The MacBook Neo's a winner

13:07David Pierce:so let's just talk about this now because i think the the main philosophical argument has been basically does the existence of the macbook neo just completely obviate the ipad um and apple would obviously tell you no but i have i have a very hard time now coming to the conclusion that if you have six hundred dollars to spend on an apple device you should buy anything other than this device like this to me makes the ipad error especially if you're thinking about it as a somewhat primary computing device, like even if it's not your only computer, it's a thing you intend to do more than just hold and watch movies on.

13:44David Pierce:If you want to like, my mom is a good example, right? Like my mom uses her iPad a lot to look at pictures, to browse the web, specifically Zillow. She does New York Times games on it every morning. And she does a lot of like email and basic little things. The Neo is a better, more usable machine for almost all of those things to me.

14:05Brendan Carr:Maybe. Maybe. I want to stay on the positive side. I often get accused of being relentlessly negative. And boy, am I ready. But I think the right combo for most people is a laptop and a phone. And this is why non-iPad tablets have all kind of just sort of, they live in that sort of fizzled out middle space where everyone knows it's the right category for a bunch of things, but it never hits the way the iPad seems to have hit in certain places. I think this is the right laptop for people whose lives are primarily on phones.

14:39David Pierce:Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it. If your phone is your main computer, this is a great secondary computer.

14:45Brendan Carr:Yeah. And I think the truth is that for most people, literally in the world, for most people, their phone is their main computer. And so then you're like, okay, what do I really need? I need a more capable web browser quite often. Yep. And then there's a subset of apps that might be fun to use. And then this thing is like, well, here's a more capable web browser and a pretty good keyboard and a good trackpad and a fine display. You know, I'm a display nerd. So 100 % of sRGB is not where I want to live. But it's like all that stuff is fine because really what you're doing is like here's a device that can do things my phone cannot do.

15:22Brendan Carr:You put it up against the iPad. And the reason I'm asking, does this make you mad about the iPad, is if they just didn't nerf the iPad's operating system, this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago. Yes, very much so. Ages ago. And this has a lower spec chip and less RAM than most iPads.

15:43David Pierce:Yeah. The equivalent iPad to this, price-wise, runs an M4. Yeah. I just reviewed it. It's also$600 and it has an M4 in it. It is vastly more powerful than this thing, and they just will not let the iPad be powerful in the way that this thing is allowed to be powerful.

16:01Brendan Carr:Here's my theory about that. I wonder about this, and I've wondered about it for ages, and various combinations of people will deny it to my face or insist that it's a conspiracy theory. But really what you want the iPad to do is just run desktop Safari. if it would just run desktop Safari, not weird iPad mobile Safari Plus, but desktop Safari. They would tell you it is desktop Safari. They are lying to you. Yes, they are. This is what I mean. Different people will jump out of the woodwork and both confirm and deny this in the same breath. They use phrases like desktop class. Yep.

16:34David Pierce:And it's like, well, what is that? Nope, I just want the one that's very obviously able to be run

16:39Brendan Carr:on an A18 chip with 8Ks of RAM.

16:41David Pierce:Sure can.

16:42Brendan Carr:If you would just do that, the iPad becomes a different computer. And that, to me, is the entire, that is the MacBook Neo, like at the end of the day, you boil it all the way down. And it is not that it can run GarageBand because an iPad can run GarageBand. It's not that it can browse Zillow because most people just browse Zillow on their phones. Like whatever it is that you're saying, it's not that it is a better DoorDash machine or like whatever apps exist on a phone. It is, oh, the browser is good and there's a keyboard and a mouse. And for everything that hits the wall on a mobile device, that's the exit ramp.

17:17Brendan Carr:Yep. And this thing just provides that exit ramp over and over again. It's very capable of doing all the other stuff. You know, how many creators have now posted the videos of them scrolling 4K timelines and all the stuff that people are worried about? Of course it's capable of doing that stuff. But I just, like, I think the reason people are excited about it is it is the perfect companion to a phone. And I don't think that that paradigm has truly existed yet.

17:40David Pierce:Yeah, that's a good theory. I think that's largely right. And it is, we've always talked about the upside of PCs, and I use PCs broadly, like Macs, Windows, whatever, as the backstop to all of that stuff that there are walls you run into on your phone and on your tablet and on other devices, some of which are artificially created by the companies that make them. Particularly in Apple's case, it just refuses to allow you to do certain things that you want to do. But in part because the UI doesn't afford it, right? There are just things you can't do on a six-inch screen as well as you would want to do it on another device.

18:17David Pierce:And so having a larger device as the backup is valuable. It just has been for a long time. And I think you're right that this becomes a cheap and pretty good version of every single one of those things, right? Like Antonio's review basically just goes over all the things it's pretty good at. And it being pretty good at everything ends up being really, really, really meaningful. Especially when you put it up against all of these other Windows laptops at the same price and even higher, which almost always come with at least one sort of screaming problem. Bad performance, bad battery life, bad keyboards, bad webcams, bad whatever else.

18:57David Pierce:Like there's almost always at least one sort of huge gotcha feature and the Neo just doesn't have any. And to be able to offer, this will do all the things you want to do pretty well for$600 is a huge deal. By the way, did you end up getting the$600 one or did you get the 512 gigs of storage and the Touch ID?

19:18Brendan Carr:I bought the Touch ID, David. I don't know why.

19:20David Pierce:I also bought the Touch ID. And the guy who sold it to me at the Apple store essentially told me I was getting the Touch ID. He was like, oh, and you want the 512 and the Touch ID, right? It was like, A, he said these things are absolutely flying out of the store, which I thought was really interesting. And B, it was literally like he assumed I was going to spend the extra$100, which I was anyway. But like, it was just, it was just not even a question in his mind.

19:46Brendan Carr:This is how Apple's pricing works.

19:47David Pierce:It's genius. Like they truly clocked me the minute I walked in and they were like, this is the actual price of the thing. Let's be honest with each other.

19:54Brendan Carr:Yeah. They made basically$99 of profit. Yeah. I mean, these are the problems for the other PC makers in the world. Yep. One, the entire Windows PC market is basically driven by subsidies. So whether that's preloaded bloatware that those companies pay to preload on the PCs, whether it's the stickers that Intel and AMD pay to put on the keyboard deck, whether it's Microsoft itself doing weird pricing schemes so that Copilot shows up in your face and starts screaming at you the second you open the computer. Like, there's just a whole bunch of compromise in the pricing that is related to other companies using the computer as advertising.

20:34Brendan Carr:just straightforwardly that subsidy drives down the price of pcs the same way that subsidy drives down the price of like smart tvs right a smart tv is basically zero dollars now and it's because it's a giant advertising terminal in your house and literally you can get a tv for zero dollars with a giant advertising terminal physically glued to the bottom of the tv like that market has reached its conclusion the pc market is on its way there so if you're gonna get a windows pc for $600, it's not the hardware compromises that will really kill you. It is the subsidy compromises that make the user experience horrible that will kill you.

21:12Brendan Carr:And Apple just doesn't do those things. Or if they do those things, they do them in a way that drives everyone crazy. And we all know what's going on, but they have like, well, we're just telling you that you can use Apple Wallet kind of like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah.

21:26David Pierce:And what's funny is that is so much less present on macOS than in most other places. Like the constant - Oh, it's all over the phone. Yeah, it constantly, your phone is telling you about Fitness Plus and about all the things you can do in Apple Music and about all the new stuff that's on Apple TV Plus. And I think in part because notifications are just so much less front and center on macOS, it just doesn't feel nearly as in your face as it does on the phone.

21:48Brendan Carr:Yeah, and to whatever extent Apple doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff, it doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff. Right. And again, this is like on the margin, And Apple does this stuff. Like, you can see it. It's present in their products. They are using their own products to advertise their own services in a way that I think is gross. And most people who experience it for what it is know that it's gross. But it's just not the same as Windows. Like, you know, they're just qualitatively different. And so, like, out of the box, you are just getting a nicer experience because it's not chunked up by advertising subsidy.

22:21Brendan Carr:And then there's just hardware scale. Apple makes a lot of A18 chips. All the money isn't in the chip. Because they've already made 20 billion of them. And so the money is in the other components and you can feel it. Yep. And I think that is just very, very difficult for other PC makers to compete with. Let alone, Apple is really good at pricing you into spending a hundred more dollars on effectively nothing. With such insane margins on their RAM already that they didn't have to do any pricing games because they can just take a little less money for RAM. they could take a little less profit for RAM.

22:58Brendan Carr:Like, what are you going to do? And I think Antonio has been talking to other PC makers and other PC makers are talking about it. And David, you've been making this point. They seem caught way off guard.

23:11David Pierce:Yeah, which is nuts, right? I mean, I think the most direct quote we've gotten so far was from ASUS, which just had an earnings call. And one of the questions they got on their earnings call was essentially, what do you make of this computer? How do you feel about the Neo? do you view this as a threat? And this is Nick Wu, the CFO, who basically said, you know, we had an inkling this was coming. There have been sort of supply chain rumors about this for months. So like we kind of saw this coming. We were surprised it was as cheap as it was, which I think is really interesting. That I think people probably expected this to be like$7.99 or$8.99, not$5.99 and$4.99 at education, which is a genuinely low price for a device like this.

23:52David Pierce:But then he says, he was talking about the processor and the eight gigs of RAM. And he said, this may limit certain applications. So I think when Apple positioned the product, it's probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet because tablets are mostly for content consumption. This just, like, this is dead wrong. Yeah. It's just dead wrong. And I think it is so reminiscent to me. I read that quote and immediately thought of Steve Ballmer in 2007 being asked about the iPhone. And we actually, we just pulled this clip because I found this on YouTube again.

24:30David Pierce:And there was the first comment on YouTube is, YouTube showed this to me again, 17 years later. So I think the algorithm seems to have spiked to this clip again. But let me just play you this response from Steve Ballmer when he's asked about the iPhone.

24:41Brendan Carr:The first iPhone, 2007. Steve Jobs goes to Macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that? $500, fully subsidized? With a plan, I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine. Now, it may sell very well or not. We have our strategy. We've got great Windows mobile devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q phone now for$99. It's a very capable machine. It'll do music. It'll do Internet. It'll do e-mail. It'll do instant messaging.

25:23So I kind of look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.

25:28David Pierce:First of all, I had a Motorola Q and it was not as good as the iPhone. But also, like, obviously the details here are different. What Apple just did is go down in price. And what Apple just did is make something available to many more people with a keyboard, ironically. but but the the response feels the same which is to look at this and say well this isn't what business users want and it's like well you have officially missed the point here uh and microsoft has been missing this particular point for a very long time the the whole windows ecosystem has been missing this point for a very long time that by some mix of i would call it tech debt and bad product management, to be kind, these companies are either unable, unwilling, or both to actually properly make great products in this price range and have been for a long time.

26:20David Pierce:Like Antonio is working on this story, which I think will probably be live by the time most people hear this. And at one point he was like, I don't blame PC manufacturers for not having a response to the Neo yet. I was like, buddy, you have this backwards. Then where is this 10 years ago? Like this, this has been, this thing has been sitting here for forever. You let Chromebooks eat it alive and then Google kind of forgot Chromebooks exist and Chromebooks stopped getting better. That thing has been languishing for forever. And this has just been open PC space for a long time. And it's sort of wild that Apple was the one that managed to fill it like this.

26:53David Pierce:A company that generally had no interest in doing this kind of computer for a really long time, just looked around and was like, oh, we, that's not hard.

27:02Brendan Carr:We've got these leftover iPhones. chips uh all right let me play devil's advocate okay uh because i agree with everything you're saying and i do think the pc makers are a little bit boxed in by just the pricing dynamics

27:13David Pierce:like they don't all make their own chips right they're also beholden to those chips like intel being bad is is part of the problem here yeah right but at every level like apple has to find the profit at the end of the process right they're like we put all the parts together and then we

27:30Brendan Carr:market up like apple's profit margin if you look at their results like is like rock solid between 30 and 40 percent like that's just that's what they do every quarter that's how much profit they make and they just back into it because they make most of the components right and so when the price of ram skyrockets they can pay more to samsung or whoever for ram and they can kind of like back it out and all the other stuff if you're a pc maker if you're an asus or a dell or whoever you don't make anything. So every part in your computer, someone else has to make the profit to make their company run, especially the chip, which is like usually the most important part of the computer.

28:08Brendan Carr:So you're just start with, okay, we got to pay a margin to Intel that Apple doesn't have to pay. You just start behind the curve, like legitimately behind the curve. And then Apple buys so many chips from TSMC that they get massive discounts on their volume. So you're just like, all of a sudden, you just start way, way behind in the race. And so I don't doubt that this is a very challenging thing to compete with, just on the fundamentals of the fact that the PC competitors can't remove the margins from all the components and then mark it up at the end to solve the problem. That's fair. Right. But I'm just playing devil's advocate.

28:50Brendan Carr:Like, I just see that problem and I'm like, whatever. The real, like, dynamic in the PC industry for more than the past 10 years now is that Apple decided it would own the high end. So if you just look at sales of laptops that cost more than$1 ,000, it is more likely than not that every one of those sales is an Apple laptop. They just went and they're like, we're just going to compete on this price and up, and we're going to win. And statistically, they've won. And Microsoft knew this. Like when Panos Panay ran Surface, he was like, this is my problem. I cannot convince this industry to spend that money in R &D to compete there.

29:28Brendan Carr:Microsoft is going to do it. And then I will develop hinges and keyboards and trackpads and we'll just give it away to the ecosystem so that their stuff is good and we can credibly compete at the high end because if we lose the high end, there's nothing left. Right. And that's what they all did for the longest time. And maybe there's like good high-end PC laptop competition now.

29:46David Pierce:they made some good progress there is there there has been good stuff over the years there's good

29:50Brendan Carr:there's interesting ideas in that space the whole bottom has languished and all of it is like do you want a 15 inch screen for 700 here's whatever garbage that we can surround that screen with right and people are like yeah that's the thing we wanted and i think apple's showing up with the 13 inch screen at that price point and like no one has an answer but like i i know why the pc market looks the way it looks, it's because Microsoft with Surface recognized that Apple was going to run away with$1 ,000 and up. And it was not economically viable for any one company to solve that problem. Microsoft had to do it for its entire ecosystem.

30:31David Pierce:Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the Surface Go over the last few days because that was Microsoft's biggest swing at this price point. And actually, I went back and read, And Dieter reviewed the Surface Go in 2018 when it came out and gave it an eight and a half. Like this is a there were things to like about it, but it was fundamentally it was a 10 inch computer. And there are a bunch of problems that come with making a 10 inch computer. And I think one of the things Apple understands and got right about this is that 13 inches is the right size for a laptop in so many ways. And especially at smaller sizes, Microsoft got really hung up on doing hybrids that just didn't quite pan out the same way.

31:13David Pierce:And I think if you just go back and redo the Surface Go process and they're like, okay, well, what if instead of trying to sort of overcorrect on the form factor here, we just make the cheapest Surface laptop we can and charge it at this price? I wonder what that computer would look like now.

31:30Brendan Carr:It would look like Microsoft declaring war on its PC partners and never doing it. This is the problem. They're always in between the big parts of the market with the Surface.

31:40David Pierce:Right. Yeah, that's very true. You made a face when I said 13 inches. What's your problem with 13 inches?

31:45Brendan Carr:Well, I didn't realize that I had recycled this, but I had a 12-inch MacBook, which was one of my very favorite computers. In fact, hilariously, he brought up Dieter. I bought it from Dieter. He really screwed you on that one. He did. in a very Minnesota way. At one point, I was like, do I remember to pay you for this? And he was like, of course you did. And I don't know if that's true or not. So maybe I paid him for it. Maybe I did. But it was like a very Minnesota, like, yeah, you're fine. Don't worry about it. I just wanted this thing out of my house. It was ages ago. And I love that computer.

32:20Brendan Carr:I think I finally recycled it. But that computer was the perfect size. And when the Neo was announced, I was really sad they hadn't gone one tick smaller. And now that I have it and we've had this conversation, I completely understand why they didn't. They made the most mainstream computer they could. And 13 inches is the most mainstream size. And that is the right answer to this question.

32:41David Pierce:Yeah, I think that's right. And I will say the what the air is 13 six, right? I don't really appreciably notice the difference between the Neo screen and the air screen at this point.

32:52Brendan Carr:Yep. 13 six.

32:53David Pierce:I do notice the size of the the thing. The Air sort of wears itself a little lighter to me than the Neo does, even though they're technically the same weight, and the Neo's actually a little smaller in some dimensions. The Neo feels chunkier as a computer to me. What have you made of it so far? You've been using it. I have two gripes I would like to talk about, but I want to know what you've thought of the Neo so far.

33:17Brendan Carr:I think the Neo's a beautiful piece of hardware, and for all the reasons I've said, I think only Apple can really produce it, and I'm really happy that they got rid of Allen Dye because macOS Tahoe is a visual abomination. Is this your first Tahoe experience? I've used it like academically. Okay. Do you know what I mean? Like at a remove? Yeah. Like I have a computer with Tahoe on it.

33:41David Pierce:You touch it through a piece of glass?

33:43Brendan Carr:Yeah. Like literally a piece of glass. Like my work computers, I just don't update them until I have to because I just can't take them down. Like this podcast machine, I don't even know what it's running. Like it just needs to work. And that's the thing it does. And then I thought liquid glass was bad, so I didn't update my main work computer over there. Again, I have another Mac that has it on there, but it was to dink around. It's what I put the updates on. This is the first time I've sat down and really used Tahoe with liquid glass. And every part of it is infuriating, and Apple should be embarrassed.

34:15Brendan Carr:And the number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is because I know that Apple has no choice but to fix liquid glass in Tahoe at WWDC. and you should wait until they rev macOS 27 and they undo this ungodly abomination of an interface. It is so bad. Liquid glass on a phone is like fine. It's not great and I don't love it, but it's fine because, you know, a phone is inherently a single tasker. What they have done to delineate windows and the menu bar and items that you've selected on macOS with liquid glass is so bad. It goes against every principle of good design. It goes against every principle of just common sense.

34:59Brendan Carr:Like, should two things that are different look different or the same, David?

35:03David Pierce:Obviously the same. What if you couldn't tell what's what at any time on your computer?

35:08Brendan Carr:What if I told interface it was just like a weird, blurry mess? There are parts of Tahoe that are legitimately slow for no reason. When you open control center from the menu bar. First of all, when you look at the menu bar in the top right, every button does something different. So, like, you click the clock and the notifications slide in from the side. You click Control Center and there's, like, a very slow fade animation. Yep. And Control Center, like, bubbles in, which is exactly what you don't want for quick controls.

35:40David Pierce:Correct.

35:40Brendan Carr:Like, it is basically like, oh, you just want to change the brightness? What if there was a Broadway show? Like, you don't want that. You just want the brightness toggle to appear. But that's different than the slide in. And you keep going down and then another one's a dropdown. And then you get all the way to like the Wi-Fi icon and it's a standard dropdown. And you keep going and you get to the regular menus. And when you click on those menus, they don't shade in dark enough for you to tell that you've selected a menu. I'm so glad you're finally doing this. This makes me so happy. I'm not even in the weeds of this interface.

36:09Brendan Carr:I'm like, I'm going to raise the brightness and pick save from the file icon. And all of this is stupid. Yeah. It is. I told you, I didn't want to go negative, but I'm telling you that Neo was like, at first it made me really happy and then it made me incredibly sad that this thing is, it's like a visual disaster. It got to the point where I did the only thing I can do when I'm so mad at an Apple interface. I just started texting John Gruber. Who hates it as much as anybody. I was like, I see what you're saying. And he was like, yeah, dude, it's bad. He's like, if anything, I'm not going hard enough.

36:45David Pierce:The menu bar is actually such a perfect example because it's also like it's it's translucent now but it is still a hard border so and those two things don't make any sense so it's like it looks like it should be interactive with everything but it's not it's still a hard line but just look at the menu bar now like i'm just i'm gonna do this while i'm sitting here okay so you click on the clock and it slides in from the right you click on the control center and it bubbles it really is slow i hadn't really even noticed it it's so slow

37:10Brendan Carr:i mean it is like a song and dance routine to be like i want to turn the volume up and of all

37:14David Pierce:things that should just appear that's it then you do search and it opens up spotlight in the center of the screen in a modal yeah then you click on battery and it opens up a menu to the left you click on wi-fi and it opens up a menu to the right it's like it's it's literally like every single one of these was designed by a different person and none of them ever spoke

37:34Brendan Carr:to each other it's insanity apple is so good at this like historically the thing that they're good at is looking at this and being like, make this make sense. And they've just lost the plot here.

37:46David Pierce:My favorite Tahoe thing forever, though, is just if you want to understand the problem with Tahoe, take all of your apps and drag them to the same corner and then see if the top left corners line up. Spoiler alert, they don't. Apps are just there's no there's literally no rules anymore for what's going on with Tahoe. Tahoe is very bad. Liquid Glass is very bad. But the Neo is still awesome. And I really like, we came out of last week being like, this thing is going to sell huge. And I think it's actually going to be bigger than I thought. I think this will replace the MacBook Air as the sort of default, I don't have any follow-up questions.

38:25David Pierce:What computer should you buy? Computer for people.

38:28Brendan Carr:Maybe. Maybe. I think we have yet to see. I think it's hard to know at the very beginning. I think all the benchmarks suggest that that is true. All the sort of early reviews, our reviews suggest that's true. I think once people start using them at scale, we're going to find out.

38:44David Pierce:It's possible.

38:45Brendan Carr:But the A18 Pro is so tested.

38:47David Pierce:Like that chip is mature and good and made it monstrous scale that I don't worry about like battery life problems we don't know about. I don't know. I just I have a hard time imagining what it would be that would be the glaring problem. Of course you have a hard time imagining what it would be.

39:02Brendan Carr:It's so obvious what it would be. And you can't, it's like blocked out in your brain like Westworld. They're like, it doesn't look, it's eight gigs of RAM.

39:08David Pierce:Oh God.

39:09Brendan Carr:That's what it would be. It would be. Can I tell you how unbelievably vindicated I am?

39:14David Pierce:We're going to run a 12 minute super cut of everybody yelling at me for saying eight gigs of RAM is fine. And then all those same people saying, oh, it only has eight gigs of RAM. That's not a problem for normal everyday computer users. Yeah. Fuckos. I was right the whole time.

39:28Brendan Carr:That's it. I'd say only question mark I have is once you, once millions of people buy this thing and they start using it for all kinds of stuff that nobody could possibly foresee, will eight gigs of RAM swapping to this storage, will it be not a problem, which everyone assumes or will some weird stuff bubble up? And then I would just point out once again, Alan Dye's last vindictive act was to force this interface on millions of unsuspecting consumers who just want to spend$700 on a nice computer with touch ID. they're just out here doing their best and i'm telling you right now mark zuckerberg you got rolled because you have no taste if you saw this work and you're like that guy i know everything

40:08David Pierce:i need to know about you man so fundamentally the macbook neo is a referendum on mark zuckerberg's

40:13Brendan Carr:taste this works for me that's all i'm saying the one other thing i should say before when we should

40:19David Pierce:move on from the neo here is it is a bummer the thing doesn't have a backlight on the keyboard um particularly because they color match the keyboards so on the the indigo one here it's actually it's a pretty dark keyboard which like aesthetically looks really nice but even sitting here in in decent light it is hard to see it's dark text on a dark key um and i i think antonio had one of the lighter colors and said it was a little easier to see on the light keys what you're typing in the dark but on this like they're dark keys and the backlight would have been really nice

40:49Brendan Carr:and here's what i'm hoping for if you're not a car nerd but i'm a huge car nerd if you go into any car forums. All car forums are sort of dominated by people going on Timu and Alibaba and putting in RGB ambient lights all over their cars. There's just a huge market for that for every car. This thing is so modular and so repairable. I'm just waiting for the weird Alibaba market of backlit keyboards for the Neo to show up. It's got to come. That's what we want. We want weird gamer keyboards for the MacBook Neo. If you're making one now, send it to us. We will prominently feature it here on the front desk.

41:22David Pierce:That's real. We do want that. that's absolutely correct um before we get off of apple stuff um we we reviewed the the iphone 17e this week uh allison did that i reviewed the new ipad air um i don't think we need to talk about either one of them because they are precisely exactly what you think um the 17e is sort of fascinating because allison i think made the correct point which is that it's a very good phone i think as apple approaches its budget devices that is the right way to do it they put magsafe back again it's like it this is a much cleaner correct set of trade-offs to get to a lower price but the base iphone 17 is the best the base iphone has been in a long time and the leap is 200 and i think like it for if your budget allows only the 17e awesome you'll be very happy but i think the the case for moving up 200 especially given the economics of how people buy phones and the way that people use their phones and like the primacy of phones in modern life, you should spend the$200 and get the better phone if you can.

42:24Brendan Carr:It's 100 % the flip of what we're saying with the Neo. I think if you perceive the Neo as like, this is a great companion laptop for people whose primary computer is a phone. You should absolutely spend less money on the laptop and more money on the phone.

42:35David Pierce:Oh man. Okay. 17E and MacBook Air or 17 and MacBook Neo?

42:41Brendan Carr:17 and Neo. That's what, like 100 % because you want the real camera. Yeah.

42:44David Pierce:I think that's right.

42:46Brendan Carr:I mean, unless there's some specific thing that you need that M5 chip for, which, you know, if you know what it is, you know what it is. Go get it. But I think for most people, having a slightly more capable phone is a much better trade-off. Yeah, I think you're right.

43:02David Pierce:But the other one we need to talk about here is the Studio Display XDR, which you have not bought, but I am confident by the time we do this podcast next week, will be in your house.

43:10Brendan Carr:The second it goes on non-corrupt sale for even$1, I'm buying this display.

43:15David Pierce:What if I give them the dollar so that they can give you a dollar off?

43:19Brendan Carr:What if you buy me a computer? I will accept you buying me this computer. That's fine.

43:25David Pierce:All right, deal. John Higgins reviewed it for us. It seems to be the thing we hoped it was. Are you as enthusiastic about this now? We've tested it. We've seen it come out. Is it what you wanted?

43:39Brendan Carr:Yeah, it's absolutely what I mean. It's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. That's out of the MacBooks, right? But it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. I, you know, it is very expensive. Yeah. But what you're buying for that is basically a bunch of calibration settings. And so I think I'm curious to see if other display makers use similar panels or similar technologies without all of the added cost of doing all the calibrations and bring some of the core technology at a lower price, which is 100 % true of the 5K panel that Apple's using in the regular stereo display, which you can now buy on Amazon in a totally no-name Chinese case for$500.

44:18Brendan Carr:Yeah. Right, and it's just not, and we're going to review that too because I think it's really interesting to see. It's literally the same panel from 2012. That's wild. It's just been around and now you can buy it in a bunch of different configurations. The XDR is a step forward. And so I'm, like I said, I'm going to, I just, again, I saw it at the event and I literally just looked at it in the store and I came this close to buying it because it looks great. Like, spectacularly great. And it is a step forward. I barely even need this thing because I do almost all my photo editing on my MacBook Pro, which has a mini-hailing Mac.

44:53Brendan Carr:Like, it has the same kind of core technology in it. But you know what I keep saying. You stare at screens all day. You should spend the money on the best one you can because they last forever. And, you know, if I can convince myself that I'll have this display for 10 years, it's only three you know 320 a year think of the savings i mean i will say there are there are very

45:16David Pierce:few technology devices i would say it's even plausible to say i'm gonna buy this and keep this for a decade i think the studio display xdr has a strong shot to last a decade on your actual

45:26Brendan Carr:desk monitors screens just last forever tvs and monitors just they last forever it is so hard to convince yourself to upgrade um so like i said the second it goes on sale for even a dollar i'm gonna buy this thing and not like a corrupt sale not like it also apparently has a better webcam which is very exciting i i put tape over those webcams no thank you my webcam all my webcams in in the house are the real cameras with power buttons for for privacy reasons or for camera quality reasons both yeah you get you get one with the other and the idea that there's like a software-defined webcam in my computer that someone could come get yeah i'm this is where i am with zuckerberg zuckerberg has tape on his laptop you ever look at a picture of his laptop there's tape on that webcam and it's like oh buddy you you're the guy who wants to put glasses in

46:16David Pierce:everybody's face has tape on his webcam i know yeah um i will say by the way we keep getting emails from people volunteering to come to your house and take apart your iMac to turn it into a display for you um i don't i don't know what your precious ethics will allow on that front but we have a series of volunteers who are willing to come do this for you at any point.

46:35Brendan Carr:I think that's allowed. I think that's not, I mean, that's just like, that's just somebody doing their hobby. You know, like that's a good time.

46:42David Pierce:Yeah, I got a big, I owe a big part of my journalism career to fixing David Pogue's Xbox when he was the tech columnist at the New York Times. There you go. This is how it starts, people. Go to Eli's house and fix his iMac.

46:53Brendan Carr:Well, dude, my little village here in Westchester County does repair cafes. Maybe I'll just, I'll just like hijack the repair cafes. like everyone bring their 5k iMacs we're making monitors just a parade of 5k iMacs down the street yes and then the senior citizens who are all there to get their ancient vacuum cleaners repaired will

47:11David Pierce:be very confused it's pretty good it's pretty good um all right two more apple rumors and then we're gonna be we're gonna stop with apple for a while um the first uh for mark german at bloomberg is that the next set of apple releases is going to be high-end stuff having now done some of the low-end stuff, it's going to extend up even higher, potentially called Ultra, but not necessarily called Ultra. It sounds like the foldable iPhone fits into that, about which we also have some rumors. But there's just a real movement up in the market here for Apple. And I think this is really interesting. There was also this news this week about Uber Elite, which is like newer cars, fancier rides, just catering to expensive people.

47:54David Pierce:And I think that's a trend that is coming in in a really real way. Like we've talked about this before, that one of the great, cool, exciting things about technology is we all have the same iPhone, right? Like there is just the iPhone, no matter who you are, within very small stratifications, the same technology is available to everybody. We may be headed for a period of that not being the case in a really mainstream way.

48:17Brendan Carr:I would pay a thousand extra dollars for MacBook Neo that didn't have liquid glass on it. I was putting that out in the universe right now.

48:23David Pierce:That may become available to you, but I think the like, Until now, it's been, you know, new technology that hasn't quite come down and like foldable phones are still really expensive. Right. But that's not nobody would call that sort of a mainstream thing yet. And when they become mainstream, everybody sort of assumed the price will come back down. Maybe we're just headed to a point where there is going to be a true luxury class of mainstream technology for a while, which I think is really interesting. And I don't know quite how to feel about it.

48:52Brendan Carr:I mean, pricing products is kind of like an art and a science. And I think what you're seeing is there are some people, I mean, you're just seeing income inequality. That's what you're describing. Yeah, essentially. And so some people just don't care about$1 ,000 of price difference and they'll just spend it. And some people really care about$100 of price difference. And you can hear these companies are just headed, their products are headed in two different directions. Yeah. And I, you know, I think the Fold, the iPhone Fold, being the Ultra product, it's hyper expensive, sort of makes sense.

49:26Brendan Carr:Like, you want to price your way into early adopters. You want to price your way into someone who, if they feel like the product is bad and they got cheated, isn't so mad. Right. They're just going to buy another phone and move on with their lives. I think the rest of the Ultra products, you got to make a case for something beyond it's the fastest chip. Sure. and I think once you get away from like pro is the designation, which means nothing in Apple world anymore, and you go to ultra, like you have to make some case for it. It can't just be like, it's wrapped in the finest of leathers. Like something else has to happen there.

50:00David Pierce:Right, I was going to say, you get like the Hermes version is what Apple has traditionally done. Yeah, so we'll see. And it's going to need a new move.

50:05Brendan Carr:But I can see why you would introduce ultra with the fold to say this is the best possible thing or the most expensive possible thing. And you're not just getting okay it's so expensive most people can't afford it you're getting also we don't really know how it's going to work and i think the rumors around the fold are like uh we don't really know how it's

50:24David Pierce:going to work yeah so the the rumor right now the rumor that came out this week is uh the outer display of the iphone fold will be about the size of a small iphone which seems like a victory um and then it'll open up the the wide aspect ratio will have side-by-side apps this appears to be like a exciting new thing that apple will tell you it has invented but it's not going to have the full sort of suite of iPad multitasking stuff. It won't run iPad apps, but it will let you do more stuff. I have a lot of questions. But the biggest thing that is here that I think really sucks is that apparently Apple is going to ditch Face ID for Touch ID in order to accommodate the thinner display so that it can have them fold.

51:07David Pierce:I think this is a bad idea and Apple should stop it. face id is so much better than touch id that going back this happens to me all the time i used i use face id uh on an ipad pro just like in my day-to-day life and then i get the new ipad air every year to review it and it has touch id and the amount of time you spend on a device that sort of moves in aspect ratio like that figuring out where to put your finger and how to it's awful and and getting going back to that after having your face just sort of make your phone feel like gets unlocked sucks. And it will make this supposedly very premium thing feel annoying to a lot of users.

51:48Brendan Carr:I'm curious if that rumor is real. I mean, that's the rumor. But if they do it, they're going to do it the same way as the iPad, right? They'll put it in the power button or the sleep-wake button on the side. Yep. Which is maybe not the worst thing on a phone because you've got to hold the phone.

52:02David Pierce:Yeah, but you're holding what amounts to a double-sided phone and trying to reach that bad No, I don't want that. And what if the power button moves depending on how you open it? Where is it going to be on that? There's just a lot of questions. And I think not knowing where to tap the thing to unlock my phone is bad. I will say I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro and having both is awesome. It has both the underscreen thumbprint reader and Face ID or whatever, Face Unlock, whatever they call it. That combination is awesome because - Oh, what if they go with an under screen one? That would be fine.

52:42David Pierce:That would be fine. I could live with that. But it like the fail gracefully from Face ID when it works to Touch ID when you're wearing sunglasses to passcode if we can't figure out how to do it otherwise is exactly the correct, like graceful scale down. And just starting with Touch ID, every time I get on an iPad, it annoys me all over again. I mean, we'll see.

53:04Brendan Carr:I have many more questions about this than Face ID. i mean if the grand failure of the ipad is that you won't just let it run mac apps the grand failure of the fold is you won't just let it run ipad apps yeah there's a line in emma's story that

53:18David Pierce:she wrote about it emma roth on our team wrote about this uh this is again from mark german and emma writes still apple is reportedly trying to take advantage of the phone's larger screen real estate by updating its core apps with a sidebar on the left side of the screen like oh A sidebar. Look at us. That's what my thousand dollars is for.

53:37Brendan Carr:You know, the problem is all these projects started, you know, 500 years ago.

53:41David Pierce:I know.

53:41Brendan Carr:Again, you know, under one Allen Dye.

53:47Brendan Carr:I don't know what to say, guys. Yeah. Like, again, I think liquid glass on a phone is like, it's fine. Because there's just not a lot of ways to get tripped up when you're just looking at one app at a time. the second you have two at a time, the second in multiple windows and menus, which is what you're going to buy with an iPhone Fold. It is nice knowing that whatever augmented reality device meta comes out with will be a disaster.

54:13David Pierce:Do you remember there was that period about four or five years after Steve Jobs died where there was a lot of coverage around, like, you know, this was the first one that Steve Jobs was not personally... I wonder if we're going to get the reverse with Alan Dye, where it's like, thank God, this is... We are absolutely going to get the reverse. This is finally the last one Alan Dye touched before he left Apple.

54:29Brendan Carr:Apple doesn't leak as a company, and I guarantee you the people at Apple are going to leak. Like, the stain is gone.

54:37David Pierce:Yeah, we finally took all the code out of this one. Yeah, agreed. All right, we need to take a break. We have a bunch more gadgets to talk about, including some Xbox. Somewhere between hints and news, but lots to talk about. We'll be right back.

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56:59David Pierce:All right, we're back. So it's GDC this week, Game Developers Conference. Jay, Peters, and Sean Hollister are there on our team covering a bunch of stuff. And I would say, did you guys talk about Project Helix on the show last week while I was out?

57:13Brendan Carr:Not really.

57:14David Pierce:Okay, so Project Helix is this thing we've heard inklings about. Obviously, there's been this huge shakeup inside of the Xbox team. Asha Sharma is now running all things Xbox inside of Microsoft. And Hinted is maybe not strong enough, just sort of said out loud that the next Xbox is Project Helix and that it's going to play PC games. And this is a thing we've been hearing about forever. This is kind of the obvious convergence coming between the Xbox and Windows and kind of all of the things Microsoft is trying to do into a platform strategy that makes a lot more sense. Um, we got a few more details on it this week and I would say more evidence that is tangential to the existence of Helix, but suggests that it is going to be the exact thing that we thought.

57:58David Pierce:Uh, Microsoft is telling developers that if you want to build next gen Xbox games, that you should build PC games, which is sort of fascinating. Yeah. Uh, this just, this, this shift feels like it's happening, right? Like there is whatever Xbox is going to be. It really looks an awful lot like a Windows computer.

58:15Brendan Carr:Yeah. I mean, they've announced Xbox mode is coming to Windows 11 PCs.

58:19David Pierce:And they're finally calling it Xbox mode, which, thank God, instead of Xbox full screen experience.

58:25Brendan Carr:Here's some questions I have about all this. One, you know, the rumors were that Phil Spencer had always been going to retire. And this was part of the plan. And he was stepping down. And that, you know, Sarah Bond, who was the president of Xbox, was really running Xbox while Phil dealt with integrating Activision or whatever. or whatever big set of dumb issues that he bought when he bought Active A Friend. Who knows? And then, you know, Tom reported this out that Phil and Sarah had really alienated a lot of people with the This Is An Xbox campaign and, like, trying to make Xbox everything but the console and that Asha Sharma would come in and she's like, I don't know anything about Xbox.

59:03Brendan Carr:I'm just going to listen to everyone. Right. Which is what, you know, this is what you do as a new executive. Yeah. And then it's like, this is the exact same plan, you guys. This is the same plan. Like maybe the advertising campaign has gone away, but the idea that we're going to put all the focus on the console, you're just announcing that you're going to build appliance like Windows gaming PCs. And that's the future of your console, which was the plan. It was just 100 % the plan. Like what about the plan was so bad that Phil Spencer's long-awaited retirement just happened suddenly in a rush and his handpicked number two was supposed to take over, didn't get the job.

59:42And a lot of people, a lot of theories about like, you know, who's who's taking shots at Sarah.

59:47Brendan Carr:But like the truth is she didn't get the job. Yeah, that's just a thing that happened. She didn't get the job. So like what about this plan is different than the plan that got one person sort of shoved aside and another person out the door entirely to get the job? Like, I I can't tell you the answer to that question right now based on what we know.

1:00:04David Pierce:It's a good question. And I think none of this is to say, by the way, that this is not necessarily the right plan. I think there is still a strong argument to be made that betting on PC games is a smart move for Microsoft in a variety of ways. We just talked about all the reasons that Apple is kind of eating the PC market from all directions. One thing Apple doesn't sell is gaming PCs. Apple would love you to buy a MacBook Pro and play games on it. Apple wants nothing more than for you to play games on your MacBook Pro.

1:00:37Brendan Carr:No, they don't want that. That's all they do. They want to demo one five-year-old Assassin's Creed game twice a year and be like, we're good at video games. And that's the end of that.

1:00:44David Pierce:No, all they want to do is be like metal. And developers are like, I don't care about this at all. Please leave me alone.

1:00:50Brendan Carr:Well, they care about it when they're doing weird free-to-play loot boxes on the iPhone.

1:00:53David Pierce:Yeah, agreed. But gaming is a huge business. Gaming PCs are a huge business. This is a thing Windows does really well. There's an Azure Play here. There's an Xbox Play here. It is actually a really interesting bit of sort of perfect corporate synergy to just care a lot about PC games. If you're Microsoft. But you're right that that has been the case for a very long time. And it is not super clear what has changed.

1:01:18Brendan Carr:Right. Something happened where Phil Spencer, who architected this plan, got pushed out the door in a rush. And that's a retirement that was, quote, long plan. But like it wasn't like some big celebration of Phil Spencer. It was like, see, Phil and his handpicked successor did not get the job. And there is just a lot of reporting about all the problems there. people have a lot of feelings about but she didn't get the job and then there's a new person who's like we're gonna come we're gonna make the xbox great again right like and then there's this and i i just can't tell you what's different i i'm trying i like i'm looking at this and being like okay like is it just that this train was on the tracks and helix won't even be a thing until

1:02:01David Pierce:next year right they've said it won't even be out in alpha until next year so there's a lot of times

1:02:06Brendan Carr:There's a lot of time for a lot of things to change. But the idea that the Xbox is just an extension of Windows, that's been the plan. There's not another plan.

1:02:20David Pierce:I do wonder if the this is an Xbox debacle is a piece of all of this. Because there's so much done inside of the Xbox team that has just muddied that thing that you just explained. right where like there's xbox play anywhere and there's xbox cloud gaming and there's the this is an xbox me and i think it has looked a lot like microsoft has lost the plot even if it hasn't lost the plot do you know what i mean that there's a real focus function here that is just saying what if what if this is what they're trying to do if the xbox's job is to be the the like class leading way to play PC games. And then you can also buy a gaming PC.

1:03:07David Pierce:You can also buy a handheld that's going to run Windows. All the software is the same. You can build one game that'll work all across these things. And Microsoft can say, oh, you want a thing that is just Xbox mode all the time to put in your living room? Buy this. Do you want a gaming PC? Buy this. Do you want a handheld? Buy this. All your games will work everywhere. That's not that different if you squint from what they've been trying to do all along, except that the way that they've put it together and the way that they've packaged it and the way that they've marketed it and talk about it has been insane.

1:03:39David Pierce:And so it's just like, what if you took this plan and took out all the parts that seemed like nonsense, but kind of kept the plan the same? Maybe that's what Helix is. And it was Jason Ronald, who is the VP of Next Generation at Microsoft, who's an unbelievable job title, was talking about Project Helix and he said it's going to have a custom AMD chip and he said it's going to have an order of magnitude increase in ray tracing performance up to and including path tracing. Terrific. What if this thing is just a super optimized, super simple Xbox mode only kick-ass gaming PC? Do you know how much easier that is to explain than what the hell has the Xbox been for the last 10 years?

1:04:20Brendan Carr:I have two thoughts about this. One, I'm convinced Microsoft's inability to convince Apple to let them do game streaming is what just like pulled this whole thing apart. That's possible.

1:04:34David Pierce:This is the rug pull. This is what you retrenched to when you couldn't make game streaming work.

1:04:38Brendan Carr:Right. If they had been able to do game streaming and leverage Azure and just be like, your phone is an Xbox now, maybe all of this is very different. And there are lots of arguments about this. Maybe it was never going to work, but they were never able to just ship an Xbox game streaming app on iOS and be like, here's Xbox. It's happening. With the power of Azure, your phone is not Xbox. There are a bunch of people

1:05:00David Pierce:listening to and watching this who are yelling about latency and controller lag and all this stuff. And all of that is true, but the other truth is that Microsoft never really got to try.

1:05:08Brendan Carr:No, yeah, they never got to try. We just kind of don't know. There's a lot of weird ways they tried. They tried it in the browser, all this stuff. But like, I think that was their plan. And they just couldn't do it. So then they ended up back at, well it's windows or whatever nonsense and then their other problem this is my other big thought is their problem is windows fundamentally their problem is windows this thing that they're junking up with bad ai ideas at every turn that fundamentally and this is like i'll connect it to the neo the great power of the neo is like even if you think the chip is underpowered almost all the apps you want to run are web apps in a browser yep so you're fine yeah anecdotally i've heard

1:05:52David Pierce:from a bunch of people over the last week who were very excited to buy a Neo explicitly because it doesn't have any co-pilot nonsense all over it. This is your problem. These are your choices right now.

1:06:02Brendan Carr:And like you're just like stuck here. By the way, we are going to cover Linux on the desktop here at the Virgin 2026. Hell yeah. This is the year of Linux on the desktop. We're just going to manifest

1:06:11David Pierce:this as the year of Linux on the desktop.

1:06:12Brendan Carr:And one of the reasons I'm saying that is, you know, our own reporters, Sean and Tom and everyone else keep saying it is better to play Windows games on Linux right now. this is a huge problem. Yep. This is just a problem across the board. So like maybe this is the plan and it's all going to work and you're going to make an ultra optimized windows PC that runs Xbox mode all the time. But it feels like what you're going to do then is get, you're going to strip out all of windows. So then you're just, you're kind of just making a console again. And maybe the goal is the games can play anywhere. You can download the games on Xbox mode on your gaming PC, but those people are still going to be like, I'm running this dumb co-pilot Windows and I hate it.

1:06:54David Pierce:Well, yeah, I mean, that's why I think Xbox mode ends up being really interesting and really important here because if you can make a thing that is sort of Windows at the bottom and Xbox on top, you might have something that can solve a bunch of problems all at once, right? You don't have to re-architect everything across platforms. You can build games that run everywhere, but you can have something that either when you want it to or all the time doesn't look anything like Windows. and doesn't look anything like Windows is such a feature of so many of these devices. Like Sean keeps reviewing these handhelds and every time you press two buttons, you end up in a Windows setting menu and it's awful.

1:07:32David Pierce:And so like there's just, if they can actually fix the layer on top with Xbox, but still have it be Windows underneath, that could work. That is just nothing about the history of either the full screen experience, which has been out for a minute, or Microsoft as a company suggests that that's the case. But I think Xbox mode in theory, I think at least helps solve some of that problem, which is why I'm very curious to see how it pans out over the next little while.

1:07:59Brendan Carr:Yeah, this whole situation is just, if you know what's different, you tell us. But it does seem like something was going awry and some plan was deemed not good enough, which led to massive executive turnover at Xbox and a new CEO of Xbox whose first public comments were, we're going to bring Xbox back to what makes Xbox great, and I'm just going to do a bunch of listening because I don't know anything about video games. And then here's the same plan. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's no shot Helix didn't exist before. Tom has been reporting on Helix for months. Yeah, exactly. So why announce the next step of the plan that you thought was bad if you thought the plan was bad?

1:08:44Brendan Carr:I just don't know the answer.

1:08:44David Pierce:Do you think the plan is good? I mean, just the very basic idea of merging PC games and Xbox games into one, effectively one thing to develop for developers and one thing to buy for gamers and treating the Xbox as some spinoff of a gaming PC rather than like a whole different gaming system. Do you think that's a good idea or a bad idea?

1:09:12Brendan Carr:I think Microsoft should sell Xbox and they should give up on being a consumer company they're not good at it I think the only reason they still have Xbox is because it is the one thing Microsoft does that truly resonates with people under the age of 500

1:09:25David Pierce:it's the one thing that every Microsoft employee's kids think is cool well they have Minecraft accounts or something

1:09:32Brendan Carr:but that's all part of Xbox gaming or Microsoft gaming they should just let that thing go I mean they can't now

1:09:38David Pierce:they're in it way too deep now

1:09:40Brendan Carr:Yeah, the biggest acquisition in their history. Yeah. I don't know. There's just a bunch of mistakes that they made. I think they did all that stuff because they understood that mobile was important and the next generation of gamers would come up on phones and they needed to be in that business. And I'm telling you, someone will write it. Hopefully it's us. The moment that Apple did not let them do game streaming, everything went off the rails. and I just feel like you should acknowledge that and maybe it's time to like Microsoft in its heart wants to be an enterprise company. That's the thing that they are.

1:10:17Brendan Carr:That's the thing Nadella has made them. He's done an incredible job turning that company around and if you recall the first thing he did was he got rid of Nokia and said we're done with this.

1:10:25David Pierce:Yeah. Nokia was a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. Like a lot, a lot, a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard.

1:10:31Brendan Carr:That's true. I just, I don't the idea that you can evaluate this is like, is this the right strategy for Microsoft? It's like, dude, it's been a decade. They've been chasing this dragon for a decade. They have. Maybe just let the games company be a games company and live its own life without either having to be like, this is the thing that will make Windows PCs cool, or this is the thing that will spike Azure usage. You know what the thing that spikes Azure usage is, right? It's every single day, open AI to something stupid.

1:10:58David Pierce:Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, you do wonder, The two things that are really interesting sort of historical sliding doors moments here are that moment years ago when everybody looked at Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and said, OK, this kind of live service game is actually the future of everything. And we can build tons of them and maybe there will be lots of them. And do you know the ones that keep winning? It's Fortnite, it's Roblox and it's Minecraft. And so many dollars and so many jobs have been lost trying to unseat those three things that I think there was just a sense of this is going to be a big, huge, giant teaming industry.

1:11:35David Pierce:And it's still just pretty much the three damn games.

1:11:38Brendan Carr:Basically, everyone got drunk on COVID. Like, I don't know how to explain this. Everyone was at home and spent all their money on their laptop. And every single tech company was like, oh, we're all brains and bats now. We're going to do brains and bat stuff.

1:11:50David Pierce:No one's ever going outside again.

1:11:52Brendan Carr:No one's ever going outside again. and we just need to find a way to collect the money that people that are waving at their laptop every day because that's where all the money is and that's where all the time is. And that's how you got cryptocurrency. Yeah. Straightforwardly. Like, what if we gamble with fake computer money? Like, great. That's where you got prediction markets in a big way. It's where you got huge overhiring and tech companies, which we're now undoing by calling them AI layoffs. Like, down the line, and you get all the way to live service games. Like, Fortnite is a metaverse. That's where you got the metaverse.

1:12:21Brendan Carr:like Mark Zuckerberg being literally like, I will put your brain in a vat. I will ship a vat to your house tomorrow. You just got so upside down because everyone was at home and then people left their house. And live service games have the same network effect problems as any new social network. Right. Like, do you remember Peach? I do remember Peach. Did I use Peach? No one else does. Yeah. Or L or whatever else. Yo. Like, they're all the same. It's like, here I am. No one else is here. I'm out. All my friends are still on Fortnite. Yep.

1:12:52David Pierce:Well, that, yeah, so that's the one piece. And then the other piece is the AI thing, right? Where it's, I think, right as this sense of, okay, gaming is this gigantic industry, it's where people spend a ton of money, how can we tap into that and change it? was like, do you remember when all those conversations were happening where everybody's like, oh, we pay all this attention to Hollywood, but gaming is this many multiples bigger as an industry, and it's where young people are going, and gaming is the future of everything. Right as all of these companies were like, oh, we should invest deeply into this, like smash cut to AI just takes over the industry.

1:13:24David Pierce:And I think it's just an interesting, if that, I think, probably wrong idea about gaming being the future of everything had gotten another couple of years of runway before AI had come in and just completely taken over the conversation. Who knows how many more bad investments Microsoft would have talked itself into.

1:13:40Brendan Carr:Who knows how much more NFT conversation we would have had to have. Actually, do you know my favorite, like the world got drunk on COVID confusion? This is my plug for version history. It was Clubhouse, right? The chat app where VCs would be like, what if I said racist stuff in an ephemeral talk space? We ran those stories. That's your next episode of version history.

1:14:02David Pierce:Yeah. coming out coming out this sunday uh it was me and ashley carmen from bloomberg and casey newton from platformer both of whom worked at the verge both worked at the verge both covered clubhouse uh we had we had ourselves a time talking about clubhouse but yeah it is all of that stuff is is wrapped up together there was this sense at one time that the way everybody was going to do everything was going to be different and was going to look like video games and that was not correct and so you can see how microsoft looks at video games at one point and is like this is actually more adjacent to what we're good at than we realized.

1:14:36David Pierce:And I think that was not correct.

1:14:38Brendan Carr:Look, I recognize we started by talking about GDC and Project Helix and whether or not Windows is a good platform for playing video games on. I'm just ending this segment by saying you can evaluate a lot of ideas the tech industry has right now by asking yourself, does this only work if we're all brains in vats? And the answer is often yes. Like the answer is this would go a lot better if you were a brain in a vat and all you could do was use the interfaces provided to you by a handful of giant tech companies. They'd be psyched. And whatever Alan Dye is cooking up at Meta.

1:15:11David Pierce:All right. That's enough of that. What game are you playing right now? Are you still mad? It's Madden all day. It's just Madden all day.

1:15:19Brendan Carr:Now the season's over, you don't have to take the injuries from the auto updates on the rosters. Packers are sick if no one's hurt.

1:15:27David Pierce:I'm killing it. Love it. I'm thrilled for you. This is great. All right, we should take one more break, and then we're going to go back. We've got some lightning round stuff to do. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast.

1:16:01Terms and conditions apply. In a classroom of sodas, most stay quiet. Then there's Mr. Pibb. Sweet cherry, bold outbursts, the kind of flavor that gets attention. Bold kick of cherry.

1:16:16Brendan Carr:And you're Mr. Pibb. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19 ,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs. So you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

1:16:47David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause for flavor. Neil, are we doing this? Oh, we're doing it. Okay. It is time, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I missed it last week. I missed it terribly. I'm so thrilled to be back. I wore my Brendan Carr is a Dummy t-shirt out in the world, kind of by accident, without realizing I had it on. Several questions. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:17:17Brendan Carr:Good Lord, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Wow. Wow. He thinks that people still watch TV. Oh, that's good. He's a dummy.

1:17:34David Pierce:A little like David Bowie-ish?

1:17:35Brendan Carr:Yeah, it's got some real 2000s indie vibes. Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's got some real, like, I would say, like, there's like a little spoon vibe in there.

1:17:48David Pierce:Yeah.

1:17:48Brendan Carr:Yeah, and a little postal service.

1:17:51David Pierce:Yes. not quite enough reverb for the postal service, but we're headed in that direction. Not enough Jenny Lewis.

1:17:57Brendan Carr:Can you get Jenny Lewis to just actually come and be my girlfriend?

1:18:00David Pierce:Is that a choice? Jenny, if you're listening, and I know that you are, if you can go to Neal's house and fix his iMac,

1:18:07Brendan Carr:everything, Neal will retire from journalism. This is where I, somehow in the segment where I just rail against an unelected, power-hungry bureaucrat, I admit to the VergeCast audience that I've had a crush on Jenny Lewis since I was like a teenager.

1:18:20David Pierce:we all knew let's be honest with each other that was a good one last week last week we didn't run

1:18:25Brendan Carr:one because we were getting too much a-ass slop that was handmade and i appreciate it our listener

1:18:28David Pierce:who sent this in goes by the northeast valley and i hope that's i hope that's your artist name because that's very cool thank you for sending that in that is very good all right what do we

1:18:36Brendan Carr:have niline uh i've got two also david you live in dc where wearing a brendan cars dummy t-shirt

1:18:41David Pierce:out in the world might provoke some real reactions yeah did you get any real reactions i got a couple of Who is Brendan Carr, which feels like a pretty good, it made me think of the like who's that clown is the sickest burn because it implies not just that you're a clown but you're not even one of the better known clowns. Made me think of that. I enjoyed that very much. And then I got one person who saw the back which says America's favorite podcast and then a podcast who was like, oh, do you have a podcast? And I just sort of ran away.

1:19:11Brendan Carr:Tina Nguyen who's our DC reporter was at an event and And, you know, it's like supposed to be a very polite room full of powerful DC people. And people whispered to her that they very much enjoy this segment. So shout out to the people whispering to Tina. I know we have listeners out there. I know you're listening, Brendan. All right. I got two this week for you. And one's just a toss up to you. The thing that you are doomed to do every week on this podcast. So the first one, I think this is very, this is like emblematic of Brendan and how he has no thoughts or opinions or feelings of his own because he's such a dummy.

1:19:48Brendan Carr:And so like his programming misfired this week. So usually Brendan, who is totally captured by the telecom industry and just desires to be the speech police, usually when it comes to picking between consumers getting better, faster, cheaper internet and the needs and wants of AT &T and Verizon and whoever else, He will pick the telecom companies. Yes. Right? Like, Brendan is like, we shouldn't put labels on your internet service that tells you what all the fees are, because that's too much work for your cable company ISP guys to figure out. So we're taking those away. This is a real thing Brendan has done that we've discussed in this segment.

1:20:20Brendan Carr:So this is like, you know, his core programming. Don't protect consumers. Protect the telecom companies. In any dispute between telecom companies and consumers who you're going to pick, Brendan's going to pick the telecom companies. What happens, David, when the telecom companies fight? and you're the government regulator in charge of the telecom companies. You say, now, now, children. I love you both equally. Brendan does not realize that his job is to be the neutral arbiter of these disputes and be the regulator because he's so captured by interests all the time. He's just a fundamentally corrupt idiot.

1:20:55Brendan Carr:Right. So this week, Amazon filed a petition responding to SpaceX applying for permission to launch one million satellites. so SpaceX applies for permission to launch a million satellites to do data centers

1:21:11David Pierce:in space why doesn't the Verge do more stuff like that can we just apply for permission to we don't have to launch a million satellites let's just see if they'll let us you can feel any way

1:21:19Brendan Carr:you want about Elon Musk saying I will launch a million satellites to put a data center in space whatever they do it this is one party asking the FCC for permission and Amazon files a petition response saying and I want to quote the petition. This seems to describe a lofty ambition rather than a real plan. Timing is likewise uncertain. Deploying a million satellite constellation would take centuries, even assuming the availability of all global launch capacity to do so. And the argument is if you give SpaceX permission to do this, you're going to cut down on the permission you give other people to do other things.

1:21:54Brendan Carr:And Amazon is, of course, very well positioned to say these things because they have their own satellite constellation they want to launch. They have the money and the resources and the time and the Jeff Bezos to spend the money on lawyers and fight the fight against Elon Musk. This is what you want. In our system, you want the two parties who are positioned to fight to a policy outcome to do this. This is why you set up a system of having petitions to protest requests.

1:22:21David Pierce:This is a good fight that should happen.

1:22:22Brendan Carr:This is the system working. We asked for permission to do this. Does anyone have any objections? Amazon is like, we have an objection. Brendan, his little brain misfires because there's no poor little consumer paying their$80 a month Verizon bill to screw over here. There's no comedian to muzzle with his censorship. There's just two feudal lords battling for his goodwill. So instead of staying out of it and saying, this is the process, we will let the FCC's lawyers and technical experts evaluate the request for permission, evaluate the objections and come to a ruling. Brendan, what does Brendan do?

1:23:02Brendan Carr:He's posting on X, which is owned by Elon Musk. And he says the following. Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1 ,000 satellites short of it, meaning its upcoming deployment milestones, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit.

1:23:21David Pierce:You know, there's just a kind of post on X that you know they hit the post button and were just like, oh, nailed it. And you're like, you didn't. You didn't nail it.

1:23:31Brendan Carr:You didn't nail it. He picked a winner. The process is you ask for permission. You file petitions saying I support or oppose this thing. And then you evaluate it. You're running a little administrative court and that is supposed to look fair. You're not supposed to be the head of the agency before the process has even begun to play out saying you suck. I pick Elon. And Brendan, because he didn't have a consumer to screw over, but he has to just do something corrupt at every turn or violate his weird programming, did something corrupt. I'm telling you, this is dumb. You can feel however you want about Elon saying he wants to put a million satellites in orbit to build a data center in space.

1:24:16Brendan Carr:Sure. you can feel however you want about amazon saying actually this is stupid and we want to put a bunch of we want to launch our own constellation and junk up the skies and lead inevitably to kessler syndrome what you can whatever feelings you want all of that is is maybe it is a bad use of amazon's resources to be doing this and they should just pay all the drivers more you can feel any way you want about all these things the thing that i know that you should react to is the head of the agency picking a side before the process has begun to play out. That is just naked corruption. Yeah.

1:24:52David Pierce:And saying, don't send me petitions, says guy whose job it is to receive petitions. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah.

1:24:59Brendan Carr:By the way, to your point about he thought the tweet was a banger and it's not, it's very funny that Brendan, who oversees Art Nation's telecommunications provider, think that it's a clear black and white trade-off for Amazon between filing petitions and launching satellites.

1:25:18David Pierce:there's only one employee at Amazon who knows how to do both things.

1:25:22Brendan Carr:Like, I don't know, man. Like, I feel like the lawyers can file as many petitions they want. And if they stop, it won't affect the satellite launch plans.

1:25:29David Pierce:Maybe the lawyers also launched the rockets. Amazon's a wild place.

1:25:33Brendan Carr:Yeah. Like Amazon's like, Claude launched the rock. It's like, what do you think is happening? God. Like, and maybe you think they're being anti-competitive and they're just trying to buy time to launch more of their Leo, whatever. Like, sure. fine. But again, this is just nakedly corrupt by Brendan. This, by the way, ties into the second thing Brendan did. Not this past week, but the week before. And poor, I'm sorry, David, this is where you come in.

1:25:57David Pierce:You're going to make me talk about David Ellison, aren't you? I'm going to make you talk about Warner Brothers and Paramount.

1:26:02Brendan Carr:So, Warner, you know, they decided to go with Paramount. Paramount, they actually had a meeting this week, which I'm confident you will talk about in a second here, where David Ellison met all the Warner people. But Brendan, who raised a lot of concerns about Netflix buying Warner, said to CNBC that he expected the Paramount bid for Warner to be approved, quote, pretty quickly because it's cleaner. Quote, cleaner.

1:26:26David Pierce:Again, just why even pretend there is process at this point? It's just they picked a winner.

1:26:33Brendan Carr:They picked a winner. David Elson said he was going to screw with CNN and Brendan Carr was like, great, I don't have any more concerns. And the idea that we have a neutral regulator is completely out the window because Brendan is a corrupt dummy. Yeah. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show and answer these allegations directly. I will make them to your face at any time. Apparently on the streets of D.C., we can go at it. My Brendan Carr is a dummy t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered. I'll give you a t-shirt, Brendan, that our listeners made for us. It's a great t-shirt.

1:27:01Brendan Carr:I only have one because it's like a precious fan-made object. It's special. Brendan, I will give you my Brendan Carr is a dummy t-shirt. You can have it if you face me in the Thunderdome of this podcast.

1:27:13David Pierce:A shirtless knee lie against a Brendan Carr as a dummy wearing Brendan Carr. That would do numbers on TikTok.

1:27:20Brendan Carr:Look, I'm not saying anybody wants to see me without a shirt. I know for a fact people want to see me without a shirt on more than they want to see Brendan Carr without a shirt on. Anyway, that has been Brendan Carr as a dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:27:30David Pierce:It's very good. That does lead right to my first lightning round item, which is this meeting that happened between David Ellison and David Zaslov. The Davids, as I call them. It's been a tough time for Davids. It's rough for you, bud. We're not being represented super well at this moment.

1:27:47Brendan Carr:I will say it does seem like at any moment you could take over Warner Brothers. Yeah, I mean at this point. The likelihood of you getting to run Warner Brothers is statistically higher than you.

1:27:56David Pierce:That's true. But it also seems like David Ellison is just sort of running through the Davids now. So like David Ellison might host this podcast at some point. I don't know. He's welcome to do that as well. That'd be great. I'd happily turn it over to him as long as he wears the shirt. um but so anyway so david zasloff went to uh the the warner brothers lot i think to have this big meeting with uh the the like executive team at warner brothers this is apparently a sort of normal tradition that they do um went and he talked about it talking through you know that he expects to make 30 films a year which would be a big number not seen in decades from a single studio uh he said really nice things about hbo which is really funny because out the other side of his mouth.

1:28:37David Pierce:He's talking about how he intends to turn HBO Max into Paramount Plus, that at the end of all of this, there's only going to be one streaming service. I assume that streaming service is Paramount Plus. Sure, whatever. There are a lot of questions about who Casey Bloys, who runs HBO, will or won't report to within this new structure. The HBO side of all of this, I think, is going to be very messy and very fascinating.

1:29:00Brendan Carr:And very bad.

1:29:01David Pierce:And very bad. And probably it is not going to lead to the next season of things being very good would be my guess. But all of that is to say, then David Ellison takes a bunch of questions. One of the things he said, to your point, he acknowledged that the process with Netflix had all of this stuff had been, he called it, quote, a turbulent process. But then he said, and I quote, that part is behind us, which is either flatly not true or evidence of the true level of corruption happening here. Right. Because like, frankly, the fact that Brendan is saying that is kind of just saying the quiet part out loud that everyone has assumed, which is that there is basically a handshake deal with the Trump administration, that this will work and is fine.

1:29:49David Pierce:And that there will be no process. There will be no meaningful review that this will all just get waved through because everybody agrees politically. And that is that is the assumption being made by a lot of people who are critical of this deal. And there is just increasingly loud evidence that that is what is going on.

1:30:05Brendan Carr:And the thing, the specific thing is not whether or not James Gunn is going to make Superman ever more woke. It is CNN. Yes. The specific thing that is at play here is whether or not CNN can be more biased in favor of the Trump administration, which will be harder and harder to do as the Trump administration gets more and more confused about why we are at war. Like you just can't, you can't, you can't have CNN all day being like, it's pretty,

1:30:31David Pierce:pretty good war right even even telling people why it's a good war gets more and more complicated every day as the trump administration forgets why they're doing it's not going great yeah so like it's whatever you think of like should you let zach snyder make a 4-3 grayscale justice league

1:30:48Brendan Carr:which again was at &t's idea or should batman be super woke i don't know maybe that's gonna i don't know like make the art and let people decide like that's how you should do it i don't think that's what the Trump administration cares about. I don't think they care about Ellison's promise to make 30 movies a year in theaters, which seems impossible to do. It does.

1:31:09David Pierce:It also, I will say David Ellison is like a guy who has been making movies. So to the extent that he is like an actual person with some track record in Hollywood, did he do it all with his dad's money? Yeah, sure. But he has been in this game for a while. But the thing that really bums me out the But I'm just saying, even if you can decide that you believe David Ellison, that he's going to put up dad's money, Oracle money, to make 30 movies a year and put them in theaters.

1:31:36Brendan Carr:And maybe that's a good economic decision or a bad one. Maybe there's enough demand for 30 theatrical releases a year.

1:31:42David Pierce:I would say there's almost no evidence that there is demand for that.

1:31:45Brendan Carr:Who knows, man? Like, whatever. You can evaluate that. That is not what the Trump administration cares about. No. What they care about is CNN. Right. And David Ellison has promised Trump that it's been reported. He promised sweeping changes at CNN. Yep.

1:31:59David Pierce:He did say in this event that it would remain editorially independent, which I would say is also what he has said about CBS News. And that is do with that what you would like. We have all watched what has happened to CBS News. But the other thing was that he was asked about layoffs at Warner Brothers Discovery. A thing that you like to say that is true is that the only thing that always happens because of a merger is layoffs. Yep. It's the it's the one and only guarantee. And he did the thing that they always do, which is essentially promised that that's not going to be what happens. He's been saying that he they see upwards of six billion dollars in cost savings and synergies.

1:32:37David Pierce:And he said in the meeting that this is from Variety. Most of the cost synergies would not come from layoffs. And I can just tell you with no inside evidence that that's a lie. It's just there is no way that is not the case. That is where those savings come from. Like maybe they're going to sell one of the lots. That's the thing that's been talked about a lot, right? This is very valuable real estate in LA. That's not where you get$6 billion. You get$6 billion by firing a bunch of people who have the same job at two different companies. That is what is coming.

1:33:07Brendan Carr:Yeah. No, without question, it's what's coming. Actually, I can add a tiny little bit of reporting to this. Please. So you and I have spent years covering all these platforms, like the streaming platforms and their user interfaces and the people who build them. We know a lot of the people who have built a lot of these platforms. And so I know some of the people who built Paramount Plus. And I know some of the people who have built HBO Max and the platforms that Warner has been using. HBO Max is like a particular disaster, right? It started as HBO Go and HBO Max and they had two different things and they merged them and they bring in Discovery.

1:33:43And all of these people are saying, what are you going to improve with Oracle's technology?

1:33:50Brendan Carr:Because this stuff is pretty good now. It's just streaming video. Like, this is kind of like a white label solved problem. And unless you're focused at, like, Netflix levels of algorithmic discovery, which is where your focus should be, you can't just show up and be like, Oracle will make this better. Right. the core parts of the platform, particularly in the case of HBO, where they had to go through massive gyrations to fix the problems, they're like, yeah, the problems are kind of fixed.

1:34:22David Pierce:Yeah, you can stream Game of Thrones without crashing now. We're good at that.

1:34:27Brendan Carr:Yeah, they got there. It took them a long time. They spent a lot of money, but they got there. Paramount, again, those folks are like, what has he been talking about? The Steam is good, the product was good, there's nothing to do. So unless he's talking about we're going to use the TikTok algorithm to show you a thing, which he's not saying. Right. He's just waiving the idea that Oracle technology will fix things at a slide deck. There's nothing to fix. So I don't think there's$6 billion of, like, tech infrastructure debt to repair or cost savings because you're running too many data centers. It's just going to be people.

1:35:00Brendan Carr:Yep. It is. In every business, it's the biggest line item. So I don't know, man. It's all bad. Yeah. The good news, again, much like Alan Dye going to meta to destroy it from within, is that buying Warner kills you.

1:35:14David Pierce:True.

1:35:16Brendan Carr:And apparently every media CEO has to flirt with the idea of killing themselves in this way.

1:35:21David Pierce:It's just part of the process. You get too much money, and then the universe takes it away from you by convincing you to buy Warner Brothers. This is what happens.

1:35:30Brendan Carr:This is going to be the end of the Allison family.

1:35:31David Pierce:Yeah, agreed. All right, let's do one more each, and then let's get out of here.

1:35:35Brendan Carr:Okay, I want to make this a true lightning round item because we're going to go deep on this in a different way. So last week, Grammarly just stole our identities. Yeah. You might recall. This is like a huge story. It spun fully out of control. So last August, Grammarly launched a feature called Expert Review where you could like, you know, Grammarly like expresses itself as a keyboard on your device where you like type and the Grammarly keyboard like corrects your grammar. That's what it's supposed to do. So now what they're saying is sort of the last mile for AI. So the AI will always be there watching you type.

1:36:10Brendan Carr:No thanks. I don't know, man. That's what they say. And so their big idea was that in Grammarly, you could submit your writing to be reviewed by experts. And the experts are like, it's just an AI. And then to make it more compelling, they decided the AI would be me and you and Casey Newton and Julie Angwin and all these other famous journalists. bell hooks is in there which is particularly nice like literally just like you name any author that's been published a bunch they're in this feature uh i think we can all evaluate how many people use grammarly uh by saying that this feature launched in august and we noticed it yesterday i was just about to say uh-huh so this is bad so there was i think it was futurism or wired did an article being like look at all these famous authors in this feature and then we went to test it and instead of getting famous authors we got we got ourselves we got sean allister and me and all these other people so we published this thing that's like hey this is us and we asked grammarly for a statement they gave us kind of a nothing burger statement um then they rolled out uh email in opt out so if you if i wanted to not be in their feature i could email them

1:37:18David Pierce:which is not how it's supposed to work no it's like do this magic incantation and then we will

1:37:22Brendan Carr:take you out of the product and then you know i heard from friends and other huge publishers being like, how'd you find this? Or lawyers want to know. You can tell that the sort of like legal drums were starting to go. Julia Angwin, who is an excellent reporter, filed a class action lawsuit this week. And then Grammarly fully rolled it back and said, we're very sorry, blah, blah, blah. The reason I'm saying this is a lightning round item is because Shashir Mahotra, the CEO of Grammarly, has long been scheduled to be on Decoder next week. Like well before this happened, he was going to be on Decoder.

1:37:56Brendan Carr:so he's still scheduled to be on Decoder I think he's going to be on the show we're taping that next week we're going to try to turn around as fast as we can so I'm just going to stop it here because I want him to come on Decoder

1:38:07David Pierce:but now it's now it's out there that Shashir you have to now you have to show up

1:38:12Brendan Carr:you got to show up and if you don't then I'll just do that episode of Decoder with an AI version of you

1:38:19David Pierce:I like it I think that one is it's going to get it's going to get weirder before it gets better on that front. And it also, it is sort of a perfectly AI story because it is not actually, it wasn't you. It wasn't even based. It was just like Nilay vibes in somebody's edits. It wasn't in my vibes. It was the worst edit of all time.

1:38:40Brendan Carr:That's not how I edit. And I want to say this as clearly as I got it. As somebody who edits and gets edits, there's no way you can look at someone's published work and determine what they are like as an editor. Correct. You cannot do it. Not a chance. They're just different tasks. Like 99 % of my edits are me just like highlighting a word and saying clunky. You're not going to get that out of my writing.

1:39:07David Pierce:That's true.

1:39:09Brendan Carr:And I'm curious to ask a lot of questions here. But I think the number one question in my mind is, why did you think that you could get to this is what I'm like as an editor from reading my published work? because those things aren't they're not even in the same universe yeah no it's it's the whole

1:39:29David Pierce:the whole thing is is very bad and also like if you use that feature and trust it i'm very sorry

1:39:33Brendan Carr:because it is leading you astray in lots it's making you write seo slope every one of the

1:39:39David Pierce:screenshots that you see of like the edits it's suggesting it's like oh that's bad like that's actually just an objectively bad idea and i hate that it's a resource to me but it's also just a bad idea and not correct and it's making your writing worse uh it's good for telling you like when you use the wrong tense of a word. And I would not trust Grammarly for much of anything beyond that.

1:39:58Brendan Carr:Yeah. Anyway, he's coming on the show. We'll see.

1:40:01David Pierce:Yeah. Okay. For my last lightning round item, I have kind of a thing and a half. First, just some super quick follow-up from Tuesday's episode. When I was talking to Lauren Feiner about all of the stuff going on with the Live Nation Ticketmaster settlement, one of the things we said was that it seemed like the deal meant Live Nation was going to have to sell a bunch of its amphitheaters and venues. It turns out that is not actually the case. There are a bunch of venues that are going to have to have an open ticketing model, so they'll have to use things other than Ticketmaster. But as far as we can tell, it doesn't seem like at this point, according to the deal, Live Nation is going to have to sell any of its amphitheaters and venues.

1:40:35David Pierce:Important update from everything we're talking about on Tuesday. There's also a bunch of shenanigans still happening with Live Nation Ticketmaster. Even though that settlement happened, it looks like Court's coming back as soon as next week. We'll catch up on that when the trial restarts again. Lauren, poor Lauren, is going to stay in New York. For our purposes right now, I want to talk about some big news that dropped today, actually on Thursday as we're recording this. Alison Johnson and our team has been working on her review of the S26 Ultra from Samsung. Don Preston reviewed the S26 and the S26 Plus, which are exactly what you think.

1:41:06David Pierce:Samsung took its phones and did them again, only now more expensive because of RAM shortages. But the big thing, and we talked about this when Samsung announced this, other than the what is a photo apocalypse of it all, The big new thing that got announced in the course of this phone being announced was this thing that Google and Samsung called, I believe, task automation. And this is the AI can just go do things for you on your phone feature. This is what Apple has been promising with Siri. This is what Google has been talking about with Gemini. This is what Rabbit tried to do with the large action model.

1:41:40David Pierce:Like this is the thing with AI. This is what everybody wants to do. They shipped it. It's out on the S26 Ultra. I believe it's coming to the Pixel shortly. I have a Pixel 10 Pro that it has not shown up on yet, but this thing is supposed to be out there. Allison has been testing it. She has had some pretty interesting experiences with this thing, but it kind of works. Your phone can use itself. Let me just read you one paragraph that she wrote just to give you a sense of how it works. She writes, the first prompt I gave it was pretty simple. Order an Uber to the airport. This is like a classic AI use case, by the way.

1:42:14David Pierce:Gemini asked for clarification to determine which airport. A good question to ask. Then it went through a couple of steps on its own, adding the destination and opting to skip the step where you specify your airline, which doesn't really matter at my local airport since it's all in one terminal. As promised, the system stopped before the final step and prompted me to review the details before putting in the request for the car. That is a smashing success of a hands-on story right there. Obviously, that is like, I think as we discussed, that is like the simplest, most straightforward example of this thing that gets very complicated and very messy very quickly.

1:42:44David Pierce:But she also like, she had it order Starbucks for her. There's just like a set of things that this thing appears to be able to just commandeer your phone and go do on your behalf. And that is nuts.

1:42:57Brendan Carr:I mean, when we talked about it when it was announced, we got a lot of feedback that was like, everyone's lying. AI doesn't work. And my feeling has always been Google is smarter than that. Right? Like they know they can't announce broken Siri, which is what Apple announced. Like here's a Siri that doesn't work. It's like not a choice for them. And I think they have very wisely picked food delivery and ride sharing. These are the only two things they're going to try to do at first because they are the most solvable, constrained problems. And then you kind of expand to the universe of things.

1:43:29David Pierce:Well, they're also interacting with the database, right? Like it's anything with this kind of incredibly structured data is where it's going to be.

1:43:36Brendan Carr:So I have a great question here because Samir, when he was announcing this feature at the event, said, we can do this any way you want. We can do this via MCP. We can do this via API, or we can just click around in these apps. So it's unclear. I know Uber, Dara has been on Decoder, and he's like, we are happy to integrate with this stuff. It doesn't matter to us. I don't know how they're integrating with this Starbucks app. So it's unclear to me if they're just literally running the app in a virtual machine on your phone and clicking on it.

1:44:03David Pierce:Allison's experience so far suggests that it is actually just like literally scrolling around the app for you, which is pretty interesting.

1:44:08Brendan Carr:And if all that's running locally, that's bananas. Yeah. So I have a million questions on how this works in practice, but the fact that it's working is the thing. Yep.

1:44:17David Pierce:I've actually been thinking a lot about this because I think the none of this works stuff was very much a feature of this podcast for a long time. And I think it has slowly gone away because this stuff is starting to work. Like a lot of it doesn't. There's still a long road. And the gap between some of this works and we have invented digital God is still so vastly enormous that we have to keep talking about it. But like, I don't know, I just keep coming back to sort of that that Claude Code moment that everybody had over the holidays. It's like, these tools can do things now. They do do things.

1:44:52David Pierce:The it's just fancy autocorrect argument is no longer correct. Like something meaningful has flipped. And I think now the questions of like, okay, what does this mean morally? How do we talk about it environmentally? How do we what is the business of all of this? Is everybody full of shit talking about the like, digital god possibilities? all of that still exists, but I think is actually now vastly more complicated because some of this stuff works now. Some of it does work. And we have to reckon with it now in such a different and more nuanced way because some of it works now, Eli.

1:45:24Brendan Carr:I'm aware that some of it works now. And you talk to vastly more software developers than I do, but it sounds like the existential crisis in software development is here, like fully here. Very much so, yeah. My hesitation as you're saying this is I think it's all still pretty brittle. Sure. And the promise of this technology, particularly Asian stuff, is that it will overcome the brittleness of every other attempt to do this kind of thing that has ever existed before. So like Alexa, there's a virgin history this season on Alexa. The problem with Alexa is that you just, it was brittle. You would ask it to do stuff and it couldn't do it.

1:45:59Brendan Carr:And then people stopped asking it to do anything at all. And they were like, I know it can do music and timers. And that's where that technology died. And I think this is still pretty brittle. I just think the boundary of things that people expect it to do is getting bigger.

1:46:11David Pierce:You're right, but you're framing it wrong, right? Like what happened was Amazon built a hugely successful machine for playing music and setting timers. They've sold a lot of those things. There are a lot of them in people's house and they are like a meaningful interface for a lot of people to do a lot of things. Like there is a generation of kids that is growing up talking to Alexa. It's real. It's happening. Like that's a very powerful thing. What Amazon never figured out is how to A, do the next thing, and B, figure out how to make two nickels rub together from doing it. And this is where we are with AI right now, right?

1:46:46David Pierce:The thing where, yes, this can write some code for you is real and powerful. There are a bunch of little things, again, that it's starting to do. Like, can AI order coffee from Starbucks for you? We are rapidly running at a point where the answer is just yes. That's not digital God. I don't know how to be clear about that. It's also not clear that that's anything, right? So we are at, I think, that fun, interesting moment that we were with Alexa all those years ago where it's like, okay, this is something. How much is it is the next question. And everybody continues to assume that just because it can do the first two things, it will eventually be able to do everything.

1:47:23David Pierce:The last run we took at this proved that that was not the case.

1:47:26Brendan Carr:This is when we have a bit brittle. I think we've expanded the envelope of where the brittleness is. Yeah. But there's still some brittleness that is yet to come.

1:47:35David Pierce:Yes.

1:47:35Brendan Carr:By the way, I have been threatening everyone that we're going to do a segment of the show called New York versus San Francisco where we just invite Casey on. And then he and I just have different ideas about AI. I think it might be time. To your point, it might be time.

1:47:47David Pierce:I had a meeting just before we recorded this podcast. And the person I was talking to started with, I know I'm in San Francisco where everyone is completely AI pilled. But.

1:47:57Brendan Carr:Yep.

1:47:58David Pierce:We got to do it. It's just what it is.

1:47:59Brendan Carr:Casey has agreed to do it. We just have to do it.

1:48:01David Pierce:I'm down. I think it's a good idea. And I'll just like, I'll be Chicago. You know what I mean? I'll just, I'll be somewhere in between.

1:48:09Brendan Carr:Good old Midwestern Dave is here

1:48:11David Pierce:to moderate New York versus San Francisco. I love it. It's going to be great. All right. We should get out of here. We've gone way over as we are wont to do. I missed a week. It's nice to be back. I don't like when I don't have anybody to talk to about this stuff. I have to bother like my three-year-old about technology. He's not interested. But that's it for the Vergecast. Like you said, Neil, Clubhouse on version history this Sunday. we're not feed dropping so to all the people who yelled at me about feed dropping we will not be feed dropping clubhouse go to the new version history youtube channel we're a version history podcast on tiktok and instagram um those accounts are small and that makes me feel vulnerable so please go follow them so i can have some self-confidence again uh this is openly manipulative you've ever said it's true this is where i'm at right now in my life uh i said something about like and subscribe and i got a comment being like like and subscribe is so 2008 and it just made me truly feel feelings.

1:48:59David Pierce:Who's on Decoder on Monday?

1:49:00Brendan Carr:It's the CEO of Yahoo. It's a wild convo. There's a lot there. I was basically like, is everything gambling now? And we talked about it for a while.

1:49:08David Pierce:Spectacular. I'm personally very excited about that episode. I've spent some time with Jim over the last several months talking about the future of everything and he's a good hang. I'm excited to hear that episode. Remember, if you subscribe to The Verge, you get all of those podcasts, ad free, plus everything else that we're doing with The Verge, all of our newsletters, all of our everything. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It's a good website. We're pretty proud of it. The email is vergecastatheverge.com. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. This show is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:49:35David Pierce:This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time. Neelai, crack and roll. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50 ,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals. Free samples. Zero pressure. Right now, get up to 45 % off with minimum purchase.

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