Vision Pro, Galaxy S24: it’s gadget season again

29:22David's like, no, we're not doing that math. Refuse. Putting that aside, just putting that aside, how many people have tried iPhones? How many people have tried MacBooks? Like what I really think Apple is selling here is the Apple-ness of it. Like by calling it – you know, Apple always does stuff. It's like they give a different name for something that we already know by another name. So by calling it spatial computing, they're just going like, oh, but Apple is doing it now. But let me just – 20 million is – I understand. It's not everybody. The Xbox One as of September 2023 has sold 33 million units.

29:55And there's not a person on earth that you're like, do you know what an Xbox is? And they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, because we've had video game consoles for 40 years. And you've had VR headsets for a decade. And no one has tried them. 20 million people. Six months after Atari came out, you think everybody on Earth knew what a game console was? Maybe. I mean, look, they made the movie The Wizard about the first. I just I think like a I think the way Apple markets its products at the beginning has next to nothing to do with what those products ultimately are. Like if you go back to 2007 in the iPhone, 2010 in the iPad, 2015 in the Apple Watch, like the way they talk about those products is nothing like what they became.

30:41It just isn't. And so I think I posted after you guys posted your pictures, just being saying basically if Apple can make these things cool to wear in public, it'll be the marketing coup of the century. And I got, I mean, dozens of replies from people being like, Apple's not marketing that way. I was like, I don't give a shit what Apple is marketing it with. Like I, the five minutes after that thing goes on sale, somebody is going to take this thing into a coffee shop and go on a run where, and that's like, that's how this stuff works. You buy it, you do whatever the hell you want with it. And I like, we have so few answers still about what you're going to do inside of this thing or how you use it or what it's like, or if it's a better monitor than my monitor.

31:19Now, David, that's not true. We're going to have fruit ninja. Disney plus. Disney plus. like a wealth of opportunities. Fantastico. I will say that I do think they expect people to take it out into the world just because when I was getting my demo, like one of the use cases they were talking to me about was like, you're going to be on a plane and you're still going to be able to interact with your stewardess when she asks you for whether you want a drink or a snack. I'm dying to wear this thing on a plane. I've never wanted to do anything more. I'm going to go on like a status run just to collect whatever horrible new system Delta is doing now and wear this headset.

31:58And you're going to have to charge it six times. So we should talk about that. This is the stuff that is legitimately new and honestly a little silly in the best way. So you're in a VR experience, and we should just call it that. You're in a virtual environment inside the headset. And if someone walks up to you and you look at them, they just sort of fade into view. and then you can see. It's really weird. It's odd. In this, actually, this very funny moment in my demo, I was like playing with this, right? Because I'm sitting on a couch, there's people around me, the Apple people around me, and I forget that they're all watching what I'm doing.

32:36So I just kept looking at them to make them fade into view, and eventually one of them just looked up at me like, what are you doing? Because I was just staring at them. She'd be like, are you going to appear? And then they appeared and they were looking at me. Like, how similar is it to that moment in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf just slowly appears from the whiteness in front of... It's kind of like that. Like, I just... The thing that came to my mind was, like, Casper the Friendly Ghost. Just very slowly ghost of VR future coming into your periphery. And it's very strange. Hello, Devon Sawwell.

33:13They're kind of semi-transparent and just floating in the middle of a volcano. Yeah. And it's weird. But then like viewing it from the outside because, you know, we can't see ourselves. Like I think the photo is the only concept that I have of what I look like in that thing. But we did get to see another person using it and get a look at eyesight. And that was just – I'm still processing what eyesight looks like. That's the eyes appearing on the front of the display. And so the reason we weren't able to do that is to do that, they've got to create what's called a persona for you. this is your virtual head that will appear in facetime calls i don't know that's the only way to describe what it is uh and then that virtual face when you are in the headset and you start talking to someone your eyes show up on the front display of the headset it's fancy googly eyes like we get it yeah it's it's it's weird it's weird because it's obviously a render of eyes and it's like a render of your eyes yeah so like when you blink it blinks when your eyes are open they're Did you try to make eye contact with the person who was giving you the demo?

34:20I have never stared in another person's eyes the way that I stared into that person's eyes. And they were virtualized. I was like, are you looking at me? Because I'm looking at you. It's weird. And like there's different cues that happen with eyesight. So like if they're looking at you, you can tell they're looking at you. But if they're not looking at you, but their googly eyes are looking at you, you can kind of tell because there's like a blue flash that comes up. and that's supposed to signal to you that they're not focusing on you. They're doing other things within the headset. And if they're fully immersed, you don't see the eyes at all.

34:54It's just like that shimmer that appears. This is creating all new ways to be rude to someone at a bar. Yeah. But Apple's marketing says no one's going to take it to a bar, Eli. No one's going to do that. They're 100 % going to take it to a bar. Eli specifically is going to take it to a bar. I'm going to be hammered in this headset 24-7 on a plane. I live in the sky now, everybody just flying around wasted. I'm dying to see two people in two headsets try to communicate to each other. Like, just think about the enormous amount of signal processing that needs to take place in order for those two people to make eye contact.

35:32You've got to put on two headsets. They both have to capture a virtual depiction of you. then it has to take a real-time video of your eyes process that into a 3d model of your face display that on a front screen which is then captured by a camera in the second headset which then has to re-render that into reality to display to someone else's eyes which are in turn being captured and displayed on a 3d rendering of that and it's like you could just take the headsets off but i'm dying i'm absolutely dying to make this happen and just be like this was a lot of work. So like if we were in the room and we were both wearing the Vision Pro and talking to each other, would we just like materialize in each other's screen?

36:15And would you be wearing the headset? Would we be wearing the headset? And would I be seeing you wearing the headset with your eyesight on in my screen? That's just like breaking my brain. Or would it be the digital avatar? When I say these were tightly controlled 30 minute demos, what I mean is I asked to have that experience and I was met with almost dead silence. Nope. That's just not a thing that we're going to, and I was like, okay. Like I understand, like eventually I keep saying this, eventually people are going to get them. We will get a review unit by hook or by crook. And we will spend time with this thing, asking some questions right now that fill the gap between everyone's imagination and reality.

36:56And that gap, I, I'm just going to keep underlining it. That gap is magical. Like that's the fun part of like liking technology. You're like, you can imagine what these things can do. And I'm, the reason I keep pointing at VR headsets is like, there's actually something you can ground these experiences with that exists today at scale. They might not be as good, but the gap between, I have a quest pro sitting here, the gap between a quest pro, which we did not give a good review to and the vision pro we, that's the thing to evaluate. It's not, here's a magical new experience. No, that's a headset.

37:31You can look at the pictures and you can say, okay, this is a VR headset that contains a lot of ideas about the future of computing for sure. But it very much has some of the limitations that are inherent to this form factor. Like, for example, having to be on your head. Like that's just a limitation of this form factor that is easily comparable to everything else that's ever been in this form factor. I think one other question I have is like with the experience, like we're grounding it in VR headsets that we've had, right? But the thing is that most of like 900 ,000 % of my experiences in regular, regular VR headsets is gaming.

38:09And there was not a single gaming demo to be had in the Vision Pro. So that's kind of one thing that's been in the back of my head. I was just like, okay, the obvious use case for VR is gaming in this point in time. but I don't think we've heard a lot about gaming in the Vision Pro. We've heard about it like as entertainment and some sort of productivity platform. But am I really going to do that? Well, Meta bought all the good gaming companies for VR. That's real. So that's part of it. And then like we're getting Fruit Ninja and I have no doubt Fruit Ninja is going to have you with a virtual sword cutting the stuff yourself, right?

38:48I'm going to be pinching. I'm going to be pinching the fruits. Pinching the kiwi. But that's what I, because I was looking at that too, because that's what I care about. No disrespect to everyone who wants to have all of their meetings in a room with everybody wearing a headset. You cannot wait. I want to spend$3 ,500 on a sick gaming headset. I don't, but they can be cool games. It's called the Vargo, and it's a very loud, Alex. Oh my God. I'm going to go get a Vargo. The best experience. I love that we're getting away from the pronunciation of that product just a little bit every single time we say it.

39:22We get a little further away from it. Virgo. That's actually the name. Yeah, it's the Virgo headset. It's the Vigo Mortenstein headset. This is as much as we know about the Vision Pro. We did get to see the Disney Plus app. There is some other drama. Netflix is not going to make an app for this thing. That news broke this week. They're just like, use the web browser. That's fine. That's weird. It sounds like app developers as a whole have not rushed to this platform yet, which is fine. The platform doesn't exist yet. I wouldn't expect a bunch of app developers to be ready to ship on day one. But there are some big questions about what this thing is for, how it actually works.

40:00It's$3 ,500 to get one. You have to go. You have to either go to a store or upload your prescription after scanning your face. Like there's a lot of steps between now and lots of people having them. And I think there's just a lot of caution in the middle of all of that. Yeah. And I think for the funny position Apple is in right now is it's having to reckon with the fact that it's Apple and it's very hard for Apple to quietly launch a product. But fundamentally, this is this is like a public beta of a thing, right? Like Apple does not think this is the final version of this. It's not what anyone believes is going to be where we're headed at overall in a decade.

40:40and this is the kind of thing that like snapchat would call like the next rev of spectacles and still be like this is just a fun thing we're messing around with and apple because it's apple has to come out and say this is the future we've solved everything this is perfect and it just puts you in a funny position as a marketing enterprise here's a question i'll leave everyone because again we none of these reviews stop calling them reviews it's driving me bananas uh you people actually have to review them whether it's us or whoever whatever reviewer you trust like whatever independent reviewer you trust to spend a lot of time with something and give you an opinion go trust them i hope it's us you know we try really hard but whoever it is the question that's going to be embedded in all those reviews is if apple thinks the future is ar which tim cook has said over and over and over again and then this is a simulator of an ar device which is kind of the framework that i'm just going to start with right this is a simulator of the thing they want to make.

41:36Well, then showing us all these VR experiences, having a light seal, blocking you off from the real world and putting you on top of the volcano or an Avengers tower. That's not AR, right? That is, those are VR experiences. And there's a real tension in this product between the things of VR headset is inherently good at, especially when you spend all the money on it and the AR simulator, it might wish to be. And I, I truly do not know how they will pick those paths. Because if you just want a pair of glasses or you just want a pair of contact lenses, which is the end state that they have talked about in the past, wow, you're not going to be able to block off light and put everybody in Avengers Tower.

42:19So how do you get from here to there if everything good about this product is VR? I mean, that's the same challenge that Meta's facing, right? Who said the same thing? AR is our future. This is where we're going. All of this stuff is just a step on the way to AR. I think they're just I think Meta is just more open about this than than Apple is. I think Apple is in the exact same place Meta is with only their high end headsets going to probably sell better and perform better. But otherwise, I think ultimately it's it's it's very similar space of we're not there yet. The technology doesn't exist.

42:51The things we want to do to make AR cool isn't possible yet. So we're going to do a really good VR headset because that's the way you start to normalize the stuff that's going to be necessary for AR. But Apple's much quieter about it because they want us all to think that they've created a new form of computing when everybody knows they just made a really cool VR headset. Well, no. If you listen to David, no one on Earth has ever heard of a VR headset before. That's definitely what I said. That's right. uh well and ultimately uh this is the first vr headset anyone has ever tried on in the history of the universe uh apple actually invented the term vr just this no i think ultimately what what all these companies seem to be saying is that vr is a feature of ar right like those two things are not mutually exclusive and ultimately you want both uh but the thing we can do right now is pretty good vr there's not much evidence yet that we can do pretty good ar and i think uh i think to alex's point like meta is pretty open about that uh some of the other headset makers are pretty open about that and apple just by virtue of the way the company operates is not allowed to say it's bad at anything so instead it's going to keep imagining new futures that it has invented even as it goes through the same stages as everybody else i feel even though we had demos and replayed this thing again uh i'm just gonna keep repeating this and we should move on to talk about what's going on with the apple watch and the galaxy ring yeah because we do have v here but we don't know anything yet.

44:20Even the people I know who've worn this thing five times, they don't know anything. We have to take these things outside of Apple's control. We have to try to wear them on airplanes and behind Cybertruck wheels. Can you imagine the Cybertruck wiper in this thing? Do you think the Cybertruck wiper moves too fast for the Vision Pros cameras? I'm dying to know. There's a whole other thing that happens when a product is actually released that is the important thing. And that I'm just going to keep everybody focused on that because you cannot know right now. And that to me is utterly fascinating. Like it is kind of the best moment because anything is possible and everyone can have all the dreams they want.

44:59And then you're going to put on the headset and your weird rendered eyes are going to look into the eyes of someone you love and you're going to be like, am I still cool? And there's going to be an answer. If you ask that question, no. This is what I do with every piece of new technology. I just look at someone directly in the eyes and say, am I still cool? And that person is always Becky. And she's always like, you never were.

45:23All right. Very quickly, let's talk about what's going on with the Apple Watch. It's somewhat simple, I guess. It's banned again. Yeah, it's banned again. It's banned again. So, you know, it's just been kind of a back and forth where this is really funny, again, because usually I think Apple is so used to winning that the fact that it's losing a lot against Massimo right now is just kind of very fascinating to watch just because. So earlier this week, Bloomberg was suggesting that, you know, Apple is going to drop the blood oxygen feature from the watches in order to get around the ITC ban. And that basically U.S.

46:04Customs and Borders was like, yeah, that works. That's cool. That's totally awesome. But that wasn't confirmed, right, at the beginning of this week. And then yesterday, basically, we heard that the federal appeals court was like, yeah, we're not going to extend the stay on this ban. So starting today, 5 p.m., ban's back on. You can't sell this stuff. And then, you know, late last night, Apple was like, ha ha. Guess what, guys? We're going to sell versions without the blood oxygen feature. So that's how we're getting around that. Those went on sale today. So that's currently where we're at with the Apple Watch ban.

46:38And it's just like, just pay Massimo. Like, you could just end this. You could license this. A deeply funny C line of the story is that Massimo added a new board member this week. And it's Bob Chet. Oh, yeah. Ex-Disney CEO. It's fantastic. He's going to make it tech. It's pretty good. He's going to make it tech. He, since leaving Disney, I think he was always bald, but he's gotten more aggressively bald in a particular way. The photo of him, it's like he's joining Massimo's board. It's like, oh, Thanos is on the board now. Like, that's very much the vibe. It's pretty good. This is just the ban is still temporary because Apple has an appeal going.

47:19And the hardware is still in there. It's just not accessible by the software. And V, your point has always been like, this is the least useful piece of the Apple Watch. It is. It is the least useful as of right now piece of tech in most smartwatches, to be quite frank, because like what are you using blood oxygen for? Right. In COVID, everyone was all on pulse oximeters because you could tell whether, you know, you were your lungs were working, whether they were breathing. But the thing that people have to realize is that these are not FDA cleared pulse oximeters. Right. They're wellness gadgets.

47:52You are taking a spot check at any given second as to how much blood oxygen you have in a second. You have to sit there for 15 seconds still. You can't move for it to tell you what this estimate of your blood oxygen is. And for the vast majority of people who are not having any kind of lung issues or whatever, if you're healthy, 99.9 % of the time is it's going to be over 95 and you're going to find out, I don't have to worry about anything. The other use case for pulse oximeters within these smartwatches is to tell you whether you have breathing disturbances at night. So you're just going to get an average in the morning of what your SpO2 level was.

48:36And for 99 percent of people who are healthy, you are going to see that it's either above 95 percent. You're good. Or it's going to be below that and you're going to be like, oh, I'm a side sleeper, so it messed up. Therefore, I can't really trust that. Because if you are a side sleeper, it is going to tell you that it's lower. Like Garmin's tell me regularly that my SPO2 level at night is 91 percent, which is that's like you should be going to the hospital if you start getting to those levels. So it is not really all that trustworthy. The only thing is like in the mid to long term, these companies are looking at pulse oximeters as a way to detect sleep apnea.

49:13The only company that's remotely close is Withings. And even they're not saying it's sleep apnea, right? They're saying breathing disturbances, which may indicate at some point that you may be inclined to sleep apnea. So maybe you should go to a doctor. So it's really not that serious of a feature right now. It's just not. So keep buying the watch. If you were planning to buy a watch, the Apple Watch, you can still just go buy it. You can still go buy it. It's fine. The SE is not impacted. And, you know, it's really funny because whenever I recommend products, for most people, I say, you're going to be fine with the SE.

49:49It's totally good for you. And they just have FOMO. They just want all the stuff. It's cool. Yeah. What if I need to light up an 80-decibel siren in the middle of the woods? Come on. SE can't do that. No, no, it can't do that. But neither can the regular Series 9. It's only the Ultra that's going to be doing that for you with it. And what do you have to have, Victoria? I know you have the Ultra. I know you have the Ultra. V, you also got to try the actual Massimo smartwatch at CS with the features. Yes, so they're calling it the Freedom, which is just like— Are you serious? Yes, it's called the Freedom.

50:24It's 46 millimeters. It's a big, chunky boy. And they told me like a bazillion times, so I have to say it, it's an early prototype. It might not look like this when it comes out later this year. But, you know, it's kind of the – they were very much telling me that they're putting out a smart or smartwatch. So this is a smartwatch that's going to have timers. It's going to have notifications. It's going to work with your phone more fluidly. It's going to have a better app experience. It's going to have health tracking experiences, which sounds an awful lot like an Apple watch, right? So they keep telling me that the reason they're putting out this watch is so that it can tout its sensor accuracy.

51:01because all these companies be out here, according to Massimo, with sensors that are not accurate, that are not giving you the actual results that you can trust, but they're going to give you the health results that you can trust, and it's going to be smarter. So, you know, you sit there and you're like, so you're trying to kill Apple, right? This is the Apple Watch killer, and they're like, no, this is about us. This is about us and our sensor accuracy. And, you know, of course they have to say that, but you just look at this thing and you're like, I see you are coming for the consumer wearable space.

51:33And they're not the only medical tech company doing that. You know, at CES, I saw Movano. Movano is a medical tech company, and they're coming out with a smart ring that has also got, you know, they're in the last stages of FDA clearance for their particular sensors. In the past, I've seen medical tech companies come out with like Almaron. They had a blood pressure smartwatch at CES. So it's not the first time The medical community has been like, we can try hardware. We can make that work. But it's just very interesting given the backdrop of the Apple Watch band that Massimo's out here and like, hey, we got hardware.

52:08Speaking of rings, there was also the big Samsung announced that they're going to do a smart ring now. Is it going to be as cool as Aura and Movano and everybody else hopping in the space now? Well, the cool thing about the Galaxy ring is that they were like, hello, we're here. And then there's a ring and it's spinning in space and there's stars on it and it looks gorgeous. And they're like, the video was sick. If you haven't seen the video, you should go watch it. The little like reveal video of it is pretty badass. Very cool. And then they're like, and we will give you no details. And, you know, I was looking at that.

52:40I was like, OK, but also this is clearly going to be a sleep tracking or a competitor just because, you know, at CES and I wrote the story at CES, there were a buttload of smart rings. more smart rings than I've ever seen in my life at CES at all different price points, at all different feature sets. So for Samsung to come out here and be like, yeah, we're also getting on the smart ring train, I think this is the year of the smart ring. I really do. And it's one thing to go to CES and say, Movano, nobody – unless they read my work, nobody knows what Movano is. if I say Zep and Amazfit, or Amazfit, this budget thing that has basically replaced Fitbit for that market, they're coming out with a smart ring.

53:26People are going to be like, okay, you wearable nerd. Sure, sure. You're saying. No, no. This episode of the Vertical House, we got Vargo. We got Movano. I want to call out Shelly. It's a DIY smart home company. We'll just name little companies. Yeah. So, you know, like if I say that there's a bunch of small companies out here that are putting out smart rings, This is going to be a thing. People are going to be like, OK, V, Pat, Pat, you know, you're a wearable nerd. Of course you think that's going to happen. So for Samsung to come out and be like, hi, guys, we got a Galaxy ring. I'm just super vindicated in my seat over here, just going like, yes, see, I told you.

54:00I told you smart rings are going to be a thing. This is a thing that people are really thinking about. And it's because there's a huge segment of the population that is really mad that they have to charge their smart watches if they want sleep tracking. So the obvious answer here is that you have a smart ring, which is going to be more accurate for that anyway because the bottom of your finger is more accurate for heart rate tracking. It's more accurate for blood oxygen tracking. And the battery is going to last longer than your Galaxy Watch that lasts maybe two days if you're really good about battery management.

54:33So I really think that this is their answer to that. Also, just from a market perspective, the wrist has been claimed. Yep. You cannot replace the thing that's on many people's wrists. So you're like, let's try fingers. There's that. And I'm just curious because the one thing at CES that stood out to me was Amazfit with their ring was just like, this is going to be a standalone. But also it could be a companion wearable for your wearable. So it's going to work with their smartwatches. And I think if Samsung really wants to be smart about it, they'll do the same. They'll be like, okay, this is your smart ring and it's going to work with your smart watch.

55:12We've spent the last two years working really, really hard on the sleep tracking. Can I just tell you my graph of the wearable success formula? It's just 15 more axes just sprouted off that graph. I was diligent and I didn't say anything about the Vision Pro and the graph. But now we're like, we got wearables on top of wearables. We need exponents in this thing. I'm telling you, this is where we're headed because not everyone wants a wearable that's going to be, you know, an extension of their phone. Right. A lot of people who are going for the smart ring, they don't want the notifications. They don't want their kind of I think it's the next evolution of the fitness band, which is like R.I.P.

55:55It's gone. The smartwatch has devoured it completely. I'm telling you. So the dorkiness cost is going down the curve. See, and then the cost cost is low. So smart rings, they're up in the upper right, depending on how they look and whether or not you have to refer to them as the galaxy ring, which depending on who you are, is either a huge positive or a huge negative. From like the one person who I saw online who got to see the actual prototype, it's supposedly very light. It supposedly looks nice. We'll see. The render, it looks like an aura ring, but make it galaxy. So we'll see because a lot of people will look at an aura ring and be like, oh, that looks really cool.

56:35And then other people will be like, that is so chunky. Get it the F away from me. Absolutely not. But, you know, on the design front, I think smart rings are starting to evolve a bit. I saw the EV ring. It's very cool. It has a little gap up top. So when you're bloated and you can't get your ring off, it can still come off. That's, I'm just saying, Samsung, that's right out there. You can copy that and make the Galaxy Ring next level. Well, that's the Galaxy Ring 2 powered by AI. All right, speaking of AI and Galaxy stuff, V, we got to let you go. We got to take a break. We've gone way over in the first segment.

57:09That's how we're doing today. But V, thank you so much for coming on. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back and talk about the rest of Galaxy Unpacked and the S3-4. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

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59:32Alright, we're back. There's more Samsung to talk about. You ready? I'm ready. Phones. Phones. So it's fascinating that Samsung chose to do the Galaxy event a week after CES. Is it? It's fascinating that Google showed up at the Samsung event more assertively, I guess, more loudly than they did at CES. Yep. Yes, that's true. Just quite a lot of dynamics there, right? Yeah. Samsung can attract a bunch of attention without CES, so it makes sense. But Google put a lot of its AI features in the S24 this year, which is really interesting. Yeah, empowered by the Google Gemini, right? The large language model that a lot of the generative stuff is going to be doing is Google Gemini, which I don't think is surprising.

1:00:15I know some people were like, why wasn't it ChatGPT or Microsoft, whatever Microsoft is doing? And it makes sense. Google makes Android. They work closely together. Why wouldn't they use the people who are already doing this stuff in their own phones? Google and Samsung also desperately need each other to compete with Apple. Like neither one of them can beat Apple on their own. They've both tried and both have failed. And the way to do it is together. And it's working pretty well. But my big takeaway from this event is I am super, super bearish on the future of the Pixel now. Yes, same. Google clearly believes Samsung's phones are the flagship Android phones now and that it should treat them as such.

1:00:57That was my vibe, too. I just want to point out that Samsung strikes so little fear into Apple's heart that Tim Cook refuses to pronounce the name Samsung correctly. What does he say? He says Samsung every time. Every time. And I can't tell if it's a diss. I can't tell if he just doesn't know. Just go listen to him say it sometime. That's a diss. Tizen has caused no fear in this man's brain. Like you can do the EEG and you're like Tizen and nothing lights up. He's like Tizen. That's like an older Southern person does. They always like to be like, oh, I just forgot the name. Is that how you're supposed to pronounce it?

1:01:37And they never they refuse to learn. Yeah, it's very good. Anyway, but I agree with you, David. is that's my way of saying I agree with you. Like, it needs to be the combo platter. And I think Apple, there's a lot between Apple and Google and the search deal and all this stuff. But on their own, I think Apple's like, what? And they are both still very reactive to Apple in that particular way. But we should talk about the S24 because it is meaningfully ahead of the iPhone in certain ways. And this will almost certainly be the Android phone of 2024. It's wild to say that the second week of January, but I think we can fairly confidently say it.

1:02:10At least in the United States, this will be the benchmark. Yeah, because they don't do the Note. The Note isn't kind of the big landmark anymore for them. It is this S series. And so we got the S24, which continues to be kind of the smallest one. It's small. It's 6.2-inch display. That's enormous. And then there's the S24 Plus, which is 6.7-inch display. And then the S24 Ultra, which can't have the same size display. So it is 6.8 inches. Way bigger. Just, yeah, just a tiny, tiny bit bigger. Same with the batteries. Like the S24 is like a 4 ,000 milliamp battery. And you're like, okay, cool. And the S24 Plus is 4 ,900.

1:02:50Cool. And then just a little bit bigger, the S24 Ultra is at 5 ,000. And big, big cameras here. Like I'm curious for you guys. You guys geek out. You in particular, Eli, geek out about these cameras a lot more than I do. The backside of the S24 and the S24 Plus is both a 50 megapixel wide camera with a 12 megapixel ultra wide and a 10 megapixel 3x optical zoom and the 30x space zoom. So you're getting kind of the same camera package in both of those. And then the S24 Ultra is totally, it feels totally different. It's a 200 megapixel wide, same ultra wide, same tele zoom, but then a 50 megapixel tele 5x zoom instead of the space zoom, which like that feels cool.

1:03:39and that's the one so one of the things that samsung said about that zoom camera is that because they took it from the s23 ultra which had a 10x zoom they actually took it down to five but because they upped the resolution so much what samsung claimed at least to alice and johnson and our team is that you'll get more image quality at 10x zoom just because you have so many more pixels to play with even though you're doing digital cropping and uh digital zoom is not a It's just cropping your photos and everyone should know that. But the thesis at least is that you're still getting higher image quality just because it's capturing so much more light in the 50 megapixel sensor.

1:04:17So I think that the math of that is fascinating. And I'm really curious to see how that stacks up in reviews. But the cameras are nuts. So I think there's the math and there's also just the caution to the wind AI processing that Samsung is doing. Sure. Why will those photos look good? Because Samsung's like, make them look good. And the AI's like, your wish is my command. Here's some shit I made up.

1:04:47What is a photo? rabbit hole that we should fall down. But there's a bunch of other AI stuff here going on. Yeah, yeah. Google powered AI stuff. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff like they're going all in on translation, which was for the longest time, that was a really cool pixel feature was that you could kind of translate things on the fly and transcribe things as well. And that's coming to the Samsung, the S24 lineup. And then on like the image side of things, there's a lot of photo editing that you're going to be able to do now. You can just like circle something and it should get rid of it kind of that Photoshop demo we see all the time now on the S24, which is both cool and hilarious because people were like using it to circle out like watermarks.

1:05:32Yeah. Samsung's own attempt to make you know things are AI copyright or AI generated was to put a watermark and then you can tell the AI to remove the watermark. It's beautiful. Perfect. No, no, it's beautiful. Those were like the things that I was particularly excited about just because I love to not have to open Photoshop anymore. The longer I can go without opening it, the better for me. I will say the one that really got me was the idea of being able to make a 120 frames per second slow motion video out of anything. This is the rabbit hole. Oh, is this your rabbit hole? This is the rabbit hole.

1:06:03Oh, I thought the rabbit hole was going to be the thing where you can move the horizon on a photo and it'll fill the edges instead of having to crop the edges. When you take a rectangular photo and you turn it a little to correct the horizon, you're going to have these empty spaces in the corners the s24 will generatively fill those corners to make it still feel like a rectangle yeah but i can do that in photoshop like i definitely never ever done that in photoshop alex we have had the can you do this in photoshop and does that negate all of this argument yes so many times and i think that it does but we have to let neil i have this no filling in the edges like whatever because the edges are usually not the subject of your photo right so like am i lying about whether there's a little bit more water there maybe i'm lying maybe who cares right like a little more what this is so much more like blasé than you were about the pixel i've been beaten down i can move someone over on a bench that's outrageous but there's more water over there yes they keep moving the line levels of outrage i'm this is nuance real time nuance is being developed also that's so boring i do think that's not a photo it's just not i trying to gin someone up into an outrage cycle over there's a little more water even i can't do that but i took 50 frames and i made all the people look at me in a way that never happened it's still dangerous territory to me the the ultra slow motion the most dangerous territory because now this thing is generating entire frames that never happened right entire frames and creating a video, a slow motion video, which people are more attuned to thinking is real than any.

1:07:43Watch this back in slow motion. Let's see what really happened. And every other frame is a lie, right? If you go from 30 frames a second to 120 frames slow motion over the same duration, boy, that's a lot of frames that never happened. And Samsung's like, yeah, we'll put a watermark on it. And then you can be like, yeah, get rid of the watermark. It goes away. Like this is when I say this is the what is a photo apocalypse like this is more apocalyptic. What is a photo shit? I'm going to throw a wrench in this because the TV companies weren't they already doing a lot of this already? Yeah. This is just what interpolation is.

1:08:19Yeah. Just making up frames and sticking them in there. Only it's now the people who are like we're going to invent the moon. Wait, wait. It really depends. There's a lot. There's a lot of different ways TV companies have done this. the dumbest way they've done it is like three two pulldowns where you have a refresh rate on tv of 60 hertz whatever and you're throwing 24 frames per second content up there and you just double the frames right you do three frames of something then two frames that's a three two pulldown like that's fine you're just showing sort of double the frames to match your refresh rate then there's a little bit of the ai upscaling that is occurring on tvs right now fine that's weird but they're like there's something else happening there that is not this thing where you're like, I'm going to capture this video or I'm going to insert any video into this editor and it will now create a slow motion video.

1:09:07It will actually generate outside of real time, other frames. Whereas a TV is like, I'm going to play back this video to you. And in real time, in an ephemeral way, I will throw away this data when I'm done with it, create new detail or create frames in the middle like there are very few tvs in the market today none i think that you can just feed a video signal to and it will create a slow motion video and claim that that is a correct so is the difference for you one goes real fast and one goes real slow the difference for me is this thing generates files that you can then pass around as information whereas a tv is just doing different display tricks in theory if you scroll frame by frame through one of these 120 frames per second videos you will land on a series of frames that never existed in the world yeah you will land on a series of moments that are entirely generated right and you will not be able to trust those moments and that trips over some line that like it takes the eyes from this photo and the eyes from this photo and the eyes from this photo and puts them all into one photo because that's where all the eyes looked best like that at least is those pixels were real and captured and existed in the world.

1:10:16Putting them together is one thing. But with this, you're actually creating something, no pixel of which was captured in the real world. Yes. 0 % of those pixels are ever captured. I'll just give you an example. It's the NFL playoffs. Was it a catch? Right? Like, here's a real thing that like people argue about all the time. Was this a catch? And what do we do? We crop in, we slow motion. And now we're like, we're going to let a computer decide whether that ball hit the ground somewhere in the middle and it's gonna have to guess where a football went which is not following a normal trajectory i feel like that's not gonna happen why not wait well i'm sorry if you football fans are gonna like could like literally i was not convinced until you said that example and now they're gonna hold up their samsung phones to the tv capture the video of the replay and say make this slower and they're gonna post that to wherever and argue about a bunch of fake images.

1:11:11Literally fake images. Also, but there's going to be a ref who's going to have a very fancy camera who will be like, that's wrong. Do I trust in refs too much? That's like just one example. It's the lowest stakes example. Although given the prevalence of sports betting, also a very high stakes example right now in America. That's just one thing. It's an election year, right? What if, I don't know, Trump stumbles over some stairs or Biden stumbles over some stairs or appears to stumble over some stairs and a bunch of people on either side want to take video of that and then create a bunch of fake frames where it looks like they stumbled more than they did or they slow it down.

1:11:47And as we know, things in slow motion appear way more dramatic than real time and you send that out and now you have a slow motion video, many of the frames of which never happened. Like that is the apocalypse because people are inclined to trust slow motion video to say what really happened. in here there's nothing there's no all the stuff we've heard about content authenticity whatever samsung's like what you can just do it no watermarks no cryptographic signature none of this other stuff like it's just here's some ai stuff and just had like heedless and when i keep saying the what what is a photo apocalypse is here it's like oh it's this stuff yeah where actually the end state is no one trusts any media because they all know how easy it is to generate anything and then now you're that's a really weird place to end up we're getting there really fast i think too i've i've just consistently been amazed by how quickly just in my own life people are adopting that sort of reflexive skepticism of like oh this is a picture it's probably fake it's like the burden of proof is now like prove that it's real not proof that it's fake it's very strange right this is a deep fake this is just a thing people argue all the time it feels bad but also at the same time if it means we never have to see the shark swimming in the highway water ever again like oh you will it's not that people aren't just gonna hit like on social media or there won't be grifters like if we could get to a place of pure skepticism where that stuff faded fine but this stuff is already out there uh i'll give you an example uh and during the kyle rittenhouse trial which was in wisconsin's attention to it uh kyle rittenhouse his lawyers argued that some of the photographic evidence could not be used because the iPhone has AI in it.

1:13:32Right. I think we cover this on the show. They won. The local prosecutors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, were not ready for that argument. Surprise, surprise. And they were just like, yeah, we're going to exclude this evidence because we're not ready to have a bunch of experts come in here and say, what is a photo? That's years ago. This happened years ago. And now we have Samsung phones that can take any video and interpolate frames that never happened. What are you going to do when that stuff hits a courtroom? What are you going to do when that stuff, when there, when there is like dramatic amounts of money in sports books on the line and you want to claim that the refs are rigged?

1:14:10Like there, there's no responsibility here. Like we were just past the point of no return with what is a photo? Because the answer for a Samsung video is like these are not these are not videos that you can trust right no i i think you're right and i do think we're pretty clearly past the point of no return on this and i think we uh have to figure out what the next thing is right whether it's a watermark whether it's the cryptographic stuff you're talking about like we've been threatening to do the metadata episode for forever and like that's the thing because it we're we're long past the thing where uh you can straightforwardly trust every single thing that you capture just because it's light projecting onto sensors right like we've been past that for a long time and i think i i this strikes me as i like i take your point about the football example which i actually think is a really good one like a ball is moving unpredictably literally the camera is going to guess where it went and it's going to get it wrong sometimes and that's bananas uh but i don't know this doesn't strike me as like an entirely new field of scary stuff in this way i kind of agree with nilai and that it does feel like the the the bar has been raised on like this or lowered the bar has moved significantly in one direction or another depending on on your point of view and that it's a it's now so so much easier to make fake stuff with your phone like like this phone the s24 sure is put Photoshop in your pocket in a way that wasn't there before.

1:15:41And Photoshop has often been like that's been a massive tool for misinformation since its inception. And now anybody can go and they can circle something and get rid of it, or they can film something and have a computer decide which way the ball goes. And that just wasn't possible before this. So it's like really cool stuff. I'm really excited about it from like a personal perspective as someone who likes to make stupid things horrified for it on like a society yeah i also think one of the one of the debates we had around the pixel was there where the sort of ease threshold is because i think and this is where the photoshop thing comes in right just because you can do complicated things in photoshop it changes it when it is just a button you can press in the camera app on your phone i think we all agree on that yeah and the thing about this one is it's it's gonna be just complicated enough to do what you're describing me live that i think that might be the reason it bothers me less is like not only do you have to shoot this video you're gonna then have to uh run it through this process to get you the 120 frames per second thing you're gonna have to find a frame that looks good that was generated which it usually won't because if you shoot something at 120 frames per second each individual frame usually kind of looks like shit uh and then you're gonna have to take that thing isolate it out and then go do something with it and that that to me is like more steps than the pick somebody up off a bench and move them over there that that second thing actually alarms me more just because it is so simple and straightforward to do that people will do it and a lot but that's spoken from someone who probably doesn't have like a thousand dollars riding on the next green bay packers game i don't um i don't uh gamble i spend a lot of money on limousines you know there's people out there who knows who those folks are but but there is like Like, I think the incentives are low enough, probably going to be low enough for a lot of folks or high enough for a lot of folks that that little extra effort isn't going to be as big an impact for them.

1:17:36And we're seeing the same thing with deepfakes, right? Like deepfakes were something that we kind of could be like, whatever. It's hard to do. And it's gotten so much easier to do a deepfake now and do a really good one that that misinformation potential has really skyrocketed. And it feels like the S24 brings us to that place in a beautiful package. brought to you by Samsung. That was my Tim Cook impression. That's good. I think you have to have a song harder. Samsung. Sorry, Samsung. It's like people who say TV. I'm just telling you to go listen to it. Other little bits and bobs AI-wise of the S24 line, Google is bringing a bunch of Gemini model stuff to it.

1:18:16You can have circle stuff to search on the phone, which is finally used for circling. I love that it called Allison out. Like she tried to get she tried to like cheat it. She's like, aha, try a picture of like this fake plant. You're going to tell me it's real. And it's like, that's a fake plant. It costs nine dollars. And she's like, rude. Dude, Google Lens is really good. Like, it's a remarkable part of Google search that I feel like doesn't get talked about as an AI product in the way that it should. It's really good. And they now have the multi-search stuff where you can take a picture and then ask a question about that picture.

1:18:53And the example they gave was like, you take a picture of a backgammon board and say, how do I play this game? And it'll figure out that it's backgammon and then use Gemini to tell you how to play backgammon. That stuff is cool. Yeah. and that's real like future of search stuff and that's where also the circle search comes in you're like oh i see this bag in a video that seems cool circle the bag send it to google by the bag what's interesting to me all the generative ai stuff here is either image editing which comes with its own obvious philosophical dilemmas or it's like sort of llm stuff right like search for something it'll talk to you about it you can there's magic compose and all this stuff in here the middle piece that Samsung was kind of reaching for with Bixby is not here right which is what we saw with the Rabbit R1 at CS where it's like you're telling your phone to do something that just like does it and if you will recall Samsung's attempted differentiation with Bixby its voice assistant whose name sounded like a dog wearing shoes was that you would be like set some settings and Bixby would go like set some settings for you in a way that Siri and Google Assistant kind of can't.

1:19:58And it's striking to me they have not closed this loop on that phone because that's what you would expect. Because it wasn't just Rabbit we saw this with. A lot of the TV companies were like, we've got AI in our TV. Oh, really? What does it do? It makes your picture prettier, figures it out. And so you'd think Samsung would do this. And I'm kind of like, is there something happening with Google and the relationship with Google that's kind of restricting that? Or is it just they haven't gotten there yet. I think it's just harder work than people reckoned with. Like the idea that I could tell my phone to whatever, turn on Bluetooth doesn't seem that hard, but it is actually, it's a leap beyond just understanding what Bluetooth is, right?

1:20:41You have to have a different kind of access to my system and a different kind of access to the tools and the stuff that I actually want to do. And this was the problem with a lot of these things that have come out first the text sucked but right like they had it built in the right direction but it wasn't very good and now we have llms which are much better at understanding what you mean but are not connected to the metal in the same way and i think the next phase of this is to put those two things together right like yeah google has made a lot of noise about gemini being built into android more and more over time and i'm sure that's coming but right now gemini is like built into google photos more than it is built into Android.

1:21:19And so the next phase of that is to just pull it down a level in the stack. But that's just, it's harder work than it seems like it ought to be. But it is sort of surprising that no one has really gotten there yet. Yeah, and I just haven't closed this loop. It's like, I want you to play this song and it's going to like click around and Spotify for you. Yeah. This is the device that actually makes sense. The Rabbit, I think, captured a lot of imagination, but that's still what it is doing. Yeah. That's a clicky wheel. Right. What if I just still had my big screen and great camera and it could still do that for me.

1:21:48I'm eager to see that one closed. Okay, we should take a break. We are just way over. It's just a ridiculous show this week. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round, and then we're going to go for another hour or so. We'll be right back. That's going to be great. Support for this show comes from Figma. Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world's best digital apps, websites, and experiences. And now there's a faster way to bring those ideas to life. Introducing Figma Make, an AI-powered prompt-to-code tool that helps you turn ideas into something real fast.

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1:24:18All right, we're back. It's time for a lightning round. Uh, I will tell you Smeg, the obscure refrigerator company that Kranz called out last week, uh, did not sponsor us this week. Uh, so now we're just going to name some other companies as we go. I'm going all in on Iowa, which was like a stereo company oh i like that i didn't know they were around anymore that's the sony sub brand yeah do they get spun off i don't know if they spun off but they were they had a big presence at ces and liam and i both were like they're still around that was my first stereo it's a big moment for us well i've now clicked on a button labeled i will legacy oh they spun off from sony uh literally when you click on i will legacy it says our company has no association with Sony Corporation.

1:25:06Well done. So you guys, like, come on, get your name out there, hit us up. Yeah, lightning round sponsored by, it could be you, Iowa. I'm very precious about, you know, disclosures and all that sort of thing. This I will sell. Except in the lightning round. Except in the lightning round. We will sell it to anyone. First come, first serve. All right, Kranz, what's your lightning round? So CNN had a major restructuring this week, and normally that doesn't feel like a Vergecast thing, But a lot of this restructuring was because they realized people use their phones a lot and they're not watching cable TV as much.

1:25:38And that's a Vergey thing. So they are combining all the different news apparatuses or news operations. So that means their digital operation, their TV operation, and their streaming operation are all going to be combined into one big mega operation. And then they're going to have a spinoff of like, what are the other places we can advance ourselves? And also we got to figure out the phone. that seems really important. We should put CNN on phones. That's pretty good. It's just bundling and unbundling, man. Give a few years and every newsroom is going to start to be like, we need specific teams for each of these.

1:26:13What's our vision pro strategy? We're headed back down that road before too long. I'm sure of it. So there's some context here. One reason that CNN has always a vert story is that the modern CNN is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, a company that came into existence from the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery. Surprise. Warner Brothers sold to Discovery by AT &T, a company that used to own CNN. That was cool. They could have had it on the phones. AT &T bought all of Warner Brothers in a pitch that they described as, quote, a vision deal. And the vision was that they would preload garbage Warner Brothers apps onto mid-range Android phones in AT &T stores.

1:26:56This is true. I'm not making this up. Anyway, they sold it to, they sold, they got conned into making a grayscale 4-3 Justice League by Zack Snyder. They sold the whole kit and caboodle to Discovery, who installed this guy Chris Licht, who was supposed to revitalize CNN. I would say that was a disaster. But now they have a new guy, Mark Thompson, who used to be the CEO of the New York Times. He led the big digital transformation there. He hired another executive from the Times and they're going to now they're going to figure out phones. Yeah, it's it's not like super encouraging that in his memo announcing this big restructuring and their need to focus on phones was he said, I don't think anyone's yet cracked the code on how that translates, truly translates to a new to a great news experience.

1:27:45That's not kind of what you want to hear from the guy who's like, we're going to fix things with phones. but he seems to also recognize that he hasn't figured it out yet and he's working on it so i don't know i like the honesty i appreciate the honesty personally i'm excited like given what he did with the new york times app that's that's honestly one of my favorite apps that i use on my phone pretty much daily i'm i'm willing to to see what happens i'm curious it's cnn is weird because cnn is on one hand wildly successful digitally like cnn CNN.com, however big you think it is, it's much bigger than that.

1:28:22CNN.com is huge. But it doesn't feel sort of crucial in the way that some other news sources feel crucial. Like the New York Times has done a really good job of making itself like central to the universe. And I think if I'm Mark Thompson, that's probably. Wait, what's that? They don't need to know that you feel that way. All right. They're fine. They're doing fine on their own. but and i think the idea that they feel like no one has cracked mobile devices is really interesting because i also kind of feel like that's true everybody just built apps and you can have good apps and push notifications are the best thing anybody has found to get people in but like i now get a push notification from the new york times every time anyone on earth dies it feels like and that we're just in this weird place of like what is the push what is the pull what is the experience supposed to look like is it just a list of articles whenever i open the app like I think it's cool that they're coming at this from the idea that no one has solved this.

1:29:20And the answer is not just like send more push notifications. So people open our app more often. I don't know what the answer is either, but I think it'll be fun to watch. I mean, if they improve on what AP News does, where it sends you a push notification and then you click on it and then they're like, we don't have a story up yet. Here's our front page. Oh, perfect. My favorite experience with the push notification for news. I'll be happy. Like the bar is kind of low. I think if they put some thought into it, it'd do something cool. Yeah. And especially CNN has gone through this weird thing where there was CNN Plus, where they were going to do a whole big streaming service that died immediately when the Warner Brothers Discovery thing happened.

1:29:55What was it? Was it around for like a couple of weeks? It was around for a week. It was a week. Okay. It was like a week. And then it got – Zaslav was like, this is stupid and got rid of it. And then now there's CNN Max, which is on Max, the streaming channel. and it has all the things whereas CNN Plus was like, we think you'll really like the CNN brand and we're not going to carry anything over from the channel. Jake Tapper had a book club on CNN Plus. Like, sure. I don't think that was going to work, but I wish we had gotten to see a little bit more of it play out. CNN Max is like, we're just going to put like CNN on your TV.

1:30:27And I appreciate that as someone who cuts the cord. That's fine. Good. But I think the idea of like, we're just going to stream a cable channel to your phone and that'll do it is also not the answer. And I think every content company is going to have to come up with some version of that answer. And they're having to do it very quickly. So I think CNN coming at this from like, we are a gigantic digital presence. How do we turn that into TV money? It's going to be really interesting. And I have no idea what it looks like. Yeah. All right, David, what's your lightning round? Mine is, so Apple and Epic have been fighting for a very long time.

1:31:03The Supreme Court just declined to hear it. I promise we're not going to talk about this for a long time. So basically what happened is that that for all intents and purposes is now over. Apple has to allow developers to link to other places that people can pay for apps. But what Apple did is put in rules that say, even if you do that, we're now going to collect 27 % of what people buy when they click on the link and go pay you somewhere else instead of 30%. And so all the people who are mad about Apple's 30 % tax are now predictably just as mad about Apple's 27 % tax when you pay for something else.

1:31:38And it's gone into this fascinating place where it's like Apple has always said, we don't think this is just a payment processing thing. We think you're paying us 30 % for all of the other things that we provide and all the other people who make these apps. At this point, you're paying the money for the right to have an application on their phone. Yeah, no, that's basically right. Right. And Apple would not say it quite like that, but that's basically the argument. It's our phone. They feel very strongly it's their phone. But all these companies from Epic to Spotify to, you know, everybody else in this coalition for app fairness match dot com and all these other folks, they are equally pissed.

1:32:13And so we're just going to have this same fight again with slightly different rules, which is now instead of paying in an app and giving Apple 30 percent, you pay on the web in an app and you pay 27 percent. And that is just it's just going to start this whole fight all over again. And I think it's fascinating. Oh, yeah. So Epic is going just to walk through the procedural nightmare here. There was the trial, which we covered. Apple won almost all of the claims except the one California state law claim that basically made their anti-steering provision illegal. The thing where you can't tell anyone else that you can go buy stuff elsewhere.

1:32:53Apple appealed that. Epic appealed that. They got all the way to appealing to the Supreme Court, which said, no, we don't want to. We've got other things in our minds. The Supreme Court, ladies and gentlemen. That means the case is over. And this one ruling that Apple lost, you cannot have this anti-steering provision exists. And Apple is basically doing what you would call malicious compliance. Right. They have found a way to comply with the letter of the law and absolutely not its spirit by doing this 27 percent thing. If any purchase happens on the web within seven days of someone clicking that link, you have to audit it.

1:33:27It's crazy. I mean, it's crazy. And so Epic is mad and they have said they're going to go back to the trial court and say, this is not what you intended to have happening. Like this cannot be the outcome you anticipated when you wrote that ruling and we'll see what happens. Malicious compliance is exactly the correct way to put it. It's delightful. It's so petty. It is ridiculous. Look, I get that there's like lots of money involved here, but Apple is like doing, they're doing some stuff that is dangerous for their reputation with app developers here with these games. And I, there's something there that's dangerous.

1:34:01Well, and that's happening while like the whole Hay thing that became a fiasco, what, two summers ago, was a mini fiasco again this time because Apple rejected Hay's calendar app. uh there have been rumblings that an antitrust case against apple is coming sooner rather than later this year like the the the smoke is pretty ugly when it comes to the apple versus developers fight at this moment in time yeah we'll see and it's gonna get we're gonna get a lot more fairly quickly which is not great when you have a giant new totally like architecture that you're trying to get people to adopt yeah and develop for probably not the best time to piss off all your developers.

1:34:40And by the way, the argument for app developers has always been, yes, the phone is very valuable. We are the ones who made it valuable. Right. Yeah. Like there's an app for that as a real way that they market the phone. We'll see. Okay. Mine is, I just want to call out Alex Heath interviewed Mark Zuckerberg on the site that published literally today as we were, we were setting down to tape this episode. Zuckerberg's thing is better as pivoting to building AGI, artificial general intelligence. He's doing that pretty obviously to make sure that meta can compete for talent this is like the thing that all these companies are thinking about that all the hottest talent in the industry is going to go build agi somewhere or the other and meta wants to be in the game and i just want to call this out um he part of their cell is he's like we have more nvidia h100s than anyone they have 340 000 nvidia nuts and i just think it is incredible we have arrived at a place where the ceo of a company like meta is like we have more GPUs than anyone else.

1:35:37You should come work here. Come play with my GPUs. I think that's pretty good. There's a part of me that's like, that's the funniest part of this whole story, is part of the pitch, is like, they've got more GPUs. We got so many GPUs in this office, you come right over. Yeah, pretty good. But you should read the whole thing. There is, you know, Alex rightfully pushed back. He said, look, you just changed the name of the company to Meta. Zuckerberg's answer to this is like, it's not a huge change. It's that in the virtual world to connect with other people, maybe you'll be talking to AGI's in virtual characters.

1:36:11I don't know, man, you can go read it yourself. Well, you need to talk to somebody in there and there's not a lot of people. Yeah. Here's a quote. I don't know how to more unequivocally state that we're continuing to focus on reality labs in the metaverse. They're still spending$15 billion a year on it. And Zuckerberg sees a future in which virtual worlds are generated by AI and filled with AI characters that accompany real people. So Ready Player One. That tracks for me. I really don't think that is a justification from Zuckerberg. I mean, it's a small one, but I don't think the company saying we're in on the metaverse and then saying we're in on AI means like 180 degree pivot.

1:36:47To make the metaverse work is going to require a huge amount of really sophisticated AI. I don't know if it involves Tom Brady playing a character who will talk with me in a messaging app, but like again i think a thing i've been saying a lot is like we need more terms than just ai we call everything ai and actually ai is a million different things and uh having a lot of gpus you can use to do stuff is going to be pretty useful in the metaverse i'm going to start putting how many gpus we have in our checklist there's like five it's so good um 1440p uh you're gonna like it uh i agree i just think the idea that the top line is not still a metaverse is really interesting oh yeah to build a great metaverse we need to build basically agi is a coherent story we're ag we're we're doing it now is like there's there's a little bit of flip floppy oh totally and he is definitely saying we're an ai company that is also building the metaverse not we're a metaverse company that is building ai in order to get there and that's like that's the thing you say because the metaverse has been real bad for your stock price over the last couple years and because apple's about to put out the vision pro yes uh which it feels like the next turn like it's where's more if you thought we talked about the vision pro too much today just wait until we actually get one yeah and we surround ourselves with iowa speakers and smeg refrigerators yeah when does this thing go on sale february 2nd uh it's february 2nd okay it's coming at some point in the near future we're going to have a lot more to say about this and i'm sorry in advance all right please send us an email if you think people have heard of VR headsets before.

1:38:22You can address them to david at theverge.com and we would love to know at vergehas at theverge.com. I will respond with Neal's credit card number so you can buy him a Vision Pro. That'd be great. If someone wants to stand in line for me or whatever, that'd be amazing. That's it. We have quite a lot to talk about next week. There's just a lot going on. The year is fully kicked off. So we've got to wrap this one up. We'll be back next week. We'll see you. That's Verge Has in Buckethead.

1:38:50And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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