Search as we know it is officially over

35:11And they're kind of just shutting it down. It sounds like a paid version of Luxa is coming and that's the future. A thing that I've learned a bunch of times over the last couple of years, and for whatever reason, this just keeps coming up as I talk to people about products is that if you work at a big company and you have a product, there has to be someone really high up in the company who cares about it. And without that, if you're not like earth shatteringly successful, your thing will die. And this is this is true at Google. Like if you don't have a sort of executive sponsor who can sit in a meeting and talk about why you're still worth the resources, your product dies.

35:49If you it's true at Amazon, like, I think one thing that we're learning about Amazon is that there were a bunch of things that Jeff Bezos in particular, really cared about. And we've seen those things start to kind of wither on the vine after Bezos left. And I've heard this about the Kindle. I've heard this about Alexa, that these were things that, right or wrong, good business or bad business, like Bezos really believed in as things that matter both to the world and to Amazon. And without him there, it makes sense that if you're Andy Jassy and you're looking around and you're saying, okay, where are we just hemorrhaging money and or wasting resources?

36:25You could look at Kindle as wasting resources. It's a big team that doesn't make that much money in the scheme of what Amazon does. and you look at Alexa and you're like, okay, this thing was supposed to be the future. It's been 10 years. We've lost, not only, Neil, did they lose$25 billion, they lost$25 billion in five years. Not even the whole run. The journal's very good reporting couldn't find losses earlier than that, but presumably they were very large. This thing is a disaster of a business. And can I just read you what I think is some truly great knife-twisting writing from the journal?

36:57I used to work at the Wall Street Journal. They're very careful. They're very meticulous. they are not prone to like grandiose turns of phrase, but what that means is they will just very quietly, subtly just stab you repeatedly with a story. So it says, while hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn't take off. Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps, such as setting alarms and checking the weather. We're worried we've hired 10 ,000 people and we've built a smart timer, said a former senior employee.

37:30Brutal. Brutal. But also, yes, correct. That is exactly what it is. Yeah. I can't think of another company that operated a product division the way that Amazon operated the Echo division. Right. For 10 years, once a year, they would roll out a dozen new Echo devices. And they would just be different shapes and sizes, ever so slightly like weirder variations on the same thing. And if you look back over 10 years, how many Echo products would you say are essential? Right? I really can't think of that many different Echo products that are not just variations on the original formula they identified 10 years ago.

38:11And so we talk about$25 billion being wasted. It's like I don't know what they got from that. The product just hasn't gone anywhere. Well, I'll make this comparison, which I think is – it's a little out there, but go with me on this. this week meta released the latest version of llama which is open source and mark zuckerberg put out this whole thing about why he believes in open source and all this stuff and he has this line in there and it's like one of my formative experiences was building products limited by what apple would allow in its platforms and this is why i believe in open source and you know read it's great and i'm sure that will cause its own kind of consternation out there in the world amazon thought this was the next platform if you will recall they failed at the fire phone deeply badly failed with the phone they are also constrained by what apple will allow them to do on their devices and meaningful big ways and they really thought they had it they really okay ambient computing is going to be the thing we're going to put i mean they got one in every single home because they gave away for free yeah and then they this is part of the accounting tricks that the wall street journal is talking about is they they accounted revenue for purchases that were like not made They call it downstream impact.

39:18And like by putting an Alexa device in your home, people will shop this much or they will stay with Prime or whatever it is. And they made up some money. And then you're like, it's brilliant. There's no money. That didn't happen. Have you guys ever bought something directly through your Echo? No. Actually, I moved off the Alexa platform ages ago because I just wanted Google home frames. I wanted the photo frames on the hubs. and amazon finally did this but they never built a good photo service which is exactly the problem you're talking about which is the amount of cost and complexity to build a good photo service is not worth anything in the scheme of amazon right google accidented into google photos and they have it so they can run google the nest hubs which have the cool photo frame feature and i know i know that alexa devices have that and you can do it but then you got to use amazon photos which is not as good and it's like oh is the money to improve amazon photos worth it to get even five percent of people to switch away from google and you just like run the math inside of amazon you're like what are you talking about we run amazon like figure out how to sell more shoes like stop it i've been thinking a lot about the conversation we had around that very first demo of the humane pin all those months ago uh when he stood there and he was like i forget what he's he ordered a book he like took a picture of the book this is imran chowdhury the the ceo i think this is right he was wearing a prototype of the pin like took a picture of a book and bought it and we were just sitting there be like okay here's the list of questions i have about what just happened what credit card did you use where's it shipping to where did you buy it from what's what source is it how much did it cost all of that stuff has existed with the echo forever and with all of this you're like Alexa you know buy me toilet paper uh if I have to then go check my phone to make sure it worked correctly which I do we failed we we just accomplished nothing and I that I think was just never gonna work for Amazon and and they have they have tried to back their way into people want to do this with the you know the the subscribe and save thing has some stuff going for it and they're like we'll reorder the things that and all this stuff and doesn't work.

41:25And God, this has to have been six years ago. Now I was in Seattle in a conference room with a bunch of Amazon executives. And I made the joke about like, okay, this thing is for music and timers. What's the third thing? Where's where's my third thing going to be? And they gave me this long speech about how Oh, there are 10s of 1000s of things, lots of people like to do lots of different things. And I was like, but none of what you just described to me is a killer app that will make you money or any of these developers that you're trying to bring onto this platform. And it is wild to me how many years later, precisely nothing has changed.

41:56Yeah. Like they just never found another thing. It got very good at the things it was good at and it never found another thing. It's so funny. Cause there is that subscribe and save stuff. You know, you run out of things in your house and you should be able to be like, Alexa, I'm out of coffee or whatever. And they just couldn't close the loop in that very specific way. Or do you remember the dash buttons they had? you would just like push the button and like laundry detergent would show up and like kids are pushing them too much so they got rid of them they just figured out like automating that stuff and maybe you have a little too much overlap is better and that's how you get to subscribe and save like it doesn't really matter and then anything that you want to buy that isn't something you've already bought a hundred times in a row you probably want to do an like an infinite amount of like product research on and that's just better and so like i think they're stuck with this product And the next move is to put an LLM in it, to charge money for it, and to have it be this thing.

42:54But to your point, they thought this was an operating system. They thought it was a platform. They were licensing it out to all kinds of other companies. They thought they had Windows. We've talked about it in the show. It's like Amazon thinks Alexa has Windows. And you're like, the thing you can do with Windows is look at it. Like, right? Like, you can play games on it. Like computers need screens, I think, is like maybe the end result of all of this. Them planning to charge for an AI-powered Alexa feels like a very questionable next step. Like it feels necessary, right? You need to charge for it because that's what everybody's charging for the premium version of their thing.

43:33But it is, you know, after a decade of people being like, Alexa, it could be a little bit better. I think the idea that people are like, you know what? Maybe I will pay and get a slightly better Alexa. well just think about the horrible upsells that are coming for all of us with Alexa devices right like even today like you've every one out of 10 times I asked Google Home to do something and it's like you know I can also do this I'm like I don't I've known that for so long I don't I don't want you to when with Alexa it's gonna be like you know you can pay me to tell you even worse that's the thing right so like Jake to your point I think to me the question Amazon is about to ask is, is 50 % better Alexa actually meaningful?

44:18Because let's assume that it is, right? Like, I think there's some evidence that if you go from the machine learning tech that we've had before to like LLM powered systems, the like, the speech to text gets better, the text to speech gets better, the natural language processing gets better, like most of that seems like it'll work. If Alexa just gets 50 % better at every single thing it already does, does it become a better product or a better business for Amazon? Because I don't think so. I can't think of anything that I'm like, oh, if only it were better at this, I'd do it all the time. I think if you put ChatGPT into Alexa, it would get a lot more usage than it does today.

44:53I think if you charge$10 a month to access ChatGPT in Alexa, you're not going to earn that much money. Right. And this is a problem with it being a voice first assistant. If you could pay$10 a month to get ChatGPT everywhere, oh, that's kind of interesting. Right. But you can't. you can pay to get it in their app. And then that app runs on your phone where Siri is there. Fine. And it's not going to run in these voice assistants in your house because Google owns them or Amazon owns them. And you actually have this problem where you have what is fundamentally an application running into what many, many, many big companies have thought of as an operating system.

45:33I mean, this is like the starting point though, right? The grand AI dreams are that these AI tools can actually functionally do things for you, right? They can make the purchase. They can push the button. They can navigate an app for you. And so I think if we're talking about Alexa as an operating system, 100%, they need to be working on these AI things. They need to make that happen. But the last time somebody tried this, it was the rabbit, and they sort of made up the fact that they could do any of these things. And so I would say I don't have high hopes for V1 of this, but it's, I think very clear that they need to do something.

46:12This feels like the start. I haven't seen it yet, but it feels like this is going to be very much first steps. Yeah. One thing that's interesting about the journal piece, which is indeed very well reported and does, like David say, have many fine turns of phrase in it. Panos Panay, who now runs this division, did not speak to them. And we know Panos. He is a forceful personality. I don't think he's just going to let it ride. Like, if anything, he will provide focus to this, and it is unclear what that focus will be. If they are going to launch a paid tier, maybe that's his project. Maybe there's a new set of hardware coming.

46:50But there's another turn coming for this. It just feels like an entire decade's worth of Alexa hardware is about to become like, huh. So what's funny about that is I think if it weren't for Panos, I would have just asked you just now, do you think it's possible that Amazon is just going to decide to get out of the devices business? Because what this story is about broadly is Amazon's devices business is a disaster. And there was a period not that long ago where Amazon bought Ring. Amazon bought, what was it, Blink. It bought Eero. It was like it was deep in the we are going to be a hardware company in a very real way, especially in the smart home.

47:33And obviously, Alexa and Echo is the biggest part of that team as Amazon looks at it. But like there don't seem to be runaway hits here. There is nothing that is like making all of this work. And it's the same for Kindles and Fire TV. Like all of this is baked into that. And so if I'm Andy Jassy and I'm like, OK, we need to we need to keep growing. we need to put money inside of the stuff that's really going to matter. It doesn't seem that outlandish to look at devices and say, this is not a game we want to play anymore. But if you're going to do that, you don't hire Panos Panay, I don't think.

48:04And if you're going to do that, I don't think Panos goes to work for you, which is why all of this is very confusing to me. Right. And there's a lot of early sort of unsourced rumory reporting that he's like, what have you all been doing? And so we'll see. They need a vision, right? The vision under Dave Limp, and you can listen to Dave on our shows over the years, was your house would become a computer and he was just going to put microphones and speakers everywhere and then maybe get some satellite internet. Because he ran Project Kuiper, their satellite internet that competes with SpaceX. this is a real thing um and so his idea was that he would just sort of like smarten up your house and that would you would just like add stuff until you like like a black hole like it collapsed and until it started giving up light and heat and became alive and turned into a computer like i don't know what that metaphor is but that's what it felt like every time i talked to him he's like here's what we're gonna do we'll add some ring cameras and then ero will run the networking and we'll put a mic and a speaker in every room and then you'll have a fire TV and then we'll just keep squeezing until it's alive.

49:14And I was always like, but when do they talk to each other? Like that is the part, like the vision is like they have to do something that is more than the literal sum of the parts. And I don't think they ever got there. And importantly, if your Amazon makes money at some point, like Amazon just keeps giving hardware away, betting that once it's in your house, they'll figure out how to make money off of it. and we are now pretty long into that experiment not working. And you kind of wonder if it's ever going to start to work. It feels like everyone learned the wrong lesson from Apple, right? Apple turned your phone into a shopping mall and like you blink in an iPhone and Tim Cook is like, that'll be 100%, right?

49:52But the hardware is still very expensive. Yeah. Amazon's like, this is the cheapest TV we can make. It's full of ads. And it just did, they didn't get the second part. All right. There are other gadgets to talk about. Do you want to start with a Z Fold 6? Yeah. That's about it, right? Yeah, that's my level of enthusiasm. Yeah, so Jake, I want to know what you think about this. Neela and I have talked a lot about folding phones, and I always end up sort of defeated and sad, but I want to know what you think. I mean, if I had a lot of extra money to spend, I would own like nine foldable phones. And I would love staring at them.

50:29I would love dreaming about how often I'm going to flip them open and use the huge inner screen. And in reality, everybody I talk to who has a foldable phone does not open them all that often. And it's really interesting reading Allison's review because she's looking at this and she's like, this is, you know, it's a great phone. I think they've like pretty much figured it out. You know, they ironed out all but the literal crease. You know, it folds flat now. The screens like touch the edges. It's great. it's a really nice looking piece of hardware and I do think like we sort of got to you know a few years ago there was this question of okay is this going to replace the standard phone and I think now it's very clearly no this is just like another offering and they've gotten really good and I think what Allison is kind of finding here and this seems right to me for everything I've read from everybody I've talked to you have to have a use for it you have to specifically want this and buy this um and particularly given that these are like twice the price of another phone you have to really want it yeah uh our old friend dan siefert who's now at google um had maybe the funniest reaction to david instigating what i can only describe as the books palma wars of 2024 uh he was like what you really want is a folding phone which is the most dan or screens would be the most dan thing to say i love you dan um dan is also the one who tried to get me to use samsung decks every day uh which we all know how that went but his point was you want a device for reading what you actually want as a folding phone that is a phone most of the time and you open it and you have a tablet and you do this thing and it's still the argument is what you really want as a tablet most of the time but it's just i don't think android tablets are that compelling yet like yeah to this day and so allison's point here is like samsung kind of has no competition here and coasting on having invented this yeah and these are totally iterative refinements i i think i think that's true but i also think if you're samsung you're you are kind of looking at android and going like okay what are you what are you gonna do for me here and and we're now on a pretty long run of google kind of loudly talking about how it's investing in making stuff better for larger screens and it has gotten better like the basic ui of a larger screen android device has come a long way.

52:53It doesn't feel like somebody just like took the edges of a JPEG and stretched it anymore. Like it's much better, but it's still, it doesn't feel meaningfully different to use the internal screen than it does to use the external screen. And so I think like Jake, to your point, you get a foldable phone and what you realize is mostly what you bought is just a heavier phone that every once in a while you're going to open up and do something with. It's not like a every time i sit down to do it i'm gonna open up the phone this is the reason i think flip phones are more interesting because i think to me there is a much more natural divide of what you do wear on a flip phone and on a fold phone i think partly just because of the way we've all used phones for so long you're just gonna sit there and use it as a phone most of the time because all of the operating system all of the apps all of our muscle memory has taught us how to use a phone like a phone.

53:44And so there's just the case for this larger screen just has not been made super convincingly. And Samsung does not seem to every year invent new reasons to make that case. Like the sketch thing that you can do on there is awesome. You can draw an image and it'll make that image for you with AI. Terrifying for the future. Very cool. You need like a lot of those if you're going to start to sell these things to people in meaningful ways, especially for twice the price of a normal smartphone. Yeah. Also, it is still too tall and skinny on the outer screen, which I think is why people instinctively sort of open it every time.

54:19Yeah, though, weirdly, it seems like Google is heading in that direction, too. All the rumors about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. You did. That's really impressive. Are they going more in this direction? I think it's crazy. I thought the old kind of wider, more book-like format was going to be a winner. yeah but the pixel 8 fold that's the one yeah you can tell google runs a company where most information is indexed by machines in how they care to name things um uh but it was like too wide like alice has a photo and review of the one plus open the pixel fold and the new galaxy z fold 6 and it's like the one plus open is the right shape yeah it's a phone like that's the answer is make it a phone and then you can open it to a tablet and every other one is like it's a book right it's a remote control and it's like why don't you just make it the size of a phone and i get that it's challenging because you have to optimize the tablet on the inside and you you're i don't want to reopen the great aspect ratio debates of the verge cast of old but like what is the right aspect ratio for both of these things is kind of an open question it's 1610 just gonna lock it in three two baby let's go all right so that's the z-fold six if you really have a view uh sketch to image is gonna you know probably end democracy as we know it but it'll be fun while we while we have it can i just say before we move on if you are a person who already owns a z-fold and you're upgrading to the six tell us why vergecast at the verge.com i i'm like i sincerely want to know because there are a bunch of little hardware things there are a bunch of little software things i want to know like what are the what are the new things that make you want to upgrade your foldable phone so hit us up yeah uh let's talk about the galaxy ring real fast uh these analysis of this is this is an accessory for the galaxy watch not what i expected which is kind of fascinating yeah yeah so basically the the ring seems to have gotten the hardware basically right it's light it's thin it lasts a long time it doesn't have a subscription the charging case is great because it's a charging case and not just like a weird puck that sits on your desk uh but it's it is kind of totally ancillary to everything it doesn't seem to be wildly accurate in the way that you would hope something on your finger could be more accurate than something on your wrist it does an interesting job v found of sort of trading data collection between the watch and the ring so it'll it'll actually optimize for which device is better at collecting which kind of data through which sensor which is very cool and potentially good for battery life but yeah it seems like it's it's fine like if you don't have a watch and you want a ring it'll be fine it won't be as good as having both it probably won't even be as useful as the watch but it'll be fine but also like people who want smart rings probably also have smart watches i don't know so i i land on like this seems like a good additive thing but i kind of wanted more out of it it's also extremely samsung dependent yeah i i just googled it i can get a galaxy watch six for half the price of the galaxy ring i think like there's the question this thing does more we already know people like smart watches um galaxy watch this looks pretty good um it and in v's findings right the ring is supposed to be better um at a bunch of different tracking for health stuff.

57:41It just wasn't. So at least for this first version, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, as much as the discrete form factor could be nice for people who want to wear other stuff on their wrists. Yeah. Can I ask, if you are deeply in the Galaxy ecosystem, can you talk to us? This is like every now and again I ask for people who buy gaming Android phones. No one's ever called us. I just want to be clear. look not all audiences as we as we know it's a fractured media landscape maybe hardcore android gamers don't listen to the verge cast but i suspect if anyone would have that audience it would be us uh reveal yourselves and if you're hardcore in the galaxy ecosystem if you're like we know about our ios fanboys right there are people who are like i now that iphone has rcs i believe in rcs like we know you are but we're talking like deep like if you if you don't have a level if you don't by a galaxy book just for the connection to your phone like i'm out you're not in it you're not using dicks as yeah it's exactly right i'm sure i know and i i just want to i i just want to know you i just want to be your friend uh so one thing about v's review that really jumped out at me was uh we talked about this after the samsung launch but the the whole energy score thing this idea of like collect a bunch of data and it's going to sort of spit back to you like this overall measure of how you're doing and also some information about how you can do better uh can i just read you a paragraph from her review just while i'm reading damning paragraphs about companies uh she says the new energy score is also broadly accurate though the ai powered insights for it hit or miss after a punishing long run in 90 degree heat my energy score dipped 18 points the next day victory i was told i needed to rest that night i went to bed my score jumped 16 points blah blah except i was also told my sleep was compromised and to stop drinking alcohol or late night eating to ensure quality sleep.

59:35I don't drink. And my last meal was at 645 PM. AI, baby. That's the thing. Like all of these things that the Samsung and Apple and everybody else is on this path of like, we're going to collect as much data about you as we can on your body biometrics. We want all this stuff and we're going to, we're going to give it, we're going to use AI to give it back to you. Right. And the more data you give us, the better the AI will do. i am i am so skeptical of the idea that these tools are going to be good at reading charts and helping me understand what's going on with my body and helping me try to live better and this is the future of medicine david yeah i also in some episode in the last couple of weeks ragged on people who aggressively sleep track uh i'm just i really am like throwing a lot of strays on this show recently i heard from a bunch of people who were like you're just firing into the air just seeing where the bullets i heard from a few people who were like i sleep track intensely and i look at my score and i care very much about it and i i that's all well and good but still it's to the point of like okay if if you're tired go to bed earlier like that's that's as sophisticated as most of these tools get and there is no evidence in a lot of these that ai is going to make that like meaningfully better no no i use the app sleep cycle on my phone which is a great alarm clock i pay the subscription it's a subscription alarm clock app on my iphone it's great uh and it will tell you basically like astrology level correlations all right maybe the real you know i just like haven't dug into it affecting your sleep but it's like it it's like here's first of all it calculates a sleep score which i don't even know what that is um it's because by listening to you which is terrifying and then it will just like correlate it to different things so it's like you sleep better when it's raining it's like do i and the craziest one is uh air pressure it's like here's the air pressure and it it's a it's a curve with two peaks and there's like parts of a barometer that apparently i sleep better and i'm like i don't know if this is you have to optimize it's like you're missing out this is why i've hermetically sealed my room and i adjust the air pressure in my room every time he just vacuum seals himself every night before bed now wire cutter has a great list for for hermetically sealing the room it's very expensive but it's really worth it yeah i'm saying once you've used this app that is like astrology level correlation i do like the idea i will say of of waking up in the morning and it's like uh you didn't get very good sleep that's mercury's fault for sure like that would make me feel better i would actually pay for that like i would like to outsource all of my bad sleep to someone else's problem do that i mean i guess my the question i have though is like i don't i don't know how much more like a doctor is going to help you right i i mean if you if you discover that you actively have sleep apnea that's very serious that's a really good thing to learn about um if you just find out that you're waking up a few times in the middle of the night um i don't know like i feel like a quick google search asking your friend for some some advice on if you're partying too much?

1:02:40Look, rainy showers is plus 9 % sleep quality for me. Actually, my favorite in this list... Is there a word cloud coming here? It's affected by location, so it knows where you are, and I will tell you that if I go to bed in Philadelphia, minus 26 % people... I don't know what that means!

1:03:01I've often enjoyed my time in Philadelphia. Too much. But the air pressure, I'm just showing Jake. The air pressure. It's crazy. You have to be careful there. There's a lot of red on this front. Today I am the pilot. And I am telling David he's wrong. Alright, we should talk one more gadget, the Asus Rogue Ally X10. However you want. It's whatever you want. Sean loves this thing. Loves it. Says it's the best Windows gaming handheld there is, except Windows is really bad at going to sleep. Right. Best Windows handheld is like the most damning with faint praise thing of all time right now. But yeah, it's...

1:03:40By the way, I have to say, I think we gave all of these products sevens, and I feel like I need to have a stern meeting about sevens. Because only the Vision Pro gets a seven, right? Is that right? Yeah. Only the Vision Pro deserves a seven, nothing else. We give one seven a year, and it's the most damning seven we can give. I love that for us. That's the new rule. but yeah the the rub on most windows handheld gaming is that it's bad uh like the upside is that it's windows so it runs everything the downside is that it's windows so it ruins everything like that's it's honestly that simple this one kudos to asus like the it's fast uh the battery life is pretty good the it the fan is not super loud it has a variable refresh screen that sean really liked uh the downside is still windows uh it is just not optimized to run well on a screen like this but i will say we had a whole conversation uh two weeks ago on the show with sean and kranz because i am like deep in a buying debate with myself about which portable console to buy and they kind of were like it's the steam deck unless the the rog ally x can be great it kind of seems great like this kind of seems like the one it's it's a little finicky because it's windows but it'll play all your games and it'll play them all pretty well and it will last a long time like as windows goes that's it this is the key it will play all the games right sean is like the performance can play the most demanding games and the battery life is good the other thing i'll say here is like this is twice the price of an entry that's the killer part it is 800 this is not the price of buying a gaming pc exactly but this is like a pretty serious console level investment that is true it's like more than buying a playstation right yeah but buying the steam deck you're like oh it'd be kind of cheeky um and i think this is this is like this is your serious gaming device yeah um this is a commitment but i think that's okay like if it if it if it runs as well as it seems to like sean is a pretty demanding benchmark of games so when he when he says he's happy i know i'm going to be like ecstatic because sean is mad about frame rates and i'm like this looks great to me what are you talking about sean so this is why i don't review gaming handhelds but i i think i was very encouraged by how encouraged he was even playing was it alan wake 2 that he said it's like a bear of a game for any of these systems and seemed to be pretty happy with it yeah and the the as these things get less and less finicky over time slowly um i mean it's just making this kind of caliber of gaming more accessible to people who do not want to deal with that on a full-fledged pc which is great all right we gotta take a break are we not talking about google's weird chromecast thing that's it that's all i have to say about it google has a weird chromecast thing that hopefully will be more powerful than a chromecast yeah it's like a wedge it's like you know the people who do finger skateboarding it's made for them that's what it is like belkin is gonna make you a finger skateboard for this thing 10 minutes after it launches but yeah we don't need to talk too much about this because all of this stuff is launching in two weeks basically and has just been leaked to death so we'll have many more chances to talk about this between now and then uh but weirdly of all the stuff i think google is going to launch if they can launch a very good google tv powered set top box that might be the thing i am specifically most excited about it and i say this as somebody who finally caved and bought an apple tv to plug into my roku tv because i'm so tired of crappy streaming software just give me something better Sony Pictures Core you can only watch four movies three of them are in the Bad Boys series but they're 80 megabits per second and number four is Madam Web which exists I like to think in the same universe as the Bad Boys movies I watched I watched all of Ghostbusters Frozen Empire at 80 megabits per second I could not tell you what happened in that movie I could not tell you if it began or ended like it just it just happened to me and I was like these pixels look so good this movie is so bad it's great all right we gotta take a break we'll be right back with the lighting round still time to sponsor it call now support for this show comes from linkedin when you're a small business owner your business is on your mind 24 7 so when you're hiring you need a partner that works just as hard as you do.

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1:09:04all right we're back jake you've never done a lightning round with us no uh and i you know yeah i want to apologize for that sponsorship not coming in it really felt like this is gonna happen um i have been told again this is not my set of hats at all but i have been told that there is interest we just gotta we just gotta get jake just couldn't get the money together in time i i i had 15 i offered it uh to andrew and he yeah apparently the other prices thing too high i'm willing to take any amount of this point but our sales team would like to hit money revenue boats rides on boats we're it's we're in all right jake you uh you're a guest you have the you have the opening lightning round item that's very kind of you Yeah, so I want to open with Apple Maps launches on the web.

1:09:54Revenge of the web. We open the show with like the web is dead. We're closing it with like Apple has to do web stuff now. This is either monumental or just does not matter at all. And I am not sure which it is. But there's like a thing happening around Apple Maps where I'm of a generation. My generation believes that Apple Maps is garbage because that's how it was when it launched in 2012. And then we kept using Google Maps because I've used Google Maps since its inception. It's a lovely, mostly good product. But I do think more and more people are using Apple Maps. It's the default on the iPhone.

1:10:36People aren't questioning it. And by all accounts, it's gotten pretty darn good over the past 10 years. Can I caveat that slightly? Yes. Apple Maps is very good at navigation. it's very like if if you put in an address and you want it to get you to that address apple maps is very good it's actually in a lot of ways better than google maps which i think has like mostly lost its mind as a navigational tool we can come back to there are lots of other parts of a maps app apple maps is trash at most of them but it is it is very good at just like a to b directional navigation especially if you've watched you guys ever use the the tappy tap things i really like that not because i remember what the taps do and are supposed to remind me to do but because it makes me look down at the map so that i actually remember where i'm going it's just like hey you have to turn soon look look at the screen it's very hidden the mat the the taps the haptics are like the purest hidden ui of all time yeah it's like six in a row if you're supposed to turn left and like three pairs of two if you're supposed to turn right like i really think that's what it is i cannot figure it out i just take like my wrist starts making noises at me and i'm like oh yeah I'll look at the screen.

1:11:43It's great. It's like no one cares enough to figure this out. But sorry, Jake, continue. So now it's on the web, right? It is on the platform that is accessible to everyone. So before now, it's not that Apple Maps was available on the web in some very limited ways, right? They had an API. Developers could pay for it and embed it into their tools. I believe the Infatuation uses it for all of their restaurant maps. DuckDuckGo, all the DuckDuckGo heads out there know this it powers DuckDuckGo's maps so it's not like it wasn't available but there was no maps.apple.com and now there is, don't go to that address because it might be slightly different but it is on the web, you can use it and if you're sick and tired of Google Maps which I'm sure some people are you can switch to Apple and I think as they inevitably try to turn this into a services business the fact that it is on the web is going to matter.

1:12:41So it's not clear to me that overnight anybody's going to switch their bookmark from Google Maps to Apple Maps on the web, but it feels pretty important that they have brought this to the web eventually so that it is on, you know, the biggest platform in the world. Can I give you my Galaxy brain take on this? Yeah. So Google Maps is fundamentally a search engine, right? Like it's a local listing of places That's actually the thing about Google Maps that is the best. It has all the places. It has pictures. It has reviews. As a database of local things, it is pretty much unmatched. Apple is awful at that.

1:13:21It has a Yelp integration that everybody really hates. It's just Apple is not good at that. But that's where all the money is in Maps, right? Like you can be a data provider, which Apple is, but if you want to really do this and do this well, you want to essentially sell ads in local search. And that's a big business. It's a business in which hardly anybody is doing a good job of competing with Google because you kind of need the mapping product to do it on top of. And if you want to do that, you need it to work on the web because you need it to be everywhere. Because like, if I'm in the car, what I want is navigation, like I need to get somewhere.

1:13:58But if I'm like planning things, or I'm looking for places nearby, like that is a desktop activity that you do on the web. And this is how you get to Chromebooks. This is how you get to Windows. I think like there is a Maps app for Mac that I cannot imagine people open ever on purpose. But this is like, this is your way of becoming like a tool for advertising and for place search way more than it is like mobile web navigation. And so I think in that respect as a sign that this is something Apple is going to start caring a lot more about as a business is super interesting to me. And probably bad for Yelp because you got to kick Yelp out if you want to do this well.

1:14:42And bad for Apple Maps. What you're fundamentally describing is they're going to put a bunch of ads in this thing. I know. That's really true. Which is the reason that people like it right now, that it doesn't do that. But that feels like it is the inevitable direction. So use it now while you can. But yeah, this feels like they're teeing that up. and um you know being available on a huge platform is all right now i'm gonna galaxy brand it this is this is apple knowing that there's big court case about google default search on its products and that search is all going wonky and people search for places all the time all the time and the the thing after all these years people expect maps to show up in search results on the web so you just need to get to a place where you're not kicking people on their macbooks into a weird map app that you can just display a result i thought you were going to say instead of taking google's money for safari search it was going to take google's money for to like power all the place data in apple maps uh just as a way to like make a deal while sneaking around web defaults i like that a lot too but i think i think you might be right and this is this This is a hedge in a lot of ways, right?

1:15:57Like you have to be good at this if you want to win at any of this stuff. I think that's, I think you're probably right. The web ain't dead. By the way, as we have been speaking, we have a little breaking gadget news. Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, released a letter apologizing for the disastrous rollout. I will point out just some chronology here. He says, we know too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app, which rolled out on May 7th. Today is July 25th. so it's been a minute and I want to begin not me this is I'm quoting Patrick now I don't want to apologize to you for anything Patrick says I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you fixing the app is our number one priority since May 7th we have released new software updates approximately every two weeks each making significant and meaningful improvements and they're going to keep releasing updates every two weeks and now they have a schedule here's all the things they're going to fix every two weeks for the next several months.

1:16:56What a mess. There's only one answer here, and it's that your entire audio chain should be analog. I agree. You would have none of these issues. I agree. This is why I have a full vinyl setup. Every now and again, I play a record. I'm like, no one knows I'm listening to this song, and it is the best. That's not true. Your phone is listening to it. That's true. Mark Zuckerberg and the FBI are like, he's listening to that again. can we just crisis comms this one for a second yeah this makes no sense to me because there are two things here that patrick spence did that i think are are bonkers and nonsensical one is 10 weeks later remind everybody of the stupid thing that you did uh which frankly many sonos users are reminded of every day because the experience is a mess but like the sonos initially came out and talked about how it took courage to do this like just to what an incredible million years later own goal and then the other thing that he does is is lay out the roadmap like you said for the next few months which says among other things that the alarms are not going to get better until september so now what you've said is oh we screwed up we're so sorry it's gonna take two or three months before really really really basic things ever start to work again and so all I'm going to do as a Sonos customer who came out of this whole period being like, well, that sucks.

1:18:24Hopefully it'll get better. Now I'm like, oh, now they're just sorry, which helps nothing. And all I know is none of this is actually going to get better anytime soon. Here's what I'm going to tell you. If you are looking for an alarm clock, you can use this app called sleep cycle, which tells me that if I get 6 ,000 steps, my sleep is green. But if I get 12 ,000 steps, it's red. but if i get 21 000 steps it's green again and you have to pay for the alarm so you have to exercise none or tons yeah but if you do like a good job disaster hey look they've never updated the app and made it not work you know does the alarm go off every morning the alarm it um it's terrifying it's a surveillance alarm clock it listens to you sleep it figures out when you're coming out of rem sleep and then it wakes you up so you actually like that i mean look it's terrifying and sometimes it it um it claims to have recorded you talking in your sleep look i'm saying i love it it's my favorite it is it is my astrology all right leave me alone i'll take that as as one of my lightning rounds uh david what yeah jake i forgot to mention that we do a lightning round in which we all pick one thing and then neil i pick six or seven things that's just important for you to know the lightning round is just when neil i talks for a long time I'm honestly I was stunned I looked down I'm like sorry Neilide doesn't want to complain about the 1080p limitation on FWO I'm sure we'll get to that how are you going to let that opportunity go by I just wanted to fill you in I know it's been a while since you've been on the show which the other part of that means is my lightning round thing only gets to take about 45 seconds because at some point the show has to end yeah it's a lightning round actually I'm really confused about the lightning round it's best not to worry about it it just helps it's just three things when you actually sponsor it then you can be mad about it the second we get money the whole lightning round is going to change we should be talking about these for no longer than 30 seconds it should be debate policy style we're just talking really really really fast to get everything through what we're supposed to do is get through all the things as fast as we can and somehow we got to we're just going to all pick one and talk about them at length just like all the other segments which might be why it's never been sponsored Because as fast as we can is four or five hours.

1:20:44Listen, never, never. Guys, we can do this. No, we can't. It's impossible. I want to be clear. David, what do you got? I just want to really quickly talk about these new NBA TV deals that just came out. Oh, boy. We've talked a lot on the show about how sports deals are like a harbinger of all of what's coming in streaming. The NBA just signed two or three, rather, new decade-long deals. uh one with comcast one with disney which are fairly normal tv deals some streaming some tv but the big new one was with amazon uh and there are now going to be not a ton of games but lots of games uh 66 a year and 20 playoff games a year on prime video um amazon's paying almost two billion dollars a year for this it is like this company is dead serious about being a real player in sports uh they are all the way out on gadgets apparently like all the all the alexa money is just going to end up getting put into sports rights deals because prime video seems to be the thing they are like deeply committed to winning in some way shape or form and i just find it fascinating and yet again the sports watching landscape gets weirder and more confusing uh there's going to be tv deals espn is going to have its own streaming service it's also going to have this venue sports thing.

1:22:02There's going to be Peacock. There's going to be Prime Video. Like, God help you if you just want to watch sports in the next day. I don't know a ton about the sports landscape. Before all these streaming deals, was it this fractured and splintered? Or could you mostly get one or two channels and find these things? Now it feels like just to watch one league, you need to split across nine different streaming services depending on the phase of the movie. No, that's right. It never used to be this bad. I think the NFL was probably the most spread out. And basically the way it worked was two channels split Sundays.

1:22:36And then a third channel had Sunday nights and a fourth channel had Monday nights. And that was. And that was the best. That was the worst, like the most confusing, complicated version of it. Most of the time it was split between one and two networks. And then you throw in like regional networks for baseball. And it's always been a little weird. But like right now. So I'm an Arsenal fan. That's how I watch soccer. If I want to watch every Arsenal game, I have to have five networks. That's a real number. It is insane. And so, like, it's just all of this is broken. And it's because there's now so much more money in sports.

1:23:13Like, the rights have gone through the roof. And so, these traditional entertainment companies just can't afford the rights anymore. Because, like, I mean, if you total up. So, Disney is paying$2.6 billion annually. Comcast is paying$2.45. And Amazon is paying$1.93. So seven-ish billion dollars. Nobody can afford that on their own a year. These rights have gotten so expensive and they're so important that the competition has just gone insane. And the leagues, I think probably correctly, are like, well, we can make more money by selling pieces of it to lots of people. And then we'll let fans solve it for themselves somehow.

1:23:47And the solution is going on to Internet message boards and staling the storm of seas. that's what's happening like eventually it's going to get so complicated the revenues will come down because people we'll see but i agree with you that amazon is betting very highly on sports because it makes prime video stickier it makes it feel more free uh and it gives you like other than that then they have to what are they going to pay for more seasons of reacher right like his homeland are going to be even more evil well it all it all sort of tracks right like it is it is it does the thing for amazon that actually alexa doesn't where like you can sell ads against football that accrue back to amazon in a very real way right yeah there's a lot of aws ads unless there's exactly in a way that all of that stuff they wanted to connect those dots with alexa and never did they're actually pretty well connected on prime video yeah but it is getting insane to watch anything it's a disaster all right here's my other one i am going to complain about 1080p streaming.

1:24:49As long as we're on the subject, I'm going to take this opportunity. Disney launched the bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max. Interesting, by the way, that ESPN Plus is not part of it. Just a little swap out there. Like, no one cares about this sports product because that's moving into the bigger bundle with the other companies. Very weird. There's a lot of weird stuff going on there. None of this really matters except the bundle is what,$29.99 a month? $16.99 a month. $16.99 a month with ads, It's$29.99 a month without ads. For ad free. So that's cheaper. If you were to pay all in just straight up, you'd be paying$48 a month.

1:25:28So it's cheaper. But 1080p two streams. And the weirdest part about this is that when we asked Disney to clarify that and make it clear, they refused to answer on the record. It's so bizarre. What are you doing? Usually when we get a refused answer on the record, it's controversial. you know it's like this is controversial like an explosive claim and they're like no we're gonna see and disney's like we just won't tell you it's 1080p on the record no one wants their name attached to bit rates that low so we actually we actually don't know we know that max is 1080p yeah uh hulu and disney plus they wouldn't say so actually it's the disney half of this is just stonewalling the hbo half is like ah whatever yeah yeah yeah max is like we you don't care that much uh it is very hard it is very expensive and very hard to get max in 4k you just buy max ultimate and it's just ridiculously expensive and nobody wants it it's what i gather it's the only streaming service i pay for you pay all the way you pay if i'm paying for it i want i want all the pixels wait really wait jake be honest do you really you pay the whatever seven hundred thousand dollars a month it's like seventeen dollars it's not we no okay but the reason i ask is we've talked a lot on this show about like price elasticity for 4k because my theory is they're just gonna charge everybody who is dumb enough to pay for 4k streaming until you're paying a hundred dollars a month per service or you just go down to ads like those are going to be the two tiers to be completely candid uh i meant to cancel months ago and okay so you're in the neil situation where like i paid for this it's just i'm like i'm probably gonna watch something i i i'm really not sure what network is the bear on hulu yeah i gotta cancel this yeah it's not good i'm just saying the fact that of all of them max which has the best movie catalog makes it the hardest to get 4k is just kills me.

1:27:30I watched Dune 2 on a plane. It was pretty good. It looked alright. I still have never done this, but my dream is that when we review movies, we don't issue them scores. We issue them where and when to watch. Oh, that's good. Some of them are like, go to the theater. We rate it by screen size. Yeah, go get to the theater. IMAX. This is an IMAX movie. And then you get all the way down to the end and you're like, for free on a plane, if there's nothing else. Right? And like in the middle, it's like, wait for it to hit Netflix. Like there's all these things. And that is the true mark. That's really good.

1:28:10Yeah. It's on cable with ads. And you're hungover. Fine. We need to come up with a scale. On mute in the dentist's waiting room. Yeah. Exactly. It's fine. We got to figure out the one for Baywatch, which I've seen go viral on seat backs. I just the, um, what's the new Sydney Sweeney, Glenn Powell, anyone, but you, I mean, I don't know what you, uh, I watched that go viral on seat backs. The last time I was on a plane, whatever that category is, is the most complicated category. Cause it's not wait for a seat back. It's when it happens, it happens to everyone. You know, what's tough is, is which is better than wait for it.

1:28:52I have my, my new plane gadget is the, the 13 inch new iPad pro very beautiful, very bright, very large. Um, nothing like a, like surprise nudity in a movie on a 13 inch iPad to really make the plane ride awkward for eight minutes. I just do the quick, like fold the screen down, just sort of keep an eye on it for a couple of weeks. It's worse than watching with your parents. Oh, it's awful. Got Oscar nominated. It's fine. It's for art. That's just what I yell to the plane as it's happening. Yeah. Yeah. My parents were like, let's watch Oppenheimer. And I was like, this isn't supposed to be here.

1:29:29I'm 42 years old. Okay. Last quasi-lightning round item. We have... David caused the Bukes Palma War of 2024. Rivian CEO RJ Scringe caused the great CarPlay debate of 2024 to light up. It's real. People are writing articles. People are yelling comments. David and I are holding a formal CarPlay debate soon on the Vergecast. I'm just letting you know. We hashed it out. With like rules, like Liam is a moderator. They got heated. I won. I'm not telling you what side it is. Eli called me names and they hurt my feelings. It's a reflection of the current political environment in America. That's what I'm saying.

1:30:16Alright, I think that's it. There's like a lot of other stuff going on. It's a wild week. We barely even talked about the other thing that happened this week in the world. after we received feedback on our political views last time you mean the olympics i'm gonna wrap this up all right that's it there's a lot going on uh we have to you know there's a new presidential candidate she has like a lot of tech policy views that we don't know yet so all that's to come the olympics are starting which also seem very difficult to stream in 4k unless you have a specifically a comcast cable box in which case you get a low latency 30 megabits per second stream uh comcast is an investor in box media they provided me with none of these you can tell how much they care for me uh i they did not install comcast service in my house far outside of their service area to just give me one of these boxes um there's a lot going on it's all gonna be on the verge.com jake this was great thanks for joining us man of course that's it that's where you asked rock and roll and that's it for the verge cast this week hey we'd love to hear from you.

1:31:19Give 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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