Is this peak TikTok?

In short

The Vergecast Episode Summary: Is this peak TikTok?

Episode Overview Hosts: Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz Release Date: [Insert Date] Description: In this episode, the hosts dive into a range of technology topics, including the review of Apple's Vision Pro, significant changes happening in the TikTok app, streaming service updates, and various industry news.

Key Topics Discussed

Apple Vision Pro Review

General Impressions:
Nilay Patel discusses his review of the Apple Vision Pro, describing it as the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand/eye tracking.
Despite its advancements, there are concerns about the limitations of these technologies.

Main Concerns:
Camera Pass-through: May not be suitable as a replacement for true augmented reality (AR) experiences.
Eye Tracking: The idea of using eye tracking as an input method is critiqued for overloading user experience.

Final Rating:
The Vision Pro was rated 7 out of 10, a score that sparked debate among the hosts regarding its value against its price point of $3,500.

TikTok Developments

Impact of Universal Music Group's (UMG) Withdrawal:
Major artists including Taylor Swift and Drake have been pulled from TikTok due to disputes over payment structures and AI content usage.
The removal of such artists has left a significant void in TikTok’s content library, raising questions about the app's future.

TikTok's New Features:
TikTok is testing a feature that identifies products in videos and provides purchase links.
This marks a shift as TikTok begins to emulate YouTube’s shopping model while facing criticism for increasing commercial content at the expense of user experience.

Streaming Service News

Password Sharing Crackdown:
Hulu joins the list of streaming platforms enforcing stricter password-sharing policies, a trend that is sweeping across the industry.

Amazon and iRobot's Acquisition:
Amazon's plan to acquire iRobot has been halted by the EU, leading to layoffs and leadership changes at iRobot.

Additional Industry Updates

Snap Inc. Updates:
Snap has recalled its Pixie drone due to battery issues, raising questions about its future as a hardware company.

Top-Level Domain Discussions:
ICANN has proposed a new top-level domain ".internal" for local devices, stirring conversation about internet protocols and user privacy.

Key Takeaways

The hosts expressed mixed feelings about technological advancements in products like the Apple Vision Pro while acknowledging the significant challenges faced by platforms like TikTok amidst shifting industry standards.
The disruption caused by UMG on TikTok highlights the precarious nature of digital content distribution, underscoring the dependence of platforms on major labels.
The password-sharing crackdown reflects a broader trend in media streaming that might push consumers back toward traditional cable models.
The proposed ".internal" top-level domain raises interesting questions around privacy and local network management.

Conclusion This episode of The Vergecast encapsulates the rapid evolution of technology and its impact on user experience, the entertainment industry, and corporate strategies. The discussions emphasize the intertwined nature of innovation, regulation, and content accessibility in today's digital landscape.

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For more information, reach out to Vergecast at vergecast@theverge.com or call 866-VERGE11.

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Transcript

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1:21Hello and welcome to the First Cast, the flagship podcast of putting windows all around you and then walking around them and looking at them and being in the future. The future. Yeah. That's iTunes' most specific genre.

1:39It's Verge Cast. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Franz is here. Hi. I'm your friend that really misses Microsoft's Windows. The HoloLens people are so mad at me. They're like, how did you do this whole review? And you never mentioned HoloLens, the thing that invented spatial compute. And it's true. Microsoft invented a number of these words with no regard for what they meant. They're like HoloLens is mixed reality. That means augmented reality. This VR headset and Windows, that's Windows mixed reality. Like just anything. All the words meant the same thing. And I have done some very cool HoloLens demos in my life.

2:19I put on a HoloLens and I changed a spark plug on an ATV in the basement of a Microsoft building. And it guided me. Yeah. They put arrows, like, go to this drawer, open this drawer. I don't know if any of that was real or if it was totally state. Whatever. It was awesome. I was like, this is definitely the future of changing spark plugs in an ATV. As long as the room is set out exactly right and the computer knows where all the parts are, like, this is how we should change spark plugs. Which, by the way, if you set up the room exactly right and you know where all the parts are, you no longer need the computer to change the spark plugs.

2:50Because you put the spark plugs where they go. But whatever. You outsource that. But they were like, imagine a mechanic on an airline. And now I'm like, man, I wish Boeing had bought more HoloLenses. They're also in Seattle. Just putting that out there, Microsoft. The problem with the HoloLens. Oh, and I did a very cool demo. Microsoft, one of the few companies in VR that has ever solved co-location. So I wore a HoloLens and someone else was wearing a HoloLens. And we were looking at the same thing at the same time. And, like, I would interact with – it was like a model of something. and I would interact with it and they would spin it the other way and no one else as far as I can know very no other companies on a commercial scale I don't think the quest headsets can do that the vision pro can't do it okay that's cool then right so I just all credit to hololens the hololens is a gigantic failure which is why I didn't mention it it failed as a product the person who was leading the project got forced out of microsoft for sexual misconduct allegations.

3:53They did a bunch of layoffs on the team. They've reorganized their hardware portfolio and they say quote, and this is a real quote, we'll make a next version of the HoloLens when the time is right. Oh, there you go. Is it right? No! You know what they're going to do? They're going to make a bunch of AI stuff and print money instead of being like, you can change a spark plug with our glasses on. I'll never be able to change a spark plug though. Anyway, so shout out to the HoloLens people. HoloLens also objectively the coolest product name in this entire category. Oh yeah. No question. HoloLens kicks ass.

4:30It's good. It's a good name. And the first one was cool. And the second one was even better from what I'm told. I never tried the second one. And you know, if you have the perfect spark plug setup, that thing kicked ass. Are you saying you You don't fondly remember the Acer AH101-DB-EY Windows Mixed Reality headset? That had a good name. That's a good ring. Say it slower. Slower. But Addy and I just decided what the words would mean in our review. We made a sidebar. We're like, this is what mixed reality means, and this is what augmented reality means. And then Addy was like, you know, this is a flip of how Microsoft wanted it.

5:05And it's like, I don't care. Like, I'm putting my foot in the ground, and this is what we're saying. Anyhow, so shout out to the HoloLens people. I feel you. It was a cool demo. Did any Magic Leap people get at you? The Magic Leap people were just happy to be mentioned. Right? Like your product is a true AR product, optical AR that has fatal compromises in it and no one should buy it. They're like, oh my God, finally. The validation we deserve. Some people, I will say two things. Some people, I basically called the top on two technologies in this review. I said camera-based pass-through might be a dead end.

5:42And I feel that it might be a dead end. And I said, hand and eye tracking, there's a part of it that's valuable for some things, but it's also a dead end. It cannot be the primary input. And I heard from people who've been working on this who have shipped. Wait, sorry, real quick. We should just say, by the way, this is your review of the Vision Pro, which went up this week. We talked a bunch about it on Tuesday. Yeah, yeah. If you haven't been living inside of Neelai's brain for the last week or so, he's talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which we just got to so fast. I was going to say, let's try.

6:14No, this is right. I woke up. I use this app called Sleep Cycle as my alarm clock. And yesterday I woke up and it basically congratulated me on finally getting some sleep. Oh, boy. It was like, good job. You've got 400 % more sleep last night than you've been getting. And I was like, this is a disaster. So, yeah, I'm wired. Now I've got too much sleep. But the amount of caffeine, I've basically only eaten Cinnamon Toast Crunch this week. It's bad. All of it's bad. What side of your mouth after that much cinnamon toast crunch? Well, I didn't eat it all in one go. Yeah, but it's cumulative. It's cumulative in that each bowl is 25 grams of sugar.

6:53Oh, my God. We'll miss cereal. I'm just like, the crash is going to be bad. We're not buying this anymore. I would get home and be like, what can I eat? You know, like fast. Cereal. Cereal. And I was like, this cereal. Anyhow, yes, Vision Pro Review. uh i heard the the two things in my review that i they were like the big ideas that i didn't overly highlight is the vision pro is the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand and eye tracking they've ever seen and i was like it might have inadvertently proved that these are deadheads and i have heard from people who have shipped millions of devices with camera passer and who have invested millions upon billions of dollars into hand and eye tracking and they were like, you have a point about camera pass-through.

7:39It's good for what it's good for. And like, it's not a dead end if you use it right, but Apple's trying to make it do too much, which I thought was really interesting feedback. That's fair. Because it is like on the Quest 3, it's useful in spots, right? It's like the, I'm playing a VR game and I like double tap on the headset and it opens up so I can like see what's around me or whether I just kicked my dog or whatever. But it's not like you don't live in the pass-through. And so for that, I think pass-through works fine. Apple is like default state is passed through and I think I think that might be where it's pushing too hard There's a really cool app Uh that gen 2 we posted on the site where it's a shortcuts Yeah, and you can put it the shortcuts all around your house So you get all these shortcuts by your tv and all this stuff and that's really cool It's like oh, but to use that you have to word this all the time, right?

8:23So not no longer useful. So it this is the argument This is a simulator of what Apple really wants, but they're like look camera pass through it has its uses but if you try to pretend it's AR, you're going to run into the problem. We agree with you there. And then the note about eye tracking, and this person has spent a lot of money on eye tracking in their life, was you are overloading an input channel by trying to use it for output, which is fascinating. Wait, explain. So your eyes are an input channel. So you're used to taking in a lot of information with your eyes. So you're an input channel, and then you overload it by trying to use it as an output channel to control the device.

8:59Oh, that's smart. And so the feedback was you hit on something that this industry has been talking about for a long time, which is you can't overload your input channels as output channels. And you'll run into this problem with eye tracking because you have to look at what you want to look at. And you have to look at what you want to control instead of what you're looking at. Yeah, because historically eye tracking was just to, like, enhance it. So, like, if you kind of glanced to one side, the camera would move so you'd see whatever was over there. Yeah, that's foveated rendering. Right, yeah.

9:26And it didn't really – But that's to save processor cycles. Right. But no, it also made it a smoother experience. It made it like less, oh, I'm just staring at some screen. Oh, yeah, so you get some blurry. Yeah, like it made it a nice experience. And even when you do it just on a regular laptop screen, I did a – I reviewed way too many Toby laptops once upon a time. It was really useful because you could just kind of look at things and it would pop up and make it a little brighter and make it a little easier. But like anytime I would try to like control the computer with it, I was like, oh, I hate this.

9:56Yeah. Because I'd like glance at my watch and my character just start running around in circles. Yeah. And this is overloading an input channel as output. So when you use it the way you're describing for foveated rendering, for highlights, right, that make it a little brighter, you're enhancing the input channel. Right. When you use an output channel, you might overload yourself. So this person was like, yeah, in the history of eye tracking, this is a thing that we understand. And then they said I had it wrong on hand tracking. Oh. The industry believes in hand tracking. They're going to get it right because it is the most natural way of doing things.

10:29And there's a lot of work being done. I keep pointing at it. It's a computer that's always washing hands. And regardless of that joke, the Vision Pro does misregister a lot of hand input. Also cannot differentiate between your hands and someone else's hands. Also, you personally look really goofy doing it in the office. It was so good. Wait, hold on. So if you're just sitting at your desk on the Vision Pro, I can just stick my hands in front of your face and start literally typing on your keyboard? Sure can. Or you can just put your hand in front and click your fingers together and it'll register a click.

10:59I'm going to do this to you so much when I see you. I can't wait to do this to you. Assuming that I'm wearing the headset. What a good prank. It's a good prank. You're screwing people. When I say the thing is lonely, it does not contemplate anyone else being around you who is not on their best behavior, which is all the time. all other people are not on their best is it just assuming that like the pass through will suddenly pop on and you'll see David being like yoink I assume that's the noise that David's going to make that's what I do when I type yeah the only AR feature is in it specifically it recognizes David Peterson makes that sound so anyway I thought this was all really interesting feedback because people who have been working on this stuff for a long time were like we liked your review here are the things we think you got right and wrong and the camera based pass through as a replacement for true AR feels directionally correct to me.

11:50It might be the ceiling for that. Eye tracking, they're like, yeah, people are going to react to it differently. We'll see. This is the first big eye tracking at scale that will happen. And then they're like, you're just wrong in eye tracking. The fact that it just misregisters input to me is, again, by the time you're listening to this, people will have them. By the way, iJustine has already worn a Vision Pro and a Cybertruck. Just immediately? Yes. Like as soon as the embargo lifted, she was walking out. I mean, she's funny as hell. So like I appreciate that she did that. But like some other kind of YouTuber, not iJustine who is wonderful, some other kind of YouTuber is going to do the actual thing with the Cybertruck and the Vision Pro.

12:30And the clock is just ticking. Unsafe. Don't do that. Don't do it. They're not going to listen to us. They're doing it for the views, man. Don't do it for the clicks. Do something else cool. So we'll see. I'm excited for people to actually get their hands on this outside of just experiencing other people's experiences. Uh, and I'm, I'm very curious to see how people react to hand and eye tracking in particular. Yeah. Also, if you got one, uh, as you're hearing this on Friday, the second it's the day this stuff is coming out. If you got one, call us and tell us about it. Uh, well, this will be a super fun thing to do on the hotline for the next few weeks.

13:02I just want to hear people's experiences with the vision pro. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what's cool. Tell us what sucks. Give us, give us your 60-second review of the Vision Pro, literally whenever you want. Call the hotline, send us emails. Yeah. Vergecasts at theverge.com. I'm dying to know. You can tell me I'm wrong, whatever you want. I'm dying to know how you feel about this product because it is new, and that's what's exciting about it, which leads me into the score. So a lot of people have asked me about the score, and I will tell you, and David in particular will tell you, that I drove myself crazy trying to give this thing a score after I'd written the review.

13:36Yes, confirmed. Just bonkers. because I'm the one who says world of no sevens and I gave it a seven. So if you don't know world of no sevens, the thing I say all the time, which is seven is just the default score. It is milk toast. And so if you say world of no sevens, it forces you to make a very hard choice between six and eight. And I am the person who says this and I definitely gave this thing a seven. And I tortured myself over that seven. And you got it wrong. And David thinks I should have given it a seven. I tend to agree with, I was genuinely shocked because I didn't participate in the review, but, but we, you know, we did the verge cast.

14:14And so I went as soon as it posted and I click and I scroll down and I saw that seven and I was like, but we, it felt like a six in the verge cast that we recorded. This is interesting. Yeah. And I said on the verge cast and I have to own this. Yeah. Inconsistent input system is a full point deduction. And at that moment in time, and I, this is a hundred percent true. The score that was entered into our little score database was a six. Oh. And I said that knowing that I'd already typed the six into that database. What pushed you back up to a seven? I had a conversation with Viren and Becca, in particular Becca, our wonderful video directors, who made this whole review with me and used it a lot in the course of that review.

14:55And they reminded me that it was really fun. so so it lost a point for inconsistency gained a point because it's fun as hell it lost a point for uh viren was we were we were like we were in it we were like we opened up our own how we rate page and like read our own definitions of the numbers like you're in an office with people for hours upon hours arguing with the dumbest like you just like fall down the rabbit hole completely um we discussed bringing back decimals which we got rid of a couple years like the whole thing and Viren's line was we need a number that means fantastic but useless he's like this is fantastic I have no idea why I want to use this what about the number that says it's$3 ,500 do you know how many you want fun buy a Nintendo Switch and you'll have$3 ,200 left isn't that cool so look like I was saying I was at 6 for a long time it was a 6 I swear to you was a six and back it was like but you have had like the thing you are doing the you are constantly talking about this thing that you keep coming back to like i'm lonely in here is because you're having fun and you want other people to have fun with you which is not how i feel about the meta quest which is like this is fun like i'm swinging a bat around like there's not a point where i'm like look at this thing that you is wild that i want you to see like the art gallery of web pages that i made in our cafe it's like this is great like nothing else can do that right now the meta quests can sort of do it, but they're kind of shaped.

16:27This is perfectly locked in place windows, and you can just leave the room and come back. That's your point. It was fun. It was a full point deduction for the stuff I complained about, and it earned its way back into the 7 zone because it's not an 8. Yeah, I was going to say, it was never an 8. There was no point was this thing getting an 8. Did it ever go to 5? So I was texting with Dan Seifert. Wonderful reviews editor, number one Dex fan in the world, Dan Seifert. Traitor. Dan just left the Verge, So he was not part of this review. We wish him well on his new journey in life. It's going to be really fun for him.

16:58But Dan texted me after the review and was like, seven, huh? And I was like, dude. And literally people were jumping out of the woodwork to quote Dan at me throughout this process. Because Dan's quote is, you never regret giving something a lower score. Ever. Like if you just instinctively pick the lower score and it's five years from now, you won't have regretted it. You might be like, ah, I gave that stupid thing an eight. Why did I do that? yeah you'll never be like i judge it too harshly like literally i'm like walking down the street and people like you know what dan would say it's like haunting me and i will say that's not that's not a like judgment decision that's not saying like we reflexively hate products that is like a decade of hard-worn experience yeah and this is the mistake that you made nilai is you got sucked in by the thing being fun like that's a stupid reason it's just a stupid reason like this is a $3 ,500 computer.

17:52You don't judge your MacBook on whether it's fun. You judge it on whether it does the things it is supposed to do. And this fundamentally doesn't. There are a lot of things that it is supposed to do that it either doesn't do or doesn't do very well. And it is $3 ,500. I take the criticism and I, look, I knew what I was buying. I was buying a bunch of people telling me that I did give it a high score, including David on this very podcast. I knew how this Vergecast would start today when I gave it that seven. You did. But wait, I just want to point at the tension of this, which I think is both the tension you felt in reviewing this and the reason we all think the Vision Pro is so interesting is that it is objectively cool and new and interesting, right?

18:35Like the Joanna Stern, a friend of the Wall Street Journal, made a video and there's a moment in it where she sets two timers and puts them over two different things on her stove. Like that kicks ass. It's so small and so silly, but it's so cool. And people really responded to it that is not a reason to buy a$3 ,500 product or to wear a headset on your face all day but she said right but it is cool it is undeniably cool the shortcuts thing you're talking about is like undeniably cool and I want to live in a world where that is part of my life I will not wear the headset and I will not buy the headset in order to get that thing but like that's that tension right where you have these moments where you're like oh this is it like they they did it this is it and then you have to weigh that against what is this thing I have on my face?

19:18What does that mean for like my life? Is this worth the cost? And you even said in the review, right? We, we review things, not just based on like what they might be someday, but what the thing is in the box, but that is so, but that's not, that's not what got it to seven. That's my rule. It's a good rule. It's the right rule, but it's, it's so hard to do, especially in this case, because a Apple has a longer history of being right about these things than most so like most of the time you genuinely should not assume this thing will ever get better for any reason because most of the time it doesn't with apple it usually does and so you have to believe that more than with most companies but then also it's 3 500 okay so here's how i've been that price thing also wait on my mind another good argument for sex if it's a phone review and even in phone reviews now it's like you're just reviewing iphones for people who buy iphones you're very rarely writing a review for somebody with an android phone except for like blunt curiosity if the camera's good or bad um my assumption going into this was that i was not writing buying advice the people who are buying the vision pro buying the vision pro whether or not i think it's good or bad so what was that score speaking so the score was like okay like however many they sold 80 000 120 000 the vast majority of people are going to try this thing on and my guess is after a while they're like yeah it's seven and like that is where that came from right is it kind of works a little time but oh man sometimes i have really good time like that that exact thing the reason it's world of no sevens is the that is why i got there because sometimes you're like oh this is great and then sometimes you're like i'm looking at the look at the right and like that is like a real challenge in there it's not broken the last apple product i gave a six to was the apple studio display whose webcam basically shipped in unusable state Right.

21:10And I was like, this is six because this display technology, the panel is fine, but the backlight technology is steam powered and this camera is effectively broken. Six. And that was what,$1 ,200,$1 ,300? $1 ,600. $1 ,600. I should have given that a five. Yeah, you should have. That's what I was about to say. You scored that thing too high. Yeah. All right. Maybe I'm just wrong. But I will say a bunch of people pointed out the similarities between what this thing is and what the original Apple Watch was, which I think is really interesting. because you gave both a seven. And I think you were right about the Apple Watch and wrong about this.

21:43And I've been trying to figure out what it is. I know what it is. Wait, wait, I want to hear what David's theories. I have two theories. One is$3 ,500. And the other is, I think the first Apple Watch got the form factor almost right and hadn't quite figured out the use case. But it was like still a nice thing to where I got furious at the first Apple Watch because it didn't tell the time. The screen wasn't on all the time. Like, how dare you will watch if you don't tell me the time when I look at you. But it like the thing was there. Right. It was close enough to being what the thing should be.

22:17And it already did some of the things you would want it to. So it was like that felt closer to me than this, in which the thing itself is nowhere near what it's supposed to be. Nope. Not even close. And so that's where it loses me. Like I deduct a full point for absolutely no one thinks this is what this is supposed to look like. Yeah, I will say I feel very vindicated by the modern rereading of the Apple Watch reviews. Guy got raked over the coals for giving that thing a bad score. Yeah, it holds up. It really does. And I was like, this thing is a, I believe I used the word bobble. I was like, this thing is a bobble and you will buy it.

22:48And if you buy it, you will like it because people like bobbles. But it is not fashion. It is technology that looks like fashion and they need to figure out what it's for. And it took them three generations to get there. And they totally rebooted the software. and I was like no one will ever and like for a long time people were like you were just unnecessarily harsh and this time literally our screenshots comparing my two reviews being like oh this is the same exact thing the only thing I will remind everyone of is one I was right I'll always remind you no but two the path wasn't set when the thing was launched right so being like this thing happened to the Apple Watch means it will happen to the other thing they had to adjust right and actually the review is like it adjusts them like they take the feedback from the market from the customers from the reviewers and they like make decisions based on it and one of the big decisions they had to make along the way was we are totally rebooting watch os to make the interface different to completely decrease our reliance on third-party apps in an app store you're just telling me your watch review should have been a six but also apple with the apple watch and this is true of a lot of apple things right apple starts by getting the hardware pretty close to right and the software is further away alex will be joining dan sievert in the world beyond yeah can we just re-review every apple product we've ever done right now let's just rescore them all i get a lot yeah the watch hardware was very close and then the question is how do we make this thing into what it ought to be inside of this box?

24:27And Apple usually gets the box right. In this case, neither one of them is right. Yeah. Well, like the watch shipped to people and they could use it and they could set it up and they didn't have issues with it. And lots of people bought one. Wait, famously, Karl Lagerfeld could not set his up and wore it around. Do you not know about this? This is like an old Vergesse joke. Karl Lagerfeld was photographed. You know, they gave it to all the fashion people. They photographed Karl Lagerfeld proudly wearing it. With the setup screen on the face. And that's like, we started calling it Lagerfelding, where you're just like wearing a dead Apple watch just as a fashion accessory.

25:02That's awesome. But again, that was another reason to give it a seven, because it was like a fashion thing. Not necessarily a good one, but it was fashion. And this is just like such a developer kit that I keep thinking about that a lot. Like it feels like such a developer kit. They just won't say it, man. There was a story in Vanity Fair. A beautifully photographed story. in Vanity Fair. It was. Stunning. A photograph story in Vanity Fair. Tim Cook is wearing the headset. He's blinking. Did you notice this? His eyes are closed? His googly eyes on the front of the headset are closed. He's blinking in the photo.

25:35That's very funny. It's fantastic. They should put that on the website. Anyhow, there's a story in Vanity Fair and it is, I mean honestly a story could be from 10 years ago. I know Nick Bilton who wrote it. Nick is a very nice guy. I've had a taco at a party at his house before. He's a very nice guy. but it could have been written 10 years ago about VR. Right. Right. Like the line is like Tim Cook saw himself on the moon. He knew it was the future. Like that line has been written about Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer. Yeah. You could have just like done find and replace magic leap for every time they say vision pro at that room.

26:10Yeah. Do you remember a magic leap? Was it wired that ran the story where yes. Roni Bromitz was like, I'm hacking the GPU of your brain. Yep. Like we just been here, man. Like, uh, And so I think Apple can't say it's a developer kit. They can't place themselves in the long line of companies that have been doing this for a long – they have to say it's finished, which is why they have to have entertainment. And they have to do this. James Cameron is in that Mani Fair piece quoted as saying this will change everything. And it's like, dude, you have done more scuba diving VR than anybody. I have been thinking about that quote specifically more than anything else that's come out of this whole situation.

26:50because James Cameron is like not generally a guy. I was going to say he's not generally a guy prone to hyperbole, but he did once declare himself king of the world. I don't know if that was hyperbole at some point. At that moment in time. Yeah. But when it comes to like technology, he's not usually a guy prone to hyperbole. And so when he's like, no, this changes everything. And he's specifically talking about the display technology, which sounds really, really incredible. I was like, is there something there? Like, have we missed something that James Cameron is seeing that we're not besides like the inside of the headset it is legitimately amazing display i have nothing but admiration for how hard it was to build those displays they are genuinely amazing yeah right they are available apparently on the market the same person who told me uh hand tracking being something he believed in was like you know meta could have bought those like they that was a thing that meta had the opportunity to buy but meta's version of headset would have been even more expensive because meta doesn't have m1 chips or m2 chips they would have had to go and buy chips with more power and more battery and they're like this is we can't go this way right so apple uniquely was able to make use of these displays which are again an engineering marvel but it's like james they're just better than what you have now right they're just like linearly better than the thing you have now yeah and that if you're james cameron like you should be able to see like this is the step like this is the step change that changes at all is like not the thing i really want to sit him down and be like, did they just cherry pick your quotes here?

28:20They run Apple TV Plus, man. I know. I just need to know more from Jim. Jim, call me. I know you listen to Vergecast. He does. Yeah. We'll talk about the sub, too. Jim was the guy who told me about Meta. He's the source. If you're listening, Tim Cook. That's not true at all. Not even the slightest bit true. A little bit. By the time you're listening to this, it will be out. I'm sure some of you are driving your cars wearing it right now. Stop it. Pull over to the side of the road. Apple today a little bit more apple announced along with the launch the vision pro 600 apps will be at launch which seems like a good number it's a lot for for a new platform it's a good number is it i think so i mean it's fine it's some apps but like this is the company that spends a lot of time talking about hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of apps 600 is is good i'm gonna point out i once got really roasted for being for complaining about how few games launched with the nintendo switch yeah granted i did say it when zelda came out and it was one of the best games ever made but like here's the 600 yeah 600 is impressive 600 is great 600 is vision pro like built for spatial computing it's also going to have all the ipad stuff yeah one million apps 600 vision pro apps sure which i will just point out is 999 000 900 uh 600 hundred nine hundred ninety nine thousand four hundred four hundred four hundred yeah no that's a hundred that's a million yep okay i'm gonna do this math right math please leave this in no do not leave this in leave it in everyone's gonna find dan if we leave this in all right um which i'll just point out is nine hundred ninety nine thousand four hundred ipad apps that's a lot of It's a lot of iPads.

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30:08Anyway, among the 600 is not bad if it's the right 600. But I will just point out, among the 600 they announced, compatible apps from top cable services, including Charter Spectrum, Comcast, Xfinity, Cox Contour, Sling TV, and Verizon Fios. Yeah. That's what I want. If you're rocking the Verizon Fios app in space, like, what are you doing, man? Paying your bills. If you buy the space computer and take it out of its little marshmallow and put it on your head, you're like, let's open the Charter Spectrum app. What are you doing, man? Well, you got to pay your bill so you can keep downloading stuff.

30:48That is the funniest. And obviously you're trying to point out. Entertainment. It's entertainment. It's not Netflix. It's fine. Do you know what those apps stream in? 480p that they lie is 720p. That is the lowest bitrate video you can get, which is hilarious to me. because I, this is all buried in the review. I should quick post on this site just to break it out. It will not support VR video on YouTube. It's just like, won't do it. Right. And they're like, because the VR video on YouTube is too low quality. Apple. So it doesn't have a YouTube app. And if you go try to watch them 360 video on YouTube, it just won't work.

31:22The end. Can I say one more weedsy thing and then we can break out of this? Go. Yeah. It's very weedsy, but people asked us this question a lot. And I didn't know the answer when we did the old episode. How does it smell? How does it smell? Okay. It smells like the future, obviously. The faintest whiff of roasted marshmallows. People asked about the Mac display sharing, and I finally know how it works, which is very complicated. It is basically a 27-inch studio display or iMac display. So you tell your Mac you're sharing to it. Your Mac imagines a 27-inch 5K display. It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, which is a perfect 2 to 1 scale.

32:02That's how a 27-inch iMac works by default. You cannot change it. So a 27-inch iMac display, you can run it at other resolutions, and it'll be fine. This one, it gives you a low-resolution warning. So it wants to run at this 2-to-1 scale. Then it takes that 5K display and sends it as a 4K video stream to the Vision Pro, which you can then resize at will. So it is not pixel-perfect at all. It looks great. I have no complaints about how it looks. but the thing that is happening is that it is imagining a 5k display that a mac knows how to run at because that is the 27 inch iMac the 27 inch studio display it runs the interface at 2560 by 1440 but if you're running something 4k it has enough pixels to just do it because it's 5k display but then the thing that is happening is streaming at 4k to the vision pro so it compresses that and It makes us smaller.

32:53It sounds both technologically cool and also like I just hate it in the same way I hate when people say, yeah, this is 720p streaming. Yeah. When it's secretly 480. Yeah. Or if they're like, this is HD and it's 720. Lies. Just putting that out there. Anyway, everyone asked me that question and that is the answer. And so it is correct that they keep calling it a 4K Mac display. It's actually a 5K Mac display, but it's actually running at 2560 by 1440. And whatever, it looks fine. And you'll use it unless you need pixel perfect accuracy, in which case, take your face computer off and just look at your screen.

33:29There we go. Six out of ten. That's it. We got to take a break. We'll be back. We're going to talk about the version for the rest of the year. Come on. We got to take a break. We got all this stuff to talk about. 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. 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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34:39Find 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. Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drewski, lift with your legs, man. Santa, Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not that. Of course he did, right, Santa? You know, my elf Drewski here, he handles the nice list. And elf, I'm 6 '3". What everyone wants is iPhone 17. And at T-Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies.

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36:45That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast.

36:55All right. That's enough talking with our eyes. Let's talk about our ears. Huh? all right lay on this plane patel let's go i tried it's been such a long week the cinnamon toast crunch crash is real man it's happening in real time in front of me i'm just melting over here no it's big news this may be bigger news than vision bro it's bigger news it will impact more people more directly okay yeah that's more damage to the economy than you can imagine josh hawley is going to write a bill about it soon the Universal Music Group in a fight with TikTok has pulled its catalog from TikTok. Its catalog includes Taylor Swift, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo, Bad Bunny.

37:43Basically, I think U2 is in the mix. Billie Eilish is on here. Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, Adele. Yeah. All of them. Universal CEO, Lucian Grange, who, by the way, was profiled in The New Yorker this week, talking about his worries about the music industry and generative eye, obviously ahead of them pulling their music from TikTok. They said TikTok has offered them horrible terms and is trying to bully them. This is bad news. And it's gone. If you go look at Taylor Swift on TikTok right now, her catalog is gone. All those videos, all of those TikTok videos that have Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and all those other artists, copyright notices.

38:18Yeah. And there's just a huge portion of TikTok that is now silent. It's nuts. And I assume this is ultimately just a negotiating tactic on both sides and they'll this feels to me sort of like a carriage dispute with cable companies where it's like it's actually in everybody's interest to resolve this and they will but it universal is clearly trying to prove that it is willing to pick this fight because i think tiktok has reached a point that like i've been thinking a lot about roku reading about this because there was this long period of time where roku was like every streaming company's favorite streaming platform because it didn't have competitive content.

38:55It wasn't an advertising business. It was just the place people bought hardware to go to apps. And that was perfect for all the apps, right? And so everybody worked with Roku, even when they wouldn't work with each other. When Apple and Amazon were beefing, they still both worked with Roku. And then Roku got big enough that it said, we are going to start selling advertising on our own. And we're actually going to start making our own content. And we're going to start competing with you. but we're so powerful now that there's nothing you can do about it and and roku started sort of just eating chunks of that market away and it had gotten so big that there was nothing any of these players could do about it and i think tiktok believes it is now that powerful that tiktok grew so much on the back of essentially like goodwill and free marketing for all of these uh record labels and all the music being out there and became this like center of culture and now is turning around and saying, look how powerful we are.

39:48You're going to play by our rules now. And I think Universal is one of the few companies probably in a position to actually hold fast against that. Especially because of its table of artists. And Universal, to be clear, is a big, old-school, bully record label. Like, Lucien Grange is a very good operator. He has led the music industry through Universal through many shifts, and he gets what he wants. he's the one who when fake drake showed up on youtube it's lucy and grange who pushed youtube and google into being like here are responsible ai things and here's a new monetization system for ai generated music on youtube i don't know that's great for the world it's great for universal music yes yeah right and that's it's his job and he's gonna but he has shown the ability to bully platforms using his gigantic catalog of artists and the artists all like him and there's hardly anybody with that specific kind of leverage against these platforms.

40:45And he's going after AI in this. Yes, but specifically he wants protection against generative AI on this platform, just as he has it on YouTube. I think the difference between TikTok and YouTube in this context is that YouTube is a music listening platform. And this has long confused YouTube itself. YouTube, Google, very data-driven organizations. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, used to say things like, we're a music service. Because if you look at the data, the thing people do the most on YouTube is they listen to music. Right. There's literally a stat on YouTube that is most watched non-music video video on YouTube.

41:23Like that's how big music is. It's like Mr. Beast keeps breaking the non-music video record. Yeah. Right. Because that's YouTube is music videos slash everything else. Right. Oh, right. And like the lo-fi beats girl. Like people turn on YouTube and they just like get access to music. Yeah. And so YouTube is streaming and YouTube Music exists and they've grown this thing. And YouTube knows that Google executives now will tell you YouTube is a licensing product. Google Search is a fair use product. YouTube is a licensing product. They know they need these relationships with the labels to preserve the existence of YouTube, especially because what people do the most is they just listen to music.

42:01TikTok is a discovery platform, right? And that is where their power comes from. Yeah, but I think music is still intrinsic to its success. It is, but TikTok to Spotify is the pathway there. Right, for music. But I'm saying for TikTok, the reason people go watch this stuff is because it's music. It's everybody doing cool stuff. But if you're TikTok, what the data is showing you is people discover new songs on TikTok, and then they go to Spotify and listen to them. right and you're saying to the music industry you will not be able to break new artists to younger generation without us so you believe that you have all this whereas youtube is looking at data and saying if the music goes away all of this is gone right but i think umg is saying you need us because otherwise the kids won't have any content to do their dances to but they they will have other this is the tiktok bet right right if you're tiktok this is how you end up here you're saying there will be other music.

43:00Yeah. They're hoping that somebody else is as big as Taylor Swift, which is like bold. Travis Kelsey is going to start his own record. Right. The Superbowl is in two weeks. This is a bad time to not have Taylor Swift on your, on your, on your platform. It's an interesting one though, because like the, the, the three names we put in our story, which I think is sort of fascinating are Taylor Swift, Drake and Olivia Rodrigo. Right. I think Taylor Swift obviously does not need TikTok. TikTok is more in need of Taylor Swift than Taylor Swift is TikTok. I don't think that's arguable. drake same olivia rodrigo interesting case olivia rodrigo very famous artist came up on disney channel had lots of things but also her music broke in a big way on tiktok would olivia rodrigo be as big as she is now without tiktok who knows right and and she's huge and i think every i think you're right that the bet tiktok is making is that everyone who is not an a plus plus list artist needs TikTok more than TikTok needs them because there is just an infinite supply of up and coming musicians all over TikTok everywhere.

44:03Are you going to break the Lil Boothing guy without Universal Music? Maybe you are, right? What's the other, is TikTok just going to do sea shanties? Yes. Maybe. Do you remember Ricky Desktop? We did a profile. This dude, Ricky Desktop. The DJ guy. He did the dice beat, the boat beat, the chicken wing beat. And then he was like, oh, no, I'm a real producer. And he won't talk to us anymore. Ricky Desktop, if you're out there, man, I hope you made it, dude. Chicken wing beat was fire. It was. But like that's TikTok's bet is there's an infinite supply of new things to discover. And Universal's bet is you need our like we have the stars.

44:42That's why I think this is fascinating. Like historically, I just thought it was really interesting, both because what David said earlier about how this is like the fights with the carriage. It's the same thing. like, oh, we're in a new entertainment age where now these fights are no longer happening between TV companies and big studios. They're happening between music companies and big social media platforms. And that's just like, we're in a whole new space and it's still rapidly developing. And now you have this whole generation of kids and it's like, okay, they're going to stay on this platform that is doing their girl Taylor dirty, which is certainly a messaging that UMG can and has pushed.

45:18Yeah. Or are they going to... are you going to protect Taylor Swift against AI? That's what all universal has to say. And the tick tock's right answer right now is like, no. Well, and given, I mean, a Taylor Swift is Taylor Swift, but also what's been happening with this, like the, the images, the non-consensual generative AI stuff of Taylor Swift on Twitter. Like this is, uh, I, I would not purport to say that universal timed this intentionally and perfectly, but boy, if they did, did they time it perfectly? Their contract was up on January 31st. The contract was written ages ago. The timing just worked very well for them.

45:55But it did. And I think it is all of these things are very much coming together. And also one other wrench to throw in here is TikTok is relentlessly trying to close the TikTok to Spotify pipeline with TikTok music, which it is continuing to work on and continuing to test and continuing to roll out all over the world. And so TikTok is becoming this thing where if it works and if TikTok music works, it's going to just like take the whole music industry inside of it. And so if you're universal, you're like, okay, if we sign a bad deal now and TikTok music hits, it suddenly becomes a really bad deal.

46:30Because now there's no out, there's nowhere to go because we've lost a whole generation of music listeners to this one app and service. Can I just offer you some very, I just realized this, a very funny media inside baseball drama tidbit. Sure. The New Yorker this week has a profile of Lucien Grange, Condé Nast. Wired's cover this month is Z Show, the CEO of TikTok. And they're just like battling it out across the covers of Condé Nast. It's pretty good. It's very good. But that's like where we're at, right? Like these people are out in public trying to advocate for themselves. I think TikTok is in danger.

47:09Look, I've called the top on this episode on camera pass-through and eye tracking. I feel like we're close to calling the top on TikTok. Wow. Really? Yeah. TikTok, it's a pandemic phenomenon. They didn't just grow through good vibes. They bought billions of dollars of Facebook advertising to get app installs. And that really popular, was it Musical.ly? It was Musical.ly. They bought Musical.ly. And they've got AI in the recommend. But like this is a pandemic phenomenon that felt really good in that time. Everyone's together. We're all doing these dances. Like we create cultural moments. We need to escape life and all we have to do is flick.

47:47Yeah, right. And here's all these people talking. We're all baking bread. The kids are doing call and responses in department stores. Remember, you know, like they would all yell the thing and yell the other thing. Like what was it? It was dirty, which is great. That's what I love. Yeah. It was just fun. Like kids are terrifying their parents with this app is like, that's what we're here for. That's why the verge exists. And now it's in the middle of what Corey Doctorow would call the inshittification cycle. Right. Right. So TikTok is no longer full of organic, wonderful content from people who are bored in the pandemic.

48:20It's full of people trying to sell you stuff. Right. And like more, more so than YouTube. Right. YouTube, you can have AdSense and you can just make videos and YouTube runs the pre-rolls and you get some money and that's the end of that. The TikTok creator fund does not work that way and it doesn't even pay that much money. So if you get success on TikTok, you immediately start looking for a brand deal. And you just see this thing happen so fast. And so it has just become less good feeling. In the same way that I would say Instagram has had the exact same problem. Instagram is influencers now.

48:58It's a catalog. Yeah, and TikTok is just headed that way, and they've added the TikTok shop. Now they're doing this thing where they're incentivizing horizontal videos that are over a minute long to compete with YouTube, and they're going to add this music service. And you're getting farther and farther away from the thing that made it worth spending billions of dollars to get app installed. They're doing the Elon Musk. They're trying to do an everything app. Yeah, maybe. I just think when you open it, it's no longer like, here's a bunch of delightful things that are happening. Like it, and maybe I just need to reset my algorithm or something.

49:31No, it's, it is what it is. I mean, and now like, I think the TikTok shop is the thing, right? Like if you want to point at one thing, if you want to call the top, it's the TikTok shop. By the way, to be clear, I'm not, I'm saying, I feel comfortable saying we might be close to calling the top. No, Neil, I called the top. You heard it here first, everybody. Done. Four out of 10 on TikTok from Neil Patel. But no, the shop, not only did the TikTok shop come in and all of a sudden two out of three videos you saw was somebody trying to sell you something from the shop. John Herman in New York Mag wrote a really good piece about he did a live stream after putting a used pencil in the TikTok shop and got thousands of viewers because TikTok just absolutely boosts engagement through the roof as long as you're selling something.

50:16And now TikTok is running a test we destroyed this week where it's actually identifying products in videos with AI and offering purchase links to them. So not only is it incentivizing everybody to deliberately sell you stuff, it is going to sell you stuff even when you don't mean to sell stuff. And all of the incentives on this platform now are going to be to sell you stuff from the TikTok shop, which by all accounts is being wildly subsidized and everything's very cheap and it's all sort of sketchy and weird. but like that is going to break this platform faster than anything else. I have a question about the shop.

50:50Do you guys like when you see the little orange button, do you just scroll past it as quickly as possible? When I see the live indicator or when I see the TikTok shop, I'm like gone. Except there's one that gets me every time and it's wrecking my whole algorithmic situation. It is constantly trying to sell me off-brand DeWalt batteries. And you're like, ooh. I get so many TikTok shop live streams for like, You can buy five DeWalt six-amp-hour batteries for just$20. Look at how well they are. And it's like, those are going to light my house on fire. And I just keep watching. They'd be like, are they going to light on fire in this video?

51:21And it's also just QVC. Anytime I see the live ones, I'm like, I don't watch QVC when I had television. Why am I going to do it on a TikTok? I got to go buy some batteries. It's in my brain. You're thinking about it. Yeah, they got you. It's not even QVC. It's just a guy being like, look at how cheap these batteries are. Yeah, it's not even as good as QVC. QVC tries a lot harder than this. But I also think like this, this is the same thing. This is TikTok feeling itself, right? I think Instagram, somebody wrote this, I think it was John Herman, but if it wasn't, I'm stealing this thesis from somebody else.

51:51So to whoever it was, I'm sorry, I forgot who you are. But Instagram has sort of identified this same thing where it's like, what if we made everything for sale, but has done it very slowly and carefully because there is a sense of like, we don't want to ruin the experience or at least not ruin it very quickly. tiktok doesn't give a shit about that tiktok is just like oh you like our app shopping now and there is this sense of like tiktok i think feels like it is inevitable now like it has won in a way that it can now turn on anything it can change the algorithm it can say oh we're doing horizontal videos now it's literally going 90 nilai tiktok is going literally going 90 oh my god i'm not ready to do that at all no i'm not even saying in reality the app is going 90 they want you to make horizontal videos so one of my favorite things to do this is going to make me sound very pretentious whenever I leave America I like to read books about America it's just like a thing I also tuck into some Tocqueville as soon as I leave not like that I'm imagining Eli just like unfurling the pledge of allegiance on the plane not like that so one of my very favorite books is called The Conquest of Cool It is about the American advertising in the 60s after all the GIs came home and they got money.

53:12And that's when the counterculture started. And it is if you like Mad Men, you should read this book because it is the thesis of Mad Men. Right. Is we're going to take the counterculture. We're going to take rebellion. We're going to repackage it and sell it to people. And that means Americans just our culture is like kind of sarcastic and ironic all the time. Right. Like we sell rebellion here in America and like selling out. it this is the most sellout our culture has ever been but it's still like ah you sold that like we're just not a sincere people here in the United States of America other countries are very sincere which is why I always read about our culture when I go because the contrast is real and so you can see a little bit of that over commercialization because Instagram is an American company that feels very American like it understands the thing that it is and it knows is it can't just slam shopping into your face culturally.

54:02The designers, the product managers, Adam and Steve, like there's a lot of people who live here. Like it's an American product in that way that it's American. They try to be very global. Like Instagram is huge all over the world. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying there's a cultural aspect to the product's design that is reflective of the fact that you cannot just walk up to an American and be like, buy this shit. Like it just kind of, it sometimes just doesn't work. Right. Like there's a little bit of ironic detachment that we accept here, that we expect here. TikTok is just, it is a Chinese company.

54:34And I think there's a little bit of that, like the reason, there's everything apps in China, if you go to those places, are ultra commercialized in a very different kind of way. And I think, I'm not even saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that it's a different culture. No, you can feel it. Because I think, I also see it with how we're very reviews driven in this culture. Like in America, you go on Amazon, you go to places, you still are checking like, okay does this have a good score am i gonna get this and and that that shop app is like so there's none of it none of that it's just like you want to buy it right yeah there's just a different vibe and i again i don't i don't i i really am being careful i don't mean to say like in a xenophobic way i'm like literally just identifying a cultural difference in how the commercial content is presented to you in this app that i think is reflective of something else When you look at apps like Shein and Timu and like Wish back in the day and like that vibe is a lot of that comes from China and is very much percolating all over the US now.

55:35Right. Like there were all these years where all these different kinds of companies tried to make this influencer driven shopping work, which has been huge in China for years. Right. Like a person will get on camera and just talk about products they like and they sell millions of dollars. And that has never been a thing in the U.S. And it is like rapidly becoming one because that portion of culture and commercial life is very much been exported to the U.S. And I think it's happening really fast. Yeah. But it's just QVC. Sort of. It's just like sort of. Yeah. But it's a really different generation, right?

56:11QVC is different, actually. I was watching QVC in the lobby of a hotel recently. It's a rockin' life. what I lead here. Highs and lows. So much excitement. Signing the Apple security NDA for the Vision Pro, watching QVC in the hotel lobby. Right? Highs and lows. And they were selling an electric snowblower with a cord. And the poor woman had to be like, this cord is so convenient. And it was just amazing. It was some of the most amazing performance I've ever seen. I was like, screw the Oscars. Like, find this woman. This is the best actress in America. and like yeah TikTok has some of that element to it but a lot of it is just like showing you stuff like there isn't that that performative like isn't it the best?

56:58Like Amazon has more QVC in it and I'm telling you that I think that is like reflective of the sort of just like detachment you need yeah like it's authentic right it's like very American authentic in its way oh but it's not it obviously isn't but that's what I mean like there's you have to build a little bit of artifice in our culture to go dead into selling right right and in other cultures you don't and that's just a cultural difference and it's interesting to david's point to see that come through in the apps what's really interesting is meta doesn't operate in china so we have not sent that back the other way which is just like also fascinating and it's good i think for good reason they don't operate in china right like they don't want to give data to the chinese government but Google doesn't operate in China for the same reason.

57:44Apple does. Interesting. So this moment for TikTok where I'm saying you're close to calling the top, I wonder if that will be part of it too, where their arrogance about what they are, what they represent to this culture is going to run into their ideas about what will work. Yeah. I think that's right. Right. And to run into sort of the essential nature of like how Americans wish to consume advertising is going to be really interesting because it's not like the TikTok users aren't already complaining about TikTok shop. Right. Like they already don't like it. And now you're going to take Taylor Swift away and her label boss is going to say they won't protect her from AI clones of her voice.

58:20Like that's a dangerous position. And there are so many. Yeah. Okay. That's enough TikTok-ing. Killing it. This is the worst. I hate it. I hate it so much. I have been on such a like good, healthy, clean eat and diet and exercise and then this last week just reviewing this thing, I'm just like, give me the sugar. It's a real, I think like everybody, there's a version of this that is very much like when you had like finals week in college. Yeah. And like the whole rest of your life just sort of collapses around you. That's what Nilay has been through for the last seven days, except in a headset.

58:58That was like, you would see him and the rest of the team that worked on it. And it was like, oh, you guys are in finals. Yeah, and now I have senioritis. Let's drink some Miller Lite and go to six fries. I'm never doing any work again. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. We've all had pivotal decision points in our lives that, whether we know it or not at the time, changed everything. This is especially true in business. Like, did you know that autonomous drone delivery company, Zipline, originally produced a robotic toy?

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1:02:50Okay, we're back. Lightning round. Sponsored by Cinnamon Toast Crash. Do we have any individual sponsors of Lightning Round this week? I got some emails last week. Individual listeners who wanted to sponsor Lightning Round. Liam? I've asked our sales team to reach out. Oh, my God. If you're an individual listener of the show and our sales team reaches out to you, set the highest price you can think of. $50 million. But also, if you just Venmo Neelai$10, we'll do it. It's fine. Wait, I guess it's the other way around. Our sales team should set a high price. I don't know how advertising works. That's why I haven't been able to sell the lightning round to anyone.

1:03:28Give us money. I'm handing her, I'm giving it away to Smeg, left and right. You want a weird old fridge? Smeg. Yeah, it's weird that Smeg has not reached out yet. So strange. That's a weird name to choose. Actually, one of my favorite TikTok videos I've seen recently is a guy who refurbishes fridge. Really? And I think they know, they're listening to me. So show them some fridge videos. They're listening. All right, Kranz, what you got? I'm going to be mean and do two. I haven't reviewed a giant headset this week, so I'm going to be selfish and do two. So my first one is streaming stuff, which is Hulu is cracking down on password sharing.

1:04:04It's been a while, but they said, yeah, we're in on this too. We also want more of your money, which means more of you need to use your passwords. Sign in. David, how are you feeling about that? This sucks. So I forget where I first heard this. I think it was on somebody on the town podcast, which is a very good podcast that everybody should listen to, who was saying that we as society screwed up by not being angrier when Netflix did this because we all just kind of rolled with it. We were like, oh, yeah, Netflix isn't going to let you share your Netflix password. That sort of makes sense. And then it worked.

1:04:39And everybody else is like, oh, dope. We can do that, too. We should have been so much angrier at this because this sucks and is bad and is just shaking users down for every penny they can get from them. And we've just all kind of allowed it to happen. And I can't get mad now that Hulu is doing it because I didn't get mad when anybody else did it. But I wish I had. I should have been angrier. We all should have. Can I tell you a text I got literally as we've been podcasting? It's from my sister. It's a screenshot of Netflix. And it says, looks like our Netflix jig is up. this is real Alex is looking at it it's amazing my version this specifically is Hulu I have an incredibly insecure password on my Hulu because I haven't changed it in probably a decade because there I mean there honestly must be 30 people out there in the world using my Hulu account including at least one ex-girlfriend uh I've been married for a long time now like it's it's it's bad times sharing Hulu passwords is how I found out a friend had a baby it's because I was like where's all this baby content coming from this is too much and I was like oh she's still got my password that's rude stop watching baby stuff make a new account so Amazon also launched ads this week right yeah Amazon speaking of things we should get loudly mad about yeah it feels like between last week and this week we're really like fully swung into the dark ages of streaming we're fully in that moment where like it sucks because it sucks this This is when the cable bundle just like comes roaring back.

1:06:11It's here, right? No, it's not here. You can't just be like, I'll, I mean, this is why Apple's announcing the Charter Spectrum app in the Vision. I was like, you can, if you like, I like Verizon. Verizon's like, would you like Disney Plus and Hulu? Yeah. For like a little less money. And maybe we'll throw in Apple TV. No, I want like an old school cable box app now. Give me a grid guide. Start playing stuff as soon as I open it. That's what I'm saying. I mean, this is just Tubi. We're about to have the CEO of Tubi on the computer. So I'll just ask her if this is what's happening. It is. but man I wish one of these services would be like alright we're just doing it all the contents in 4k and it's everything the Apple TV kind of does that but it's not everything they don't have a lot even baseball on Apple TV plus isn't in 4k and they own it that's because they're doing sports if they weren't doing MLS isn't in 4k and Apple TV plus and they literally own it they're going to get to doing 180 degree 3d video of soccer before they stream it in 4k to a TV god that's real I 100 % believe that.

1:07:08By the way, Addy called this out yesterday, and I didn't mention it in this review. Sorry to talk with the Vision program. Apple keeps calling them 360 videos, and they are 100 % 180-degree videos. Oh, yeah. You turn around, it's just black. And they're like, but it's a 360-degree. It's like easy. No, you have to go all the way around. Did you show them the Michelle Obama video? I can't. Why do you think I was trying to watch YouTube VR, dude? Relive the moment. Just be there. Again, a million years ago, a little baby, Neal I Patel, interviewed Michelle Obama at the White House with VR cameras.

1:07:38I was so jealous of that. And we're just reliving it again. We're just reliving it like, well, a new frontier of immersive entertainment. I was like, no, I was with the first lady in a circle. You look all around. You could watch Trey Shallowhorn, our executive producer, being like, wrap it up. Just like our current producer is doing right now. Six out of ten. It's great. Alex, what was your other one? But yeah, my other my other lightning round is so Amazon was going to buy iRobot, the RoboVac company, and the EU said, no, can't do that. Yeah. So they pulled out the CEO of iRobot, Colin Engel, is gone.

1:08:17350 people are getting laid off. Oh, no. The company is like and it sucks. And Jin Tui, our incredible reviewer of everything Smart Home, wrote a really lovely piece this week just being like they were doing it. They were doing all the cool stuff and they're having to compete with companies like Eufy, who is owned by a bigger company. Like all of the other big RoboVacs are owned by companies in China with lots and lots of money behind them. And iRobot's out there being like, we're going to figure out robotics in the home all by ourselves with no money. But, yeah, so it's kind of a bummer. It's unclear what's going to happen with iRobot because it seems like they really needed that acquisition for the influx of cash because in order to compete with their competitors, they either have to make their already very expensive RoboVax more expensive or they have to not – or like they need money.

1:09:06Okay. So I will say two things about this. One, the reasoning that iRobot and Amazon gave was we see no pathway to approval in the EU. Yes. Which is now what everyone says. Yes. And the EU's argument was Amazon sells these vacuums. They're going to buy this vacuum company and prioritize their own vacuums against other vacuums. You can feel about that however you want. Amazon, just like every other company, is doing layoffs and cost cutting. And Dave Limp, the old head of hardware, is gone and Panos Panay from Microsoft is in. And they're cutting that whole division down. There's a part of me that says blaming the Europeans is a very convenient excuse to not randomly buy a robotic vacuum company.

1:09:43It's certainly possible. For a smart home strategy that has not panned out for Amazon. Yeah. Like, it doesn't, their strategy just doesn't make sense. So I'm just saying, like, it's great to blame the EU, and I encourage you to blame the Europeans at any given time. The EU culture is so broken, they have no apps. Just putting that out there. Well, there's also, there's a weird thing happening where, like, the Roomba was a genuinely, like, groundbreaking thing. iRobot has made a lot of really good products for a really long time. That thing, to your point, Alex, is becoming completely commoditized, right?

1:10:13Like you can get a pretty good, it's not as good as the best Roomba, but a pretty good robot vacuum for like less than$200 now. These things are getting cheap really fast. And then the other thing was iRobot's whole idea was like we are, based on the knowledge that we're getting and the understanding that we have of your home, literally because we have a thing that's in there mapping where your chairs are, we're going to be able to understand your home in a uniquely powerful way. and we're going to be able to do things with it. Like, remember when this got announced and all of a sudden everybody was panicked about Amazon having the literal floor map of my house?

1:10:50Like, that's a real thing. But there's also a ton that a company like Amazon with its resources can do with that. If, like Nila is saying, you believe that Alexa and robots and Ring and all this stuff, like, you can see how it all comes together. But it seems increasingly clear that Amazon has just decided that's not a winning strategy for Amazon. Well, we have not heard a word from Panos Panay yet. Yep. He's not a retiring man. He's a very aggressive personality. He wants to win. I'm dying to hear what his vision for all this is. We know what Dave Lim's vision was. He has been on Decoder. We've talked to him lots and lots.

1:11:27But he never actually brought Ring and Alexa and all this other stuff together in a cohesive way. They're very separate ecosystems. One of my favorite things with Amazon is they run Ring and Blink, two different home security camera systems that don't talk to each other. It's such a mess. It's just utterly bizarre to me. Talk about QVC. The Blink QVC commercials are incredible. So good. If you ever watch one, it's just like, these cameras just run on batteries. It's like, what is happening here? I think you have a beautiful future as a QVC host. I would do so well. I can speak directly to the American psyche.

1:12:00By the way, the Europeans have one app. It's called Spotify. Apple hates it. That's what I got for you. By the way, the other thing I want to say, I feel very badly for the people who are going to lose their jobs. Yeah. And I hear argument on the world. It's like, if you don't allow these exits, all these people lose their jobs. I will just remind everyone that what happens when big companies buy smaller companies is that they lay everyone off and the companies fail and they go away anyway. Yeah. It's one of those things where I don't know. Like, it seems like I robot was always kind of like not doing great.

1:12:29This was probably always going to happen regardless of who bought them. And now it's just like, well, we don't have to hide. We can't hide behind that anymore. We're laying these people off. The CEO is leaving. If Amazon had bought this company six months from now, they would have laid off 300 people. Warner Brothers, Discovery bought Warner Brothers. They just keep getting rid of them. Mergers are bad is my general argument that I will keep making. The Europeans have it right there. They're good at that. But I do think there's a little bit of opportunistic undoing of this deal. That's a good theory.

1:12:59I like that theory. Yeah. All right, David, what's yours? There's so many I want to talk about, but I will avoid talking about top-level domains for one day. That was going to be mine. Okay, you can have that one. I'll talk about Snap, which I think today, Thursday, announced that it is recalling and refunding every single Pixie drone that it sold because of a problem with the batteries. And I just want to sort of briefly mourn Snap, interesting hardware company, which I believe is dead. There was just one drone, right? Yeah, it was called the Pixie. It was like, we had a great video about it.

1:13:35Alex Heath made a really cool thing in like a weird carnival looking building. His joy as it like flew out of his hand. It's delightful. And it's such a cool idea. It was essentially like autonomous little yellow drone that could land on your hand and fly around and take pictures of you. And like, it makes perfect sense for what Snap is trying to do. Snap also sort of relentlessly trying to make spectacles a thing, but has been very quiet about that for a while now. I just, there was a minute. That's not true. There were a lot of minutes where I believed Snap was like a sneaky company that was going to win in a lot of really big ways.

1:14:11And I am mourning the end of that thesis a little more every single day. But RIP the Pixie, which flew apparently too high and too hot and too fast. And its batteries exploded. It's amazing that Instagram and Meta got there faster with the Ray-Bans than snapped it with the spectacles. Well, I think money had something to do with that. I'm sure money had something to do with it. but that people are lining up for those spectacles. Like Snap was a big platform and it never made the turn out of teens messaging to whatever the next thing is. Like they invented the filters. Yeah. I mean, do you remember how long the joke went that Evan Spiegel was the chief product officer at Facebook in addition to being the CEO at Snap?

1:14:58Like it was true for a long time. And it turns out the product he needed to invent was advertising revenue. Matt is still much better at that than Evan Spiegel. All right, mine is top-level domains. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. I'm so excited about this story, especially because it's such a bad top-level domain. It's not great if you know anything about the internet. So if you are a huge nerd like me or Kranz, you have a lot of local... Not David. David's not nerdy enough. Absolutely. There's one thing I know is that Kranz and I are navigating to more local devices on our network than David can even contemplate.

1:15:37David's out there being like, this Pixie drone's amazing. Right. I'm outside, you know, driving cool cars and picking up chicks and you guys are just like 192.168. Let's go. So if you have configured a router, if you, like me, have a little Raspberry Pi Tamagotchi doing a home bridge situation, if you're like Kranz, and you operate a questionably illegal flex server, It's legal. For the local community. I still don't have the password. I'm just saying. If you're like Kranz and you've been ripping Blu-rays to your Plex server. Over a decade. Very legally. You know. You got to type 192.168.whatever to get to your, right?

1:16:23And sometimes you can fudge it with a.local domain. There's all this stuff you can do. And sometimes it doesn't work. So ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. incredible name for this organization that we do not talk about enough did not know that's what that stood for that this company it's it's a it's a long story but it's just amazing they like got themselves to i can you know they just reverse engineered the acronym the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers has proposed a new top level domain for devices on your network so instead of typing 192.168 you will type whatever dot internal nilai dot internal Nope.

1:17:03Hard pass. Not too bad. The other choice, my friends, was.private.

1:17:14They should have put a pearl on there. They ultimately chose.internal as it found, quote, .private may carry the unintended imputation of privacy.

1:17:31i don't know yeah i'm just saying dot local was sitting right there my internal get out like my home bridge is homebridge.local you can't i'm happy to tell it to you because if you try to go to it you'll go to your home bridge this works so excited that's like a hack that's like a that's like a bonjour hack or whatever yeah this is like a different like an actual top level domain that will mean this thing on the internet and they went with dot internal because dot private yes too much the implication would is privacy not the other thing i think we found actually we're not the nerdiest people it's i can anyway there it's not done yet it's not happening you can go to the i can't website and leave comments please behave yourselves.

1:18:21Wink, wink. It's ridiculous. I love it. I like that people have so much stuff on their own networks that this is a thing that we... People used to insist that no one would ever have anything on their own network. You know what else you could have done as the TLD? It's dot network. What a crazy idea that would have been. Yeah. My stuff. My stuff, I think, is the one. My dot stuff. My dot stuff, yeah. Behind Firewall. David Stuff dot no girls allowed. That's my local network. It's very good. Someone's going to write in and correct me on how dot local actually works, but I know it's not an official TLD.

1:19:01That's why I'm saying it. I will say in the abstract, I love the idea of having a name for your local stuff instead of all of the IP address nonsense. I memorized all of those IP addresses so long ago. Feels like a you problem. I don't want to have to go back and redo that. I need to know where my doorbell is at all times. I'm sorry. Here's how.local works. .local is a special use domain name reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF. The rivals to ICANN. I don't know. Sharks and jets, baby. I think they should fight. And it is not allowed to be a top-level domain. It has been reserved by the IETF.

1:19:38And if ICANN comes and takes it, that's a task force, baby. All right. I'm sorry. It's been a very long week for her. Crunch Neelize is in the house. Look, I love you all. Thank you for listening to the Vergecast or watching it. I'm sure you have some complaints to leave in the comments. Just do it. Just engage. Come back and engage again tomorrow. And next time you're in a meeting, if there's just two of you there and then a third person joins, just say, that's a task force, baby.

1:20:13I'm sorry, but you knew what you were getting. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:20:23And 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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From the publisher

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Vision Pro review rating, changes to the TikTok app, streaming news, and more.
Further reading:

Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not

The Vision Pro is a computer for the age of walled gardens

Apple’s Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables

Even without Netflix and YouTube, Apple’s Vision Pro has over 600 apps at launch

TikTok loses Taylor Swift, Drake, and other major Universal Music artists

UMG set to remove music from TikTok amid AI and payment concerns

TikTok test automatically identifies products in videos and offers purchase links

TikTok goes full YouTube

Hulu is cracking down on password sharing, just like Disney Plus and Netflix

The death of the Amazon deal could mean goodbye iRobot

Lawmakers propose anti-nonconsensual AI porn bill after Taylor Swift controversy

All the news from Congress’ Big Tech child safety hearing

Snap is recalling and refunding every drone it ever sold

TikTok’s CEO can’t catch a break from xenophobia in Congress

Your home’s internet connection could soon be called .internal

Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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