The MacBook Neo's a winner

I'm saying, you can say that you're a hero. You're a hero, right? But you don't understand. Exactly, it's just a challenge. You're just a hero. You're just a hero. And if you work, you're a hero. - That's right? - Save. You're a hero.

- You're just a hero. - Now you're a hero. As you can see, you're a hero. You're a hero, and you're a hero. You're a hero, and you're also a hero. Stop, you're the recruiting player. With Stepstown All-Jobs, you've become a hero for 1 year.

In one package, you have a fixed price. So let's take a closer look at the cost of 50% of the cost. And there are several types of flexibles. Now let's take a look at Stepstown.de/All-Jobs.

“Stepstown is the most important talent for all-Jobs.”

Though worst advice, I have ever gotten is staying your lane. I wrap it up sun, athlete, executive founder, and staying in my lane would have tapped me small. Don't protect other people's comfort at the cost of your growth. This week on Project Swagger, my strategies for embracing your multi-hyphenate existence.

Tune in now at Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the first cast, the flagship podcast of phone chips

that actually can power your computers. I'm in front of you, Pierce. New York tells you here, hey buddy. What's up? We have a lot to get to today, but mostly we're going to talk about the Macbook Neo.

Like we should just lay that out up top. There's a lot of news. We have Xbox stuff to talk about. We have a bunch of other Apple stuff to talk about. Brendan Carr still a dummy.

We got a lot to do. But I all like care about right now is the Macbook Neo. It should be said both David and I purchased Macbook Neo's.

“For the purpose of the podcast, because we just need an excuse to buy Macbook Neo's.”

There is no reason for it about it. I literally, two days ago was sitting on my computer, like at our dining room table, shopping for a Macbook Neo, on my M4 MacBook Air. And I have this home to be like, "What are earth on my doing here?"

So the story we both told ourselves today is that we're doing this A for the Vergecast. And B, I'm going to give this computer to my wife, who I should, she came home for lunch today. And I showed her the computer. I was like, "This is your new computer and she could not have been less enthusiastic." Yeah, that's right.

Just the most whatever possible response to this new computer. I tried to do that with the studio this way XDR. I was like, "I'll buy myself this." And as like back in your office, you'll have two monitors. I'll do my old one. She's like, "I don't need that."

And you can't get over that wall. Like there's nothing to be said. By the way, shout out to, I won't say the person or the Apple Store they want to. But I went to the Apple Store to buy a MacBook Neo. Again, because I convinced myself if I spoke about the MacBook Neo on the Vergecast without

physically holding one, the audience wouldn't think I had any credibility. This is how I worked my way into this purchase. So I got to the store and I buying the laptop and the person at the store recognizes me. And I was like, "I'm this close to buying an XDR." Like, I was like staring at it. He was like, "Do you want me to sell it to you?"

And I was like, "The second thing goes on sale for one dollar.

I'm so blessed." And I started joking. 3298, like, hit me. And he's like, "I get you dollar off." And I thought about it.

He's like, "Do you want me to go get a manager to get you dollar off?" And I thought about it. And then I was like, "What I foolishly chosen to sell is our stupid ethics policy." And I can't take your one dollar. And I trurly browned my way out of that store.

So this suggests that if you try hard enough, you can get any Apple products for one dollar less than the real deal. And it does seem like there's some pricing flexibility that I guess Apple store. Yeah. Also shout out to the person and Vergecast fan that I ran into at the Apple store this morning, who was very excited to talk about the Vergecast in the Neo.

And it's very excited that we're going to be talking about the Neo on the Vergecast. Shouts to you, you know, you are. It's-- that's where Dave didn't ever recognize. Not on the street. No, God, no.

In the Apple store. In the Apple store, and it's the E.S. It's great times for both of us. It's great. Before we start with the Neo, can I start with--

which is just a very big nerd update? Yes, please. So last week, I spoke about the kaleidoscope, the very expensive streamer in my house. There were some comments on Instagram that are like, it feels like we're subscribing just for new light

to live as extravagant lifestyle. And I just want to point out, it's a review unit. It did not spend $13,000 for our subscribers money on a hybrid rate streaming. Although I would.

So I just want to lay that out.

The reality is I did not do that.

But if I had the opportunity, I might.

“I think we can say, again, our ethics policy requires”

that when we hit the point that your subscription money is only funding the life luxurious lifestyle, we'll tell you. Yeah, I mean, we'll come on this podcast and be like, listen, we're good from now on if you subscribe to the verge, it's both.

That's great. We're not there yet.

“So that's your review unit, just one way out there.”

We're going to set it back the whole thing.

That's the ethics policy. And the second piece,

and I just want to shout out to all of our people out there, the number of people who reacted to that segment, by just saying out loud, this is why I torrent blue rays. It's off the charts. Like the number of people are like you and your dumb legal streamer

carrying about high quality. You can just get the torrents for free. And then there was an argument, a pretty good argument in I think both on our Instagram comments, and on the YouTube shorts comments of all places,

about the relative extremely minor bit rate differences between kaleidoscope and blue rays. And the best part of this, in this conversation that was kicked off of people being like, this is why I steal the movies, was a deep complaint that Disney, in particular Disney,

cheaps out when it encodes its movies for blue ray. And they insist on putting all of the movie onto one blue ray, regardless of how long the movies are. So like Avengers and Game is three hours, but they fit it onto a single blue ray.

They'll press that however much they need to. However much they need to. So in this one case, the $13,000 kaleidoscope is better, because kaleidoscope doesn't have to care about file sizes when they re-encode from them.

And it was like in this extremely heated debate about like, I stream the movies, why would you pay for this? This is stupid, you can get torrents. Are these people who are like him?

“But for Disney ones, you have to pay for it.”

- This is like when you were like, everybody needs, what was its Sony Bravia Corps just to watch Spider-Man? - Yeah, exactly right. Anyway, shout out to all of the people,

that is exactly what I want from the Verge community, is that argument, it's very good. - Can I ask a really stupid question? If you hypothetically, and this is not legal advice, if you torrent a blue ray,

can you will it look as good as a blue ray? - It depends on what you torrent. - Well, sure, but like in theory, can you rip a blue ray and have a digital file that will play back looking as good as a blue ray?

- Yeah, you can torrent a bit for a bit blue ray. You're gonna end up with some weirdness. They call them remixes, because you have to... I'm sure the people in the comments will explain all this to you, David, but you can get a bit for a bit copy of a blue ray.

The problem then is where are you going to play it back? - Right, and like how are you going to play it back? And who is going to play it on the blue ray? - Blue ray, blue ray. Or if you're gonna stream it off your NAS

to an app like Plex or infuse an Apple TV, will the Apple TV play back uncompressed at most, or will that get re-encoded into 5.1,

which is basically what happens right now?

So you just have to have with some like, I have got this huge file and I need to play it back somewhere, but you can get, and the problem with the blue ray is that blue rays have like menus, and extra scenes, and like you have no navigation for that.

Like the code to run the blue ray, and menu doesn't run anywhere. You've just got a bunch of video files. So there's some weirdness there, but you mean this is what people are doing. - I love it, it was just, I was just very happy

that we got from Neil, as an idiot, who's spending an extravagant money too. This is why I still have the blue rays to, I'm very mad at how Disney encodes its blue rays. Like basically in 5 comments, it's pretty good.

- It's pretty good, yeah, I couldn't be happier with our work. - There is a real like piracy is back culture thing happening that we should probably dig into some other time. Like the, there was such a long run of like, moral conflict over downloading media,

and I feel like there is no longer moral conflict over downloading.

“- I think a lot of people would walk up to David Allison,”

looking dead in the eye, but like I will still, every movie that you make using Warner Brothers to discover. - 100% 100% yeah, it's just gonna happen. - Yeah, well, we'll come back around. We, there Warner Brothers is gonna make it

in appearance during one era, I believe, 'cause you're back. And whenever you're here, we have to talk about Warner and Parama. - For the rest of my life, apparently, thank you, David Allison. But yeah, we should, we should get to the MacBook Neo,

because the computer is out, our review is out, Antonio de Benedetto reviewed it for us. The reaction to this thing I would say has been pretty universally like rapturous. This computer appears to have accomplished exactly

the thing Apple intended it to accomplish, and maybe even more so. Like have you been a surprised by the positivity around this thing as I have? - Not really, I think what I'm more intrigued by

is the positivity around the sense that Apple is having

a good time for the first time in years.

- Mm-hmm. - Like when you open the box for the Neo, it has the little tab that says hello on it, and that like the classic Mac font. Like Apple has not been playful in a long time.

- Like truly has not.

literally pictures of Benedetto.

- Right, do you see that TikTok they made of, just a lime doing a face-to-end call? - No, I mean, it's just like non-sensical, avant-garde, weirdo, TikToks they're making. They started another new Instagram account

that's just more branded content, but there's just a playfulness to Apple's vibe around the Neo

“that I think connects directly to a cost $5.99.”

And the work spends around about $6.99. It's colorful, it's fun. This thing is not taking itself very seriously. So then you run into, and it's running an iPhone ship, and as a Kickstarter, but you're not supposed to take it seriously.

So why did you take it seriously? And it turns out an iPhone ship with a Kickstarter, as we have known for a long time, is remarkably capable, we've just been hidden behind iOS. And so if you just let that system be capable,

it turns out to be very capable. - Yeah, I mean, I think to me, the thing that has been so interesting has been exactly the thing you just described about a bunch of people being like,

"Well, this computer doesn't do X, Y, and Z." And just overwhelmingly, it's like, "Well, then it's not for you, that's fine." I think people instinctively understand what this computer is for in a way,

I think it's really fascinating. And this, we started to see this even over the course of like the 24 hours after it shipped, right? You go from, okay, it's just a cheap laptop. Well, Apple makes the M1 air, why not continue to do that?

And then you start to see some of the things that Apple did to this, right? It is the marketing campaign, and it is the colors, and it is some of the choices they made with the device. Not all of which I agree with, by the way,

I have some real quibbles with this particular computer here. But it started to really coalesce around like, "Oh, Apple's actually doing a very specific thing here." And it is, we talk all the time about Apple's ability to sort of have a whole thought, right?

And this computer feels like, this is not a worse MacBook designed to be cheaper. This is like a different idea about a computer in a way that I think resonated with people pretty aggressively. - I mean, Apple will tell you,

I mean, this was their entire message to us. When we talk to their executives at the event, they kept saying, "We can't make crap. "We're not gonna make crap. "We were just able to make this computer great

"using the things we had today." I watched that tear down video of it, and it is remarkable at how much it is just an iPhone. Yeah, like the motherboard is this big. Yeah, right, it's nothing, it's spread out a little bit

'cause I have room, but you can see that, "Oh, this is just an iPhone with a huge battery "and some speakers." - It's so striking, 'cause you pick the thing up

and one of the first things you notice about it

is like it is dense. It is a solid piece of computer, and that's because it is just all battery. There's just nothing else going on in there. It's an iPhone with a giant as battery and a keyboard.

That's the whole thing that's happening there. - This is what it makes you, and I agree about the iPad, has been making me. - So, let's just talk about this now, because I think the main philosophical argument

has been basically just the existence of the MacBook and you're just completely obviated the iPad. And Apple would obviously tell you, no. But I have a very hard time now coming to the conclusion that if you have $600 to spend on an Apple device,

“you should buy anything other than this device.”

Like this to me makes the iPad air, especially if you're thinking about it as a somewhat primary computing device, like even if it's not your only computer, it's a thing you intend to do more than just

hold and watch movies on. If you wanna like, my mom is a good example, right? Like, my mom uses her iPad a lot to look at pictures, to browse the web specifically Zillow. She does New York Times games on it every morning.

And she does a lot of like email and basic little things. The Neo is a better, more usable machine for almost all of those things to me. - Maybe. - Maybe.

I wanna stay on the positive side. I don't think it, I don't think it accused of being relentless in negative. And boy, am I ready? (laughing)

But I think the right combo for most people is a laptop in a phone. And this is why non iPad tablets have all kind of just sort of, they live in that sort of fizzle-bout middle space, wherever it knows it's the right category for a bunch of things.

But it never hits the way the iPad seems to have hit

in certain places. I think this is the right laptop for people whose lives are primarily on phones. - Oh, that's good by thinking about it. If your phone is your main computer,

this is a great secondary computer.

“- Yeah, and I think the truth is that for most people,”

literally in the world, for most people, their phone is their main computer. And so then you're like, okay, what do I really need? I need a more capable web browser quite often. And then there's a subset of apps that might be fun to use.

And then this thing is like, well, here's a more capable web browser and a pretty good keyboard and a good trackpad and a fine display, I'm gonna display nerd.

Where I wanna live, but it's like,

“all that stuff is fine because really what you're doing”

is like, here's a device that can do things by phone cannot do. You put up against the iPad and the reason I'm asking, does this make you mad about the iPad? Is if they just didn't nerf the iPad's operating system,

this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago. - Yes, very much so. - Ages ago. - And this has a lower spec chip in less RAM than most time. - Yeah, the equivalent iPad to this,

price wise, runs an M4. - Yeah, I just reviewed it. Like, it's also $600 and it has an M4 in it.

It is vastly more powerful than this thing

and they just will not let the iPad be powerful in the way that this thing is allowed to be powerful. - Here's my theory about that. I don't think I wonder about this and I've wondered about it for ages

and various combinations of people will deny it to my face or insist that it's a conspiracy theory, but really what you want the iPad to do is just run desktop safari. If it would just run desktop safari,

not weird iPad mobile safari plus, but they would tell you it's a desktop safari. - They are lying to you. - Yes, I mean, different people will jump out of the word and both confirm and deny this in the same way.

- They use phrases like desktop class. - Yep, and it's like, well, what is that? - Nope, I just want the one that's very obviously able to be run on an 18 chip with 8K's of RAM. - Sure can.

- Just do that, the iPad becomes a different computer and that to me is the entire, that is the MacBook Neo, like at the end of the day, you boil it all the way down and it is not that it can run garage fan

because an iPad can run garage fan. It's not that it can browse Zillow because most people just browse Zillow on their phones. Like whatever it is that you're saying, it's not that it is a better door to ask machine

or whatever apps exist on phone. It is, oh, the browser is good and there's a keyboard in a mouse. And for everything that hits the wall on a mobile device, that's the exit ramp.

- Yep. - And this thing just provides that exit ramp over and over again. It's very capable of doing all the other stuff that you know, how many creators have now posted the videos of them scrolling for a time lines

and all the stuff that people are worried about. No, of course it's capable of doing that stuff.

“But I think the reason people are excited about it”

is it is the perfect companion to a phone and I don't think that that paradigm has truly existed yet. - Yeah, that's a good theory, I think that's largely right.

And it is, we've always talked about the upside of PCs

and I used PCs broadly, like Max Windows, whatever, as the backstop to all of that stuff that there are walls you run into on your phone and on your tablet and on other devices. Some of which are artificially created

by the companies that make them, particularly in Apple's case, it just refuses to allow you to do certain things that you want to do. But in part because the UI doesn't afford it, right? There are just things you can't do on a six inch screen

as well as you would want to do it on another device. And so having a larger device as the backup is valuable it just has been for a long time and I think you're right that this becomes a cheap and pretty good version of every single one of those things,

right? Antonio's review basically just goes over all the things it's pretty good at. And it being pretty good at everything ends up being really, really, really meaningful.

Especially when you put it up against all of these other Windows laptops at the same price and even higher,

which almost always come with at least one sort of screaming problem.

Bad performance, bad battery life, bad keyboards, bad webcams, bad whatever else, like there's there's almost always at least one sort of huge gacha feature and the Neo just doesn't have any. And to be able to offer this will do all the things you want to do pretty well for $600 is a huge deal.

By the way, did you end up getting the $600 one

“or did you get the 512 gigs of storage and the touch ID?”

I bought the touch ID, I don't know why. I don't know. I also bought the touch ID and the guy who sold it to me the Apple Store essentially told me I was getting the touch ID. He was like, oh and you want the 512 and the touch ID, right?

It was like, he said these things are absolutely flying out of the store, which that was really interesting. And it was literally like he assumed I was going to spend the extra $100. Which I was anyway, but it was just not even a question in his mind. This is how Apple's pricing works.

It's genius. They truly clocked me the minute I walked in and they were like, this is the actual price of the thing, let's be honest with each other. Yeah, they made basically $99 a profit off of the thing. I mean, these are the problems for the other PC makers in the world.

But one, the entire Windows PC market is basically driven by subsidies. So whether that's pre-loaded, blowware that those companies pay to pre-load on the PCs,

The keyboard deck, whether it's Microsoft itself doing weird pricing schemes so that

copilot shows up in your face and starts screaming at you the second you open the computer.

There's just a whole bunch of compromise in the pricing that is related to other companies using the computer as advertising. Just straightforwardly, that subsidy drives down the price of PCs. The same way that subsidy drives down the price of smart TVs. Right, a smart TV is basically $0 now and it's because it's a giant advertising terminal in your house.

And literally you can get a TV for $0 with a giant advertising terminal physically glued at the bottom of the TV. That market has reached its conclusion, the PC market is on its way there. So if you're going to get a Windows PC for $600, it's not the hardware compromises that will really kill you. It is the subsidy compromises that make the user experience horrible that will kill you. And Apple just doesn't do those things or if they do those things, they do them in a way that drives everyone crazy.

We all know what's going on, but they have like, well, we're just telling you that you can use Apple wallet. Kind of like, you know what I mean, like, yeah. And what's funny is that is so much less present on macOS than in most other places. Like, that's all it's in. Yeah, it constantly your phone is telling you about fitness plus and about all the things you can do in Apple music and about all the new stuff that's on Apple TV plus.

“And I think in part because notifications are just so much less front and center on macOS, it just doesn't feel nearly as in your face as it does on the phone.”

Yeah, and to whatever extent, Apple doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff, it doesn't allow third parties to do that side. And again, this is like on the margin, Apple does this stuff. Like, you can see it, it's present in their products. They are, are using their own products to advertise their own services in a way that I think is gross. And most people who experience it and for what it is, know that it's gross.

But it's just not the same as Windows. Like, you know, they're just qualitatively different. And so like, out of the box, you are just getting a nicer experience because it's not shrunked up by advertising subsidy. And then there's just hardware scale. Apple makes a lot of 18 chips.

All the money isn't in the chip because they've already made 20 billion of them.

Yeah. And so the money is in the other components and you can feel it. Yep. And I think that is just very, very difficult for other PC makers to compete with. Let alone Apple is really good at pricing you and dispending a hundred more dollars on effectively nothing.

With such insane margins on a ram already that they didn't have to do any pricing games because they can just take a little less money for a ram. They can take a little less profit for a ram. Like, what are you going to do?

“And I think I'm telling you, I've been talking about a PC maker.”

There's not a PC maker, makers are talking about it. And David, you've been making this point, they've seen caught way off-guard. Yeah, which is nuts, right? I mean, I think the most direct quote we've gotten so far was from a suit, which just had an earnings call. And one of the questions they got on their earnings call was essentially,

what do you make of this computer? How do you feel about the Neo? Do you view this as a threat?

And this is Nick Wu, the CFO, who basically said, you know, we had an inkling.

This was coming. There have been sort of supply chain rumors about this for months. Like, we kind of saw this coming. We were surprised. It was as cheap as it was, which I think is really interesting.

That I think people probably expected this to be like 799 or 899, not 599 and 499 education, which is a genuinely low price for the Bicycle. But then he says, he was talking about the processor and the eight gigs of ram. And he said, this may limit certain applications.

“So I think when Apple position the product, it's probably focused more on content consumption.”

It's different somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios. Because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet. Because tablets are mostly for content consumption. This is just, like, this is dead wrong. Yeah.

It's just dead wrong. And I think it is so reminiscent to me, I read that quote in immediately thought of Steve Balmer in 2007 being asked about the iPhone. And we actually, we just pulled this clip because it's, I found this on YouTube again. And there was the first comment on YouTube.

His YouTube showed this to me again, 17 years later. So I think the algorithm seems too spike to this clip again. But let me just play you this response from Steve Balmer when he's asked about the iPhone. The first iPhone in 2007. Steve Jobs goes to Mac world and he pulls out this iPhone.

What was your first reaction when you saw that? $500 fully subsidized with the plan. I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.

Now, it may sell very well or not. You know, we have our strategy. We've got great Windows mobile devices in the market today. We, you can get a Motorola Q phone now, 99 dollars.

It'll do music. It'll do internet. It'll do email. It'll do instant messaging. So I kind of look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy.

I like it a lot.

First of all, I had a Motorola Q and it was not as good as the iPhone.

But also, like the, obviously, the details here are different. What Apple just did is go down in price and what Apple just did is is make something available to many more people with a keyboard, ironically. But, but the response feels the same, which is to look at this and say, well, this isn't what business users want.

And it's like, well, you have officially missed the point here. And Microsoft has been missing this particular point for a very long time. The whole Windows ecosystem has been missing this point for a very long time, that by some mix of, I would call it tech debt and bad product management to be kind.

These companies are either unable unwilling or both to actually properly make great products

in this price range and have been for a long time.

“Like Antonio is working on this story, which I think will probably be live by the time most”

people hear this. And at one point, he was like, I don't, I don't blame PC manufacturers for not having a response to the Neo yet. And I was like, but you have this backwards, where is this 10 years ago? Like this, this, this has been, this thing has been sitting here for forever. You let Chromebooks eat it alive and then Google kind of forgot Chromebooks exist and Chromebooks stop getting better. That thing has been languishing forever. And this has just been open PC space

for a long time and it's sort of wild that Apple was the one that managed to fill it like this. A company that generally had no interest in doing this kind of computer for a really long time, just looked around and was like, oh, we, that's not hard. And they've got these left over. I don't know, let me play devil's advocate. Okay, because I agree with everyone you're saying, and I do think the PC makers are a

little bit boxed in by just the pricing dynamics, like they don't all make their own chips. Right. There'll also be holding to those chips, like Intel being that is part of the problem here. Yeah, right, but at every level, like Apple has to find the profit at the end of the process. Right. They're like, we put all the parts together and then we market up, like Apple's profit margin. If you look at their results, like, is like rock solid between

“30 and 40%. That's just, that's what they do every quarter. That's how much profit they make.”

And they just back into it because they make most of the components. Right. And so when the price of RAM's skyrocket, they can pay some more to Samsung or whoever for RAM and they can kind of like back it out and other stuff. If you're a PC maker, if you're an a suitor, a dollar, whoever, you don't make anything. So every part in your computer, someone else has to make the profit

to make their company run, especially the chip, which is like usually the most important part of the

computer. So you're just start with, okay, we got to pay a margin to Intel that Apple doesn't have to pay. You just start behind the curve, like legitimately behind the curve. And then Apple, by so many chips from TSMC, that they get massive discounts on their volume. Right. So you're just like, all of the sudden, like, you just start way, way behind in the race. And so like, I don't, I don't doubt that this is a very challenging thing to compete with, just on the fundamentals of

the fact that the PC competitors can't remove the margins from all the components, and then margin up at the end to solve the problem. That's fair. Right. But I'm just playing devil's advocate. Like, I just see that problem in a mic, whatever. The real dynamic and the PC industry for more than the past 10 years now is that Apple decided it would own the high end. So if you just look at sales of laptops that cost more than a thousand dollars, it is more likely than not that

every one of those sales is an Apple laptop. Yeah. They just went and they're like, we're just going to compete on this price and up. And we're going to win. And statistically, they've won. And Microsoft knew this. Like, when Panos Pena ran surface, he was like, this is my problem. I cannot convince this industry to spend that money and R&D to compete there. Microsoft is going to do it. And then I will develop hinges and keyboards and track pads. And we'll just give it away to the ecosystem.

So that their stuff is good. And we can credibly compete at the high end because if we lose the high end,

“there's nothing left. Right. And that's what they all did for the longest time. And maybe there's”

like good high end PC laptop competition now. They made some good progress. There is there. There was Ben good stuff over the years. There's good. There's interesting ideas. And that's yes. Don't think it's good. The whole bottom has languished. And all of it is like, do you want a 15 in screen for $700? Here's whatever garbage that we can surround that screen with. And people are like, yeah, that's the thing we wanted. And I think Apple's showing up with the 13 in screen at that

price point in like no one has an answer. But like I know why the PC market looks the way it looks.

enough. And yeah, it was not economically viable for any one company to solve that problem.

Microsoft had to do it for its entire ecosystem. Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the surface go over the last few days because that was Microsoft's biggest swing at this price point. And actually I went back and read Deeter reviewed the surface go in 2018 when it came out and gave it an 8 and a half. Like this is a there were things to like about it. But it was fundamentally it was a 10 inch computer. And there are a bunch of problems that come with making a 10 inch computer.

“And I think one of the things Apple understands and got right about this is that 13 inches is the right”

size for a laptop. And so many ways. And especially at smaller sizes, Microsoft got really hung up on doing hybrids that just didn't quite pan out the same way. And I think if you just go back and redo the surface go process. And they're like, okay, well, what if instead of trying to try to sort of overcorrect on the form factor here, we just make the cheapest surface laptop we can and charge it at this price, I wonder what that computer would look like now. It would look like

Microsoft to claim war on its PC partners and never doing it. This is the problem.

Right there, they're always in between the big parts of the market with the surface. Right. That's very true. You made a face when I said 13 inches. What's your problem with 13 inches? Well, I didn't realize that I had I had recycled this, but I had a 12 inch MacBook, which was one of my very favorite computers. In fact, hilaracy about Deeter. I bought it from Deeter. And I yearly screwed you on that one. In a very minutes so-to-way, at one point I was like,

do I remember to pay you for this? And he was like, of course you did. And I don't know if that's true or not. So maybe I paid him for it. But that was like a very minutes so-to. Like, yeah, you're fine. I just wanted the thing out of my hands. I was just ages ago. And I love

“that computer. I think I finally recycled it. But that computer was the perfect size. And when the”

Neo was announced, I was really sad. They hadn't gone one tick smaller. And now that I have it, and we've had this conversation, I completely understand why they didn't. They made the most mainstream computer they could. And 13 inches is the most mainstream size. And that is the right answer to this question. Yeah, I think that's right. And I will say the, what the air is 136, right? I don't really appreciably notice the difference between the Neo screen and the air screen at this point.

Yeah, 136. I do notice the size of the thing. Like, the air sort of wears it self a little later to me than the Neo does, even though they're technically the same weight. And the Neo's actually a little smaller in some dimensions. The Neo feels chunkier as a computer to me. What if you made it so far? You've been, you've been using it. I have two gripes I would like to talk about. But I want to know what you've thought of the Neo so far. I think the Neo's a beautiful piece of hardware. And

for all the reasons I said, I think only Apple can really produce it. And I'm really happy that

they got rid of Allen die because Mac OS Tahoe is a visual abomination. Is this your first Tahoe

experience? I've used it like academically. Okay. Do you know like at a removes? Yeah, like I have a computer with Tahoe on it. And I like you touch it through a piece of glass. Yeah, like literally a piece. Like my work computer is I just don't update them. So I have to because I just can't take them down. Like this podcast machine. I don't even know what's running. Like it just needs to work in there. That's the thing it does. And then I thought liquid glass is bad. So I did not

update my main work computer over there. Again, I have another Mac that has it on there. But it's just sort of, it was to dink around. It's like what I put the updates on. This is the first time I've sat down and really used Tahoe with liquid glass. And every part of it is infuriating. An Apple should be embarrassed. And the number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is because I know

“that Apple has no choice. But to fix liquid glass in Tahoe at WWC. And then you should wait”

until they rev Mac OS 27. And they undo this ungodly abomination of an interface. It is so bad. Liquid glass on a phone is like fine. It's not great. And I don't love it. But it's fine because you, you know, phone isn't inherently a single tasker. What they have done to delineate windows and the menu bar and items that you've selected on Mac OS with liquid glass is so bad. It goes against every principle of good design and goes against every principle which is common sense.

Like should two things that are different look different or the same David? Obviously the same. So what if you couldn't tell what's what at any time on your computer? What if I still interface? It was just like a weird blurry mess. There are parts of Tahoe that are legitimately slow for no reason. When you open control center from the menu bar.

different. So like you click the clock and the notification slide in from the side, you click control center and there's like a very slow fade animation in control center like bubbles

in which is exactly what you don't want for quick controls. Correct. Like it is basically like,

oh, you just want to change the brightness. What if there is a Broadway show? Like you don't want that. You just want the brightness toggle to appear. But that's different than the slide in and you keep going down and then another one's a drop down and then you get all the way to like the Wi-Fi icon and it's a standard drop down and you keep going and you get to the regular menus and when you click on those menus, they don't shade in. Dark enough for you to tell that you've

selected a menu. I'm so glad you're finally dealing with this excuse me, so I have. I'm not even in the weeds of the centerface. I'm like, I'm going to raise the brightness and pick save from the file icon and all of this is stupid. Yeah. It is, I told, I didn't want to, I don't want to go

negative. But I'm telling you the Neo was like, it first made me really happy and then it made

me incredibly sad that this thing is, it took a visual disaster. It got to the point where I

“did the only thing I can do when I'm so mad at an Apple interface. I just started texting”

Shawn Krueger, who hates it as much as anybody. I was like, I see what you're saying and he was like, yeah, he did it's bad. He's like, if anything, I'm not going hard enough. The many bars actually such a perfect example because it's also like, it's translucent now, but it is still a hard border. And those two things don't make any sense. So it's like, it looks like it should be interactive with everything, but it's not. It's still a hard line. But just looking at the

menu right now, like, I'm just, I'm going to do this while I'm sitting here. Okay. So you click on the

clock and it slides in from the right. You click on the control center and it bubbles in, you really

is slow. I hadn't really noticed it. It is like a song and dance routine to be like, I want to turn the volume up. And of all things that should just appear, that's it. Then you do search and it opens up spotlight in the center of the screen. In a moment. Yeah. Then you click on battery and it opens up a menu to the left. You will click on Wi-Fi and it opens up a menu to the right. It's like, it's literally like every single one of these was designed by a different person and none of

them ever spoke to each other. And it is sanity. Apple is so good at this. Like historically, the thing that they're good at is looking at this and being like, make this make sense.

“And they've just lost the plot here. My favorite Tahoe thing forever though is just, if you want to”

understand the problem with Tahoe, take all of your apps and drag them to the same corner and then see if the top left corners line up. Spoiler alert, they don't. Apps are just, there's no, there's literally no rules anymore for what's going on with Tahoe. Tahoe is very bad. Look, the glass is very bad, but the Neo is still awesome. And I really like, we came out of last week being like, this thing is going to sell huge and I think it's actually going to be bigger than I

thought. I think this, this will replace the MacBook Air as the sort of default. I don't have any follow questions. What computer should you buy computer for people? Maybe. Maybe. I think I think we have yet to see. I think it's hard to know at the very beginning. I think all the benchmarks suggest that that is true, all the sort of early reviews are reviews suggest that's true. I think once people start using them, it's scale we're gonna find out. It's possible. And the main

pro is so tested. That chip is mature and good and made it monstrous scale, that I don't worry about battery life problems we don't know about. I don't know, I just, I have a hard time imagining what it would be that would be the glaring problem. Of course, you have a hard time imagining what it would be. It's so obvious what it would be. And you can't, it's like blocked out in your

“brain, like Westworld. It doesn't, it's a gigs of RAM. Oh, God. That's what it would be.”

It would be, can I tell you how unbelievable you've been vindicated. I am. We're going to run a 12 minutes super cut of everybody yelling at me for saying a gigs of RAM is fine. And then all those same people saying, oh, it only has a gigs of RAM. That's not a problem for normal everyday computer users. Yeah. Fuck those. We're going to see. That's it. I'd say only a question mark I have is once you want to millions of people buy this thing and they start using

it for all kinds of stuff that nobody could possibly foresee. Well, a gigs of RAM swapping to this storage will it be not a problem whichever one assumes or will somewhere in stuff like that. And then it's fair question. I would just point out once again, Alan dies last vindictive act was to voice this interface on millions of unsuspecting consumers who just want to spend seven hour hours on an ice computer with touch ID. They're just out here doing their best. And I'm

telling you right now Mark Zuckerberg, you got rolled because you have no taste. If you saw this work and you're like, that guy, I know everything I need to know about you man. So it loaned Emily the MacBook Neo is a referendum on Mark Zuckerberg's taste. This works for me. It's all I'm saying. The one other thing I should say before when we should move on from the Neo here is

the keyboards. So on the the Indigo one here, it's actually it's a pretty dark keyboard, which

like aesthetically looks really nice. But even sitting here in decent light, it is hard to see.

“It's dark text on a dark key. And I think Antonio had one of the later colors and said it was a”

little easier to see on the light keys, what you're typing in the dark. But on this they're dark keys and the backlight would have been really nice. And if you're not a cornered, but I'm a huge cornered. If you go into any car forums, all car forums are sort of dominated by people going on Timo and Ali Baba and putting in RGB ambient lights all over their cars. And they're just a huge market for that forever car. This thing is so modular and so repairable. I'm just waiting for the

weird Ali Baba market. Backlight keyboards for the Neo to show up. Like you know, it's got to come.

That's what we want. We want weird gamer keyboards to the Macbook Neo. If you're making one now

send it to us, we will prominently feature it here on March. That's real. We do want that. That's absolutely correct. Before we get off of Apple stuff, we reviewed the iPhone 17e this week. Allison did that. I reviewed the new iPad Air. I don't think we need to talk about either one of them because they are precisely exactly what you think. The 17e is sort of fascinating because Allison I think made the correct point, which is that it's a very good phone. I think as Apple approaches

it's budget devices. That is the right way to do it. They put Magsafe back. Again, it's like this is a much cleaner correct set of tradeoffs to get to a lower price. But the base iPhone 17 is the best to the base iPhone has been in a long time. And the leap is $200. And I think like if your budget allows only the 17e awesome, it would be very happy. But I think the case for moving up $200, especially given the economics of how people buy phones. And the way that

“people use their phones and like the primacy of phones in modern life, you should spend the $200”

and get the better phone. It's 100% the flip of what we're saying with the Neo. I think if you perceive the Neo is like this is a great companion laptop for people whose primary computer is a phone. You should absolutely spend less money in a laptop and more money on the phone. Oh, man. Okay. 17e and MacBook Air or 17e and MacBook Neo. 17e and Neo. That's like a hundred percent. I think you want the real camera. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, unless there's some

specific thing that you need that M5 chip for, you know, if you if you know what it is, you know, it is go get it. Yeah. I think for most people having a slightly more capable phone is a much better trade off. Yeah. I think you're right. But the other one we need to talk about here is the studio display XDR, which you have not bought, but I am confident by the time we do this podcast next week,

we'll be in your house. The second it goes on non-corrupt sale for even $1.00. I'm buying this this

What if I give them the dollar so that they can give you a dollar? What if you buy me? I will accept you. That's fine. That's fine. All right, deal. John Higgins reviewed it for us. It seems to be the thing we hoped it was. Are you, are you isn't enthusiastic about this now? We've tested it. We've seen it come out. Like is it, is it what you wanted? Yeah, it's absolutely what I mean, it's the first new display technology idea from Apple and quite a while. That's out of the

MacBooks. Right, but it's the first new display technology idea from Apple and quite a while. I, you know, it is very expensive. Yeah. But what you're buying for that is basically a bunch of calibration settings. And so I think I'm curious to see if other display makers use similar panels or similar technologies without all of the added costs of doing all the calibrations and bring some of the core technology at a lower price, which is 100% true of the 5K panel

that Apple is using in the regular studio display, which you can now buy on Amazon in a totally no name Chinese case for 500 euros. Yeah. Right, and it's just not, and we're going to review that too, because I think it's really interesting to see how it's literally the same panel from a 2012 like it's just been around and now you can buy it and dump a bunch of different configurations. The XDR is a step forward. And so I'm like, I said, I'm going to, I just, again, I saw it at the event

and I literally just looked at it in the store and I came this close to buying it because it looks great like spectacularly great. And it, it is a step forward. I barely even need this thing because I do almost all my photo editing on my MacBook Pro, which has a Mac, like it has the same kind of

“core technology in it, but you know what I keep saying. You stare at screens all day. You should spend”

the money in a best one you can, because they last forever. And, you know, if I can convince myself that I'll have this display for 10 years, it's only 3, you know, 312 hours a year. I think it's a savings. I mean, I will say, there are, there are very few technology devices. I would say, it's even plausible to say, I'm going to buy this and keep this for a decade. I think the studio

just lost forever. TV's in, in monitors, they lay last forever. Yeah. It is so hard to convince yourself

to upgrade. So, I could say, the second it goes on sale for even a dollar. I'm going to buy this thing

and not like a corrupt sale. Not like, it also apparently has a better webcam, which is very exciting. I put tape over this one. No, thank you. My webcam, all of my weapons in the house are the real cameras of power buttons for privacy reasons or for camera quality reasons both. Yeah, you get one with the other. And the idea that there's like a software to find webcam in my computer that someone could come get. Yeah. This is where I am with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has tape on his laptop.

You're looking at a picture of his laptop. Yeah. He's just tape on that webcam and it's like, oh, buddy, you're, the guy wants to put glasses and everybody's face has tape on his webcam. I know. Yeah. I will say, by the way, we keep getting emails from people volunteering to come to your house and take a part-year eye Mac to turn it into a display for you. I don't know what your

precious ethics will allow on that front, but we have a series of volunteers who are willing to

“come do this for you at any point. That's a lot. I think that's not, I mean, that's just like,”

that's just somebody doing their hobby. You know, like, that's a good time. Yes. I got a big, I owe a big part of my journalism career to fixing David Pope's Xbox when he was the tech columnist at the New York Times. There you go. This is how it starts. People couldn't realize how it's in fixes eye Mac. We'll do my little, my little village here in Westchester County does repair cafes. Maybe I'll just, I'll just like hijack the repair cafes. Like, everyone bring their 5k

eye Macs. We're making monitors just to parade a 5k eye Macs down the street. Yes. And then the senior citizens who are all there to get their ancient vacuum cleaners repair will be very confused. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right. Two more Apple rumors, and then we're going to be

we're going to stop with the Apple for a while. The first, uh, for Markerman at Bloomberg is that

the next set of Apple releases is going to be high end stuff, having now done some of the low end stuff. It's, it's going to extend up even higher, potentially called ultra, but not necessarily called ultra, um, it sounds like the foldable iPhone fits into that about which we also have some rumors,

“but there's just a real movement up in the market here for Apple. And I think this is really interesting.”

There was also this news this week about Uber Elite, which is like newer cars, fancier rides, just catering to expensive people. And I think that's a trend that is coming in a really real way. Like we've talked about this before that one of the great cool exciting things about technology is we all have the same iPhone, right? Like there is just the iPhone no matter no matter who you are within a very small stratifications, the same technology is available to everybody.

We may be headed for a period of that not being the case in a really mainstream way. I would pay a thousand extra dollars from back with me. I didn't have like a glass on it. I was putting that up in that universe right now. That may become available to you, but I think that the like, until now it's been, you know, new technology that hasn't quite come down and called like foldable phones are still really expensive, right? But that's not nobody would call that

sort of a mainstream thing yet. And when they become mainstream, everybody sort of assumed the price will come back down. Maybe we're just headed to a point where there is going to be a true luxury class of mainstream technology for a while, which I think is really interesting. And I don't know quite how to feel about it. Do you mean pricing products is kind of like an art in a science? And I think what you're seeing

“is there are some people, I mean you're seeing income inequality. That's what you're describing.”

Yeah, essentially. And so some people just don't care about a thousand dollars of price difference, and they'll just spend it. And some people really care about a hundred dollars of price difference. And you can hear these companies, they're just headed, their products are headed into different directions. Yeah. And you know, I think the fold that I've unfold being the ultra product, it's hyper expensive sort of makes sense. Like you want to price your way into early adopters,

you want to price your way into someone who if they feel like the product is bad and they got cheated isn't so mad, right. They're just going to buy another phone and move on with her lives. I think the rest of the ultra products, you got to make a case for something beyond it's the fastest trip. Sure. And I think it once you get away from like pro is the designation, which means nothing in Apple world anymore. And you go to ultra. Like you have to make some

case for it. It can't just be like it's wrapped in the finest of others. Like something else that's to happen there. Red, it's going to say you get like the ormez version is what apples is traditionally done. Yeah. So we'll see. And it's going to need a new move. But I can see why you would introduce ultra with the fold to say this is this is the the best possible thing or the most expensive possible thing. And you're not just getting, okay, it's so expensive. Most people

can't afford it. You're getting also we don't really know it's going to work. And I think the rumors are on the fold are like, we don't really know it's going to work. Yeah. So the rumor right now,

of a small iPhone, which seems like a victory. And then it'll open up the the wide aspect ratio

will have side by side apps. This appears to be like a exciting new thing that Apple will tell you it has invented. But it's not going to have the full sort of suite of iPad multitasking stuff. It won't run iPad apps. But it will let you do more stuff. There's I have a lot of questions.

“But the biggest thing that is here that I think really sucks is that apparently Apple is going to”

ditch Face ID for Touch ID in order to accommodate the thinner display so that it can have them fold. I think this is a bad idea. And Apple should stop it. Face ID is so much better than Touch ID. That going back this happens to me all the time. I used Face ID on an iPad Pro just like in my day-to-day life. And then I get the new iPad Air every year to review it. And it has Touch ID. And the amount of time you spend on a device that sort of moves in aspect ratio like that,

figuring out where to put your finger and how it's awful. And getting going back to that after having your face just sort of make your phone feel like it's unlocked sucks. And it will make this supposedly very premium thing feel annoying to a lot of users. I'm curious if that rumors real. I mean, that's the rumor. But if they do it, they're going to do it the same way as the iPad. Right? They'll put it in the power button or the sleep wake button on the side. Yep.

“We're just maybe not the worst thing on a phone because you got to hold the phone.”

Yep, but you're holding what amounts to a double-sided phone and trying to reach. Yeah, they could just, that's that bad. No, don't, yeah, I don't want that. And what if the power button moves depending on how you open it? Where is it going to be on that? Like, there's just a lot of questions. Yeah, and I think not knowing where to tap the thing to unlock my phone is bad. I will say I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro and having both is awesome.

It has, it has both the under screen, thumb, print, reader and face ID or whatever face unlock, whatever they call it. That combination is awesome because what if they go with an under screen one? That would be fine. That would be fine. I could live with that. But the fail gracefully from face ID when it works to touch ID when you're wearing sunglasses to pass code if we can't forget how to do it. Otherwise is exactly the correct, like graceful scale down. And just

starting with touch ID. Every time I get on an iPad, it annoys me. I don't know. I mean, we'll see. I have many more questions about this than face ID. I mean, if the grand failure of the iPad is, you won't just let it run mac apps. The grand failure of the full of this, you won't just let it run iPad apps. Yeah, there's a line in Emma's story that she wrote about this. This is again from Mark Herrmann and Emma Wright's still Apple is reportedly trying to take advantage of the phone's

larger screen real estate by updating its core apps with a sidebar on the left side of the screen. Like,

“oh, a sidebar. Look at us. That's what my thousand dollars is for. You know, the problem is”

all these projects started, you know, 500 years ago. I know. Again, you know, under one, Alan die. I want to say guys. Yeah. Like, again, I think liquid glass in a phone is like, it's fine. Because there's just not a lot of ways to get tripped up when you're just looking at one app at a time.

The second you have two at a time, the second you multiple windows and menus, which is what you're

going to buy with an iPhone fold. It is nice knowing that whatever augmented reality device meta comes out with will be a disaster. Like, do you remember there was that period about four five years after Steve Jobs died where there was a lot of coverage around like, you know, this was the first one that Steve Jobs was not. I wonder if we're going to get the reverse with Alan die. Where it's like, thank god, this is we are absolutely going to get the reverse. This is finally the last one

happened. I touched before he left out. Apple doesn't leak as a company and I guarantee you the people at Apple are going to leak. Like, the stain is gone. Yeah, we finally took all the code out of this one. Yeah, agree. All right. We need to take a break. We would bunch more guys just to talk about including some Xbox somewhere between hints and news, but lots to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from one password. It's easy to assume that being small means flying

under the radar, but the reality is that small businesses are being targeted more and more

by bad actors. Cybercriminals know that leading teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. One password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure. They provide turnkey solutions that can be rolled out in hours, whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. One password is designed to meet small teams where they are, but it's also built to grow with your company. However complex your security needs

better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at onepassword.com/vergecast and start securing every log in. Support for the show comes from Laurel Group, using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all.

The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the

power of light to hair care and skin care. Light, straight and multi-styler and the new LED face mask both of which were recognized as CES-2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on Laurel.com. Laurel Group, create the beauty that moves the world. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn apps. When you're running your own business, every decision could feel like make or break and you can't afford to waste a penny.

So if your B2B marketing is still falling short, it may be because you're preaching to the wrong

“choir, whether you know it or not. If you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads.”

LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision-makers

according to their data. That's where they stand apart from other adbys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue, also you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads both one of the highest B2B return on adspend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. So get your ads in front of the right people and make your B2B strategy work. You can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads

and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/vergecast. That's LinkedIn.com/vergecast in terms of conditions apply. All right, we're back. So it's GDC this week, game developer's conference, J, Peters, and Sean Hollister there on our team covering a bunch of stuff and I would say, did you guys talk about project helix on the show last week while I was out? Not really. Okay, so project helix is this thing we've heard in clings about obviously there's been this huge

shakeup inside of the Xbox team. Ashashama is now running all things Xbox inside of Microsoft and hinted is maybe not strong enough. Just sort of set out loud that the next Xbox is project helix and that it's going to play PC games. And this is this is a thing we've been hearing about forever. This is kind of the obvious convergence coming between the Xbox and Windows and kind of all of the things Microsoft is trying to do into a platform strategy that makes a lot more sense.

We got a few more details on it this week and I would say more evidence that is tangential to the existence of helix, but suggests that it is going to be the exact thing that we thought.

“Microsoft is telling developers that if you want to build next gen Xbox games that you should”

build PC games, which is sort of fascinating. Yeah, this shift feels like it's happening. Right, like there is whatever Xbox is going to be, it really looks an awful lot like a Windows computer. Yeah. I mean, they've announced Xbox mode is coming to Windows 11 PCs. And they're finally calling it Xbox mode, which thank God instead of Xbox full screen experience. Here's some questions I have about all this. One, you know, the rumors were that Phil Spencer

had always been going to retire. And this was part of the plan and he was stepping down and that

Sarah Bond was a president of Xbox was really running Xbox while Phil dealt with integrating Activision or whatever, whatever big set of dumb issues that he bought when he bought back to the friend. And then, you know, Tom reported this out that Phil and Sarah had really alienated a lot of people with that this is an Xbox campaign and like trying to make Xbox everything but the console and that Asha Sharma would come in and she's like, I don't know anything about Xbox. I'm just going

to listen to everyone, which is what, you know, what, this is what you do as a new executive. Yeah. And then it's like, this is the exact same plan you guys. This is the, this is the same plan. Like, maybe the advertising campaign has gone away. But the idea that we're going to put all the focus on the console, you're just announcing that you're, you're going to build appliance like Windows gaming PCs. And that's the future of your console, which was the plan. It was, it was just 100

percent the plan. Like, what about the plan was so bad that Phil Spencer's long-awaited retirement just happened suddenly at a rush. And his handpicked number two was supposed to take over, didn't get the job. A lot of people, a lot of theories about like, you know, who's taking shots

“that's there. But like the truth is she didn't get the job. Yeah. That's just a thing that happened.”

She didn't get the job. So like, what about this plan is different than the plan. They got one

I can't tell you the answer to that question right now. Based on what we know. It's a good question.

“And I think none of this is to say, by the way, that this is not necessarily the right plan. I think”

I think there is still a strong argument to be made that betting on PC games is a smart move for Microsoft in a variety of ways. Right? Like, we just talked about all the reasons that Apple is kind of eating the PC market from all directions. One thing Apple doesn't sell is gaming PCs. Apple would love you to buy a MacBook Pro and play games on it. Apple wants nothing more than free to play games on your mobile. They don't want that. They want to do. They want to demo one

five-year-old Assassin's Creed game twice a year and be like, we're good at video games and that's the end of that. No, all they want to do is be like, metal and to developers like,

I don't care about this at all. Please leave me alone. When they care about it, when they're doing

weird free to play loot boxes on the iPhone. Yeah, agreed. But gaming is a huge business, gaming PCs are a huge business. This is a thing. Windows does really well. There's an Azure play here. There's an Xbox play here. Like, it is actually a really interesting bit of sort of perfect corporate synergy to just care a lot about PC games if you're Microsoft. But you're right that that has been the case for a very long time and it is not super clear what has changed.

Right. Something happened where Phil Spencer who architected this plan got pushed at the door in a rush and that's a retirement that was quote, "long plan," but like, it wasn't like some big celebration of Phil Spencer. It was like CFL and his hand-picked successor did not get the job. And there was just a lot of reporting about all the problems there. People have a lot of feelings about the cheating at the job. And then there's a new person who's like, we're going to

come, we're going to make the Xbox great again, right? Like, and then there's this. And I just can't tell you what's different. I'm trying. I'm looking at this to be like, okay, like, is it just that this train was on the tracks and he looks won't even be a thing until next year. Right. They said it won't even be out in alpha until next year. So there's a lot of times, there's a lot of time for a lot of things to change. Yeah. But the idea that the Xbox is just

an extension of Windows is that's been the plan. There's not, there's not another plan. I do wonder if the this is an Xbox debacle is a piece of all of this because there's so much

“done inside of the Xbox team that has just muddied that thing that you just explained, right?”

Where like there's Xbox play anywhere and there's Xbox cloud gaming and there's the this is an Xbox made and I think it has looked a lot like Microsoft has lost the plot, even if it hasn't lost the plot. Do you know what I mean? There's a real focus function here that is just saying what if what if this is what they're trying to do? If the Xbox's job is to be the like class leading way to play PC games and then you can also buy a gaming PC, you can also buy a handheld

that's going to run Windows. All the software is the same. You can you can build one game that will work all across these things and Microsoft can say, oh, you want a thing that is just Xbox mode all the time to put in your living room by this. Do you want a gaming PC by this? Do you want to handheld by this? All your games will work everywhere. That's not that different. If you squint from what they've been trying to do all along except that the way that they've put it together

and the way that they've packaged it and the way that they've marketed it and talked about it has been insane. What if you took this plan and took out all the parts that seem like nonsense?

“But kind of kept the plan the same? Maybe that's what Helix is and it was Jason Ronald was”

who is the VP of next generation at Microsoft was an unbelievable job title. It was talking about project helix and he said it's going to have a custom AMD chip and he said it's going to have quote an order of magnitude increase in ray tracing performance up to an including path tracing. Terrific, right? Like what if this thing is just a super optimized super simple Xbox mode only kick ass gaming PC? Do you know how much easier that is to explain than what the hell has the Xbox

been for the last 10 years? Well, so I have two thoughts with this. One, I'm convinced Microsoft's inability to convince Apple to let them do game streaming is what just like pull this whole thing apart. That's possible. This is the rug pull. This is what you retrench to when you couldn't make game streaming work. Right. If they had been able to do game streaming and leverage Azure and just be like your phone is an Xbox now. Maybe all this is very different and not there

are lots of arguments with this. Maybe it was never going to work. But they were never able to just

ship an Xbox game streaming app on iOS and be like here's Xbox. It's happening with the power

who are yelling about latency and controller lagging all this up. And all of that is true, but the

other truth is that Microsoft never really got to try. No, yeah, they never got to try. We just

kind of don't know. There's a lot of weird ways they try. They tried it in the browser all this stuff.

“I think that was their plan. And they just couldn't do it. So then they ended up back it. Well,”

it's Windows or whatever nonsense. And then their other problem, this is my other big thought, is their problem is Windows. Fundamentally, their problem is Windows. This thing that they're junking up with bad AI ideas at every turn that fundamentally, and this is like, you know, I'll connect it to the Neo. The great power of the Neo is like, even if you think the chip is underpowered, almost all the apps you want to run are web apps in the browser. Yep. So you're fine.

Yeah. And it totally, I've heard from a bunch of people over the last week who are very excited to buy

a Neo explicitly because it doesn't have any copilot nonsense all over it. This is like that's

these are your choices right now. And like you're just like stuck here. By the way, we are going to cover Linux on the desktop here at the version 2026. It's this. Hell yeah. This is the year. We're just going to manifest this is the year of Linux on the desktop. And one of the reasons I'm saying that is, you know, our own reporter Sean and Tom. And everyone else keeps saying it is better to play Windows games on Linux right now. This is a huge problem. Yep. This is just a problem across the board.

So like, maybe this is the plan and it's all going to work and you're going to make an ultra optimized Windows PC that runs Xbox over all the time. But it feels like what you're going to do then is get, you're going to strip out all of Windows. So then you're just, you're kind of just making a console again. And maybe the goal is the games can play anywhere. You can download the games on Xbox mode on your gaming PC. But those people are still going to be like, I'm running this

“dumb copilot Windows and I hate it. Well, yeah. I mean, that's why I think Xbox mode ends up being”

really interesting and really important here. Because if you can make a thing that is sort of Windows at the bottom and Xbox on top, you might have something that can solve a bunch of problems all at once, right? You don't have to rearchitect everything across platforms. You can build games that run everywhere. But you can have something that either when you want it to or all the time doesn't look anything like Windows. And doesn't look anything like Windows is such a feature of

so many of these devices. Like Sean keeps reviewing these handhelds. And every time you press two buttons, you end up in a Windows setting menu and it's awful. And so like there's just if they can actually fix the layer on top with Xbox, but still have it when it's underneath, that could work. That is just nothing about the history of either of the full screen experience which has been out for a minute or Microsoft as a company suggests that that's the case.

“But I think Xbox mode in theory I think at least helps solve some of that problem, which is why I'm”

very curious to see how it pans out. Yeah, this whole situation is just if you know what's different, you tell us. But it does seem like something was going awry and some plan was deemed not good enough, which led to massive executive turnover and Xbox and a new C of Xbox,

who's first public comments were we're going to bring Xbox back to what makes Xbox great.

And I'm just going to do a bunch of listening because I don't know anything about video games. And then here's the same plan. Right. And yeah, I mean, there's there's no shot helix didn't exist before actually. Right, so Tom has been reporting on helix for months. Yeah, exactly. So why and now, why announced the next step of the plan that you thought was bad if you thought the plan was? I just don't know the answer. Do you think the plan is good? I mean,

just the very basic idea of merging PC games and Xbox games into one effectively one thing to develop for developers and one thing to buy for gamers and treating the Xbox as some spin off of a gaming PC rather than like a whole different gaming system. Do you think that's a good idea or about idea? I think Microsoft should sell Xbox and this should give up on being a consumer company. They're not good at it. The, I think the only reason they sell Xbox is because it is the one thing Microsoft

does that truly resonates with people under the age of 500. Yeah, it's the one thing that like every Microsoft and please kids think is cool. Well, they have Minecraft accounts for something. But that's all part of Xbox gaming or Microsoft gaming. Like they should just let that thing go like, I mean, they can't know. They're in a way too deep now. Yeah, the biggest acquisition in their history. Like, I don't know. There's just a bunch of mistakes that they made. I think they did all that stuff

because they understood that mobile was important in the next generation of gamers would come up on phones and they needed to be in that business and I'm telling you where someone will write it,

the rails. And I just feel like you should acknowledge that. And maybe it's time like Microsoft in its heart wants to be an enterprise company. That's the thing that they are. That's the thing

that Ella has made them. He's done an incredible job training that company around. If you were called,

the first thing you did was he got rid of Nokia and said we're just done with this. Yeah, Nokia was a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. Like a lot, a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. That's true. I just, I don't, the idea that you can evaluate this is like, is this the right strategy for Microsoft? It's like, dude, it's been a decade. They've been chased in the dragon for a decade. Like, to have maybe just let the game's company be a game's company and live it's on life without

either having to be like, this is the thing that will make Windows PCs cool or this is a thing that will spike Azure usage. You know what the thing that spikes Azure usage is. Right, every single day opening high does something stupid. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, you do wonder the two things that are really interesting sort of historical sliding doors moments here, are that moment years ago when everybody looked at Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and said,

okay, this kind of live service game is actually the future of everything and we can build tons of them and maybe there will be lots of them. And do you know the ones that keep winning? It's Fortnite, it's Roblox and it's Minecraft and so many dollars and so many jobs have been lost trying to unseat those three things that I think there was just a sense of this is going to be a big, huge giant teaming industry and it's still just pretty much the three damn games.

All right, basically everyone got drunk on COVID. Like, I don't know how to explain this.

Everyone was at home and spent all their money in their laptop and every single tech company was like, oh, we're all brains and bats now. We're going to be brains and bats stuff. No one's ever going outside again. No, it's ever going outside again. And we just need to find a way to collect the money that people like that are waving at their laptop every day because that's

“where all the money is and that's where all the time is. And that's how you got cryptocurrency.”

Yeah, straightforwardly. Like, what if we gamble with fake computer money? Like, great. That's where you got prediction markets in a big way. It's where you got huge overhiring into companies, which are now undoing by calling them AI lights, like down the line and you get all the way to live service games. Like, Fortnite is a metaverse. That's where you got the metaverse. Like, Mark Zucker would being literally like, I will put your brain in a vat. I will ship

a vat to your house tomorrow. You just got so upside down because everyone's at home and then people left their house and live service games have the same network effect problems as any new social network. Right. Like, remember peach? I do remember peach. Did anyone else do this? Yeah. The roller, whatever else? Yo. Like, it's they're all the same. It's like, here I am. No one else is here. I'm out. All my friends are so important. Yep. Well, that. Yeah. So that's

the one piece. And then the other piece is the AI thing, right? Where it's, I think right as this sense of, okay, gaming is this gigantic industry. It's where people spend a ton of money. How can we tap into that and change it? Was like, do you remember what all those conversations were happening? Where everybody's like, oh, we pay all attention. All this attention to Hollywood. But gaming is this many multiples bigger as an industry. And it's where young people are going and

gaming is the future of everything. Right as all of these companies were like, oh, we should

“invest deeply into this, like, smash cut to AI just takes over the end. And I think it's just an”

interesting. If, if that, I think probably wrong idea about gaming being a future of everything, had gotten another couple of years of runway before AI had come in and just completely taken over the conversation. Who knows how many more bad investments Microsoft would have told the stuff was how much more NFT conversation we would have had. Actually, you know, my favorite, like, where we all, like, the world got drunk on, on, like, COVID confusion is in my plug for version history.

It was clubhouse, right? The chat app where DC is would be like, what if I said racist stuff and in the femoral talk space? Like, this is where we ran the stories. That's your next episode of version history. Yeah, coming out coming out this Sunday. It was me and Ashley Carman from Blumer again, Casey Newton from platformer. Both the food. Both works at the verge. Both works at the verge. Both cover clubhouse. We had it. We had ourselves a time talking about clubhouse. But yeah,

it is all of that stuff is wrapped up together. There was this sense at one time that the way everybody was going to do everything was going to be different and was going to look like video games. And that was not correct. And so you can see how Microsoft looks at video games at one point. And

“is like, this is actually more adjacent to what we're good at than we realized. And I think that was”

not correct. Like, I recognize we started by talking about GDC in Project Helix and whether or not Windows is a good platform for playing video games on. I'm just ending this second by saying, you can evaluate a lot of ideas the tech industry has right now by asking yourself, does this only

work if we're all brains and vats? And the answer is often yes. Like, the answer is this would go

a lot better if you were a brain and a vet. And all you could do was use the interfaces provided to you

All right. That's enough for that. We, what game are you playing right now? Are you still

“out? You're still mad? It's a mad no-day. It's just mad no-day. So now this season's over,”

you don't have to take the injuries from the auto updates on our servers. Packers are sick if they want to hurt. I'm killing it. Love it. I'm thrilled for you. This is great. All right, we should take one more break. Then we're going to be back. We got some lightning rounds up to you. We're going to be right back. All right. We're back. Time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause for flavor. Neil, are we, are we doing this? Is it? Oh, we're doing it. Okay. It is time

once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I missed it last week. I missed it terribly. I'm so thrilled to be back. I wore my bread and car as a dummy t-shirt out in the world. Kind of by accident without realizing I had it on several questions. Bread and the car as a dummy.

“Oh, it's good. Well, like David Bowie is. Yeah. It's got some real”

2000s in the advice. It's got some like I would say like there's like a little spoon vibe in there. Yeah. Yeah, and a little postal service. Yes. Not quite enough reverb for the postal service, but we're headed in that direction. No, no, Jenny Lewis. Can you get Jenny Lewis to just actually come and be my girlfriend? Jenny, for listening, and I know that you are. If you didn't realize how some fixes I'm at, everything Neil, I will retire from journalism. This is

right. Somehow in the in the in the in the segment, right, just rail against an unelected power hungry bureaucrat. I admit to the virtuous audience, and I've had a crush on Jenny Lewis, and so I was like a teacher. We are Neil. Let's be honest with you. That was a good one. Last week, we didn't run on, so we were getting too much. I had a slot. That was handmade and I appreciate it. Our listener who sent this in goes by the Northeast Valley, and I hope that's, I hope that's your

artist name because that's very cool. Thank you for sending that in. That's very good. All right. What do we have, Neil? I've got two. Also, David, you live in DC. We're wearing a brand of cars that I mean, T-shirt out in the world might provoke some real reactions. Yeah. Did you have any real reactions? I got a couple of who is branding car, which feels like a pretty good. It made me think of the like who's that clown, because it implies not just that you're a clown,

but you're not even one of the better known clowns. Maybe think of that. I enjoyed that very much. And then I got one person who saw the back, which says America's favorite podcast and then a podcast, who was like, "Oh, do you have a podcast?" And I just sort of ran away. Tina Nguyen, who's our DC reporter, was an event in, you know, it's like supposed to be a very

polite room full of powerful DC people and people whispered to her that they very much enjoy the

segment. So shout out to the people whispering to Tina. I know we have listeners out there. I know you're listening, Brendan. Yeah. All right. I got I got to this week for you. Okay. And one's just a toss-up to you, the thing that you are doomed to do every week on this podcast. So the first one,

“I think this is very, this is like emblematic of Brendan and how he has no thoughts for opinions or”

feelings of his own, because he's such a dummy. And so like his programming misfired this week. So usually, Brendan, who is totally captured by the telecom industry and is just desire to be the speech police, usually when it comes to picking between consumers getting better, faster, cheaper internet, and the needs and wants of 1810 Verizon and whoever else, he will pick the telecom companies. Yes. Right. Like, Brendan is like, we shouldn't put labels on your internet service.

The tells you what all the fees are, because that's too much work for your cable company, ISP, guys, to figure out. So we're taking those away. This is a real thing, Brendan is on that we discussed in the second. So this is like, you know, his core programming. Don't protect consumers protect the telecom companies. In any dispute between telecom companies and consumers, you're going to pick Brendan's going to pick the telecom companies. What happens, David,

when the telecom companies fight? And you're the government regulator in charge of the telecom companies. You say now now, children, I love you both equally. Brendan does not realize that his job is to be the neutral arbitrer of these disputes and be the regulator, because he's so captured by interests all the time. He's just a fundamentally corrupt idiot. So this week,

Amazon filed a petition responding to SpaceX applying for permission to launch one million satellites.

So SpaceX applies for permission to launch a million satellites to do data centers in space. Why doesn't the verge do more stuff like that? Can we just apply for permission to,

You can feel any way you want about Elon Musk saying, I will launch a million satellites

“to let us data center and space. Whatever they do it, this is one party asking the SEC for permission.”

And Amazon files a petition response saying, and I want to quote the petition, this seems to describe a lofty ambition rather than a real plan, timing is likewise uncertain, deploying a million satellite consolation would take centuries, even assuming the availability of all global launch capacity do so. In the argument, as if you give SpaceX permission to do this, you're going to cut down on the permission you give other people to do other things. Sure.

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

This is a good fight that should happen. This is the system working. We asked for permission to do this. Does anyone have any objections? Amazon is like we have an objection. Brendan is a little brain misfires, because there's no poor little consumer paying their $80 on the Verizon bill to screw over here. There's no comedian to muzzle with his censorship. There's just two feudal lords battling for his goodwill. So instead of staying out of it and saying this is the process,

we will let the FCC's lawyers and technical experts evaluate the, the, the request for permission evaluate the objections and come to a ruling. Brendan, what is Brendan, he's posting on x, which is owned by Elon Musk, and he says the following, Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellite short of it, meaning it's upcoming deployment milestones, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting

thousands of satellites in orbit. You know, there's just a kind of post on x that you know, they hit the post button and we're just like, oh, nailed it and you're like you didn't, you didn't nail it. You didn't nail it. He picked a winner. The process is you asked for a permission. You file petitions saying, I support or oppose this thing and then you evaluate it. You're at your running a little administrative court and that is supposed to look fair. You're not

supposed to be the head of the agency before the process is even begun to play out saying, you suck. I pick Elon and Brendan because he didn't have a consumer in a screw over, but he has to do something corrupt at every turn or violate his weird programming did something corrupt. I'm telling you this is done. You can you can feel however you want

about Elon saying he wants to put a million satellites in orbit to build the data center in

space. Sure, you can feel however you want about Amazon saying actually this is stupid and we want to put a bunch of we want to launch our own constellation and drunk up the skies and lead inevitably to guess or sit and drink. Whatever feelings you want, all of that is is maybe it is a bad use of Amazon's resources to be doing this and they should just pay all the drivers more.

“You can feel any way you want about all these things. The thing that I know that you should react to”

is the head of the agency picking aside before the process is a begun to play out. That is just naked corruption. And saying don't send me petitions says guy whose job it is to receive petitions. Like yeah, what are we doing here? Yeah. By the way, Tier point about he thought between it was a banner and it's not. It's a very funny that Brendan who oversees our nation's tokenications provider think that it's a clear black and white trade-off for Amazon between filing petitions and

launching satellites. There's only one employee at Amazon who knows how to do both things. Like I don't know man, like I feel like the lawyers didn't file as many petitions as they want. And if they stop, it won't affect the satellite launch plans. Maybe the lawyers also launched the rockets. Yeah, Amazon's a wild place. Yeah, like Amazon's like a cloud launched the rocket. It's like what do you think is happening? God. Like and maybe you think they're being answered competitive and they're

just trying to buy time to launch more of their Leo. Whatever, like sure, fine. But again,

this is just nakedly corrupt by Brendan. This by the way ties into the second thing Brendan did.

“Not this past week, but the week before important. I'm sorry David. This is where you come in.”

You're going to make me talk about David Ellison. I'm going to make you talk about Warner Bros. Paramount. So Warner, you know, they decided to go a Paramount. Paramount, they actually had a meeting this week, which I'm confident you will talk about in a second here where David Ellison met all the Warner people. But Brendan, who raised a lot of concerns

approved, quote, pretty quickly because it's cleaner, quote, cleaner. Again, just just why even

“pretend there is process at this point. It's just they picked a winner. They picked a winner.”

The David Ellison said he was going to screw a CNN and Brendan Carr was like, great. I don't have any more concerns. And the idea that we have a neutral regulator is completely out the window because

Brendan is a corrupt dummy. Yeah. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come in the show and

answer these allegations directly. I will make them to your face at any time. Apparently on the streets of D.C., we can go at it. My Brendan Carr is the dummy T-shirt. It's raising a lot of questions. I don't even have T-shirt Brendan. Our listeners made for us. It's a great T-shirt. I only have one because it's a it's like a precious fan made object. The Brendan, I will give you my Brendan Carr is a dummy T-shirt. You can have it if you face me in the Thunderdome with this podcast. There's

shirtless knee lie against a Brendan Carr is the dummy wearing Brendan Carr. That would do numbers on TikTok. Look, I'm not saying anybody wants to see me without a shirt. I know for a fact, people want to see me without a shirt on more than you want to see Brendan Carr without a shirt on. Anyway, that has been Brendan Carr's a dummy America's favorite podcast with a podcast.

It's very good. That does lead right to my first lightning round item, which is, which is this

meeting that happened between David Ellison and David Zazlov. The David's, as I call them, it's been a tough time for David's. We're not being represented. I will say it does seem like it any moment you could take over Warner Brothers. Yeah, I mean, the likelihood of you getting to run Warner Brothers is statistically higher than that. It's true. But it also seems like David Ellison is just sort of running through the David's now. So like David Ellison might host this podcast at

some point. I don't know. He's not going to do that as well. That's I'd be great. I would, I'd happily turn it over to him as long as he wears the shirt. But so anyway, so David Zazlov went to the

“Warner Brothers lot. I think to have this big meeting with the executive team at Warner Brothers,”

this is apparently a sort of normal tradition that they do. Went and he talked about it talking through, you know, that he expects to make 30 films a year, which would be a big number, not seen in decades for a single studio. He said really nice things about HBO, which is really funny because out the other side of his mouth, he's talking about how he intends to turn HBO Max into Paramount Plus that at the end of all of this, there's only going to be one streaming service. I assume that

streaming service is Paramount Plus. Sure. Whatever. There are a lot of questions about who KC boys who runs HBO will or won't report to within this new structure. Like the HBO side of all of this, I think is going to be very messy and very fascinating and very bad and very bad. And probably it is not going to lead to the next season of things being very good would be my guess. But all of that is to say, then David Ellison takes a bunch of questions. One of the things he said

to your point, he acknowledged that the process with Netflix, all of this stuff had been, he called it, quote, a turbulent process. But then he said, and I quote, that part is behind us, which is either flatly not true or evidence of the true level of corruption happening here, right? Because like, frankly, the fact that Brendan is saying that is kind of just saying the quiet part out loud that everyone has assumed, which is that there is basically a handshake deal

with the Trump administration, that this will work in his mind. And that there will be no process, there will be no meaningful review that this will all just get wave through because everybody agrees

politically. And that is that is the assumption being made by a lot of people who are critical of

this deal. And there is just increasingly loud evidence that that is what is going on. And the thing, the specific thing is not whether or not James Gunn is going to make Superman ever more woke. It is CNN. Yes. The specific thing that is at play here is whether or not CNN can be more biased in favor of the Trump administration, which will be harder and harder to do is the Trump administration gets more and more confused about why we are at war. But you just can't,

you can't, you can't have CNN all day being like, it's pretty pretty good war, right? Even, even telling people why it's a good war gets more and more complicated every day as the Trump administration forgets why they're doing it. It's not going great. Yeah. So like, it's, whatever you think of like, should you let Zack Snyder make a four, three gray scale justice league, which again was 18 T's idea, or should Batman be super woke? I don't know.

Maybe that's good about, I don't know. Like, make the art and let people decide. Like,

“that's how you should do it. I don't think that's what the Trump administration cares about.”

I don't think they care about Ellison's promise to make 30 movies a year in theaters, which seems impossible to do. It does. It also, I will say David Ellison is like a guy who has been making movies. So to the extent that he is like an actual person with some track record in

But the thing that really bums me out the moment, but I'm just saying, even it, like, you can decide that you believe David Ellison that he's going to put up dad's money oracle money to make 30 movies a year in put them in theaters, and maybe that's a good economic decision or a bad one. Maybe there's enough demand for 30 theatrical releases a year. Let's say there's almost no evidence that there is demand for that. Who knows, man? Like, whatever, you can evaluate that.

That is not what the Trump administration cares about. No, what they care about is CNN. And David Ellison has promised Trump that it's been reported. He promised sweeping changes in CNN. Yep. He did say in this event that it would remain editorial independent, which I would say is also what he has said about CBS news. And that is do with that, which he would like. We have all watched what has happened to CBS news. But the other

thing was that he was asked about layoffs at Warner Bros. Discovery. I think that you like to say

“that is true is that the only thing that always happens because of a merger is layoffs.”

Yep. It's the one and only guarantee. And he did the thing that they always do, which is essentially

promised that that's not going to be what happens. He's been saying that he, they see upwards of $6 billion in cost savings and synergies. And he said in the meeting that this is from variety. Most of the cost synergies would not come from layoffs. And I can just tell you with no inside evidence that that's alive. It's just it. There is no way that is not the case. That is where those savings come from. Like maybe they're going to sell one of the lots. That's the thing that's been talked

about a lot, right? This is very valuable real estate in LA. That's not where you get $6 billion. You get $6 billion by firing a bunch of people. You have the same job at two different companies. That is what is coming. Yeah. No, without questions was coming. Actually, I can add a tiny little bit of reporting to this. Please. So you and I have spent years covering all of these platforms,

“like the streaming platforms and their user interfaces and the people who build them. We know a lot”

of the people who have built a lot of these platforms. And so I know some of the people who built paramount plus. And I know some of the people who have built HBMX and the platforms that Warner has been using. HBMX is like a particular disaster, right? It started as HBGo and HBMX and they two different things in the merge of them and they bring in discovery. And all of these people are saying, what are you going to improve with Oracle's technology? Because this stuff is pretty good now.

Yeah. It's just streaming video. Yeah. Like this is kind of like a white label solved problem. And unless you're focused at like Netflix levels of algorithmic discovery, which is where your focus should be, you can't just show up and like Oracle will make this better, right? The core parts of the platform, particularly in the case of HBGo, where they had to go through massive generations to fix the problems. They're like, yeah, the problems are kind of fixed.

Yeah. You can stream game of thrones without crashing now. We're good at that. Yeah. They got there. It took them a long time. It's been a lot of money, but they got there. Paramount. Again, those folks are like, what is he been talking about? The steam is good. The product was good. There's nothing to do. So unless he's talking about, we're going to use the TikTok algorithm to show you the thing, which he's not saying. Right. He's just waving the idea

that Oracle technology will fix things at a slide deck. There's nothing to fix. So I don't think

there's six billion dollars of like tech infrastructure debt to repair or cost savings because

you're running too many data centers. It's just going to be people. Yep. It is in every business. It's the biggest line item. So I, I don't know, man. It's all bad. Yeah. It's the good news. Again, much like Alan DiGoing to Meta to destroy it from within is that buying morener kills you. And apparently, every media CEO has to flirt with the idea of killing themselves in this way. It's just part of the process. You get too much money. And then the universe takes it away

from you by convincing you to buy more. This is what happens. This is this is going to end to the else. Yeah. All right. Let's do. Let's do one more each of them. And then let's get out of here. Okay. I want to make this a true lightning round item. Okay. Because we're going to go deep on this in a different way. So last week, Grammarly just stole our identities. Yeah. You might recall. This is like a huge story. It's spun fully out of control. So last August, Grammarly launched a

feature called expert review where you could like, you know, Grammarly like expressed itself as a

“keyboard on your device. We like type and the Grammarly keyboard like corrects your Grammar. That's what”

it's supposed to do. Now what they're saying is sort of the last mile for AI. So the AI will always

be there watching you type. Nothing. I don't know, man. That's what they say. And so there are big idea was that in Grammarly, you could submit your writing to be reviewed by experts. And the

be me and you and Casey Newton and Julie Angwin and all these aren't famous journalists.

Bell Hooks is in there, which is particularly wonderful. Like literally just like the new name,

“any author that's been published a bunch, they're in the feature. I think we can all evaluate how”

people use Grammarly by saying that this feature launched in August. And we noticed it yesterday. It's just about to say. So this is bad. So there was, I think it was Futurism or Wired did an article being like, look at all these famous authors in this feature. And then we went to test it. And instead of getting famous authors, we got ourselves. We got Sean all started me and all these other people. So we published this thing that's like, hey, this is us. And we asked

Grammarly for a statement. They gave us kind of nothing, burger statement. Then they rolled out email in opt-out. So if I wanted to not be in our feature, I could even come in. It's not as supposed to work. No, it's like do this magic incantation. And then we will take you out of the product. And then, you know, I heard from friends at other huge publishers being like, how did you find this? Or where does want to know? You can tell that the sort of like legal drums were starting to go.

Julie Angwin, who is an excellent reporter, father of the class action lawsuit this week. And then Grammarly fully rolled the back and said, we're very sorry blah blah blah. The reason I'm saying this is a lightning round item is because Shashira Mahotra, the CEO of Grammarly, has long been

scheduled to be under Coder next week. Amazing. Like, well before this happened, yeah, he was going

to be under Coder. So he's still scheduled to be under Coder. I think he's going to be on the show. We're taking that next week. We're going to try to turn our ass fast. We can. So I'm just going to stop it here because I won. We come under Coder. But now it's now it's out there that Shashira,

“you have to now you have to show up. You got to show up. And if you don't, then I'll just do that”

episode of the Coder with an AI version of you. I like it. I think that one is it's going to get it's going to get weirder before it gets better on that front. And it also, it is sort of a perfectly AI story because it is not actually, it wasn't you. It wasn't even based. It was just like knee-live vibes. It wasn't in my vibes. No, it was not in all time. Yeah, it's not how I added it. But and I want to say this is clearly as again. Somebody who edits and gets edits. There's no way

you can look at someone's published work and determine what they are like as an editor. Correct. You cannot do it. Not a chance. They're just different tasks. Like 99% of my edits are me just like highlighting a word and saying clunky. You're not going to get that out of my writing. That's true. And I just like I'm curious to ask a lot of questions here. But I think that the number one question I mind is why did you think that you could get to this is what I'm like as an editor

from reading my published work? Does those things aren't, they're not even in the same universe. Yeah. No, it's the whole thing is very bad. And also like if you use that feature and trust it, I'm very sorry because it is leading you astray in lots of things. It's making you read SEOs love. Every one of the screenshots that you see of like the edits, it's suggesting it's like, "Oh, that's bad." Like that's actually just an objectively bad idea. And I hate that it's

me sourced to me. But it's also just a bad idea and not correct in this making your writing worse. It's good for telling you like when you use the wrong tense of a word and I would not trust grimly for much of anything beyond that. Yeah. Anyway, he's coming on the show. We'll see.

Yeah. Okay. For my last lightning round item, I have kind of a thing in a half. First, just some

super quick follow-up from Tuesday's episode. When I was talking to Lauren and Finer about all of the stuff going on with the live nation ticket master settlement, one of the things we said was that it seemed like the deal meant live nation was going to have to sell a bunch of its amphitheaters and venues. It turns out that is not actually the case. There are a bunch of venues that are going to have to have an open ticketing model, so they'll have to use things other than ticket master. But as far as we

can tell, it doesn't seem like, at this point, according to the deal, live nation is going to have to

“sell any of its amphitheaters and venues. Important update from everything we're talking about in Tuesday.”

There's also a bunch of like shenanigans still happening with live nation ticket master, even though that settlement happened, it looks like courts coming back as soon as next week. We'll catch up on that when the trial release starts again. Lauren, Poor Lauren is going to stay in New York. For our purposes right now, I want to talk about some big news that dropped today, actually on Thursday, as we're recording this. Austin Johnson and our team have been working on her review of the S26

Ultra from Samsung, Don Preston reviewed the S26 and the S26 Plus, which are exactly what you think. Samsung took its phones and did them again, only now more expensive, because of ram shortages. But the big thing, and we talked about this when Samsung announced this, other than what is the photo Apocalypse of it all. The big new thing that got announced in the course of this phone being announced

can just go do things for you on your phone. Feature. This is what Apple has been promising with Siri. This is what Google has been talking about with Gemini. This is what Rabbit tried to do with the large action model. Like this is the thing with AI. This is what everybody wants to do. They shipped it.

“It's out on the S26 Ultra. I believe it's coming to the Pixel shortly. I have a Pixel 10 Pro that”

it is not showing up on yet, but this thing is supposed to be out there. Allison has been testing it. She has had like some pretty interesting experiences with this thing, but it kind of works. Your phone can use itself. Let me just read you one paragraph that she wrote just to give you

sense of how it works. She writes, the first problem I gave it was pretty simple order and Uber to the

airport. This is like a classic AI use case, by the way. Gemini asked for clarification to determine which airport. A good question to ask. Then it went through a couple of steps on its own, adding the destination and opting to skip the step where you specify your airline, which doesn't really matter at my local airport since it's on one terminal. As promised, the system stopped before the final step and prompted me to review the details before putting in the request for the car.

That is a smashing success of a hands-on story right there. Obviously, that is like, I think as we discussed, that is like the simplest, most straightforward example of this thing that gets very complicated and very messy very quickly. But she also actually had it order Starbucks for her. There's just like a set of things that this thing appears to be able to just comment your phone and go do on your behalf and that is nuts. When we talked about it, when it was announced,

we got a lot of feedback that was like, everyone's lying. AI doesn't work. My feeling has always been

Google smarter than that. They know they can't announce broken Siri, which is what Apple announced.

“Here's a Siri that doesn't work. It's not a choice for them. I think they have very wisely picked”

food delivery and ride sharing. These are the only two things they're going to try to do at first, because they are the most solvable constrained problems. Then you expand the universe of things. Well, they're also interacting with the database. It's anything with this incredibly structured data is where it's going to be. I have a great question here because Samir, when he was announcing his feature at the event, said, we can do this anyway. We can do this fight. MCP, we can do this

over there. We can just click around on these apps. It's unclear. I know Uber, Dara has been on Dakota and he's like, we're happy to integrate with this stuff. It doesn't matter. I don't know how they're integrating with this Starbucks app. It's unclear to me if they're just literally virtual running the app in a virtual machine on your phone and clicking on it. Allison's experience so far suggests that it is actually just like literally scrolling around the app for you, which is pretty

interesting. And if all that's running locally, that's the nanas. Yeah. So I have a million questions

on how this works. But the fact that it's working is the thing. Yep. I actually think you're

“a lot about this because I think the none of this works. Stuff was very much a feature of this podcast”

for a long time. And I think it has slowly gone away because this stuff is starting to work. Like a lot of it doesn't. There's still a long road. And the gap between some of this works and we have invented digital God is still so vastly enormous that we have to keep talking about it. But like I don't know, I just keep coming back to sort of that cloud code moment that everybody had over the holidays. It's like, these tools can do things now. They do do things. It's just fancy auto-correct

argument is no longer correct. Like something meaningful has flipped. And I think now the questions of like, okay, what does this mean? Moreally, how do we talk about it? Environmentally, how do we, what is the business of all of this? Is everybody full of shit talking about the digital God possibilities? All of that still exists. But I think it's actually now vastly more complicated because some of the stuff works now. Some of it does work. And we have to reckon with it now in

such a different and more nuanced way because some of it works now, Eli. I'm aware that some of it works now. And I, you know, you talked to vastly more software developers than I do, but it sounds like the existential crisis in software development is here. It's like fully here. Very much so. Yeah. My hesitation as you're saying this is I think it's all still pretty brittle. Sure. And the promise of this technology, particularly ancient stuff, is that it will overcome the

brittleness of every other attempt to do this kind of thing that has ever existed before. So I go like so. There's a version history this season on Alexa. Yeah. The problem of the Alexa is that you just, it was brittle. You'd ask it to do stuff and it couldn't do it. And then people stopped asking it to do anything at all and they were like, I know it can do music and timers and that's where that technology died. And I think this is still pretty brittle. I just think

the boundary of things that people expected to do is getting bigger. You're right, but you're framing it wrong. Right. Like what happened was Amazon built a hugely successful machine for playing music and setting timers. They've sold a lot of those things. There are a lot of them in people's

there is a generation of kids that is growing up talking to Alexa that's it's real. It's happening.

Like that's a very powerful thing. What Amazon never figured out is to how to age the next thing

and be figure out how to make two nickels rub together. And this is where we are with AI right now. Right. Like the thing where yes, this can write some code for you is real and powerful. There are a bunch of little things again that is starting to do like can AI order coffee from Starbucks for you. We are rapidly running at a point where the answer is just yes. That's not digital god. I don't know how to be clear about that. It's also not clear that that's anything. Right. So

“we are at I think that fun interesting moment that we were with Alexa all those years ago where”

it's like, okay, this is something. How much is it? Is the next question? And everybody continues to

assume that just because it can do the first two things, it will eventually be able to do everything.

The last run we took at this prove that that was not the case. This is where we have been brittle. Yeah. I think we've expanded the envelope of where the brittleness is. Yeah. But there's still some brittleness that is yet to come. Yeah. And by the way, I have been threatening everyone that we're going to do a segment of the show called New York versus San Francisco where we're just invite Casey on and then you know, I just have different ideas about AI. I think it might be time.

To your point at any time. I had a meeting just before we recorded this podcast and the person I was talking to started with. I know I'm in San Francisco where everyone is completely AI-pilled. But. Yeah. We got to do it. What it is. Casey is a great to do. We just have to do it.

“I'm down. I think it's a good idea. And I'll just like I'll be Chicago.”

You know what I mean? I'll just I'll be somewhere. I'm just going to Midwestern Davis, you know the moderating efforts is it's I love it. It's good. Okay. All right. We should get out of here. We've gone way over as we don't want to do. I missed a week. It's nice to be back. I don't like what I don't have anybody to talk to that stuff. I have to bother like my three-year-old about

technology. He's he's not interested. But that's it for the first cast. Like you said,

me like clubhouse on version history this Sunday. We're not feed dropping. So it's all the people who yelled at me about feed dropping. We will not be feed dropping clubhouse. Go to the new version history YouTube channel. We're a version history podcast on TikTok and Instagram. Those accounts are small and that makes me feel vulnerable. So please go follow them. So I couldn't have some self confidence again. It's so openly manipulative. You've had first.

It's true. This is where I'm at right now in my life. I said something about like and subscribe and I got a comment being like like and subscribe is so 2008. It just made me truly feel feelings. Who's on decoder on Monday? It's a CEO Yahoo. It's a wild conglow. There's a lot there. Is everything gambling now and we talked about it for a spectacular. I'm personally very excited about that episode. I've spent some time with Jim over the last several months

talking about the future of everything and he's a good hang. He's excited to hear that episode.

“Remember, if you subscribe to the verge, you get all of those podcasts. Add free”

plus everything else that we're doing with the verge, all of our news letters, all of our everything. The verge.com/subscribe. It's a good website. We're pretty proud of it. The email is vergecastivers.com. The hotline is 866-111. This shows a production of the verge in the vox media podcast network. This shows produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time. Nealye.