Tim Cook is destroying his own legacy

27:39I actually don't think he's going to be remembered well. I think he's going to be remembered as the guy who capitulated. I think you're right. I went back and was reading Tim Cook wrote and posted publicly a thing after George Floyd was killed in 2020. And let me just read you the beginning. The tone shift of this is just insane. And then we can move on. But here's how it starts. It says, right now, there's a pain deeply etched in the soul of our nation and in the hearts of millions. To stand together, we must stand up for one another and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism.

28:12Like, the word and feeling and tone of that could not be more different from what has happened. And I remind you, that happened in the first Trump administration. Yeah. The external conditions were nominally the same. It's just hard to read both of those and have any feeling that Tim Cook meant either one of them. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think it's easier to blame the nebulous idea of racism, which is what that is. Yes. Right? He's not blaming the cops in that statement. And here, there's only one thing to blame. Right? An out-of-control secret police, and he just can't say it. Yeah. I don't know, man.

28:51Don't go to the parties. That's my advice. I think just of a piece with all of this stuff, there was a bunch of news this week about the changes with TikTok. Basically, the deal went through last week. TikTok USA got off to, I would say, just a horrifically bad start. They couldn't keep the thing online enough to show you videos, which is a bit of a problem if you're TikTok. There was also there was a bunch of meta news. Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call that AI is the future of social media and a bunch of people just like made fart noises into their computers as a response. But it seems to me that there is a thing that's happening here where the sort of public at large, and I hate to generalize everybody, but it kind of feels like any benefit of the doubt, any belief in the general desire to do the right thing and do a good job with these platforms in particular.

29:47It's just gone. It's gone. Utterly gone. Gone. First of the TikTok thing is very funny because I think that there's going to be some sort of weird new ownership censorship scandal coming. Right? The Ellison family, Oracle, bought TikTok. A group of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, are part of the consortium that bought TikTok. Like, a bunch of people who have expressed beliefs about content moderation just bought an important platform, and I suspect they're going to do something with it. maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're not going to, but I think they will. I don't think that's anything to do with what happened this last week.

30:24I think that what happened this last week is Oracle has to run something now. And then it broke. Yeah. And like a very funny part of this is TikTok kept putting out statements being like our data center partner put like had an outage and it's like, you mean Oracle, the company that bought you? You just can't say it. This is the catastrophic system failure I was referring to at the beginning. They called it a catastrophic system failure. And it's like, you mean, Larry? You mean dad broke it? Because that's your data center partner. The company that bought you because the government made it happen.

31:00Like, why can't you just say it? I think I would be back in on TikTok if they were just like, you know, Larry did it again, guys. Yeah, dad broke it. You just scrunch around the garage and he unplugged the server. Which is basically the Oracle experience from what I'm told. So there's that, which is very funny. Then there's some reporting from, I think, Bobby Allen at NPR that because they separated the infrastructure from ByteDance at large, there really was a data center problem with Oracle in the U.S. And it was supposed to fail over to the ByteDance data center in Singapore. And that link was broken.

31:35And then there was a catastrophic failure. This is also very funny because I would remind you, TikTok was banned 100 years ago. Yeah. Like, they have been prepared for this outcome for a long time. You would think. And to only now realize that the failover link was reliant on the illegal data center is just the funniest outcome. Yeah. But I do think it suggests no one trusts them. No one trusts content moderation. No one trusts what they see in their feeds. Instagram had this weird bug where stories were not getting any views. And so everyone leapt immediately to anything I post about ICE isn't getting any views.

32:16TikTok had the weird bug in DMs where it appeared the word Epstein was getting blocked in DMs, but only if you sent it as a single word, which is not how anyone talks in DMs. But everyone leapt to TikTok as banning the word Epstein because of ICE, which is a conspiracy theory that if you just sort of examine it, it makes no sense. And you're like, oh, no one trusts these people. They're all too big. All of their content moderation has gone away. They throw it all out the window for community notes or not even community notes in the case of Meta. They say it's happening, but it's not actually happening.

32:48And now the Trump family and its aura of corruption has, like, personally touched all these platforms. Mark Zuckerberg will do anything he can to get in Trump's good graces. He's still not in Trump's good graces because he's still Mark Zuckerberg. Like, what are you going to do with that? And we can see there's other platforms that are growing because people are totally fed up. Yeah. And I don't think I don't. Can you see how they can recover the trust? Because I can't. No. And in part because it is so hard to see. Right. That like something as as flagrant as they took it over and immediately banned the word Epstein from TikTok is just not how it works.

33:28That's like, that's not what these companies do typically, unless, you know, like, could that happen eventually? Sure. I mean, it is what happened with Elon, right? He took it over and immediately changed how that moderation worked. He did. That is very true. And I think we're going to see that in this case, right? Like someone was asking me the other day, is there a world in which at the end of this, TikTok remains TikTok and it sort of feels the same and this transition is normal? And my answer was no. Like even absent all of the politics, just the fact of who these people are and the way that they're retraining the algorithm and the way that they're rethinking the way that people's data is stored and the way that they're going to redo content moderation, it's going to be different.

34:10And it's very hard to imagine it's not going to be worse. And the hole that they're in now suggests that they would have to do a bunch of very loud, proactive, successful things to make this work. And again, I would remind you, TikTok has been trying to do this for years. Project Texas was like as loud and nakedly transparent as I think it is possible to be in this space. And it didn't do anything for anybody. And I think once you've burned your reputation to this extent, I think it's very hard to get back. And it's the same for Tim Cook. Like, are we one cool iPhone feature away from everybody being like, Tim's genius?

34:44Like, no, I just don't see it. I don't know how you get this back. I mean, Tim has spent years pretending to be surprised by his own products at product introductions. Like, I don't think he can announce the new feature and be like, I did product innovation. Right. Like, I've personally seen this man have Johnny Ive, like, point at the back of a Mac Pro, and he's like, wow, look at the fans. And it's like, you've seen it before, right? Yeah. Like, I don't know what that is. No one believes that he's a product innovator. Like, I think what I'm getting at is, like, once you have the stain of corruption, it's yours forever.

35:17Yes. You can't get away from it. And all of these companies right now feel corrupt because they are so close to the nakedly corrupt thing that I don't know if TikTok can ever get the trust back. I think it will just be conspiracy theories about content moderation from here on out. And I certainly don't think Meta is going to get any of it back, given their history, given the fact that Instagram is just a platform for the weirdest slop. Man, I saw a sexy Winnie the Pooh just doing the Dougie the other day. And I was like, I don't, this is making me feel too many feelings. I saw a sexy Winnie the Pooh doing a Dougie is not a sentence I'm going to forget you saying anytime soon.

35:53A lot of people have seen it, and a lot of the comments suggest that a lot of the people had the same emotional breakdown that I did at that time. I am officially never a child again after seeing that video. Damn, Winnie. Anyhow, these platforms have lost our trust. Yeah. And I think that's one of the weirdest outcomes of all this because they're also how all of these videos are being distributed. And so there's something very important there about being able to trust what your eyes can see, being trust that it's not being manipulated by AI in real time, that it's not fully generated by AI, and that the people distributing the content to you are telling you the truth and are trustworthy.

36:32And can reach you. And can reach you. Every single one of those is a lever that now these people have, a new group of people has an opportunity to pull. Yeah. And there's like, I think it's very hard to show how to do better. is in when you've entered the faith. Like even again, if I'm going to approach this with the best faith possible and say Larry Ellison just wants TikTok to be awesome. He just wants to watch sick videos of trucks. Like that's all Larry Ellison wants. If I believed that, he is still going to have an incredibly hard time convincing people that he is not who they think he is because of the unbelievably long list of evidence suggesting he is exactly who they think he is.

37:10And we've hit this point now where like all this stuff with the Instagram thing, they're perfectly reasonable technical explanations for why view counts wouldn't be going up the way that they're supposed to on Instagram. Everybody immediately leaps to conspiracy theory. This is malicious in some way. And it's like you said, I think once you've inspired that immediate connecting of dots in people's brains, you can't undo it. Yeah. And especially once your platform has been so successful spreading every other conspiracy theory in the world. Yeah. Like you're stuck with that. You live in a house that you built.

37:41Well, and I think the bet for all, I mean, the bet for Twitter in a very real way, And I think the bet for TikTok is going to basically be, where are you going to go? What's your other move? Which is why it's been fascinating. Have you joined Upscrolled yet? I have not joined Upscrolled. There's another, Upscrolled is the TikTok clone, right? It's like number one in the app store. Yep. Not yet. There's another one, Skylight, which is the app protocol, open social web TikTok clone that I'm interested in. I just haven't installed it on my phone yet. Skylight is very cool. I think Skylight is really neat that it exists more than it is like a particularly sophisticated product, if that makes sense.

38:11but it's like it is built on all the stuff that makes Blue Sky special and interesting, but it's TikTok. And I think that's very cool. Upscrolled is just, it's positioning itself as we are TikTok with better values. And boy, is it working for people. It's really fascinating. And I don't think that app has any sort of particularly terrific set of features going for it. It's run by people, I think in a team in Australia, New Zealand. The app is fine. It's like, it just, it looks like an app that was getting a few hundred downloads a day, which is what it was getting. And now it's the number one app in the app store.

38:46But it does suggest there is meaningful energy for something else. It's like one of my predictions for this year was we're going to get a new social platform that matters. And whether I wouldn't bet on it being upscrolled, but it sure looks like it's going to be something, that there is real appetite for it in a meaningful way. As always, my bet is on the open social web. Something's happening there. Can we actually, can we end on one thing? Please. The one piece that we put up about all this that made me laugh the hardest, although it is a pretty poignant feature about the nature of tear gas, is Sarah Jong wrote best gas masks.

39:23And we had the comments of the piece like, stick to tech. And her commenters were like, this is tech, it's gear, it's a gadget. So I would like to put gas masks on the Eli scale of wearable bullshit. Oh, dear Lord. Because it's a gadget, we could do it. So if you remember, and we rejiggered the scale, a little bit. So if you remember, the scale of wearable bullshit is the X-axis is fiddliness and the Y is utility. And so if you have something that you put on your body, the utility has to far outweigh the fiddliness. Neil, I have great news for you. Yeah. Travis, our producer, has vibe-coded something for us.

40:00Of course. Would you like to see it? I would love to see it. Okay. You know AI has really taken a turn when we're vibe-coding every week now. I swear Travis keeps complaining that he has to do this and I think he loves it I think he loves it too oh this is perfect so you see on the y axis it was very tall right you've got utility so like very useful and the x axis is fiddliness and you can go to fiddliness and then oh you put in the line that I asked for I think that line is at 2x so anything above the line is good and anything below the line is useless so do we can we put eyeglasses on here sure so I have well okay let me just tell you the ones we have here uh i have the vision pro i have the meta ray-bans and i have the meta ray-ban displays so let's let's put those in first okay so the vision pro is very fiddly and not very useful so yeah that's so kind of kind of down here it's way below the line low utility high fiddly way below the it's in the it's in this it's in the dead zone right yeah this diagonal needs a name this is like the eyeglasses diagonal yeah right that's great what was the other the meta ray bands where were those the meta ray bands are like kind of fiddly they're like on the line okay right so we'll put them like they're kind of fiddly yeah kind of like well I would say down further down they're yeah like there like lower medium utility lower medium fiddly yeah they're glasses you gotta put them in but they're useful because you get do you see what I mean yeah like regular glasses skyrocket high.

41:32Like, massive utility because they allow you to see that overcomes any amount of fiddliness. They go up here in the high utility, not fiddly part of the range. And then the displays, I think, are even more fiddly because you've got to wear the bracelet. Yeah, they're like often... So they're a little higher utility. Low, low, low. Yeah. And lower, lower... A little higher utility because they have a thing in there. Yeah, but like substantially more fiddly. And so you can see how the eyeglass line really defines this here. Yeah. Okay, so then you get gas masks, which are very fiddly, right? You got to tighten the straps.

42:06You got to make sure you get a seal. From our commenters, it turns out you got to pick the right cartridges to filter out the chemical irritants the government is using to repress you. But if you need it, the utility is off the charts. So these belong at basically the top right corner of the ground. Right above the line over there, but only if you need it. Oh, I forgot to mention, by the way, face is a huge fiddliness penalty. Yes. So all these things, if you have to put it, if you put them on your face, the fiddliness is off the charts. Yeah. But as, as to your point, if, if we're talking, does it do a job that is important?

42:43Hard to beat gas mask. Hard to beat gas mask. If you need it, then it overcomes face. Do you see what I mean? This is, this is why it works on the chart. It's just another gadget that you can apply the rubric to. It's very good. This is where we've come to in America. We'll link to Sarah's piece on The Verge, but you always like to say, you find something on the internet and you're like, this is a PhD thesis. Sarah's buying guide to the best gas masks is a PhD thesis on so many things, but also is The Verge. If you're like, what is The Verge? Read Best Gas Masks and you will fully understand. When I say I get notes from our expats, a lot of people are like, yeah, this is the thing that we, this is what you should do.

43:24It's sincerely absurd and also fantastic. All right. we love a weird graph we love the open social web this is what we do here we should take a break and then we have let's get to gadgets we should do some gadgets we're going to right turn out of this and we're going to get back to some gadgets and some AI stuff because that's what else is there to talk about right now we'll be right back

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47:13All right, we're back. Neal, there's a new phone. Have you heard about phones? I love phones. What are we here for? The Samsung Galaxy Z Tri-Fold is on sale today, Friday, January 30th, if you're watching or listening to this now. And the big thing we've been waiting for on this, this is the three-pane folding phone, was the price. The price is, I would say, worse than I expected. It is$2 ,899 for a 512 gigabyte of storage smartphone. It seems high. It's pretty high. There's my take. How's that? Here, can I do some inside baseball? Yeah. We're The Verge. We're in a reviews program. I think the reviews program is the heart of what we do here.

48:00We spend a lot of time thinking about product reviews. Samsung didn't give anyone review samples of a trifold before the on sale date. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn't. The thing is obviously being in sale. No, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. It almost never happens. Like at this point in the phone market, the Apple does it after they launch. Apple is like the most secretive of all the companies. But most companies are giving out. I can't think of the last time a like ostensibly flagship phone didn't have any reviews before it went on sale. That just doesn't happen anymore. Yeah. I mean, obviously the thing has been out in Korea and some creators have certainly like imported Korean units.

48:42Sure. But usually the latest reviews hit is like the on sale date. And like Apple in particular like manages to that. Samsung is just like, no. And I suspect that that means what it usually means, which is they don't want people to review the phone before you can buy it. The pictures of this phone look great. I'm like everyone. I'm curious about how durable it is. I'm curious about how thick it is when it's folded. like they've been very careful to not show you pictures of how thick it is when it's folded and so like you can look at our hands-on video you can look at a bunch of stuff um you can see it's pretty thick when it's folded but three thousand dollars and we're hiding from reviews a little sketchy a little sus i mean a this makes me think of uh i had a film reviewer friend years ago who told me you can tell how good a movie is just by the date the reviews come out and and the closer, like if there are no reviews until the day the movie comes out, it means the movie sucks and the studio thinks it.

49:44But if you start reading reviews like two weeks ahead, they're trying to build buzz for an awesome movie. Like they're truly, it's a very fun thing that like, if you just, you can chart it moving back from release date. And I think there's something to that here too. But I mean, you were, uh, you were at the verge in 2019. You remember the first reviews of the galaxy fold. Oh yeah. Dieter killed the phone. So this is literally, literally, Like, I was not working at The Verge at the time, but my memory of it is it was Dieter's Review and it was one other. Was it Marquez? Somebody tried to peel what looked like the screen protector off of it.

50:21Yes. And it wasn't the screen protector. It was the screen. It was the screen protector, but it was laminated onto the screen. Right. And so if you tried to peel it, you broke the screen. And I think that made this whole line of phones take a huge hit. Yeah, I mean, they didn't do the launch. They, like, went back and rejiggered the phone. Right. And it took a durability hit for a long time. Like, I think still people perceive foldable phones to be more fragile than they actually are because of the first impressions of the Galaxy Fold. Well, and also because they are more fragile than regular phones.

50:59I mean, they have a hinge. They have a moving part. You can see the thing that would break. Yeah. but like yeah i think the the charitable interpretation here is samsung is terrified the uncharitable version is this product sucks and samsung knows it i don't know it's only one of those they are so deep into the development of folding phones i don't think it just like fully sucks i think probably it is not quite as useful as 2899 would have you believe yeah and by that i mean like it's a thick phone like i mean i want this thing really badly 2899 is literally buy a macbook an ipad and an iphone yeah yeah i don't know it's we're gonna we bought one we're gonna buy one and we're gonna review it and then we'll review it and then i'll take it and because we bought it i can keep it and that'll be great that's why that's that's my plan so okay my question on this one outside of the reviews right like we're gonna spend a lot of time reviewing this.

51:59And one of the questions is like, is it worth the money? But in Samsung's interest in just selling this thing to people, I kind of don't think the price matters. This to me rings of like the Vision Pro, where it's like the people who are going to buy this, we're going to buy this anyway. And maybe if it was 10 grand, you turn some people off. But the people who want this phone are going to spend what it costs to get this phone. And I assume Samsung is not anticipating selling tens of millions of them. So maybe it doesn't matter. So this is the real problem for Samsung. If you want to sell this form factor, the thing that is important is that when you unfold it into a tablet, it is useful as a tablet.

52:41Yes. And it's not just a movie viewer or whatever. And have you used an Android tablet? Because what you got here is a Samsung Android tablet. And none of that ecosystem makes sense. still to this day. We should talk about Aluminium, the new Google operating system that leaked. There's something there that's interesting. But if Samsung doesn't sell enough of these to make it clear that there's a market for people who want a phone that unfolds in an Android tablet, the developers aren't going to show up. And then this thing is hooped from the jump. And I actually think that might be why the reviews are limited.

53:15Because the first thing I would check out is what happens when you unfold it. Is this useful beyond I can watch a movie at a larger scale? Right. I can watch videos at a larger scale. Right. And I, I don't know. I, I mean, what I'm really asking here is do you think Samsung did a good job on the software and you can just have whatever reaction to that question you want? Right. Historically speaking, the answer is probably not. Um, but yeah, but ladies love the whiz, man. that is an old verge cast cut there's six of you who got it and for the rest of you i'm very sorry if you don't get that joke you should start on this episode and listen to every single one in reverse chronological order until you get to that joke from like 2012 and then it will all make sense um but no you you mentioned uh aluminium os which i'm literally wait was it aluminum OS or is it aluminum OS?

54:09I've seen it written both ways. I've been saying aluminum because I think it's funny that Google would tweak Apple that directly, but it would be very funny. Whatever it's called. And I've seen both. It should be aluminum. Rick Osterlo at Google, if you're listening, and I know that you are. Aluminium is the correct answer. But this is the long awaited combination of Chrome OS and Android that is supposed to make these things make sense. Chromebooks that can functionally run Android apps, Android tablets that have a desktop class browser. This is the thing that it always should have been. And I think you're right that if something like the Trifold is going to work, it's going to have to be software like this.

54:48And we saw, I would call it a brief teaser of what it might look like. 9to5Google found a bug report with some videos that included that were basically that were uploaded showing this thing. It's also called Android 16. So this thing appears to be real and out there in the world and people are using it. It looks kind of just like Chrome OS and Android together. It's what you think it would be. Like if you close your eyes and smoosh those things together in your brain, that's what it is. It's DeX. Google made a DeX and they have a better design team than Samsung. Yes. And more coherent thoughts about the role and function of software in our lives.

55:31And they made DeX. And that's amazing. Like, you know, I tried to use DeX for a week on a Z Fold, and boy, did that not work. Nothing about that was a good idea. But this, if you have an Android phone that functionally turns into Chrome OS, you know, when you unfold it or plug it into a bigger screen, and you get the benefits of all the apps that are already there without having to contend with the idea that Samsung has its own browser, its own app store, its own window. Like all of that made that messy, made like Dex is messy because of it. If you just do that natively in Android, you got something.

56:08Like you can see how unfolding the phone to make it really big to get you essentially like a laptop class experience would be like amazing. Yeah, I am so suspicious of this actually working because Google has been trying to do that exact thing for a decade, maybe longer. And it's it's super obvious that you should combine those two things. Google understands better than maybe any other company the power of a desktop class browser. It also has Android, which is very powerful and has a lot of apps. And putting those two things together is not like a novel idea. It turns out to just be a very hard engineering and design and UX problem.

56:47And then throw in this infinite range of screen sizes and orientations. And this thing is just very hard. But I do think it's cool and exciting that Google appears to be actually committed to the road of this thing, of how do we take one device and turn it into lots of devices in different orientations? I think that's very cool. Yeah. And Samir, who runs Android, Samir Samat, what's in September of last year? He was at the Qualcomm Summit, and he said out loud, they're doing this. Here's a quote. What we're doing is we're taking Chrome OS experience and re-baselining the technology underneath it on Android.

57:22So straightforwardly, they're taking Chrome OS, they're stripping out the sort of Linux foundations of it, and they're putting it on Android. I have a lot of like wistful feelings about that. It's probably the right choice technically, right? Sure. But I bought my parents a Chromebook like 10 years ago. It was a Chromebook Pixel. Remember when Google made a$1 ,000 Chromebook? I bought it from my parents. I actually wrote about it on the site. And the thing about it that was great was that it only had one interface paradigm at that time. Now Chrome OS has all kinds of stuff in there. It's like fake apps and all this stuff.

57:55But at the time it was... Browser tabs. It was browser tabs. And if you bought your parents a Mac back then, it was like, remember they had the launcher, there was different windows, and the app store, but then too many paradigms. And it was just impossible to use. I did not want to do tech support over the phone. And the Chromebook was like, just use the web. And they were just using it. They got it. It was one interface paradigm, very simple. And this is the end of that in a very real way. We're doing mobile apps next to browser tabs, and we're going to mix it all together, and we're going to have to manage everything.

58:26And I'm just sort of wistful that there was one moment where like applications on the web were enough to support an entire platform. And then we immediately got away from that. It's wistful. That's all I'm saying. I mean, it's because you can't collect a 30 % tax on all the transactions. I was going to say it's because running an app store is a lot more lucrative than running a web browser. It turns out we've had a bunch of lawsuits about that recently. It turns out, yeah. one other thing we should talk about there was a bunch of really interesting AI stuff this week like we're you and I've been talking a lot about this sort of ongoing trend of 2026 being the year of AI products right we've done a lot of infrastructure we've done a lot of technology the models are hitting a really interesting threshold one model Well, we're going to come to that.

59:16But we're hitting this point where I think the most interesting question for most purposes is what are you going to do with any of this? And all these companies are like, oh, God, we have to make money on this at some point. And Satya Nadella said this thing where it was like, we have to be useful or else people will stop giving us permission to do all this. But anyway, there were a couple of interesting things this week. I wrote a story about this thing, Yahoo Scout, which is basically a Yahoo spin on AI search that I think is very cool. It is the most search engine-y of all the AI products I've used.

59:51It has hyperlinks that look like hyperlinks. It's very attuned to the web. It's weird that it comes from Yahoo, but I liked it a lot. But the one I actually really want to talk about is MaltBot, which you in particular are kind of obsessed with. I mean, I'm obsessed with it in the same way that everyone else is obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with it first because the story is absolutely chaotic. A developer started a thing called ClawdBot, which is C-L-A-W-D, ClawdBot. Not to be confused with the other Clawd. Not to be confused with the other Clawd. But kind of to be confused. Well, it's a local AI application that sits on your machine.

1:00:25A lot of people are buying Mac minis to run it. and then it can do everything on your machine based on the models you plug into it. And obviously one of those models is Claude. And the reason I said one model has made a particular turn is that it very much feels like Claude, specifically like Opus 4.5, has made this turn where it is remarkably more useful in the specific domain, like in the domain of software engineering than it used to be. And because there's, you know, Claude code and Claude co-work, you can give it agentic tasks so you can run off and do them. And of course, a bunch of developers are like, it's alive.

1:01:01Like, just like immediately how people feel about this. But it's a tool that can write apps. And then you apply that skill set to just like general tasks. Well, you get something like Claudebot, which Anthropic wrote to the developer and said you have to rename it. So you renamed it Moltbot, which immediately started a crypto scandal. Like, this is all very funny. Yeah. But Moltbot, which is the renamed Claudebot, you can put it on a Mac mini and then you can text it, right? You can like, you basically connect it to Telegram or WhatsApp or anything. You can text it from your phone and it just does stuff on your computer, including writing apps for itself.

1:01:39Right. To accomplish tasks because cloud code can write apps for itself. So I think a lot of people just like their minds exploded that day, right? Like what if my computer could use itself and not in just like a constrained domain, but literally it was like, I can't do this today. I will just write code that I can execute on this Mac Mini. Right. And I've now written myself an application to accomplish this task. I'm not even going to tell the person that prompted me for this, but I did it. It's just done. And you can, there's infinity TikToks and social posts from people who are like, look at this wild thing I had to do.

1:02:11There's a lot of problems with this. There are security nightmares up and down about letting AI just have unfettered access to write code on a machine that has all of your data. And that is accessible via messaging platforms. Right. I think people have already, like, exploited CloudBot over email and text. You can just prompt, inject, attack this thing all day and all night. But I think there's also a piece where, because the tool has gone from, I'm generating a bunch of slop, or I'm ingesting a bunch of slop, and then hallucinating summaries of the slop. Like, basically, like, we've gone from the Apple intelligence, like, table stakes slot generation to now this computer is doing stuff.

1:02:54And it is solving problems on its own. And I think that's pretty, like, many questions, many security concerns, all that stuff. But that's the turn, right? That's the turn where I think this goes from we can generate a bunch of dancing Winnie the Poohs to, okay, we're getting real work done. Actually, another example I'll use, Jen Toohey saw all the people using Claude to monkey with their smart homes and went on what I would call a journey of self-discovery about Home Assistant. And she got Claude, like Claude Code, to build her a Home Assistant dashboard. And this took a lot of work. Like, it was slow in some cases.

1:03:37Paulus, who runs Home Assistant, got a phone and helped her through it because it's still too complicated as it should be. but you can just see the, you can see how it's going to work, right? Instead of downloading Home Assistant and building a bunch of YAML and screen with dashboards and getting it wrong, she just talked to the robot and it did all of that for her. And then she ended up with a dashboard that actually can intermingle all of her incompatible smart home systems together. And Jenna is like particularly complicated smart home because she's a smart home reviewer. And the comments on that piece were like, this seems more complicated.

1:04:09And a lot of people are like, but you're not a smart home reviewer. Well, I also think she's a perfect example of no one would ever build the product Jen needs. There's no business in it because there's only one Jen on earth. Luckily for us, she works here, but luckily for the world, there's only one Jen. You know what I mean? Like no one has the set of needs that Jen needs. So no one is going to go to the effort to build that kind of software. But the idea that you can just build it for yourself, I think is so powerful. And Thomas Mann, who runs Raycast, was on the show a couple of months ago.

1:04:41and he is super into the idea of cloud code and all of these AI agent services for writing code too. And his point is basically like, I am suspicious of AI tools that try to sort of reinvent the wheel every single time. And every single time you ask it to do a task, you have no idea what it's gonna do. They always do something different. They're super unpredictable. Like we talk about this all the time. If I just ask Alexa Plus to turn off the lights, God only knows what's gonna happen because it's not actually a predictable system. But what you can do is you can use these AI tools to build software that is then predictable.

1:05:14And it's like you build it once and then it works forever instead of having to essentially build it and hope every single time. The idea that you can use it to build the exact software that you need, tune it to your specific needs, and then it will work reliably because it is just software. That's a super intriguing turn for how we think about AI to me. just to be fair a lot of problems that too so the idea that everyone has a slightly different riff on the same app solved in slightly different ways that's not great like oh i totally disagree i think that's awesome it's awesome and sure it's you know there's a list of pros and cons it's awesome in the sense that a lot of people have custom software it's a very bad in the sense that what what if like one in ten of those has a catastrophic bug that brings down the power grid.

1:06:04Like, that's not good. Sure. There's a reason you deploy software at scale. Yes. Right? And that mostly professionals write it. Right. Like, what if you write your own code and you build your own app with an AI and has just an even stupider bug that, like, if you turn the light on and off three times while staying in one foot, the light bulb explodes. Like, there's, like, dumb bugs that show up in these apps, edge cases and weird patterns that you will not be able to solve. Or even in the cases of most people, even identify the pattern that leads to the bug. Like, this is why QA exists, right?

1:06:34It's to figure out what patterns lead to the bug so you can, like, reverse engineer and figure it out. That is the danger here. And it's the danger, like, straight up of, like, I'm also a smart home nerd. And the idea that anybody can show up to my home bridge and debug what's wrong with it is ludicrous. Because that thing is just a reflection of my personality at this point. I mean, it's not nothing that Jen needed to get Paulus, the creator of Home Assistant on the phone to solve this problem, right? Like for now, what it is, I think this stuff is at its best when it's shortcuts for people like Paulus who know what the end state is supposed to look like and can debug their way there.

1:07:14Right. And I do think that's very powerful. There's nothing, this is the turn. Like I've been waiting for a turn where the thing is obviously more useful to do normal tasks than to make slop. Yeah. And like, maybe this is the turn. You can feel it coming. I also think just Anthropic might think Claude is alive. Like, that's like burbling in the background of all this. Like, I think a lot of people in San Francisco think it's alive. By the way, we do have to do this segment where we get someone from San Francisco on to do New York versus San Francisco where I just remind them it's not alive. That's my segment idea.

1:07:49We're going to do that. It's a good idea. Is this alive? And you just ask people on different coasts. Just see what happens. somebody in London somebody on the Mediterranean who just like they're on a boat they don't care yeah you're like I don't know it seems alive but this is presumably this is the turn right it's not the AI search tools it's not chat GPT doing ads to bite some of Google it's like we're going to invent new kinds of products entirely yep is is a molt bot going to be like I don't know but it is a window into a possible future yeah and right now this stuff is like nerdy and complicated is all hell, but I do think there is a huge interesting opportunity to figure out how this stuff trickles down to being useful for normal people, right?

1:08:36Like the comparison everybody makes with AI stuff is we're at the command line PC era where you have to sit down and know the language and be able to do the things in the right ways. And even people who claim that it's just easy to get what you want to chat GPT are liars. Like you have to know how custom instructions work. You have to prompt engineer like the existence of the phrase prompt engineering suggests that all of this is too complicated. So but it's like, how do we how do we pull this down to what it's actually supposed to be, which is pointing and clicking on a screen, right? Like that's that's how we got a lot of what we got out of computers.

1:09:12We need that equivalent for AI. And it feels like we are slowly stepping down toward that with a lot of these tools. Yeah, I think it's very funny. And this is very reductive and it's probably wrong. and I'm sure someone will correct me, but when you put like Gemini in thinking mode, it is basically prompt engineering itself. Like if you ever click the thing and you see it sort of like prompting itself to think through things. And it has a personality when it's doing that, which is fascinating to just look at. And it is like a neurotic, somewhat stressed out personality. It's just like, oh gosh, that's not right.

1:09:44Yeah, it's like, what am I doing here? Like, do we even know what I'm like? In the middle of the snowstorm that we had here in New York, I ran my snowblower like 15 times and the last time I was like screw it how much would it cost to get a heated driveway which is one of those things you think once every five years during a snowstorm when you sit away and I was like alright you look it up and you need to know how long your driveway is and I'm like we're not going out in a snowstorm with a measuring tape so I asked Gemini how long is my driveway based on public records and it lost its mind and gave up and you looked at the thinking and it was like I just don't know if I can figure this out laughter And it's like, I know it's not alive.

1:10:22And I know this is, you know, it's all just hallucinating its way. But it's like, man, this thing seems stressed out. You felt a little bad, didn't you? You're like, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to get this to you. Like, how would you make a computer do this? Like, that's what I felt like legitimately. I was like, man, like there's a data center somewhere that we made it do this. And like, this is not the right outcome. Like, this can't be how it's supposed to work. You melted a bunch of snow off the roof of a data center to do that. Yeah, exactly. It's self-prompting itself into like an anxiety spiral.

1:10:53Like this isn't how computers are supposed to work. Yeah, I don't think so. We should take one more break and then we're gonna get to the lightning round. But before we do, a call out to all of you. If you have built software for yourself using these tools, I wanna know about it. We're covering a bunch of these. I'm doing a big story about people who are making software like this for themselves. If you made an app, if somebody you know made an app, especially if it's like weird and niche and complicated, like Jen's. If you can out-Jen Jen, I want to hear about it. I'm David at TheBirds.com. We're VirgedCastAtTheBirds.com.

1:11:24Send us all of your weird, handmade, bespoke, vibe-coded apps. This is a terrifying thing to ask for and I'm very excited about it. All right, real quick break, then we're going to do the lightning round. We'll be right back.

1:11:36Nilay Patel: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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1:12:46Nilay Patel:This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. Would you let AI pilot your plane, raise your child, decide your future? On March 27th, Focus Features presents The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Critics and audience at the Sundance and Southwest Film Festivals call it the most urgent movie of our time. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, rated PG-13, only in theaters March 27th. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C.

1:13:29Nilay Patel:According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

1:13:46All right, we're back. Neal, we've talked a lot of politics, but I feel obligated once again to ask you, is it time? It's time. No. We've got music this week. We actually have a lot of music this week. I asked for theme songs. It's true. And many people have sent us, Brendan Carr is a dummy, theme songs. So it is time now for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brennan Carr's Dummy. Run the music.

1:14:20That has such like YouTube mashup circa 2009 energy to it. I love it very much. It's fabulous. The fact that it's auto-tuned us is very good. That's from Miguel who sent that to us. A lot of other people said that we're going to keep running the theme songs. But thank you, Miguel. It made me laugh very much when I heard it. That's good stuff. I'll keep this one short. There's a big Brendan Carr as a dummy coming up next week. There's a vote he's going to take. We'll cover all that when we get to that vote because it'll happen. We're pre-announcing Brendan Carr as a dummy now. I already know. He's a dummy.

1:14:47He's such a dummy. I already know what he's going to do next week. Of programming Brendan Carr as a dummy months ahead. I already know how he's going to be an idiot next week. We'll get to that. I don't want to overdo it. We've done a lot of politics. What I want to call out specifically is a lot of people think I'm some like liberal animal, right? Like whatever it is. I will remind you that mostly what I say is that government's huge regulations are bad and that free market competition between big tech companies is good. And you can just decide what my politics are based on that. And most of you decided that I'm some sort of like liberal maniac.

1:15:18I'm going to counter you with the fact that last week we talked about Brendan Carr trying to impose restrictions on talk show hosts. Yeah. And Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees with me that that is stupid. It is not often that the Wall Street Journal opinion board follows the Vergecast in its analysis of government regulatory affairs. You'd be surprised. Okay, wait. So I once worked at the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. And I think I'm probably speaking out of turn here, but whatever. I would say the general perception of the Wall Street Journal is that there's a bunch of people on the news side who do terrific, important journalism.

1:16:02One of the best and strongest newsrooms in the world. And then there's a bunch of people on the opinion side who are mostly old lunatic men with terrible opinions about everything. That's right. They're like, we should shut the government down and should be roving packs of feral wolves sponsored by billionaires who get to do whatever they want. Like that is basically the tenor of most editorial board pieces. So my question to you is, when you have opinions about anything, and then the Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees with you, is that a victory or is that a huge L for you? I'm just going to read you.

1:16:37It's a long post that definitely has some sides that I don't agree with. It's like, whatever. But here's the paragraph about Brendan Carr trying to regulate talk show hosts. There's a strong argument that this rule violates the speech rights of broadcasters. It also makes no sense in today's diverse media market in which public broadcasters account for a shrinking share. Many politicians connect with voters using social media and podcasts. Joe Rogan can host any politician he wants and show can shows on cable networks. But Jimmy Kimmel gets government supervision. That is precisely the argument I made on running cars last week.

1:17:16and I'm just saying these lunatics agree with me and you can decide what my politics are as you wish. I don't know if I'm proud of you or if this is the last time you're ever going to be on the Birchcast. Do you know what I mean? I have a lot of things to think about. Here's what I'm saying. We should all, we should dismantle the government and billionaires should all build their own feudal systems and we should have little land skirmishes across the country because that'd be fun. You all like Game of Thrones, don't you? But also leave Jimmy Kimmel alone. The one thing we can all agree on in America.

1:17:46Just if you're such a dummy that the Wall Street Journal editorial board is a week after the Verge cast, you are doing something wrong. As always, Brendan, if you'd like to appear on this program or apparently the editorial page is the Wall Street Journal, which I think we can arrange, just give us a call. We'll have you on. We can debate it. I'm going to call you names to your face, as is my God-given right as an American, but you're welcome. That's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's Favorite Podcast of the Podcast. Okay, next time we're going to do New York versus San Francisco versus the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

1:18:17That's a segment waiting to happen. It's going to be incredible. My first lightning round item is a bit of staffing news, which is not a thing we do a lot. I love a personnel transfer. Yeah, this is like not normally VergeCast fodder, but I think this is really interesting. So Sebastian DeWitt, who co-founded a company called Lux, which made an app called Halide, this really popular camera app. Sebastian's been on the VergeCast. Yeah. Is a veteran of the what is a photo wars. Has done some really interesting work. makes a lovely app. Also a really good writer about design, really thoughtful, has joined the Apple design team in what I would say is an extremely good sign for Apple design.

1:18:56And a very funny sign for Alan Dye. A very funny sign for Alan Dye. So we've been covering this saga for a little while now. Alan Dye, who ran design at Apple, left to go start a design studio at Meta, which is a funny sentence all on its own. He was replaced by a designer named Steve LeMay. And I think according to John Gruber and a bunch of other people and a lot of reporting, the general consensus within Apple was that that was extremely good news on all counts. The thing that has been happening recently is that everyone has decided that liquid glass sucks because liquid glass sucks. In particular, everybody seems to be very mad at macOS Tahoe.

1:19:31Have you noticed this? Yes. There is just sheer rage about both how bad the design is in some ways and also just how kind of unconsidered it is. I think a thing you could always say about Apple was that it was it was nothing if not thorough. And it even did its bad ideas all the way to the end. But there's this screenshot floating around all the time that shows a bunch of different apps with slightly different corner radii. And it's just like, this is the most unApply thing ever. So anyway, so just the idea that somebody like Sebastian DeWitt, who is, I think, fairly universally believed to be somebody who A, gets it and B, is good at this, would go to Apple in this new era of Apple design is pretty fascinating.

1:20:12And I think potentially very exciting. This is a person we have talked to a lot and now I think we'll never talk to again. I know. Sebastian, you're welcome on the show anytime. Yeah, anytime you want. You get a good run. I've talked to Sebastian a lot about cameras and how photos look and a lot of how I feel about like how HDR photos look has been shaped by conversations with him and the idea that there should be process zero and halide with no image processing at all. Like there's a lot of thoughtfulness there about how things should look and how they should work. And I'm hopeful that this is the sign and not just people are flooding for the exits and, you know, and like their checks are being written to fill the seats.

1:20:51But I do think there's no way he would have gone back under Allendei. It is hard to imagine. That's hard to imagine. And maybe this is a sign. I agree with you that people hate Tahoe. I haven't even installed it. Really? Yeah. I mean, I can just see that it's bad. Also, I hate installing new versions of macOS because they have been - I was going to say, you were on Snow Leopard for like 12 years. And I would be today if stupid Riverside would run in it. It's very unlikely. If you can make your podcast app run on my 2002 iMac running Snow Leopard, that'd be awesome. But like, they have not treated the Mac with a level of care, right?

1:21:33They've just been like, here's some iPhone ideas. And it doesn't work on that platform. So I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful this represents like we need to bring in some people who understand what it means for Apple to care about design. So we're going to go. And Sebastian used to work at Apple in the past. So I think you're seeing them be like, OK, we need some people to bring the history back and like the culture back. I'm excited for it. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting one. By the way, Halide, new version this week with a bunch of cool new stuff, including Process Zero, which we talked about on this show, which is basically strips out all of the processing, all of the post-processing, all of the everything that happens when you take a picture on your phone and just takes a picture.

1:22:14People really like it. They've done a bunch of cool new stuff. People seem to really like the new app. People should download it. I still think it's probably the best camera app on the phone, including the built-in. I'm an Indigo person now, although Indigo's very slow. Indigo's so slow. It's so fun, but it's so slow. I think Indigo's worse on the 17 than it was on the 16. indigo on the 16 but the 16 camera is really bad in specific ways so maybe there's just less of a delta also I always ask Becky to take pictures using indigo and she's like no the babies you need live photos because they're moving all the time and I want to see them move real fight there man Becky gets it alright what's your next one my next one is we gotta figure out how to walk the line on this one Tesla is discontinuing the model S and the model X Elon announced this on Tesla's earnings call this week.

1:23:03By the way, two years in a row of decline for Tesla car sales. Elon, we can run the audio. Elon announced that they're discontinuing the S and the X because they've got to focus on making robots. Actually, let's just run it. The way Elon announced this is so weird. Go ahead.

1:23:19Nilay Patel:And then I guess I have like one, I guess it's not exactly bad news, but it's a

1:23:33Nilay Patel:it's time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X now would be the time to order it because we expect to wind down S and X production next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. So, just say it, dude. First of all, like, incredible announcement. But it's not bad news because they're going to build robots that obviously are going to work. I think Elon's done running a car company. I think he's absolutely lost interest in his car company.

1:24:18There's news today that he's going to try to merge SpaceX and XAI. The thing that I'm saying, like, we've got to walk the line here is the Model S is a historically important car. And, you know, 2012, when the Model S came out, there were not electric cars being built to be as, it was expensive, but it was still a mainstream car, right? And the Model S is what led to the supercharger network. It led to lots and lots of people having electric cars for the first time. It became a status symbol in its way. Obviously, the market exploded when they did the three and then the Y, but the S was the vanguard of like the mainstream electric car for the longest time.

1:24:55The Model X had the Falcon doors and it was crazy. Maybe it was not nearly as successful. That thing was a status symbol. And then they just stopped caring about those two. Right? When the 3 and the Y took off and they became the big sellers, the S and the X just sort of languished. And they got little updates and little facelifts, but they really stopped putting the emphasis on those as they went more mainstream. and it's just you can just like track the whole evolution of tesla and electric cars and just how much they cared about the model s do you know i mean like the they introduced the market they introduced the three for a minute the three was like such a big seller that every other car maker got confused and they thought people wanted electric cars in the pandemic and then like that went away and now maybe elon doesn't care about any of it anymore and he's just canceling the s and you know like you know like the market for luxury sedans is not small like bmw and mercedes exist every single day yeah you can make an electric luxury sedan they're gonna they're gonna keep trying and he just doesn't care and there's something about that again wistful it's like elon is elon today and he's boy do i have a lot of feelings about that but he incepted this entire market and this entire movement with the model s and now he doesn't care he's just canceling In favor largely of robots, as far as I can tell.

1:26:16Right. Like the big push now is these optimist robots. Right. And autonomy generally and the idea that everything's going to be a robotaxi. And it's like, does any of this stuff work? Like, I don't know. I think he's pillaging Tesla to do whatever he wants to do. Yeah, there was a bunch of coverage of this earnings report that essentially amounted to actually the announcements of cars don't matter because this company is so unbelievably leveraged against the idea of autonomy and AI anyway, that them selling cars is sort of immaterial to the stock price, which is a very weird way to think about what is going on with Tesla, but feels directionally kind of correct.

1:26:50yeah and you know he was like if you want one you can buy one like you look at the facebook groups for the model s and the x people are like yeah they're not going to support these cars if we buy them and they're discontinued yeah no that's just a bad it's a bad place to be i i'm again i think that you know elon has managed to pull rabbits out of a hat with tesla forever but a lot of people don't want to buy his products straightforwardly because of his politics yep and the sales are declining for two years in a row and now he's selling even fewer cars than he was. Like literally there are fewer cars.

1:27:24Hilariously, they're going to keep selling the Cybertruck. Of all of the Teslas you would cancel, the Model S and the X, like the three-year-old SUV, we're canceling that. We're going to keep the Cybertruck going. And he said this thing about the Cybertruck that is such a capitulation. It's like, I don't know. Can we run a Cybertruck quote?

1:27:39Nilay Patel:We will transition the Cybertruck line to just a fully autonomous line. and there's obviously a market there for cargo delivery, like you say, like localized cargo delivery within a city, within a few hundred miles, something like that. There's a lot of cargo that needs to move locally within a city and an autonomous Cybertruck could be very useful for that. Remember when Elon Musk said almost exactly the same words about the Hyperloop? I'm just sorry. They made the truck because the best-selling vehicles in America are pickup trucks. And you're like, now there's a market for autonomous cargo delivery and we're transitioning the Cybertruck to a fully autonomous.

1:28:22Like, that means they're not going to make anymore.

1:28:24Nilay Patel:Correct. Right? They're going to like make them on demand for when you're like, your local plumber wants to have a flashy car to deliver sinks. Or like, this is so dumb. Or by all accounts, the huge numbers of them that are sitting around waiting to be sold. Yeah. They're just going to. I think it's sad that they can't think of another idea for the Model S to compete. but we're going to keep the Cybertruck. Or they're just not announcing it. They're quietly canceling it. RIP Cybertruck Wiper, the stupidest idea in card design that everyone knew was a problem that has been recalled like a half a dozen times already.

1:28:59Speaking of stupid ideas, actually, before I get to my last one and we wrap up and get out of here, do we have a Trump phone update? We do. I have not been tracking the Trump phone this week. I'll give you a preview. It's on the site now. Dom is covering the Trump phone. He's profiling all the main characters of the Trump phone company, Trump Mobile, which is just like a move, right? You just like print people's names and see what happens. And he got some of them to reply to him. And then they ghosted him. Oh, interesting. So that's the Trump phone. You should read it. It's very good in classic Dom fashion.

1:29:31It's, you know, he's on a mystery adventure trying to find the Trump phone, which does not exist. although he found out that early on in the process they also announced a Trump phone ultra that no one has talked about since. What? You can just say things, Neil. You can just say things. Oh, man. If they were actually smart, they would announce the Trump phone mini for all the people who want a little phone. Yeah. And that would be exciting. But in November, Don Hendrickson announced to the trade publication wireless dealer magazine, which didn't know existed, but now is my goal to own. Immediate subscribe.

1:30:10Yeah. Yeah. Are you a wireless dealer? Let's get it. Here's a quote. We're focusing on evolving with our customers by offering even more powerful tools to fit their lives. Our next major step is the launch of T1 Ultra, our premium device that builds on the success of the original T1. T1 Ultra was for sure a character in Terminator and you cannot convince me otherwise. I refuse to believe it was not. I just saw that they're building on the successive T1, like just straight grifting pre-orders. All right. This thing we conned a bunch of people out of their money for, and now we're doing that, but bigger is like a pretty sweet sales pitch.

1:30:44It's got a bigger flag on the back. All right, what's your last one? I just want to talk very briefly about a keyboard. This keyboard is called the Corsair Galleon 100 SD. Are you a keyboard guy? I don't know that we've ever actually talked about this. We cover mechanical keyboards and stuff a lot on this site. I have like a boring ass Logitech keyboard that is fine. Are you a keyboard guy? No, not in the way that we have keyboard guys. I'm guessing you're an Apple Magic keyboard user. Yeah, it's just, yeah, I've got this one. I will say I keep keyboards for a long time. Okay. So I keep a keyboard until it completely wears out.

1:31:18Like my last keyboard I got rid of because the space bar literally broke in half. Oh, wow. So that's where I'm at with keyboards. But anyway, so this thing, the Corsair Galleon 100 SD is basically a mechanical keyboard with a stream deck attached to the right side of it. And if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know I am an avowed fan of the Stream Deck, which is basically just a bunch of programmable buttons and knobs that you can make do things. Yeah. I think that rules. I think everyone should have one connected to their computer. And I actually think basically putting it where the number pad would be on your keyboard is an incredibly great idea.

1:31:52Cam Faulkner on our team wrote about it for us. It's a very good keyboard. He gave it an 8 out of 10. It's expensive. if it's 350 bucks, but basically other than that, it is what you want it to be. It's a good keyboard with a stream deck attached, but I just want to call everyone's attention to one paragraph from Cam's review. When I say we have keyboard guys, this is what I need. There's really like, there's a mechanical keyboards. I think it's called keyboard warriors slack room. And it is honestly like the people in there are speaking a different language. There's so many words that I've never heard in that order.

1:32:27One of the things I'm sort of like proudest of is like, I mean, and this is like not just the Verge, but like the keyboard people have just horse powered the knowledge of what a Hall effect keyboard switch is into existence. They have just insisted that we all know that there is a thing called the Hall effect and you can make buttons with it. And those are the best buttons. And God help you if you think that anything but a Hall Effect button is acceptable in this day and age. And that is just, that just happened. Like they were just like, this is going to be a thing now. It's very real. Can I tell you how long it took me to learn that Cherry Switches was a line of switches made by a company called Cherry and not a type of switch on a keyboard?

1:33:09At any rate, I love the keyboard people. I aspire to be one of you, but I am terrified at the prospect of it. I just want to read you this paragraph. It says, The design isn't that different from Corsair's Vanguard series of keyboards. The galleon includes gasket mounting and multiple layers of dampening. You've already lost me. This is in the best possible way. But we keep going. Typing sounds and feels satisfactory and bouncy yet controlled. Its MLX pulse switches have a pronounced thok sound and don't require much force to actuate. See? See what I'm saying? Also, thok is a word that everyone has agreed is the correct onomatopoeia for keyboards, and it rules.

1:33:43Everything about this makes me so happy. One of the few missed opportunities is making the Stream Deck modular so that left-hand typists can easily access its buttons in Opt. Don't care about that. Right-hands are the correct ones. Hey, hey, I'm left-handed is what I'm saying. And this is where it gets really great. The Mount Everest Max did this years ago, and it's all the more puzzling given Corsair hired that company's founder, Tobias Brinkman, as the VP of its gaming division responsible for building this very keyboard. I just want to tell you, I know two things for sure. One, Cam wrote that sentence off the top of his head with no research or additional information necessary.

1:34:14and two, I don't know any of the words in that sentence and I love it very much. Wait, you're not a Mount Everest Max guy? Come on. I don't even know what that is. The Mount Everest Max could be so many things. It's obviously a keyboard with a modular stream deck attachment. Context clues, bro. There's Mount Everest and right next to it somebody built Mount Everest Max that is like twice as large. It's good. I love this. Look, the point of Diverge is to have a platform so big that Cam can just nerd out about keyboards with stream decks on them. That's, this is what I want. We started with like, we got to have our values.

1:34:48This is my values, is someone should care this much about keyboards with light up buttons. And I promise you, I swear to you, we will stay caring about it this much. Because at the end of this paragraph, Cam is like, why didn't you make what I wanted? And Corsair was like, maybe we will try.

1:35:11Yeah. Cam Faulkner. Very good. Better ideas than the company that makes the keyboards. Very good. We got party speakers, we got democracy, and now we got light-up keyboards. This is good, actually. I think we can, now that the Cybertruck wiper is going to go out of our lives, we need to replace it with something. Maybe we're both just going to become keyboard guys. Justice for the Mount Everest masks. Or it's either, it's going to be mechanical keyboards or it's going to be Linux. And it feels like, it feels like it's a dead heat. I'm headed to Linux. Yeah. I have to say the, you were talking, I don't trust the platforms.

1:35:42were like, let's do a little bit of Linux stuff. It's like, oh, we should be a Linux blog. The whole audience is like, do Linux. To the point where I think Tom's newsletter this week is Microsoft being like, yes, Windows is very bad now. We're sorry. Spectacular. It's very good. It's all, we're just coming back around. We're just doing early computers again. It's going to be amazing. All right, we should get out of here. This has been tremendously fun. Again, we're going to keep covering all of the stuff going on in Minneapolis, all of this stuff. There's a lot of great stuff on the site. We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes.

1:36:12Read Kristen's story. Read Best Gas Masks. Read all of it. It's great stuff. And email us, vergecastatheverge.com, davidatheverge.com, neilatheverge.com. Reach out to us. Tell us what you think, what you want to see more of, what you want to see less of. We read all the emails. I'm terrible at responding to email, but I'm very good at reading email. So get at us. But now we're going to get out of here. And I should say, the best way to support all of that and our whole team and everything we're doing is to subscribe to The Verge. If you do, you get ad-free podcasts, including this one and Decoder and Version History.

1:36:44And it is the thing that lets us do all of the stuff that Neil, I was talking about at the beginning. It is the thing that lets us just say all of this stuff out loud, is all of you. And it is very cool. It becomes more that way every day for us. And that is a very, very, very cool thing about The Verge right now. Go subscribe. Verge.com slash subscribe. It's like 50 bucks a year, right? I don't need... What does it cost,$10? You sound like a Netflix executive. Stop it. for now we're done we're gonna get out of here we love hearing from you vergecasttheverge.com 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline call us with all of your thoughts and feelings the vergecast is a verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network this show is produced by Eric Gomez Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk we will see you on Tuesday Julia Alexander who is on Decoder this week is gonna be on the vergecast on Tuesday we have a whole bunch of fun stuff coming up it's gonna be great we'll see you then Eli rock and roll