Your next laptop could be a foldable phone

16:08Allison Johnson:It's in it. Definitely. I have boundaries around like when I'm willing to take this out as my only computer. And I do want to talk about those boundaries.

16:17Jacob Feldman:OK. Because I think that that line is really complicated. Yeah.

16:20Allison Johnson:Yeah. Well, and I like I have some trips coming up. Wouldn't it be nice to not haul my MacBook around? But then I start thinking about using Lightroom on Android and the whole thing just disintegrates. Yeah, but it really is kind of the I want to leave the house. I want to be as unencumbered as possible. But I still, you know, there's a minimum viable product of I sit down at a coffee shop. something you know Michael Fisher and I talks about is we both have trouble like writing anything meaningful on a slab style phone it just feels like you're boxed in and it I'm like I can type an email but everything anything longer than that just feels like it's not working so having the inner screen of the foldable changes things for me how big is the internal screen on the Z Fold 7?

17:14Allison Johnson:The inner screen is eight inches. So just big enough to run WordPress, write my little blogs. And it does something for my mindset and having a real keyboard in front of me also does the same thing. And it's there's sort of two parts to this journey, I think, which is convincing myself that the phone is a computer and not a phone. And the keyboard, All of that has done it, you know, like successfully.

17:47Jacob Feldman:Wait, tease that out for me. What does that sort of emotional difference look like?

17:52Allison Johnson:I think it is the thing, whereas on a phone, if I'm typing out with my thumbs, you know, I'm just so aware that it's a phone. And something about having, like, keys under your fingers, you're not, like, tapping around with your thumbs on the screen. um yeah it it does it for me it just like clicks i think okay i buy that so where where has your

18:18Jacob Feldman:line landed like if you're you're leaving the house what what is the most complicated thing you're you're willing to sit down prop up the keyboard open up the phone and try to do

18:31Allison Johnson:it definitely comes down to like dealing with images if i am going to be like taking photos and I need to move those onto a computer or a phone and manipulate them and export them. I'm sure I could do that on Android, but it makes me kind of queasy. I will do as much as when we're writing up some news, we'll get some images supplied and you need to resize them or crop them because they're not quite right and all that. Like, I'm comfortable doing that. But that is like right up to the edge of like, if I need to start doing background cutout things, like, forget it. Yeah, that seems right.

19:22Jacob Feldman:But it's I think, yeah, it seems like if you can hit the list of I'm comfortable doing basic communication stuff, even if what I need to do is like write a long email. I can I think spreadsheeting is a tricky one. there's going to be a lot of people who are like even an eight inch screen with a keyboard is not enough to do spreadsheeting. I think that line is probably different for everyone to some extent. But again, one of the things I keep coming back to is I think Android is part of the problem here. And you ran into this a bunch that like for our purposes, we use Google Docs like for a living, right?

19:57Jacob Feldman:Like I fundamentally, I make Google Docs for my job. It's essentially what I do. So Google Docs, the app on Android is garbage. And if you try to use Google Docs in the web browser, it just constantly yells at you to open the app. And the app is garbage, as I said, because it's garbage. And there's just sort of this ongoing frustration that I think like you mentioned it being a Chromebook. The thing about a Chromebook is it has a really good browser. And if you open up the Z Fold 7 and it gave you honest to God desktop Chrome, I would be so much more compelled by this whole setup because it would feel simple and thoughtful and you could just open up a thing with a bunch of tabs and that would be your work system.

20:41Jacob Feldman:But it feels like at every turn, Android is fighting this thing that your phone is trying to let you do.

20:46Allison Johnson:Yeah.

20:47Jacob Feldman:That just drives me nuts.

20:48Allison Johnson:And you can wrestle it into a place that works, but you do have to be willing to deal with the weird edge cases where it's just funny. Like some stuff is just so much better on the inner screen in a Chrome tab as opposed to the app. Slack, terrible on the, you know, like tablet kind of screen. It just is the Slack app, but stretched. So there's a bunch of white space that's not used. But actually, Richard Lawler, our friend and senior news editor, he was like, I opened it in Chrome and it's great. It's everything you want it to be. You get the columns and yeah, you will inevitably like close the phone and I'll open that tab on the outer screen and be like, oh my God, what is this?

21:44Allison Johnson:an app for ants, you know. So you have to be willing to like fuss with things a little bit. But when I'm sitting down at the coffee shop to work, you know, I get situated. I get slack going in a Chrome tab. And what trips me up and it always trip me up on a Chromebook is the switching profiles like um my phone is you know kind of default assigned to my personal gmail and google account i have the work google account on there but chrome is constantly trying to like shove it to the back seat like no no you don't you don't belong here like every time i open a new tab it's my personal you know google and and all the things tied to that i'm like no I want the work profile and you have to kind of keep doing that.

22:39Allison Johnson:But for me, I can get to a place like without too much trouble where I can sit down. I have my little blog. I put up with the Google Docs app because I cannot get it to run the desktop version of Google Docs in a Chrome tab, even though it's all made by the same company.

23:05Jacob Feldman:I am convinced that no one at Google has two Google accounts somehow because this has been a problem for 20 frigging years and somehow nobody understands how to just make it work with multiple Google accounts. And also, I don't think anyone at Google uses a web browser. I'm dead serious. This is the only thing I can think of. Everybody is just like, desktop apps are great and we don't need web tabs. And I'm like, have you, what if, what if we opened up Google docs? Wouldn't that be cool on our phones? And they're like, why would you ever do that? Oh yeah. It drives me insane. But back to your sort of, is this a computer or is this a phone question?

23:40Jacob Feldman:Like when you, when you sit down and you're sort of in the flow state of your, your purse computer life, what does the screen look like? Are you, are you in a, are you in a one app at a time thing and you're sort of flipping back and forth? Are you tiling as many apps as you can fit on this eight inch screen? Because that's kind of what you would do on a laptop. Like, how does it how does it end up after you've been doing this for an hour?

24:02Allison Johnson:I am usually kind of like one app gets most of the screen and that's Google Docs. And then off to the side, I'll have like Chrome with whatever I'm referencing or I'm looking up. I had the Pixel, the Google Pixel recorder. you know I had a transcript and recording that I was referencing kind of back and forth. It gets a little hinky because Google Docs app will constantly like you have to like tap into it and then you're actively typing and writing. It's not as seamless as if you're just kind of like tabbing back and forth on a desktop. You can open like so many tabs on little windows on the Samsung in particular.

24:57Allison Johnson:I find that like I can just as easily, you know, have my two apps set up, swap over to Spotify and start playing something. And then I've got controls on the keyboard if I need to do something quickly like pause or turn the volume down. Okay.

25:17Jacob Feldman:So that's, that's like slightly chaotic, but feels sort of manageable. And I feel like I'm looking at my computer right now, I'm sitting in front of a 27 inch screen and I have four windows open, including the one that we're recording into right now. And that's like, that's probably one more than you would do on per computer. But like you could split screen an eight inch screen fairly functionally. And Android does allow for that more or less.

25:44Allison Johnson:Yeah. And Samsung is very like, you can make each window as big or as small as you want to. It doesn't matter if it looks like garbage or like, yeah, go for it. That's so nice of you, Samsung.

25:57Jacob Feldman:Yeah, yeah.

25:58Allison Johnson:I appreciate it. Yeah.

26:01Jacob Feldman:So what about the software in particular would work better for you? Do you have a wish list coming out of this experiment that you're like, if only I had X, Y, or Z, this thing would be totally doable?

26:14Allison Johnson:I want every company to remember that they have an Android app and to fix the bugs in their Android app. Because it's just like, I know all these developers are running around with iPhones and they're like, oh, something is horribly broken on Android. So first things first, fix your Android apps. Second, I think the profile thing is really the only thing that I get tripped up on over and over. And I'm kind of like this, like it could just be better. You know, I know how I have it working on my laptop. You know, the two profiles coexist reasonably well on on my MacBook. So those would be my two things, I think.

27:04Jacob Feldman:OK, I think that's a good one. And I think I've actually been thinking a lot about the app thing from a different direction. I've been using this Razer Ultra for the last little while. And I am actually, I find myself more and more convinced that I'm right, that flip phones are the correct form factor and should be the future for everybody. So congrats to me. But there is this thing about even the apps that are best designed. And there are some very good Android apps out there. Like a thing that is true is that iOS apps are better than Android apps. Like it's just a fact. But there are some very good Android apps out there, but none of them have done the work required to work on a bunch of different screen sizes.

27:42Jacob Feldman:Right. And this is like the promise of Android is that Android can be functional all the way up to the size of a TV and all the way down to the size of like a watch. Like this is the thing we're supposed to do. And there is nothing in these apps that works properly on anything other than like a six point something inch candy bar screen. it doesn't work on the smaller screen the stuff doesn't work great on the bigger screens like my guess would be the z fold experience probably works best in some ways when you have two apps side by side because they are essentially phone apps like you you get something that looks and feels sort of like a vertical oriented phone app side by side and that that in many ways is actually how these things are intended to be looked at and there's like android is so desperate to be versatile, but just hasn't quite finished doing the work.

28:32Jacob Feldman:And all the developers haven't quite finished doing the work of like, you want the phone to be all of these things and to be able to do all of these things and sort of satisfy all of these different use cases. And technically speaking, Android is so close to that and so much closer than anything else is out there. But there's just all of these tiny little design quirks. And the fact that everybody wants to push true to mobile apps because that's what the ecosystem is. And all of this stuff that's like, we've talked a lot about aluminum, this like long Google project to unify these things that it's like, if Google can actually start to put some of these pieces together, like they will solve purse computer.

29:10Jacob Feldman:Like this is the thing they want to make work, which I find very exciting. And every time I use it, I am just less and less convinced that everybody who is going to need to be on board to pull this off is going to be anytime soon.

29:21Allison Johnson:Yeah, it's frustrating because like the hardware exists. Like I have, there is so much more like horsepower in this Z Fold 7 than like the Chromebook I bought five years ago, you know? Totally. It has, you know, like an insanely good Wi-Fi and cellular chip, like so many problems, like hardware problems are solved. There's a million tiny keyboards, you know, like it's all here. But then you kind of get let down by the software and you're like, oh, this is where the limitations are. And it feels like, yeah, it just could be so much better. Yeah.

30:02Jacob Feldman:All right. So real talk before I let you go here. Your hypothetical situation, you're going away for the weekend. You have no work plans, but we're in the news business. Sometimes work happens. We always exist in a phase of I might have to work soon. It's a delight. Everybody should do this. But you're going away just for a couple of days. Are you comfortable enough that that purse computer, the Z Fold 7 can do it, that you're going to leave your laptop at home?

30:32Allison Johnson:Yes. Yeah, I really am. I am bringing purse computer. I'm bringing my little Logitech keys to go. Love it. I have had enough success being in WordPress and getting everything I need to do done that it feels like this is the minimum viable product. I'm not going to run into some weird edge case where I'm like, oh, God, now I need to slack somebody to do something for me or like upload an image or something like embarrassing. it covers all of those basic use cases for our jobs that I'm totally happy and only like 5 % unsure.

31:16Jacob Feldman:What do you do with the fact that this thing is going to be super destructive to your battery? Like we all kind of baby our phones anyway. And you're saying I'm going to do more aggressive stuff for hours with the screen on even more. Like, are you just killing your phone by 1 p.m. every day now?

31:34Allison Johnson:No, not quite. I would not trust it as like a full day. You know, I'm going to ride the bus downtown and use my phone and sit at a WeWork and write blogs for five hours. The phone would absolutely be dead. And for those kind of one to two hour stints in the middle of the day at the coffee shop, I'm finding it's fine. I get to the end of the day, like in the alarmingly low percentages of battery. But it's OK for those little short stints. Anything longer than that, I would definitely plan to have like some recharging time or a battery or something like that. Okay.

32:22Jacob Feldman:The version of this experiment that personally I'm very excited to try is the, it's a three-hour train ride from D.C. to New York. Can I purse computer through the whole train ride? Which is like, I very rarely have like serious business to do, but it's a perfect time to catch up on emails and get some reading done and watch a show and whatever. and that is in theory the thing this is perfectly set up to do for me really well without me even needing to bring a bag on the train which would just be glorious.

32:51Allison Johnson:There you go. That's the dream. I like this idea.

32:54Jacob Feldman:All right. Well, I'm going to do it. I'm coming to New York in like two weeks. I'm going to keep you posted. It's going to be unbelievable.

32:59Allison Johnson:All right. I want to hear all about it. Good.

33:02Jacob Feldman:All right. Allison, thank you as always. Next time we're going to do this from your phone and it's going to be awful and we're going to have a whole different conversation about it. I'm ready. We're going to take a break. Thank you, Allison. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Your website sets the tone for your brand, and it's the face of your company. So if you struggle to make small changes and simple updates, you're leaving opportunity on the table. That's why so many companies from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are turning to Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster.

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36:44Welcome back.

36:45Jacob Feldman:One of the most interesting pieces of news to me over the last couple of weeks was a new set of packages from YouTube TV that try to kind of split out different parts of what you might want to watch on YouTube TV. And the funniest thing to me was that there is a sports-focused package, right? So the idea is you don't want everything, you just mostly want sports. And the sports package is like 80 % as expensive as the whole package. So this really just is the state of sports streaming. Sports rules television, particularly live television. And most of the money and most of the resources and most of the viewership in TV, in live events, period, goes to sports.

37:22Jacob Feldman:So I figured now was a good moment to catch up on where we are in the state of live sports and streaming. Jacob Feldman, who's a reporter at Sportico, keeps up on this and covers it tons all the time. And he was on the show last year to explain where we were with ESPN and a lot of these changes going on with how the sports industry is morphing itself for a streaming universe. So I invited Jacob to come back and talk about the Super Bowl and the Olympics and what's going on with YouTube TV and ESPN, which I honestly forgot launched its streaming thing. We got a lot to catch up on. Let's get into it.

37:56Jacob Feldman:Jacob Feldman, welcome back to the Vergecast. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. This is like an annual tradition where I watch a bunch of sports and I get really annoyed at how hard it is to watch sports. And then I bring you on to talk about watching sports. Sports streaming therapist is kind of my title in many ways. And so it's an honor to do it. This sounds about right. So I have a bunch of things I want to kind of jump around and And then I want to talk through a bit of a piece you wrote kind of about the sort of big wars in sports streaming coming this year. But I want to start with the Winter Olympics.

38:26Jacob Feldman:For anyone who can't see, you're wearing a USA curling jacket, which just hopelessly biases you forever in this whole thing. Have you been watching the Winter Olympics? I have been. And we can get into this. Obviously, the Winter Olympics overlapped the Super Bowl this year. So I was out in San Francisco last week or two weeks ago, depending on when you're listening to this. And so I missed the beginning, but I've been catching up and watching morning, midday and night. What have you made of it as a sports business reporter thinking about like the streaming of it all? Yeah, the streaming of it all is amazing.

38:57Jacob Feldman:I think as a fan, I think they finally figured this out. And we can talk about the progression here because for a long time, the Olympics were one of the most frustrating sports to watch. You had it on for three hours each night. They were kind of spending most of the time talking about family backstories, which are great if you're into family backstories. But if you're into curling, not so great. I think there was a lot of stuff that had already happened that you already knew all of the results of that they weren't showing enough of. So it was just like it for the longest time, the Olympics sort of satisfied nobody.

39:28Jacob Feldman:Exactly. That drove me crazy. But it does. It feels now like Peacock in particular was just like, what, you want Olympics? Here's all of it. Right. Here's the Olympics. We have 400 streams going at any given time. And honestly, it's exactly what I wanted. Yes. And if you want multi-view, they have that. If you want curling only multi-view, they have that this year. If you want Red Zone with Scott Hansen, they have that. It has really been a choose-your-own-adventure in the best kind of way. It does seem like the biggest technical innovation, at least the one that has sort of blown the most people's minds, is the drones.

40:00Jacob Feldman:I feel like the drones are suddenly everywhere. They have absolutely made some of the coolest shots I've ever seen in the Olympics. There's one for the downhill skiing that it would just sort of fly up behind them and follow them for the beginning of every run. And it's amazing. It is noisy, which is a little weird. And there's sort of this whirring sound that I now associate with the Winter Olympics. What have you made of the drones? Yes, the whirring Olympics. And I have heard from some producers, because I asked them about this too, some people think this might be a solved problem. And maybe even by the end of the Olympics, they'll have figured out the right setting in terms of the audio to cut that.

40:39Jacob Feldman:that out um but yes the drones have been the one of the biggest uh surprises and and delights of this olympics and i think it's probably yeah i'm curious your perspective on this and someone from the tech side i mean you guys have seen these drones develop and then us on the sports side every four years like wow they can go that fast or that small the cameras are that good you know it's kind of like when you jump you know four generations of iphones all of a sudden it's like oh okay uh yeah these actually can fit in they don't uh you know distract from from the broadcast like they might have four or eight years ago.

41:08Jacob Feldman:Yeah, it is really fun to watch that progression because there was this moment, I don't know, five, eight years ago that there was this thought that drones were going to become sort of a real consumer product that like you would have a drone and I would have a drone. Sure. Everyone needs one for Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. And we would just like play with our drones. And that has not really panned out forever. Then the FAA got involved, I think. Right. Maybe not. And they're still they're still a little too expensive and they're still a little bit fragile so there's like a lot of reasons it didn't quite hit the mainstream that way but as a as a professional tool yes we just continue to unlock incredible new things that drones can do and and i've had this same experience that it's like every time i turn around some sporting event or another if they're all over f1 now to these drones that are like you they just they're opening up new ways to watch all kinds of things in ways that i find just unbelievably exciting even as somebody who just absolutely does not care about drones as a product.

42:06Jacob Feldman:I think they're such a cool camera thing. Yeah, the cool thing is I think we'll get to the point where it's just a cool shot, right? We can talk less about the technology. And yeah, they're coming to NASCAR this year in a big way. Baseball's using them. One of my favorite little details about the Olympic drones is that in a few cases, it's actually ex-Olympic athletes piloting the drones. So one of the big concerns was, are these going to get in the way of the athletes? Are they going to crash? Are there going to be injuries? And so this was a multi-year process to get all the various sporting bodies on board, eventually get the athletes on board.

42:36Jacob Feldman:One of the things that helped was, yeah, these are, I think it's the ski jumping and maybe one other where it's, you know, these are extreme sport athletes who were the core drone market. And so a lot of them, after their playing days are over, have moved into the drone piloting world and bring, I think, that expertise of, you know, here's actually how we should be using these drones. Here's the coolest shot. Here's how to give people at home a sense of what it's like to jump off one of these mountains. That's so cool. Well, I mean, that's kind of an extension of the sort of athlete to sports photographer pipeline, which is the thing I've always enjoyed.

43:07Jacob Feldman:Yeah, exactly. Like the Randy Johnsons of the world who are like, I know what's happening. I know what it looks like. I know where it is. And so I can get different sorts of shots because I just understand the game differently. I love that. And especially with extreme sports athletes, I was going to be like, oh, wow, impressive that they're this good at flying drones. But they're probably all learning how to fly drones anyway, because if you're hella skiing, you probably have a drone with you. Right, right. Exactly. That's awesome. So real quick, I'm curious also about the Super Bowl. You were there, it sounds like.

43:32Jacob Feldman:As a viewer, the Super Bowl was pretty uninteresting this year. And I mean uninteresting in the best way, right? Like there were no streaming issues. There were no, it wasn't like, oh, it's on Tubi. How do I download Tubi? It just like was the Super Bowl. Did you notice anything different this year? No, I think that's right. It's interesting. Last year it was on Tubi, as you mentioned, which is free. And so this year there was no free streaming option, but it didn't seem like there was any uproar. I think people still accept that if it's on a broadcast network that you can get with an antenna, they're not too upset.

44:01Jacob Feldman:And so, yes, the streaming option was Peacock. Peacock, as we mentioned, has grown a lot over the last four years. It's the last time they had a Super Bowl. It seemed to hold up well. Hulu, YouTube TV, all those companies now at this point can handle the scale of the Super Bowl. And as you mentioned, it's become standard for them to broadcast these massive events. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about some of these streamers because I think we're in a really interesting moment of change for a bunch of different streaming services. And almost all of it is centered around sports in some meaningful way.

44:33Jacob Feldman:But let's start with YouTube TV, which just announced a bunch of new packages. There's the sports plan. There's the sports and news plan. There's the news and entertainment and family plan. They're trying to sort of slim down the bundle a little bit to make it a little less expensive for people. But the most interesting thing to me here is basically there's YouTube TV, which is all the channels. And then there's YouTube TV, which is just the sports channels. And boy, is it almost as expensive as the whole thing. So watching these things, you've been covering YouTube TV for a long time. I think YouTube TV is the closest thing we have to like a real success of a cable replacement, I think.

45:10Jacob Feldman:What stuck out in these new plans to you? Yeah, I think, taking a step back, this is what YouTube TV always wanted to be, is my sense, going back to the early days. I think there was even a conversation about, you remember, like, Locast and Aereo and some of these, like, free streaming, legally dubious services? I don't remember exactly how that shook out in the courts, but they no longer exist. Not well for Arial, I'll tell you that. Yes, yeah. But point being, I think YouTube TV kind of thought about that model too. Like, you know, we're YouTube, we're a free streaming service. Is there any way we could ingest these local channels and give people a package of TV on top of YouTube?

45:47Jacob Feldman:That didn't work out because, as Locast and Arial, these programmers, these channel owners, wanted you, if you were going to show Fox, you also needed to show Fox News and Fox Business and Fox Sports. They're bundling us all together. You had to buy them all, essentially. and YouTube said, okay, we'll do that. We'll put together this big base plan. And then YouTube TV got big enough where they're like, actually, what we want to do is offer a sports plan. And if you're not going to go along with that, we're going to go, you know, we'll offer it without you, essentially. So there was the big Disney dispute last year.

46:19Jacob Feldman:Right, so this was all part of this. Yes, exactly. Interesting, okay. Yes. So even before the Disney one, there was a renegotiation with Paramount, which on CBS, with NBCUniversal, and I think Fox as well. And so they have a new set of deals that allow them to offer these bundles. And the sports one is particularly interesting because it separates sports and news for the first time. Basically, you can get TNT without CNN, which normally come together. You can get Fox Sports without Fox News, which almost always come together. But as you mentioned, it's not that much cheaper. I think it's$55 if you're a new user, which is a pretty good deal,$65 if you're not a new user.

46:56Jacob Feldman:And I think that'll be most people, which is$18,$17 less than what's called the main plan now. You'd say it's called the base plan, but it's kind of confusing because now base is the most expensive. And so there's still some education to be done there. But I mean, in my world, every sports fan that subscribes to YouTube TV is like, okay, great,$15 less. I'm not losing that much. Sign me up. And I do think the timing of this is really notable as well. They launched this or they announced this the day after the Super Bowl. As you know, YouTube TV is most popular during the football season. They have Sunday ticket.

47:29Jacob Feldman:Obviously, it's a big part of that. And churn rates are the highest in February. Everyone cancels or downsizes. And so I think this is YouTube TV's effort to say, stick around with the spring. You can get all of March Madness on this slightly cheaper bundle. You can get all the World Cup in the summer on the slightly cheaper bundle. And then football season will be here before you know it. That, to me, I think is what will be successful for them if they can flatten that churn a little bit in between football seasons. Yeah. Well, and I think that reaction you described where a bunch of people just immediately go, oh, great.

47:58Jacob Feldman:This is all I'm here for anyway. Now it's$17 cheaper is, I think, a really telling one. And to me, it feels like what I can't decide is if YouTube is in a particularly good position of leverage where it is the one that is the most successful. It's also YouTube. It's also Google. Like it just doesn't need to play the games that everybody else needs to play. so it can afford to basically sit back and be like, listen, here's what we're going to do. Either get on board or don't. We don't really care all that much. And I think the dispute with Disney pretty clearly proved that YouTube has more leverage than its content providers at this particular moment.

48:33Jacob Feldman:But what I wonder is, is this just YouTube or is this the beginning of a sea change that's like actually what's about to happen is we are all just going to recognize that cable is sports and sports is cable. And in 12 months, that's all it's going to be. yes i think it's both um so youtube tv is not the first of these products to come out with a sports specific bundle sure fubo did it six months ago direct tv did it a year ago no offense to fubo but i don't think that's going to move the needle quite the way you correct but the point being this is not a new idea i think for a long time these companies said look people are signing up for sports how do we maximize and make this you know the cheapest we can with the most sports that we I think that has been the direction for a long time, really probably since the launch of Netflix and since the destruction of the slow death of the cable bundle, which both started 10, 15 years ago.

49:26Jacob Feldman:And then, yeah, I think YouTube's size is what allows it to pull this off in a big way and allows it to charge$65 and still be successful. And I do think we're going to see, my sense is another part of these negotiations from last year are going to be more integrations between YouTube.com and YouTube TV. I'm sure you have this experience too when you talk to those folks. There's YouTube on TV, which is the YouTube app on the TV. And then there's YouTube TV on the TV, which are still two different apps. And they'll explain to you why people love that. I will tell you that that's confusing. They're wrong about that fact.

50:02Jacob Feldman:and not only that those two apps seem to have no idea that the other ones exist like the thing i keep asking people at youtube is like you understand that people who watch nfl games might be interested in nfl content on youtube and every single time they're like oh that's such an interesting point and like how it's like have a meeting guys this is not complicated right or maybe the people yeah who are watching pat mcp on youtube might want to know that he's on right on your other app yeah but uh yeah they'll tell you it's actually yeah whatever it's a whole whole nother conversation um but point being i think those are going to get closer together um now they have some more flexibility in that and i i do think you know youtube as you guys have written about is dominating tv viewing time both apps included uh increasingly in in recent months and and this is only going to accelerate now they have some flexibility both in how they're selling it and also how they're distributing some of this content yeah that's interesting it's we've been tracking this change for youtube for so long from kind of you know cat video platform to hugely powerful cultural influence everything video yeah but that everybody still thinks of as cat video platform right like the the sort of in the in the business in particular the idea of what youtube was was so far behind what youtube actually was for so long and i feel like over the last two years really that has caught up and now everybody who needs to know from like the ceo of Disney to advertisers to users understands that YouTube is this like unparalleled cultural power.

51:30Jacob Feldman:And I wonder if this is the year it starts to flex that power on a lot of different fronts like you're describing that all of a sudden in the way that I think back to like Steve Jobs basically going to AT &T with the iPhone and being like, you will you will either play our game or we will walk away. I have all of the power in this relationship. Like that's a game YouTube is sort of uniquely positioned to start to play on a lot of different fronts if it wants to. And it'll be interesting to see how hard it tries to push. Yeah. I think before you said sports is cable and cable is sports. I think increasingly YouTube is TV and TV is YouTube for a lot of people.

52:03Jacob Feldman:Yeah, I totally agree. The other company sort of sitting there next to this, and this is the one we talked about a lot last year, is ESPN. When you came on last year, one of the things you talked about a bunch was this looming launch of ESPN as a streaming platform. They were going to just launch the channels. You could just stream ESPN the channels. ESPN was doing Where to Watch. It had this big idea of we want to be the destination for all sports everywhere all the time. I was preparing to do this conversation with you, and I literally just straight up forgot that ESPN actually did launch that.

52:38Jacob Feldman:I'm sure it exists in the world, and I'm sure people like it. It is just not part of this conversation in the same way. Where is ESPN? ESPN did make this big deal with the NFL that just closed that brings a lot of NFL stuff to ESPN. where is ESPN in this journey to be like the sports platform for all sports things everywhere is it working um it is complicated okay so ESPN as you mentioned wants to be the destination they when you think sports they want you to think ESPN um the challenge for them is that right now all their a lot of their money still comes from the cable bundle so they don't want you to get rid of the cable bundle.

53:15Jacob Feldman:So they are trying to walk this middle path, which included launching a service last year called ESPN, but also sometimes called ESPN Unlimited that is free if you have cable, but otherwise is$30 a month. That includes everything. There's also ESPN Select and Plus if you just want a little bit less of things and increasingly less and less, but they're going to try to get you to Unlimited. Then they're also going to bring in MLB TV, and that's going to cost extra it's going to cost a little less if you have espn unlimited which is free if you have some cable doesn't currently include youtube tv but will by the end of the year it's a big mess it's a big the fact that you just were able to do that coherently off the top of your head is the most impressive thing anyone has done in this podcast it's terrifying and unfortunate and i go to bed and wake up every morning being like what is espn unlimited again what is it today you're the guy with like drawing the lines on the whiteboard being like here's here's how all of this makes sense.

54:09Jacob Feldman:Or doesn't. Yes, exactly. People in the office give me a hard time for saying I've just become customer support at this point for ESPN and MLB and whoever else. Like, here's what you need. Here's why you don't have access to this. Here's what channel it's on. And maybe one day that will end. But for now, ESPN has given me a good job of explaining what they have going on. Yeah. So in the long run, I think they'd like to get to the point where, again, they are the front door and you can buy other services from them um you you pay them monthly um but getting there is it's very complicated and has upset a lot of sports fans over the last six months both in terms of the confusion of what do i have access to why do i not have access to it uh and also the cost of it 30 a month is a lot for a streaming service uh especially when it doesn't include everything that you might expect it might yeah does espn have moves coming this year do you think Like, is this NFL deal a big one?

55:02Jacob Feldman:I think it's smaller than some people might think. So again, you have to get into the details here. For instance, they are getting NFL Network, which means that they are getting seven more NFL games. I think that's the biggest deal. So they'll have more games. As part of the deal, they're giving back four games to the NFL. So they really are only getting three more games. They're getting the right to distribute NFL Red Zone on linear channels, but not the right to distribute it digitally. So Red Zone is not going to be included in ESPN, not going to be included in ESPN Unlimited, but there are some tie-ins there.

55:33Jacob Feldman:And again, it's a little more complicated than ESPN all of a sudden owns the NFL. It's not going to be as straightforward as you might think, but it does help a little bit. This MLB TV deal is going to, again, be a big deal, I think, next year, more so than this year. I think they're still getting up to speed in terms of what the integration is. This year, you're still going to be able to watch in the MLB app or in the ESPN app. I think they'd like to get you to the point where it's all in the ESPN app if they can get all the various authentications and configurations and bundles with local deals, and T-Mobile has a benefit that doesn't expire until 2028.

56:06Jacob Feldman:And again, you very quickly go down the wormhole of rights deals that make this all much more complicated, but ESPN is slowly working its way towards a more simple structure. Okay, slowly but surely. And part of the challenge is, I think, again, I was looking at some of these other deals going on right now, and Amazon continues to... A, have all the money in the world, and B, invest pretty heavily in sports in such a way that I kind of think, I don't know, I took Amazon only like half seriously as a sports player for a long time. That it was like, it seemed happy to have football, and you can see why it would be useful to have football, and maybe that would be enough.

56:43Jacob Feldman:But it seems like Amazon is really interested in being one of the main sports networks in the world. Is that what you're reading to? Yes, and it's even bigger than that because Amazon is really interested in being your TV app. And so in a very different way than YouTube TV, it's very different models, right? So YouTube TV's model is you pay YouTube TV$65 a month. You get every channel you would need to watch sports. Amazon's model is, okay, actually on YouTube TV, you're not going to get Thursday Night Football because we have that. You're not going to get a lot of NBA because we have that. So you're already coming to Amazon.

57:16Jacob Feldman:And while you're coming here, you might as well buy Peacock from us. You might as well buy Paramount from us. Hopefully one day ESPN will allow you to buy ESPN from us. And we'll bundle it all together. We'll give you one interface with all your sports. And it's also a big deal for a lot of sports fans who maybe are not as technically proficient that maybe they have an Amazon Fire Stick. They have an Amazon Remote. There's an Amazon Button on the Remote. I hear from a lot of people that that's how they watch sports is they click the Amazon Button and they see what's there. And so Amazon, I think, has a much bigger ambitions than just being a channel or a network.

57:47Jacob Feldman:I think they want to be the place you go to, just like all these other apps that we've talked about. Right. But Amazon can do that without needing sort of exclusive rights everywhere, which is a really interesting play that it has that is going to be hard for anyone else to do. They need just enough exclusive rights to become the default place where they then have everything else. And this is why it is all so fragmented. And we haven't mentioned Netflix. They have a somewhat similar model increasingly. YouTube had an exclusive game. So all these companies want to be the place where they can offer everything.

58:17Jacob Feldman:and as a result, everyone has a very small slice of the pie. Right. But it does seem like the way that race shakes out to me is it seems like the future is, there's sort of one of two futures that's going to happen, right? Either we get to a point where every sport has one provider and you have to go to lots of providers for different sports, but like in the way that Apple is just doing F1 and the MLS, right? That eventually everybody, they're all sort of stratified that way. or you get to the point where it is so impossibly disperse, which is like what the NFL is, right? I mean, it's trying to know where all the NFL games are is insane.

58:57Jacob Feldman:No one should be required to have to do that. Just be. I'm the only one who has to know. No one else has to know. Correct. That's why we bring you here every once in a while. But then the race is to be, okay, how do I become the gateway to all of that content? The hub, the front door. Right. And this is, we've been talking about this with streaming in general for the longest time that was like Apple TV is desperate to be the search engine for all of your other streaming networks. And that stuff has been messy over time for a variety of reasons, but it does feel like the race to do that for sports in particular is getting really hot as this stuff gets so much more dispersed that for Amazon to say, okay, you're coming here anyway.

59:35Jacob Feldman:Like, sure, we'll send you to the ESPN app for the ESPN stuff, but you're going to find it through the Prime Video app. That's a source of power that I think all of these companies are now after, even when they can't win the rights with all of the money in the known universe. Yeah. And as you guys talk a lot, a big part of that is, okay, if you buy ESPN through us, we're going to get 30 % of that on and on and on. And that's how you make work from a financial perspective. Yeah. You mentioned Netflix, which is obviously a fascinating and unknowable player in this. The other thing that's going on right now is Netflix is trying to buy Warner Brothers, which is another player, long-time player in the sports world.

1:00:13Jacob Feldman:What do you make of that deal? Let's say that goes through. Sure. Just purely hypothetically, it seems I would say Occam's Razor says that deal will eventually close. Right. Does that change the sports streaming world in any meaningful way? Not as, again, not as much as people might think. So Netflix is buying Warner Brothers, but Warner Brothers already spun off Discovery, which included TNT Sports in the US. And it's actually more complicated in Europe. and we don't have time to get into Eurosport and Discovery and Warner Brothers. So we'll stick in the U.S. And so I think basically the only sports that Warner Brothers have is like hard knocks, things that are on HBO, essentially.

1:00:51Jacob Feldman:Whereas the things that are on TNT like NHL and college sports, those are still streaming in the HBO Max app. It's unclear how long that will continue, but wouldn't be owned by Netflix. But I think it goes back to the larger point of Netflix buys Warner Brothers in theory. and suddenly becomes a much bigger player. And all of a sudden, more sports are going to want to gravitate to where people are watching. And we can talk about the podcast part of this, too. I mean, Netflix clearly wants to be a place where people are coming for sports content. I think they realized what drive to survive, you know, kind of woke them up to, oh, sports fans, you know, they're pretty serious.

1:01:27Jacob Feldman:They'll pay to watch this stuff. And it's on and on, and all the way to the point of Christmas games and NFL and World Cup coming, Women's World Cup next year, I think will be the next big test. Yeah, the Women's Royal Cup one is going to be really interesting because the question I was about to ask you is, it is very telling to me that we continue to bring up Drive to Survive as the example. The example, yeah. Because that show is old now. Yes. It's been around a while. It has fallen off a bunch. Like, I love F1 and I don't watch Drive to Survive like I used to. Yeah, right. But there was that phenomenon of the first, like, two seasons was really something.

1:02:01Jacob Feldman:And it doesn't, it feels like Netflix has spent a lot of time trying to repeat that. And I'm not sure it quite has. It did for one evening. What was that? Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson. Oh, yeah. Fair enough. Okay. Okay. That's fair. Yeah. So they did Drive to Survive, as you mentioned. It blew up bigger than anybody could have expected. They did about 12 different other versions of Drive to Survive for golf and baseball and tennis. The tennis one was pretty good. They canceled it so fast, but I really liked the tennis one. Tennis one didn't go over huge with the audience. Golf, I think, is the one that has done the best.

1:02:32Jacob Feldman:Baseball was one and done. And so, yeah. And then they slowly pivoted to live. And they had some really weird stuff early on. They had a golf tournament featuring F1 drivers. They did a tennis exhibition match. This Jake Paul, Mike Tyson thing that's, if you believe Netflix's numbers, like the most viewed sporting event outside of the Super Bowl this decade. And that has let them say, oh, like live events, we can do that. So they've done more boxing. I don't know if you watched Skyscraper Live. I did. I would argue that is sports. Terrifying. Yes. Yeah. Like, I'm the guy who gets, like, sweaty palms watching YouTube videos of people at the top of buildings.

1:03:09Jacob Feldman:So watching this happen live was, like, an actively stressful experience. Yes. But it was amazing. The announcers seemed to be stressed, too. I think everybody didn't really know what they signed up for until it got going. Like, oh, he's actually just, there's no net or ropes. It's just a guy climbing a building. Okay. Okay, cool. It could start raining and he's just up there. It's like, okay. so anyway point being I think that sports is part of their larger live events push and I think they're going to try to get more it's going to be really interesting to see so the NFL is renegotiating its rights packages starting basically now and there's a big question of whether Netflix is going to go all in are they going to try to get Sunday night football or Monday night football is Amazon going to try to get even more is Amazon going to try to get a Super Bowl is the NFL going to give them a Super Bowl is YouTube going to do a lot more again they've only had one game to date?

1:03:57Jacob Feldman:Or are the existing players, CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN going to say, we really need football, we can't give any more up? And then the streamers say, okay, well, we'll pick up everything else. We'll take the World Cup that you can no longer afford because you're spending all your money in the NFL. We'll take the World Series. We'll take college football. We'll take March Madness. So that is going to be the next big shakeup. I think it's going to be one of those two things. And this next NFL rights cycle will really determine how important these streamers want to play a role in broadcasting football.

1:04:25Jacob Feldman:So you bring up one of the last things I wanted to ask you about, which is it seems like we've been talking for years about this looming change where if these unbelievably rich tech companies decided they wanted to win at sports, they just could. They could just outbid everybody. And there were questions on all sides, right? It was like, okay, well, does the NFL want to lose broadcast because it has these huge audiences even in exchange for more money. So the back and forth has been really complicated, but it does feel like going back over a lot of this, that that change, if it hasn't already happened, is like in the middle of happening right now.

1:05:05Jacob Feldman:The first companies you just named as the most interesting players for the NFL are all tech companies. And then we lump all the other ones under the traditional players, which is like the most faint praise imaginable. So what is your read of that dynamic right now? Has this great shift to tech money and streaming happened? Or are we still in this kind of diverse, diffuse space for a while? I think the big change that has happened is that four or five years ago, the fight was between the streamers and the traditional channels. And those channels have streaming networks. It's a little more complicated than that.

1:05:42Jacob Feldman:But that was the basic idea. Where are you going to watch this stuff? Are you going to watch it via a cable bundle? Or are you going to watch it direct to consumer via one of these streaming apps? And the streaming apps largely won. I mean, there is still stuff. The biggest events are still on broadcast TV. But for the most part, when you think of entertainment, you're thinking of Netflix and Prime Video and you look at the Emmys or what have you. So the battle now is between the streamers. And that's what has really changed. It used to be, am I going to put this on TV or put this on streaming?

1:06:10Jacob Feldman:And now the question is, am I going to put this on Netflix or am I going to put this on Amazon? and I think that is where it's going to be really interesting to see different priorities emerge between what does Netflix want to do versus what does Amazon want to do versus what does YouTube want to do rather than it just make more sense on streaming or TV. Got it. Okay, all right. So I'm going to give you three events coming up soon and you're going to tell me which one is the one you're most looking at as like a moment in this transition. The beginning of the Formula One season exclusively on Apple TV.

1:06:40Jacob Feldman:March Madness being March Madness. I think it's like that's the next big moment on the sports calendar. And the Masters, which also is moving, I think, to Prime Video, right? There's a couple hours on Prime Video. Moving very slowly to Prime Video. Boy, Amazon made a big deal out of that if it's just a couple hours. I believe it's like Thursday 12 to 2. Don't quote me exactly on that. But it's something like that. Yeah, early rounds. Then I'm guessing the Masters is not going to win this game that we're playing here. But of those three, which do you think is the most sort of meaningful next moment in the sports calendar for streaming stuff?

1:07:14Jacob Feldman:Well, March Madness is the most interesting property because of who owns it. And we've already mentioned them several times. So TNT, March Madness is a weird event in that it's split between CBS and TNT. And the final alternates between these two. These are two companies that theoretically are competitors. but because CBS didn't have a big cable presence and because TNT didn't have a big broadcast presence, teamed up for this kind of unlikely alliance to broadcast March Madness. And those are two companies, Paramount and Warner Brothers, but now TNT is spun out, that have been talking about buying each other in different ways and emerging in different ways and both trying to figure out what TV sports looks like in a streaming world.

1:07:54Jacob Feldman:So if you want to watch all of the games, you need a cable bundle, right? they're not all going to be one app and if you have a cable bundle then you can I think authenticate into the March Madness Live app and watch it there again it gets very technical very quickly but that has made it a great event for YouTube TV for Spectrum for Comcast to say look this is actually the best way to watch you can watch in multi view you can have a CBS and a TNT game next to each other and so the question is are people going to pay up for that experience or they're going to say yeah you know I'll watch what I can watch in my Paramount Plus app I have that subscription or I'll watch the highlights on YouTube or, you know, I'll watch the docuseries a year later.

1:08:33Jacob Feldman:Probably not that option. But that is the question is can these events that are such signature TV events, can they continue to be that way? Or do they need to reformat themselves, reframe themselves and pitch themselves like you're saying to an all in one, you know, audience that now is so used to getting stuff so easy? I loved your your summer takes episode. What is that? Six months ago where you were like all streaming services are bad. I believe that. I really do believe that. You're thinking about that? That's still a winter take? Mm-hmm. Okay. Because it's interesting to me, I mean, what you're basically saying was, you know, you should just rent the movies individually or buy them or what have you.

1:09:10Jacob Feldman:And I think the reason all these streaming sources are getting into sports is because you can't do that with sports, right? There is no alternative. They own this exclusively. You can't buy these a la carte. And so the question is, can these events like March Madness, which is like 63 games on the men's side, 63 games on the women's side, I think it's actually 67 games now with expansion and they're going to expand again. Does that work in a streaming environment compared to these big, you know, temple events? Is it all just going to turn into Jake Paul, Mike Tyson, standalone events? Or can we do these month-long things via streaming?

1:09:38Jacob Feldman:I think we still haven't seen. Yeah. It does feel like whatever is going to happen, this is not the year it gets less complicated to be a sports fan, right? Like there's no sign of this thing letting up. Yes. Next year. Next year it'll be simpler. That's what we've been saying for 10 years and one day it'll be true. We're going to have you back in 2027 and you're going to say, Guys, we fixed it. Yeah. It's one app. Everybody knows what ESPN Unlimited is by now, right? I don't need to explain that. Boy, am I looking forward to that. All right. Jacob, thank you as always for being here. My pleasure.

1:10:07Jacob Feldman:I appreciate it. Go watch more Olympics. This is what I'm going to go do too. It's going to be great. Yes, you as well. Enjoy. Go Team USA. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and do a question for the Verticals Hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Complex problems are just that, complex. And when you're trying to run a business, complex problems often mean there's an even bigger issue just under the surface. Thankfully, there's Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you.

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1:13:48Jacob Feldman:All right, we're back. Time for a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecasts at theverge.com. Keep all of your questions, all of your thoughts, all of your feedback coming. A lot of the stuff that we've been hearing recently is still about tiny smart home mysteries. And I have to tell you, I love it. Please keep them all coming. Anyway, our question this week happens to be just perfectly up the alley of what I've been thinking about all week. And it comes from Drake.

1:14:14Allison Johnson:Hello, I'm Drake from Portland, Oregon.

1:14:16Jacob Feldman:I'm actively listening to your podcast about the AI, the Bockelpin. And as we were talking about the flip phone sort of idea, it reminded me of the days when people would actually wear the flip phone as like a belt flip or like a shirt flip. So it'd be like it just being held there in place. And people would use that as speakerphone with the little tiny itty-bitty like screen on the outside, saying that they're in an active phone call so they can use it as a speakerphone sort of device. That might actually be another approach to the flip phone AI debacle. Okay, so the reason I've been thinking about this question all week is because I am using the Motorola Razr Ultra right now.

1:15:02Jacob Feldman:I'm in my phone switching project and basically what I'm trying to do is I'm going to spend a week using six different kinds of phones, foldable phones, phones with keyboards, phones you've never heard of, phones you've super heard of. I'm going to try and do the full sweep of the smartphone landscape to figure out which one I really want. It took me a day and a half to get the stupid eSIM ported from my iPhone to this phone, but it is now my phone. It's up and running. Everything's going fine. And I've had the most fascinating experience, which is that I think more than ever that the flip phone is an important and good and correct in many ways form factor.

1:15:40Jacob Feldman:And I think this for a bunch of reasons. One, I think it is just easier to hold and carry. Like having this fit into your pocket makes more sense. It also fits in my hand. There's something really nice about the idea that I can actually hold and reach every corner of this device with one thumb. I can use it like when I sort of roll over in bed, I can like tap around on it much more easily. This thing just works for me. And then there is this feeling like, okay, I'm opening up my phone to do something, take a call, write an email, look at a notification, whatever. And then I close it and I'm finished.

1:16:14Jacob Feldman:And there's just something psychological about I am done with my phone now that I think has actually made me use my phone less. the problem is all of the software that is supposed to support this is bad like android just does not exist in a meaningful way to make this work so what you're stuck with is every time i'm using an app and i close the phone it pops up a thing saying do you want to allow this phone app to run on your external display and i just say yes because who cares but then what happens is it just runs the full version of the app. And so you just get a thing that just feels like a smushed Android app.

1:16:57Jacob Feldman:Like what this should be, the correct version of this in my head is a phone on the inside and a smartwatch on the outside. What I want from this is to be able to do very simple input and very simple output, right? I want to be able to quickly see what the weather is. I want to be able to quickly do a tap back emoji on a text message. I want to be able to change the music. Like what I don't need is the full freaking Spotify app on this tiny little thing or my full Gmail or the full anything else. It's just pretending this is a tiny phone and it's not. And this is like fundamentally the thing I think is left to solve, right?

1:17:33Jacob Feldman:In the way that a foldable phone acts like a phone that turns into a tablet or acts like a phone that turns into a laptop, as we were just talking about with Allison, that's an interesting software and UI problem to solve. This one goes the other direction. And this is where I think Drake's idea about having these be AI systems is really interesting. Like the idea of having a phone that I can close or sort of turn off and mute in some way that then morphs into this whatever always on or push to talk or whatever AI machine, I actually think is super interesting. Like if I if if when it was closed like this, I could press and it was essentially just a Gemini machine.

1:18:15Jacob Feldman:That's pretty cool. I can use this for Gemini, but it's trying to do a lot of other things. Right. So if I'm using an iPhone and it's like, OK, I close the iPhone and then it turns into like a HomePod or a basic controller for Siri and music. I think that could be very cool. And I do think there is something meaningful about the idea that I am actually shape-shifting the form factor, right? I've come to feel this way about foldable phones too. And Allison was saying this earlier, that if you have a device that you change its sort of stature and the way that you're holding it and looking at it and using it, you can convince your brain that this is a new kind of device.

1:18:53Jacob Feldman:And actually that's one of the superpowers of a device like this is it can transform and so does your ability to interact with it. So I'm like thinking about Drake's idea and it's like, okay, right. I have this on my collar. And the other problem with this razor is it is exactly the wrong form factor. Like it's, it's too kind of big and thick, like, and wide like this. And then this is just a little too much. Again, I want something that might not be possible to exist, which is I want a big phone that turns into a tiny smartwatch, but I digress that's somebody else's problem to figure out but if I take something like this and then you know instead of having it open in my pocket I turn it into like a pinnable wearable on my collar and now what I have is is a sort of plod style AI recorder that I can talk to and get information from or take notes with or whatever I think that's super compelling and I think there is something more interesting about that than the idea of making a wholly different device and that's what everybody wants to do.

1:19:52Jacob Feldman:They want you to either use a smartwatch for a lot of these purposes, which I think is where Google and Apple and others will head, or they want you to buy some complete new form factor. And to me, I'm like, what if it's just half my phone? And having now used this for a week, this feels like two devices. It is one thing when it's closed, and it's another thing when it's open. The problem is the thing that's when it's closed is optimized for when it's open. And if we can just fix that, I think we'll be onto something. This is the same problem Allison had trying to make her medium-sized phone into a big tablet.

1:20:24Jacob Feldman:I'm having it in the opposite direction, and she wants to make laptop. I want to make AI. I think there's something really interesting there. Anyway, if you've figured out how this works, by the way, if you have a Razer or a Z Flip, and you've solved this external display system in a way that you get your notifications and you can do your media controls, but you don't accidentally end up using a full Android app on this tiny screen all the time, please let me know. It's possible I'm just missing settings, but I don't think so. I think we just need to fix this problem. Anyway, for now, that's it for the show.

1:20:56Jacob Feldman:I'm sure I'll have new feelings about new kinds of phone next week because that is what we do here on The Verge Cast. But for now, we're gonna get out of here. Please, as always, remember to subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe. You can get this podcast ad-free. You can get version history ad-free. Version history, by the way, just about to come back. Very excited about it. We're recording a bunch of really fun episodes. The week you're hearing this, I'm really excited about the next batch we have coming for you. You can also get decoder ad-free, all of it, just by subscribing to The Verge.

1:21:23Jacob Feldman:It is the single best way to support everything that we're doing. This show is part of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. And this episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Nia and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, presumably more Epstein files because that keeps happening and we keep talking about it. And some gadgets. We're getting gadgets again. It's mid-February, and it's already gadget season. It's great times out there. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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1:22:54Allison Johnson:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and cueing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.