This phone starts fires on purpose

14:24Nilay Patel:I'm sure his review will actually be far more technical. Like, he has things to say other than this is sick. So I'm excited to co-bine this review with him. I mean, there's some really, truly wonky stuff about this. Like, I had to open a – to configure it, you have to go on the web and then, like, log into a little web portal on the device. It's, like, ridiculous. like the it's meant for installers to put in for rich people it's not meant for normal humans to have and i but i had to do that not for any particular like complicated reason you have to do that to enable hdmi cec because it doesn't because for thirteen thousand dollars you do not get a remote control because the assumption is this is true because the assumption is that your high-end av installer has put this in as part of an integrated system and you're just like sitting down in the theater and your butler is beginning this for you.

15:16Sean Hollister:I feel like far too much of the tech industry has been premised on the idea that H-D-A-M-I-C-E-C is a viable solution to solve everything.

15:23Nilay Patel:I got it. It works kind of. So now we can at least click around with my TV. But to turn it on, I have to open an app on my phone. So there's some real edges here, but then you're like, it's a video playback device. So who cares? Once you're in it, you're in it. And I've just been rewatching all of these old movies that are in the catalog that came with the device because I'm like, oh, it's like I can see what's actually going on for the first time. Highly recommend it. It's very much that Ferris Bueller scene with the Ferrari, if you have the means.

15:54Nilay Patel:Anyway, it's the gadget of all gadgets. I've never been happier. We're going to write an actual review of it. Like I said, there are some rough edges around this thing that make it not a consumer device. And, of course, just to get the whole system as delivered to me, you're$13 ,000 in the hole and it doesn't come with any movies like you still have to buy or rent the movies

16:17Sean Hollister:do they cost like more than usual is it like$70 a movie,$100 a movie no that's about to say

16:21Nilay Patel:all the ones I've looked at are it's like$6 or$7 to rent and$25 to buy so it's not out of Blu-ray zone

16:28Dominic Preston:that's fine

16:30Nilay Patel:you can also buy a used Blu-ray player for like$150 and just buy Blu-rays this is a thing you can also do

16:36Sean Hollister:for now they are discontinuing a lot of these blu-ray players for a finite result but like i've

16:42Nilay Patel:like i've been saying it is i i just haven't been happier with a gadget in in ages because this thing isn't trying to do anything it's not trying to like replace all white collar work right it's like these movies will look better than the regular movies like yep it super does no getting around even my wife noticed it the other day like um i made her watch uh that's really good at concerts so there's a lot of concert because again it's uncompressed audio so we're just sitting around watching the cure and nxs and the rolling stones live for no reason and she's like this sounds really good i'm like yeah it's uncompressed and she was like out of the room by the time i finished um but it's like it's just you get so much more dynamic range in the audio that they have built a little business doing um like concert streams or concert footage rather um because watching a streamed concert.

17:29Nilay Patel:You're like, this sounds bad. But if you have all the channels uncompressed. I told the people I was a huge nerd and so I had to prove that I'm a huge nerd after getting a spec rung earlier this week. Just invite a few of them in to testify. I went to Neely's house. I'm sure the Kaleidoscape people would be happy for you to come demo their products. 13Gs at a time. But we'll have a full review. John and I are going to work on it. He's got other stuff to do. He's got other products to review. You can imagine what some of the display products he has to review are. They're in the mix. We're working on some of that stuff.

18:03Nilay Patel:But when we get a free moment, we will review the Colidescape just so I can talk about it again on this show. That's what I have for you. All right. We should start with the actual news, which is not just me insisting that everybody comes within a mile of my home. Look at how good my TV looks. Dom, you are at MWC. I've been at MWC in years. It's since we're Mobile World Congress and it's in Barcelona. It's the biggest phone show, telecom show in the world. I think a really interesting dynamic right now playing out for us here in the United States. Phones outside the United States are getting so much more interesting than anything we have here.

18:39Nilay Patel:And MWC is where that's happening. Describe the show to us. There's one I want you to absolutely start with. But then I want you to talk about just how different phones are getting over there.

18:49Dominic Preston:Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme of MWC for me this year was hardware is getting weird. on this side of the Atlantic. And people are pushing hardware in as many weird directions that they can, mostly in the camera, but not exclusively. The emblematic handset here is the Ukitel WP63. You probably don't know Ukitel. They are a rugged phone brand. So they make these sort of big bulky phones with giant batteries and absurd waterproofing and that kind of thing. The WP63 is pitched as a camping phone. It's got a 20 ,000 milliamp hour battery. It's got a a camping light. It's got a super loud speaker that you can use for listening to music or for sort of sounding an alarm or something.

19:28Dominic Preston:And it also has a fire lighter built inside. It has an igniter. And igniter is sort of a generous way of putting this. This is basically like an old car cigarette lighter. It's a tiny little electric plate embedded inside the phone. There's a button on the outside, which has a little red fire icon on it. And you push the button i think you can also do this like within the phone and this little plate slides out and it is just the size of the end of a cigarette wait are they because are they selling it to light cigarettes they are pitching it as a camping accessory for outdoors for rugged adventures but rugged ventures the way they demoed it at mwc i have been told is by lighting cigarettes

20:16Nilay Patel:right when you need a rugged adventure outside of the bar for five to ten minutes

20:21Sean Hollister:we've all been there so this is no more stylus instead your pen-shaped object is a cigarette

20:26Dominic Preston:lighter now yeah i mean they just need the slot for the cigarettes to slot in the phone as well and then we're really talking um wait no so i'm looking at a picture of this it's not it's not a

20:34Nilay Patel:pen-shaped object it's just like a it's a tiny little disc that slides out it really yeah the

20:39Dominic Preston:whole bit that slides out is the size of the cigarette tip it is like there's this you know quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch square that slides out.

20:47Nilay Patel:You know how like we've criticized various phone companies for the batteries not big enough? Like just make the phone thicker and put a bigger battery in there. This is like they made the phone gigantic and they're like with all of this extra battery we're going to do resistive heating on a coil of metal so you can spark up a cigarette. Like I respect it. It is very much a 1980s cigarette lighter. Like this is the thing that like was in my parents' cars.

21:14Dominic Preston:It's retro tech. And maybe cigarettes are the next retro thing that Gen Z is going to get into and everyone's going to take up smoking again.

21:20Nilay Patel:This is what I mean about what's happening overseas. Like you can start a company where your entire, first of all, it's called Ukitel. Your entire like promise to the consumer is like, it's just an Android phone, but this one can light cigarettes. And like, maybe you have a business because there's just like more access to the market there. Like this thing is not going to be in the T-Mobile store.

21:40Dominic Preston:I suspect no. I'd be pretty impressed if they could pull that off. Not least because I never saw it light a cigarette. We tried to see this thing work three times. And I was repeatedly in contact with the PLs. I know other people did see it work. It did work. I've spoke to other journalists who watched this thing light something on fire. Every time I went, it had broken about 10 minutes before I arrived. And this happened on three different occasions. Alice and I kept trying to see this thing, but we never once saw it light up because they had one sample and it broke every single day of the show.

22:11Sean Hollister:This is the same company that does like the giant batteries in their phones, right? Yes.

22:16Dominic Preston:And this one has a giant battery. It's got a 20 ,000 milliamp hour battery as well. They have others that go bigger than that.

22:20Nilay Patel:Once you have a big enough battery, like what can we do with it? It's like cigarettes.

22:23Dominic Preston:Yeah, you can do anything with it. And just stick a little resistive heat plate next to the battery.

22:29Nilay Patel:Alright, so this is what I mean. If phones over there are just getting weird, right? Because there's more access to consumers, there's more Android users outside of the United States than not. There's just a different, WhatsApp is a more dominant messaging platform that lets people switch more easily. There's all this stuff. And then you can see phone makers are competing on hardware. So cigarette lighters aside, we should talk about the robot phone because this to me is like the most let's compete on hardware phone in quite a while. I know they're calling it a robot, but it appears that they've just put a gimbal on a phone.

23:05Dominic Preston:Oh yeah, it is absolutely. The robot phone name is a real stretch. This is the gimbal phone or the stabilized camera phone or the DJI Osmo pocket phone. Any of those would work just fine. This is from Honor. It's worth saying this one is China only, but they do say it's coming out. This is the sort of thing you look at and you think, oh, that's some goofy concept device that someone's come up with and they made three of them and they're never going to sell it. They insist they are making this. There is a production run. They're going to sell them in China. They talk about it like it's a product line that will have more of them.

23:34Dominic Preston:they talked about the idea that it will come to Europe in the future or future versions might this is something they are supposedly exploring but yeah it is it is a phone with a DJI Osmo Pocket style mini gimbal that kind of sits in the rear camera and folds up out of the top of the phone and then it can rotate it can look around it can do stabilized video it can do subject tracking video you can swivel it around and use it for your selfie camera so you're getting this kind of rear main camera quality for your selfies um and then the robot of it all is it has a llm powered chat app and it makes cute noises and it'll nod its its head at you and shake its head and dance to imagine dragons and all sorts of horrifying things like that my favorite part of

24:15Nilay Patel:your video by the way is you point out it can dance to imagine dragons but no other songs no

24:19Dominic Preston:other song that is the only song yeah i asked if it knew other dances and other songs and they were like, you know, it will. But, you know, for the demo, the demo, we have this. And yeah.

24:30Nilay Patel:Do you think that they licensed the Imagine Dragons songs or do you think they were just like, they'll be fine?

24:34Dominic Preston:I hope they did, if only for how often it was being blasted. I heard it played, I don't know, at least two or three times during the press conference. They had this dance routine on stage at their booth. I heard it played there. Anytime anyone went on the demo and said like, hey, robot phone, play some music. Suddenly Imagine Dragons starts blasting. Imagine that but with 10 robot phones in a ring and it's the one demo everyone wants to see is it dancing to music uh so i've had a lot of magic dragons in my life i feel like it shouldn't be too much

25:02Sean Hollister:of a stretch for this company to come up with like some reasons that you might want a robot like maybe the little gimbal could be it's your eyes if you can't see very well and and the phone could like describe things into your ears this feels like there could be legitimate reasons for

25:16Dominic Preston:that yeah they didn't pitch accessibility uses at all the the way they went down the robot angle was that kind of, it's a companion. So they're talking about having an accessory that clips it onto your backpack. And they were saying it could describe what you're seeing, but in that kind of like, you could be on vacation and it will describe the scenery and talk about where you are to you and that kind of thing.

25:34Nilay Patel:Wait, hold on. I know this isn't the first time we've encountered the robot. This is the first time you've gotten to see and hold it, right?

25:42Dominic Preston:I didn't get to hold it, but this is the first time we have seen it turned on and working. it has previously been shown off in a pure cgi maybe ai slop concept video and then a ces i got to see one but turned off and i wasn't allowed to touch it and the arm didn't move or anything that was just to like here's a plausibly a dummy unit you know this is what it will look like this time they had a load of them on the booth working moving but no one was allowed to actually

26:08Nilay Patel:grab the thing and so three months from now you'll be able to touch one yeah at some point they said

26:13Dominic Preston:Second half of this year, it'll come out. We'll see.

26:16Nilay Patel:Right. You can just see the progression. Every three months, you get ever closer to the robot. I'm just saying, it seems like they've backed into needing to make it more of a robot because of AI. If you're like, this is a robot phone, and actually all it is is a gimbal that pops out and moves around mechanically, you'd be like, yeah, that's enough. It doesn't actually have to be a robot.

26:35Dominic Preston:The extra bit of context here is that Honor is building towards an IPO. and they do not want to IPO as just another company that makes phones and tablets and smart watches. And so robots, they just thought we'll do robots instead. That'll be the thing that pushes us forward. I was told by someone at Honor, they kind of looked at EVs, but the Chinese EV market is already sprawling and enormous and has countless brands and Xiaomi's there and doing a a very good job so far. So on, I kind of thought, we can't fit there. But, you know, robots. We could probably do robots.

27:11Nilay Patel:And so their attempt to convince everyone they're a robot company is by putting a gimbal on the phone. This is all fine. I'm actually very taken with the gimbal on the phone. Like, I watched your video, I watched some other videos, and I'm like, oh, this is neat. Like, you get stabilized video, it can do the tracking, it's tracking Allison and a crowd of people in your video. And then, like, in the back of my head was, isn't the S26 Ultra doing all this with a crop sensor? Like there's a real dynamic here right now where they did a lot of mechanical stabilization. And it's cool because people like mechanical gimbals.

27:48Nilay Patel:They like the Osmo Pocket. I enjoy the gimbal I have for my phone. And then I'm looking at Samsung and they're like, you don't need that. It's just a huge sensor. We'll just crop it really fast. You're reviewing like the S26 for us. That has the horizon lock on it, right?

28:03Dominic Preston:Yeah, that has Horizon Lock as well. It doesn't have the giant 200 megapixel sensor that the Ultra does, but it also has Horizon Lock. And I tested it out after seeing the robot phone. I thought I'll play with Horizon Lock a bit and see how they compare. And yeah, Horizon Lock seems to work really well. It seems impressive. What it's doing on the software side is kind of amazing. I think it's plausible. The hardware solution will be better in terms of like pure quality you're going to get. You're not cropping into the sensor as much. You can have the full resolution. You can do all this other stuff.

28:32Dominic Preston:Maybe even the actual stabilization will end up being better because they have hardware and software going all at once. But you get all these other problems. You know, this thing is probably going to cost a load whenever it comes out. I can only assume it will be unreasonably fragile compared to any other phone on the market. In China, I don't know how, you know, well set up Honor is for a repair system, things like that. They are a big company. They have a big presence in China. Maybe they're going to be able to repair people's broken robot phones. If they ever launch it overseas, I would never really put my faith in them to be able to handle fiddly repairs on this tiny little gimbal arm.

29:07Dominic Preston:I assume the waterproofing will be near zero, and the dustproofing, I assume we're going back to the early foldable days where they just have to shrug and say, we can't protect this in the way that we could have slapped.

29:18Sean Hollister:I will say, as somebody who does use an Osmo Pocket 3 all the time, I film all my videos, you're actually looking at me right now through one, I can probably get its gimbal ActiveTrack going. this thing this thing is wonderful but i always feel like i can't quite tell what i'm filming on it this the postage stamp size screen is not big enough so you kind of want to pair it with the

29:39Nilay Patel:phone so i can definitely see we got our first robot phone customer right here yeah put it

29:44Dominic Preston:together put it together i've used a pocket as well and had the same thing the postage stamp screen is very hard to work with sometimes getting that experience on a big phone screen all in one device uh you get to edit on that device right if you are willing to edit on your phone screen that you can edit on a phone better than you can edit on an osmo pocket so there's a logic if you

30:03Sean Hollister:but but i think the most important thing is getting the sensor out of the phone so you can make it bigger and you can pick up much better alone it's not much bigger well we don't know

30:12Nilay Patel:actually the size right but it's still a 200 megapixel sensor we know it's 200 megapixel

30:16Dominic Preston:and that is it honor has said zero other camera specs they've said nothing about the actual sensor size um the aperture or anything like that um it will also have an ultra wide net telephoto and even still has a selfie camera built into the screen because they i asked them about that they did explain it kind of makes sense that you might want to use face unlock or something and you don't have to wait for the robot to pop its head up every every time you want to do face unlock on

30:37Nilay Patel:your phone but i'm just saying all this stuff the ai stuff they're trying to do to make it a robot it's like just put googly eyes on the gimbal and call it a robot and like i remember like it's fine it's like honestly half the people it's still like it's alive you know like it's like the presence of google is like yeah that's definitely alive like you don't need to do um but you mentioned dust resistance they also announced a new foldable uh what's the v6 the magic v6 uh yeah which is sort of the most toughest foldable around right it is now ip68 and ip69

31:08Dominic Preston:beating google's pixel time profile which are just ip68 um the the difference between those is that the eight is uh for submersion in water and the nine is for high temperature and high pressure jets of water so it has both ratings it can survive submersion but also i don't know a really intense pressure wash if you want to subject your phone to that you know it's funny i still like get

31:31Nilay Patel:nervous about putting my phone my regular phone underwater and then it's like oh this folding

31:36Sean Hollister:phone you can put in a car wash it's like i don't i'm not gonna do that but but but you should the ip ratings that sealant is good once twice maybe as as as salt gets into it as as chemicals eat away at the sealant. It's for that accident, but do not rely on it to do it more than once.

31:55Nilay Patel:All right. Well, I'll keep my folding phone out of the car wash.

31:59Dominic Preston:I've heard stories of a Google employee I know in the UK who once in the early days of an IP68 Pixel very proudly demonstrated the waterproofing on his Pixel phone by dunking it in the swimming pool, which it did not survive.

32:14Nilay Patel:Brutal. Jami was there. They had a bunch of Leica phones, some other stuff. What's going on there?

32:18Dominic Preston:Yeah, they had a huge launch. They had a lot of different stuff. The main things are the Xiaomi 17 series phones, which had launched in China very late last year. This was their big European unveiling. So there was the 17, which is their iPhone 17 slash S26 slash Pixel 10 kind of compact-ish flagship phone. They jumped from the 15 series to the 17 series. They quite explicitly said at the time they did this in China that it was to match their numbering to Apple's, which is delightful. I love that for them. The more exciting thing was the 17 Ultra and then this kind of Leica branded spin on that, which is officially the Leica Lights phone.

32:56Dominic Preston:What a name. It's great. I mean, so it's actually the fourth Lights phone, but the other three were all made by Sharp and they were only available in Japan. And they were this kind of weird little phone that a lot of Leica nerds got excited about and could never buy unless they made a trip to Japan. So this is the first Lights phone to be global, by which I mean, not the US, but everywhere else. it is kind of extraordinary as cameras go it's basically just the 17 ultra to be clear like the lights phone is not a whole different thing it's the 17 ultra but with a load of extra like a branding they put the like a red dot logo on it it comes with like a branded accessories the software has been not totally co-created with leica but tweaked with like a like a like a aesthetic has been put all over android and all over the camera app so it feels a bit more like you're using a like a device from that kind of ui experience just like the fonts that run through it and things like that.

33:45Dominic Preston:And then the big, fun, silly, gimmicky bit on top of it is that the rear camera ring rotates. So if you get the Leica version of the phone, you can use that rear camera, you can twist it around, and it can control zoom or exposure, or you can set it to sort of move between different filters in the camera app and things like that, which is fun. And I thought I would love this. I was so excited for it. And I discovered that although in my head, the camera, they're like the camera island on these, these ultra flagships feels enormous and they are enormous. They stick out of the phone loads. There's a huge black circles on the back of the phone.

34:22Dominic Preston:They look really outlandish compared to it, you know, what Samsung and Apple do. But when you compare it to actually a camera and you try and hold it and grip the lens mount with your hand, you discover it's tiny. It's really flush against the camera body. There is nothing for your hand to hold on to. And it's really awkward to actually try and use that as like a zoom control or focus or something. It doesn't actually work in the way you really feel like it should. Yeah.

34:46Sean Hollister:I've always wondered who are these branded camera phones for? Are they for Leica nerds who are like, I want to have this Leica phone in addition to my Leica camera? Or do these people just, they pull out the actual camera and not bother with the phone?

35:02Nilay Patel:So I'm lucky enough to know two Leica nerds. they buy everything like a mix i will and i'm going to just say this out loud neither of them have any children and so the the money you would spend on college goes directly to leica i hope like a starts like a scholarship fund or something because that would be the true circle of life but like literally everything down there's like i made like a subscription camera app and my my my buddy was like well i have to have it and i was like no you absolutely do not like i i just download halide like you'll be fine and uh there was no like they're gonna buy this phone i'm sure and they're gonna buy the lens cap which is by far the best accessory for the phone

35:46Dominic Preston:the huge lens cap that goes over the back oh yeah i for anyone on the video you've got this like like a branded lens cap on the back of the case that comes with it and it's brilliant okay how to

35:55Nilay Patel:feel about the fact that the leica logos on the back are meant for are in portrait because i think this is the mistake of this phone, is that those logos should be to be holding the phone in landscape.

36:09Dominic Preston:So the funny thing about this is, is that this originally came out in China as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica Edition. And it had a slightly different design there. It had a two-tone finish, whereas it's now just a single color on the back. A couple other small tweaks. And in China, it's landscape. And then the international version, they changed it to portrait.

36:31Nilay Patel:No!

36:32Dominic Preston:And everyone is curious about it. All of a sudden, like, that is the thing everyone has said. Why did they change the logo orientation? They ruined it.

36:39Nilay Patel:Because that's what makes it look like a camera. All right. Well, hopefully, this is never going to come to the United States. So hopefully, if you're buying it on the gray market, you can obviously choose, right? So I would say buy the Chinese one. Other companies, Vivo, Techno. There's a Unihertz phone to talk about. Walk me through these.

36:56Dominic Preston:Okay. Okay, Vivo didn't bring like a full phone launch, but it did a tease of its X300 Ultra, which is going to be its equivalent to this Xiaomi phone, its rival, its similarly priced top, top, top spec, similar giant camera module. It announced for the first time that it's going to bring that phone to Europe, which it's always been China exclusive before. They said that this Ultra will come in internationally. And it teased a set of ridiculous accessories to go with it. So last year, Vivo was the first of the big Chinese phone brands to release what they call a telephoto extender lens, which I reviewed at the time.

37:28Dominic Preston:It was a 200 millimeter lens that you strap onto the back of the phone and you stick it on top of the existing telephoto on the phone. And then you get this full 200 millimeter telephoto experience. They're now doubling that with a 400 millimeter telephoto extender, which I think might be more millimeters than I need for my phone focal length, to be honest. uh it's it's gonna be a lot of zoom i love all of allison's pictures of this one because yeah

37:58Sean Hollister:it's just all the gear around the phone you can't see the phone at all yeah it's very good

38:03Dominic Preston:yeah then they are releasing a camera cage together with small rig which is a company that basically makes all these camera cages and other kind of ott professional-ish accessories for phones and so this is a dual hand grip camera cage with a fan on the back and a mount for a light and you can add a tripod to the bottom and all this stuff and they're really trying to pitch this is now like you can be have a professional cinema setup with a phone at its center and this can be the phone and you know they're announcing some other like video features support for uh 10-bit log across all three rear lenses the new stuff they're doing with lookup tables and compact video things that mostly go way over my head and at some point i'm gonna have to get my head around because i'm gonna have to review this thing somehow uh but they're really like leaning in on this idea that cool what we can do to stand out is just go full in on professional cinema as what this phone does which i will say in their credit one thing i like about this is it's kind of refreshingly honest for a company like this to confirm that that's what you need when you want to produce this kind of hey all of this was shot on a phone content and that part of their their hype spiel for this camera case, this grip rig thing, is, oh, this is what we use when we shoot our product launches and produce all the promo videos for it.

39:23Dominic Preston:It's a nice contrast compared to other brands which love to tell this thing was shot on the phone. And they leave this big blank around what that means, right?

39:32Nilay Patel:Yeah, Samsung just did this at the S26 launch. And I mean, Apple does this every time, but Samsung literally just did this weeks ago at the S26 launch. and you saw the photo of the actual rig they were using to shoot the s26 launch and you're like where's the phone yeah like you're you kind of get to a place where it could be any phone exactly

39:48Dominic Preston:because you've put so much around it there was demonstration of this they literally had a setup you could go and try it out where they had taken this whole rig and mounted it on a dolly and you could sit and use the the tracking dolly to like take a shot and try out the new pro video app they have and again i just love that they're like cool when we talk about using this for cinema great stuff we mean with all these other thousands of dollars worth of equipment around the phone well

40:11Nilay Patel:it's interesting so their approach to modularity is like stuff around the phone then you've got this company techno which is it's all just like pogo pins and magnets like can make the phone bigger and weirder and then i actually want to end by talking about lenovo which i have a lot to say about this lenovo laptop and its modular ports talk about the techno because it's we're we're just in an age of like modularity in like specific ways right not you're going to build your own phone out of parts. But in this case, you've got, okay, we're going to be honest that what you need to do is mount the phone in a rig and then mount accessories to the rig.

40:45Nilay Patel:This techno company is like, we're going to be honest that you're just going to clip a bunch of magnets to our phone. And then I think Lenovo's on drugs. But let's talk about techno first.

40:53Dominic Preston:Yeah. So the techno one is back into, this is full concept territory. This is not a product that they're intending to release. We've seen modular phones before. I like this. I think this is one of those smarter implementations of it I've seen imagined. It is just a very, very thin phone, thinner than a USB port, and it doesn't have a USB-C port. It has a tiny battery, but they have various pogo pin and magnetic attaching points on the back where you can slap on power banks and you can stack multiple ones on top of each other. So you could kind of keep stacking these various 3000 mAh power banks on until you've got as many as you want to have.

41:25Dominic Preston:They had microphone attachments, speaker attachments. They had various types of camera attachments. They had sort of small little action camera things you could slap on the back, but also you could just put on what basically looked like a full mirrorless camera and pogo pin that to the back of the phone.

41:43Nilay Patel:This is the dream.

41:44Dominic Preston:It is the dream. The magnets are not strong enough. I held this thing, and if you were not supporting the full weight of the camera lens with one hand, it just immediately wanted to fall off.

41:55Nilay Patel:This is the reality of all pogo pins.

41:57Dominic Preston:Yes, it is not quite enough for a full camera to stick on the back. It can be done.

42:02Sean Hollister:Essential, the Essential phone had a magnetic Progo Pin camera attachment.

42:06Nilay Patel:Let me just ask you a question about the Essential phone. Is that company still around? Obviously not.

42:12Sean Hollister:They had so many other issues.

42:14Nilay Patel:But magnetic and Progo Pins was not the problem.

42:19Sean Hollister:Name a Progo Pin product at scale that still exists. All I am saying is the only reasons to buy a new phone in the world anymore are because your battery is too old or because you want a better camera. So the sooner we get to, just slap a new camera on your phone, slap a new battery on your phone, the better we will be.

42:36Nilay Patel:I know the dream of Pogo Pins is alive. By the way, I just like saying Pogo Pins. But it is true that the dream of modular accessories is you just bink onto the thing. It's going to live forever. By the way, I think I can answer my own question. I believe the only at scale still existing Pogo Pin product is the Surface. because I think the Surface keyboard is Pogo Pins. That's it. That's all I got. You correct me if I'm wrong. I think that might be it.

43:02Sean Hollister:There are so many Pogo Pins in my life, I don't remember which ones are still sold at retail. Who are you?

43:07Nilay Patel:All right. The reason I want to bring this up in modularity is because I want to end by talking about this Lenovo concept, which is a concept. It is basically a framework laptop. Sean, you've covered the framework at depth. Talk about another company that is just chasing the Pogo Pin dream to its complete conclusion. So this is just a laptop you can take apart. I know you've seen it, Dom. The thing that gets me about it, and this just kills me, is they're like the thing you should do with modularity is be able to replace the ports. And so you can swap in an HDMI port. You can swap in a USB-C port.

43:41Nilay Patel:This is all very funny because they also made a little case for you to carry your ports around so that when you need the HDMI port, you open your little ring box. And it's like, no, this is just dongles. You just made the world's most inconvenient dongles that you can never replace. But now you have a little jewelry box for your modular ports. Dom, what was the idea here?

44:06Dominic Preston:I can't speak to everything they were thinking with this, other than someone wanted a port pouch, like you said. Yeah. I mean, this was like a weird concept that combined two things at once. It was the modular ports, which you can swap in and out, which I think were USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI. But then it also just had this odd setup with a screen that was mounted on the back of the laptop lid and could detach. You could then connect it as an external monitor with a cable and sort of an external monitor that magneted to the back of your laptop when you didn't need it. But you could also grab it and stick it on the bottom and have a dual screen laptop setup.

44:46Dominic Preston:So just screen where the keyboard should be and more screen where the screen should be.

44:50Nilay Patel:you know you know that i'm fixated on the ports when i don't mention the removable screen that can go either on the keyboard deck or the back of the existing screen i'm like that's fine that's

44:58Sean Hollister:some normal stuff yeah it will not surprise any long-time readers of the verve to know that i am all over this i want this to exist and i am especially excited that these modular ports are not now tiny usb-c connectors that go into your motherboard but rather tiny m.2 connectors that go into your motherboard. So that theoretically, it won't just be HDMI and USB. Theoretically, you could plug in eGPUs and giant solid state drives and anything else that could run over a PCIe large bus.

45:28Nilay Patel:Really big on bus. Yeah, for a 2026 in which buying GPUs and fast storage is completely achievable for most people. I have a lot of dreams. I love it. It sounds like MDC is crazy. Dom, you were also at the Nothing event today. A true hero leaving Barcelona wanted to go to the Nothing event today. They launched 4A Pro. Briefly, tell us about that, then we got to take a break.

45:50Dominic Preston:Yeah, so Nothing launched two phones, the Phone 4A, the Phone 4A Pro, and also a pair of headphones, the Headphone A, which are basically just a$100 cheaper version of their overrear headphones that they released last year. The 4A and the 4A Pro are kind of interesting because they are two near identical phones in terms of specs. There's very little, like tiny little variations in the exact chipset and how bright the screen is, things like that. They're basically the same phone, but they look totally different. so the 4a which is the cheaper one which is not coming out in the us that was just europe and india the 4a looks a lot like a regular nothing phone if you've seen any nothing phone they've done over the past five years it's got this transparent back it comes with this design where you can see what are meant to look suggestively like the innards of a phone but are in fact not the innards of a phone they're just some other bits of plastic and screws and it comes in some nice colors there's white black but they've also got a really punchy blue and pink, which I actually kind of love.

46:43Dominic Preston:The only real kind of shift with the 4A is they've got a new glyph lighting setup. This is nothing's kind of design they put on the back of all their phones with some sort of funny set of weird lights that you can use for notifications and alerts and timers and things like that. Here they have a new setup, which they call the glyph bar, which is just seven vertical lights in a strip, a red one at the bottom that can be a video recording light. And they just go up and down. So you can use like a volume slider and it's, you know, how much, how many of the lights go up tells you what volume you're on.

47:09Dominic Preston:And you have a timer with a, blocks countdown and things like that.

47:12Nilay Patel:I do love changing the volume on my phone by looking at the back of it.

47:14Dominic Preston:It's very satisfying. I tried this for a video and I was like, it goes up, the lights go on. It goes down, the lights go off. Great. You could do that for 20 seconds tops. The 4A Pro is a bigger shift for nothing. It's their first metal phone. So they have had these transparent designs all the way along. This one drops that. It's a big shift to their aesthetic. Suddenly the bulk of the body is just metal. It comes in silver or black or a kind of suggestion of a pink.

47:44Nilay Patel:Yeah, this is a very, it's blush.

47:47Dominic Preston:Even blush feels a bit generous. It's a silver with kind of a hint that there might have been some pink near it once. But then they have a camera module, which looks a bit like the other previous nothing thing. So once you get to the camera, that bit's transparent. And that bit again has these little bits of, you know, plastic doohikies underneath and you can see and it looks fun and exciting. And then that phone has what nothing calls the Glyph Matrix, which is basically just a round dot matrix display. They also did on the Phone 3 flagship last year. This isn't totally new. The version on here is bigger, but it's also substantially lower resolution.

48:24Dominic Preston:There are a lot fewer square LEDs to light up in there. So it's actually a lot less useful in some ways. I was really ready to like the fact that it was a bigger size because I found the Phone 3 one a little unhelpful. I like the idea. I didn't actually find it very useful in any sort of practice. This one, I feel like it's going to be even worse. They have options like, you know, a glyph mirror where you can see yourself lit up in the squares, but it's now so low resolution, you cannot make out any meaningful shapes in this display. It's just a blur.

48:53Nilay Patel:This, I will say, I look at this photo of it all, you post a photo of it all lit up, and my immediate reaction is, okay, there's a clock. There's almost nothing else you could put on here. that isn't one big sort of 8-bit icon. Like you could put like a rain cloud on here to be like, it's raining.

49:10Dominic Preston:And that's basically what I think will end up being. A lot of the use cases I suggested before and that I think they're going to push through here is just the idea of like, you can set a custom little emoji-esque icon for say different notifications. You know, the joke they made in the keynote is have a crying face emoji for when you get Slack notifications or something like that. So you can customize it and do things like that, which is fine. It's all very manual from the phone three, at least when I reviewed that before, you already have to go through by app and come up with these designs yourself.

49:37Dominic Preston:You can upload images into it, but it doesn't do anything smart, like just automatically pull the app icon and suggest that as a thing here. You'd have to go and download the WhatsApp icon if you wanted the WhatsApp logo to be what appears when you do it.

49:51Nilay Patel:That's ridiculous. Yes.

49:52Dominic Preston:I can't believe they didn't join that up. It's the most obvious part of this, but yeah. I think this would be a kind of controversial design for nothing fans because the transparency is so central to all the design aesthetic they've had all the way along since they started the company. But I kind of see the logic because they did go transparent with the phone 3 and everyone hated that design. It was not popular at all on the fans of it. I personally thought that phone was really hideous. This one is like different, but I also think it kind of works. There's more of a symmetry to it. It looks a bit more thoughtfully laid out.

50:24Dominic Preston:I like the look of it, but we'll see. Did they say why? Why are they changing it? I think part of it is that it can get slimmer. This is their thinnest phone yet, partly from going to the metal rather than using the plastic. Otherwise, mostly just evolving the design language and things like that. They talk a lot of not moving away from transparency, but evolving the transparent design, refining the transparent design, things like that.

50:50Nilay Patel:I feel like nothing, this is like the challenge of being a sort of Android phone maker in a market. Like you're up in Asia where you're up against the robot phone in a Leica co-brand. Like this phone has Fogo pins. Like the market there is so aggressive now that nothing started as being like, we're the solution to the iPhone. Like we're going to be the counterculture rebels. And they got locked into, and that means our phones are transparent. And that is not enough at this point. Like you have to do something else. I'm, you know, Carl Pei is out there and he's like, we're going to be an AI company, like everyone else says all the time.

51:28Nilay Patel:But I think they got kind of backed into the phones are transparent and that's our whole brand because the brand was not supposed to be about transparent phones. It was supposed to be about much bigger ideas. We'll see what they do next. All right, we got to take a break. It's funny, we talked so much about like the Android market, the hardware market for Android. You can just see it. And Dom, it seems like it was very much on display to MWC. There's stuff happening in the market that's just not coming to the United States. It's like our market is much more constrained. We have different carrier relationships.

51:56Nilay Patel:We've got all this other stuff going on. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about, on the software side, it seems like Android is up for yet another round of changes that Sean has been digging into. So we've got to take a break. We'll be back. We're going to talk about Google and Epic. We'll be right back.

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55:10Nilay Patel:all right we're back on this the episode of the verse cast which everything about android changes forever So we did it with, first we did it with robots. Now we're going to do it with in-app purchases and video games. Ying and the yang of Android. Sean, huge news this week. Google and Epic reached a new settlement. I'm actually, you know, I was covering Apple this week and this happened like on the same day. So I've only skimmed over the top of it really. My understanding is Google and Epic already tried to settle this lawsuit about antitrust and Android. And the judge basically said, I don't trust you.

55:42Nilay Patel:Go away. And then now they're just like, whatever, we're settling anyway.

55:46Sean Hollister:What is going on here? Let me just preface that it was incredible to be in the courtroom for the settlement hearing with Judge Donato trying very, very hard not to say out loud, but instead to make the people in front of him make Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and make Android boss Samir Samad. He was trying very hard to make them say instead of him that the two companies are completely allies right now. They have a secret$800 million backdoor deal that Tim Sweeney basically said he would never do anything like. And him being careful, the judge being careful not to break this confidentiality. But they can't get around this as they're evaluating the settlement.

56:26Sean Hollister:And eventually Tim Sweeney just blurts out what's going on. All right.

56:32Nilay Patel:So I want to get to that. So just to put it in everyone's brain, Epic, which makes Fortnite, very famously sued both Apple and Google for antitrust violations in particular because they don't want to pay the 30 % fee for in-app purchases in Fortnite, which is all their money. And Fortnite's so huge that they basically could afford to get kicked off of both these app stores and not have Fortnite in mobile because they will just collect money from children buying dances on every other platform.

56:56Sean Hollister:PlayStation especially.

56:57Nilay Patel:And this has been going on now for most of my adult life, from what I recall. Six years. Yes. Every day I wake up and Epic and Apple and Google are suing each other, and that's the way it's going to be. So the Epic and Apple case is totally different. The dynamics of that case are very, very different. That is an underground. It's own machinations. The judge in that case is very mad at Apple in particular, all kinds of stuff going on there. Put that out of your brain. This is a different case. In the Google case, because Google runs Android and then it has to ship Android on other companies' phones, there's just more evidence of Google doing monopoly stuff.

57:36Nilay Patel:Like there's just more emails from Google to Samsung and Google to Honor. Like Google has to run its ecosystem. And every now and again, a Google executive is like, do what we want or we'll kill you. And they just have to like write it down an email and send it, which is not what Apple has to do. Right. Like Apple is like, come to Tim's office and then you don't know what happens there. Like Apple's integrated company. It's all one stack. Because the Android ecosystem has to be controlled, there was just vastly more evidence in the Google case of Google doing monopoly stuff.

58:08Sean Hollister:Tremendous amounts of emails. So many. And also evidence that Google was trying to cover up some of this by deleting some of those emails. The judge was very angry about this at the time.

58:20Nilay Patel:Right. So Epic wins, like running away in the Google case in a way that, you know, you can argue about the results of the application and that one's still ongoing. But in the Google case, because there was so much evidence, Epic just wins running away. And then there's there. I'm still I'm still trying to wrap my head around this timeline. And then the judge is going to like issue a remedy, a ruling, say what the punishment is. And then these two show up and they're like, we've settled. And then somewhere in that settlement, Tim Sweeney just admits that there's like a secret$800 deal. deal. And the judge says, no, I don't believe you.

58:51Nilay Patel:This is bad. And this is the part of it. And now they're just doing it anyway. What is going like? Truly, what is going on here?

58:58Sean Hollister:OK, OK, let's see. Years after Epic wins unanimously in this jury verdict and we've gone through we've gone to the appeals and we're waiting to see the Supreme Court takes this up. Suddenly, yes, Epic and Google come out together and say we're settling this. Now, what does that settlement mean? Because you have to remember that these companies are already past the point where any company would usually settle here. The judge has already issued a permanent injunction here that says, hey, Google, you cannot do all of these things anymore. You cannot make these secret deals that incentivize companies to bring games exclusively to Android.

59:36Sean Hollister:You cannot have all these apps on this platform completely under your control. You need to create a place where rival app stores can exist inside the Google Play Store. And you need to give them access to the full catalog of Google Play apps so that an upstart app store could possibly compete against Google Play from within. It's like this entire host and carrier process here where these other app stores can maybe now break Google's monopoly. The judge agrees to all of this incredibly. And now that that injunction has not only been in place for a long time, but been upheld by an appeals court, now suddenly Google and Epic want to be friends.

1:00:20Sean Hollister:And the judge is incredibly skeptical about all of this. But after this settlement hearing where judge is incredibly skeptical and Sweeney Burlerts out all this stuff about secret deal, we find out that Google and Epic are now So joined at the hip for whatever happens next, they come out this week and they say, we are moving ahead with many of these things that the judge was skeptical about being proper remedies for the monopoly that Google had. They are going to move ahead with lower App Store fees, which sounds great. Traditionally, you'd have this 30 % fee that app developers would have to pay to Google.

1:01:00Sean Hollister:They'd take 30 % of what was going through the App Store. unless the app in question was a subscription fee that you're paying, which case would be less, or unless it was going to be the first million dollars of revenue for an app developer. There was a smaller fee for that, but generally 30%. That is the standard app store tax, quote unquote. Now that fee is going to be less for one reason, because Google is going to reduce it to a 20 % standard, down from 30, for in-app purchases. And also because Google is decoupling billing, it's billing fee from its service fee. One of the things that we decided that was decided in the Epic versus Google case is that billing and services were illegally tied together.

1:01:43Sean Hollister:Google is not supposed to be able to say, you have to use our billing system. The judge decided you cannot do that. You will not be able to do that anymore. You'll have to have rival billing systems. App developers should be able to choose another provider like Stripe or PayPal or something to process those transactions. So Google's saying, we're going to go ahead and do that everywhere around the world. We're going to reduce our fees and we're going to decouple billing from payments. But since things are still ongoing in the United States, it's not really a settlement here until the judge has approved that this is a better idea.

1:02:21Nilay Patel:So they're just front running the judge. They're like, judge, this has already happened. Like, don't you want to be cool?

1:02:25Sean Hollister:And it's going to happen almost everywhere else around the world. Google, you know, I talked to Google Android boss Samir Samad, and he's like, we're going to do this everywhere else where we don't need to wait for a judge to approve this. We're going to do this everywhere else we can. We're going to do this everywhere where we don't already have an ongoing case with Epic. We're not being sued. We'll just go ahead and just roll this out everywhere else. And so you, United States, you can do this different, more onerous process if you want, but maybe you should do it the way we're doing it everywhere else.

1:02:57Sean Hollister:Why not? And so they're now proposing that the judge modify the permanent injunction yet again to reflect the new state of things that they're doing everywhere else around the world.

1:03:07Nilay Patel:So basically, they're like, here's our conclusion that we've come to it with Epic. Judge, don't come up with your own system. Just do the thing we did with Epic. Pretty much. There are a couple other weird things going on in there. Well, I'm just curious, because they've obviously paid Epic. You reported on various terms of this payments Epic, this weird secret deal that we don't know a lot about. Right? They're going to do metaverse apps. I don't know what we're doing here. Tim Sweeney is very unhappy with us, because you wrote a story pointing out that he's not allowed to disparage Google's Play Store or App Store policies.

1:03:40Nilay Patel:And he has to say that they're like a pro-competitive actor. And he's out there being like, I can yell at whoever I want. I don't know about that, buddy. But Google has gotten a lot out of this. It seems like Google is driving this car, an Epic, which one is suddenly just along for the ride. That dynamic to me only makes sense if there is hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands.

1:04:03Sean Hollister:Well, in this case, it's probably$800 million changing hands over a number of years because that is the number that came up publicly now. because they have a secret Unreal Engine and services deal of some sort where Google is now going to be using possibly some Unreal Engine things. And Epic is going to be having Google hosting, I think, for these servers. But there's also the whole metaverse app thing. We don't know what that's about yet. It was revealed in this term sheet.

1:04:33Nilay Patel:What a massively successful metaverse concept that everybody loves.

1:04:39Sean Hollister:if if if you believe that maybe the phrase metaverse browsers refers to fortnite refers to possibly i decline can i i would like to be excluded from this narrative no longer being just considered a game can i just can i stop this here i don't i don't mean i don't

1:04:57Nilay Patel:mean to sean you are just the messenger and you're my co-founder here at the virgin i love you deeply i'm so mad at you for making me consider the idea that fortnite is a metaverse you know like I stop it stop telling me that fortnight is metaverse I'll jump to the conclusion

1:05:13Sean Hollister:there is a huge redacted section of the term sheet that we have now seen go through the court filings this huge redacted section it might just be about this formerly secret 800 million dollar unreal engine services deal or maybe the fact that it is redacted in a large portion of this metaverse browsers section is redacted might have to do with maybe epic has gotten some kind of secret sweetheart deal for fortnight in general and maybe google is agreeing to no longer consider it to be a game and so they might even have a more favorable rate than the 20 or 15 percent because it's a metaverse browser because it's a metaverse browser not a game we don't know this

1:05:55Nilay Patel:for sure it's all redacted lots of black so again uh i'm gonna just try to bracket my level of upset from you personally so that's fine i'm still very upset with you um uh i mean this came up in the apple case right is fortnight a game is roblox a game it's hard it's hard you can make these arguments that like in particular like for example roblox is actually just an app development environment in which games are routinely expressed and roblox it's not a game. You just have to leave reality behind to do this. Like most people do not experience these things in this way. And you're saying there's some evidence here that Google has decided that Fortnite is not a game, but rather a metaverse.

1:06:40Sean Hollister:A more generous reading might be that there's some future metaverse browser that is not Fortnite and something else that Epic wants to get a different deal for. Every time you say metaverse browser,

1:06:50Nilay Patel:I think about getting up and leaving. Like I don't, I'm going to shut this down.

1:06:53Sean Hollister:Another interesting thing, which we've not spent a lot of time reporting out yet, but might be interesting to listeners of this Vergecast, Epic and Google in these revised permanent injunctions and these settlements that they want to make, they're trying to define Android as the injunction refers to it. When you're trying to decide where can Google not make sweetheart deals, where you're trying to decide where can Google not impose various things that maybe seem monopolistic, Epic and Google are trying to define Android apps as things that are running explicitly on phones and tablets. And I will tell you right now that while Android is this one thing, Google is currently working on another operating system called aluminum or aluminum, perhaps.

1:07:43Sean Hollister:I was about to say, technically, it's aluminum. Aluminium.

1:07:47Nilay Patel:I don't even mean like a US versus UK English thing. I mean, like, I believe it's actually called aluminum.

1:07:53Sean Hollister:It is spelled that way. It is spelled with the British English spelling. So, yes, aluminum it is. this this operating system it is also revealed in court filings is basically android for pcs and so if if epic and google can somehow say well you know apps for aluminium shouldn't be shouldn't be subject to all of these you know permanent injunction things that we don't like very much and all of a sudden aluminium is everywhere rather than android and google effectively manages to quietly rebrand everything it's doing to aluminium i wonder what that's going to do to this, you know, this attempt to restrict Google's monopoly.

1:08:33Nilay Patel:That's a lot of very subtle, very coordinated moves for Google. Do you know what I mean? This is true. I like everybody over there. They're nice people. But like, we're going to do a series of very subtle, very stealthily coordinated moves that add up to a big result at the end. It's Google. like what come on is it plausible i don't know uh i the thing that i don't understand is why they think the judge will buy this like just laziness just the docket's full and you know i'm tired of you two like fine because the judges already seem so skeptical of all of this on my

1:09:17Sean Hollister:call with um with samir head of android um he he tried to be very deferential out loud to the judge He did not want to suggest that in any way the court would like take this modified injunction that Google and Epic wanted run with it. We talked a little bit, myself, Samir and Tim Sweeney, about the two worlds that might exist after this is all said and done. And they were very clear that there is not going to be a world. There is not a third world where there will be rival Android app stores living within the Google Play Store and registered app stores that you download from the web and put on your phone.

1:10:01Sean Hollister:It will be one or the other, and the judge gets to decide which of those it is in the United States. But it might be the whole world is going on with registered app stores, and everybody gets their non-Google Play stores by downloading through the web. That's how it's going to be around the rest of the world. or it might be that the United States is the exception, where the United States has to carry rival stores within its store, and you'll download the Epic Games Store from inside Google Play, and it will have all the Android apps inside it. But everywhere else in the world, you might have to do something different and download that rival app store from the web.

1:10:34It might be that two-world scenario.

1:10:37Nilay Patel:I feel like bringing that to the judge and being like, don't you want to be like the rest of the world, is one of the least convincing things you can do to a judge in the United States of America possible. Like, they're like, yeah, I don't care about that. I don't, who cares? And then you're like, well, yeah, because in the rest of the world, they've got robot phones. Like, it's already totally different out there. Like, just as a point of leverage, it just seems very confusing to me. Like, don't you want to be like the rest of the world? Historically is one of the least convincing things you can say to any person in the United States.

1:11:08Nilay Patel:Like, no, the answer, like, wholeheartedly is like, no, we will not have health insurance. Like, at no point is anyone here like, yes, the rest of the world has it right.

1:11:17Sean Hollister:I think it just might be different here in the U.S. from here on out. And I wonder if maybe that's a good thing. All of the reduced fees that Google is going to spread around the world, the best versions of them are contingent on app developers joining very specific new programs that incentivize them to be very closely tied to Google, use Google APIs, bring their apps to more devices, and play devil's games. advocate for a moment to make their apps run nicely. I would love to have my phone app run great on a tablet and run great in XR and run great on my, you know, my TV or my car. And that's the thing that Google would like to see happen and is incentivizing.

1:12:00Nilay Patel:This is one of the more interesting dynamics between the Apple and Google cases with Epic. You can see that Google desires the level of control over the app ecosystem that Apple has. And the mechanism of Apple's control is like a long history of beautiful design and like Apple bloggers saying that apps are ugly. And like, there's a normative culture around Apple. And then it has the app store where it's like, would you like to be featured? Make your app beautiful. Right. And there's just like, there are layers of control there. Some of which has nothing to do with Apple itself. And a lot of which have to do with Apple's control over distribution.

1:12:36Nilay Patel:But because it's all just Apple, you can't be like, they're a monopoly over the app store. Because if you buy an iPhone, and get the app store. Google to exert the control over the ecosystem has to be like, how do we get leverage over Samsung? And then they have to go get it and use it and like write the email being like, we have identified our leverage over you. Here it is. Comply or death.

1:12:58Sean Hollister:Neela, you and I have been here long enough that we have, there was a point that you and I were advocating for Google to have this control. We were tired of fragmentation. We were so tired of Android fragmentation. We were like, look at these Skyhook filings. Yes, Google's cracking the whip and making sure Samsung doesn't fuck up the phone every time.

1:13:18Nilay Patel:If you can write us an email and explain what Sean means by look at these Skyhook filings, we'll find a way to get you some merch. That is a deep cut, my dude. No, I'm with you, right? But that was also a reflection of the fact that all the skins that the manufacturers were putting on Android were bad. I'm saying here in 2026, we're not looking at whatever water droplet Samsung touch whiz garbage. We're looking at a bunch of phone makers around the world, legitimately pushing that platform beyond the boundaries of what anybody considered it could do. Right. And it, it, it all kind of looks like iOS and it all kind of looks like this.

1:13:52Nilay Patel:And that's like, you can have whatever feelings you want about that, but we're not in the air crazy era of fragmentation where it like boundary pushing on the platform and google's need for control is kind of like completely like it tangential to that right dom like do you see like there's not a lot of google influence at mwc they're there but none of these devices depend on google's innovation no you don't see a really

1:14:15Dominic Preston:big push for them on on how googly their phones are um like you said all the uis are very different to what you'll see on a pixel but often like you said closer to an iphone than a pixel phone um a lot of them will have you know they're they're android and they've got gemini and things like that but they're not talking about gemini they're talking about their own ai tools their own ai assistants all this stuff that's built on top of it and built around it um and no one's really no one's even comparing themselves to to google and to pixel phones and and taking them as a yardstick of what counts as success in the industry or or an idealized version of an android phone or what they should be aspiring to or building from whenever they want to talk about any other company it's just apple or samsung um google is is there there's there's this bit called android avenue whether you can go and play with demos of new android features and that's kind of

1:15:01Nilay Patel:about the presence it has yeah i don't we'll see i just like the idea that they're gonna show up to a judge in the united states and be like don't you want to you don't want the united states to different and it's like well even if you just look at the market like it already is so different and then who cares anyway sean is deep in it we're gonna keep covering this quasi settlement that's not a settlement. If you know what's going on with the secret$800 million deal and whether or not Fortnite is a metaverse, Brad, you just let us know. We're in the game. I'm very curious what all that means. We got to take a break.

1:15:32Nilay Patel:We'll be back with the lightning round. Support for the show comes from Zapier. When it comes to incorporating AI into your workflows, there's lots to consider and lots of trend chasing. But actually making it happen starts with the right tools, like Zapier. Zapier is how you break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company, for real. It can help you actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about doing it. Their AI orchestration platform allows you to bring the power of AI to any workflow so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to whatever tools your team already uses so you can incorporate AI exactly where you need it.

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1:17:45Nilay Patel:we're back it's the lightning round unsponsored for flavor by the way i keep we keep saying that we have some like wacky ideas about all of this sponsoring and flavor in particular you'll see i'm just teasing that here you'll see i think you're gonna you're gonna like some of these it has nothing to do with me no one can ever pay to tell me what to do but other people who don't work at the verge you could pay to tell them what to do you just think about that for one minute. Think about what that might mean. All right, let's start. We got to start. Gentlemen, I apologize for this. We do this to start the lightning round every week.

1:18:17Nilay Patel:It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy. Travis tells me we don't have theme music this week. And I'm looking at the note for why. And I just want to tell the audience, I'm very disappointed in you. And the note for why is that apparently we're being overrun with AI slot music for Brennan Carr is a dummy. and we don't want to play the AI slot music. I'm sorry. So if you can make really, really good AI music, which we have played in the past, I believe, Travis, correct? We'll play that. If you want to make your own Gregorian chant, which we ran last week, which I believe, Travis, we should run again this week, we'll play that.

1:18:58Nilay Patel:But no mid-tier AI slot. That's the rules. Can we get some, like, Brendan Card beatboxing? Yeah. Some of that. We've played some very avant-garde Brendan Card themes. Travis, can we just run the Gregorian chant one more time to start this one for Brendan Carr is a dummy? Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:19:22Nilay Patel:So this week, this is a very short Brendan Carr is a dummy because we've had too many gadgets. And quite frankly, Brendan's a dummy, but it waxes and wanes. This isn't true First Amendment Brendan Carr stuff. This is just the man is dumb and lives in the past. So this week, he proposed a rule. The FCC is going to vote on it this month, trying to incentivize United States companies to bring their call centers back to America and then further require the people who work in the call centers to be proficient in American standard English. I'm just pointing out the reason the call centers are abroad is because the labor is cheaper in other countries and so if you force the American companies to bring the call centers over here, they're not going to pay the higher labor rates, they're just going to let AI answer the phone I can't say it any clearer than that, they're already trying to do this because the AI is cheaper than the already cheap foreign labor and so if you're like you have to have your call centers in the United States, they'll be like, yes, they're in data centers now.

1:20:32Nilay Patel:He's such a dummy. Like, I don't, this is such an obvious outcome of this rule. So the way he's doing this is he can't actually tell people where to put their call centers. He can put limits on call volume going to other countries, which would then force you to put your call centers in the United States. This is the most incredible kind of rate regulation you could have in 2026 on a global telecom network. This is the exact sort of stuff that, like, when they argue against net neutrality, they're like, why would you regulate the networks and do rate regulation? The free market should decide. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no.

1:21:05Nilay Patel:People don't like hearing foreign accents, so I will do intense rate regulation on the phone network, which I have legislation over, which I have jurisdiction over, and I'll move the call centers to the United States where all these companies will happily pay full freight American labor rates and not use AI. Very dumb man.

1:21:24Dominic Preston:I've got to say, anyway, I don't know why you're so skeptical about this. I mean, Trump Mobile managed to set up its call center in the U.S. quite successfully from what I understand.

1:21:33Nilay Patel:But that's the only thing they do. They set up a call center to just accept your money and send you nothing. That's a great business. Like, if you could set up a business where you employ a bunch of very kind people in Kansas to answer the phone, take your credit card, and then charge you$200, like, at scale. Like, that is a—but then do nothing else. great business. At some point, you've collected enough pre-order payments to just run your call center on the interest alone while you buy crypto, which I'm confident is what Don Jr. is doing. Yeah. Anyway, Don, by the way, do you have a Trump mobile update for us this week?

1:22:15Dominic Preston:Only that it was not at MWC. I did look. I looked for, I searched Trump in the MWC database. I looked for Liberty Mobile, which is the sort of MVNO that really feels like is Trump Mobile behind a sort of gold sheen. But there was no sign of them whatsoever. I really tried. You know, I was hoping they'd be there with some sort of flag-waving booth asserting American exceptionalism abroad or something.

1:22:37Nilay Patel:When you said you were going to look for them there, I was like, I don't, why would Trump Mobile be in Europe? Like, they don't go there. That's not allowed. We don't acknowledge Europe. But I was kind of hoping you'd see them because they had rebranded it.

1:22:50Dominic Preston:A stamp of US flag on Barcelona soil. I mean, while I was there, there was a lot of stuff in the news about Trump saying very angry things about Spain and Spanish politics for reasons I didn't fully understand. So we're doing the perfect excuse to go and, you know, lay down the law at MWC2. Yeah, it does.

1:23:05Nilay Patel:All right. That's been Brendan Carr as a dummy with a little side show into the Trump phone. Brendan, if you're listening and you would like to investigate Liberty Mobile, which is just collecting payments for a phone that doesn't exist, by all means, we would love to hear the results of your investigation. In the meantime, I'll remind you that it's 2026. No one's watching broadcast television. and if you move call centers to the United States, they will 100 % be answered by ChatGPT. It is as much of a guarantee as I can give you, Brendan. You're always welcome to come on the show. I think you're a coward and a dummy.

1:23:33Nilay Patel:That's been Brendan Carr is a dummy, American's favorite podcast for the podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:23:45Nilay Patel:I mean, that alone is so much more high-quality thinking than anything Brendan has done for the past year. I don't know how else to say it. All right, we got a lightning round. Sean, what do you got?

1:23:56Sean Hollister:I have a 61-pound machine that eats plastic and spritz out bricks. I'm waiting for the return label. This is the Clear Drop soft plastic compactor. We saw that this thing was going to be at CES. It pulls in all of your household plastic, all the thin household plastic, the bag that you took off your comforter, your snack wrappers, your Ziplocs, all that kind of stuff. You put it in the machine. eventually weeks later it will compress it and then heat it into a three pound brick 2.6 3.3 it varies a little bit and then you mail that off across the country to uh some guy's house uh but properly uh after they change the shipping labels it won't be some guy's house anymore

1:24:38Nilay Patel:wait wait wait wait wait wait wait just wait to just pump the brakes

1:24:44Sean Hollister:whose house uh matt matt it went to matt daly's house matt daly is uh an advisor and and kind of a head of product and marketing for the company um he is he seems to be a very nice guy who gave us a great virtual tour also um on on the website for this product of which he is an advisor there are two testimonials from him about how good the product is and for some reason the bricks were going to his house to make sure that they didn't have too much stuff. I don't want to heap too much criticism on Matt Daly. He gave us a great virtual tour and has been very patient with our questions throughout the entire process.

1:25:18Sean Hollister:But where the bricks should go and eventually did go in our case is to a facility in Indiana where they get ground up and turned into downcycled plastic products in the future. So that might be in composite lumber for decking or lawn furniture. They might be in highway, the highway guardrails. The way they get connected to the poles that they're on is sometimes through a very cheap piece of plastic. It might be in those. This is what you can do to keep your plastics out of the landfill, assuming you want to pay$1 ,400 over two years for the machine and for the mailers that let you send these bricks to them once a month.

1:26:00Nilay Patel:I mean, I read your review. I watched your video. I have to say, I enjoyed the part of the video where you were like, what happens if I stick my hand in here? Seemed ill-advised. The answer is, Sean, remains intact, has not been turned into a brick. It's all good. And then, I mean, it's essentially a negative review where you're like, this doesn't make any sense and I wouldn't buy this. And the company was like, thank you. And that happens so rarely that the company was like, yes, you've pointed out a number of flaws in our idea.

1:26:25Sean Hollister:The best I've ever gotten before today from a PR representative after a review vaguely like this is, you're tough, but you're fair. This one was like glowing. Verge does real journalism. You should read this site. By the way, we think we should fix these things. So this was wonderful. And from the guy who I accused of, you know, having to send the bricks to his house and writing those testimonials. He says he wrote them before he started working for the company. So it's all good.

1:27:00Nilay Patel:There's a number of products in this zone out here. There's a bunch of like smart composters. It all feels like you can buy consumer goods to make you feel good about buying other consumer goods. And at the end, none of them ever math out. Like, that's just how that feels to me.

1:27:14Sean Hollister:The idea, and Justine, our senior science reporter, Justine Kalma, who co-wrote this piece with me and tackled the plastics section of it, she is adamant, and she has the experts to back it up, that we cannot fix the plastics problem by getting rid of the plastics that are already out there. We need to make fewer things out of plastic in order to not have a tremendous amount of plastics overwhelming our world and our landfills. And so, you know, she came in this worried that this might actually be a project that the plastics industry might have funded to make it look better, to make the use of plastics look better.

1:27:56Sean Hollister:Because some of the advisors for this company have some ties to the plastics company. We didn't really find that out. I don't know that this is necessarily that. They put a lot of work into creating a device, and that actually seems to exist. But still, this is not the solution right now, and it may never be. Yeah.

1:28:13Nilay Patel:All right.

1:28:13Sean Hollister:Tom, what do you got?

1:28:14Dominic Preston:Okay. I have the Infinix Note 60 Ultra, which is another stupid, weird phone. But what I really have is the wireless charger that Infinix shipped to me with it, which is shaped like a racing car. It is an enormous Qi charger, which the actual Qi charger is just a small puck in the center, which you can kind of pop out. But it's in this enormous, quite like weighty, solid plastic base, fully shaped like a sort of chrome and carbon fiber racing car. It has really strong like Simpsons, I sleep in a racing car, do you energy to it. It's incredibly nice. The whole thing has happened because the phone, Infinix, for what it's worth, are a company, they're one of the Chinese manufacturers.

1:28:59Dominic Preston:They're owned by a bigger company called Tranchion, who also owns Techno, who we spoke about earlier with the modular phones. Infinix are very big in Africa, parts of South America, parts of Asia, particularly Southeast Asia. No presence at all in Europe, really. This phone, their first Ultra, is a partnership with the car design company Pininfarina. So the whole thing is ostensibly car-themed. But what's funny is the actual phone itself has almost no car-theming whatsoever. There's like one RGB light on the back that they call the, I think it's the floating tail light. and it's just like sure there's a light cars have lights on the back too that that checks out oh

1:29:37Nilay Patel:this is a tail light yeah this is a big red bar across the back of the phone it's it's i mean

1:29:42Dominic Preston:maybe i'm doing it down it is it is a bit like a tail light but that's the only carish touch to the whole thing there's like a dot matrix display on the back of the phone that is not a car thing cars don't tend to have dot matrix displays last i checked um but they just went all in on these accessories which i don't even know if you can buy you know like they sent this to me but that It must be some weird thing they sent to the press. It also, like, they sent me a SIM tool, which is shaped like a racing car. Like, I can just, like, pop out my SIM with my tiny little racing car SIM tool. And I love this.

1:30:12Dominic Preston:I'm going to treasure the SIM tool, at least. I don't know if I quite want to charge my phone on a racing car every night. But I do. I swap SIMs a lot because I'm reviewing phones all the time. And so I do have a sense of, like, the SIM tools I like, you know? I like some nothing ones because they have a kind of chunky plastic handle to them. but I think the racing car might be the the pride of my collection now

1:30:32Nilay Patel:okay two things one Pin and Frina is just a very funny company I don't I don't know if you're as deep into car world design

1:30:39Dominic Preston:I am the opposite of a car guy so I know like okay so Pin and Frina is famous

1:30:43Nilay Patel:for designing some of the most iconic Ferraris of all time like

1:30:46Dominic Preston:you would

1:30:47Nilay Patel:and like other Italian brands Testarossa

1:30:50Sean Hollister:give me a Testarossa yeah

1:30:52Nilay Patel:just like hilariously Pin and Frina was like they were the ones and a bunch of Fiat's like they're a car design company But now they make their own cars. They make their own weird EVs. So, like, they're constantly trading on this history that is long gone because you know who designs Ferraris now? Johnny Ive. So, like, that's gone. And then second, it's just, like, this picture you have of the lock screen where there's just a random quote on the lock screen. Let me just read you what the lock screen says. there is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can hinder the firm resolve of a determined soul.

1:31:29Nilay Patel:And it just says that on the lock screen. I think it's beautiful. Words to live by. Can you change that? Or is that just what it always says on the lock screen?

1:31:39Dominic Preston:There are two to pick from. They're not really fully on the lock screen. You kind of swipe up into them. And there's no explanation of what they are, why they're there, whether you can add more, change them, whether they're going to add more in an update or something. I don't know. I'd love to kind of keep getting more of these. I'm going to see if I can... No, I don't have the other one to hand, sadly. The other one is something about crying and about how if you cry, it's because you're too strong or something. Crying is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength, but in much more grandiose kind of upsetting wording.

1:32:13Nilay Patel:That's true. By the way, Sean, they did design, Peninferno did design a Testarossa. I went look at it. They sure did. And now I think the crying is because Johnny Hyatt is designing the new Ferraris and they're doing weird EVs. That's incredible. All right. My lightning round one, I think this is the funniest little stat about our audience I can give you. So on Apple Day, cover all the new Apple stuff. The iPhone 17e, the new MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo, which is a huge, everyone wants to see it. The iPad Air, which no one wants to see. So we're like looking at the traffic. David and I are like in the car on the way back to the office to be like, what's everyone interested in?

1:32:51Nilay Patel:We're like prepping for the live stream. And it's the traffic. I'm dead serious. The number one story on the site was the MacBook Neo. Guess what number two was? Go ahead. Go ahead. Guess what number two was.

1:33:05Dominic Preston:Kobo remote. It was the Kobo remote, which is not any of the other Apple products.

1:33:13Nilay Patel:The number two story on the site on Apple Day was the Kobo remote. which is just a little clicker for Kobo e-readers that you can just press the button and it turns the page. And it was the MacBook Neo and then this like, I don't even know how much it is. It's like$10.

1:33:28Dominic Preston:It's a$30 clicker. $30, it's so expensive.

1:33:31Nilay Patel:It has a horrible branding on it. It says Rakuten Kobo on it. The thing is incredibly ugly. It's a$30 clicker. It has two buttons on it and one is page forward and one is page back. We have a great headline. Andrew Lesteschi wrote this headline and he's like, I love this thing. I love clicking my e-reader in bed. And I'm just telling you, it was the number two traffic on our site on Apple Day. It is my favorite. It's like everything I need to know about the Verge audience right there. Like, what do you actually want? You want a remote free e-reader that doesn't require a weird Bluetooth hack. Very good.

1:34:03Sean Hollister:Secret is everybody wants to be bundled up in a blanket. Nobody wants to put their hands on a book.

1:34:08Nilay Patel:Books. That's the one. Sean, what's your other lightning round?

1:34:14Sean Hollister:I have the Lego smart brick. I have the Lego smart brick right here. You have the Lego smart brick. I have two of them. I've got four of them actually.

1:34:22Nilay Patel:So I heard that they were out, like people could buy them, but none of the software worked yet. Yeah.

1:34:27Sean Hollister:So the thing about them is they're not supposed to require any software. In fact, Lego, the Lego group just did like an hour long live stream the other day saying that these things work out of the box. You do not need to use the app. Some of the designers said, I've been working on this product for two years. I've never even seen the app. The app is just for downloading updates for future functionality and for turning down the volume if you are a parent. These are the only things that it is for. It is important that it has both of these functions, though, because number one, they are loud and annoying and they make the same sounds over and over again, which is not something I expect to go again.

1:35:06Sean Hollister:And two, they do not have all of their functionality out of the gate. The original sets, the original three sets that come with them, all of which I have here and can lift if you want, X-Wing TIE Fighter and Throne Room Duel, all three of these, they use light sound color sensor to make certain different sounds. They can detect like a figure nearby, but they don't have all the most fun stuff we saw at CES, like being able to tell precisely where two bricks are from one another, like how close and what their orientation is like. They don't have ambient light sensor functionality yet. They don't have any, they're not using their microphones to like detect sound yet.

1:35:44Sean Hollister:And there are very few, as far as I've seen, multi-brick interactions where you can actually see all kinds of cool stuff going on that isn't simply swoosh and blast and so on. So I have here, this is the X-Wing with a Lego smart brick inside. Pick this thing up. Is that one dead already? Oh, by the way, They only have about 45 minutes of battery life. Lego recommends that you leave them on the charger when not in use. And I did not do that last night. So, okay. So now this is an X-Wing. I don't know how well you can hear that. And so we got Luke in there. Plays the Force theme. So you know that Luke's in there.

1:36:18Sean Hollister:You can hear R2 occasionally. If I spin the thing upside down. Yeah, we got some sounds. He's got a little scream. He's going upside down at some point. And so I can blast by pressing this button. Maybe.

1:36:32Nilay Patel:It does seem like what Lego has made here is like one of those crazy sound effect boards for morning zoo cruise radio shows. Do you know what I mean? That's like the vibe I'm getting from this demo that you're giving me right now.

1:36:43Sean Hollister:When we were at CES, they showed us all kinds of amazing things that it could do. Like you could have a little police car and you could have a thief try to like commandeer that police car. It would sound the alarm, wouldn't let him in. And then you brought the police guy over there and then, come on, let me shake that thing again. You brought the police guy over there and he would be allowed to be in his own thing, let him in. And then the robber would scream when the police guy enters the car. All this kind of fun stuff that's like multiple figure interaction. But with these ones here, the best I've gotten is you can have the sets blast each other a little bit with the multiple bricks.

1:37:16Sean Hollister:Let me get this Millennium Falcon up here. There we go.

1:37:19Nilay Patel:I do feel like I need to remind you, Sean, although we are on YouTube, this is primarily a radio show. Oh. This is some of the most tortured radio that has ever been made in the history of the world.

1:37:30Sean Hollister:I did ask you if you wanted to see them and I did not wait for your answer. I was like, I'm going to launch into this thing right here. Okay.

1:37:38Nilay Patel:No, I feel like I understand what's going on here. When these things were announced and you wrote about them, I would say, I caught this from you and I 100 % caught it from the audience that everyone wants this to be great. Everyone sees the potential and everyone is fully expecting to be disappointed. and I'm watching you disdainfully shake a Millennium Falcon at me right now on a stream and I would say the disappointment is high.

1:38:05Sean Hollister:Yeah, yeah. The Lego, the smart brick, it deserves better than these first Star Wars sets. And I'm worried, I'm a little worried that if this is what they've got for us out of the gate, maybe there are some hidden limitations that they did not discuss at sea as maybe some of the better functionality uses way more battery life. Somebody's already torn apart one of these bricks. The battery, the milliamp hours in this battery can be measured in the tens. I think it has like 42 milliamp hours or something like that. So it's very small. They recommend that you always leave the thing on the charger when you're not using it.

1:38:42Sean Hollister:The batteries are not removable, not replaceable. The entire brick has disposal instructions for it when they eventually run out of charge and can't use it anymore. And it's all very expensive. You're paying, you know,$70,$80 for one of the starter sets. And it comes with a few things to do. Like you can have a little Stormtrooper turret blast at your X-Wing. And you can have a scanning station scan around. My six-year-old loved scanning around for Darth Vader with the scanning station. But after like a day or so of me leaving this stuff on my coffee room table for them to play with whenever they wanted to, they were not playing with them whenever they wanted to.

1:39:24they were watching screens.

1:39:26Sean Hollister:They were asking for Minecraft videos. They were reading books. They were playing with their dolls. So I don't know.

1:39:31Nilay Patel:Yeah. All right. Well, we'll wait for that full review. Although I suspect I know what it's going to say. All right, Tom, what else you got?

1:39:38Dominic Preston:Okay. So first bit of context here. I've been in Spain for most of the past week. The first thing I knew about the war in Iran was waking up one morning in my hotel room, opening blue skies, seeing, oh, a war started half an hour ago. Cool. That's great.

1:39:53Nilay Patel:Very 2026 situation.

1:39:56Dominic Preston:I've got to go to a phone launch now. So, you know, I'm going to go see a robot phone and I'll hope this war sorts itself out. I was then really busy all week. There were a lot of phones. We'd gone over that. So the second thing I saw related to the Iran war was a minute long video put out by the White House Twitter account, which was a Call of Duty highlight video, including video game footage and shots of missiles hitting Iranian targets.

1:40:24Nilay Patel:Oh, God.

1:40:26Dominic Preston:That's the most I know about what's actually happening in Iran right now. This is like a video. They tweeted it out saying, courtesy of the red, white, and blue. And it opens with like a 10-second clip, which is genuinely from Call of Duty. It's a clip from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, apparently. It's the animation of when you call in a nuclear strike after you've got a kill streak sufficiently high. Oh, good. That's what you want. Very reassuring. And then there's 50 seconds of just clips of actual missile strikes that have been hitting actual targets over the past week, presumably some of which have included casualties.

1:40:59Dominic Preston:The whole thing is set to music. And there's a couple bits with like voice barks, which I assume are also from Call of Duty. They sound very much like those kind of like little NPC lines barked out by a character in Call of Duty. I mean, there's been a lot of dystopian stuff, but this one really hit me.

1:41:15Nilay Patel:I do feel like we've spent so much time on this show, on the site, on Decoder, talking about deep fakes and reality detection and cryptographic signatures and C2PA and plenty of this work. And like, we rarely contend with the fact that people are routinely confused by video game footage.

1:41:34Dominic Preston:Yes.

1:41:35Nilay Patel:All the time. And it's not weird AI stuff. It's literally just screencaps of Call of Duty and Microsoft Flight Simulator and like all this stuff. and I don't know that there's like a you can't be like we will do deep fake detection of Call of Duty.

1:41:50Dominic Preston:Yeah, it's real Call of Duty stuff. It's actually a weird existential crisis.

1:41:53Nilay Patel:No, that's a real video game. But it happened in the video game. But you're just using it to lie.

1:42:00Sean Hollister:You just need more video game journalists. You need more video game journalists everywhere and the staff of every newsroom to be like that is not real. That's Call of Duty. That is Call of Duty. That is Halo. That is bad.

1:42:12Nilay Patel:That's horrible. We're doing a story, by the way, Tini Nguyen on our site has been trying to identify the people in the administration who post these things, where they come from. There's a pretty elaborate system that we can kind of like see the shape of in the world where there are like Discord servers or people like make these things and send them to administration. If you know, you tip us. You just send us a note because we're reporting that out. I'm, once you see a content farm, like once you've been in media for long enough, you like, you recognize a content farm from like a hundred miles away.

1:42:48Nilay Patel:You're like, oh, the Trump administration is running a content farm. It's just a very weird content farm that posts Call of Duty clips in front of real war footage, but it's a content farm. I know what that looks like. So we're, we're trying to find the shape of it. So if you know, if you have any insight, uh, send us a note, cause we're, we're chasing that one down. All right. My last one, I'll keep this very quick. We're, we're way over. this is what happens when David's not here is they just let me off the leash. In the background of all of this, Ticketmaster is on trial for being an illegal monopoly here in the United States.

1:43:20Nilay Patel:It's a very weird one because the Trump administration has to pick up a case that the Biden administration started, right? And this all started with Taylor Swift tickets and all this. In the background, there's a lot of history here. But the Trump DOJ is pursuing this case. There was a thought that it would get settled early because previous figures from Trump One were lobbying for Ticketmaster. There's just endless complexity of this one, but it's at trial right now. Lauren Feiner is in that courtroom. It is wild stuff left and right. And the one she filed today, just as we were coming on, is basically a story in which the Barclays Center thought that it might leave its contract with Ticketmaster and go with SeatGeek.

1:44:04Nilay Patel:and in retaliation Ticketmaster which also manages a bunch of artists pulled the Billie Eilish show at the last minute and you just see this stuff now it's just coming to light like the whole industry's been talking this stuff forever but it's in the background of this and the reason I'm bringing it up here on the Vergecast is I keep pointing this out like our whole world is run by databases that people control and like Ticketmaster is just a database of venues and artists and literally seats and who owns the seats and like all that's sort of like up for grabs lately and like some of the biggest monopolies in the world are just like weird databases and ticketmaster is one of them um and lauren's in the courtroom right now is like maybe it's going to get torn down and like more people get more access to databases in weird way once you start noticing this you're like oh that's all ai is going to do to doordash right like it's it's the dynamic of like who gets to access the database and how and on what terms Woo, that's up for grabs.

1:45:01Nilay Patel:Right? Like, just, like, fully up for grabs. What is the Play Store? It is a database of apps. Like, who gets to access it on what terms and who has to pay whom for what? All of that right now is up for grabs. And it's crazy to look at the Live Nation case and Ticketmaster case and see the same dynamic. So go read Lauren's coverage because it's all in there. And also, it will make you very mad at Ticketmaster, which, from what I understand, is a feeling people enjoy. It's like, 4 o 'clock, it's time for our two-minute hated Ticketmaster. Like, it's like a thing people like. So that coverage on the site, it's very good.

1:45:31Nilay Patel:There's all kinds of other stuff on the site. We had a wild week on The Verge this week. Go read it. As a reminder, you can subscribe to The Verge to support all that journalism, to make it so that no one can tell us what to do, which is my favorite thing about working here at The Verge. And you get ad-free episodes of our podcast, including Decoder and Version History. You get a bunch of newsletters. You can email us at thevergecastatheverge.com. You can also call the hotline at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gavez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

1:46:01Nilay Patel:We will be back next week. Rocking it.