Emulators are taking over the App Store

25:12Nope. So that's emulators here in the United States, around the world, because Apple knows if it allows emulators in alternative app stores in Europe, people will want them here. It's bad. So it's allowed them here. Wait, can I ask a legal question, though? This is the thing I've been wondering about the last couple of days, is this has been going on. This idea that we now see what better looks like, and that could be bad for Apple. I've been trying to figure out in my head, if I'm Apple, am I more worried about, okay, this sort of proved the point that the iPhone gets better if we allow this one thing.

25:44Now it becomes more legally dicey. They're going to say, well, now we have to allow all these other things because we've proven the point that it gets better when we do. Or does Apple say, we've thrown you a bone or two. Let's all shake hands and move on. Does that make sense? I'm trying to figure out like which is the winning strategy there. I'm going to ask some AI generation program to generate Tim Cook and Jonathan Cantor and Tim Cook saying, we've thrown you a bone or two. Now let's shake hands. It'll blow up. We're going to blow up a data center with that prompt. It's an unimaginable situation.

26:16I think the danger for Apple is they will get forced into allowing more and more things. This has long been the danger. This is why they have fought it for so long. We don't know what kinds of things will happen in the European market because other kinds of app stores are going to let other kinds of things happen. So there's only one app store in Europe right now. It's by Riley Testout. It is called Alt Store Pal. It's going to launch with Delta, obviously. And this clipboard manager app, Clip, which is a type of app that is forbidden by Apple in the regular app store because a clipboard manager can see all the things that you are copying and pasting.

26:53Totally normal to have clipboard managers on desktop computers. Apple is not allowed it on the phone. So here you go. Here's this one other kind of thing you can do in the iPhone that you couldn't do before. Is that going to be enough? to turn the tide of regulation around. I don't know. Emulators obviously were. Yeah. Right? So there's only one store right now. Yeah, there's only one store, and there's no porn or gambling. And I feel like we made a bet. I think I may have lost a bet somewhere. How quickly porn. Well, I think Riley's been working on this store for a long time. Yeah, and he didn't want to put porn on it.

27:23Give it a minute, Kranz. I absolutely do not believe you have lost this bet yet. Okay. It's coming. The second the Vision OS app store opens, the floodgates. Wrong phrase.

27:40I'm sorry, boy. Don't cut any of that. There's only one. The point is there's only one store we don't know. But the second there's another compelling thing that you can accomplish with an app from another store that is compelling enough for anyone, any significant set of people to go download that store and get that app, Apple will allow that thing. It seems inevitable that that is just how the flow of innovation is going to go now. We always joke that just the hint of competition makes these companies behave, just like a whisper of competition. Here you have both mandated competition because of the regulators.

28:18There's now other app stores. And there's going to be way more than a whisper of competition. There's going to be just people trying stuff because it's a land grab in Europe for iPhone customers again. which is cool. Yeah. Yeah. And that pipeline of cool apps come out that Apple doesn't allow to Apple allows it so that people don't go through the hoops of downloading an app store. What it seems is now obvious, and I'm so curious how far this will go, is that it is more important to Apple to keep you in the app store than to keep its rules about the app store. Oh, yeah. Apple will bend massively as long as you stay in the app store.

28:57and it's going to be so interesting to see how far that extends like i i i am on record with like the apple sports stuff to say that betting and gambling is coming to apple platforms in a way that people do not yet see and i think this like porn i think is probably a pretty bright line for apple that it won't cross for a variety of reasons but like there will be popular betting apps that do things that Apple's apps won't let you do. And like, how far will it go to keep as much in the app store as it possibly can is going to be a big question over the next year. I think the port is going to happen as well.

29:35I think they're going to do like, yeah, I think they're going to be like, Oh, you can age gate it and then use face ID to access your porn hub account. And they'll tell a security story about it. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to do a whole security story about it. This is no, I disagree. Okay. Yeah. Because you would just see too much porn on the subway? No. Although, two things. One, as I was riding the subway into work this morning, a woman was watching a horror movie with full speakers, no headphones. Oh, cool. And there was just a lot of deep breathing and then screaming. Just horror movie. And for a while, it was just deep breathing, so everyone was looking around the subway car.

30:11Incredible breach of subway etiquette all the way around. And I was like, should I just give her my AirPods? This might be worth the 200 bucks right now. I honestly believe that if you are listening to something on full speaker, everyone else within Earshot is now firmly within their right to come over and press pause or rewind. We're all watching this together now. You just sit down next to the person. Yeah, we're all watching this together. And I can be like, oh, can we just go back 10 minutes? I missed the part that was happening. You should be able to sit down next to them and be like, we're watching this together.

30:42Just do the double tap to go back 10 seconds. Exactly. Don't do that. But if you do, let us know how it goes. probably not well I'm guessing not well okay that was a side note here is why I think Apple won't just like let porn happen okay there was nothing to watch the other night and I did it I watched Argyle uh huh it was bad it was real bad did his hair ever move did he ever fix his hair I don't want to say anything about this movie what I want to say is throughout the entire period that I was watching Argyle I was trying to imagine Tim Cook watching Argyle.

31:23Is that just like if Tim Cook wouldn't do this, it won't appear on the App Store? I think that is as good of a content understanding for Apple as anything. And you're like, this is about as far as he's going to go. He had to sit there. And then he had to tell Matthew Vaughn that that was a good movie. Right? There was obviously a screening. This is a big Apple movie from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn. yeah do a leap is in the thing and then they all got up and the lights came on and in you know apple park and tim was like right yeah i just there's like a part of me that says like that there's a boundary on apple's behavior and i don't know exactly what it is about the image of tim cook watching argyle that makes me confident the boundary will never get to porn yeah but if you just sit there.

32:16I don't watch Argonne. I can't stress this enough. This is not a good use of your time. It's awful. It is just not a good use of your time. But if you watch it and you imagine Tim Cook watching it and being like, this is what I paid for. Then there's a part of your brain that's like when the whatever Apple product marketing manager comes to him and says, all right, here's how we're going to solve for the porn revenue. Like that person will just like get yeeted on site. Like he's like, my brain can't process this. He's just got a little spring in his office. It's a beautiful Johnny Ive liquid metal.

32:54It's gorgeous. It looks kind of like the Webby Award. The design is obvious in its minimalism. But it's just a box on a spring. It's like. All right. That's enough talk about Tim Cook and pornography in the same sort of mental space. We're sorry. David, I know you're covering it. Are there more app stores in the mix here? I think so. So the, the first phase of this, there's been a handful of folks saying it's coming, right? And a lot of it is gaming. Epic has been loudly talking about doing this. The folks behind the setup thing, which is like a subscription to a bunch of Mac apps, they've said they're working on some stuff.

33:32So I think we're going to get more of these. And there's going to be a set of them that are like very professional and very legit and are sort of big businesses unto themselves. and then there's just going to be this crazy minefield of new ideas and i think those are going to take a while from what i can tell it's like it's hard work to build one of these things and i think uh in riley's case he's been running alt store for a while and so there were there was a bunch of paperwork and stuff to do to get this working there was the you have to get like a million dollar line of credit or something to open one of these app stores but he was able to from what I understand, jump through these hoops relatively quickly.

34:10If this is just a... Yeah, because Tim Sweeney was like, here's a million dollar line of credit. I need this to start happening. Basically, right. And then if you're the MacPaw folks who have been running SetApp for a while or you're Epic, you have the resources to do this. But if you want to just spin up an App Store from nothing, it's actually pretty hard work. And so I think that, my guess is this fall and maybe even into next year is when the truly weird stuff is going to start to happen. But it is going to happen. My question is, what is the next set of emulators? Just to stay focused on emulators, maybe Apple's not going to allow Windows 95.

34:44It's Atari Lynx. It's definitely Atari Lynx. But maybe Apple isn't going to allow Windows emulation in this app store at the gate. But you can see maybe Alt Store is going to allow Windows 95 emulation. And we're all going to be playing Leisure Suit Larry on our iPads, right? It's interesting, yeah. You can see Commodore 64. Is the Commodore 64 a retro game console? I don't know. Yes. I guess. Yeah, I believe there was one briefly on the store. There you go. I mean, what is the definition of a retro game console? Right. We could do another half hour on the bird chest, I'm confident. But as that starts to open and the library of acceptable software starts to expand, which Apple has never allowed.

35:25They've wanted everyone to stay inside of their user interface. And for good reason. I don't think these are bad things that Apple wanted. They didn't want a bunch of weird flash ports in the iPhone in the beginning. They made very serious rules about how apps should look and feel so that the user experience would be great. I think that the time limit on needing to do that has long since expired. So now it's like what else is going to be allowed here? And you can see that emulation of various kinds of other computers are going to very quickly open the door to floods of other cool software, which all most of which by the way won't be monetized by like weird micro payments and ads yeah because it's just old software i'm curious one that i think will be kind of interesting is scum vm so scum v scum vm is a lot of what was that game monkey island yeah monkey island point and click games all made by lucas arts yeah which is now owned by disney and and scum vm is kind of like independently maintained by other people and i'm like oh that's a really that's one you always see anytime a system starts allowing emulators, the PSP, the Vita, even the Steam Deck, that's one of the first ones you see.

36:33And it's like, is it going to pop up soon? Are we going to get ScumVM? Are we going to be able to play the Dig in Monkey Island on this thing? Or is Disney going to come around and say, hey? Yeah. We'll see. There's a part of me that the thing I'm looking forward to most is some sort of retro Windows or Mac emulator that just lets me run a non-creative cloud version of Photoshop on an iPad. It's close. That's coming, right? It's coming. Wes Davis, our weekend editor, posted on threads a video of him playing. It was the Kirby, the Canvas Kirby game. Yeah, on an iPad. For the DS, yeah. For the Nintendo DS, but he was playing it with a stylus on iPad.

37:11And it's like, that's better than any idea that Apple's had for an iPad game. Yeah, I was like, that's cool as hell. I love that. That's not great. I'm excited for it all. A little chaos is good for this market. Yeah. All right. I want you all to go. We're going to take a break. You all go just watch the Argyle trailer. Don't do that. Why would you tell people to do that? Go do anything with your life other than watch the Argyle trailer. I've never watched a movie where I've openly wished the Apple TV had a 2X button. I'm just like, because I can't stop in the middle. Yeah. Don't just walk out of the room.

37:47I'm just going to go do laundry. I got to know what happened. It's just like a curse. This is why I watch so little stuff. Yeah. Because I got to know. And then I'm like committed. And now this is my personality now. Now I really, David, I think we need to just find the worst content possible and be like, Eli, you're in it now. You got to keep going. Eli, I've heard of suits. All right. We're going to take a break. I'm going to yell at David a little bit. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do.

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40:11Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from Figma. Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world's best digital apps, websites, and experiences. And now, there's a faster way to bring those ideas to life.

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41:29That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast

41:39Alright, we're back For me, it was the scene where she started ice skating Wait, who? I haven't seen it yet This is spoilers No, we cannot do this Listen, sometimes I would say the Vergecast is known for long diversions down strange rabbit holes This is just like objective cruelty to our audience I'm just saying you know that famous story where Tim Cook looks at his lieutenant and he's like why are you still here yeah I literally imagined him standing up in the Steve Jobs theater when that happened in the movie and being like why are you all still here Matthew Vaughn just crying running weeping from the room it's not good I have so much to say about how bad this movie is alright that's a that's a Tuesday episode no that do that on decoder get that out of here it's a full we're gonna get Matthew Vaughn on decoder and be like alright So the big reveal of this movie.

42:30How do you make decisions and let's change that?

42:35All right. Speaking of Decoder, there's an org chart change at Google. That was a good segue. I pulled that one off. I was rehearsing that one. Yeah, I loved that. I looked in the mirror this morning. I'm like, we're going to get this right today. Just nail it. Yeah. So Google is getting a whole reorg. It's not just Google. It's Android, right? Because, David, you actually spoke with Rick. You got the whole thing. Yeah. So the place to start is that Google is a famously well-run company with an org structure that makes sense to everyone and is structured in order to make everyone produce good work.

43:18We all agree on that as sort of the premise of all of this. No, Google is just abject chaos all the time. And this is like in large part deliberate. Like from the beginning, Google's whole thing has been like hire really good people and just sort of like turn them loose. And it's just like a loose construction of smart people who make things. And that's fine as far as it goes. That's how you get Gmail, which was somebody's 20 % project 20 plus years ago now. it's also how you get 400 ,000 messaging apps and all of the weird things that google has built and killed over the years but basically the the thing that i have come to understand over the last couple days of talking to people including this new team at google which is basically a combination of google's hardware team which was run by rick osterlo and its android team uh which was run by Hiroshi Lockheimer.

44:09Hiroshi also ran Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Photos, Google One, and a smattering of other stuff. But it basically oversaw like a lot of the most popular platforms where people actually interact with Google stuff. All of that is now being smushed into one team under Rick Osterlo. It's called the Platforms and Devices team. And the idea very much is to make all of that into one team so that they can run faster with ai like the whole story over and over is just ai we have to do things faster we have to make our moves more quickly we have to be able to pivot faster we have to be able to build new stuff faster we need to have hardware software and ai all together we need to have full stack everything like google i think as we've seen over the last, what, 18 months now, got caught sort of off guard by the speed with which AI took over the world.

45:03Like, Google built so much of this foundational technology and yet didn't beat ChatGPT to market. Like, that is a failing of that company. And they are now racing to keep up. And I think sort of smushing the hardware and software together, particularly on phones, is a pretty huge shift in trying to make that go faster. So I have a number of questions here. One, I think Google was initially, Alex is just laughing. I'm just laughing. I was like, the speed with your, I've got some questions. I'm reading this, I mean, it's an org chart. Yeah. I have a number of ideas about this org chart change. But the core one is what you just said, which is Google was caught off guard by ChatGP.

45:46It's failing the company. where it's been a year now. LLMs are not as good as people said they were going to be. Like the humane pin, like even if you imagine a version of the humane pin where the hardware was perfect and it was fast, it's still like that's the wrong bridge. Yeah. They just, there's no way for them to fix that problem. Right? And we have not seen any meaningful improvements on hallucination for any of these models really. So you're like, yeah, they were caught off guard and then they were really worried that Google search would go away. Satya Nadella is out there being like, I'm going to make them dance.

46:23I would – it is true that Google started dancing. They did a little tippy-tap dance. But Satya Nadella didn't do it. Right? It's like that wasn't – Bing has not been the beneficiary of the dancing in any way, shape, or form. Google, I would say, dancing without rhyme or reason. Not a lot of rhythm in the dancing happening in Mountain View. Agreed. And so it's like, if you believe that that is the thing that set them into action, that's the thing you're talking about. Like, to what end? I don't know if I'm being completely honest. And I feel like this is the strange moment we've come to in AI. Like, you had Drew Houston on Decoder this week, I think.

47:01And he repeated the line that Sundar Pichai and others have said that AI is as important as fire. Like, people just say that unironically. That this is the most important thing that has ever happened to society. Like, literally, that's a thing people say out loud. And is it? Like, is there any actual evidence of that so far? I mean, I would say, yeah. Liz and I. Fire, Alex. Yeah. Fire. I would say there's ample evidence it's not crypto. Like, I think we're there. Yeah, I think Liz and I have talked about this a lot. She gets, like, weird 2 a.m. texts from me just being like, Like, do you think that, like, AI is the biggest thing since the internet?

47:45If Liz is not responding to these texts with AI-generated responses, I don't know what we're doing here. No, she's always fully in the conversation with me. It's really nice that she returns my calls. Thank you, Liz. But I do think that, like, AI is – artificial intelligence as a whole, not necessarily just generative AI, is a pretty big moment, right? Like, it is a form of automation that is enormous. And it covers a whole lot of different industries. And that kind of big sea change is very rare. And it is as big as the internet. It is as big as when we started automating machinery and stuff like that.

48:22Like it's a big moment. But it happens in fits and spurts and stuff. And right now we're kind of in a moment. It's a technical term. Right. It's only obvious which things qualify in retrospect, right? If you're running one of these companies, you look at what the internet did 25 years ago, and you look at what mobile did 15 years ago, and you say, okay, a whole generation of companies died at the hands of these changes, and the world changed because of these changes. If you believe that AI is the next one, you kind of have to bet everything right now even before it's ready. Because if you don't, you'll get left behind by the companies that do.

49:05That's one side of the bet. The other side of the bet is that at this moment, there is nothing about AI and chatbots and this thing that is that important yet. And so we're in this place where it's still, I think, we got that incredible pop of like, oh my God, I cannot believe this thing is as good as it is when ChatGPT launched. And there has not been a moment that has surpassed that since then. Maybe I'm wrong. I would be curious to know if there are folks who feel like we've hit higher highs than that in terms of like remarkable achievements in AI. But to me, it feels like we're still riding that one single high.

49:46But if you believe that it is going to be as big and fast and powerful as so many of these people do, you don't have a choice but to bet everything on it. Because otherwise you're just dooming yourself and your company and your employees to death. Yeah. Yeah. And fine. I think all of the big high point moments in AI since then, or at least the ones that have made the news broadly, like broken into mainstream news, not just this show, have been bad. Yeah, they've been failures. They've been failures. They've been swaggy popes. Yeah. Like weird, woke mind virus controversies, like fake ones, just like all over the place.

50:26Like Bard just getting dates wrong all over the place. Like, the thing that is notable at these systems right now is that they don't know anything. Yep. We're going to talk about Meta's AI launch this week. I generated a bunch of images of stuff, and it just, like, doesn't know how clothes move. Yeah. And it's like, oh, this isn't that useful. And that's, like, so I just want to stay there for one second. Like, you're making this bet because you're like, we have to accelerate our AI moment. it's still unclear like what that moment looks like and maybe the whole point is like move faster, figure out what's right and what's wrong Astralow gave you the example of the pixel camera okay, I get it but they've been doing AI stuff with the pixel camera but this is his example and he's like, we're going to do that but faster it felt a little to me and David maybe correct me if I'm wrong it felt a little like Silicon Valley in particular is very hyped on AI Right.

51:23Like like there the conversation is, what are you doing with AI? If you're not doing something, you're stupid. And a lot of this felt like almost a response to those people being like, yes, we also care about AI. We're at the big we're big. This is our performative moment to tell you that we genuinely believe in this. But it was really for that audience, not necessarily. I think that's half right. Like, I think that's exactly right. I think the other audience is investors, right? To right now, if you want to continue to run the company that you run, you have to tell an AI story. You just do. Like that is where we are.

51:59It's what everybody was doing with mobile 10 years ago. It was like, if you didn't have a mobile strategy, what are you doing? Now that thing is AI, right? Like it's Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example of this. Like Mark doesn't talk about the metaverse anymore because nobody wants to hear about the metaverse and they sell shares in meta when they do. and so now they're telling an AI story and in a lot of ways the AI story and the metaverse story actually run together but they talk about it differently because that is how you win and you get people excited and you convince them that you are marching towards something huge so I think you're right they're they're telling that sort of same story to two audiences because without them they don't have the runway and talent they need to get there at all okay so this was but the first question okay sorry is this the right goal right so that's just the first one and I think the answer is probably yes.

52:46It has to be the right answer. We have to show movement towards this goal. We have to unify Google's famously messy teams, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Google now has Google DeepMind, which itself is a merger of Google Brain and DeepMind. The CEO of that, Demis Asabas, who's been on Decoder, and I asked him how will this merger work, and he was like, it'll be fine. Recently, some leaked comments suggesting he's not so happy with it. So now you've got Google research and DeepMind. We'll see how that's going. And then you've got this new group, which, you know, from a thousand yards, if you squint and you're hammered, it's like, oh, they're doing an Apple.

53:27They're doing hardware and software and services all under one roof to make better, complete products. They're going to vertically integrate everything right when the FTC is like, hey, stop that. Yeah, it's perfect technique. I mean, you do have to be hammered to make that claim. But you see it, right? It's like you squint. You're like, okay, then they'll do all the products over here. They still have a Samsung to deal with. Like if Google's like now the Pixel rules because we made the software custom for the Pixel. Do you want some of the Samsung? Also, you just announced a bunch of our AI stuff in your phones.

54:01How are they going to manage that? Google is very sensitive to this question. I raised this question to Rick and Hiroshi and their response was essentially, no, you're wrong. Everything is fine. The partners love us. Don't even worry about it. I'm paraphrasing, but only just. But I think. I mean, they gave you a quote from the CEO of Qualcomm for this story just to be like, see? And it's like, dude, he sells chips to everyone. He doesn't care. That's right. Christian Amman does not care if Google and Samsung are beefing as long as everyone's on phones. It's all about the power of Snapdragon. I think there are two things going on here.

54:36One, I think there's an interesting thing here to compare what Google is doing to actually what Panos Panay did at Microsoft, which is he was running Surface and then he was running Surface and Windows. And the way that they came to see it was actually what we need to do is we need to make the best Windows PCs and then give what we make back to the ecosystem. So like the Surface team actually pioneered a lot of things that really worked well on Windows. They did a lot of work on the handwriting stuff. They did a lot of work on detachables and then essentially gave that back to partners who were then able to make better Windows PCs as a result.

55:13Can I tell you a story about that? Sure. I feel like I can tell the story because it doesn't work there anymore. Okay. So one of my favorite CS moments, I'm walking around a Microsoft booth with Panos, and we're talking about that exact concept. Why do you make these things? Because the Surface machines were there and the partner machines were there, and I was like, this has got to be weird for you. And he was like, no, no, no, let me show you something. Panos, like, no, no, let me show you something. Yeah. And he's like, that's my hinge. And he was pointing at one of the partner machines. He's like, that's our hinge.

55:40and that's my displayed blah blah blah like he was like this is all our stuff and like what we're doing like we're just spending the money to innovate because none of these OEMs can outspend Apple so this is worth it to us and I asked him for years to give me that story like in a printable way but obviously none of the partners are gonna be like that's Panos's engine right but I think there's something to that right and if you are the company with the resources to feed the ecosystem, you can kind of rising tide lift all boats that situation. And if you're Google and what you need is for AI to win broadly and for Gemini to win specifically, doing that work on the Pixel and then giving it to Samsung theoretically works for everybody.

56:25I say theoretically because I think Samsung has a long history of not being psyched about Google's situation internally anyway. Tizen, I guess, still exists. I would not bet Samsung is thrilled with this change at Google. But I do buy the theory that if Google manages this correctly, it could pull Android AI as a whole along with it. Well, and you're talking about phones. We've been talking about phones mainly, but it's not just going to be the phones, right? It's going to be in the TVs and the watches and all the other places, too, where Samsung doesn't have as big a sharehold, right? Samsung TVs, they sell a lot of TVs, mainly to Neelai.

57:08Tizen, baby. I love it. Oh, that's a good sound. Actually, the Tizen startup sound on the TV. It's like... Just sounds. Episode four. But there is all this other stuff. And in those cases, yes, this makes a lot of sense. Okay, let me give you the counter example. Okay. Just before you go off into Android TV, because there's nothing I want to talk about more about the raging success of Android TV. It's all you think about, I know. Google bought Motorola famously. Yeah. And Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, who worked at Google at that time, is another CS story. He was walking around CS and he saw how hard Samsung was skinning Android, got furious, locked into a battle with Samsung to bring them back into the fold and ruin Android less.

58:02Yeah. Touch whiz. And the deal was Google had to sell Motorola to Lenovo. That was the concession that Samsung extracted to stop it. like it wasn't because I yelled at them about making bloop bloop sounds and having making everyone go to the bathroom because of touchwiz it was because Andy Rubin was like what are you doing I will sell Motorola and stop competing with you directly if you real touchwiz back in that's a lot right and many things have happened since then we've now it's called one UI like it's all different now Google since then bought the failing HTC turn that into whatever pixels we have now.

58:42Like, the relationships are different. It seems like the tensions are different. But there is actually history of Samsung being so irritated that Google would compete with it head up by buying Motorola that it started peeling people off and Google had to make the big concession. Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, touch with sucked. Like, it was hurting Samsung, Wasn't it? You know, many people. It was hurting me to look at it. So I just assume. Famously, someone has called this show and insisted that ladies love the Wiz. This is a real thing that has happened on the show before. I forgot about that.

59:21Big Papa Joe, baby. We'll run the clip. We'll put the clip in the show notes. That's a real thing that has happened. We've been doing this show for a very long time. Yes. I don't know if people like Dutch Wiz or not. I don't know if that was a good idea. I'm just saying that tension was there. And part of the reason Tizen exists is because Samsung wanted its own operating system. It does not want to – it wants to be in control of its future. Right. And it has this massive dependency on Google and phones. And it did not want that in TVs. Anywhere else, it doesn't want these dependencies. I'm just saying, you look at this and you're like, oh, they're – you know, you do your drunk thousand-yard squint at this org chart change.

1:00:01Like, oh, they're walking right back into it. I call that the 2am Liz text. Yeah, I think that's right. I guess I think the thing that is different from 10 years ago is like, where are you going to go? Like Samsung knows Tizen is not a move at this point. There's just no there's no option outside of Android. If you are a smartphone manufacturer, Samsung, if it made Android worse or tried to go to the AOSP route and build their own apps, like it didn't work last time and it super wouldn't work this time yeah and the other side is if you believe that ai is the thing you need google more than ever because like samsung has been way out in front of promoting gemini it's getting a lot of these gemini features ahead of pixels in some cases like i think if if you believe in the ai revolution samsung is actually sort of forced to increase its dependency on google not try to get away from it i mean what What if they end up going with like Harmony OS or whatever, Hallways?

1:01:34operating system is on, right? Got us there. Yeah, it was coming, inevitably. Yeah. I'm hopeful for a more focused, faster Google. That's what Rick is saying he wants to do. He wants to move everything faster. He wants to ship more things. I think the best thing Google could do would kill even more products, actually, right now. Just reduce the number of Google products by half and then loudly announce that it will just keep iterating those products for five years. That'd be cool. That would be a huge change. Do you remember in, like, 2011 when Larry Page came back as CEO and he did, I think it was on an investor call, said he gave the whole more wood behind fewer arrows speech, and then Google promptly killed a whole bunch of stuff that it had been working on.

1:02:18This is just the Google cycle, right? They realize, oh, we're not making enough money and or the world is changing. The first time it was about Google +, was like, we're going to reorient everything around social, which went super great, and that's why we all use Google +, now. it's just the same thing again right like Google sort of lets its company sprawl lets everything get weird hires lots of people builds a million messaging apps and then at some point you go oh this is actually making us interesting but it's making us slow and we have to all point in one direction now and that's what you do when you have to point in one direction and for Google that one direction is very much AI like they made a couple of other little org changes today as part of this announcement at DeepMind and Google Research and elsewhere and like Sundar Pichai in particular is very clear that the message is like move faster and move towards ai like that is google's job for the foreseeable future will it work yes because google is a famously well-run company with a culture and structure that makes total sense all right well google io is coming up next month yeah that's right and i anticipate we will we end up talking to all of these folks at i every year so uh we'll just see how it's going we're like one month in did it work just stare really hard and then AI Sundar Pichai will say yes it did and then that'll be it you know we have meta is competing with chat GPT on our list here they announced AI products they're everywhere you can chat with a meta AI on literally any meta surface you can think of Instagram WhatsApp for some reason have you done that no I have gone directly to meta.ai and only asked to produce images of Jesus made of spaghetti

1:03:58the true correct use which it won't do it will not produce any religious iconography if you ask it to produce images of a middle eastern man from ancient times made of spaghetti it will happily do that but it's not Jesus per se you know you can it's open to interpretation you can get to a state you can prompt engineer your way into something that I Make it look more Jesus-y. So the reason I mention this, just to point out, this has been going on for months now. Crazy AI-generated images are constantly going viral on Facebook. The last one, I think our friends at Hard Fork covered it. Jesus is a crab.

1:04:44Just like hundreds of thousands of likes. Was there a shrimp? There's crab and shrimp. Oh, there's crab and shrimp. Oh, I got deep into shrimp Jesus. I totally missed crab. Yeah, I think hard fork was shrimp Jesus. There's also, you know, carcinization is like a real phenomenon in evolution where everything turns into a crab. And that's been true of AI-generated Jesus as well on these platforms. And then the one that just killed me, it's a quick post on this. I wrote it. You can go into it. The images of Jesus made of spaghetti on the Lambo also made of spaghetti. Oh, my God. It was so good. The last one I saw had 36 ,000 likes.

1:05:19Oh, my God. It's very good. and I you know if meta is going to release AI tools we got to see if we can just close the loop yeah and the answer is no actually that spaghetti Jesus on a Lambo is not nearly as good as the ones that are currently on meta's other platforms so whatever tool the spammers are using a little bit ahead of meta's tools currently I like that that's good for them meta should always be a little bit behind its own users that feels right I do think it's interesting though that part of this also meta released llama three which is the new version of its own uh llm and it seems in a very real way like we have a pretty strong sort of four-party race right now between claude from anthropic uh gpt whatever gemini and now llama to be like the model we're in this space where it's like it feels like computer chips from a million years ago when like every subsequent one that comes out every two weeks is like a little bit faster and just the the sort of speed and success is going up really fast but these four companies are all like deep in it they have a ton of money they're very invested and it is it is kind of happening really fast yeah although i don't know that it's quite like computer chips and that they are all bad in different ways fair right like as chat bots uh molly white who uh writes web three is going just great she's had a newsletter she's like i'm kind of interested in this like I'm more positive on it than people think given how she feels about cryptocurrency.

1:06:51We'll link to the newsletter as well. But she's like, I asked it to write this newsletter and she has all the results of all the four. And she's like, the thing about them is I told it to write like me and it just is scolding you. Like they write like angry school teachers, I think was her phrase. And it's like that's the thing. Like they can generate copy. Is there a reliable way for anyone to say whether the copy is generated is getting better or worse? even within a single model or between them. As a critic and an editor, yes. But I don't want to read it all. But you look at four columns of middling work, and you're like, I'm not going to rank these.

1:07:31They're all garbage. All of you get D minuses. Get out of here. Well, in that way, it's actually kind of an interesting parallel to the computer chips thing, because we're in the phase where they're all passing benchmark tests with increasingly impressive scores that don't mean much to real people yet. And the question is like, is anyone actually going to make real use of the sort of raw capability of this stuff that means anything to anybody? And so far, the answer is largely not really. Yeah. But I do think one interesting piece of the meta puzzle, at least, is it has massive distribution and is 0 % afraid of using it.

1:08:06Like if you use a meta product, boy, is there AI next to you now. It's just happening. Here it is. Just talking to you. Meta's AI showed up in a Facebook group for people with gifted and disabled children, made up a child it had, and said it was very happy in the New York City public schools. Oh, no. Yeah, that's just a thing. And someone said, is this Black Mirror? And the AI responded, no, it's not. It's just me, Meta AI. It was like a story in 404, which we also link many links to everyone. I'm just saying the most notable stuff about this era. And I was like, when it's going a little sideways.

1:08:40Yeah. I mean they've gotten really really good at making machines that are impressive at confidently lying and that's always been the goal just go put a little suit on it and have it run for office like it's got it down finally a president I can get behind yeah llama 3 it's like I'm shrimp Jesus I'm proud to be an American that's enough AI talk let's talk about the real thing mini LED televisions Yeah, we got the TVs It's been heavy, man Sorry, David Policy updates, there's been Europeans AI stands for awesome interpolation Alright, so Sony This is the most important story of the year I'm with you For now, until next week I'm telling you There's a revolution in TVs happening Just lock in All the TV makers are like Neil, I can't sit Yeah, because I do.

1:09:42So at CS this last year, we saw a bunch of mini-LED televisions. I confidently predicted that mini-LEDs would bring prices down and people would start buying bigger TVs. There's a little bit of data somewhere. There's a little bit of data about some other thing that I'll talk about in a second. Sony has started skipping CS. They've done it for years. They announced their TVs this year. Sony slowly pulling back from OLEDs, which is really interesting. So the OLED I have, the A95L, QD OLED, quantum dot OLED, very bright, very colorful. They're just sticking around. No updates to the flagship OLED in the Sony.

1:10:18Wow. All of the flagship TVs are mini-LED TVs. They're the Bravia 9s. Sony won't tell you how many backlight zones they have. They will just tell you increasing percentages. Incredible chart. They're just like 325 % more dimming zones. Just more. Just more. Don't worry about it. It's just a lot. And that's 325 % more than last year's X95L, which I've seen, which is a beautiful TV that only if you're paying attention to do you see any blooming. Now, it's brighter. There's 325 % more zones. I'm anticipating that there will be no blooming or it will be even harder to see, which means you can now get gigantic, super bright LED bright TV with the black levels of OLED without the burn-in problems.

1:11:10How much does that cost? And it's better for gaming because it's faster refresh of LEDs. Yeah. No, I totally am all for that. And with someone with a 2017 OLED, really, you cannot understand how much I'm all for that. It's also 50 % brighter than the X95. I'm just telling you. But how much is it? They're not like a number that's good. No, Neil, I tell the people. Tell the people. What is the cheapest one of these costs? The 65-inch is$32.99, which is not out of whack with top-end OLEDs. Can I just say that price number slightly differently? Yeah. It costs$3 ,299.99. You're like sitting there. $32.99 is like, oh,$32.

1:11:55That's what a normal TV costs now. No, no. You're going to have to stay on the wall for 10 years. If you're out there cross shopping an LG G3, you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's all I'm saying. You're going to have it on your wall for two years, and then Neil I. Patel is going to come on the Verge cast in 2025 and say, listen, everybody, there's another 325 % increase. So here's the problem. So the A95 only goes up to 77 inches and the top end Brabvia nines are 85 inches. That's so much TV. Which is$5 ,499. I just bought this TV last September. Like, what am I doing? This is bad. Like, I have to send her to college, right?

1:12:32You know, like, that's going to be a couple days of college by the time she's ready to go to college. That's like some textbooks. Yeah. A single textbook. Yeah, you get 24 hours in the storm, kid. I bought a new TV. I'm just saying these TVs represent a huge shift from OLED in this market this is when it's starting to happen and I think that means the rest of the TVs are going to get cheaper these are the crazy top ends that are supposed to compete with the high end OLEDs they have insane features we're so far from the motion smoothing debate generally regular people TVs just have to turn off motion smoothing At the high end of the market now, the TVs have built-in calibrated modes for the services where the services can calibrate your TV for whatever they're streaming.

1:13:24So Prime Video calibrated on the new Sony Bravia 9s will know if you're watching a movie or you're watching Monday Night Football and recalibrate the TV for you automatically. But that will only work if you use the smart TV function they have. It's going to be not talking about the details. if you want to run Bravia Core and stream at 80 megabits per second you gotta make some sacrifices by the way there's some debate in the comments of Chris Welch's story about this about whether it's called Bravia Core or Sony Pictures Core I'll just clear it up it's only Bravia Core and Bravia TVs the only place the platform supports 80 megabits per second pure stream everywhere else it's Sony Pictures Core and it doesn't have the one feature that's good so Sony Pictures Core is the bad one Sony Pictures Core is like what if we made a not good streaming service with a small cat like what if we made a streaming service where you opened it and it was like Madam Web is the thing we got you turn it off yeah I just didn't I didn't redeem my credits for Madam Web no I will say Sony does a thing that I appreciate which is they just they make the TV that is just the dope TV.

1:14:40And they're like, whatever it costs, no problem. But like this$5 ,500 one is enormous. It has, uh, what was it called? Like X wide angle for the viewing angle stuff. It has amazing speakers. It's like, I just, Sony does the thing that I like where they're like, here is the luxury version. And we are just going to slowly make that one cheaper over time. And someday in 2061, I will own this exact TV in my house. And I can't look, I can't, It's going to take a long time. So that's the Bravi 9, the top ends. So the flagship Sony TVs this year are mini LEDs and my A95, which we'll just soldier on. Yeah.

1:15:17Well, I mean, that's good, though, because you don't have – do you have regret buying it? Do you have the FOMO? I don't want to say it this time. Then the one step down, the Bravi 8s, are regular OLEDs, not the QD OLEDs that I have in the A95. they've got all the same stuff but you can just see Sony is their biggest, best, their push is mini LEDs. I think the rest of the industry will follow them. Then there's actually cheaper mini LED TVs. They don't have all the stuff. I think you use cheaper generously. It's a very relative term. $2 ,300 for a 65 inch mini LED set that is as good as the X95 is dead on competitive with an OLED.

1:15:57With a high end OLED. I think I need to just one in my house next to my 2017 OLED to see which is better. I got to like get them next to each other and see if it's truly better. All right. So I will end my gushing over Sony's television, which I haven't seen. I don't know if these are as good as I want them to be. I don't know what 325 % more dimming zones mean. I don't know if these auto calibrated modes that require to use their weird software that basically tries to like ransom you into enabling Samba Interactive TV, which watches your every move like a hawk to sell it to some snarling database.

1:16:31I don't know. Alright, that's all just there. I'm just saying picture quality wise, you can see what's happening in this market. Next to that is the fucking frame TV which is like dominating the charts and I just want to tell this story about the rudest text you can send me. The rudest text I've ever received and I feel comfortable saying this because I posted about it and Casey revealed himself. Yeah. So Casey and I friends as you can tell by the tone of my voice and so you know he just got in your house he's like everyone's excited everyone's buying stuff i just got in your house and he's like should i buy a frame tv he sent me this text at 12 30 in the morning and i he's on the west coast on the east coast and i i believe this conversation took another full hour like i was like i can't let this go something's wrong in the internet yeah yeah you like you couldn't sleep that night until you get that done i tried so hard to make this man buy an lgg i was like you play video games you like quality why did he want the frame because in the end it was revealed that all of the people he was asking own frame TVs including me I own two one's just in the studio in the podcast studio in my house it just shows the decoder logo that's all it does it does have a beautiful bezel it was sure I'm trying to help you here Neela I'm trying, I'm trying.

1:17:53The frame TV is like a 10-year-old LCD panel with a single backlight, no dimming zones. It's just a bad TV. Yeah. But people like it because the display is matte, and most people don't actually watch their TVs anymore. They watch TikTok. Can I float a theory at you? That maybe people don't care about 325 % more dimming zones anymore. Is it possible? They don't care about TVs anymore. I think the frame TV is the harbinger of doom. What's the problem? What is the thing all streaming services are facing? People are saying, okay, there's going to be a big black rectangle in my house. I want it to look best when it's off because it's mostly off.

1:18:34Wait. I just realized the Sony TV is basically like a cool gaming PC to the frame's iMac. I don't think I've ever wanted to melt as much as I currently wish to melt. You have so many iMacs in your house, Eli. Eli, this is why it just sounds is going to be a huge hit on Netflix because nobody watches their TV anyway. It's just sound while you look at TikTok. It's going to be incredible. But I'm saying, like, I think I keep making this joke that I could write 10 ,000 words with the frame TV. It definitely could. Maybe I just need to, like, rant into a camera for an hour. We can edit it together.

1:19:12But all I'm saying is you look at the market. You look at the quality of TVs that are coming. There's a technology shift in the TV industry underway right now with these many LEDs. I think they're going to be really cool. And then you look at what people are spending the money on, like what people think the best TV on the market is, what's still priced. You are worried about these prices. Go look at the frame when it's not on sale. It's insane. You're buying a 2016, 2017 vintage edge-lit LCD. It's bad. And they're charging the prices of an OLED because the display is matte and you can pay$52 for the art store.

1:19:47and people are like, that's the best TV you can buy. That's why Samsung will stick with Android. Tizen. On the phone. Oh. On the phone. It all comes back to the phone in Android. Why is that? I just forgot. Because the Tizen app store is killing it on the frame. That was a bad joke. Keep going. Okay, we'll just cut that part. Anyway, all I'm saying, I could just keep ranting about this forever. Forever and ever and ever. I like it, though. I'm telling you the frame TV is the harbinger of doom. for the streaming services.

1:20:21Because people are like, we don't watch this thing. We're going to pay a premium. Oh, you're saying because the TV is so crappy that when they do watch it, they'll be like, what's the point? People are buying a TV intentionally to not watch it, is what I'm saying. The point of a TV is no longer to be watched. Right, it's to just be there. It's like a binky. If I need a TV, I'll turn on this thing and I don't really care what it looks like. the rest of the time it's going to show me a picture Is it that many people though? I would argue the Frame TV is Samsung's most important product. It is the product that has the most impact on the culture today A thousand words, 10 ,000 words 15 ,000 words I want to read all of these words I host two podcasts a week I can't even justify to this group of people that we should talk about the Frame TV that much Everyone, I need to take a week off I got a lot of emails asking for your 10 ,000 words on the frame TV.

1:21:16So I think we're going to have to just do this at some point. Yeah, we'll carve the time out. We'll carve the time out. All right, let's do one more TV related. Just to end this segment in a place of hope and optimism. Oh, no. Are we about to go from Neelize crazy to Kranz is crazy? Yes. Oh, no. Because one of the things I noticed in the Sony story was that these TVs all have ATSC 2.0 tuners in them. Yeah. And this week was the big broadcasting conference in Las Vegas, NAB, and everybody was making lots of announcements. And the big announcement, some of the big announcements I was excited about was from Roxy, who we covered back at CES, and NBCUniversal, Peacock, some sort of distantly related cousin of ours.

1:22:02There's no way. I'm sorry. There's no way Peacock is a distantly. Comcast? Yes. Is a part investor in us. Okay. And Peacock. We're distinct cousins. Sure. I don't. We don't know each other. That means I'm basically friends with Zooey Deschanel. So I'm good with that. Basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's fine. That's the worst disclosure we've ever had. I'm basically friends with Zooey Deschanel. That's the new disclosure. sure. But they both announced that they were bringing new technology to ATSC 3.0. Right now, there's a couple of channels in the country that broadcast on this spectrum that use ATSC 3.0, not a lot.

1:22:48And right now, if you go and you watch shows on those channels, it's just normal TV. There's no reason to be excited. But coming soon, because of Roxy, you're going to be able to pause and skip in your local news. And then on the Today Show, which I know everyone listening is a huge fan of, you'll be able to do the same through the NBC Universal stuff. And so it's like, it's a little bit, little something happening there. And eventually it could be something really cool. I still keep being like, one of these days Peacock is just going to be on NBC and that'll just be the new NBC. And it'll distribute over there.

1:23:28I got you. One day. The thing I want to reveal about this story is that when Alex was writing it, she realized that her TV does not have ATSC 3.0. Oh, no. It does now. Get out there. I bought that tuner immediately. You bought a tuner. Bravia nines. All right, we got to take a break. I'm killing it. I've worn David down. This is what you get. This is your fault. My TCL Roku TV is quaking over here. Oh, my God. No, that's just upsetting. Don't say you have a TCL Roku on this podcast. Speaking of TVs that are ruthlessly mining your data. Yeah. It's awful. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be right back with David Pierce's TikTok headline blitz.

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1:27:03All right, we're back. I would say that it's when there's not quite enough news is when our show goes the longest. I don't know why that is, but that has been true for 10 years. I think it's when I give you too much time to mess with the rundown before we start. I'm going to start revealing the Vergecast to you four minutes before we get recorded. Just live reacts. We could just do a box of me reacting to you doing the Vergecast the whole time. It's rare that we get a show that's so out of control that we bring up Big Papa Joe. Here we are. That's a lot. All right. We're here. We got to wrap this thing up.

1:27:36We're just way, way over the line. I promised it and now it's here David Pierce's headline blitz David take it away I would like to just briefly catch you up on all of the things that are happening with TikTok because TikTok is not banned it is still here and it is wild is just how I would say it so here's what has gone on in TikTok land just since the last time we did this show together in the studio TikTok Notes is an app that is coming out it's only available in a couple of countries but it's just straight up Instagram TikTok just did Instagram and they're like here would you like Instagram?

1:28:09TikTok made it. So that's a thing that exists. There are also now ways to buy event tickets, like concert tickets and stuff inside of TikTok, because TikTok hasn't found enough ways to sell you stuff. They want to sell you more stuff. I think that is going to work. I think all of this concert stuff is going to move inside of music apps in really interesting ways. And I think TikTok is going to do it first, and it's going to be really fascinating. There's been a bunch of non-news news about the TikTok divestment stuff. There's a new bill in the house that is being attached to uh aid to foreign countries that is partly now also a tiktok ban so it's possible that that is going to move to the senate much more quickly where they're going to have to talk about divestment and banning the president has said that he's going to potentially delay a ban another six months to make this all happen again uh tiktok has said it's going to restrict people who keep posting problematic stuff on the for you feed uh it also was reported this week that all of this project texas stuff which i would say we have relentlessly made fun of on this show for a long time uh is basically just a bunch of nonsense and that bite dance has access to lots of us users tiktok data uh twitch and spotify continue to do their best tiktok impressions uh spotify is rolling out a remix thing so you can start to play with music in the same way that you can play with sounds and speed them up on tiktok twitch is doing a for you feed basically i don't know how to say it more than that they just did a for you fade for Twitch, which I think is actually very smart.

1:29:39The world is TikTok now. Like everybody is trying to become TikTok and TikTok is trying to become everybody else. And maybe it'll be banned and maybe it won't. And that's all I got. I will say that TikTok trying to sell stuff relentlessly is just reaching new levels of weirdness for me personally. I found a solution. Okay. Okay. Here's what you guys are going to do. You're going to go on TikTok and you're going to search deep talk, one word, deep talk. And then you're going to watch a bunch of those videos. They're going to be really weird. They're going to be nonsensical. You're going to be really confused.

1:30:11You're going to be like, this is just looks like what Kranz's brain looks like on the inside. And you like a few of those and then you're on deep talk and you're no longer on shop talk. Okay. It's great. I would, when I say all AI right now, my experience with it is like weird and bad. TikTok believes I want to coil things that look like ropes so much. It's like you're going to buy a garden hose reel. You're going to buy an extension cord reel. You're going to buy a USB cord reel, which I don't think you should be doing at all. It's just like, have you thought about reels? Buy them. Just buy them now.

1:30:46And the pitches are increasingly abstract and a little threatening. They're like, you will feel guilt if you don't get in on this hose reel deal now. Mine is a puppet. It's already bad. It's already bad, Alex. Skateboarding on a leaf over water. That's all my TikTok is right now. And it's great. I'm like, I don't know what the hell's happening here. I'm just saying there are people out there right now who have bought upwards of a dozen hose reels because this algorithm has just ruthlessly manipulated them. Yeah. I mean, I did buy something not directly from TikTok, but they showed me a strainer.

1:31:23I went and got it on Amazon. It's great. We'll see. Do we have a sense of the Senate bill might be moving? Do we have a sense if it's going to happen or not? At the moment, not exactly. But Lauren Feiner just wrote a really good story that the general assumption is that because it's tied to foreign aid, the Senate is basically going to have no choice but to talk about it. Like where we landed with the last bill is the Senate is just sort of studiously pretending it doesn't exist. That is going to be less possible now. and it's I think it's going to get raised one way or another where it goes seems to be anyone's guess alright we have time for I think two more that was David's Headline Blitz everyone congratulate David please send him a note if you'd like more Headline Blitz in the future you can sponsor the Headline Blitz inside of the lightning round if you'd like to it's available for sponsorships at this time we're still we're very close just everyone close your eyes and send good vibes for our first lightning round sponsor and then we'll move on to the Headline Blitz alright Alex what you got yeah so So Boston Dynamics, they make the robots.

1:32:23That's a good one. Yeah, they make the robots. Earlier this week, they said goodbye to Atlas. And then the very next day, they said hello to new Atlas in the most terrifying video of all time. Yeah. Where like the legs did like some weird 360 degree hinge stuff. The head looks like some sort of lamp. It basically looks like a video game monster. And then we wrote about how it needs to have hair. We did do that. That was a good pitch from Alex. Yeah. And I said, just make sure it's overreported. And boy, did Eve Pizer overreport the story of why robots need hair. Just asking directly some poor scientist, do you think the robot would be less creepy with fur?

1:33:02And the robot's like, no. The scientist was like, not the robot. You don't ask the robot what would make it less creepy. I'm sorry.

1:33:13Don't worry about it. Was this written by a robot? Yeah. Give the robot's hair, written by a robot. You should watch the video. Our former Verge reporter, James Vincent, I believe his post on the video was, it's funny that Boston Dynamics just leaned directly into terrifying. Yeah, just horrifying. Horrifying thing. It's very good because it looks like a person, but it moves like a horror movie. This is probably what the person on the train was watching. All right, here's mine. I just want to end with this because I'm just going to say it. So this is mine. I just want to end with this. I don't know why I think this is so funny.

1:33:53Samsung is requiring its executives to come to work for six days a week now to, quote, inject a sense of crisis. Yeah, they got to get around that Google reorg. Yeah. Wait, so Samsung is like, we want to make this worse for everyone. So, right. They've had disappointing financial results. Sales are down. They fell short of expectations in 2023. It's a crisis. We need to make you feel the crisis. The executives are now doing a six-day work week until something. And I – you know, theoretically I'm an executive at this organization. I feel like if I was like I'm going to come to work one extra day a week, but it's just executives having ideas about how to not come to work anymore.

1:34:41I feel like our staff would be like, you're going to have the worst ideas in the world. Have fun by yourself. It's like, here's what we need. Everyone have more meetings on Saturday about how it's a crisis. That will solve the crisis. I cannot wait for the weird shit Samsung is about to start doing. Like just fully. They just did a buy one, get one free TV deal. That's a six day work week idea. Like fully a six day work week idea. they're going to start giving away toasters when you open a bank. It's going to be incredible. They're going to have the wobbly guy in the lots outside the best spot.

1:35:19Is Bixby coming back? Bixby, full Bixby, but like goth Bixby. Like get some attention. I finally saw the video of what's her name. Just crawling out of the water. Go, go, JoJo. Bixby's doing a country album. Let's see if that works. Like, can you imagine what a bunch of executives, unconstrained by the reality of making or doing anything. Yeah. Trapped in the office together on Saturday. Told it's a crisis and they can't go home on Saturdays until the crisis. Just imagine. It's going to be incredible. I can't wait for what happens this year. We're going to get some cool stuff. Every TV is a 3D TV.

1:35:59Like just anything. Curved and with AI inside. It's good. Yeah. The whole rest of the world. Drew Houston on Decoder is like, we're going fully remote. You don't push your employees. You get better innovation. Samsung's like, Saturdays. Yeah. We're just going to stand over you and breathe loudly. Someone there is currently pitching, bringing back the Galaxy Note, but now it has two styluses. And everybody is freaking out about how exciting it is. Right. It's just a mad, like in the lead times on new products are long. Yeah. So like four years from now, we're going to be like, what on earth? Yeah, instead of a stylus, it's nunchucks, and it's going to be epic.

1:36:40We're going to look back on today. Yeah. You can directly trace it. Just boop all the way back to that. It's going to be a good time. What if it's a laptop, but it's 54 inches? All I'm saying is I'm going to start calling whatever happens next. We just have to start calling it Saturday Samsung. Yeah. Just as a family. Can we agree on that? Yes, totally. Okay. As a person who is an aficionado of weird Sony, I am very hopeful for the opportunity Saturday Samsung, I pray. Party speakers. Right? Where are they? It's coming. Someone is going to ask that Saturday. Where's Samsung's answer to ULT Pro?

1:37:16Somewhere. It's coming. What was that little robot we saw that could—Bali. I was just about to say, Bali is about to get a lot of shine at Saturday Samsung. Bali is a main character. Go, Bali, go. All right. That's it. We're way over time. We're just completely over. I apologize, but I don't apologize because the feedback we get is you'd like this to be six hours long. So we'll do that next week. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast.

1:37:45And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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