an event. I know Ben. Ben's a smart journalist. In the middle of this interview, Ben Smith looked at Brendan Carr and said, I think I think I'm being trolled here because Brendan talks in such stupid circles. Right. Like no matter what the question is, his idea is that he's so smart that he can just like weave his way through it. And Ben was like, you're just trolling me because you're nothing you say makes sense. Like all of it isn't inherently contradictory and kind of like you're just justifying government censorship and specifically what he was responding to was ben was saying aren't aren't you just attacking these broadcast stations for speech you don't like by holding back their licenses or threatening these investigations and brendan's response to this this is one of the most value free like like principles free just naked like i'm a corrupt piece of shit comments you can make so the fcc is built on precedent and you know legal principles And if you look at what the Democrats did, I now have the, you know, they did bad stuff too.

1:36:50So now I have the precedent to do bad stuff. And you're like, no, you should not do bad stuff. Right. If your big worry is that under the Biden administration, the FCC was doing all kinds of weird censorship and you're a free speech warrior. the answer is not for you to show up and do more censorship because they set a bad precedent. Right? Like that makes you a bad person. Just straightforwardly, if you're like, they abused the law. So now I am the punisher. You should not be in charge of speech in America. And that is Brendan's worldview. I promise you that is his worldview, is that he has been given a permission slip to censor speech across the board because of the power he perceives to have.

1:37:36And when I say across the board, I also mean across the ocean. Because this week, you know, his big thing this week, he said the United States will defend the interest of our tech giants against the EU's Digital Services Act. We've covered the Digital Services Act a bunch on the show. I've made Jake write about it. Like the entire Verge team had to write about the DSA. DSA is a big deal. It covers the big platforms. It says some platforms are gatekeepers. There's a Digital Markets Act, which is right next to it. Then the speech platforms have certain rules that they can keep up and take down. The EU is like, we're going to have some laws on platforms.

1:38:10You have a different, they don't have the First Amendment. They have different speech laws in the EU. Famously, Elon Musk, Mr. Free Speech absolutist lie, but he says it all the time. He's like, if you don't like what's on our platform, pass a law, and then we'll comply with the law. That's his vision. The EU passed some laws. They made some laws. J.D. Vance is like, your laws are incompatible to First Amendment. And the EU is like, yeah, we don't have one of those. They have a different speech tradition. I think they're very proud of some of their free speech traditions. I get notes from our European listeners all the time.

1:38:42They're like, we have free speech. This is different than yours. And their criticism of our First Amendment is that our First Amendment is so absolute. And I believe this. I think this is a good thing. But their criticism of it is it doesn't allow us to do common sense things. right there. We should not just allow hate speech the way that we allow it, but our first amendment jurisprudence allows it. We should like deep fakes. We'll get to it. But like the EU can just like make some speech laws in a way that I, I think is inappropriate, but their, their criticism of our first amendment is you don't have to be this crazy about it.

1:39:18Like you can just make some policies and see if they work and you can change the policies. Brendan Carr is like, I will defend Facebook against EU regulation. Dude, you run the FCC. Like you are powerless against the European Union. There's nothing for you to say that has anything to do with them. You can just wield some enforcement authority corruptly, which you now said that you want to do, and punish European companies that operate here. Or issue statements of law that make no sense. And basically just interfere with business because you're on a power trip. And everything he does and says indicates that he's on a power trip.

1:39:54Even the stuff that I think is intended to be mysterious and fun. It's like, oh, you're just on a power trip. For example, this is the last piece of Brennan Carr. The FCC has these open meetings, right? And the open meetings are supposed to be like, here's all the stuff on our agenda. They're usually pretty unanimous. They don't argue with the open meetings. So they've got one coming up. And they're going to explore, at the March open meeting, they're going to explore alternatives to GPS to provide some redundancy to the system. And also improvements to the 911 system. They're going to be next generation 911.

1:40:24Great. This is like normal FCC stuff. This is what you want the FCC doing. They're like, should 9-1-1 work better? Like, yeah, you don't have to pay attention to this. I didn't know GPS was a problem, but we can come back to that some other time. Well, there's just like in a bipartisan way, you're like, we all depend on this one system that could be disrupted. We should have other. Let's have more systems. Yeah, sure. I buy that. This is some like basic stuff. Yeah. Final paragraph of this. He says, wait, there's more. Finally, we will consider an adjudicatory item from the media bureau. I can't preview the details of an item like this one in advance.

1:40:57I'm sure inquiring minds will want to know. Does it fit with public safety, our theme? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is no, but that's just how life in open meetings go sometimes. This vote will be part of our broader efforts to clean house and clear up some backlog. So we'll be closing out with a good government win. What's an adjudicatory item from the Media Bureau? Right? That means adjudicatory means he's going to issue a judgment, right? The Media Bureau is what covers all the broadcasters. he's going to do some goofy shit. And he's like hyping himself for it. Could this be like the 60 minutes-y kind of stuff that we've been talking about?

1:41:33Like yet another you were mean to Donald Trump on your news show kind of things? I have no idea. I'm just saying like he is drunk with power and sitting in a chair that should not afford him any power whatsoever. And he is having the time of his damn life. And we know that because he keeps saying it out loud. Yeah, he keeps, I mean, and I'm just saying we should not have government censors. I know that's controversial here in America in 2025. We should have government censors. We should have government censors who think they can just make law any way they want, which is what Brendan is doing. We should have government censors who go to events and tell journalists that they're empowered to be corrupt because they think their predecessors are corrupt.

1:42:15That is exactly the opposite of how you clean up a corrupt government. And you should not have government censors who think that doing censorship is worth like a hype reel in a press release. Like all this is wrong. It's real like bad guy with a gun, good guy with a gun energy. Like the only way to stop the bad stuff is for me to do it. And then it's not bad because I'm doing it. Yeah. It's like it's kind of like there's like a little tiny part of me that admires that way of thinking about your life. But it also just seems insane to me. When Trump was elected, our European reporters, Thomas Riker, Tom Warren, all those folks, they were like, oh, we're in for it.

1:42:57Because the EU is all about regulating the tech giants. And there's a reason that all of the tech CEOs were at the inauguration. They want Trump to fight a war over the DSA, in particular the DSA, the Digital Service Act. And you can see that the war is starting. It's not that Brendan Carr loves the tech giants, right? He wants to reopen Section 230 because he's just going to write a law to reinterpret a law that exists. Not something an agency can do. Very specifically, not something an agency can do anymore because of a recent Supreme Court ruling. but it's like you see that there's no logical coherency to this man except the abuse of power on the one hand he's going to protect the czech giants against europe on the other hand he's going to beat them over the head with his interpretation of 230 so that they censor the way he wants them to and it's like just anyway brendan as always i know you listen i know you get readouts i i honestly i know you do you're you're welcome to come on decoder and uh face some real questions.

1:43:59I'm going to invite you every week. If people want to tweet at Brendan, you can. He's available. He loves to tweet. He doesn't do anything except tweet at people and think about how to abuse his power. So tell Brendan he's welcome on Decoder. What if the adjudicatory item from the media bureau is Brendan Carr is coming on Decoder? That would be amazing. Brendan Carr is putting Neil Patel in jail. I think he's a coward. I don't think he'll ever show up. So there's that. But he's welcome anytime he wants. there you go all right we got to wrap up with like a gadget just to clear the air jake what do you got did you see the phones that you can just attach an entire camera lens in the back of i did and i got a note from dita being like how do you think these pogo pins work um which is very good wait i missed this they don't have they don't have to work this is i'm sure you should ask dom more because this was at mwc so when you talk to him on tuesday but um it's their concepts so i don't like do they work like that's a very big question mark do they look insane and ridiculous and do i like absolutely want this 100 it's just like the you know and you could put a pancake like pancake lenses exist right there are small camera lenses no no no these are full-on telephoto lenses strapped to the back of what is essentially an iphone um so they just like made a phone with an e-mount on it and it it rules there's just a full sensor just in the open and exposed on the back of this camera.

1:45:21It rules. Do you have to put a body cap on your phone when you're not using it? Yeah, it's not a bad idea. I mean, I unironically love that idea. This is great. It's fabulous. Like, we're doing weird camera bump things all over the place anyway. Like, just go after it. Exactly. The cameras have sort of peaked. We've just been doing multiple cameras. The ultimate trajectory of smartphones is just to turn them back into DSLRs that can make phone calls. All I'm hearing is the Lumias had this right like 12 years ago. The Lumias were correct. Because there's two approaches here. The one is the what if the main sensor was just a full on sensor, right?

1:46:07Sure. And then there's what Xiaomi is doing, I think. Which is what if we made a whole ass camera and just like mag saved it to the back of the phone. Yeah. That's the one where it's like there's pogo pins. They're saying that it communicates with like a laser communication system. Think about how convenient it would be if in order to have the quality of a DSLR on you at all times, all you had to do is carry an entire additional lens that you could strap to your phone. I want this to be great and it doesn't make any sense. So like it's a whole camera. It's got the sensor, the optics, all in a lens module.

1:46:46And you just kind of like snap it on the back of a phone. Oh, I didn't realize the sensor is in Xiaomi's lens. Okay, that's pretty good, actually. Right, so there's two of them. One of them is like... One of them is the exposed sensor. One of them is the exposed sensor, and then the lenses just go on it with a regular mount. And that's like one idea, you know? Like, that's if you just had the idea, that's the idea you would have. And then there's Xiaomi being like, ah, it's not quite ludicrous enough. What if the sensor was in the lens? And then every time you changed lenses, you were also changing sensors.

1:47:20My worst tech take has always been that there is some very good idea in all of this. Like, do you remember the Samsung Galaxy camera that was literally just a Samsung phone strapped to a camera? That was a good idea. I remain 100 % certain that a point and shoot that runs full Android is a thing that should exist. If you could watch Netflix on that thing, I really think you would find an audience. It's just like the creator economy is huge. Everybody is just out here doing like you're telling me the people who like buy a second phone just to make TikToks wouldn't buy a second phone with a kick ass lens on it.

1:47:54So, David, the funniest part of this story is that deep, deep in the story, there is a link to Sony having this idea in 2013 with something called the Cybershot QX10 and QX100. Yep. That story was written by David Pierce for TheVerge.com. 10 out of 10. And so you have a review of the QX10 and your conclusion was that the QX10 was bad and the QX100 was great. I don't think any of that held up at all. I was right. Can I get a readout on what the review scores were here? I don't know. Oh, yeah. This was the review I wrote about seeing Paul Rudd on the streets of New York City. The layouts are so broken after over a decade.

1:48:38Like 12 years later, these layouts are broken. one of the pictures is just captioned with the word fire twice fun fact i don't know why i literally i have a picture of paul rudd in cargo shorts that i took on this camera when i ran into him yeah the specific broken pull quote in this story is the qx10 is slightly better than your phone the qx100 blows it away hell yeah then i think we all know what a huge hit the sony cybershot all i'm hearing is also by the way this is i got to the score the score is 6.3 sure uh seven i don't know the yeah i remember debating between the 0.2 and the 0.3 for a really long time uh all i'm hearing is history is proving david right this makes me really happy uh it's it's very good it was 500 anyway this idea is back with by jami and i'm very excited for it all right good we've cleared the air gadgets are back everybody Here's my waterproof.

1:49:37Jake has to go, like, direct the Super Bowl from his control room now. Yeah. All right. That's it. That's the Verge Cast. Thank you, Jake. Thanks for having me. Vodka.

1:49:51And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

1:50:32Binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.