Hello and goodbye to the MacBook Air

30:12That black plastic MacBook was a triumph. It was. All right. We should move on from just navel gazing with MacBook Air. Look, release a wedge shaped computer and Alex will buy it. I will say the fact that I cannot wait for our reviews because if they actually got rid of the fingerprintiness on the midnight one, that might be the thing that makes me actually kind of lust after an M3. MacBook Air because the M2 one looked great, but then you touch it and it's gross forever. And hopefully they fix that. So we are in different places because the other rumor is that they're going to refresh the iPad lineup and actually make it make sense that they will have an iPad Pro and iPad Air and then the iPad Air and the iPad Pro are pretty fuzzy.

30:52Have you seen the rumor that there's not going to be a 12.9 inch iPad Air? Because that makes sense. Yeah. What if we had more models, Neal? Can I interest you in more iPads? Every now and again, I'm reminded that Tim Cook is a supply chain expert. He's like, what if I just flex on my ability to manage the complexity of the supply chain? That's what I got. You want 4 ,000 SKUs? I got you. 8 ,000. Come at me. I'm Tim Cook. You can just do it. He's like, how many manufacturers in how many countries? Double. Why are you still in the room? By the way, that's the most famous Tim Cook story I think about all the time.

31:30When he had the meeting about some problem in China and he looked at his executive and he's like, why are you still here? and the guy got up and flew to China. Didn't go home. Didn't pack a bag. Just went straight to China. Just went straight to China. Very good. And that's how you get a 12.9 inch iPad Air. He's like, what are you doing? This isn't enough, excuse. Get out of here. I don't know what his meetings are like at all. Is that, you should come on Decoder, Tim. Please tell me what actually goes on in your life. What I think is really interesting about the iPads is they're going to put an OLED screen in an iPad Pro and I do not need to upgrade my iPad Pro and I will buy that product so fast.

32:07Yes, 100%. Why? Because OLED. Why? Why am I going to do that? It's the same reason you have a stupid Sony TV. It's the same reason. There is just a subset of people in the world headlined by one Nilay Patel who if you just say the word OLED, they will start just hawking money in your general direction. And when you run out of ideas, you just say OLED now and Nilay buys it. By the way, can I just say, Becky and I watched Anyone But You on Bravia Core on the new Sony OLED. And boy, if there's one movie that does not need to be streamed at 80 megabits per second, it is Anything But You. Nothing in this movie is moving fast.

32:49But that doubles the amount of stuff that's on Bravia Core, so that's pretty exciting. It's like, they got one. They did it. Anyhow, I hope they can reconcile the iPad line a little bit with all of these changes. And actually be like, okay, the Pro has the nicest display. Yeah. Not, yeah, the same display with a nicer backlight. We'll see. None of this stuff is going to get an event. So we will have very little opportunity to ask questions about it. You know, like we're going to get them and we'll review them and that will be that. But I think it's funny that Apple doesn't think adding up its biggest products and announcing them all at once merits a moment anymore.

33:27Because they're not phones. They're in a place where they have to do really, really flashy things. I think they only do the phone because people expect them to do the phone. I honestly think with the way they're going right now, unless they change the phone in some giant way, that if the next iPhone is a camera bump and a processor bump, the argument to not do an event based on what they're doing here is right there. But there's no way they can't do an iPhone event. That's their moment every year. Yeah. I do think we're ramping up towards a pretty huge WWDC in June for a variety of reasons. All the AI stuff is rumored to be coming then.

34:02And I think if you want to see a sort of software-led hardware cycle coming, I think it probably starts at WWDC. Yeah, I agree with that. And I'm very curious to see the best consumer laptop for AI is a clear potential hint towards the next version of macOS and iOS will have some actual AI features in it. Besides whatever LLM they claim is powering the world's worst autocorrect on the iPhone keyboard. We should talk about the Microsoft news because right next to all of this is the Surface Pro 10, Surface Laptop 6. Alex, what's going on there? Yeah, there's some confusion there. Tom was doing some investigating.

34:39And because we had one – we had Zach Bowden, I believe, say that we were going to get a whole new line of Surfaces with OLEDs in them announced this month. It sounds like we're going to get something announced this month, but it's going to be more for like commercial. stuff. And then we'll get some consumer stuff later, including some surfaces with OLEDs and ARM processors. But we're not really sure if the ARM processors are going to be exclusive to the consumer ones or if we'll also get Intel in them. So there's still, things are up in the air, but we're going to be getting some new surfaces this year.

35:18It sounds like we're going to get a pretty big redesign on the Surface Pro and the Surface laptop for consumers, but not necessarily the commercial version yeah and the fascinating thing here is that panos penne is no longer at microsoft to run this stuff so whether or not there is a mission change for surface or philosophy change for surface i think is kind of up but we won't see it this time i think like just the the product rev cycles are so long that like panos would have led whatever these are so i think if there is an event at which they talk about it i think that will be interesting but also we're probably a generation or maybe even two away from new leaders showing big changes uh but i also kind of feel like like i loved the surface laptop at the beginning loved it it was so nicely designed it was like soft and comfortable it came in those good colors the battery life was like i loved that thing and i feel like both the pro and the laptop are kind of long in the tooth at this point it feels like both are in need of kind of a new idea about what they're supposed to do for you and i'm sure microsoft will tell you a whole ai story and there will be a co-pilot button and everything will be everything but for me like the there there are bits and pieces of the design stuff that tom has been talking about but i'm really curious to see if there is a bigger shift in the works here yeah and that thing about the cycles being long when panos panay was out there posting that how excited he was about the Alexa hub.

36:45I was like, you didn't know that was coming. Right. Yeah. That literally was finished before you started working. I'm like, I wish I could show up and be like, I'm excited about other people's ideas too. I'm in charge now. I agree with you, but I do think just how they position these products after the leader is gone and there is some new leadership that has to be accountable for even launching them. Like one thing you do is not make them. Yeah. That's a choice, but I think they're going to do it. I think they're going to launch them. And I think Microsoft has to be in the game. And yet maybe they have a co-pilot button on them.

37:18Maybe they put ChatGPT right in the camera just to look at you. Like, here's some weird ideas I had. You should leave your wife. That's famously what ChatGPT said to – you remember. Yeah. It's very morning for Kevin Roos. Yeah. So does Kevin. So do many readers of the New York Times. But all of that, right, is like you have to make these products for a reason. and one thing we definitely just saw with Microsoft is some big rethinks of why they do things. Xbox just went through a huge rethink of what is Xbox? What are we doing? Why do we make this stuff? The answer was we're going to put the games on other people's platforms now.

38:00There's more money to be made on the games than making the games put hardware in your living room. I wonder if Surface is in that place too. I think that's very possible. It's going to be really interesting to see if microsoft tries to tell a consumer story about these things or is just like buy these for your point of sale people at work which i think it might like i think one of the reasons panos left was reportedly that microsoft was pulling back on some of the ambitions for this stuff and that i think you might be right that we might start to see pretty fast yeah all right we should take a break and we should come back it's time to get the eurozone which is a real thing.

38:40It's a really cool name for a very boring idea. But we're going to leave and come back. And then the Verchast goes to the Eurozone. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is when the sales start coming in. If your business is looking to start selling online, Shopify has everything you need to create your online store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S., from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style.

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42:18Alright, we're back. To clarify for our European listeners, the Eurozone is where they take the Euro. It is a very cool name for a very boring thing. Places where you can spend the Euro, which is only 20 of the 27 countries in the EU. The Eurozone is also an amusement park that's just kind of like, it's just Europe everywhere. It's like Epcot, but it's all Europe. You're just like, here's some cheese, chocolates. Everyone's very trim. Everyone's walking so much, and even though they eat the carbs and the dairy, Eurozone. You know, there's a proposal in the EU to relabel the fat burning zone on treadmills as the Eurozone.

43:03Had me the first half. I'm not going to lie. Oh, boy. So look, we're not going to the Eurozone. All right. We're going to the bigger Venn diagram of the Eurozone, the EU itself. Welcome. The EU won't stop. They're doing things. They love regulating. companies. It's what they do. And maybe they're going to do a good job this time. Maybe some real changes will happen. We can talk about some changes in the past, which I think informed changes here. But the Digital Markets Act has arrived today, Wednesday, March 6th, the day we are speaking is the day it has gone into effect. A bunch of big platforms have been designated as gatekeepers and they have to change how they work.

43:45They have to become more interoperable. They have to provide more choices to consumers. All kinds of things are happening. David, can you run us down? There's quite a few. Sure. So this basically hits six companies. You have Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. There is a very real one of these things is not like the others thing with ByteDance there, which I actually think is very interesting and we should talk about. But essentially, all of these companies have been designated as, like you said, gatekeepers, which means they are the ones who are so powerful and so important that they should not be allowed to just do whatever they want.

44:21And the way that the EU regulates that and has decided has been complicated and everybody is appealing everything and it's all kind of a mess. But essentially, we can go through each company if you'd like to, but essentially the way it has boiled down is that these companies now have to offer more transparency and data protections for users. And that shows up in a bunch of different ways. Amazon has had to give advertisers more transparency over like what they're doing and how their ads are doing, which is a strange and sort of obvious seeming thing. TikTok is now letting you pull a lot of your data out of TikTok and put it into other apps that support it.

44:58Meta is giving you more ways to protect your data and not have it shared across meta services. So the idea is like your data should be your data. This is one of the things the EU has been harping on for a long time, right? That I should be in control of my data about me on the internet. And all of these six companies are having to do a lot more. Then there are big debates about app stores. I think this one's largely about Apple, at least from what we've seen so far, but we'll hit Google and the Play Store in pretty real ways, too. There's the question of, like, are you allowed to build in your own apps and preference them over others?

45:32So Microsoft in the EU is now allowing you to disable Bing and uninstall Edge and a bunch of other Microsoft apps. So the idea is just these big companies relentlessly self-preference themselves. And the EU is essentially saying you have to stop doing that. And there's a fallout in a million directions from that. But that is, I think, kind of the top line as I've come to think about it. Yeah. And what's really interesting about that is the amount of big businesses that exist in the world that are organized or at least adapted to that self-preferencing. Yeah. Google search is, I think, maybe the clearest example of this in the world.

46:08Many, many huge industries are just adapted to the notion that Google is where people search for things. Totally. So today I think a bunch of travel services like flight airlines and hotels and other kinds of things put out a letter that's like, we know Google is going to change, but it should still send us as much traffic as it used to before. Right. And there's like a fear that like change will lead to a different result as opposed to somehow being better, but the same, which is a fascinating way to think about regulatory change. The other thing that's happening is that the changes are hitting things that have never been different.

46:45In particular, a bunch of Apple services. Right. I think those two things are actually really aligned. And I'd never really thought about it like that until you just said that. But there is this fascinating thing where it has been like this for so long that actually, even if in theory, some of these things are going to get better and more pro competition and more fair, which there are a lot of smart people who argue it's actually going to be none of those things. But even if it is those things, it's still going to screw up all of the businesses that are going to be affected by it just because it has been this way for so long.

47:18And just the sheer amount of change that is going to come for all of these companies, even if it ends up being good in the end, is going to be such a like crazy whirlwind of new stuff over the next 12 months that it's going to like it's going to change a lot of things. And we should say almost all of this is happening just in the EU and the EEA, the European economic area. And if I'm being honest, I don't totally understand the distinction, but I know our international team gets really mad when we say one and it's not the other. So just know that it is whichever one of those is correct, is what I'm saying.

47:52but we expected a lot of this to be like big global change. I think that the idea was whatever what happened in the EU would sort of roll out everywhere in the world. And that is in almost every case not happening at all. And in fact, what's happening is like the European internet is going to be one thing and the rest of the world is going to be another. So I think one of the reasons we all thought this would happen is I always think about the model of car regulation in the United States. California is a huge market for cars in the United States. It passes some rules. The easiest way to make cars is to make them comply to California's rules.

48:26And so California's rules sort of affect everybody else across the country because the cars are built for California, like emission standards and things like that all happen for California. You can see, okay, Europe's a big market. They're going to pass some rules. We're going to have to design the products for the most constricted market that will hit the United States as well. And what all of these companies are saying is, no, our monopolies are pretty good, actually. So we're going to go ahead and spend more money making weird special European versions of our products. And then unless you force us to, we're going to keep taking the profits, the monopoly profits everywhere else.

48:58And that is a rational response. Like many, many, many things are different in the United States versus Europe. Like Europe has a bunch of different regulations than we do. But it's weird because I think people assume an idealism of some of these companies that what they want is to compete or what they want is a more level playing field for consumers. And here it's pretty naked that what they want is to preserve their monopoly profits. So they will do a bunch of extra work over there to make a different European internet. And unless they are forced that whatever those goals are will never come here or anywhere else.

49:37Right. Yeah. And I think at this moment, there's pretty strong indications that they're right to make that bet that whatever is happening there is not going to percolate elsewhere because so far it really hasn't uh but at least so far i mean am i right to say that the thing that's going to hit the most people most quickly is this stuff with ios right it feels like apple is the one that is like changing in the biggest ways the most quickly and i guess on the side also pissing off the most people the most quickly Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's 100 % what's going to happen because that's what everybody actually uses right now.

50:15And it's actually being changed right now in some cool ways, but mainly ways with, what is it? A lot of feelings is what Neil, I was saying earlier. It's a lot of feelings. So many feelings are happening. Apple is like screaming as it goes to do all of this. In a way that everyone is having to learn more about App Store policies than I think most of the European Union ever wanted to. I'm just kind of surprised by how mad Apple is being about all of this. How loudly angry Apple is being about all of this. It is true. And you always feel like Apple wants you to not think about all the machinations that make Apple Apple.

50:58And now the fact that like I can tell you developer deals off the top of my head feels like a problem for me, a problem for Apple, a problem for the world. Like this is a strange place we've entered into. And I think it was always going to kind of happen too, right? If they – like you guys were talking about this. If they open it up, if we start paying attention to this stuff that we didn't really pay attention to for a very long time, then, yeah, people are going to want to have these conversations about how much money Spotify is getting on the back end and that sort of thing. But at the same time, that is really bad for both Spotify and Apple's business.

51:35Yeah. Or not their business, but their reputation with the public more than anything else. Like the business is all going to keep going. Apple's going to make a lot of money with this new thing where they have to pay 50 euro cents, if she says. European Union. I believe it's pronounced doubloons. But for every download over that first million, including every app update, like that's insane. That's a lot of money. And they're being so petulant about it in a way where I'm like, you just got hit with a$2 billion fine. like yeah but do you want to get more that's what usually like so it's weird i'm just i keep being surprised by it neil i'm curious how you feel about this because i i feel like we've reached a point where this fight has been going on so long specifically between apple on one side and spotify and epic on behalf of lots of others but especially those two companies on the other side and it really seems like no one looks good in any of this fight like i i feel like everyone has lost this fight now and it's just bad times all around nobody's happy everything's worse this just seems like it sucks yeah i'm always thinking about the beginning of the app store when the thing that apple would compare it to was app distribution on pre-iphone smartphones which was largely handled by carriers and carriers were capricious and they would get in developers ways and they would charge exorbitant fees.

53:11And it was bad. Yeah. And I would just caution Apple that having a reputation for being capricious and charging huge fees and getting in developers ways and then issuing press releases saying things like Spotify has never paid us a cent to be on the iPhone is like, but everyone who has an iPhone paid you the money. Right. Yeah. They bought an iPhone. This is the problem that Apple is running into almost insistently by saying that when you have an application on someone's computer, Apple deserves a cut of what happens in that app. And that is as simple as it gets, right? Like you either agree with that proposition or you don't.

53:53When you have a computer, should the person who sold you the computer be in between you and the things you can do on that computer? There are some really good arguments for Apple being in between the iPhone customer and what they can do on the iPhone. iPhones go everywhere with people. They contain an enormous amount of their personal data. They can track you. They can be used for horrible things. They have a shitload of cameras on them, just more every year. They're like, we're up to five. You know, it's like there's a lot of reasons where you want a bunch of extremely motivated, very smart computer scientists and policy people sitting between a computer user and the things that can happen on their computer.

54:36And in particular, what software other people can run on a computer. But you have to have an exit ramp. And the reason you want to protect the computer user should be for safety, not because of money. And what's happening right now is Apple is using the moral argument for we need to keep our users safe. We need to protect them from themselves when they use these computers that go around in their pockets everywhere they go. They have pictures of their kids on them. And they're using that to justify their economic argument. And I think that's where it's falling it down. And I think that is candidly where some of the people at Apple are at risk of damaging their personal reputations inside this community.

55:14Because they keep saying it out loud. It's not even Spotify, though. For me, it's what's happening with Epic and how they were just like, okay, we don't trust you anymore, so we're going to take your developer account away again. This is what I mean. This is the one, right? Yeah. This is the one. And it happens so. It's so capricious. The DMA was announced, and Apple's compliance plan with the DMA was announced. And Epic immediately reacted by saying, we will have an app store with Fortnite on it in the EU, and the Epic Game Store is going to happen. And we're going to do it and we're going to prove that even under these rules, which we Epic think are too restrictive because there's a lot of rules.

55:50Apple's going to make all these alternative app stores under a lot of rules, which are basically designed to make them not good. Yep. Right? Like Apple's design of how alternative app stores should work on iOS under the DMA is basically meant to have it not be a viable thing. And Epic's point has been we're going to do it. We'll have Fortnite. We'll bring the other game developers on. And even under these restrictions, which we think are bad and are malicious compliance, we think it'll be good and prove the point. And Epic today, just literally today before we started podcasting, had a press conference.

56:24Tim Sweeney spoke. He took questions from reporters, including our own John Porter. And they released a bunch of emails between Epic and Apple, including emails between Tim Sweeney and Phil Schiller, where Epic applied to be a developer to make this app store in the EU under, I believe it's Epic Games Sweden. Apple wrote back to Epic and said how can we trust you? You've done all this stuff in the past. Tim Sweeney wrote to Phil Schiller and said you can trust us. Tell me what assurances you need. And they got and Apple replied at least according to the emails we have seen from Epic. Apple is free to send us some other emails.

56:59But Tim Sweeney said what other assurances do you need? And Apple replied by sending a letter from a lawyer saying you have criticized the App Store and our plan for compliance in the EU. you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy and we are revoking your app store privileges. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, why would you do that? Like, the only thing that's gonna happen is Tim Sweeney, who loves a press conference about how shitty Apple is, is gonna hold a press conference about how shitty you are. And a bunch of European regulators who you have already accused of being anti-Apple are gonna look at your behavior and fine you again.

57:34Yep. Like, this is not, like, I know a lot of kindergartners. I have a kindergartner. I know kindergartners who are more politically adept than this. I just don't understand it. And that's when I'm saying people's personal reputations. This feels like they are personally mad as opposed to playing the long game with a bunch of regulators. And just because we're speaking the day after Super Tuesday and we all have to think about the prospect of Donald Trump once again being our president, I will remind everyone that Tim Cook did the best job of managing Donald Trump than anyone, right? Donald Trump went to put a trade war up on China and Tim Cook managed Apple through a trade war.

58:18Yeah. Because he was able to distance himself personally from what Apple needed and what he probably felt and advocate for Apple's interests. And I think here there's just a collapse. Like there's just some angry people. And I think that's super weird. I really, I'm with you. I cannot make heads or tails of how this went down like this, because there was also after Apple made its announcements about what iOS 17.4 was going to be. One of the things it did that Tim Sweeney hilariously gave Apple credit for was reinstate Epic's developer account, which it had banned what feels like a million years ago now when the whole Fortnite debacle first happened and started all of the fights between Epic and Apple about this stuff.

59:01so there was this sense in which it was like okay apple is at least outwardly going to attempt to look like it's turning over a new leaf and play nice in in these spaces and then to just so swiftly say just kidding and just yank the rug out from under them again knowing full well what epic is gonna do is it's just weird i just truly cannot figure it out because it is so obvious that it was going to go like this if this is how you played it. Epic is the single loudest voice building a third-party app store. And like Apple either wanted to light this on fire or should have known it was going to be lighting this on fire.

59:42So we do have a statement from Apple now that kind of directly gets at what you're saying. And it just feels like maybe they didn't do it as cleanly as they wanted to. So we reached out to Apple. We asked what's going on here. Apple mad. That's the whole statement. here's the quote Epic's egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate any or all of Epic Games wholly on subsidiaries affiliates or other entities under Epic Games' control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion. In light of Epic's past and ongoing behavior Apple chose to exercise that right So this is just nakedly revenge Yeah, well and the ongoing behavior is Tim Sweeney continuing to be loudly mad on Twitter about what's going on with the DMA.

1:00:30Great. But I'm just like, you could have just said in light of the Epic's past behavior, you don't have to say ongoing behavior. Yeah, fair. Right. And that's the part where it's like, oh, this company is just vengeful. You can say, look, we had a lawsuit. They broke the rules. We sued them. They sued us. We had an antitrust trial. The result of the antitrust trial is we don't have to do business with them. We're just going to not, we're going to keep not doing business with them. That relationship was broken. Saying we sort of maybe thought we'd do business with you and we approved a thing and we did some weird letters.

1:01:06Ah, f*** it. I don't know. There's just something that like if you want to build a business on these platforms, I don't know that that feels like a stable foundation. And I think a lot of these companies, Spotify, Netflix, Epic, whoever, we've heard now, as David pointed out earlier, We've just heard too much about the reality of doing business on the store. And at the end, I think consumers don't know. They don't feel it, right? Like it's hard to be sad about a thing that doesn't exist. But the point of this regulation is like, what if it was different? What if the stores are more vibrant? What if there were more kinds of apps, including apps Apple would never allow?

1:01:47I'm shocked we have not seen a store spring up just for gambling in Europe, right? But like European laws of gambling are actually much more permissive than laws of the United States about gambling. I'm shocked that there is not already a storefront for gambling apps in Europe because Apple would never allow it. And it's like you can – I'm not a gambler. I go to Vegas and I ask people how much money they're going to spend on gambling and I spend that money on Linazines because that is a better investment, my friend, every single time. It has been for decades. Everyone remembers the Linos. No one remembers the Blackjack.

1:02:18I remember the Linos. It's pretty good. It was good. I'm not a gambler. It's like whatever. I'm just saying like that is a world that could exist. That is an industry that could exist that Apple right now just prevents from existing. There are lots and lots and lots of things like this. And it's hard to prove the negative. And I think Apple not even allowing Epic to prove the negative is like all they're proving is that they're capricious. And they're pretty mad. And I just – I don't know if that is the smart political play. You might feel it's a smart moral play. But it just feels like a bunch of European regulators are not going to look at that and be like, yes we we also have to abide by what an american court said right yeah well i think in this case like so much of the question of what's happening on ios particularly is is somewhere in this gray area between technically doing what is required right the sort of malicious compliance that a lot of folks have talked to apple about and doing things that are just nakedly not solving the problem that you claim they're solving, right?

1:03:17Like I think the Apple's browser choice screen on iOS in the EU is to me, perfect, malicious compliance. Apple is on the record over and over in the Google antitrust case and elsewhere for saying that it hates choice screens. And it is now required to have a choice screen asking what browser do you want to use as your default browser on your iPhone? And when you upgrade to iOS 17.4 in the EU that you will get that. The screen is ugly it's unhelpful it takes you to the app store in a really confusing way it includes a bunch of browsers no one's ever heard of it's just not good and and like it's very clear that apple has no investment in making it good and they're like well you're making us do this dumb thing we're gonna do it in the dumbest way we can think of that is very hard to fight that like that argument is hard to prove that that's what's happening it's very obvious that that's what's happening But this thing where it's like, oh, you claimed to be opening up the app store because that is what by law we are requiring you to do.

1:04:16And now you are just vengefully shutting down the biggest, loudest player that wants to do this just feels like a bad call. Yeah. I think Apple making it really, really hard and arduous to open a third party app store is in a certain way very clever. I think it's conniving and it's cynical, but it's very clever for a company that has a lot to protect in that space. To just pick this fight with Epic again over and over and just kick it out and threaten to have all of this come back at you just seems dumb. I just don't get it. I feel like it's a company who is seeing their power wane in this marketplace, right?

1:04:57They're seeing it happen really quickly and they have to assert their dominance. like they have to show everybody no we're the boss we still control it right like spotify you start mouthing off like this that what that's what happens to you and that's certainly like a take that's a thing you can do plenty of businesses have played that kind of hardball but very few that are so consumer facing and and really dependent on consumer goodwill in a way that Apple is very much dependent on. We have to deal with our ISPs, even though we hate them. They are some of the most hated companies in the United States, but we have to deal with them because they're monopolies.

1:05:39And this is a very common reaction of a monopoly is to be like, okay, if you're going to fight our monopoly, if you're going to try to counter our monopoly, we're going to grind you into dust repeatedly. And you shouldn't probably do that if you're someone like Apple who is a monopoly on the app store, but isn't necessarily like a monopoly in a lot of other places. Like you can go buy a Samsung phone. You can go buy a Google pixel. You can just not use Apple products. Eventually. The best thing you can do when you're a monopoly is not act like one. And I feel like Apple didn't learn that lesson.

1:06:16Like a very, like, you know, Microsoft, when they were the death star, they acted like, you know, and they got in a lot of trouble and like you know why chrome has way more market share than ie it's because microsoft got himself in a lot of trouble and the sources stop bundling ie with windows like that that's a real thing like that was the antitrust case and it's because microsoft went and killed netscape with a bunch of moves just like this and i i worry all the time with the modern apple that the people who are coming into the company the people who uh work there like you know this company's been around for a long time they have only worked at the apple that is this apple and the people who built it from the underdog apple are you know they're just getting older it's just like time we're tired there's been a wave of departures from apple recently uh reported all over the place and you're just like oh if you walk around like you're that thing and you're not you don't have that little like chip on your shoulder you got to earn it from consumers already like you've got to take one piece of market share away from windows every single day, which is what the version of Apple that became this thing came from, like you are just going to act like a bully because you have no conception of when you weren't.

1:07:34And I think the flip side of that is consumers, a lot of newer, younger consumers do not have any recollection at all of Apple on the come up, right? Of that incredible run of Apple just sort of like creating product after product that revolutionized industry after industry. They're like, yep, we grow up, we get a phone. My parents put a watch on me so I can leave the house without them. So they can track me everywhere. Like my friends are all on iMessage and they bully people with green bulb. And it's like, yo, there's no like long history of goodwill here. There's just this, right? And it's like, I can't get Fortnite on my phone because these two billionaires are fighting.

1:08:12And like I said, I will just, I'll end it here. We talked about EU regulation for a long time. People are gonna email us, they're gonna talk to me about Apple's business model and how much money they make and stock price. I get all the, whenever we criticize Google, people are like, I dare you to short Google. I can't. We cannot buy the stock. We cannot do that. And I will just remind you of a quote that I think about maybe once a week. It's in a wired profile of Walt Mossberg walking through the CES show floor. And he had just written a bad review. This is a true story. He had just written a bad review of like the Sirius radio when it had first come out.

1:08:46And the CEO of Sirius started yelling at Walt Mossberg on the show floor of CS. And he said, you brought our stock price down. And Walt Mossberg looked at him dead in the eye and said, I don't give a fuck about your stock price. And that's it. I don't care about the richest company in the world making more or less money where their stock price goes. I care like, are we getting more interesting, innovative products? Are we building cooler experiences for people? Do I feel like when I spend my money as a consumer, I've done it in a way that feels good and healthy? I don't know if these regulations are going to achieve that.

1:09:18I don't know if Apple's compliance or malicious compliance will achieve that. I have no idea. I do know that right now, the way it has been going, our choices are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and more and more of the dollars are flowing to Apple instead of app developers, and that feels weird. So I'm all for flipping the table and everyone can have their feelings, but I would just caution Apple in particular, acting like this right now does not get you the goodwill so that the next time you're like, I think all of you should rewrite your apps in a different language that we invented.

1:09:48People aren't going to do it. And that's where the power comes from. You know what I've been thinking about a lot recently is Apple Pay, which I think Apple Pay on the iPhone is like essentially a perfect product. And the way they've integrated it into websites so that like, like for me, it's, it's take out food over and over, right? Where I'm like, I'm on a website, I'm, I'm ordering and my options are either spend eight minutes entering my contact information which i can do but it's 12 fields and i have to go get my credit card and remember what it is or i tap the button that says apple pay i double click on the side it scans my face and i've paid for dinner that is that is winning with product in an open ecosystem and it kicks ass and it is like that is apple at its best the opposite of that is this fight that apple is in about all the anti-steering stuff and the two billion dollar fine that just came from the EU about all the Spotify stuff, which is Apple saying you are not allowed to tell people the other places they can go pay for your stuff.

1:10:44And for years with Apple Music was preferencing Apple Music, Apple Music was allowed to have ads and notifications that Spotify and others are not allowed to have. And that is the opposite of winning with product. That is saying we are going to prevent you from doing anything, including save your customers money, because we can and and to me it's like i i want to see the apple pay apple and not the apple music apple because that was go can i tell you a story about apple pay yes so over the weekend this is like what happens when you're the energy of a tech website i went to pay with apple pay and it didn't work right my credit card got declined and i was like this is weird and i called the bank and the bank was like Apple Pay is having an unexpected upgrade which is an incredible euphemism like an absolutely incredible euphemism.

1:11:36It broke in a cool way so I was like that's weird and I posted on threads about it like is anybody else having problems with Chase and a lot of people got back to me like this is broken for me all day. It's like email Apple it's the weekend. Email Apple. I was like hey is Apple Pay broken? I'm just going to write a story down and it took a minute because it's a weekend fine and they got back to me and they, Apple, you can read the story. Apple basically was like, this is Chase's fault. It's not Apple Pay's fault. And I was like, great. You know, Apple Pay doesn't work, right? Like it doesn't matter to anyone whose fault it is.

1:12:07What matters is that Apple, like people are trying to pay with their phones. It's not working. And they're like, yeah, but it's Chase's fault. And I was like, cool, like, cool. Like I will happily write that down. You know, like here's the information I can give you. Have you thought about updating your status page to say it's Chase's fault? Like it's – this is what people are reacting to. This is the information you can give them. And the idea that Apple had a dependency on one of the largest financial institutions in the world and they were like, but blame them. When it's like, but what people are holding is a phone that has your logo on it.

1:12:41It's like when AT &T goes down, people don't blame Apple. They blame AT &T. You're very happy for that. That's fine. People understand these relationships. But at the end of the day, you are responsible for the products. and like that thing where Apple Pay is an almost perfect product because Apple has managed all these relationships for you that's what I mean about the hubris like yeah Apple's like it's not our fault it's like no it's your product right let's it's your magic right like you are the ones who made this almost perfect product and you're pissed that you have a dependency on someone else and you would prefer Apple in particular is famous for preferring to have no dependencies on anyone at any time yeah and I get it because I would love to have no dependencies but then you look at some of the moves, like this web app stuff, right, where they, the DMA, they said, we're going to disallow web apps because we think we have to allow other browser engines.

1:13:29And people said, no, no, no. Like the EU got a little weird and Apple said, okay, we'll have web apps again and we'll just do it this way. I will just remind everyone that the reason Apple exists today at all is because Steve Jobs could do the iMac and tell people they could get on the internet. And the only reason that was a viable thing to say was because what people wanted was web browsers. Yep. And so the web browser on the iMac was approximately the same as the web browser on Windows. And so he could sell you an iMac instead. If he had been like, well, you can use here as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft could have just turned off Apple.

1:14:01They could have turned off the business. But because of the internet, like the open application architecture of the internet, he was able to sell Macs again. And it's weird now for Apple to be at the point where they're like, what if we don't have an open application architecture? Right? And like that's weird. Like that's where you came from. The company would have not made it out of the 1990s if not for that. And I just – I don't know how to like underline for people. Like a lot of our audience is young. But these things are not new. Like these moves are old moves. And it's just weird for Apple, which is a company built out of some of these changes a long time ago, to be making the same mistakes.

1:14:42Yep. Agreed. We'll see. there's a chance that this just results in a bunch of like weird Europeans talking about how much better they're like 15 browsers are. I also think it's possible. This results in nothing. Like I think, I think what Apple clearly wants to change is nothing. And I think you're going to get a bunch of people who like accidentally set Ecosia as their default browser for 10 minutes. And then they go back to Spotify and nothing at all changes. Well, no, here's my real question. The, the one thing that could change that, uh, cause choice screens have not worked in Europe, right?

1:15:10Like famously, uh, in one of our pieces about it, we linked to a long analysis of where choice screens came from and whether they work or not what has never happened is you've never been able to pick chrome right that you the choice screen has always been designed to make you not pick chrome well it's been designed to make you pick a browser you've never heard of or the only one you've heard of in this case there are at least two you've heard of there's safari and chrome so the idea that people will pick chrome is actually fascinating i'm dying to see what happens there i don't i don't know what's gonna happen anything else, but the Chrome versus Safari and choice screen, that seems very interesting.

1:15:45It could happen. All right. We got to take a break. We've been going on way too long about Euro. All right. The wine is great. We're leaving the Eurozone. Goodbye, Eurozone. Get the f*** to Eurozone. All right. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be back with a lightning round. 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. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

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1:18:52We're back. we're out the eurozone we made it we landed in america we landed america where we're going to talk about elon musk and pickup trucks in short order that's really going to happen here all right we got to make this lightning round quick we went on too long this show is too long oh wait do we have a sponsor for this lightning round i don't think so don't you bravia core that's not that's all sony has to pay the money to sponsor the lightning round other people don't have it But if you're a big company, if the European Union has designated you a gatekeeper, you have to pay money to sponsor the line.

1:19:26All right, Dave, what you got? Okay, I have two, which is a good start. One is very fast, which is just that there are now transcriptions in Apple Podcasts for all of its shows, including the Vergecast. Sometimes they are very wrong in very funny ways, but it's actually a great feature. You can tap on a paragraph and it'll take you to that part of the show. you can it's a great way to go back and be like what was that thing i missed without actually having to like scan back 15 seconds in the show it's just an awesome feature i am not an apple podcast fan in general but it is like i'm i'm tempted back to it because of it uh it's just a cool thing so if you make a podcast app do transcripts it's great and also don't yell at us for things they get wrong in the transcripts because they're not our transcripts but my real one is uh sorry sean hollister has been covering a bunch this week uh that is something we talked about a bunch on the verge cast last year which is game emulators so there's this emulator called yuzu that was for emulating nintendo switch games and basically nintendo picked a fight and yuzu just caved yeah and this has been the thing that a lot of the folks in the emulator community have worried about for a long time which is that emulators are very popular and kind of just unproblematic enough that it has not been worth it for the game companies to pick this fight.

1:20:45But Yuzu kind of crossed that threshold for a couple of interesting reasons. People were using it to play unreleased games. So it got the kind of press and attention from these companies that you don't typically get. And basically what it sounds like happened is Nintendo just showed up and was like, we will crush you to death. And they said, okay, we're shut down and took all their stuff offline. They shut down the Discord. They've been doing stuff. And it has had this real like immediate chilling effect on emulators all over the place. There are folks shutting down discords. There are folks saying you can't talk about emulation here because of the legal repercussions that we're worried about.

1:21:22And it just literally took Nintendo picking one loud fight with one company. And all of a sudden it feels like this whole emulator world is kind of in peril. Which is kind of weird because Yuzu, like, I had it on my Steam Deck. I own a Nintendo Switch. I feel totally morally... Notable Plex user. Fine with my choices. Has the emulator on her Steam Deck. Yeah, who knew? But it was always kind of a weird one because generally emulators only emulate older systems. So, like, it doesn't emulate the PS5. It emulates the PS4 or whatever. and Nintendo because of the Switch architecture was really really easy to emulate and it has been since the Wii it's just been like super super easy to emulate and people just started getting more aggressive with that and it's like yeah if if I can go download the unreleased Metroid game and play it on my Steam Deck that probably is actually a pro like I was kind of when that happened I was like isn't Nintendo gonna come down like a bag of bricks on them because that's not how emulators have worked for the last 30 years and yeah they they did in fact come down like a bag of bricks on youtube but also if you wanted to make that same case about a 20 year old mario game it's just as true it's just that it's such a smaller less interesting business for nintendo that it's better off just leaving well enough alone and let the people who want to play these old games who are then probably likely to come by the new games do so right like it's it's this very sketchy but sort of workable balance and i i do agree i think yuzu did something slightly different to trip because it was a current thing it was current games because even like the 3ds emulator they had was it was just you know not as many people are paying playing a 3ds nowadays or like there's a really good one called dolphin for for wii games and gamecube games and that's a 20 year old system that's that's that's different than like i can just go buy a bunch get a bunch of unreleased games on a torrent site and play them on my Steam deck and never play Nintendo at dime right now.

1:23:28Like, no, that's just like, that's just piracy. Why do you know that information? I have no idea. I gotta go. I have no idea what's happening here. It's okay, Alex, you're in Texas. There are no laws there. Yeah, there are no laws here in Texas. We don't do regulations here. Here's what we do. We roll call and we play unreleased Metroid games. but it was all the users thing was always wild i'm i wish it didn't have such a chilling effect on the emulator community because like yeah emulators are sick and i still want somebody to make a good n64 emulator which is still a weird challenge but we think analog is up to something i'm hoping oh my oh right they did they did they did the t-shirt thing i will say uh you The trope at The Verge is that copyright law is the only law on the internet because it's the only thing that can stop anyone from doing anything for some reason.

1:24:21Well, the reason is the first amendment. But copyright law is the only law on the internet. And here I think there's – we still don't know the answer, right? It's actually kind of fascinating that they settled because what you get is people don't know if I'm really legal or not. Some of them get taken to court. but usually the way the cases are structured is you have a big rich corporation and then an emulator which is just like a handful of people in a github right that's the fight yeah so the big huge corporation shows up and says ah we're gonna sue you that's gonna cost a lot of money and that usually crushes the thing it's the same in uh the fan fiction community actually like fan fiction is something that is sort of just tolerated by large publishing houses there have in a handful of cases, but like, it's probably bad to piss off the people who love your work so much that they're writing their own versions of your work.

1:25:11That's just like a bad move. So it's like tolerated, but you could just stop it if you wanted to. Or you could at least file a bunch of lawsuits and get everyone to spend a lot of money and chill it out of existence. And I think here, what you have is Nintendo probably said, look, we can make your lives horrible. We can cost you a lot of money and we will probably win because we can afford even more lawyers and like who knows what this outcome will be this could take years or you could just shut it down pay us the money and this will be over and i i i don't like i i feel conflicted about that right like that didn't get anyone to an answer the next emulator can start right there's no law against it there's no precedent saying it's illegal like you could probably take the source code of yuzu today and start it all again but these people can't because they signed the settlement to make it go away and i i just wonder like at some point the amount of drm and protection and lockdowns and stuff that is around all digital content is going to run against the reality that people are going to build emulators right and like we just haven't we just haven't run the process to its end because the money has never been aligned to let us have the fight all the way to the end.

1:26:24Nintendo, though, has always been pretty consistent with like emulators versus, I guess, piracy. Like, I think they think of those as two very different things. And for a long time, there was a lot of different ways you can pirate games on older Nintendo systems. They did a lot of like these cartridges that you can go and you can put in a system. And they were really aggressive about stopping those. When the 3DS system had a pirate, like a little, people were out there selling a little SD card you could put in a 3DS and just pirate everything. Nintendo was super aggressive about that. So like the Yuzu thing, I know everybody's being like, what does this mean for the emulator community?

1:27:02But it really was more, what does this mean for the game piracy community? And that'll probably piss off a bunch of emulator people. I do feel like there's a difference between selling atoms, like selling physical Nintendos, and like, it's a little bit hard, but you can figure it out on software. All right, Alex, what's your lightning round? My lightning round is I want to be really fiscally irresponsible and get the new Lenovo Legion Go. It's$700. I don't need it. Sean reviewed it. I want it so bad. It's Windows, which means it's not as good as the Steam Deck because the Steam Deck, the Steam OS is just superior.

1:27:41But you can turn it into a tablet. You can take both of the handles off. And one of them, you can then turn into a mouse. like a vertical mouse and that is just that just rules i just i want this thing so bad it's the gadgetiest gadget yeah covered in a while i think where it was like lenovo was basically like we are prevented for a variety of reasons from making a really great handheld gaming thing because you just kind of can't do that with windows the way that it works now everybody agrees with that including microsoft uh so we're just going to do a bunch of weird fun stuff where you can flip everything around and cool things happen is any of it any good sometimes but is it cool and rad and you're gonna want one anyway like yeah yeah you do yeah and i do like yeah this might not be a good device but i want it anyways sean did give it six the everything old is new again vibes of this thing are like man i've seen microsoft try to shove windows on a hand in so many different ways and now it's like yeah it rules now you know it's like fine fine you want this little crap laptop you can have it i want it i kind of love it i love it i love it i can't say no uh also i love sean has a long history sean is one of our co-founders he has a long history here at the verge of extremely like just sean photo choices there's no adjective describing except of Sean.

1:29:16In here, it's like a Windows handheld that's obviously being photographed on a chair outside. They're beautiful photos. They're very good. Only the mind of Sean Hollister can produce these images. I love it. It's very good. You can just go read it. It's a fun read. Alright, here's my lightning round. It's our boy Elon Musk. We haven't talked about Elon on the show for a long time. I feel like we've done a good job, but we can't not talk about this. Elon sued OpenAI this week. for a breach of contract, which I will come to, saying that when he was a founder of OpenAI, he gave us something a lot of money, it was supposed to be open source, and now OpenAI is a proprietary extension of Microsoft.

1:29:59He wants the court to declare that GPT-4 is actually artificial general intelligence and must be open source. It's crazy. The whole thing's crazy. OpenAI released a reply. We thought it would be a legal filing, but it's just a blog post that says Elon's done. Yeah. More or less, that's what it says. With a bunch of emails where Elon is like, we should make OpenAI part of Tesla. We obviously can't compete with Google. There's just a bunch of emails in here, which is just a weird way to respond to this. Here's the receipts. Also, notably, Ilya Sutsukov, who has not been heard from since the Sam Altman OpenAI CEO, signed the OpenAI response blog post.

1:30:39So they're united on this. Here's what I will say about this. open eyes respond and they say they're going to move to dismiss the lawsuit all the claims this is just very basic stuff and i will say i got one thing wrong in the blog post but i did it on purpose as a test if you believe me um sure so i wrote about this okay i'm not wrong you're wrong i'm not wrong i was testing you uh sure uh as you may know i was once a lawyer i was not good at being a lawyer. I'm not claiming that I was a good lawyer. I very quickly moved to blogging about cell phones. That's how my legal career was going. I was like, what if I memorized the name of every HTC cell phone, right?

1:31:20That was a better choice for me as a person. But I did the thing. I know a bunch of lawyers. I'm married to a lawyer. We got lawyers on our staff. We got lawyers at the company. They're everywhere. You can't get away from them. And I was like, hey, can you sue someone for breach of contract if there isn't a contract? And the answer is basically no. Like that fundamentally is the answer. Like you have to have a contract, particularly if the performance of said illusory contract takes place over a year, like longer than a year. So for example, I'll give you a law school hypothetical. Alex and I are friends, right?

1:31:58I said, Alex, this is like some real law school shit. I said, Alex, like I'm going to deliver you 50 pieces of lumber a week for$50. And Alex says, cool. And then we shake hands, right? And then I show up and I say, here's my 50 pieces of lumber. And Alex says, here's 50 bucks. And we just do that over and over again for 11 months, right? And on the 12th month, I show up, I deliver the lumber, Alex doesn't pay me the money. I can probably sue her for breach of contract. Rude. You got all this performance. I took the lumber. By the way, in law school, it's like always lumber. It's always something like this.

1:32:33things of like what are you talking about? Like nails of hay. Yeah, you're like, like most law students are like, 1L's like 23 years old and the ancient law professor is like, and then what would happen if you didn't deliver the lumber? And they're like, what are you talking about? What is, I didn't do the reading. So I promise to Venmo you every week. Yeah, okay. Like it's always like this. Then you can sue, right? You have this like, I did this thing called Reliance where because Alex had paid me before, I went, I dropped out the lumber, I left. I assumed the money would come. She didn't pay me.

1:33:05I say, you got to pay me. I go to the court and say, look at all this history. And then look at the negative thing that happened to me because I assumed that she would do the thing, which is pay me the money for the lumber that for some reason I had been delivering for 11 months without a written contract. Sick for it. And that's like the classic law school. Can you enforce a contract that's not written down? Example. Elon is saying not that. Like so much not that. Like the most not that. He's saying there is a contract, but the contract called the Founders Agreement only exists in other pieces of paper.

1:33:44He's like, it's in these emails I have between me and the other founders. It's in the articles of incorporation that they filed in the state of California. Like, Court, just read some stuff I'd like you to read. Write me a contract and then say they breached that contract. Right. He's saying if you read all these things, like you'll get the idea. Right. That when I was donating money to a nonprofit, I assumed that they would. And it's like if you are a first year law student listening to this or you attended law school or even if you're thinking about attending law school, just ask yourself. You're a judge.

1:34:17You're looking at the richest man in the world. And he's like, I don't know. I'm kind of an idiot. Like I just gave him all this money without contract. And the judge is going to get out of here. like my own 1L contracts professor his name is Stuart McCauley he used to say to us all the time what happens? he pays your money and he takes your chances and like if you buy the stuff and it's bad like that's on you and like here Elon's like donated the money and he had he has all these emails like these other emails are like that OpenAI is publishing where he's like this isn't enough money we're never going to succeed I want total control of this or I'm not going to give you more money and it's like dude you just didn't have the first thing Like the first thing, which is what are the terms of me giving you this money?

1:35:00You didn't write them down. It is the silliest 1L law school problem I can think of to file a claim for breach of contract. And then within the breach of contract claim that the contract does not exist, but is actually located in some emails. Like I cannot tell you what every – like I showed it to Becky and she just gave me the face. Like I don't want to think about this. She's like I graduated from law school. I'm a practicing attorney. me we don't do this anymore uh and then the second one uh the claim is for promissory estoppel uh which is long term but that's the thing where it's like i delivered the lumber and alex to pay me the money and so i i have what's called detrimental reliance so i like assumed she would do the thing sorry alex i assumed alex to pay me the money that she was paying me for for months and months and months and i did the thing she didn't pay me the money i've now relied on her promises to me and performance of those promises in the past there's none of that here because the detrimental reliance is that OpenAI was supposed to deliver AGI, which you cannot possibly claim.

1:36:03Just what are you talking about? They didn't make Skynet. Anyway, it's all very dumb. The thing I got wrong is that I put a joke at the end, another 1L law school joke, where I was like, the thing that will happen is OpenAI will file a motion to dismiss, and I use the federal name of the motion to dismiss, and on California, it's called a demur. I'm very sorry. I'm not going to correct it because it's a honeypot for nerds. First of all, that's a really good joke. It's a really good, funny joke that lots of people got and enjoyed. So great job. Sarah John thought it was hilarious. I'm glad. There you go.

1:36:34The audience is small, but it's there. I think, to me, the wildest thing about this is this now marks two episodes in two weeks in which we have talked about Elon Musk demanding to take over another company. Last week, it was Elon saying, I'll sell Tesla to you, Tim Cook, but I want to be the CEO of Apple. and now it's open ai and true true like you miss 100 of the shots you don't take you know what i mean yeah like your shot elon next next he's gonna be like listen larry page just give me google just shut up just give me google uh well i mean he's actually two tesla shareholders saying give me more of tesla which is very funny yeah yeah elon also has a very expansive view of what a contract is in another case x is suing the centers for combating digital hate for a report they put out saying hate speech had risen on Twitter.

1:37:23Now X, after Elon took over, they're claiming this interfered with advertisers, blah, blah, blah. And their legal theory is that it's a breach of the contract, that when they signed up for their Twitter account, they knew they weren't supposed to do X, Y, and Z, and they could foresee that they would be interfering in X's business relationships by doing whatever they did. And the judge, I want to say this as clear as I can, The judge evaluating this case said to X's lawyers, quote, this is the most vapid extension of contract law I have ever seen.

1:38:00What are you doing? I like you would be I would be embarrassed if I if I went into court and that I've never been in court. You would be embarrassed until you went to bed on your bed of dollar bills. Yep. Just dollars, though. It's a dollar bill. Just single dollar bills. Yeah. Those aren't hundies. That same law professor, Stuart McCauley, my contracts professor, Stumack we called him. He was very good. He would often ask us as we went through the facts of some esoteric lumber case, why do you think this case was filed? And we would all answer some high-minded question. He would start cackling.

1:38:38And he'd be like, no, no, no. The lawyer wanted a BMW.

1:38:44Uh-huh. It's very good. Elon's buying a lot of BMWs. Elon's buying a lot of BMWs. I'm just saying, if you want to stand in front of a judge and have a judge call you vapid, I don't think a BMW is enough. You got to at least hit Aston, if not full G-Wagon situation. There you go. A lot of electric G-Wagon pre-orders are being placed around the I should run OpenAI lawsuit. All right, that's it. I'm sorry that we talked about him again. it's an election year. We're going to end up talking about it. I can feel it coming. But don't worry, we'll also talk about the law of emulation. Dodge released the electric charger this week, the EV charger.

1:39:25It's got some big speakers in the back to make vroom vroom noises. That's coming up next week on the Verchast, everybody. We should do a whole thing where we just compare the vroom vroom noises that various muscle car EVs make. We 100 % should. That's been in the works for a while, actually. It's going to happen. It's going to be great. next week we're also going to talk about lying down mode in the quest headsets a lot of stuff to get to very good I should tell everyone that we recorded this day early because the three of us will be at South by Southwest on March 8th doing a live Vergecast David has set up quite the game for us to play on that stage if you are in Texas come see us March 8th on the Vox Media Podcast stage at South by Southwest we would love to see you the very next day on March 9th, I'm doing a live decoder and interviewing the CEO of Figma, Dylan Field, which will be very fun.

1:40:14Obviously quite a lot to talk about there, live post-Adobe, but Dylan really wants to talk about the web and the future of the web. Figma is a web app. I don't know if you caught it, I'm very interested in the web. It's a thing I care about a bit, so I'm very excited about that. I had no idea. Alex is like, I didn't know what I was signing up for. March 8th, the Vergecast at South by Southwest, March 9th decoder. We would love to see it. That's it. That's Vergecast.

1:40:41And 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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