Can Meta still make the metaverse?

26:53Like if you were to say, like, I've come from the future, it's it's 2029. And there's only one meta service left, I would I would guess it's Instagram. I really would, which I would not have said a few years ago you might be right there um it's definitely got staying power and relevance and um it's more you know used by by younger people obviously threads is earlier but like it's still writing a lot of instagram's engagement loops uh they really haven't made it a standalone growth entity and they really haven't figured out like how it relates to x and blue sky um i think the next year or so, especially on the political front, will be really interesting for that.

27:34But yeah, man, bringing Facebook back, who would have thought, 20 years later? It will be. Purely from a reporting and person on the internet perspective, it's going to be fascinating because that would be a truly unique moment on the internet. To bring something like that all the way back around to the point that it became like a must-visit destination for young people. Which it was. Yeah. Facebook was the most, like when I was in college, it was the most important thing on the internet. Yeah. And it is no longer that to, I think, anybody. Getting that back would be really something. It would.

28:13And, you know, I've done a lot of actually reporting and analysis of that. Like over the last 10 years, Facebook itself has done actually a lot to fragment the internet and fragment the social internet specifically by cramming video in there for ads, by cramming AI into there. stuff from people you don't follow. Instead of trying to actually address the core thing that Facebook was, which was a place you could reliably see interesting stuff from the people you actually know, they basically just slowly mutated the product over a decade to be something that is like unrecognizable and not personal at all for people that are under 45.

28:53And undoing that seems really tough. I'm sure there's a lot of people who haven't deleted their accounts, but like getting them back in And I think the internet actually could use what Facebook originally was, though. Doesn't it feel super fragmented with X and Blue Sky and all and group chats? And a lot of the group chat activity is because Facebook pushed people out of feeds that were strangely starting to feel foreign and bad. And like they were killing democracy into group chats. Can you get them back out of group chats into a feed of your friends? That's going to be really interesting to see.

29:23I'm very skeptical of that, but it's something we're going to be paying close attention to. Yeah, it is one of those things that if he's serious about it, there are few CEOs other than Mark Zuckerberg who could make the hard decisions required to do that. Yeah. Because it would cost you a lot of money, like just pretty straightforwardly. You know, he actually, people didn't catch that. He actually hinted at that in the last earnings call. He said something, I'm paraphrasing, but it was an almost throwaway line where he was like, we're going to do things that like will impact near term results, but it's going to be good for the future.

29:55So I think the Facebook app, what you see when you open it is going to change pretty dramatically in the next year. Fascinating. Listen, if Mark Zuckerberg can get me using Facebook again every day, that will be the tech CEO coup of the century. And there are a lot of those going on right now. last thing before we go there's been a lot of fallout internally that you've been tracking and reporting on after zuckerberg goes on joe rogan and talks about masculine energy they've done some layoffs uh part of what i'm thinking about when i mentioned like this feels like a different kind of company uh is just like they've changed the way they talk to staff in these all hands like mark is yelling about leakers and posting your stories about the leaks about the leakers like uh what is your read on kind of the vibe inside of meta as those things shift well i mean it's tough meta is a huge company i think when you talk about the vibe of a 77 000 person company you have to obviously acknowledge that it's not a monolith and there are a lot of lifers still there's people who try to tune out the drama there is a strong growing faction of disillusioned, you know, pissed off people at, you know, what has happened in the last couple of months with all the MAGA-fueled content changes, the Joe Rogan stuff, taking tampons out of the men's room, all this culture war, anti-woke stuff, and then how these layoffs have been handled.

31:22You know, he basically copied Elon with that and said they were going to be targeting low performers, which is rough. It's a rough way to go out to have the CEO saying, you know, this person's a low performer and have it be SEO'd to death for forever. So that's not endeared a lot of goodwill. I think there's going to be a lot more to come on the employee versus management tension there. Kind of reminds me of where Google was, I don't know, six or seven years ago when they were really going through all that employee upheaval. and Google still has it, but they've largely stamped it out or at least like tamed it to such a degree that it doesn't feel, I don't know, as dramatic as it does at Meta right now.

32:04But Meta is very much going through a cultural shift, which is what I've been writing about, where it was probably the most open internally big tech company. And they're realizing they can no longer do that with how big it is and also just how pissed off some people are at how things are going. And so they're clamping down on that stuff. and we saw some of that with the Francis Haugen leaks and how they reacted to that, but this feels like the next turn there. And I do think meta will look a lot different, not just externally, but internally in the next year or so. And I think Zuckerberg's determined to come out on top.

32:37And just keep posting through it, as we've seen many times, that he's just going to keep posting. Got to keep posting. All right, Alex, thank you as always. Thank you. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to talk about Sonos. Be right back.

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35:08All right, we're back. We've talked a lot about Sonos on this show over the last year. I think more than most companies, it's size, actually. It is just a weird, interesting, important company in this space. I think if you're a listener to the show, I would say there's a higher than average chance that you own some Sonos stuff. This company has just kind of been around in our lives as things that people who like technology like for a long time. But then Sonos kind of spent last year setting all of that goodwill on fire. And we've talked about a lot of the news moments here. Sonos released an app.

35:42Sonos released headphones. The app went terribly. The headphones were fine. And Patrick Spence, the CEO, ended up being ousted. We've talked about a lot of that. But I think I want to go back and understand the full story and see what happened inside of that company and what we can learn. So again, it helps that I have access to one of the people who knows this story the best, Chris Welch, who has been chronicling this story for us since the beginning and has gotten lots of scoops and has some big scoops on what's to come from Sonos. So let's get Chris and just dive into this. Chris Welch, welcome back to the show.

36:16Hello, David. It's good to be back. There's been a lot that's happened in the last few months. There really is. And for once, I have not brought you here to test terrible microphones. But what I want to do is I want to talk about like the last 12 months of Sonos, which is a thing we've covered a lot on the show, but we've covered it kind of in newsy moments. And I have found myself, the further we get into the Sonos story, I feel like the less I understand what actually happened here and what is going on inside of this company and what is going to happen next for Sonos. And you had this big scoop last week about Pinewood, the set-top box that Sonos is working on, which I think is going to be another moment in time.

36:56But I just want to sort of, as best we can, tell the story of really 2024 for Sonos and kind of what that means going forward. Does that sound all right to you? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I want to start, I think it was in March of last year, when you had a scoop that Sonos was releasing a new app. Do you remember what you knew about this app at the time that was like what we thought was coming back in March? So the word back then is they were working on a new app for their headphones, the Ace. And at the time, we didn't realize it was going to be like the whole new Sonos app. but that's what it came to be like a whole huge overhaul of the sonos app like a whole do-over essentially of like all the core technology in there and stuff like that and so it was a huge project and there were good reasons for doing so because like the so much of the sonos like foundation is ancient like the sonos api is held together like duct tape and bubble gum like it's been around forever and they've like barely worked on it and so it's like kind of amazing that sonos whole platform still works as well as it does all these years later um so they had good reasons to redo the app and start from scratch and do a big overhaul.

38:06But the way they went about it was just the worst way imaginable. Right. And in retrospect, we've definitely connected all of this change to Sonos was about to launch a pair of headphones and needed this big sort of infrastructural upgrade like you're talking about. What do we know about what actually needed to happen there? Like, was this a thing Sonos actually had to do together that it was like, these headphones are coming out, we have to do this new technical upgrade to make this possible? Did they just sort of decide to do it all at once for big, you know, launchy branding energy? Like, what was actually necessary here to get the headphones out the door?

38:42I think the leadership thought the whole process was going to be a lot easier than it was, because from the start, the Ace were like built only to support the new app. They never worked with the old one at all. It's like from the jump, they were like designed for the new app. And so they had planned all this like coincide at the same time. and so uh i think they were very very optimistic um and like why they like decided to like put the app out and not do a beta or anything like that is still kind of a mystery and that's something i'm sure that patrick spence is very mad about these days uh yeah his choices back then um and so yeah uh so the plan was to like do it all at once put the headphones out make a big splashy introduction for the ace uh this whole situation is now called those cause those headphones to fall on their face, and I don't think they're ever going to recover, unfortunately.

39:30So it was all for naught, unfortunately. Yeah, okay. So I'm getting ahead of myself in this story here, but you just brought up one of the things I have been thinking about the most with the Sonos story is, obviously, by now everybody knows the BUNS app ships in May, total disaster, kind of ruins Sonos in a very real way. The headphones are very good, right? Is there a parallel universe in which Sonos does the least with the headphones? Like ships the app with whatever tiny upgrades they needed, but didn't try to sort of reinvent everything about the entire Sonos system to make the Ace work. The Ace ships, and it's a huge hit.

40:13Could that have happened? I think it was always going to be a pretty uphill climb for the Ace, just because there's so much competition. Like, Sonos saw this as a huge market opportunity, and it is a huge market, but you've got longtime heavyweights like Apple, Beats, Bose, Sony, brands that have been around forever, have their reputation. And so they were coming in with these headphones that are very good. Like, they're super comfortable. They sound great. The TV audio swap feature is very neat. And so, yeah, they had, like, good aspects, but trying to, like, top, you know, face off against Apple and Bose is just a pretty daunting task.

40:49fair. But it does seem like even in that case, I think there's an interesting thing that I think was happening at Sonos and has been happening for a while where like this company is desperate to be a mainstream brand. They're desperate for growth. Sure. That's one key question about this whole situation is like, should Sonos should ever have gone public in the first place? Because now they're a company that is like after growth above all else, finding new customers, trying to expand their customer base. And it's like, how does an audio speaker company really do that? You know, how much growth is there really?

41:20And so that's like, should they have stayed private like Bose and just like done their own thing forever and just like put out nice new products every few years and just made a decent amount of income and revenue and just been happy with that? But they are public now. And I think their biggest stock shareholder is BlackRock. And so these like giant corporations that are going to like push them to like grow and grow and grow. And so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is a thing I've always wondered is, is what was it that caused Sonos to stop wanting to be kind of a niche high end audio company? And there are lots of those out there, right?

41:55Like I think about like Bowers and Wilkins a lot, which is like a company that a lot of people really care about. But if you're not like an audio person, you've probably never heard of it. And one of the things that Sonos did for so long that was so impressive was it had this kind of high-end technology. Its stuff was very good, but it was like known to humans. Like regular people bought Sonos stuff in a way that most people were not running around buying Bowers & Wilkins stuff, right? And that's no shade to Bowers & Wilkins. It's just like a different kind of brand. But Sonos had found this thing where it was like a luxury audio company without being sort of snobby about it in a way that was actually really powerful for Sonos.

42:33And it feels like if it had just stayed there, it could have done that thing for a very long time. and instead it was like, okay, what can we do that will make us, I don't know, relevant to people who don't otherwise care and what I've always wondered is like, is that Patrick Spence being like, how do I be cooler and fancier and more famous or is it investors being like, where is the quarterly growth and it sounds like maybe it's a little of both but mostly the second thing. Yeah, I think Patrick Spence is quite a story because I think like for the most part, he was a pretty good CEO. Like Sonos had a lot of good products under him you know, the Ark, the Roam, the Move, you know, quite a few string of hits.

43:14They were good products, at least. But, like, this whole app debacle was, like, really his undoing. And, like, he should have, you know, played it much safer than he did. And, like, part of that shift was, like, all the marketing. They brought in this guy from Dyson, Jordan Saxmard, who got fired last week, or this week, rather. And his whole thing was, like, he wanted to make Sonos more fashionable and, like, more mainstream. And, like, that was his world. It came from Dyson, like, high fashion. Right. you know, fancy tech. And so like, and so he didn't hold the Sonos core customer base in high regard.

43:43Like he saw them as kind of like niche and wanted to like expand and grow and grow and grow. And the Ace was the whole big fixture of this whole plan. Right. Didn't quite pan it. And like the marketing around the Ace was strange. Like they spent a lot of money. Like if, it's like last fall, you couldn't miss the Sonos Ace subway campaigns in New York. They were everywhere. But they didn't really say anything about the headphones. They're just like photos, pretty photos, and like showed the headphones. But they didn't say like what they did, why they were different from like your standard Bose headphones.

44:08And so like they spend a lot of money, but like for what gain? Not much. So like that was his whole idea is just to like make Sonos more fashionable, more beautiful and like bring in like that crowd. And not sure it was the play. Well, that's I mean, this is the thing I find so fascinating is like there's a version of that strategy that I think could have worked right. Like Sonos, Sonos as a sort of lifestyle brand kind of tracks for me, right? Like I think in the way that people recognize Bose as more than just a set of headphones, like people, people know Bose for like the science of sound stuff and Beats is a lifestyle brand, but in like a very different direction.

44:44I think, like, I can see why Sonos would make that decision, but then, like, you have to keep shipping things that are good, which brings us back to the app. And so this is kind of the moment that you've chronicled a lot at Sonos over the last, whatever, 10 months since this happened. But the app ships in May. The response is horrific, like, immediately off the jump. Everybody hates the app. It starts to snowball and become a huge problem. Like, what is your sense, having reported this out months later, of kind of what the summer was like inside of Sonos as all of this is roiling and going on?

45:20I think they knew what they were in for, quite honestly, because, like, there were people inside Sonos who knew from the jump that, like, it was buggy, not where it needed to be to, like, stay on target for that launch. And they had people, like, they had a small group of beta testers who, like, definitely were complaining, but, like, felt like they weren't getting any feedback for those complaints. they were just like filing bug reports and getting nothing back and so yeah it was just a slow slow roll of a very big disaster coming and like they should have seen it coming they should have you know paused or at least like delayed the ace until the fall like i've always wondered like why not just you know punt the ace to like the holidays and put them out then the app would have been in a slightly better state than it was then and so but now they just went full steam ahead uh yeah people were like crunched they were like working overtime like hours and hours and hours uh their chief software guy nick millington was sending out video messages to like all the staff saying you know please everybody work a little bit harder put in a few more hours and people were just burned out and yeah and like yeah and people people at sonos really care about sonos like that's what i've learned covering them so much like they've got a great staff very passionate about the brand uh but they were pushed uh to their limits and like then you know so the app happens and since that they've laid off 300 people and like they've all lost their jobs because of bad decisions by Spence and his cohorts.

46:35So, yeah, it's been tough to see. Draw that line for me a little bit, actually, because I think this is, there was an interesting thing that happened where I think the perception of the app debacle became so bad. And I think, to some extent, we can talk about this, but I actually think we will remember the app as being worse than it actually was. It made a huge mistake of pissing off the people who like Sonos the most, but which is which is a stupid thing to do but as a as a like it's not like it broke every sonos speaker in existence right and i think the way we remember it is like it completely destroyed everything and it's like no they they just didn't ship a sleep timers right which is like there was a bunch of stuff missing and that stuff is real but i think it was not the like five alarm fire of a disaster that it could have been but it became that over time for some people it was like honestly like i think and like sometimes it'll work and then it would just stop working like out of nowhere like all your speakers will like vanish from the app and like if you were having a party or hosting like a big event and like that's when the app went on the fritz i could see how that would be infuriating yeah so like yeah especially for a company whose whole thing was that that never ever happened like for years that never ever happened to people yeah yeah so there's like some issues like just like products just like vanishing from the app for no reason uh and stuff like that but like on the whole like for me it's been fairly solid since may like i haven't had that many problems i've had like the occasional you know issue or bug but on the whole It's just like, yeah, things are missing.

47:57Features were absent for months that took way too long to bring back. And so this all just tells you there should have been a beta from the very beginning. They should have had two apps out at the same time during this transition. And so, yeah, it's just kind of, I don't know, it just boggles the mind that no one there made that decision. So it was too late. It reminds me a little of the stories we've heard about the humane pin from last year, that there were groups of those early testers who were basically screaming as though they were blue in the face about like, this thing doesn't work, you can't ship it.

48:30And eventually, and I think it's, I'm actually sort of sympathetic to tech companies in this spot because you hit a point where it's like, okay, we have booked ad campaigns. We have giant inventories sitting in a warehouse that costs us money every day. We don't sell it. This stuff is, it is hard to pull back once you have already committed, right? And so I think what you see over and over these companies do is just keep charging through. And I think it's usually a mistake, but I also completely understand why these companies keep making that mistake. It's a hard moment. But when the people who make these products are screaming at you about how they don't work, you should probably listen to them.

49:07It's just a good rule of thumb, I would say. I agree. They saw the ACE as this huge moment where they would have this new revenue driver and a big new product. And so I think their mindset was, let's just get it out and like, let's see how it goes. We'll fix it. Afterwards, they didn't realize like how bad the bugs would be for so many people all at once. And so, yeah. So is that the kind of, like I mentioned sort of drawing the line from bad app launch to sort of corporate chaos. Lots of people get laid off, huge changes, Patrick Spence is out. Sort of walk me through that spiral, I guess. Like how do we get from that launch to Sonos becoming sort of internally a very different company?

49:48Yeah. So the app came out. There were months and months of like just bad vibes in the Sonos subreddit. Just complaints everywhere, every day. And so it's been a pretty sad place for a few months. Did you have a lot of people constantly telling you to keep yelling about how bad the app is? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I remember there were times where you were getting emails like all day, every day from people being like, you're not being mean enough to the app. Yeah. And it's like Sonos didn't help itself. There was one interview, one statement they sent me where the now ex-chief product officer said that it took courage to put out the app, which is never a word you want to use in this industry.

50:23Yeah. Again, while we're giving free advice to tech founders, don't say that. It didn't work for Apple when they talked about courage. It didn't work for Sonos. Don't talk about your courage in putting out products people don't like. Yeah. So that didn't help. And it took just way too long for Patrick to come out and make an apology. It took several weeks. He had said, oh, we're working on it. And then finally, he was like, we apologize. guys. I think back in November, they put out this multi-step plan. We're going to be much more careful with our software now. We're going to bring in a quality ombudsperson was the role I think they had planned.

50:53And just to have much more steps to make sure this would never happen again. More transparency for people inside the company. If they're trying to sound alarms, saying, hey, this thing is a goddamn mess. What are we doing? Do you think that was good faith? I mean, there's a certain piece of this, I think, that was like we were talking about. they heard the feedback. People knew there were people who were unhappy, people who were making this stuff presumably knew there were bugs. And you eventually sit around a conference table with executives and decide, well, the benefits of going ahead outweigh the costs of going ahead.

51:28We're just going to keep going. Like, do you think this idea of like, let's hire more people to yell at us about when our products are bad was a real good faith effort? I think it was because I saw like how huge this had grown, this controversy. And I think, yeah, I mean, part of that plan was they were going to like, if Sonos didn't meet its targets, the topic executives weren't going to get their bonus, which that provision just made people like, what? Who cares about your bonus? This is the most tone-deaf thing I could ever imagine. And so, yeah, that didn't go over super well. People were like super skeptical, which made sense after like going through this whole mess.

52:03And so a few months later, Patrick was out. Tom Conrad, who's a longtime Sonos board member. Tom is a product guy. So like if you want someone to like steer the ship back in the right direction. He had his first earnings call last week. He was like, we have a lot more work to do. So he was pretty like mindful of like where they are and where they have to go. Where do you think that is at this moment? Like, where would you put Sonos kind of in its own journey at this point? Because I think, to me, maybe the most lingering thing from what happened last year is that I think Sonos has burned a lot of the this stuff just works goodwill that it had, right?

52:41Like, I suspect you and I have both told many people in our lives over the years to buy Sonos stuff. And so much of the logic is it sounds great. It's 30 % more expensive than everything else it competes with. But it works. And it is worth the price. And I think, to some extent, that's still true for a lot of Sonos products. but I think they have still true like no one else does quite what Sonos does when it comes to like home audio and like playing your tv sound over like all the speakers in your house like there's whim but that's like more of a niche even more niche than Sonos and it takes a lot more setup and and that kind of thing and so like no one else really like offers that core Sonos value um and so I think that's still there but it seems like Sonos has kind of burned that perception in a real way like deserved or not it has it has burned that perception from people and so and I I guess this brings us a little bit to Pinewood, which is, well, why don't you explain?

53:36You've seen that you know what the thing looks like. You've heard a bunch about it. What is Pinewood? So they got back on track late last year with the Artic Ultra. We should mention that, which was great. Fantastic soundbar. And so it proves like they still know how to make a very good speaker, you know. And so that was promising. I think that helped boost morale at the company back to where it needed to be. But even like I read your review of that, of the Ultra, and you're like. Don't call it a comeback yet. That's the thing. Even still, it's like this thing is great. It is proof positive that Sonos can still do the thing that it does very well.

54:08But the next thing is going to be like the key indicator of like where we're going. And there's still some reservation in you that is like, I don't know if I can just wholeheartedly tell you this thing is wonderful and you should get it and it will make your life better. Because like there's just something that Sonos name doesn't quite communicate the safety and excitement that it once did. And I wonder what it'll take to get that back. But you're right. it is also not, it's not how Sonos proves it can do the thing it's been trying to do for a while. Yeah. So I think that's going to come through the app.

54:37We'll see how much better it gets. And then Pinewood, which I think is coming this year, as far as I know, a very expensive streaming box that can also serve as an HDMI switch. So you can plug in like your gaming consoles and your other devices, and it can like see all that stuff and switch between them. And you can make your own custom Sonos surround sound speaker setups. So you don't need a soundbar to have surround anymore, or you won't. That'll be like one of the core selling points of Pinewood. But like, this does feel like the same kind of vibes as the Ace is like you're getting into this like super saturated market with like people that sell like$40 streaming boxes like Roku and Amazon.

55:13Yeah, if anything, it's harder than the high-end headphone market because at least people who are spending, what,$250 and up on headphones understand the kind of value prop there and like you know what you're getting when you spend more money on headphones. on streaming boxes all we've seen for a decade now is just an absolute race to the bottom like they will literally give you a television now because yeah it's so there because there's just no money in selling you the hardware and so i think it's really interesting to see especially after coming off of the ace which i think was designed to do the same thing right like bring the sonos brand and ethos into a very sort of adjacent but very different kind of market yeah To see them willing to run this back.

55:58And I feel like even in the story you wrote about Pinewood, there seems to be some consternation inside the company about like, how do we not make the same mistake we made last time? And is this the thing that will actually get us there if the Ace wasn't it? we'll see like what the final form of this thing like what it looks like what it's priced at i've heard it's going to be priced between 200 and 400 which if it's on that upper end would be obscene for like what it is compared to like the apple tv 4k or like the nvidia shield which is nowhere near that expensive so i think they have to nail the marketing and the messaging which they put this person lindsey in charge of marketing now she's been at sonos for 20 years so if anybody can like speak to like the core value and like what's at sonos apart should be her so that's promising.

56:41But as far as like what this device will do for the company, like will it make a big difference? Hopefully it'll bring in some revenue and it'll help grow the business. You know, they keep talking about like new product categories. Like even on last week's call, they were talking about like we're going to be careful about spending every dollar making and like helping to grow the company and like grow the Sonos ecosystem. And just like how? Like with what products? Like, you know, like I'm just waiting for like a new Sonos 5. Like that's my favorite all-in-one speaker it's been around forever they haven't they haven't updated it in forever it's clearly not a priority for them um that's the product i want to see or like some kind of like era 500 like a higher end speaker uh but i think for now it's gonna be pinewood after that they're working on like a full-on like receiver like an audio receiver i'm not sure how far along that is but that's in the works but like most of all is like the app like most important of all is the app this core experience is what tom conrad called it last week on the call he was like we've got to fix our core experience because if we don't, like nothing else matters.

57:37And so he's cognizant of that, which is promising, but they've got a long road ahead. They've got to build back all that goodwill. They've got to keep their employees happy, which, you know, that's its own set of challenges right now. I think I am curious how you would rate Sonos's chances at being a great software company, because I would argue Sonos has been a really great like firmware company and it is very good at making products that work well and work well together. And that is like sincerely an accomplishment. I don't know that I have ever experienced user facing Sonos software as like really great.

58:16And I think Sonos has had some really interesting ideas over the years, right? Like putting all the music stuff into one app, I think was a really interesting idea. They've done a bunch of really interesting work on sort of multiple voice assistant stuff that I think honestly has mostly come to nothing, but is like full of good ideas. And again, with all of this stuff that we're talking about with Pinewood, the idea of like, we're going to bring all this stuff into a more functional sort of universal search system is the right idea. Like I want all of the things that Sonos wants to do, but I feel like the track record of them executing on these good ideas in software is not impressive.

58:51But maybe I'm being too pessimistic because I mostly just use like the Spotify Airplay thing to my Sonos speaker. So maybe I'm not giving Sonos enough credit but like is there a good software company inside of this company uh i think there is i mean uh so like last week tom said that uh the hardware team or the software team is like twice the size of the hardware team so they've got a lot more people working on software than hardware and so you would hope that there's a good software company inside there i think there are people who care who want to like fix this app and get it to where it needs to be like the ideas in the app are good you know its design is nice but as far as like will it ever be like an apple type ux quality I don't know you know people have been saying forever like why won't Apple just buy Sonos they could probably get a bargain right now if they wanted to probably true but as far as like Sonos's course affordability you know we'll see I mean it's usable it works it did work and so I think yeah it's fine for the purpose people don't expect like miracles from this company just make the stuff work right I mean stuff like volume started to like take a long time like changing the volume on a speaker if that has lagged then you've you've certainly gone astray and so things like that are slowly getting fixed finally but yeah there's a lot of work to do a lot of polishing yeah it's going to be a really interesting year because I think the fact that Sonos is working on both a high-end receiver and a set-top box signals to me that maybe this company is not exactly sure what its audience wants from it for me it's just like just keep making roams just give me more and more like go the Logitech Ultimate Ears strategy and just give me Roams of every imaginable shape and size and price, and I will almost certainly end up buying them all.

1:00:31The Roam 2 is great, so it's fine. Roam 2 is great. The Move 2 is fantastic. That's my favorite thing of theirs right now is the Move 2 speaker. It's so good. If it wasn't so huge, I would probably have gotten a Move. Yeah, yeah, fair. But like Pinewood, you know, I think it was so far towards the release under Patrick that they couldn't just cancel it. Yeah. You know, they spent all that money on like R &D and like, you know, it's getting out the door. So it's close enough. Let's get it out, see how it does. Hopefully, you know, they can like find the right messaging. the right appeal and sell it to their core customer base, which people have been like asking for like a custom like surround sound option out of Sonos forever.

1:01:03So, yeah. So if it offers that, like people will pay for it. Some people will buy it. And if they can like, you know, like somehow do a unified search with Netflix, which has always been stubborn about like trying to like have their content mixed with other services, like if they can make that work somehow. And I don't see how Sonos would be that company, but maybe I'll be surprised. Yeah. So we'll see. Yeah. as ever, Sonos seems to be working on the thing I would want. And we'll just we'll see how it actually goes. But yeah, what is the state of the Sonos app at this point before we go? I have essentially stopped using it in all of the chaos.

1:01:35It's fine. But like, are people happy again? Is it back? That's up and down on the Sonos subreddit. That's my main way of like gauging how things are going. I just check in. Some people say it's gotten a lot better this last month, like in particular. So I think, you know, yeah, they're making steady progress. I don't think layoffs help make an app better, especially when there were quite a few engineers who were let go in this latest round, which seems kind of mystifying. But slowly but surely, they're getting back to where it needs to be, and we'll just have to see, like, well, there's too much damage done, all for a set of headphones that could have been great, but I mean, one of the funniest quotes last week on the call, the CFO was like, the Ace came out at the worst possible time, like, in regards to our app.

1:02:16It's like, well, whose fault was that? Like, you... Who could have known? who could have foreseen this situation it would just ruin your headphones forever so yeah they are good headphones it is sad they cost a little bit too much I think for what they are so like a price cut would help I think boost those up a little bit but you know yeah I look forward to buying like a refurbished pair of Ace when the Ace 2 inevitably come out and I'm sure I'll like them very much alright Chris thank you as always thank you sir been a pleasure All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the VertCast hotline.

1:02:53See you in a sec.

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1:04:28All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number 866-VERGE11, the email vergecastattheverge.com. Send us all of your questions. We try to answer as many of them as we can. We've gotten a few recently that have sent me on like huge giant reporting journeys that are going to turn into fun stuff on this show. So all of your thoughts, questions, big or small, send them all to us. This week, we have a question about business cards. Hey, guys. My name is Derek. I've, in the past, we're talking several years ago now, was able to take a picture of a business card when somebody handed it to me.

1:05:03And my phone, my Android phone, it prompted me to add it to my contacts. It was one click. It was really easy. It generally works pretty well. Sometimes there was a missed number, but most everything worked well. Now, if I take a photo of a business card, Google prompts me to go buy business cards, which is not useful at all. I was wondering, is there a current way to do this or is this just a lost bit of history to the Internet? All right. So I have two thoughts on this. One is that I miss when phone cameras did a better job of kind of automatically adapting to what was in them. Right now, you have lots of options in your camera, and they do a pretty good job of, like, seeing what's in the photo after you take the photo.

1:05:51One of the cool things AI can do is pretty usefully recognize what's inside a photo. But cameras increasingly don't even try to do this in real time. I think they realized that doing something like scanning a business card in your phone camera app is a relatively niche feature, which is true. And so in the name of making these very important camera apps simpler, they just decided to take all that stuff out, which fine, I suppose I understand. But I do miss that. And I think the idea of having a camera that recognizes what you're looking at and adapts itself accordingly is actually about to make a comeback.

1:06:26We're thinking about things like visual intelligence and all of these multimodal AI systems that relies on understanding what's on the other side of your camera. So it's possible that we are going to inadvertently resolve this business card problem. Just not yet. In the meantime, there are basically two places you can go. One is a business card specific app. And there are lots of those out there. There's one called Haystack that's pretty popular. There's one called Hi Hello that's pretty popular. There's BizConnect. There's one called CamCard, I think, which sounds creepier than it actually is.

1:07:04But anyway, all of these things want to be more than just business card scanning apps. They want to be like contact management and CRM systems. They're designed for people who like get a lot of business cards and have to do a lot of lead generation and following up. They do a pretty good job with business card scanning, but I don't recommend using them. They all want access to your contacts. They all want you to subscribe to stuff. If they all want to be a bigger platform than just a place to scan a business card, you can use those apps, but I don't recommend it. What I would do instead is use a more generic document scanning app.

1:07:37And there are a bunch of ways to do this. You can do something like take a picture in Apple Notes and then actually search for that person's name if you want to just store all your business cards in a note. Google Drive also does this very well. You can just take a picture in the Drive app and it will scan the document and upload it. And then if you search for the name or whatever, it'll actually surface the business card. That's the simple way. The most impressive way, I think, and the thing I would recommend to anyone looking to do this is just to use the Adobe Scan app. It's free. It again wants to upsell you into the whole creative cloud ecosystem and make it all really complicated.

1:08:11But you can just avoid all of that and just take pictures with the Scan app and do everything you want. And the thing that I really like about it is when you open the scan app, it lets you choose what you're taking a picture of. You can pick a whiteboard or a book or a document or an ID card or a business card. And that actually, again, adapts the camera to take different kinds of pictures and pull different kinds of information out. On the business card one in particular, when you take a picture, it will actually allow you then to save it directly to your contacts. It will extract the information out and dump it into your contacts.

1:08:46And it does that directly on your device in a way that I like very much. The Scan app is not perfect. It seems to really want a business card that is optimized in a very specific way, like big company logo at the top and then below it in like smaller bold letters, person's name, and then below it, lots of information. If you get one like that, it will almost always get it right. But I'm looking at one right now that has the first and last name in big blue letters and right below it in smaller letters, the company name. And it thinks of those things in reverse. So it thinks this person whose name is Daniel is the name of the company and it thinks their company is their first name.

1:09:28So I had to go in and fix that a little bit. But it got their email address right. It got their phone number right. It like pulled all of the relevant data pretty successfully. Certainly easier than manually typing this whole thing into the contacts on my computer. There are, again, lots of apps that will scan information on business cards and use OCR, optical character recognition, to pull it out so that you can find it later. But Adobe Scan is just the most straightforward, most simple one that actually will pull out the information and then let you put it where you want it to, which is in your contacts.

1:10:00And it does it with no strings attached as long as you ignore the occasional upsell to Creative Cloud. And hey, if you already pay for Creative Cloud, terrific. You can also have PDFs of your business cards. So that's what I'd recommend. Put the Scan app on your home screen, and you can also use it. It's really handy for doing things like scanning documents and turning them into editable PDFs. It's really great when you want to take a picture of a whiteboard or any kinds of these other things that you want to make not only accessible, but actually extract the information out of and make it useful in some other way.

1:10:32That's like Adobe's whole thing, right? They want you to then go use Acrobat to mess with the PDF. But the good news is you don't have to. You can just dump all this stuff where you need it to be and move on with your day. So that's my recommendation. Use Adobe Scan. But also I am curious if A, you found a way in the default camera app on your phone to do something cool and interesting with this, or B, if there's another app for scanning business cards in particular, but really documents of all kind that you like better than Adobe Scan, I want to hear about that too. This is a thing I encounter more than I've realized in the past.

1:11:03not even just with business cards, but like in an effort to go fully paperless and just dump all of the paper bills. And like, I got a speeding ticket the other day because Washington, D.C. has the speeding cameras and they are ruthless. And it would be nice to just be able to like take a picture of that, pull out the information and upload it. And you can kind of sort of do that in lots of ways and they kind of sort of work. But it does feel like this could all be better. And Adobe Scan is the best I've found. But if you have a better idea, especially if it is wonky and complicated and involves a lot of weird AI stuff, I want to hear all about it.

1:11:37For now, that is it for our show. Thank you to everybody who was on the show. Thank you to everybody who called the hotline. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, all of Alex Heath's coverage of Meta in his Command Line newsletter and elsewhere, all of Chris Welch's Sonos coverage, lots of stuff. He convinced me to buy a pair of the new Powerbeats Pro headphones. You can read Vsong's review all on the website. I'll put some stuff in the show notes, but as always, read the website. It's a good website. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or again, scanning apps you think I should use, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:12:15We genuinely love hearing from you. This show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Eli and I will be back on Friday to talk about, God help us all, politics, AI, gadgets, big phones, small phones, foldable phones, and everything else. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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