Tesla's robotaxi reality check

23:38There's a very rigid permitting process. You need to have several months of testing. You need to submit documents to the government to show that your technology is up to snuff. You have to apply for a driverless permit. You have to apply for a commercial robo-taxi permit. There's all these sort of a successive number of permits, but that's the market, right? California is the big market that Tesla wants to get. If they want to compete with the Ubers and the Waymos and everyone else, they're going to need to be in those markets competing with them as well. And they may run into some problems as the sort of regulatory requirements get more and more difficult as they look to spread out.

24:14Is the sense in the industry that this stuff is going to be kind of a let a thousand flowers bloom market where it'll be sort of like the car market where there's lots of different companies and you can choose your your own provider and everybody can kind of peacefully coexist on the roads or are we running towards some kind of like winner take all or at least winner take most version of the the robo taxi future here because if that's where we're going i kind of have a hard time figuring out how anybody catches waymo at this point at least quickly uh but maybe it doesn't continue to be Waymo and Tesla or some other company can figure out how to be just as successful in just as many places and everybody can coexist together.

24:56What is the sense of how it shakes out there? Yeah, I think it's going to be entirely dependent on safety. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but really it's the kind of situation where as soon as something bad happens, someone gets hit, a crash occurs, the whole industry almost needs to reset at that point. And that's when you start to see who's a winner and who's a loser in that situation. Because as we've seen in the past, when there's some sort of injury or death, that can ruin companies. It happened to Uber. It happened to Cruise under GM's ownership. And it could very well happen to Tesla, right?

25:33As soon as there have been already injuries and crashes, right? But there have been people behind the wheels of those vehicles. And so Tesla can say, we're not liable. We told you to pay attention and you didn't. This is a different situation. and Tesla is taking on a lot more risk now than they ever have in the past and a lot more liability. That said, I do think Uber's model is really interesting and could be the one that we see as the most successful. You get sort of like smaller AV operators, maybe more locally based, who are able to deploy their vehicles to a small number of customers on Uber's platform.

26:08And then you have sort of like your big operators, like your Waymos and others who have more runway, more capital, more financial support, and therefore are able to grow, acquire more vehicles, and then sort of spread across the country. But it will be a very safety-guided, I think, development, and it should be, right? If you can't prove that you can operate these vehicles, and I think the liability thing is the one that is the biggest hurdle for most of these companies. If you cannot put a driverless vehicle on the road and be confident in the fact that that's not going to come back and bite you in the ass and cost you hundreds of millions of dollars in liability costs, then you should feel confident in doing that.

26:49But otherwise, that's going to be the thing that I think that weeds out sort of the major players with the confidence and those that maybe are a little bit operating with a little bit more risk. Okay. But you think, I mean, it's an interesting way of thinking about it because there's so much potential for like problem and change there that maybe I'm wrong to think that Waymo is in any way sort of insurmountable at this point. Like, there are still so much big, huge, massive stuff left to do. I mean, Waymo has been able to circumnavigate the problems of the past with when someone has deployed a vehicle that was not ready and someone got hurt or injured.

27:25There's been sort of the under there's an understanding that like that hurts the whole industry, right? People don't tend to separate Waymo from from Tesla or what have you. They're just self-driving cars. They're just self-driving cars. It's a technology that is not ready for prime time because of this incident that happened. I feel like Waymo has been able to skirt around that a few times in ways that other companies have not. But that said, I do think that if something happens in the future and if it's a Tesla vehicle that is responsible for something that happens, some sort of incident, it will be tough because it is also a perception game.

27:57And if you can't convince people at scale to trust this technology, they're just not going to use it. They're going to rely on human driven, you know, Uber vehicles, which is why Uber hedging its bets now saying, oh, we got we got human drivers and we got robot cars. You know, that's a way to sort of say both can coexist. And that's a company that could potentially be well positioned for more success in the future. But, yeah, I do think that like if once and something will something will go wrong. I don't want to be doom and gloom, but there will be eventually an incident that happens. Someone will get injured, especially as more of these vehicles hit the road.

28:33and you just reach a certain level of scale where it's unavoidable, these types of incidents. It'll be really interesting to see who's responsible and how the rest of the industry responds to that incident. And then if the public decides to reject it and say, okay, that's enough. We've had enough of this, which we saw in LA recently with these Waymos getting completely incinerated during these anti-ice protests. That's a bad look for Waymo. It's a bad luck for the whole industry, too. And I think it goes to show that there's still a bit of a hill to climb in terms of public acceptance and trust.

29:07Totally. Well, speaking of things that have fully climbed that hill, at least in my brain, can we talk about the Nissan Leaf just for one second before we go? Oh, happy to. The last time you were on, I told you I was irrationally excited about this car. And then Nissan sort of fully unveiled the 2026 Leaf. And I feel so incredibly vindicated because this car seems awesome. It's great. And I'm very into it. Tell me why I should or should not be excited about the new Leaf. Okay, so you should be excited for it because the specs look great. It's like over 300 miles on certain trims. They haven't said what the price is, but I'm sure it's going to be like in the$40 ,000 range, which is where most EVs are these days.

29:47If it's under 40, I will be impressed. But I'm sure that's going to be reliant on some incentives that probably won't exist by the time this car comes out. It's got dual ports on it for both CCS charging, fast charging, and Tesla Naxx fast charging. I have not seen that before in a production vehicle. Typically, they'll come out with one or the other, and they'll give you an adapter for the rest. This one, Nissan's just saying, why not just put two ports on this bad boy? Love it. So that's pretty sick. And just the look of it, it just looks so much better, right? It's kind of reminded me in some ways of when the new Prius came out a couple years ago and how much of a glow-up that was.

30:28It just looked sleeker and sexier than the old Prius. The same is with the Leap. It sort of cast off its frumpiness, and it's now a fully grown-up crossover SUV. It just looked great. The downside, it's Nissan, right? Nissan not in a great place right now. Struggling a lot. They had a huge round of layoffs a few months ago. Tried to merge with Honda. Didn't work out. had to break that up. But clear that the company is still going through a lot of financial difficulties. I don't think that's going to affect the Leaf at all. I think that they're really gung-ho about the Leaf and I don't doubt that Nissan, it's not going to be like a Fisker situation.

31:09Nissan's not going to cease to exist or what have you. But I do think that that might get some folks paused. But yeah, otherwise, I do think that the Leaf looks awesome and I can't wait to test it out. Yeah, it just seems like we're still so desperate for like compelling mainstream EVs. And I think the Leaf tried and failed to be that so many times that it was like, it just kept whiffing on like really basic stuff. It was like, what if we made a car that was ugly and didn't go very far? And I was like, well, I don't think that's it, Nissan. But it was like, but it was the first, it was the thing, right?

31:44Like everyone gives Tesla the credit for inventing the EV market, but it was really Nissan that took the risk, right? They were the ones who put the Leaf came out first. That was the first, it wasn't long range by any stretch of the imagination, but it was way more than a lot of like the very early compliance vehicles that we saw. And it was cheap. It was so cheap. It was, you know, 112 miles of range, like 30 grand, maybe even like 25 grand. That was what this was all supposed to be before like the EV market got kind of hooked on luxury goods and, you know, fine leather goods and all that kind of stuff that you see with like the Rivians and the Polestars and whatnot.

32:20Things just got too fancy, and we kind of lost sight of what was the point of all this. If you really want to drive adoption, you've got to meet people where they are, and you've especially got to meet them where their finances are. And so many EVs today, I think you could say that Tesla was really responsible for that with the Model S, and then that sort of kind of was the model that everyone wanted to follow because they were so successful. So had the Leaf been the one that was the success and not the Model S, it could have been a different story. You could have seen Ford and GM and BMW and everyone else like rushing to put$20 ,000 EVs on the road.

32:54But instead it was Tesla that was the breakout star. And thus, that's why we got 70, 80,$90 ,000 EVs before we got any hint of a$20 ,000 one. Yeah, I am. I'm rooting for this car for exactly that reason. It feels like the thing the Leaf has always wanted to be is a thing we need in the car market right now. And at least from the look of the thing, it feels it feels like it might have actually gotten there. But I agree with you. I think price will end up being everything. And I would not say I'm terribly optimistic given. Yeah. You know, gestures broadly, everything. think. But that said, we're supposed to be getting cheap EVs from Ford, from Volkswagen, supposed to be coming out some really cheap ones.

33:35Next year, we're going to get the R2 from Rivian. That's supposed to be their$40 ,000 EV. I do feel, despite all of these headwinds and political machinations that are going on, it does seem that the industry is still committed to putting out an affordable EV that people can actually buy. And hopefully the LEAF will be sort of like that precursor to a lot of great things to come. You and me both. All right, we got to take a break. Andy, thank you as always. My pleasure. Thanks, David. We'll be right back.

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37:26All right, we're back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison. Hello. Allison, I have dragged you in on your day off because we have to talk about MVNOs. I wouldn't miss it. I love a good MVNO chat. So this is very fun for me because this is the sort of thing that I feel like in the course of my day-to-day life, I have spent almost no time thinking about. This sort of like weird world of network usage and carriers and who you buy your service from. I've just like, I signed up for a Verizon account in 2004 and basically have not thought about it since then. And then with all this Trump mobile stuff, we got to like actually sort of have a bunch of conversations about how self-service works that I have just not really had before.

38:10And I have found myself deeper down this rabbit hole than I ever expected. And it is sort of fascinating. And I feel like you've had kind of the same journey over the last like seven days. Yeah, and I go into the rabbit hole sometimes when I'm writing about, you know, wireless services and Boost Mobile and all that. And it goes deep. Like there are some people out there who are like so plugged into their network and like what spectrum they're using and what, you know, like all of the kind of things that go on under the hood. There's a lot, but I have skimmed the surface and it is fascinating stuff, I think.

38:48Yeah, I agree. So let's just start at sort of the very base floor here and then build up. What is an MVNO? So an MVNO is a mobile virtual network operator, and it is basically like a storefront for wireless service. They don't own the network. In the U.S., we have three wireless networks. So they buy the service from one of those three providers and they resell it. And it's like basically as simple as that. So the MVNO is a little bit more of like a marketing exercise and they feel like they can tap into a different market that the big providers are not like addressing directly. is kind of fascinating.

39:37I talked to a friend, analyst Avi Greengart, and he was like, they've been around for decades, actually. I feel like I've heard about them so much in the last two or three years. But as long as there's been an audience to address, there's been an MVNO for that group of people. So why would the big three carriers in the U.S., AT &T, T-Mobile, Verizon, allow this to happen? Like, you're basically saying they're taking their network, which these companies spend an enormous amount of money on, like, building and maintaining the infrastructure to have wireless coverage all over the United States, and sell it to ostensibly your competitor.

40:24Why would these companies do that? So they get, like, a guaranteed return on that bit of, you know, their capacity. And they might have more capacity than they're always using. So it's a little bit of like a guaranteed payday for them when they sell it to the MVNO. You know, they make their money. The MVNO then has to go like make their money back by reselling it. So it helps them in that way. And there are just market segments that like a Verizon or an AT &T is maybe too big to go after or wants to uphold a perception of like it's the best, fanciest wireless network in the world. So there are audiences of like people with poor credit or people who don't speak English that like Verizon is not going to like hire a whole team to translate all their marketing materials into like a particular language.

41:26So it's beneficial to them in like a number of ways. Okay. And my understanding of the capacity thing is that that has gotten more and more possible over time. And I think this is where I start to make very clear how little I understand how wireless networks actually work. But my sense of it is that as these networks have gotten faster, as we've gone up the Gs, they've also gotten more efficient. So like, however, whatever, 100 million people on Verizon actually use less of this sort of overall capacity than before. So maybe even as it's getting better, Verizon and AT &T and T-Mobile have actually more empty space to offer.

42:07Do I have that basically right? Yeah, and someone else I spoke to pointed out that 5G, really like the genuine 5G like we're in the era of all the networks have actual 5G networks now they're not trying to rebrand 4G as 5G and that technology does allow for more capacity so that might be partially why we're hearing a little bit more over the last like year or two in particular, especially T-Mobile, which has had kind of the head start with all the Sprint spectrum. So they had just like extra capacity lying around. You want to sell it and definitely get some money back for it. Okay. So when I think of MVNOs, I think the first one I think of is Boost Mobile.

42:58And I feel like Boost Mobile has been around forever since like the early aughts and has basically been on every imaginable network over time. It's been bought and sold like a half dozen times. The company has a crazy story, but is like pretty successful and has been for a long time, mostly without ever operating its own network. I think that's like a little murkier now in a 5G world, but it doesn't matter. Mostly it has been an MVNO for most people for a very long time. The thing I think of when I think of Boost and by extension, most other MVNOs is just that it's cheaper, right? Like it is, there are fewer perks that come with the account.

43:35There aren't as many retail stores that you go to to get your phone serviced. You're not going to get maybe as good a deal on a phone, but the price per month is cheaper. And that I feel like is pretty consistently the story with MVNOs. Is it usually just kind of that simple? Like you trade a few things, but you get a cheaper price every month. Yeah, basically. I think that's, and there's a few other things you could be playing in there. Like they may not require a credit check and Verizon will, you know, needs a credit check for you to get on one of their plans. So they make that a little bit easier.

44:10Yeah, they may be okay with, you know, lower credit scores too. And a lot of MB &Os, I don't know if it's exclusively all of them, but they tend to be prepaid. so you pay for your service and then you have your month of service and the big unlimited plans from all the bigger carriers are postpaid and you kind of sign a contract you know quote unquote they can cut your service off if you stop paying them kind of deal right yeah so what what's your sense of the downsides of these like if you you get a cheaper price is it should like roughly the same service that these things promise? Like this has always been my open question is like, yes, you are, you are, I understand taking T-Mobile network capacity and giving it to me for less money than T-Mobile.

45:01And I'm like, would I trade retail store access for that? Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. Like maybe not everybody would, but I happily would. I will fix my own damn phone. Thank you. But then there's always, I feel like you look at the fine print and it's always like weird bandwidth priority stuff going on that I've never been able to I don't know and it's just always like that's the stuff that makes me squirrely is like in ways I don't understand is this actually sneakily less good than T-Mobile even though it's technically T-Mobile yeah I I think it yes and no um there's deprioritization which is something that you know you can buy a plan from Verizon and still experience deprioritization that's where you have an allotment of a certain amount of premium data.

45:47And once you hit that threshold, it's usually pretty high. The other thing that comes into play with the MVM knows is that the networks have these kind of quality of service tiers for the way they split up traffic. So they put things that are really sensitive to latency on the highest priority, like voice calls, first responders, that kind of thing. And then like down the ranks is, you know, your mobile gaming, your internet of things, all that stuff. And I think MVNOs tend to sit like just one tier or so below like the main wireless brand's own traffic. Does that mean you will experience that difference in a meaningful way, like, it's really hard to say.

46:42I know a bunch of people on MVNOs now who are, like, thrilled with their service, and I don't think it's ever bothered them if that's a factor. Yeah, I will say the one that I have heard about, this is purely anecdotal, but I know a surprising number of people who switched to Mint Mobile over the years and had really good experiences. And Mint Mobile's thing was like, it's T-Mobile, but it's 15 bucks a month. And also like Ryan Reynolds is here. Like that was very meaningful for people. But also the idea that you are getting, I think even 90 % as good T-Mobile coverage for$15 a month, I think is a trade most people are perfectly happy to make.

47:24And I remember a lot of this happening, especially during COVID when people were at home a lot and you're on Wi-Fi a lot. And I was thinking about this, researching all this stuff. Like the amount of time that I spend off of a Wi-Fi network at this point is pretty small. Can I tell a story real quick? I had my Verizon account completely shut down while I was traveling home from WWDC. Oh, no. It was a whole technical weird thing with how I kind of did it to myself, like switching around from eSIM to physical SIM. We got it sorted out. But I got off the plane. I was like, oh, no, I'm dead. Like, I have died.

48:04I don't have cell service. Like, I just live here at the airport now. And it was actually like, I was like, no, there's Wi-Fi. And there was like Wi-Fi in the parking garage. And I could text on Wi-Fi. I could call on Wi-Fi. I'm like, oh, actually, like, this is fine. I like got my Uber on Wi-Fi and I survived. But it's an interesting thing that some of the, so like the cable companies also run MVNOs, which is such a weird thing of like, you know, you can have Xfinity mobile service and then Verizon wants to sell you home internet. And I don't know what to make of that. But I think one thing that cable companies are doing is like tapping into that, that like, hey, you're on Wi-Fi a lot.

48:50Like, we'll just kind of facilitate that when you're out and about. If there's an Xfinity Wi-Fi network, like you can use that and it saves us on the data that we're paying for. It's a whole weird world out there. It is a strange thing. And I think, I mean, that goes back to your point about this kind of rise in MVNOs over the last few years that I think is real. Like, I went back and was like, okay, is this just a thing that we've been hearing about recently? And there have been tons of these before. The answer is no. Like, there has been a boom the last several years in MVNOs. And I've been trying to figure out why.

49:27And I have a couple of theories, but I'm curious if you have a sort of leading theory about the boom in MVNOs recently. so talk to my friend Avi and he made the good point that like Ryan Reynolds really did like start a lot of this really I've been making that joke all week I thought I was just kidding no I thought it was funny too but he was like no okay Ryan Reynolds is actually to blame here um but it having like a friendly face to an MVNO and like the branding of Mint Mobile is so cute and And there's a little fox and it's just kind of like friendly and kind of appealing. I think it attracted a lot of people and sort of helped like shake off the stigma of, you know, a prepaid service or an MVNO as like, oh, that's just cheap.

50:15And, you know, you got to buy from the main carriers if you want actual good service. It's kind of like a Costco effect where you're like, oh, yeah, actually, it's kind of cool to shop at Costco and like save a bunch of money on like nice stuff I would have bought somewhere else. But so I think that makes sense. And then, I mean, you consider the fact that Ryan Reynolds like didn't start, but like bought into an MVNO, made a bunch of fun ads and then sold that MVNO Mint to T-Mobile, which provided the service for Mint already. So it essentially sold T-Mobile back to T-Mobile for$1.35 billion. Bananas.

50:55Like, genuine congratulations to everybody involved. And I think to me what that says is like, okay, there was a real understanding at the end of that that the brand matters a lot, right? That like you can have, and this is what you're talking about, you can have network capacity, you can have whatever, but like people want to deal with a company that they like, and that that's a really meaningful thing. And so I get that from the perspective of like, I get why you would start up an MVNO. Like, this is why Trump Mobile makes sense to me, right? You're like, okay, any sort of affinity based thing.

51:26It's pretty easy to start a wireless carrier. It's a thing people pay money for. It's a relationship they have. It's like, I get it. I get why the smart list guys did it. There's going to be more and more of this over time. The part of it that I struggle with is like, I don't know a lot of people with a ton of like Comcast brand affinity. I guess this is where we should disclose that Comcast through NBCUniversal is an investor in Vox Media. I don't know a lot of people who are like psyched about their relationship with Comcast. And so the idea of like, oh, sure, I'll sign up for wireless services just seems tricky.

51:53But then I guess the other thing this has made me think a lot about is, and I'm sure you and I have heard this speech from many different people many times, that like people want to have fewer accounts and fewer bills. And just the idea of like, okay, I can take your wireless service away from being another account and another bill and another customer service line and just wrap it into this thing you already have. And I think if I'm getting like galaxy brained about it, I think that's the theory for like the bank, right? Which is a very sticky account that you're probably going to keep for a very long time.

52:21And it's like you're used to dealing with your bank. Yeah, I think so. And there's a little bit of like we are more used to like dealing with things online. And I think like five or so years ago, if I thought about switching wireless service, I'm like, well, I got to walk into a store and I got to talk to a T-Mobile person and get a SIM card and do the thing. And they're going to spend an hour trying to convince me not to quit. and that's the thing I hate the most about it is when you call and you're like I would like to cancel and they're like would you like a deal and you're like I would like to cancel and they're like you would you like a better deal and you're like I would like to cancel right like okay I can offer you a year of service for 99 cents yeah just let me go yeah I quit please where were you six months ago with this deal yeah no so I I know I'm not in a hurry to add any more accounts to my life But I think, yeah, having eSIM as an option makes it easier.

53:20And I think a little bit of the momentum is there with your, I talked to my hairstylist and she switched to Mint Mobile. And she's not a tech person and was a little bit terrified about doing all of this. But she's like, yeah, it's, you know, they talk you through it. There's cute little graphical interfaces to help you, like, switch your plan. And you do it. I think having those things there for people kind of helps spread the word of like, oh, this isn't as terrifying as it sounds like. And you don't actually have to go spend half a day at a wireless carrier retail store. my sort of galaxy brain theory about why this could be a very exciting trend.

54:04And I'm curious if you agree with this theory. I talked a little bit about this with Jake on Friday, but I've been thinking about it ever since. That what we get now is we get like AT &T, T-Mobile, Verizon have spent tons of money building very impressive infrastructure all over the United States. This stuff is going to get bigger. They're going to keep working on this and they are going to be increasingly happy to like recoup that investment by selling it to MVNOs, right? So we're going to get this giant proliferation of ways to get more or less identical wireless service, like sort of within a small range of quality, pretty good wireless service.

54:39What that means now is there are going to be a million ways to compete on everything else, right? Like they're going to compete on billing. They're going to compete on like how good the app is for managing your account. They're going to compete on different kinds of features and different stuff you can do and different perks that you get, or they're just going to compete on price. And all of a sudden that like we've been on this constant rise in the cost of wireless service like a thing we talk about on the show all the time is that we get pretty bad service for a lot more money than almost anywhere else and it's largely because there are three companies that matter and nothing else and it's not the same as having like truly competitive networks everywhere but it's it's it's the closest to that that we're going to get i think and and so maybe what we're going to is this gigantic boom in like, if not the network competition, then like interface competition on top of that network.

55:29And that might be very exciting. So like I've been reading about Disney Mobile a bunch. Do you know about Disney Mobile at all? No. Disney has an MVNO. No, really? To be honest with you, I could not confirm whether it still exists. Okay. I don't think it's popular, I'll tell you that. But it launched in 2006. Like to your point, this stuff has been around for a long time. It was originally on the Sprint Network. And this was the thing that really was, I was like, oh, this is why MVNOS could be awesome. So it was basically, it was a like Disney-based experience. They were like, we want to do for families and kids and parents what we think they would want in a phone service.

56:09So here's just a list. I'm reading their press release from 2006. And they have a bunch of new features that they were launching. One was set spending allowances and track usage for voice minutes and all this stuff back when minutes were a thing. And you would get alerts when the allowances had been reached. So parents could be like, you know, you get this many text messages and this many minutes and then it'll let us know when you get to the end of it. That was a big deal back then, back when everyone was paying a ton for minutes over it. Determine the hours of the day and days of the week when kids can use their phone.

56:38Good idea. Program restricted and always on phone numbers to manage with whom kids may communicate. Super smart. prioritize important family messages and locate kids phones with GPS capabilities. So they took this thing. Right. And they're like, OK, this is sprint service, but we can actually like change the features you get with your plan and how you use it and how you access it and how we bill it in a way that makes more sense for this group of people. And that to me is like, I'm like, oh, you could there are an infinite number of versions of that thing that you could do. And I think that is like way more so than just like one fewer bill.

57:14That idea I find super, super, super compelling. Am I just totally pipe dreaming here? Like, is this not where we're headed? Could I have this world or am I just insane? I hope you're right. And I think like some of that will happen. But the thing that makes me a little pessimistic is that it all starts with their relationship with the main three carriers. And they, I don't know what level they're dictating like what you can and can't do, you know, with the service. service it certainly in their interest to make sure that like their offering is the shiniest best you know coolest i think it has already happened a little bit with like with mint mobile and t-mobile buying mint mobile kind of speaks a lot i think about how that is an important piece of business that they want to bring back in-house.

58:10So I don't know. I'm just a little pessimistic from the like capitalism, doing capitalism kind of side of it. But I hope it would be cool if there were like actual better ways to interact with a wireless company. I definitely we're going to see like, I think some of the MVNOs are sort of bundling services in that way to kind of like differentiate and the Liberty Mobile, which is the network that the MVNO that Trump Mobile is just kind of glomming onto. They had a whole bunch of thing that was like, it's like telehealth and device protection. It would be cool to see a company do that and do it in a good way that doesn't feel like upselling, you know?

59:01I don't know why this just pops into my head but i was like headspace should do an mvno what if headspace oh that's interesting i don't know like built-in soothing activities that you could do when you're dealing with your wireless carrier no see okay here's here's my idea for headspace it headspace dynamically replaces all hold music with meditation yeah yeah yeah when you're waiting it just it just replaces it and it gives you just like a five minute meditation while you're waiting on hold to talk to, you know, your bank or whoever. Yeah. It's like, we noticed you're on hold with Walgreens for 30 minutes.

59:38Would you like? Would you like to meditate? Do you want to hear the sound of whales? Yeah, I do. Thank you, Headspace. I would love to hear whale sounds. Free idea. I will sign up for Headspace mobile. Headspace, get at us. You can have this, but we demand free service. That's how this works. One other question on this, and then I'm gonna let you go. The other piece of this to me seems like phone unlocking becomes an important part of the equation here, right? Like eSIMs make it easy to switch your phone, but we're still in this kind of nebulous is my phone locked to my carrier world here in the United States.

1:00:13Again, I should point out that so much of this is going to seem like esoteric and ridiculous to people anywhere else who have long had better, more competitive mobile phone universes that don't require all of the shenanigans that we're talking about here. But here in America, it does feel like if we can get eSIMs, And we can get unlocked phones and we can get big, vast carrier choice. We are like somewhere cool and exciting. Are we on a good path to unlocked phones? I think we're on a like very slow, good path. There's some legislation. I think they were trying to tell the carriers like you cannot lock someone's phone to a network.

1:00:51Like you have to unlock it after a certain amount. It was like six months or whatever. I think it was 60 days was the thing they were going for. Okay, yeah. That's even better. whether or not like I've paid off my device to Verizon that's between me and Verizon but like they can't just be like you may only use this phone on a network that's good that's progress I think but I think there is a little bit of just a habit with especially in the U.S. of like it's time for a new phone go to Verizon or go to their website and in undoing that a little bit I don't know exactly how that starts, but like you can just go to Apple's website and you can get a device like payment plan.

1:01:36Yeah. It doesn't have to come from the wireless carrier, but somehow the good deal always seems to be tied into like, well, you know, if you connect to your Verizon account, we'll just help pay for this phone for you. All right. For now, go back to your day off. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. We are going to take a break and then we're going to come back and do a question from the hotline. Thank you, Alison. Thank you. Be right back.

1:02:02Every great company's story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rulof Boota, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 wherever you find your podcasts.

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1:03:47All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. You can hit me up directly. We're not hard to find. If you have questions, get at us. We love hearing all of your questions. Today's question is something we've talked about on the show before, but we get a lot. And so I want to just tackle it again in as aggressive and straightforward a way as we possibly can. It's about storage. Here it is. Hey, Vergecast. This is Anthony from Denver. I have a question about the best way to free up space on iPhones.

1:04:24Last week, while my mom was visiting with me, she had shared that she had just bought a new iPhone 16, but it was already kind of running out of space and was very slow. So she wanted to know what she could do to free up space on her phone and hopefully speed it up. And specifically, she wanted to know if there's anything that she could do to remove photos from her phone and back them up and store them elsewhere. Now, my wife and I were both Pixel users, so we were both kind of flabbergasted to learn that Apple doesn't have a photo backup solution. It has iCloud, which as far as we could tell is like a syncing service.

1:05:03But Apple doesn't really have any solution for both backing up photos while also removing them from the device. And so after researching for a few hours, the solution that we ended up coming to is you could use a service like Google Photos or Amazon Photos, or you could try downloading them to a computer and moving them to an external hard drive. My wife and I, we ended up deciding to solve this problem with Google Photos. And after about two hours or so of backing up most of the photos and deleting some of them, we ended up saving her about 50 gigabytes of space on her iPhone. But we're both kind of left wondering, like, how has Apple not made a well-designed like photo backup solution?

1:05:48Like, why would anyone want to use 50 gigabytes of space on their device for photos when they don't have to, when they probably don't even want those photos to be on their device at all? And is there really like is there anything else that iPhone users can do? you can see why this sent me down a rabbit hole of thinking about where all of my stuff is right and i have a few thoughts for our our friend here and for everyone who is thinking about this switch as far as i can tell is everyone i think like i'm running out of storage on my phone is as universal a problem as anybody has on technology right like it's everywhere so here's what i would say if you use an iphone this is all going to be apple specific because frankly apple does this in the worst possible way.

1:06:35And Google is at least a lot more straightforward. You just dump stuff into Google Photos and there it is. The thing that I would say is that A, even if you're on iOS, Google Photos is great and you should use it. If there's a good chance you have lots of storage over there. That's a thing I pay for separately anyway, just because I wanted the drive storage and the more Gmail. And so like there's a solid chance you're already paying for more Google storage. So use that. Use Google Photos. Turn on the auto backup. It'll send everything up there. I think Google Photos is a vastly better photo experience than anything Apple is doing.

1:07:06So that's what I tend to use anyway. I also will say, and I hate so much that I'm saying this, Apple's$2.99 a month, 200 gigabyte iCloud deal is a pretty good deal. It is absurd that you don't get that for free, that that's not the base tier, that Apple, the richest company in the world, is going to nickel and dime you$3 a month just to have like an appropriate amount of storage for your photos. But it's it's three bucks a month to largely not have to think about this most of the time. And frankly, that's worth it. A couple of other things. The first thing most people should do is go to settings on their phone and turn on the optimized storage thing in photos.

1:07:46Let me just do this right now. So I have it right. You go you go to settings. And then you tap on your name at the very top. And then you go to iCloud. And then you tap on photos. So this is telling me I have 10 ,745 photos and 687 videos, taking up 102.29 gigabytes of space. That's a lot. I suspect there are a lot of you who have much more than that. And you want to turn on the thing that says optimize iPhone storage. So basically, what that does is instead of leaving the whole kind of increasingly large file with every new rev of Apple's camera system on your device, it keeps all of it in iCloud and downloads a smaller one to your device.

1:08:26What I have found is this is just rubbish at actually working. Sometimes it loads things way too slowly. Some it seems to leave things on your device for too long. It is not actually optimizing space nearly as successfully as it ought to. Again, this is where Google Photos does it much better. It just leaves all the stuff in the cloud and then you tap it and it pulls it down when you need it like much better system. But that should at least save you a little bit of space. There is also a bunch of tools in here for just deleting things, which I think is what I would tell most people to do. So again, you go you go into settings, and you go to your face and you go to iCloud and you go to photos, and then you hit manage storage.

1:09:05And it loads this thing for you, that basically then gives you actual information about all of the stuff on your phone, right? It takes a long time in my case, because it has to look through 10 ,000 things. But it pops up a thing that says review your photos and videos. Mine is telling me I can get 50 gigabytes of space back by deleting duplicates, screenshots and videos. In my case, almost all of that is videos. And the thing I like about this is there's this one screen all the way deep down here in settings that will actually show you in order your largest videos. And I would bet, and I have confirmed this both on my phone and on some others, just as sort of basic, you know, research purposes, that almost everybody has a few like sneakily humongous videos on your device.

1:09:51You accidentally took a seven minute long video in your pocket without noticing it. You have one that's like six minutes of ProRes that is taking up half the sword on your phone. Like there's just a bunch of little things here. So nine biggest videos on my phone, I'm looking at eight gigabytes worth of space just to free up like that. So that's one thing to do. You can delete all your screenshots, you can delete all of your complicated, overly done edited photos, you can delete your duplicates, you can delete all the stuff that you don't need. And it's much easier to do here in settings than it is almost anywhere else on your phone.

1:10:27So delete the stuff, put it in iCloud. And then the thing that I would do if you like really want to invest in this is go to the iCloud photos website, which is a better way to like mass move stuff around, open it up, make the use the little slider at the top to make the photos as small as possible. Scroll all the way to the top to the very first photos you took, which overwhelmingly I suspect are ones you might want to keep, but don't need like ready access to download all those photos and put them somewhere else, like delete some of them, download some of them. It is easy and quick to do from a web browser in a way that on your phone or an iPad, or even in the photos app on a Mac is just kind of messy.

1:11:10This is like a good mass tool for just getting everything out. And what I'm trying to do in this go around is basically only keep the last couple of years of photos actually in my iCloud. Everything else goes into this like permanent storage of some kind. And so the idea is that I have a place to get those. And someday when I want to go look at them, I will know where they are. But they're not sitting in the cloud storage accessible to me all the time and taking up space because they don't need to be and I don't need them all the time. So those are all my recommendations. You probably have lots of storage space also, by the way, in places like Amazon and Microsoft and everybody, I think, has like a Dropbox account lingering that they're not using.

1:11:49There are places you can put things other than iCloud. And I would encourage you for almost everything that isn't something you think you're going to like actively need and use, put it somewhere else because Apple does not do a good job of managing your storage and desperately wants you to overpay for it. So just don't play Apple's games, delete all your biggest stuff, put it all somewhere else. And I think life will be okay. And in theory, this is a thing you should do. I don't know, once a year, that'll take you 20 minutes. It's like not a hard project, but it is a thing you shouldn't have to do.

1:12:20That is not to excuse Apple. It's annoying that this is the case. But that's what I do. So I hope any of that helps. And if you have a better tip for how to manage all of this stuff so that you don't have to go in at the last minute every once in a while and just mass delete a bunch of stuff, I would love to hear it. Tell me all of your tips. All right, that is it for the show today. Thank you to everybody who's on the show with me. And thank you as always for listening. As ever, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, storage ideas, weird things that you're as obsessive as I am about with Markdown files, get at us.

1:12:51The hotline is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We absolutely love hearing from you. This podcast is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nila and I will be back on Friday to talk potentially more about Tesla. He's going to have some FCC thoughts. We got a lot of stuff to catch up on before we all head out on parental leave. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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