Sonos loses to Google, and Threads takes on Twitter

In short

The Vergecast Episode Summary: Sonos Loses to Google, and Threads Takes on Twitter

Episode Overview In this episode of The Vergecast, hosts Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss various topics, including the Meta Quest 3 review, Google gadgets, Sonos' legal battle with Google, and the competition between Threads and X (formerly Twitter). Chris Welch joins the show to provide insights into Sonos' recent court ruling.

Key Topics Discussed

Sonos vs. Google Legal Battle

Court Ruling Overview: A federal judge ruled against Sonos, tossing out a $32.5 million patent judgment against Google. The judge criticized Sonos for abusing the patent system and labeled them a "pretender".
Sonos' Claims: Sonos accused Google of infringing on multi-room audio patents but faced backlash regarding the timing of their complaints, which were deemed too delayed.
Judicial Commentary: The judge highlighted that the patent system was misused to punish an innovator (Google) and enrich Sonos by delay and "sleight of hand".
Sonos’ Continued Fight: Despite the ruling, Sonos is determined to keep fighting for the patent rights and claims that their technology is vital for smaller companies in the tech landscape.

Meta Quest 3 Overview

Best VR Headset Yet: The Meta Quest 3 is highlighted as the best VR headset, featuring an improved display and processing power.
Mixed Reality Functionality: Meta markets the Quest 3 as a mixed reality headset, but the hosts question the practical applications, pointing out a lack of compelling mixed reality experiences outside of its demo app.

Threads vs. X (Twitter)

Competition Dynamics: Threads is attempting to carve out a niche in the social media landscape, especially in news, but Adam Mosseri from Meta indicates a reluctance to focus on news content.
The Challenge of News on Social Platforms: The discussion highlights the challenges of news distribution on Threads compared to TikTok, which has a larger audience but presents its own set of concerns regarding misinformation.

Google Pixel 8 and Pixel Watch 2

Improved Features: The episode touches on the reviews of the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, emphasizing upgrades in battery life and software support.
Seven-Year Support Promise: Google promises seven years of updates, but there is skepticism amongst consumers regarding their ability to uphold that promise based on past experiences.

Key Arguments and Discussions

Validity of Patents: The hosts delve into why the patent system is crucial for smaller tech companies and the implications of Sonos' failure to uphold their claims.
Trust Issues with Google: The conversation reveals a broader concern about consumer trust in tech companies, particularly Google, following a history of broken promises and product discontinuations.
User Experience in Tech: The hosts compare user experiences across various products, highlighting the importance of audio quality in devices like the Pixel 8, and the user-friendly features in the Meta Quest 3.

Closing Thoughts

Future of Social Media: The competition between Threads and X raises questions about the future landscape of social media and how platforms will handle news and user engagement.
Sonos' Resilience: Despite setbacks in court, Sonos remains determined to fight for its innovations and navigate the challenges posed by larger tech companies like Google and Amazon.

Additional Notes

The episode includes lively banter among the hosts, reflecting on current tech trends and user behaviors, while providing insights into the implications of ongoing legal and market battles in the tech industry.

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

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1:24Hello and welcome to RichCast, the flagship podcast. of CSS elements. Top, bottom, left, right. We've got them all here on the Vergecast. It's good. I promise you that will be relevant. I'm your friend, Neela. David Pierce is here. Hi, I should confess that I don't know the difference between margin and padding in CSS. And if someone would please email and explain that to me, that would really help a lot. You just opened a door, my friend. They create more space. They both do that. Very differently. I'm confident it is different. You have to, okay, here are the two rules. You have to limit yourself to 500 words and you can't use chat GPT.

1:56but then you can email David the difference between margin and padding and CSS. And I will recite several of those emails on this podcast. Sounds good. Alex Trans is here. I have a confession to make in that I thought the phrase big naturals came from a Gandalf? Alex, already? Wait, did you just say Gandalf? I thought it was a Gandalf meme. That's all I'm going to say about it. I just want to get that out there. I thought it was a Gandalf meme. I realize now that you've opened this horrible door. This is the most of our chats that's ever happened. We've gone from CSS. But I realized now last week I said, I have this bad idea of an example because of a meme, and I didn't say what the meme was.

2:32Was it also the Gandalf meme? It was Kevin James. Similar. Very similar. And you can just go back and listen to what I was talking about contextually to understand why that is a horrifying idea. You can find it. Casey posted it in Platformer. I'm just saying it's out there. Just DM me. I'll send it to you. Don't do that. All right. Here's why I was talking about CSS. This is a thing that just got fixed on our website that I think is one of the funniest things that has ever been fixed on our website. We have a lot to talk about. There's some threads news. David reviewed the MetaQuest 3. Sonos got just blasted by a federal judge for patent abuse.

3:07Chris Welch is going to join us to talk about that. We have a lightning round. But there's a thing that happened on our website that is so silly. It is my favorite bug that we have ever fixed. So we had published articles in, like, one of our fancy layouts. and we'll get all these comments that were like, how dare you have black text on an orange background? And we'd be like, what are you talking about? Like, that's just the headline. That's fine. And after a while, it's like, there's no way this many people are this mad about the headlines being on an orange background. Yeah, we should say the way it's supposed to look is there's like a colored banner at the top, right behind like the image and the headline and the subhead and the author's name.

3:48And it's like, it's a banner that says like, Big, important story. And then it ends, and then you read the story, which is black text on a white background. And we were getting all these comments that were like, how dare you? And I was like, that's weird. But it's a redesign. Everyone's mad about everything in the redesign. So for a while, we were just like, people are just mad that we picked this color or any color at all, which is a real thing that happens when you make a website. How dare you use a color? Fine. We used some color. I promise we ran the accessibility checkers. But after a while, the sustained anger that there was black text on an orange background, we were just like, there has to be something going on here.

4:21And we finally figured it out. It is the silliest bug in the entire world. All of those people, as best as we can tell, were using the Brave browser, which has a number of tracking blockers. And it is implemented in the most shotgun way you can imagine. They just block all instances of the word bot, which in their implementation just means the string BOT gets blocked, which means CSS bottom got blocked. Which, by the way, the fact that that works for Brave is deeply hysterical. So all these users, just imagine trying to debug this so that all these users were in fact seeing a full page of an orange background with black text.

5:10We couldn't tell, but it was because of this approach to tracking prevention, which is just brute force enforcement. Wait, let me just make sure I'm understanding this correctly because this is amazing. So Brave is just going in and anything that it's, anytime it sees the letters B-O-T, it's just like, nah, kill it. That's a bot. Get rid of it. And we had a thing meant to define the bottom of the red. It was breaking our CSS because it was blocking the word bottom somewhere. Both our product manager and our senior engineer are both named Tara. And I demanded just now in a meeting that they write about this because it's so silly.

5:46Because they had to fix it. So good. So we fixed it. This is what running a website in 2023 is like. It's great. Please keep visiting our website no matter what browser you're on. But if you are seeing something completely bananas, it might be that your browser is doing something. Just maybe is what I've learned. Check another browser always. Yeah, that's a good. That's a web design thing. That's why Safari is there on your computer. I never use it. Just to see if it's broken. Yeah. There's nothing more powerful you can say in a product meeting than it's broken in Safari 2. That's real. Done. All right.

6:21Let's talk about some things. David, you just did a bunch of reviews on a Wednesday show. And then you just reviewed the meta quest. You want to talk about those quickly? Yeah. Well, I'm mostly curious from the pixel perspective, kind of what you guys think of all this. We've been tracking this a lot. Neil, you've now had a week to sit with your what is a photo feelings. I talked to Allison a bunch about how she feels about this. She's a lot more, I would say, normal human than you are about this. She's just like, yeah, this stuff is complicated and weird and it doesn't always work all that well.

6:49And I'm very aware every time I've edited these images. That was one of the questions I asked her that I've actually gotten a surprising amount of people responding to. Is this like, she was like, yeah, my images look like normal images, but I know that I did something to them and it sort of changes my relationship with it. And I thought that was really interesting. And a bunch of people have reached out and said, not only do I feel that way with this stuff, but like it has changed the way that I've edited all of my family photos forever. Because even when I put the better face on, I remember and it changes my relationship to that image when I change it.

7:21So I've just been thinking about that for like days now. But I said on this show last week that I was sort of disappointed in what the Pixel 8 seemed to be. And I feel like I have changed my tune now seeing Allison's review and other people's reaction to it. People seem to be into this phone. Like it seems like Google did a good thing. I thought her framing of the review was really interesting and I encourage people to read it. It's about whether or not you can trust Google, which is where Google is. And I think the seven years of updates that they promised, we got a bunch of notes. why don't you talk about the seven years of updates?

7:53I think people are excited about it. You can be of two minds about that. One, you can be excited about it. Google's finally going to commit to supporting a thing for seven years. Or you can say, when will they break my heart? And I think we got a bunch of notes on either side of that debate. I think that's a strange place for Google to be in. People don't trust them to support their products over the long term. I mean, and with good reason. Why would they? They've provided abundant evidence. So you make a promise like we'll support it for seven years, and then you get a 50-50 reaction to it, which is, I think, fascinating.

8:22And that's, you know, the Pixel 8, I think, is just in that lineage of things. Like, are they going to stay committed to all of these ideas? Are they going to walk away from some of them? The assistant seems better and faster on this phone. Will it work like that next year? Will Google flip the table and Android 15? Like, there's just a lot of that embedded in this phone alongside, oh, some ideas did iterate themselves to completion, and it's pretty good. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the AI stuff is so tied up. in that, right? Because like, the promise Google has been making about this push to AI is you're going to be able to buy a piece of hardware.

8:56And as long as it is sufficiently capable, it is going to get better over time, like actually get better over time, which is a thing we've been saying for years, never buy a product based on future promises. But like, the promise of AI is that it will get better over time, literally, as you use it, it will get better. And that's compelling. But I think the Pixel 7 didn't really do that. And I think Allison wrote that piece like six months after the Pixel 7 came out being like, yeah, this phone is still pretty good. It's really not any better. Like Google does the feature drops. It adds new stuff.

9:29The models get better, whatever. But there hasn't been anything that sort of changed the game there. And I like the reason to worry about this phone is to worry that it is going to be exactly what it is right now, seven years from now. And that is so not the promise Google wants you to believe in. And, yeah, I'm very torn between the two, but, like, Google at least seems to have made a bunch of good decisions about where it could go. It's just about whether it chooses to keep going that way. When do we trust Google? Like, I think that's the thing I keep thinking about is it feels like I'm in, like, when you're in a relationship and somebody breaks your trust and you're like, how do I go back to trusting you, right?

10:06Like, in real life, it's a long journey. It's not like you need to start doing these things. And that's usually when we talk about companies. We want to trust them again. We're like, you need to do this, this, and this. But Google can't do that because it keeps breaking promises. Google killed Pixel Pass six weeks ago. Right? Like, how do I trust Google again? Because this phone seems really cool. Like, part of me wants to. It's just like that best friend where I'm like, I want to trust you. How? I think the answer is really narrow. I think it's kind of what David is saying. You're going to buy this phone on the same cadence, especially the pro.

10:45People who buy pro phones, I think, are on two-year cycles, maybe shorter. I think I know a lot of pro phone people who are on a one-year cycle. I'm on a three-year. But that's reasonable. I think it's the seven years where people are like, really? It's hard to think of a Google product except for search and YouTube that has lasted for seven years. Yeah. Gmail. That's basically true. That's kind of what we're working with here. Yeah. Even I got a note today about Decoder being in YouTube Music, and it's like, oh, because they shut down the podcast thing and moved it on. Even that, even what you would think of as basic stuff, they just move around on.

11:20So the idea that this phone is going to stay fixed and relevant for seven years, I think is really important. It's Google saying, okay, the Pixel program is going to be around for seven years. But like David said, they canceled the Pixel past six weeks before this. So who knows? So really it's just – it is that waiting game then. It is like that best friend. I just thought that was like in Allison's entire review, like that was the framing that got me. Like it's the right framing. Like here's a bunch of bets Google is taking. Some of these thoughts are finished. That's really remarkable. Google doesn't finish a lot of thoughts.

11:51And some of the thoughts on the phone are finished. But the fact that it's like a vessel of Google services and Google AI means you have to believe that that stuff will persist for quite a long time. You have to believe that this ecosystem is going to get richer and richer and richer for a long time. In a way that even the Samsung ecosystem is. Now that I have a long train commute, I got to say I'm getting Seifert pilled. I'm like, what if I don't bring a laptop and I have a Galaxy Fold and then I use Dex at the office? And I'm like, that ecosystem is – they just kept at it. What if you bring in – And now it's just waiting for me.

12:23You can do an iPad. Every time I get on this – no, no, no, no, no. It's got to be Dex. It's got to be Dex. No, because what I want is to not carry a backpack. Okay. I just want to roll onto the train like a ninja, you know, like an assassin. No backpack, no bag, nothing. Like, who is this guy in the morning commuting to New York City with nothing? Coffee, at least. Maybe. Maybe. Even that, just like, who, what? Just. Because that is a power, especially when it's warmer and you're not even wearing a coat. You just flip the phone out as dramatically as possible. Except for me. I've got a folding phone.

12:57Would you like to see my tablet? It used to be my phone. And then I get to the office. I still have nothing. You're the only person in the elevator or building without a bag. and you just like confidently walk to one of our like weird rotating desk and you sit down you're like i have a computer now it's not a great computer it's not super functional the slack experience is probably better probably yeah because slack hasn't been updated for decks yeah that's good we will now spend the rest of the show complaining about the slack redesign get excited but yeah all i'm saying is samsung like kept chipping away at that ecosystem him such that even if it's a bad idea, it feels like a good idea now, right?

13:40You're not like an early adopter of this. You're like down the road with it and you can read all the blog posts about how to make it work for you or talk to Dan. Two choices. With the Pixel, it's like everything is new all the time. So that's the thing that really got me. It does seem like the camera sort of divorced from the AI editing stuff. The camera is good. I think Allison said it's a Pixel camera. When it's great, it's great. And then when it fails, it's very predictable how it fails. I think these cameras year over year are almost like imperceptibly different. I didn't review the iPhone 15 this year.

14:12So I tried to do a thing where I tried to not pay attention to what was new for my 14 just to see what jumped out. And it's nothing. It's nothing. And when I go look, I mean, I obviously know there's stuff I'm excited about. USB-C, very cool. I had to buy only cables. Very cool. But it's like, it's so imperceptibly different. The zoom lens is really nice. in low light it's a little bit you know sweaters are a little more sweater modey yeah so soft but i think it's the same way with the pixel too both of these phones i think are imperceptibly better year over year i just come back to the ai thing and i know i was like ranting and raving last week and i received a lot of feedback and the feedback is uniformly in two camps this is the end of all trusted information and we should be more careful or you couldn't trust the information anyway why do you care now yeah that's it there's like almost no gray area those aren't that different like those might actually be on one side of the story uh and i just think that's really interesting again you can say a lot of people are like he hates google it's like no i'm just saying if you can ship photos that demonstrably did not happen and no one knows except for you and as david pointed out like a lot of the feedback is like but i know when you have that feeling that something important is happening there, right?

15:26The feeling is, oh, I'm lying to everyone. That's the feeling. There's not anything else. You're not being totally honest and you know. That's all I'm saying. Something along the way should quell that feeling. Just so you can communicate, oh, this photo was in the metadata in a way that can't be stripped. Or don't do this. There's another choice. I will say I took on my Instagram, I took a photo of Max and I eating ice cream and you can go look at it. And there's people in the background and I thought to myself, boy, I'd like to delete those people. But you'd know. I didn't do it because I can't then come back on the show.

16:02I boxed myself into a non-AI generative corner. What if you'd heel brushed them out? Yeah. Or just replaced them fully. Yeah. Just stick a tree in front of them. For some reason, David and Alex are in the background of all of my photos. All right. Tell me about the Quest 3 real quick. That's the thing I really wanted to hear about. So I had this really interesting experience with the Quest 3, which is like it's two different headsets in one headset. On the one hand, it is like the third Quest, right? It's a VR headset that does VR headset things, and it does them like shockingly well. I had this experience the first time I put on the headset of things looked right.

16:41I didn't have to spend half an hour like dialing in the little things. I didn't have to move it around a bunch of my head. It just like looked good. and it's crazy how much that upgrade in display quality which it has it's the best looking quest by a mile ever including the quest pro and just like changes everything it's more fun to do things it's more fun to look at menus i find myself like using the headset longer it has more games it has more processing power so like it's a better vr headset in all the ways you would want it to be our vr headset but then on the other hand meta is out here being like this is the first mainstream mixed reality headset and i just found myself the whole time doing this review being like what does that mean it has new pass through it uses these cameras and a depth sensor to like better map the world around you and see what's going on and you can interact with the world through your headset that's all true and all cool and there is precisely one good mixed reality experience i had on the whole thing and it's the demo app that shows you how to use mixed reality like it's called first encounter and it's sick it's so fun there's like like i played it mostly down here and it's it It starts with coming from your ceiling.

17:45There's a little alien craft and it actually makes a thing that looks like a hole in your ceiling. And then aliens just blow holes in all your walls and you have to fight them. It's so fun. It lasts like eight minutes and then it's like, go have fun on your headset. And I'm like, what else? What do I do here? So I landed in this really weird place of like, and I argued about this a bunch with Addy and Dan who have done a lot of these headset reviews for us too. Like on the one hand, it's a$500, very good VR headset. Cool. big upgrade over the Quest 2, a lot more expensive than the Quest 2. On the other hand, it has this amazing new functionality that is essentially not for anything.

18:20Don't know what to do with that. And that's how they're marketing the product. Yeah. That was the same thing we saw with the PS5, right? PS5 comes out, Astro's Playroom really, really cool, great demos. You're like, oh wow, the controller's so cool. Every other game's just like, yep, that's a controller. 100%. But this is like, I feel like a bigger deal because mixed reality is bigger than haptic feedbacks probably not a lot of people were buying the ps5 they made the entire ps5 for a metal gig game that never came yeah and like dude left you know yeah like kojima's gone and like no one's ever going to use this controller again haptic only nintendo gets to pull the controller trick yeah by the way i'm sure there are cool haptic ps5 games i only play madden and gran turismo in that fine all right just be fine with that horizon i get i get what i want out of this console it's awesome grand teresa let's just talk about let's just talk about racing seats the rest of the show pivoting no i think there's that like the chicken egg problem like you need a cheap good mixed reality headset yeah for developers to want to come and develop for it fine and the vision pro is coming and presumably some of these concepts will grow and the market will grow i guess my question is that's what everyone wants Right.

19:32Everyone wants to do augmented reality. I can't tell if we made the best VR headset ever, but we want to talk about it as though it is not a VR headset means the VR market has come to its logical conclusion. I think it has. I kind of think so, too. I think I don't know if it's come to its logical conclusion. I think it's very clear that it has a ceiling and that that ceiling is fairly low. Like I don't think this headset as much better as it is, is going to make people who never wanted headsets want headsets. Right. And like if you take the diagram of headset people and all people, it's headset people is like a teeny tiny sliver.

20:11Right. It's like people who had smartphones in like 2002. two. I was one of those people and it ruled. And my smartphone was a piece of junk and I had it because like, I am that kind of person, but it took a long time for like the world to become smartphone people. And then we're there with headsets, right? Where there's like, there's this much market share for people who want headsets to do VR things, right? It's like, it's a gaming thing and it is harder to use and access than a lot of gaming things. So it's a small group. if you believe as a lot of people in tech do that the future is glasses that we are all eventually going to wear something on our face you are never going to get anywhere close to that with mostly a vr product i think you're right that meta is just out here saying like this is the start of it like this is the what the oculus dev kit was you know 11 years ago this is now that except they want you very badly to buy it but the thing that really confuses me is that at the very beginning when meta decided it was all in on vr back when it was oculus and facebook was facebook the company went way out of its way to like juice this ecosystem it bought every company it could think of it had this like crazy flood of content it like single-handedly made the vr ecosystem an ecosystem i don't see any of that happening in mixed reality now even all the cool stuff coming there's a bunch of cool games coming there's an assassin's creed game coming if there's no game console shall exist without assassin's creed illegal yeah if you don't get it in six months just throw in the trap if i'd say it's not stabbing you nothing is happening but all the stuff that's coming is vr games addy kept making the case to me that maybe the problem here is that even meta is not sure what mixed reality is for especially in a headset you're not likely to like wear out into of the world and i think she's probably right about that so it's like this is like a very cool vr headset with a tech demo on top of it and that tech demo was also like wasn't that a magic leap tech demo years ago or it's like it was part of their oh the aliens yeah the aliens because it was but it was an office and you're like in the office and i was like that's cool so it's exciting i can do that now not with like glasses and a little backpack but it's something like it's fun the the first encounter thing is like legit fun would you say that it hacked the gpu of your brain which is what Magic Leap used to say.

22:34About the teeny tiny sliver of field of view that you would get in the Magic Leap headset. I would just never ever forget I believe this was like a Wired covered story, right? Kevin Kelly wrote about it. It was like we used the Magic Leap and there was just a line in it where they refused to describe how their technology worked. Like the poor Wired reporter was like we asked how the technology worked and they wouldn't say. They just kept saying things like, it hacks the GPU of your brain. It was just incredible. If only I could say things like that more consistently, right, it would be great. I mean, the meta three.

23:11The Verge. It hacks the GPU of your brain. That's pretty good, honestly. So I agree with you about this VR thing. Every compelling demo, even of the Vision Pro, every compelling idea for these products is virtual reality. There just isn't one. You know, the videos of the Vision Pro or the Quest Pro before it, where you're at a table and you've put five giant monitors in front of you on the table. It's like, you know what that requires? An empty table. Why would you have... Inside your house is a bad mixed reality environment because it is likely that you don't just have empty rooms. I got the idea.

23:48The dystopian vision of Mark Zucker being like, here's what's going to happen in the future. People will live in gigantic empty homes and my virtual objects will fill those homes. And to move around your house and do anything, you will wear my headset and buy my nfts but that's just like is that is that right is that why we're all chasing it so you can buy tvs from the facebook store i don't know like that you got to give me some reason to want to wear this thing in my house and all the reasons in the house are virtual reality reasons i got one i got a grand turismo and supernatural they haven't released yet but they got to like car and computer repair mixed reality like you just put it on and you look down it's like oh yeah i fix it yeah you you messed that up do that that's all it's gonna say is boy those screws are smaller than you thought huh yeah you didn't you don't have a bowl do you you forgot a bowl you're just hoping they don't roll away and it's just like a little thing up at the top showing you what actually you need to do yeah versus whatever the instructions say like i would buy a headset in a heartbeat if it did that for ikea furniture plumbing i don't know how to plumb alex i have such good news for you i'd like to tell you about a product called google glass which exists still in this world i know today exists to do exactly the thing you're describing it's not for you it's for like people who repair airplanes and stuff it's not for people who put together ikea furniture which to be fair would be sick i want it for my house no wait hold on hold on excuse me i'm sorry my google clock dinged you are wrong google glass has been discontinued march 15 2023 google enterprises stopped being sold that was their market they pivoted into...

25:26Okay, but people are still using it. Sure, I'm sure somewhere there's a mechanic being like, man, I hope this airplane database is up to date. Can you imagine you roll into Jiffy Lube and the guy's like, let me take a look. Just flips his Google Glass down on his head. I will say the first ever HoloLens demo I took at Microsoft, they made me wear a HoloLens and I replaced a spark plug in an ATV by walking around a room. I fixed some plumbing issue. My question to them, which in retrospect was not as rude as it should have been, was if you are a mechanic and you have a shop full of tools and someone has brought you their ATV, wouldn't you already know how to fix the spark plug?

26:07But that's why this is perfect for consumers, because I would not. I have a vague understanding. But you wouldn't be in a position where you were perfectly ready to replace a spark plug and your face computer was like, now walk 30 steps to the left and get this wrench. If all of that is ready to go and you spent the time to set that up and you don't know how to fix the spark plug, your priorities are just upside down. But that is exactly what I would do in real life. That's true. It's like 100%. Yeah, I've got everything ready. I Googled that. I didn't Google how to actually do the thing. I just Googled the prep.

26:46But luckily YouTube exists. And I'm sure there is a middle-aged man with boots on who will teach you how to do anything you can think of. Yeah, but I want him in mixed reality showing me and then being like, Alex, that's terrible. What are you doing? The other direction. This is like the true promise of AI. Yeah. It's synthesizing YouTube fix-it guy to look through your eyes. And he should be played by T-Pain. Never hire an AC repair guy again. When you say we don't have ideas in the Vergecast, this is how you hack the GPU of the brain. We did it, guys. T-Pain generative AI plumber just being like, that's not how you fix a toilet, Alex.

27:23Perfect. It's true, by the way, that those enterprise products existed. They thought that would be a huge market, right? You're a baby mechanic for Delta. You got to fix a thing. That's what they thought, and none of them worked out. I just say, I keep coming back to this basic idea. The thing they all want to build is glasses. And the thing they keep trying to sell is virtual reality. And glasses and virtual reality are not compatible. Correct. That's true. And so when I say, like, is this the end of the VR market? Like, you have to make the turn. You have to stop doing VR games. You have to stop Supernatural is entirely VR.

28:00You have to stop telling people that you're going to get on an airplane with your$3 ,500 Vision Pro and a battery pack in your back pocket. And you're going to watch a movie in VR. because if your eventual goal is to ship glasses, you won't be able to do that anymore because you won't be able to block out the world around you. And it just seems like everyone knows this problem is there. It's not like a secret problem. This is not some grand insight that VR requires you to block out the world around you. But how are you going to do it? Yeah, they just got to move headsets for the holidays. So let's talk about the VR part because that's what kids can actually use right now and sell it.

28:35And then I think that's always the plan is like, VR, VR, VR, and then one day they'll be like, okay, the glasses are ready. VR's over there if you want it. You can get that. Or you can spend$4 ,000 on these glasses, and T-Pain will be in your ear. And, like, compelling. Finally, someone has a killer app that does not require facial recognition. See, we did it. It's angry T-Pain the plumber. We fixed it. By the way, I say this for maybe the hundredth time in the verches. T-Pain rules, and if he ever wants to come on the show, he's more than welcome. Just putting that out there. We should talk about threads really quickly just before we move to a break.

Read the full transcript

29:06There's just Twitter and threads news in the world. There's a war going on between Israel and Hamas. Twitter did not do great in that circumstance. Every time Twitter does not do great, a flood of people comes to threads. And then we all have to contend with Adam Masseri talking about news on threads, which he should just stop doing. That's just my free advice to Adam Masseri. Because he keeps saying things like, it's not that we don't want news. It's that we're going to prioritize everything else. anything but news is my priority. Does that make sense to you? It's not that we don't want it, even though you keep asking for it and doing it.

29:43And boy, do you keep doing it. It's just that I don't want to prioritize it in any way, shape or form. And it's like, you know, silence is good. It's not that I don't want to turn up the volume on this channel. It's that I'm going to turn up all the other channels as loud as I can so that this channel is effectively zero. Like that's what that looks like. Yeah, he needs to just stop talking about news until he actually has some news about this. So I think he's sincere. I like Adam. He's been on Decoder before. I think he's even been on the Vergecast before. I think he's sincere. I think Meta got burned by what you might call the great Facebook news experiment.

30:19And also burned the world. It's useful to remember that asking Meta to do more news has not historically been a good idea for the Earth. Yes. There's a lot of wreckage in what you might call the millennial media ravine. Let's name some brands that don't exist. BuzzFeed News. Mike.com, like generally vice in its previous incarnation. It's just true. I mean, those are all huge bets on Facebook news distribution or Facebook video distribution. You can just go look at the Wikipedia page for the words pivot to video. We all live through it. And that was Facebook sent floods of traffic, web traffic to publishers.

30:59And then they stopped and they started saying the future of the Internet is video, which I will grant them broadly true. That was true. People like watching video. Who knew? You can get it from a streaming service. You can get it from Alex's Plex server. Or you can get it from a social platform. Most people pick social platforms. So that's fine. But Facebook led a bunch of companies off a cliff, basically, in terms of revenue. And I think Adam doesn't want to do that again. He keeps saying, I don't want to over-promise and under-deliver. Cynically, what you might respond to that with is, then don't break your promises.

31:33That's just a thing you could say. Well, I think it's important to remember what people are asking for isn't like give us algorithms that control the news, which leads to all the things that happened when Facebook did that. And they're not asking for pivoting to video or any of the other things. They're just saying like give us better hashtag support. So if I want to follow something breaking in the world, I can. And it doesn't have to be bad. It can be sports. And so that's the really interesting thing that's happening here to me is just completely rolling all of that in together. And I'm like, Adam, I promise you, whatever's happening in Marvel or NFL is not the same as whatever's happening in the larger world with conflicts and stuff like that.

32:18Those are different types of news. People just want a way to be like, oh, something happening. What? Yeah. Yeah. But again, I think they've been burned by this idea in the past. Right. I think, again, in no way is criticism of X, the company, praise for criticism of the previous administration of Twitter, the company. But I think you can look at it and say, maybe that horrible clown car was the best it could ever be. And we don't want to do that. We want to build something bigger. I think they're sincere about that. All that said, I don't think that they're ever going to do news. I think that Adam Assery says that they're not going to do news over and over again because they don't want to do it.

32:53But it's and again, he's not saying they won't do it or they're going to block it, although they have some very restrictive moderation policies that seem like they don't want to. Like you can't talk about COVID on threads, really. It's just like not a thing you're allowed to do. You know, I think they're going to prioritize sports coverage and fashion and culture and whatever. And they will accidentally build tools that are reasonably good for news. But the idea that the way that Twitter was just sort of the assignment editor for the media in the Trump era, I think they would prefer threads to not be that thing.

33:21That I'm OK with. Like that's the kind of thing where I'm like, okay, yeah, we don't need that. There are other ways to get this. And frankly, having all of your really good reports appearing in like 140 characters on a website is not the best way to deliver a lot of news. And we need to move past that. That seems fine. Let's do that. This is the time in the broadcast where I start talking about ActivityPub. This is the point. Everyone's making a huge mistake. You don't want Twitter again. It wasn't great. It just wasn't good. Yeah. Like just. Fundamentally bad. It was not a great time for a handful of guys to be in charge of a handful of platforms that dominated our information ecosystem.

34:01So the point, and I think that the better thing to do is hold Instagram and Meta to their promises around Federation and ActivityPub, which they continually say they're going to do. Like their engineers on the platform saying they're going to do it. Their representative to the W3C is on there saying they're going to do it. Masseri says they're going to do it. But Zuckerberg said to Alex Heath a couple weeks ago they're going to do it. They keep saying they're going to do it. They haven't done it. So you've got to hold them to that promise. And then you have to build products that interoperate and allow you to address the Threads audience with news products.

34:32Or allow you to build news products that use content from Threads in new and interesting ways. I agree with that. I also think you just made the exact case why Meta wants to do this. Because Meta federating lets it wash its hands of every complicated thing it doesn't feel like dealing with. And so I think it's just going to be true that threads is the biggest thing in the Fediverse or the open social web or whatever you want to call it. Like the day it does, it will be the dominant player on ActivityPub and probably will be for a long time. And so it's still going to have this same set of responsibilities.

35:09And I think just to be able to say it's like Google saying you can use a different search engine, right? It's just like it's not. It's true. But it's not the reality of being alive. Like most people are going to be on threads doing this stuff. And like Adam and his team still have incentives and I think responsibilities to get this stuff right. But I think like what he means when he says we don't want to do news is literally it's like the knob that says news that's on his desk. He is going to keep dialing it down. Right. Like, you know, your thing about turning up the volume is like, I think, a surprisingly real metaphor.

35:46Like, I don't think that's actually that far off from what's actually going on. The question is, do you care more about like evergreen stuff or do you care more about real time stuff? Right. And Twitter, a thing it did right was it found that balance really, really, really well. It's really hard to do the thing where you divide between what is good and what is now. And Twitter hit that balance better than I think any other platform ever has, which is why it was so good at that. You could even go on the algorithmic timeline and it would still show you new stuff. I don't think threads is ever going to push as far down that real time road ever as Twitter did.

36:21I just don't see it. I have one question about all of this, and it was something I actually saw on threads. And I think it was maybe from you or maybe a response to Adam or Sari. Why are we focused so much on threads and how it handles news and not focused on TikTok, which by all accounts is a much more widely used platform and how it handles news? because it has a lot of the same kind of like concerns about like what you can and cannot say on the platform but it also has a much bigger audience and it is actually actively algorithmically delivering that news whatever it is to people be it accurate or not and it's kind of obnoxious i found to like report when stuff is inaccurate on that platform like do i just do a call out tiktok being like everything this man has said is wrong like i've thought about it but like that for me feels almost a bigger concern than what's happening at Threads.

37:13And it's kind of interesting that I think we all talk about it here. And I know a lot of people in media talk about it, Threads, because Twitter was very much like a media thing. Everybody on media used it. And then a lot of people have migrated to Blue Sky, to Mastodon, now to Threads, and they're very much using it there. And a lot of the discourse, the conversation around news is driven by the media on that platform. And it is kind of interesting that we're driving it there and we're kind of ignoring TikTok where the people are actually watching the news. I also think there's something about those platforms that make it feel more like everyone is having a similar experience where I think like on TikTok, there's no pretense that what I'm seeing on TikTok is anything like what either of you are seeing on TikTok, right?

37:56And so it makes this question of like, what is the quote unquote TikTok experience really hard to talk about in a way that these more like participatory messaging things like Twitter and Blue Sky and now Threads, it just feels more like everyone is in one place. Whereas these other things, and I think YouTube falls in this category too, like you don't see on YouTube what I see on YouTube. So it's very hard for us to actually talk about the way YouTube works because everyone's experience of it is so different. but on a place like threads it feels more like everyone is there just because it moves so fast that even though the experiences are different it just makes people feel more like they understand it i think yeah and there was like there are universal experiences we all got the sexy ladies for like a week on threads and we're like why are you here stop i was like why aren't you here more often favorite app mine was just the nugget account like that was the most universal experience of all was the nugget account for like three weeks on threads.

38:59What, you didn't just actively interact with the sexy ladies of threads to bring them back more often? You're like, crypto, you want it? I know. Oh, this is happening. It's fine. Nothing but a man. I'm just, the thing about news is like, here's my other metaphor. You ready? Here's what the media is. The news media is on threads. We're the mandolin players in ACDC. All right. It's not to say there's not a mandolin player at ACDC. Maybe there is. You don't know. but there's also ACDC. They're not kicking you out. You might be jangling away on that thing. It's in the back, behind the drum kit. And Adam and Sarah's like, look, we're just not going to amplify the mandolin.

39:41They don't get a mic. Yeah, that's all that's happening there. And it's fine. It's a way to be. But I'm just saying that opportunity, especially when the big player is going to do Federation, you got to hold them to it. that means you get to rethink all of web distribution. You get to rethink content moderation. And to be like, give me trending topics so I can one-to-one replace Twitter is like, that's just itty-bitty thinking. Yeah. Everyone think bigger. If you're out there building a cool ActivityPub product, just like, let us know. We're going to start over covering that stuff just to show people that people are building new interesting products.

40:15I mean, it has to be good. It can't just be sexy ladies in crypto. And speaking of ActivityPub, we should say the one, the bit of ActivityPub news this week was that WordPress now officially supports ActivityPub on WordPress.com accounts. And like what WordPress is, is very confusing. WordPress.com is only a subset of WordPress and WordPress, the company and WordPress, it's like, it's a lot. But a lot of websites can now with one plugin and checkbox interoperate with ActivityPub, which means you can actually push your content to these other places. And it's like, that's what this is supposed to look like.

40:49Yeah. Right. Like that, I think is very exciting. Yeah, right. is a big start in this. Narrowly, it's, well, Threads doesn't do it yet. So if you have a blog and you're running it, someone can follow you on Mastodon and your post to your blog will show up in their Mastodon feed. And if they hit like, it'll come back to you. That's hugely powerful. You could see how, for example, if a large technology website had a quick posting format, it might make use of such a technology, especially if it was migrating to WordPress in the future. Just an idea that I have. Just a hypothetical for you all to think about.

41:22Okay, we should take a break. I want to get David's perspective on his time in the U.S. versus Google courtroom. And then Chris Walsh is going to join us and talk about another Google case, which is handily winning. We'll be right back.

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42:52Support 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. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

43:26Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

44:06Welcome back to the Vergecast Legal Hour, where we break down the hottest action courtrooms around the country. We should just pivot this show to true crime. Yeah. That's what does the numbers. That is the dream of the people who run this podcast network. We do a tech true crime show. They stole my battery bank and I spent the next five years tracking them down. Well, Chris Welch is here. Hey, Chris. Hello. Pleasure to be here. Chris covers, I would say, Sonos to the closest degree possible. I think it's kind of interesting you're here and not currently in the vents at Sonos. Yeah, I'll take a break here and there.

44:40So I want to talk about what's going on with Google and Sonos. There's a big ruling in that patent case. It's like a remarkable ruling. So I want to spend some time there. But first, there's actually another trial that's ongoing, which we keep talking about. United States versus Google. It is a trial claiming that effectively the deals Google makes with other vendors, most notably Apple, provide an illegal benefit to its search monopoly. And those deals are bad. David, you've been in and out of that courtroom. If you've been listening to the Vergecast, you know this trial is really hard to cover.

45:11There's no streams. documents and transcripts are hard to come by. There's been drama around that stuff. So we've just been, when we can, sending David into the courtroom in DC to watch things go down, watch the various witnesses. This last turn, it made it very clear that as goes Apple, goes the search market. And I think it's like under reported on, under noticed that that is like the heart of this whole case. Yeah. And ironically, this turn really started with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who a lot of people give testimony in these things and they're prepared by a lot of lawyers to not really say anything interesting.

45:50And there have been a few witnesses so far who I know have spicy hot takes. Some of them I have written about on theverge.com in stories that I'm happy to send you links to who clearly were trained to like sort of do the least in the courtroom. Satya Nadella was not one of those people. Dude came out swinging and And essentially began to make this case that Bing is bad. It's worse than Google. But the only reason Bing is worse than Google is because of the Apple deal. And that sounds like this like wild, impossible to navigate thing. But essentially what the argument has come down to, and a number of people have made this argument, and even Google has sort of acknowledged that it understands this in a lot of the evidence that we've seen in the exhibits that are being published.

46:34it's essentially that if you can be the default search engine in safari which google has been for 20 years for as long as there has been a safari you will get such market share so quickly and so many more searches like i i have like learned how things like query flow work and basically the like flywheel of the more searches you get the better the searches are thus you can make more searches thus you do better, thus you get more certain, like on and on and on. And if anyone could break in, overwhelmingly, the industry seems to think there would be real serious competitors to Google, essentially overnight.

47:14And that by not getting out of its deal with Google or letting anybody else in DuckDuckGo apparently was in negotiations to do it for private browsing, which Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO said would have been absolutely game changing for their business, it would have increased their market share, I think he said, multiple times over. But like, Apple is the moat for Google, right? Like Google has Chrome, and it has Android, and it turns out it's not illegal to have your own products on your own products. So there's really no fight there. But this one deal that Apple has, if it gave it to somebody else, the DOJ's argument is that it would essentially raise up a serious Google competitor out of nothing.

47:54And because Google is so rich, it is preventing that from happening. And that's like, that has become the thrust of the argument. And it's really fascinating. What do you think? I think it's true. I mean, it's hard to say counterfactually, right? One of the things that Judge Mehta, who's presiding over this case, asked Satya Nadella was, could a startup in search succeed, right? And there's been a bunch of talk about how the search market is considered like a no-fly zone for VCs. They don't even invest in it because it's not worth it. And so he asked him, is like, can a startup win at search? and Nadella like thought about it for a second and then just goes well there's no evidence for that and his point over and over was he was like we I'm willing to lose 15 billion dollars a year to Apple just to get the query flow and the market share that comes with it for Bing Microsoft at one point thought about selling part or all of Bing to Apple in order to fund a competitor that could actually stand up to Google in a real way because they don't think Google being this powerful is valuable.

48:53Like, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Apple could essentially turn that on for somebody else. But also, we have no proof. Google has been the partner for 20 years. Like, it was in the very first press release announcing Safari, which they showed while Eddie Q was on the stand a couple of weeks ago, mentioned Google as a partner and has been a partner ever since. And the terms of that deal have changed. And so we've just never seen it. Like, one of the things that has really blown my mind is we've only ever seen one version of the search market. There's never even been in like the modern internet, another world.

49:31Well, there is if you leave this country, right? That's also come out, right? In other countries, Apple partners with other search providers in Safari, and those companies are fine. They like exist in our competitors. Yandex is very successful. Yeah. And to be clear, like one of the reasons that if you put something else on Apple instead, Part of it was, okay, everybody's using it on Apple, so that's just automatically they use it. But it would also learn and get better because more people would be using it, right? So that's how it would compete? Or is it just like more people using it because it's on Apple and it's the default search?

50:05Yeah, so the sort of universal truth of search is that the best way to make a search engine is to already have a successful search engine. And the more people use it, like one way to think about it is a big part of your job as a search engine is to know when somebody spells something wrong, what they're actually looking for, right? Like that's a big job of a search engine. And the way that you do that is by seeing the queries that people get wrong and then where they go. And you can figure out, okay, well, they typed this word. They didn't get what they wanted. Then they typed that word, which looks very similar.

50:37We can put those two things together. And the next time somebody searches for this wrongly spelled word, we can get it right the first time. You've just instantly made your search engine better, right? Like you just can't do that if you don't have the searches. And everyone acknowledges this. This is not like a secret fact. This is like how the search engine world works is that the more search queries you get, the better your ranking gets, the better your personalization gets, the better your spell check gets, the better your, they call it, there's a better term for it than this, but it's essentially query rewriting.

51:07So when you type in a query, what do you actually mean? Are you looking for a shopping link? Are you looking for travel? They do this thing where they take the words that you use and then sort of boil it down to a set of words that can also be used in a bunch of ways. All of that you can only do with the data. And the only way to get that data is to get people searching. And so like what Nadella was saying is he's like, I don't want any of the money that comes out of an Apple deal because I'm so convinced that the product will get so much better that will make up the rest of the money elsewhere.

51:35and that like i don't think he's just spouting out of his ass like that is the deal that microsoft has offered to apple and loss i will say there's a deeply funny google presentation that has been entered into the exhibits here about ios 8 oh it's so good i mean again this is how long this has been going yeah so an ios 8 apple rolled out spotlight so you could just like pull down and do stuff and there's a deck and we'll link to it and it's in david's piece it's linked there but the deck is called it's a google deck it's called ios 8 revenue impact and the first heading on the first slide bottom line it's bad

52:17it's like it's not they're just like they're doing less searches it's a bad and then it goes into it and like here's all the searches that apple is doing for itself now it says instead of sending people to us it's the app store and maps and wikipedia and all this stuff yeah and they're just like yeah we're just losing searches and revenue because any amount of any amount of loss from safari is huge right bottom line it's bad it's even it's like so funny well and that has become one of the new stipulations in google's deal with apple as of i think 2016 is that apple can't do more in search than it had been doing in 2016 right like by the terms of this agreement Apple is not allowed to build a Google competitor or else it's in violation of this deal.

53:00This explains, by the way, several years ago, there was like IO and WWDC were like kind of back to back. And at WWDC, Apple announced like some more search things in some version of iOS. This is post 2016. And then we went to IO like several days later and all the Google people were like, Apple's doing some search stuff. And at the time I was like, yeah, they should. but I didn't realize like they were like, oh, are they in trouble? Like, are they past the line? And we wouldn't know, right? Because this deal was a secret until this trial. Yeah, I mean, we knew there was a deal, but like the machinations of the deal and both how profitable it is for Apple and how exclusionary it is are definitely, they're coming out in really new ways.

53:49It's really interesting. Just to say it, and we should move on and talk about Sonos, I am aware that people think that Google should be able to pay whatever money to Apple for whatever Apple wants to buy. And that, yes, I'm aware that many retail stores in America have their own products they put on shelves and they pay for placement and you can make all kinds of analogies. And I'm just telling you that winning an argument through analogy is like kissing your sister. That's just fine. I don't care. Wait, you don't care? Can I just tell you one very quick courtroom story that summarizes this entire thing very well?

54:17At one point during Satya Nadella's testimony, Judge Mehta, who I wouldn't say interrupts a lot, but he'll occasionally like follow up on questions or ask to clarify. And like, he does a lot of sort of drilling down on technical things that either he doesn't understand or he wants in the record or whatever. He at one point looks over at Satya Neda and says, okay, imagine you're Tim Cook. Why would you want to switch to Bing when it's a worse search engine? And that was the whole question. And like, you could like Google, you know, they have a table full of lawyers. Like you could just feel the vibe in the room.

54:47Everybody at the Google table is just like, yes. is that like sati nadella getting up there and saying bing is not as good as google is both a a case against google and the entire google defense which is that it is not illegal to be the best product and everyone is acknowledging that is the best it is the best product it's just it's a very funny thing where like doj has to do this thing where they're saying google is really good because no one else is allowed to be and google is just going to keep saying we're good and that's okay yeah and that's a really really really compelling argument like being the best is not a problem and google is going to spend a lot of time when it turns and becomes google's chance to really give its argument it's going to spend a lot of time telling us how terrific google is and i'm very much looking forward to like that second half of this trial yeah i think google is too to be perfectly honest all right speaking of google on a on a high in the legal system.

55:47Yes. I mean, this is, when it comes to the patent wars, this is as slam-dunky swagger off the court as it's gotten in a while. Chris, what's going on? Sonos got its ass handed to it, and in court, had a 32.5 million judgment tossed out by Judge William Alsop, one of the most high-profile judges who's covered who knows how many tech cases. We profiled him. Yeah, we profiled him. And so he knows his stuff. He knows what Sonos is, how long they've been around. And if you read this ruling, it's really like a super deep dive on zones and like different rooms and overlapping zones. And so he knows this stuff.

56:23And so it comes down to he just said that Sonos took too long to really, you know, come up with these complaints and say Google was copying its technology. 13 years is really the time between like their first application. And then when they like said, you know, hey, Google is stealing our ideas and trying to copy multi-room audio. And so the patents that they had included were ruled to be said they were they're now invalid and also unenforceable. And so in like big, bold letters in the ruling, I very much enjoyed that. It was like a different font for the word, which I really liked. So he calls Sonos a pretender and he says Google is the innovator, which is a little harsh, man.

56:59Like, you know, like Sonos is the company that like has made this their whole brand, you know. So I feel like that was a little, little mean. What did Google innovate in this space? Yeah. That's a really good question. Because honestly, this whole case, the entire time we've heard about it and we've been covering it and stuff, it always seemed like Sonos was kind of in the right. Google used – And then that all got thrown out and like – Yeah. This case has a bunch of twists and turns. The heart of it is like not patents. Yeah. Yeah. And this has always been, and we had Patrick Spence and at the time Sonos' chief legal counsel on the show.

57:38And we talked about why you would sue Google. And like they're using their patents because they're mad about something else. Yes. Which many people have many feelings about. Yeah. What are they mad about? They basically like went to go work with Google and then Google like immediately undercut them on business terms. They released. Put out cheap speakers that cost$49. Right. They immediately undercut them with cheaper speakers that copied their features. So they did the thing that every big company has always done to small companies forever. They pulled an Amazon. Yeah, you can replace Google with Amazon, and Sonos is just as mad, but Amazon lets them use Alexa.

58:12It's like Sonos is in this weird position where they need access to voice assistants, or at the time they did, and they just ended up really upside down with Google. They felt very strongly that Google had taken advantage of them. So then they said, well, look, we invented a bunch of this technology. We've been around for a long time. We're going to sue Google for patent infringement. That will create some leverage, and Google will inevitably settle, because why wouldn't they? And then we can't get along. And that was more or less the story. Yeah. Three years later. And then Google did not settle, and Sonos won the judgment, and then Google appealed.

58:45And now ALSEP is like, what's the quote? It is wrong that our patent system was used in this way. This is where the ruling. With its constitutional underpinnings, the system is intended to promote and protect innovation. Here, by contrast, it was used to punish an innovator and enrich a pretender by delay in sleight of hand. It has taken a full trial to learn this sad fact, but at long last, a measure of justice is done. Like. I mean, it's a good, it's a lot. Yeah. You would think that it was a murder trial. Right? Like, what did Sonos do to this judge? Yeah. This judge is like, my fucking speakers keep disappearing.

59:21Like, that's what he's. he had to do that transition from sonos version one to two that s2 he was ready he's super mad his play three is just sitting there and he's like a measure of justice for the sonos play three uh i don't know man it again for google it's 30 million dollars google sneezes that money we're just talking about like a 10 billion dollar deal with apple but anyway so now google's won they put out a statement that is just yeah i was taking a victory lap and saying the patent system needs reform and this and that. And Sonos came back and said the same thing. Of course. But also they still want to keep on fighting Google because they're trying to protect their patents and innovations and they're trying to get royalties, which I think is the main crux of this whole thing.

1:00:04It's like they want all these tech companies to pay them royalties for their technology and multi-room audio and whatnot. And that's clearly not something that Google will budge on anytime soon, as we've seen. And so three years later, there's no sign of a settlement. There's no Google Assistant on the new Sonos speakers still, which I think is the worst experience for customers. Yep. Customers always suffer. And yeah, I think, I mean, like Sonos was concerned about these companies putting out cheaper speakers, but I feel like Google and Amazon really don't care about audio as much anymore. You know, like the Nest Audio came out three years ago and like Google hasn't put out a new speaker that was good.

1:00:37I don't even care about their voice assistants anymore. There was just that new, it's Marshall, right? That has both assistants on it at the same time. I think it was JBL. JBL, sorry. But yeah, that is both things, which Sonos said once they couldn't do that. By Google's own terms, they weren't allowed to do that. And so now we see it happening on this other speaker. So, you know, I think it's time to hopefully settle because I think Sonos has its, you know. Oh, there's no way. I'm sorry. Sonos has its own place carved out. If you have, at long last, a measure of justice is done in your back pocket.

1:01:05Google's never settling. There's no settling happening here. Yeah, I just feel like Sonos, you know, like they're safe. They have their, you know, you just walk into like any Best Buy or Target and there's like a Sonos section there. Like they're not a small company. Well, compared to Google. Compared to Google, yes. But this small company, like David versus Goliath thing, they're a pretty sizable audio company compared to Wim or Weem. What's that brand that Chris Person loves a lot? That's a small company. Wim. Sonos Wim. Yeah, Sonos is a bit larger than that. I will say, Chris and I, earlier this week, we went and visited a studio where Dolby was showing off how they mix in Atmos.

1:01:40And their test product was an Aero 300, right? And it was actually really funny because it was a prototype and had the word prototype printed on it. And I was like, Chris had every part of this scoop except a picture of a prototype with the word prototype on it. But that's it. The recording industry is in on Sonos. That is the test product. And Chris was like, do you ever test on a HomePod? And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't. No, thank you. No HomePod. It's true. I don't think the Amazon products are huge successes in the audio world. The Google products certainly aren't. Right. Yeah, Sonos has the Move 2, which none of these brands really have their own version of.

1:02:18So I feel like Sonos as a business is pretty secure. So at least move towards some kind of resolution here for the benefit of people and customers who want Google Assistant on their Sonos speaker. And when it originally sued Google, it was not as secure as it is now. Like at the time, it was very much we are fighting an existential threat from Amazon and from Google, and we do not know how our company is going to continue. you. And if we don't figure that out, we're screwed. So that was a framing. I mean, I believe it was at CS. I think we were in Vegas when the lawsuit hit and it was just before we assumed both companies would announce a bunch of stuff.

1:02:55Yeah. And they announced a bunch of stuff. You know, a theme of this broadcast is that like Google products don't last a long time. It's like, looking back, we're like, oh, were they going to stay committed to the Nest audio? Or could you have just waited them out? Well, I think that was a curiosity was like, okay, this is probably almost certainly not going to be as good as whatever Sonos does, but is it going to be cheaper and then push Sonos out that way? And so Sonos shrinks and shrinks. And instead, Sonos feels like it's kind of doing well, apart from this. Well, I'm curious, but it seems like they didn't just become a patent troll.

1:03:30They invented a whole bunch of stuff. And Patrick Spence has been on the show a bunch of time being like the pace of innovation, we need to pick it up. We need to go faster. They're on a yearly cadence now. before Patrick showed up they were on like a one decade cadence so like I think they did the right thing there for sure you should read the ruling it's like a fun read to read this ruling because he's just so mad that any of this happened I think there's like an equal amount of mad at Google that you could be because they didn't like 70-80 % of cases settle and if you're google it is probably better to settle and move on and also have google assistant be available on all kinds of devices for what is peanuts in the scheme of google right but it's a fun read you should read and like a measure of justice is done it's incredible for a for a multi-zone audio patent lawsuit what's going on over there bill you all right yeah you're still pissed about the play three like air 300's out it's a replacement seems real nice it's it sounds great chris loves it i do i do like most of their products you know google and amazon their speakers are fine like the echo studio is fine it's been sitting there like untouched for like three or four years now so but it sounds nice i just think those companies clearly don't care about audio as much as they ones that I think Apple like if there's one company that Sonos should be like pretty concerned about it's Apple HomePod and like the AirPods you know like headphones if they ever get in headphones obviously that's going to be a hard climb for Sonos to do and I think there will be like a you know some kind of Apple sound bar at some point it seems like they're super interested in like a computer.

1:05:14You think Apple's going to make a sound bar? Oh yeah with the HomePods as satellites right? Yeah something like that yeah I think they're going to come into their territory at some point a bit more. No way. It's going to be like the Roku one Unless Apple can figure out how to sell you extra iCloud storage, the product, they will never make it. Well, I go to the trouble of letting you use two HomePods as eARC outputs if they're not going to make a proper soundbar at some point. They did that under duress. They're like, God damn it. Straight up, enough people just annoyed them about this thing. And then probably Phil Schiller in his house was like, why do I have other speakers?

1:05:50But actually a soundbar, no way. Zero percent chance. I don't know. They are not interested in that market. We can have a wager. We can have a wager. A wager. Apple will release a cheap Vision Pro before they release a soundbar. Okay. Wow, you're going to make some money, Chris. I'm pretty confident. I'm really excited for you. Yeah, me too. All right, this is an important prediction. You think they're going to make a soundbar? I mean, what's a cheap Vision Pro? We should really get into that. $1 ,000. $1 ,000. Ooh. That's cheap. I think for a product of Vision Pro, that's cheap. I think you still have good odds.

1:06:23significantly down. Yeah. I think I'm still feeling pretty good about some kind of like Apple TV, 4K soundbar, HomePod concoction. You know, one of those things all melded together. When I think of Apple, I think of concoctions. I feel it. We'll see. An important stipulation is you only win if Apple calls it a soundbar, which it never, ever, ever, ever, ever will. Not a single chance. Who knows? There's a 0 % chance, Apple. I just want to be so clear about that. I don't rely on this. Like, it's never going to happen. I don't know. But wait, one thing I've been thinking about a lot with this is it seems like one of the things that happened from when this ruling started, from when this trial started to today, is that the stakes for audio seem like they've gone way down.

1:07:08Like, if you rewind a bunch of years to when this all started, we were in this phase where, like, voice assistants were going to be the next big thing. Everybody was going to use them. They were going to be huge businesses. Sonos was under pressure to, like, be part of this because the idea was you were going to have speakers all over your house and you were going to talk to them. And that was going to be your main interface with technology. And like that idea is not dead, but like not alive anymore. And so now we're back to the speaker business. And Google and Amazon have no interest in being in the speaker business.

1:07:36They're in the business of getting you to use their assistants, but they're even getting out of those businesses. Like Amazon is shedding the Alexa team in a big way. Google is going to put BARD into Assistant, but is already like pretty clearly pivoting the way that it thinks about that as a tool. Like we're just out of this phase where speakers are going to be the centerpiece of your home and they're back to being speakers. And I think if we're going to go back to being speakers, that's probably good news for Sonos because these other companies just aren't going to care that much about it. Yeah.

1:08:08Right. So then it's like, why keep fighting this battle? You know, like just, you know, I think at some point, if you're google you're like we we can't go down this road because then we're gonna end up paying royalties on everything every time we screw over a small tech company and we're hosed like the fight for them seems like it's on like patent principle rather than the specifics of this case right whereas sonos like needed this win a lot more back then but at this point i don't know like i don't know how big sonos loses here sonos has got a fight because they got owned so hard in this judgment.

1:08:42Oh, sure. They did. For sure. If I got owned that hard, I would fight. Even if I knew I was going to lose, I'd be like, no, I'm still going. Well, to be clear, so they lost at this court. Okay. They need to appeal to an appeals court, right? Yeah. And so there's this case and there's still several others. There's one at the ITC where they've won a few times to ban very old Google products that you can't even buy anymore, as is usually the case with those lawsuits. And so, yeah, there are countersuits from Google in several countries. So it's still just like a very, like very angry feud that seems to have no sign of cooling down anytime soon, which seems a bit silly at this point.

1:09:19Well, now that a measure of justice has been done. I don't know why you don't say that at all. There's a long road. There's an appeals court. I love the idea of our current Supreme Court being made to deeply consider multi-room audio. That's all I want. David just sitting in the. Oh, my God. A pile of sound bars has arrived at Justice Clarence Thomas's house. And he didn't refuse them. Oh, no. I can't help it if my friends own a jet and love surround sound. All right, we got to take a break. We'll do a lightning round and then we'll get out of here. We'll be right back.

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1:12:13All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. Alex, you want to start? Yeah. There's a new piece. By the way, a number of people have told us that we need to change the lightning round to USB-C round. It's not as pa-pow sounding. Also, it's not named after the port. I don't know how to It's just a lightning round Words have multiple That's just a noun This is the PCI round Get ready everybody It's the Thunderbolt 4 round Okay Go ahead Sponsored by Intel Oh my god Sorry You gotta pay us money for that Me or Intel Someone Someone If you wanna pay us to sponsor the Thunderbolt 4 round I'm not gonna say no Alright go ahead There's some journalistic integrity there This is transparent Disclosure I will accept money if it's funny all right so the sony ps5 it's got a new sony ps5 just like now now you can go buy one and that is a perfect time to be like no we got new ones coming it's been rumored for a while it's smaller it's slimmer it should actually fit in most home theater setups which the current one doesn't okay i would like to quibble with that particular assessment this thing is you probably have an Ugly home theater setup.

1:13:26This thing went from being preposterously humongous to very slightly less preposterously humongous. Yeah, I think there's a piece on the site actually by Jay Peters that says the slim PS5 is still huge. So it's a chunk. It's smoother now. It's much more like straightforward Eye of Sauron, Lord of the Rings now than it was. No, no, but it's 24 % lighter, which I think is very important. My home theater system will be psyched about that. Yeah. thing that you put down once and never touch again, right? I'm just, look, these are the specs they gave us. This is what they're proud of. Have you seen the stand for horizontal mode?

1:14:05I didn't know you're supposed to use the current one with the stand. So you just had your current one horizontal the whole time? Yeah. Oh boy. To fit in my home theater system. I had to clear a whole shelf. I will say that Sony picked another shape that's incompatible with most furniture. Yeah. Yes. They're just like, oh, this is for a rectangle? to hell with you. But the little stand to be horizontal is not a stand. It's just like a little peg. It's like a little peg leg. I know. I just like stuck like something under there. There's the stand. You can detach the optical drive, which is truly wild.

1:14:39Yeah, yeah. The optical drive I think is most interesting. This is the part like Tom Warren when he was looking at the news. He's like, oh my God, that's so cool. And like, yeah, it is cool. It seems fairly elegant way to do it. Because you can now go same price, 24 % lighter, 30 % smaller by volume. Hey, those are how people consider game consoles. Yeah. So Xbox or PS5, I'm going with 30 % smaller by volume. That's what you should have listed on the Costco website or the Best Buy website. My water displacement is going to go so far down when I buy it. Still feel like physical media is slowly dying here.

1:15:17This is an optional optical drive. You can have it if you want it. If you want to watch 4K Blu-ray, like that new Xbox that leaked has no more drive in there anymore. So I feel like we're still inching towards a gaming world where it's all digital. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting rid of the drives. But the drives are actually important. They're good. If you want to watch DVDs and UHD Blu-rays and everything, like only three people in the world, and they're all in this room, would do. But it's a little cheaper, right? Like it's$450 starting for the digital, the disc-free one. and previously it was$499 for the digital free one.

1:15:53And then the new base model with the drive already installed is going to be$499, which was the old price for the disk free one. So that's kind of nice. And then there's going to be the disk player, which is$80 additional and integrates kind of neatly. You can go look at it on the website. It's cool. There's like a little video. It shows the integration. And it is cool. Yeah. But like you should also go look at Jay's story about how much smaller it is because 30 % volume does not actually track to dimensions. Yeah. You still don't want to measure your cabinet and make sure it'll fit in there. Again, it is also a shape that is incompatible with most things.

1:16:31You can't stack on it. Then you just slide off. It's horrible. I think that, yeah. Yeah. All right, Chris, what you got? My pick of the week is the speakers on the Pixel 8 Pro. If you've owned a Pixel over the last few years, you've known that Google, for some reason, has put terrible loudspeakers in their phones. that started with the Pixel 5. They had some weird like vibration motor that like made sound. And then they went back to like standard speakers for the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7, but they were tinny and hollow and just sounded like absolute trash. And so since the Pixel 8 Pro now costs$1 ,000, you would hope and pray that the speaker is decent.

1:17:05Like I don't use my speaker a ton, but if I'm in bed and, you know, playing a podcast or watching a video, I want it to sound decent. I don't want to spend a grand on a phone and have it sound like absolute garbage. And so finally, Google, I'm happy to say, It has a speaker that sounds comparable to the iPhone, not quite the level of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, but it's in that ballpark, which was certainly not the case last year or the year before that. My wife has a Pixel 6, and I mean, just by virtue of what I do for a living, I have 400 ,000 speakers in this house. She steadfastly refuses to use any of them and just plays everything out of her phone.

1:17:42and the rage it has filled me with in the last two years as she has had this phone of how bad it sounds all the time she's just like oh we're gonna like put on some music while we have dinner and i'm like there's a sonos like you're connected to the sonos and she's like no i'll just i'll just put it yeah on my phone it'll be fine this is podcast through becky's phone i'm like hey what kind of speaker should i get should i put speakers in the ceiling yeah she's like i don't know i listen to podcasts on my phone i'm like but there's a world of possibilities exists for you No. Nope, podcasting my phone.

1:18:11Yeah. So to me, the speaker upgrade might be the single most important thing about the Pixel 8, and I will probably be buying Ana 1 as a result. It's very exciting for me. It's a good phone, and it doesn't get that hot anymore, which was pretty concerning about the past few. That's a real part of this generation of phones. Boy, they get real hot when you first buy them. Got to be careful of that Instagram. It's a heavy, resource-intensive app. All right, I'll make mine quick. There's another trial that's happening right now. Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for the FTX, which is called fraud. I mean, I think it's fairly obvious what happened here.

1:18:42And Liz Lopato is here in New York. She's been at the courthouse filing reports every day. It is some of the funniest coverage we've ever had on the site. It is Liz at full force in terms of being a writer. Just the funniest writing we've had on the site. Her last headline is Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend. I mean, perfect. Just like perfect. Just go read it. Go read it all. She's doing it basically every day. uh there's like an army of people waiting just like waiting for her edits at the end of like the courtroom day um it's all very funny and the dude did it i don't like i don't want to turn this into too much of a true crime podcast but after extensive investigation i can exclusively reveal uh that ftx uh was a scam uh and it was obvious the entire time and crypto is a fraud michael lewis is gonna find you and fight you that dude uh do you have another hour did you see the thing michael lewis he wrote the blind side that book which is now in a substantial lot of controversy but he had a state i think he gave an interview time this week he's like i wrote my book for the jury they should read my book and it's like no they should do the trial that might be a substantially better use of their should watch money ball

1:19:58pretty good okay read liz's coverage it's great it's really fun all right that was mine david dude, what's yours? I would just like to very quickly, um, appeal to Samsung and Google to stop being so embarrassing, trying to convince Apple to support RCS. Uh, Oh no. Do we have to disclose that Dieter Bone, former host of the Verge cast regularly tweets at Apple about RCS? Sure. There you go. Done. Disclosed. Dieter is right. To be clear, Google is right. Samsung is right. Apple should support RCS. It is a, it is a better system. SMS is like a technological disaster that should no longer exist and we should stop using it silly youtube videos from major competitors are not going to convince apple to do anything in fact i would argue that every time samsung and google say to apple do rcs or you won't be cool anymore tim cook just like i don't know buy your mom an iphone throws a cat out the window and like cackles i don't know whatever he throws a cat out the way bring me another cat samsung's at it again open the cat room yeah and like and now samsung's whole thing is like we're bubbles too and it's just like it's not gonna work go go pick the fight with carriers go try to like covertly destroy sms from the outside like pick pick any fight you want or just like wait for the eu to make apple interoperate with all of the other messaging apps and it'll be fine.

1:21:31It just seems kind of sad. It's like all the teens are leaving our phones. We have to come up with these ad campaigns to put up a fight. I want this to happen and they're doing it wrong and I would like them to stop. It's real cringe. Here's what Google can do. Have a messaging app that people like to use. And stick with it for longer than six months. You should call it Gchat, an app which people firmly believe that they used and loved, which Google never made. I don't know. I think Aula was the way. That was the... My God. It's all about doing it. I'm just saying, and Google has enough money.

1:22:05You just got your$30 million back. Just give everybody five bucks. It's fine. Just do it. You'll get a substantial user base, just five bucks at a time. That's how the VCs did it. Couldn't they just put it into their next search deal with iOS? Just be like, okay, we'll let you use our search, But also Tim Cook is going to throw so many cats at the window if they bring me a tiger.

1:22:36He's he's he's a fit man. Yeah, he is. He can lift a large cat. That's all I'm saying. He could throw a large tiger. OK, please send us a note with your thoughts on how large of a cat Tim Cook can lift. Doesn't he go to the gym at like 5 a.m. every day? Yeah, I'm saying it's I think it's a larger cat than you expect. It's a big cat. Yeah, I agree. All right. We got to end it here. I would also accept AI-generated images of Tim Cook lifting a large cat. Just putting out in the world, you got to manifest what you want, you know? And that's what I want. Send them to us at The Verge Cast. We love hearing from you.

1:23:08Monday, Connectivity Miniseries comes back with Beeper Co-Founder, Eric Majikowski, who is a longtime friend of The Verge. That's going to be really exciting. David's got an installer, which can I reveal this stat, David? Sure. I don't know. Sure. Maybe. Yeah. Just well over 10 ,000 subscribers now. Oh, yeah. Zero to 10 ,000. Amazing. People love it. Subscribe to that. And then I'm not going to tell you what's happening on Decoder because I don't know. But I think something very exciting is going to happen on Decoder very soon. That's what I got for you. All right. That's it. That's Verge Cast.

1:23:38Rock and roll.

1:23:45And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. 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 Meta Quest 3 review, Google gadgets, and Threads continuing to compete with X.
Chris Welch joins the show to discuss the result of Sonos' legal battle with Google.
Further reading:

Google Pixel Watch 2 review: better battery, better watch

Pixel 8 and 8 Pro review: in Google we trust?

WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub

Threads is getting an edit button — and you don’t have to pay for it

@mosseri • We’re not anti-news

At US v. Google antitrust trial, the Apple search deal takes center stage

Judge blasts Sonos for abusing patent system and throws out $32.5 million win against Google

Google is already bringing back the software features it removed because of Sonos’ lawsuit

Sonos vows to keep fighting Google for the benefit of smaller companies – and its own revenue

Ruling pdf: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/znpnznkjgpl/GOOGLE%20SONOS%20TRIAL%20ruling.pdf

Google has fixed its recent history of terrible speakers with the Pixel 8 Pro

Alameda’s paper trail leads straight to Sam Bankman-Fried

Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple

Sony’s new PS5 with a removable disc drive launches in November

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