The MacBook Neo's a winner

Summary

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The Vergecast: "The MacBook Neo is a Winner"

March 13, 2026 | Hosts: Nilay Patel & David Pierce

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Vergecast is a deep-dive into Apple’s new MacBook Neo—a $600 laptop that’s quickly become the most talked-about gadget of early 2026. Hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce share their hands-on experiences, debate the Neo’s impact on the iPad, unpack broader market ramifications, and discuss Apple’s new vibe of playfulness. The conversation also touches on Apple’s software foibles, notably macOS Tahoe, and the wider context of the Windows PC landscape. Later in the show, the hosts break down major Xbox shifts, the state of media mergers, and erupt into the always-entertaining "Brendan Carr is a Dummy" segment.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The MacBook Neo: First Impressions & Purchase Justifications

• Both Nilay and David bought MacBook Neos for “podcast research”—and for personal curiosity.
• Hilarious anecdotes around justifying big tech purchases to their families ("This is your new computer." "She could not have been less enthusiastic." – Nilay, 02:30).
• Apple Store encounters: David recounts being recognized and offered "$1 off" the Studio Display XDR—but ethics policy prevails (03:21).

2. Community Feedback on High-Quality Streaming

• Nilay clarifies his expensive Kaleidoscape streamer is a review unit, not subscriber-funded (04:34).
• Spirited Verge audience debate over torrenting Blu-rays versus buying/ripping or streaming—Disney in particular criticized for squeezing long movies onto single discs (06:19).
• On piracy: "There is a real like 'piracy is back' culture thing happening that we should probably dig into some other time…” – Nilay (08:46).

3. MacBook Neo: Why All the Hype?

• The Neo’s reception has been "rapturous," with praise for being exactly what Apple aimed for—and more (09:20).

• Apple is seen as being playful again—in its marketing, social channels, hardware colors, and the Neo’s physical design.
  "There’s a playfulness to Apple’s vibe around the Neo…" – David, 09:53.

• At $599/$699, the Neo is “colorful and fun,” intentionally not a “serious” device—it uses an iPhone chip and 8GB RAM, but “[is] remarkably capable. We’ve just been hidden behind iOS.” – David (10:55).

4. The Neo vs. the iPad—and Why Tablets Are Losing Steam

• Does the Neo “obviate” the iPad? Both agree: if you have $600 to spend, the Neo is now the clear choice. "Makes the iPad Air... obsolete if you're thinking of it as a somewhat primary computing device." – Nilay, 13:13.

• The right combo for most people is now “laptop and phone”—with the Neo being the perfect ‘backup’ to a phone-centric life (14:44).

• iPad’s problem isn’t hardware, but its restricted OS—if Apple let the iPad just run Desktop Safari or macOS-style apps, this debate would be over (15:40).

"If they just didn’t nerf the iPad’s operating system, this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago." – David, 15:40

5. Neo’s Real-World Performance and Design Choices

• The Neo is, internally, basically "an iPhone with a huge battery and keyboard"—the mainboard is tiny, everything else is battery (12:54).
• When comparing to similarly priced Windows laptops, the Neo stands out for having no major flaws—whereas PC rivals typically have at least one fatal compromise (battery, keyboard, webcam, etc.) (18:05).
• Storage and upsells: The extra $100 for Touch ID/512GB is an “actual price” for the thing, and Apple’s pricing strategy remains “genius” (19:52).

6. Windows PCs and Market Disruption

• Apple can price the Neo so aggressively because of supply chain scale and vertical integration; PC makers are forced into major compromises because they can’t control chip/fab pricing and rely on bloatware subsidies (21:59).
• PC makers are caught flat-footed: Even ASUS was taken by surprise at the Neo’s aggressive $599 price (23:15).
• Nilay draws a parallel to Steve Ballmer’s infamous iPhone miscalculation—PC leaders brushing off the Neo feel eerily similar (24:48).

7. High-End vs. Low-End: Apple’s Two-Pronged Strategy

• Upcoming Apple "Ultra" devices will push even higher in price and features (48:17), teasing a period of luxury stratification even as products like the Neo democratize Apple hardware.
• The iPhone Fold (Ultra) rumors include possible regressions like dropping Face ID for Touch ID, and feature anxieties around “sidebars” and no iPad app support on the larger screen (50:30–53:46).

"I would pay a thousand extra dollars for a MacBook Neo that didn’t have liquid glass on it…" – David (48:22)

8. macOS Tahoe & Liquid Glass Backlash

• Both hosts excoriate macOS Tahoe ("visual abomination," "Apple should be embarrassed") due to its Liquid Glass design, poor UI consistency, and frustrating menu bar behaviors.
  • "The number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is because I know that Apple has no choice but to fix Liquid Glass and Tahoe at WWDC." – David (33:41–36:46)
  • Memorable testing of menu bar behaviors and the lack of UI cohesion is given a lengthy, animated rundown (36:47–37:40).

9. The Studio Display XDR

• Review insights: It’s "exactly what we wanted," and Apple’s calibration is the main premium you’re paying.
• A market for non-Apple-branded versions of the 5K panel is emerging—The Verge plans to review those, too (44:00–45:14).

10. Broader Market Trends: Xbox, Windows, and GDC

• Xbox’s next-gen "Project Helix" is a convergence with Windows, plugging into the PC gaming ecosystem—Microsoft essentially making "appliance-like Windows Gaming PCs" (57:58–60:47).
• Nilay speculates Phil Spencer’s sudden Xbox exit connects to missed bets or exec infighting; unclear if this “same plan” will solve core issues (58:59–62:48).
• A potential “year of Linux on the desktop,” as Windows is increasingly disliked for copilot/AI bloat (66:56–67:08).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On tech-purchasing justifications:
  "This is your new computer. And she could not have been less enthusiastic."
  — Nilay (02:14–02:40)

• On Apple’s playful return:
  "There’s a playfulness to Apple’s vibe around the Neo that… connects directly to—it costs $599, the more expensive one $699, it’s colorful, it’s fun. This thing is not taking itself very seriously."
  — David (09:53–10:55)

• On the demise of the mid-tier tablet:
  "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."
  — Nilay (13:13)

• On macOS Tahoe’s interface:
  "Every part of it is infuriating and Apple should be embarrassed. The number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is Liquid Glass and Tahoe … an ungodly abomination of an interface."
  — David (33:36–36:46)

• On Windows PC market problems:
  "The subsidy compromises that make the user experience horrible ... will kill you."
  — David (19:59)

• On Apple’s pricing 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."
  — Nilay (19:52)

• On the paradigm shift:
  "If your phone is your main computer, this is a great secondary computer."
  — Nilay (14:44–14:50)

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Topic Highlights with Timestamps

Introduction and Lead-In

• MacBook Neo dominates show’s focus (01:45–02:14)

Apple Store Anecdotes, Justifying Gadgets

• Recognized in Apple Store, $1 XDR discount story (02:44–03:53)
• Ethics policy prevents taking “deal” (03:53–04:06)

Kaleidoscape, Piracy, & Community Feedback

• Torrenting Blu-rays vs. streaming debate (04:34–08:46)

MacBook Neo First Impressions

• Why they bought them; real-world usage (09:11–09:53)
• The shift toward playful Apple branding (09:53–11:13)
• Neo’s intended audience and design philosophy (11:13–12:28)

Neo vs. iPad Role and Value

• iPad’s place in Apple’s lineup threatened (13:13–14:09)
• MacBook Neo as the “ideal back-up” for phone-first users (14:44–15:41)
• OS limitations vs. hardware: iPad’s stumbling block (15:41–17:22)

Competing with PC Makers & Market Shakeup

• Why Windows laptops can’t keep up (18:00–23:15)
• Asus’s misread of the Neo, Ballmer iPhone flashback (24:45–25:33)

MacBook Neo Pricing, Sales Tactics

• Upselling Touch ID (19:23–21:30)
• Apple’s economies of scale vs. PC makers’ business models (21:30–23:15)

macOS Tahoe and UI Critique

• In-depth rant on Liquid Glass UI problems (33:22–38:33)

Studio Display XDR Review Reactions

• Needs vs. luxury; panels in third-party monitors (43:06–45:14)

Xbox, Windows, GDC, and “Helix”

• Microsoft’s evolving Xbox/Windows vision (57:57–68:46)
• Industry’s “brains in vats” moment; pandemic shifts (71:42–75:49)

Lightning Round: "Brendan Carr is a Dummy" (79:41–90:14)

• FCC Commissioner Carr inserts himself in satellite battle between SpaceX and Amazon, undermining perceived neutrality (83:40–87:43)

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Memorable Moments

• David’s wishful thinking: "I would pay a thousand extra dollars for a MacBook Neo that didn't have liquid glass on it." (48:22)
• On Apple’s clear strategy: "Apple just went and they’re like, we're going to compete on this price and up and we're going to win. And statistically they've won." – David (28:54)
• On the perpetual cycle of bad tech platform UI: "If you want to understand the problem with Tahoe, take all your apps and drag them to the same corner and then see if the top left corners line up. Spoiler alert: They don't." – Nilay (37:51)

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Summary Table – The MacBook Neo’s Standout Features

| Feature | Apple’s Take | PC Market Comparison | |----------------------------|----------------------------------|----------------------------------| | Price Point | $599 (entry Neo model) | Rarely matched without subsidies | | Build Quality | Chunky, fun, playful, solid | Often at least one compromise | | Design | Colorful, old-school Apple vibes | More utilitarian, “serious” | | Hardware | iPhone chip + 8GB RAM = capable | PC makers can’t match cost/perf | | Battery | "Just all battery" inside | Often subpar on PC equivalents | | Experience | macOS; minimal adware | Windows, bloatware, Copilot etc. | | Flaws | No keyboard backlight; Tahoe UI | Many more, bigger flaws |

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Final Thoughts

The MacBook Neo is not just Apple’s latest budget laptop—it’s a deliberate, philosophical shift that upends how users, competitors, and even Apple itself think about affordable computing. The Vergecast hosts see it as a paradigm-defining device: bridging phone-first lifestyles and true productivity, undercutting tablets, and outclassing budget Windows PCs. While Apple hardware is nearly faultless, macOS Tahoe’s "liquid glass" interface draws near-universal scorn. The episode ends on trademark Vergecast rants, audience shoutouts, and the promise that the tech market’s next big shakeups—between Apple pushing both mass appeal and luxury, and Microsoft’s struggle to redefine the Xbox—are just getting started.

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Transcript

[Nilay Patel]

This usually shocks people. I have run 27 marathons, plus a few ultramarathons, all while fueling my body with plants. Yes, I get plenty of protein.

[David Pierce]

I'm Robin Arson, VP of fitness programming

[Nilay Patel]

and head instructor at Peloton. And this week on my podcast, Project Swagger, the fundamentals of a plant based life with nutritional takeaways for you to apply to your own life, no matter what your preferred diet is. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Pierce]

How can we understand the decisions facing the United States and Israel and Iran as they weigh next moves in this

[Nilay Patel]

war, war that was meant to prevent from reaching a bomb, eventually might push them beyond the Rubicon. And to have that bomb. I'm John Finer.

[David Pierce]

And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, former Israeli defense intelligence officer Danny Sintrenowitz joins us from Israel to discuss the war against Iran. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nilay Patel]

Bare walls, clear surfaces. The minimalist aesthetic is having a moment. And for some it's a form of resistance. I think a lot of people have a sense that, like, we live in this very consumerist society and feel kind of a desire and need to, like, push back against that. How to live with less. That's this week on Explain It To Me new episodes Sundays. Wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Merge Cast, the flagship podcast of phone chips that actually can power your computers. I'm your friend David Pearce. Neil Patel's here.

[David Pierce]

Hey, buddy, what's up?

[Nilay Patel]

We have a lot to get to today, but mostly we're gonna 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 is still a dummy. We got a lot to do. But all I care about right now is the MacBook Neo.

[David Pierce]

It should be said both David and I purchased MacBook Neos for the purpose of the podcast because we just need an excuse to buy MacBook Neos. There was no reason for me to buy it.

[Nilay Patel]

I literally 2 days ago was sitting on the my computer, sitting, like at our dining room table shopping for a MacBook Neo on my M4 MacBook Air. And I had this moment and being like, what on earth am I 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. 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.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that's right.

[Nilay Patel]

Just the most whatever possible response to this new computer.

[David Pierce]

I tried to do that with the studio display xdr. I was like, I'll buy myself this. And I was like, becky, in your office, you'll have two monitors, so I'll give you my old one. And she was like, I don't need that. And I.

[Nilay Patel]

There.

[David Pierce]

You can't get over that wall. There's nothing to be said. By the way, shout out to. I won't say the person or the Apple Store that I went 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 to go to the Stor store, and I'm 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's like, do you want me to sell it to you? And I was like, the second it goes on sale for $1, I'm gonna buy this thing. And I started joking. 32.98. Like, hit me. And he's like, I get you a dollar off. And I thought about it. He's like, do you want me to go get a manager to get that off? And I. I thought about it, and then I was like, what I have foolishly chosen to sell is our stupid ethics policy. And I can't take your $1. And I Charlie Brown my way out of that store.

[Nilay Patel]

So this suggests that if you try hard enough, you can get any Apple product for $1 less than the retail price.

[David Pierce]

It does seem like there's some pricing flexibility in the Apple Store.

[Nilay Patel]

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 and the Neo and is very excited that we're going to be talking about the Neo on the Vergecast. Shouts to you. You know, you are.

[David Pierce]

It's it. That's. That's where, David. I get recognized. Not on the street.

[Nilay Patel]

No. God, no.

[David Pierce]

In the Apple Store.

[Nilay Patel]

In the Apple Store. In the Apple Store. And it's ces. It's great times for both of us.

[David Pierce]

It's great. Before we start with Neo, can I start with just a very big nerd update?

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, please.

[David Pierce]

So last week I I spoke about the Kaleidoscape, the very expensive streamer in my house. There were some comments on our Instagram that are like, it feels like we're subscribing just for Nilai to live his extravagant lifestyle. And I just wanna point out it's a review unit. I did not spend $13,000 of our subscribers money on high bitrate streaming, although I would. So I just wanna lay that out. The reality is I did not do that. But if I had the opportunity, I might, you know, I might.

[Nilay Patel]

I think we can say again, our ethics policy requires that when we hit the point that your subscription money is only funding Nilai's luxurious lifestyle, we'll tell you. You know what I mean? We'll come on this podcast and be like, listen, we' now on if you subscribe to the Verge, it's boat.

[David Pierce]

And we. Yeah, and we'll do that from the boat. That's pretty great.

[Nilay Patel]

We're not there yet.

[David Pierce]

So that it's a review unit. Just want to lay that out there. We're going to send 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 Blu Rays. It's off the charts. Like the number of people who are like you and your dumb legal streamer caring 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 Kaleidoscape and Blu Rays. And the best part of this, in this conversation that was kicked off by 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 Blu Ray and they insist on putting all of the movie onto one Blu Ray regardless of how long the movies are. So like Avengers Endgame is three hours, but they fit it onto a single Blu ray.

[Nilay Patel]

They compress it however much they need to.

[David Pierce]

However much they need to. So in this one case, the $13,000 KaleidoScape is better because Kaleidoscape doesn't have to care about file sizes when they re encode from the. And it was like in this extremely, like 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, yeah, but for Disney ones you have to. You have to pay the money.

[Nilay Patel]

This is like when you were like, everybody needs. What was it? Sony bravia core just to watch Spider Man.

[David Pierce]

Exactly, exactly.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Anyway, shout out to all the people. That is exactly what I want from the Verge community is that argument. It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I ask a really stupid question? If you. Hypothetically, and I'm not. This is not legal advice. If you torrent a Blu Ray, can you. Will it look as good as a Blu Ray?

[David Pierce]

It depends on what you torrent.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, sure, but like in theory, can you rip a Blu Ray and have a digital file that will play back looking as good as a Blu Ray?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, you can torrent a bit for bit Blu Ray. You're gonna end up with some weirdness. They call them remuxes. Cause 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 bit copy of a Blu 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 burn it onto a Blu Ray? Burn it onto Blu Ray or you know, if you're going to stream it off your NAS to an app like Plex or Infuse on Apple tv will the Apple TV playback uncompressed Atmos or will that get re encoded into 5.1 which is basically what happens right now. So you just end up 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 Blu Ray is Blu Rays have like menus and extra scenes and like you have no navigation for that. Like the code to run the Blu Ray menu doesn't run anywhere. You've just got a bunch of video files. So there's some weirdness there. But I mean this is what people are doing.

[Nilay Patel]

Fascinating.

[David Pierce]

I love it. I was just very happy that we got from Neil as an idiot who's spending extravagance of money to this is why I steal the Blu Rays to. I'm very mad at how Disney encodes its Blu Rays. Like basically in 5 comments.

[Nilay Patel]

That's pretty good.

[David Pierce]

It's pretty good. Yeah. I couldn't be happier with our. With our audience.

[Nilay Patel]

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 media.

[David Pierce]

I think a lot of people would walk up to David Ellison, look him dead in the eye and be like, I will steal every movie that you make using Warner Brothers discovery.

[Nilay Patel]

100%. 100%.

[David Pierce]

It's just gonna happen. We'll come back around. Warner Brothers is going to make an appearance during the lightning ride, I believe, because you're back and whenever you're here, we have to talk about Warner and

[Nilay Patel]

Paramount for the rest of my life, apparently. Thank you, David Ellison. 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 as surprised by the positivity around this thing as I have?

[David Pierce]

Not really. I. 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. Like, when you, when you open the box for the Neo, it has the little tab that says hello on it and like the classic Mac font. Like, Apple has not been playful in a long time. Like, truly has not. Their TikTok account is bananas. Like, literally pictures of bananas. Right. Do you see the TikTok they made of just a lime doing a FaceTime call? No. I mean, it's just like nonsensical, avant garde weirdo TikToks that they're making. They started another new Instagram account that, you know, know it's just more branded content, but there's just a playfulness to Apple's, like, vibe around the Neo that I think connects directly to. It costs 599. The more expensive one cost 699. 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 chip and it has eight gigs of ram. But you're not supposed to take it seriously, so why would you take it seriously? And it turns out an iPhone ship with a Gigs rim, 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.

[Nilay Patel]

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, like, instinctively understand what this computer is for in a way, I think is 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.

[David Pierce]

I mean, Apple will tell you, I mean, this was their entire message to us. When you talked to their executives at the event, they kept saying, we can't make crap. We're not going to make crap. We were just able to make this computer great using the things we had today. I watched the teardown video of it, and it is remarkable at how much it is just an iPhone.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like the motherboard is this big.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, Right.

[David Pierce]

It's nothing. It's spread out a little bit because they have room. But you can see that, oh, this is just an iPhone with a huge battery and some speakers.

[Nilay Patel]

It's so striking because 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 got a. It's an iPhone with a giant ass battery and a keyboard. That's the whole thing that's happening there.

[David Pierce]

Does it make you as angry about the iPad as it has been making me?

[Nilay Patel]

So let's just talk about this now because I think the main philosophical argument has been basically, does the existence of the MacBook Neo just completely obviate 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 want to. 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. I. The Neo is a better, more usable machine for almost all of those things.

[David Pierce]

To me, maybe, maybe I want to stay on the positive side. I often get accused of being relentlessly negative and boy, am I ready. But I think, you know, I think the right combo for most people is a laptop and a phone. And this is why non iPad tablets have all kind of just sort of. They live in that sort of fizzled out middle space where everyone 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it. If your phone is your main computer, this is a great secondary computer.

[David Pierce]

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.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

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. You know, I'm a display nerd, so a hundred percent of SRGB is not, not where I want to live. But it's like all that stuff is fine because really what you're, you're doing is like, here's a device that can do things my phone cannot do. You put it up against the iPad. And the reason I'm asking, does this make you mad about the iPad? Is, is if they just didn't nerf the iPad's operating system, this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, very much so.

[David Pierce]

Ages ago. And this has a lower spec chip and less RAM than most iPads. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

The equivalent iPad to this price wise, runs an M4.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

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.

[David Pierce]

Here's my theory about that. I don't think it. 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.

[Nilay Patel]

But they would tell you it is Desktop Safari.

[David Pierce]

They are lying to you. Yes, that's what I mean. Different people will jump out of the woodwork and both confirm and deny this in the same brain.

[Nilay Patel]

They use phrases like desktop class. Yep. And it's like, well, what is that?

[David Pierce]

Nope, I just want the one that's very obviously able to be run on an A18 chip with 8 gigabytes of RAM.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure can.

[David Pierce]

If you would 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 GarageBand because an iPad can run GarageBand. It's not that it can browse Zillow because most people just browse Zillow on their phones. Like, whatever it is that you're. You're saying, it's not that it is a better doordash machine or like whatever apps exist on phone, it is, oh, the browser is good and there's a keyboard and a mouse. And for everything that hits the wall on a mobile device, that's the exit ramp.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

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, you. How many creators have now posted the videos of them scrolling 4k timelines and all the stuff that people are worried about. Of course it's capable of doing that stuff. But I just, like, 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.

[Nilay Patel]

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 use PCs broadly, like Macs, 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, but in part because like the, the UI doesn't afford it. Right. There's just things you can't do on a 6 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, it just has been for a long time. And, and I think you're right that this becomes a cheap and pretty good version of every single one of those things. Right? Like Antonio's review basically just go over, 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 almost always at least one sort of huge gotcha 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?

[David Pierce]

I bought the Touch ID, David. I don't know why, I don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

I also bought the Touch ID and the guy who sold it to me at 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, it was A, he said these things are absolutely flying out of the store, which I thought interesting. And B, it was, it was literally like he assumed I was going to spend the extra a hundred dollars, which I was anyway. But like, it was just, it was just not even a question in his mind.

[David Pierce]

This is how Apple's pricing works.

[Nilay Patel]

It's genius. Like, 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.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, they made basically $99 of profit off you this day. I mean, these are the problems for the other PC makers in the world. Yep. One, the entire Windows PC market is basically driven by subsidies. So whether that's preloaded bloatware that those companies pay to preload on the PCs, whether it's the stickers that intel and AMD pay to put on 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. Like, 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 like 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 to the bottom of the tv. Like, 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. And 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And what's funny is that is so much less present on macOS than in most other places. Like, it's all over the phone. 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 Mac os. It just doesn't feel nearly as in your face as it does on the phone.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And to whatever extent, Apple doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff. It doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

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 advertising their own products to advertise their own services in a way that I think is gross. And most people who experience it for what it is know that it's gross. But it's just not the same as Windows. Like they're, 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 chunked up by advertising subsidy. And then there's just hardware Scale, Apple makes a lot of A18 chips. All the money isn't in the chip because they've already made 20 billion of them. And so the money is in the other components. And you can feel it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

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 into spending a hundred more dollars on effectively nothing with such insane margins on their RAM already that they didn't have to do any pricing games because they can just take a little less money for ram. They can take a little less profit for ram. Like what are you going to do? And I think Antonio has been talking to other PC makers and other PC makers are talking about it. And David even making this point, they seem caught way off guard.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Which is nuts, right? I mean, I think the most direct quote we've gotten so far was from Asus, 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, we had an inkling this was coming. There have been sort of supply chain rumors about this for months. So 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. I think people probably expected this to be like 799 or 899, not 599 and 499 at education, which is a genuinely low price for a device like this. 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 positioned the product, it's probably focused more on content consumption. This differs 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 just like. That's just dead wrong. Yeah, it's just dead wrong. And I think it is so reminiscent to me. I read that quote and immediately thought of Steve Ballmer 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 is YouTube showed this to me again 17 years later. So I think the algorithm seems to have spiked this clip again. But let me just play you this response from Steve Ballmer when he's asked

[David Pierce]

about the iPhone, the first iPhone 2007.

[Nilay Patel]

Steve Jobs goes to Macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that?

[David Pierce]

$500, fully subsidized, with a 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. We have our strategy.

[Nilay Patel]

We.

[David Pierce]

We've got great Windows Mobile devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q Phone now for $99. It's a very capable machine. 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.

[Nilay Patel]

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 Apple just did is make something available to many more people with a keyboard, ironically. 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. I was like, buddy, you have this backwards. Then where. Where is this? 10 years ago? Like 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 stopped getting better. That thing has been languishing for 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.

[David Pierce]

They've got these leftover iPhone chips. All right, let me play devil's advocate, okay? Because I agree with everything 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.

[Nilay Patel]

They're also beholden to those chips like intel. Being bad is, is part of the problem here.

[David Pierce]

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 mark it up. Like, Apple's profit margin, if you look at their results, like, is like rock solid, between 30 and 40%. Like, 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 skyrockets, they can pay more to Samsung or whoever for RAM and they can kind of like back it out and all the other stuff. If you're a PC maker, if you're an Asus or a Dell or 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 just start with, okay, we gotta 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 buys so many chips from TSMC that they get massive discounts on their volume. So you're just like, all of a sudden, 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 mark it up at the end to solve the problem.

[Nilay Patel]

That's fair, right?

[David Pierce]

But I, but I'm just playing devil's advocate. Like, I just see that problem and I'm like, whatever. The real, like, dynamic in 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 Panay ran Surface, he was like, this is my problem. I cannot convince this industry to spend that money in R and D to compete there. Microsoft is going to do it and then I will develop hinges and keyboards and trackpads 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.

[Nilay Patel]

They made some good progress. There has been good stuff over the years.

[David Pierce]

There's interesting ideas in that space.

[Nilay Patel]

Dell makes good stuff.

[David Pierce]

The whole bottom has languished and all of it is like, do you want a 15 inch 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 inch screen at that price point. And like no one has an answer. But like, I know why the PC market looks the way it looks. It's because Microsoft with Surface recognized that Apple was going to run away with a thousand dollars and up and it was not economically viable for any one company. To solve that problem. Microsoft had to do it for its entire ecosystem.

[Nilay Patel]

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 Dieter reviewed the surface go in 2018 when it came out and gave it an eight 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 in 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 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.

[David Pierce]

It would look like Microsoft declaring war on its PC partners and never doing it.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the problem, right?

[David Pierce]

They're always in between the big parts of the market with the Surface.

[Nilay Patel]

Right? Yeah, that's very true. You made a face when I said 13 inches. What's your problem? With 13 inches.

[David Pierce]

Well, I didn't realize that I had recycled this, but I had a 12 inch MacBook, which was one of my very favorite computers, in fact, hilariously brought up. Dieter. I bought it from Dieter and I,

[Nilay Patel]

I, he really screwed you on that one

[David Pierce]

in a very Minnesota way. I, 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. Maybe. But that was, it was like a very Minnesota, like, yeah, you're fine, don't worry about it. I just wanted this thing out of my hands. This is 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think that's right. And I will say the. What? The air is 13 6, right? I don't really appreciably notice the difference between the NEO screen and the AIR screen at this point.

[David Pierce]

Yep, 13 6.

[Nilay Patel]

I do notice the size of the thing. Like the air sort of wears itself a little lighter to me than the NEO does. Even though they're technically the same weight and the NEO is actually a little smaller in some dimensions. The NEO feels chunkier as a computer to me. What have you made of it so far? You've been, you've been using it. I have two grapes I would like to talk about, but I want to know what you've thought of the NEO so far.

[David Pierce]

I think the NEO is a beautiful piece of hardware and for all the reasons I've said, I think only Apple can really produce it. And I'm really happy that they got rid of Alan Dye, because macOS Tahoe is a visual abomination.

[Nilay Patel]

Is this your first Tahoe experience?

[David Pierce]

I've used it like, academically.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

Do you know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

At a remove?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Like, I have a computer with Tahoe on it and I like.

[Nilay Patel]

You touch it through a piece of glass.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, like literally a piece of glass. Like my work computers, I just don't update them until I have to because I just can't take them down. Like this podcast machine, I don't even know what it's running. Like, it just needs to work and that's the thing. It does. And then I thought Liquid Glass was bad, so I didn't 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 use Tahoe with Liquid Glass. And every part of it is infuriating and 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 and Tahoe at WWDC. And then you should wait until they rev macOS 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 phone is inherently a single tasker. What they have done to delineate Windows and the menu bar and items that you've selected on macOS with Liquid Glass is so bad. It goes against every principle of good design. It goes against every principle of just common sense. Like, should two things that are different look different or the same? David?

[Nilay Patel]

Obviously the same. What if you couldn't tell what's what at any time on your computer?

[David Pierce]

What if my soul interface 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, first of all, when you look at the menu bar in the top right, every button does something different. So, like, you click the clock and the notifications 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Correct.

[David Pierce]

Like, it is basically like, oh, you just want to change the brightness. What if there was 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 dropdown. And then you get all the way to, like, the WI FI icon and it's a standard dropdown 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.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm so glad you're finally doing this. This makes me so happy.

[David Pierce]

I'm not even in the weeds of this interface. I'm like, I'm going to. 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 you I didn't want to. I didn't want to go negative, but I'm telling you, the NEO was like. At first it made me really happy, and then it made me incredibly sad that this thing is. It's like 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 Jon Krueger, who.

[Nilay Patel]

Who hates it as much as anybody.

[David Pierce]

I was like, I see what you're saying. And he was like, yeah, dude, it's bad. He's like, if anything, I'm not going hard enough.

[Nilay Patel]

The menu bar is actually such a perfect example because it's also, like, it's translucent now, but it is still a hard border. So. 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 bar 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. It really is slow. I hadn't really even noticed it until you said it.

[David Pierce]

I mean, it is like a song and dance routine to be like, I want to turn the volume up.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

screen in a mode.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Then you click on Battery and it opens up a menu to the left. You click on wifi and it opens up a menu to the right.

[David Pierce]

It's like.

[Nilay Patel]

It's literally like every single one of these was designed by a different person and none of them ever spoke to each other.

[David Pierce]

And it's. 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.

[Nilay Patel]

My. 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. Liquid 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 up questions. What computer should you buy computer for people?

[David Pierce]

Maybe. Maybe 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, our reviews suggest that's true. I think once people start using them at scale we're going to find out it's possible.

[Nilay Patel]

But the A Team 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 have a hard time imagining what it would be. That would be the glaring problem.

[David Pierce]

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, like it doesn't look. It's eight gigs of ram.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh God.

[David Pierce]

That's what it would be. It would be.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I tell you how unbelievably unphindicated I am? We're going to run a 12 minute super cut of everybody yelling at me for saying 8 gigs of RAM is fine. And then all those same people saying oh, it only has 8 gigs of RAM. That's not a problem for normal everyday computer users. Yeah, fuckos, I was right.

[David Pierce]

That's it. That's the only question mark I have is once you. Once millions of people buy this thing and they start using it for all kinds of stuff that nobody could possibly foresee, will eight gigs of RAM swapping to this storage, will it be not a problem which everyone assumes, or will some weird stuff bubble up? And then I would just point out once again, Alan Dye's last vindictive act was to foist this interface on millions of unsuspecting consumers who just want to spend 700 on a nice computer with Touch ID.

[Nilay Patel]

They're just out here doing their best.

[David Pierce]

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.

[Nilay Patel]

So fundamentally, the MacBook Neo is a referendum on Mark Zuckerberg's taste.

[David Pierce]

That's all I'm saying. This works for me. That's all I'm saying.

[Nilay Patel]

The one other thing I should say before when we should move on from the Neo here is it is a bummer the thing doesn't have a backlight on the keyboard, particularly because they color match the keyboards. So on the indigo one here, it's actually, it's a pretty dark keyboard which like aesthetically looks really nice. But even sitting here in, in decent light, it is hard to see it's dark text on a dark key. Um, and I, I think Antonio had one of the lighter colors and said it was a little easier to see on the light keys what you're typing in the dark. But on this, like they're dark keys and a backlight would have been really nice and not.

[David Pierce]

Here's, here's what I'm hoping for. If you're not a, a car nerd, but I'm a huge car nerd. If you go into any car forums, all car forums are sort of dominated by people going on Temu and Alibaba putting in RGB ambient lights all over their cars. There's just a huge market for that for every car. This thing is so modular and so repairable. I'm just waiting for the weird Alibaba market of backlit keyboards for the Neo to show up. It's gotta come. That's what we want. We want weird gamer keyboards for the MacBook Neo. If you're making one now, send it to us. We will prominently feature it here on the front chat.

[Nilay Patel]

That's real. We do want that. That's absolutely correct. Um, before we get off of Apple stuff, we, we reviewed the, the iPhone 17e this week. Allison did that. I reviewed the new iPad air. Um, I don't think we need to talk about either one of them because they are precisely exactly what you think. Um, the 17E is sort of fascinating because Alison, I think made the correct point, which is that it's a very good phone. I think as Apple approaches its budget devices, that is the right way to do it. They put MagSafe back again. It's like it. This is a much cleaner, correct set of trade offs to get to a lower price. But the base iPhone17 is the best the base iPhone has been in a long time and the leap is $200. And I think like for if your budget allows only the 17e, awesome, you'll be very happy. But I think the, 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 if you can.

[David Pierce]

It's 100% the flip of what we're saying with the Neo. I think if you perceive the NEO as 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh man. Okay, 17E and MacBook Air or 17 and MacBook Neo.

[David Pierce]

17 and Neo. That's what, like a hundred percent? Because you want the real camera.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[David Pierce]

I mean, unless there's some specific thing that you need, that M5 chip for sure. Which, you know, if you know what it is, you know what it is, go get it. But I think for most people, having a slightly more capable phone is a much better trade off.

[Nilay Patel]

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 will be in your house.

[David Pierce]

The second it goes on non corrupt sale for even $1, I'm buying this this way.

[Nilay Patel]

What if I give them the dollar? So give you a dollar.

[David Pierce]

What if you buy me a computer? I will, I will accept you buying me the computer. That's fine.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, deal. John Higgins reviewed it for us. Seems to be the thing we hoped it was. Are you, are you as enthusiastic about this now? Having we've tested it, we've seen it come out like, is it, is it what you wanted?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, it's absolutely what I, I mean it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while outside of the MacBooks. Right. But it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. It is very expensive, 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 cost 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's using the regular Studio display, which you can now buy on Amazon in a totally no name Chinese case for $500. 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 like 2012. Like it's just been around and now you can buy it in a bunch of different configurations. The XDR is a step forward. And so I'm, like I said I'm gonna. I just, I 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 is a step forward. I barely even need this thing. Cause I do almost all my photo editing on my MacBook Pro, which has a mini alien backlit. 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 on the best one you can because they last forever. And if I can convince myself that I'll have this display for 10 years, it's only $320 a year.

[Nilay Patel]

Dave, think of the savings. I mean, I will say 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 display, XDR has a strong shot to last a decade

[David Pierce]

on your actual desk monitors. Screens just last forever. TV's in monitors just. They last forever. It is so hard to convince yourself to upgrade. Um, so like I said, the second it goes on sale for even a dollar, I'm going to buy this thing. And not like a corrupt sale.

[Nilay Patel]

It also apparently has a better webcam, which is very exciting.

[David Pierce]

I put tape over those webcams. No, thank you. My webcam, all of my webcams in the house. Are there real cameras or power buttons

[Nilay Patel]

for, for privacy reasons or for camera quality reasons?

[David Pierce]

Both.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

You get one with the other. And the idea that there's like a software defined webcam on my computer that someone could come get. This is where I am with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has tape on his laptop. You ever look at a picture of his laptop, there's tape on that webcam. And it's like, oh, buddy, you, you're the guy who wants to put glasses in everybody's face has tape on his webcam.

[Nilay Patel]

I know. Yeah. I will say, by the way, we keep getting emails from people volunteering to come to your house and take apart your imac to turn it into a display for you. I don't, 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

[David Pierce]

for you at any Point that's allow. 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I got a big, I owe a big part of my journalism career to fixing David Pogue's Xbox when he was the tech columnist at the New York Times.

[David Pierce]

There you go.

[Nilay Patel]

This is how it starts. People go to Nili's house and fix his imac.

[David Pierce]

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 imacs.

[Nilay Patel]

We're making monitors. Just a parade of 5k imacs down the street.

[David Pierce]

Yes. And then the senior citizens who are all there to get their ancient vacuum cleaners repaired will be very confused.

[Nilay Patel]

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 Apple for a while. The first for Mark Gurman 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 going to extend up even higher. Potentially called Ultra, but not necessarily called Ultra. 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 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.

[David Pierce]

I would pay a thousand extra dollars for a MacBook Neo that didn't have liquid glass on it. I was putting that out in the universe right now.

[Nilay Patel]

That may become available to you. But I think the like, until now it's been, you know, new technology that hasn't quite come down and caught. 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.

[David Pierce]

Damian. Pricing products is kind of like an art and a science. And I think what you're seeing is there are some people, I mean, you're just seeing income inequality. That's what you're describing.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, essentially.

[David Pierce]

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 $100 of price difference. And you can hear these companies, they're just headed. Their products are headed in two different directions.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And you know, I think the fold, the iPhone fold 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

They're just going to buy another phone and move on with their lives. I think the rest of the Ultra products, you got to make a case for something beyond. It's the fastest chip.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

And I think 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 leathers. Like something else has to happen there.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. I was going to say you get like the Hermes version is what Apple has traditionally done.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. So we'll see.

[Nilay Patel]

And it's going to need a new move.

[David Pierce]

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 how it's going to work. And I think the rumors around the folder, like we don't really know how it's going to work.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. So the rumor right now, the rumor that came out this week, is the outer display of the iPhone fold will be about the size of a small iPhone, which seems like a victory. And then it'll open up. 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 is 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, 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 use, I use 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 to. 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.

[David Pierce]

I'm curious if that rumor's 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

Which is maybe not the worst thing on a phone. Cause you gotta hold the phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. But you're holding, you're holding what amounts to a double sided phone and trying to reach like it's just. That's that bad. No, don't. I don't want that. And what if the power button moves depending on how you open it? Where is it gonna be on that? Like there's just a lot of questions.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

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 both the under screen thumbprint reader and face ID or whatever. Face unlock, whatever they call it. That combination is awesome because.

[David Pierce]

Oh, what if they go with an under screen one?

[Nilay Patel]

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 passcode if we can't figure out 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 all over again. I don't know.

[David Pierce]

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 fold is you won't just let it run iPad apps.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. There's a line in Emma's story that

[David Pierce]

she wrote about it.

[Nilay Patel]

Emma Roth on our team wrote about this. This is again from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Um, and Emma writes, 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.

[David Pierce]

The pro. You know, the problem is all these projects started, you know, 500 years ago.

[Nilay Patel]

I know.

[David Pierce]

Again, you know, under one Alan dye. I don't know what to say, guys. Yeah, like, again, I think liquid glass on 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 have multiple windows and menus, which is what you're going to buy with an iPhone.

[Nilay Patel]

Fold.

[David Pierce]

It is nice knowing that whatever augmented reality device Meta comes out with will be a disaster.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, do you remember there was that period about four or 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 gonna get the reverse with Alan Dai, where it's like, thank God. This is.

[David Pierce]

We are absolutely gonna get the reverse.

[Nilay Patel]

This is finally the last one Alan Dye touched before he left Apple.

[David Pierce]

Apple doesn't leak as a company, and I guarantee you the people at Apple are going to leak like the stain is gone.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, we finally took all the code out of this one. Yeah, agree. All right, we need to take a break. We have a bunch more gadgets to talk about, including some Xbox. Somewhere between, I mean, hints and news, but lots to talk about. We'll be right back.

[David Pierce]

Support for the show comes from 1Password. 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 lean teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. 1Password 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. 1Password is designed to meet small teams where they are, but it's also built to grow with your company, however complex your security needs may get, 1Password will stay with you every step of the way. You can take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out [e-mail] Vergecast and start securing every login.

[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

Not really.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, so Project Helix is this thing we've heard inklings about. Obviously there's been this huge shakeup inside of the Xbox team. Asha Sharma is now running all things Xbox inside of Microsoft and hinted is maybe not strong enough. Just sort of said 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 just this, 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.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I mean they're announced, They've announced Xbox Mode is coming to Windows 11

[Nilay Patel]

PCs and they're finally calling it Xbox Mode, which, thank God, instead of Xbox Full screen experience.

[David Pierce]

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 just part of the plan and he was stepping down. And that, you know, Sarah Bond, who was the 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 Activision, who knows. And then, you know, Tom reported this out that Phil and Sarah had really alienated a lot of people with the 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 gonna listen to everyone. Which is what, you know, what, what, this is what you do as a new executive.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

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 gonna put all the focus on the console. You're just announcing that you're, you're gonna build appliance like Windows Gaming PCs and that's the future of your console. Which was the plan. It was just 100% the plan. Like what about the plan was so bad that Phil Spencer's long awaited retirement just happened suddenly in a rush and his hand picked number two was supposed to take over, didn't get the job. And a lot of people, a lot of theories about like, you know, who's, who's taking shots at Sarah Bond, 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 that got one person sort of shoved aside and another person out the door entirely and to get the job? Like, I, I can't tell you the answer to that question right now.

[Nilay Patel]

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, 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. It's Apple wants nothing more than for you to play games on your MacBook Pro.

[David Pierce]

No, they don't want that. They want that.

[Nilay Patel]

That's all they do.

[David Pierce]

They want to demo one 5 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.

[Nilay Patel]

No, all they want to do is be like metal and developers like, I don't care about this at all. Please leave me alone.

[David Pierce]

Well, they care about it when they're doing weird free to play loot boxes on the iPhone.

[Nilay Patel]

Y 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.

[David Pierce]

Right. Something happened where Phil Spencer, who architected this plan, got pushed out the door in a rush and that's a retirement that was quote long planned. 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. But she didn't get the job. And then there's a new person who's like, we're gonna come, we're gonna 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 and being like okay, Is it just that this train was on the tracks and Helix won't even be a thing until next year, Right?

[Nilay Patel]

They've said it won't even be out in alpha until next year.

[David Pierce]

So there's a lot of time for a lot of things to change. 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.

[Nilay Patel]

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 mate. 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? That 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 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'll 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? Buy this. Do you want a gaming PC? Buy this. Do you want a handheld? Buy 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 talk about it has been insane. And so it's just like, what if you took this plan and took out all the parts that seemed like nonsense, but kind of kept the plan the same. Maybe that's what Helix is. And, and it was Jason Ronald was, who is the, the VP of next generation at Microsoft, which is an unbelievable job title, 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 and including path tracing. Terrific, right? Like, what if this thing is just a super optimized, super simple Xbox mode only kickass 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?

[David Pierce]

Do you know what the. Well, so I have two thoughts about this. One, I'm convinced Microsoft's inability to convince Apple to let them do game streaming is what just like, pulled this whole thing apart.

[Nilay Patel]

That's possible.

[David Pierce]

This is the rug pull.

[Nilay Patel]

This is what you retrenched to when you couldn't make game streaming work. Right.

[David Pierce]

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 there are lots of arguments about this. Maybe it was never gonna 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 of Azure. Your phone is not Xbox.

[Nilay Patel]

There are a bunch of people listening to and watching this who are yelling about latency and controller lag and all this stuff, and all of that is true. But the, the other truth is that Microsoft never really got to try.

[David Pierce]

No, yeah, they never got to try. We, we, we just kind of don't know. There's a lot of weird ways they tried. They tried it in the browser, all this stuff, but like, I think that was their plan and they just couldn't do it. So then they ended up back at, 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, 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 a browser. So you're fine.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Anecdotally, 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.

[David Pierce]

And like, you're just like stuck here. By the way, we are going to cover Linux on the desktop here at The Verge in 2026.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the hell, yeah, this is the

[David Pierce]

year of the desktop.

[Nilay Patel]

We're just going to manifest this as the year of Linux on the desktop.

[David Pierce]

And one of the reasons I'm saying that is, you know, our own reporters, Sean and Tom and everyone else keep saying it is better to play Windows games on Linux right now. This is a huge problem.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

This is Just a problem across the board. So like, maybe this is the plan and it's all gonna work and you're gonna make an ultra optimized Windows PC that runs Xbox mode all the time. But it feels like what you're gonna do then is get. You're gonna 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, oh, I'm running this dumb copilot Windows and I hate it.

[Nilay Patel]

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 re architect 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 in. 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 be Windows underneath, that could work. That is just nothing about the history of either 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 over the next little while.

[David Pierce]

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

[Nilay Patel]

Right. And yeah, I mean there's, there's no shot. Helix didn't exist before Richmond Tom has

[David Pierce]

been reporting on Helix for months.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, exactly.

[David Pierce]

So why announce the next step of the plan that you thought was bad if you thought the Plan was. I just don't know the answer.

[Nilay Patel]

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 a bad idea?

[David Pierce]

I think Microsoft should sell Xbox and they should give up on being a consumer company. They're not good at it. I think the only reason they still have Xbox is because it is the one thing Microsoft does that truly resonates with people under the age of 500.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's the one thing that like every Microsoft employee's kids think is cool. Well, they have Minecraft accounts or something,

[David Pierce]

but that's all part of Xbox gaming or Microsoft gaming. Like, they should just let that thing go.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, I mean, they can't now. They're in it way too deep now. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

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 and the next generation of gamers would come up on phones and they needed to be in that business. And I'm telling you, someone will write it. Hopefully it's us. The moment that Apple did not let them do game streaming, everything went off the rails. And I just feel like you should acknowledge that and maybe it's time to like, Microsoft in its heart wants to be an enterprise company. That's the thing that they are. That's the thing Nadella has made them. He's done an incredible job turning that company around. And if you recall, the first thing he did was he got rid of Nokia and said, we're just, we're done with this.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, Nokia was a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard. Like, a lot, a lot, a lot cheaper than Activision Blizzard.

[David Pierce]

It's true. I just. 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 chasing this Dragon for a decade. They have maybe just let the games company be a games company and live its own life without either having to be like, this is the thing that will make Windows PCs cool, or this is the thing that will spike Azure usage. You know what? The thing that spikes Azure usage is right? Every single day, OpenAI does something stupid.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it'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 job 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.

[David Pierce]

Oh, yeah, everyone, basically everyone got drunk on Covid. Like, I don't know how to explain this. Everyone was at home and spent all their money on their laptop. And every single tech company was like, oh, we're all brains and vats now. We're going to do brains and vat stuff.

[Nilay Patel]

No one's ever going outside again.

[David Pierce]

No one's ever going outside again. And we just need to find a way to collect the money. The people 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 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 over hiring in tech companies, which we're now undoing by calling them AI. Layoffs down the line and you get all the way to live service games. Fortnite is a metaverse. That's where you got the metaverse. Like Mark Zuckerberg 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 was at home and then people left their house and live service games have the same network effect problems as any new social network.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Like, do you remember Peach?

[Nilay Patel]

I do remember Peach. Did I do no one else?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, remember Ella or whatever else? Yo, like, they're all the same. It's like, here I am. No one else is here. I'm out. All my friends are still in Fortnite.

[Nilay Patel]

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 when 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 industry. And I think it's just an interesting if. If that, I think probably wrong idea about gaming being the 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 took over?

[David Pierce]

Who knows how much more NFT conversation we would have had? Actually, do you know my favorite, like, we're. We all, like, the world got drunk on. On like Covid Confusion. This is my plug for Version History. It was Clubhouse, right? The chat app where VCs would be like, what if I said racist stuff in an ephemeral talk space? Like, this is. We ran those stories. That's your next episode of Version History.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Coming out. Coming out this Sunday, it was me and Ashley Carmen from Bloomberg and Casey Newton from Platformer, both of who both

[David Pierce]

worked at the Verge, who both worked

[Nilay Patel]

at the Verge, both covered Clubhouse. We had. We had ourselves a time talking about Clubhouse. But yeah, it is. All of that stuff is. 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.

[David Pierce]

Look, I recognize we start out by talking about GDC and Project Helix and whether or not Windows is a good platform for playing video games. On. I'm just ending this segment 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 in a vat and all you could do was use the interfaces provided to you by a handful of giant tech companies.

[Nilay Patel]

They'd be psyched.

[David Pierce]

And whatever Alan Dye is cooking up at meta.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, that's enough of that. We. What game are you playing right now? Are you still. Are you still maddening?

[David Pierce]

It's Madden all day.

[Nilay Patel]

It's just Madden all day.

[David Pierce]

So now the season's over, you don't have to take the injuries from the auto updates on the rosters. Packers are sick. If no one's hurt, I'm killing it.

[Nilay Patel]

Love it. I'm thrilled for you. This is great. All right, we should take one more break and then we're gonna go back. We got some lightning round stuff to do. We'll be right back.

[David Pierce]

Yo, Harvey, Zoey, group selfie. Ooh, nice.

[Nilay Patel]

New iPhone 17 drew ski.

[David Pierce]

Let's do a triangle formation.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm in front with a center stage front camera.

[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

I'm grabbing my phone and switching to

[David Pierce]

T mobile right now. Get back, Harvey. We're taking a. Ah, let's go again, y'.

[Nilay Patel]

All.

[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

Get back, Harvey. We're taking a. Let's go again, Y'.

[Nilay Patel]

ALL.

[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

hunters to the floofy friends you can't live without.

[David Pierce]

Although let's be honest, we could probably live without you.

[Nilay Patel]

Around 10,000 years ago, humans started farming,

[David Pierce]

which accidentally created eroded hunting bonanza.

[Nilay Patel]

That meant full time employment and activity for us.

[David Pierce]

Humans were like, okay, these guys are chill. They can stay. So unlike dogs. Ew. Sorry.

[Nilay Patel]

We basically domesticated ourselves. We chose you. Fast forward to today.

[David Pierce]

Some of us may not get as

[Nilay Patel]

much hunting in and okay, I admit,

[David Pierce]

maybe we can get a little chonky.

[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

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[Nilay Patel]

food now available in stores and online. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause for flavor. Neil. I read. Are we doing this? Is it?

[David Pierce]

Oh, we're doing it.

[Nilay Patel]

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 cars a dummy T shirt out in the world kind of by accident without realizing I had it on several questions. Brandon Carr is a dummy. Good lord. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[David Pierce]

Wow. He thinks that people still watch tv. Oh, that's good.

[Nilay Patel]

A little like David Bowie. Ish.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, it's got some real 2000s indie vibes.

[Nilay Patel]

Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[David Pierce]

It's got some real, like, I would say, like there's like a little spoon vibe in there. Yeah, yeah. And a little postal service.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. Not quite enough reverb for the postal service, but we're headed in that direction.

[David Pierce]

Not enough Jenny Lewis. Can you get Jenny Lewis to just actually come and be my girlfriend? Is that a choice?

[Nilay Patel]

Jenny, if you're listening, and I know

[David Pierce]

that you are, if you can go

[Nilay Patel]

to Nilai's house and fix his imac everything. Neil, I will retire from journalism.

[David Pierce]

This is where somehow, in the segment where I just rail against an unelected power hungry bureaucrat, I admit to the Vergecast audience that I've had a crush on Jenny Lewis since I was, like, a teenager. We all knew. Let's be honest with you, it worked. That was a good one.

[Nilay Patel]

Last week.

[David Pierce]

Last week, we didn't run ones because we were getting too much AI slop. That was handmade, and I appreciate it.

[Nilay Patel]

Our listener who sent this in goes by the Northeast Valley, and I hope that's. I hope that's your artist's name, because that's very cool. Thank you for sending that in.

[David Pierce]

That is very good.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, what do we have, Neil?

[David Pierce]

I've got two. Also, David, you live in D.C. where wearing a Brennan Karzadami T shirt out in the world might provoke some real reactions.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Did you get any real reactions?

[Nilay Patel]

I got a couple of who is Brendan Carr? Which feels like a pretty good. It made me think of the like, who's that clown? Is the sickest burn because it implies not just that you're a clown, but you're not even one of the better known clowns. Made me 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. That's about it.

[David Pierce]

Tina Nguyen, who's our D.C. reporter, was at an event, and, you know, it's like, supposed to be very polite, room full of powerful DC people, and people whispered to her that they very much enjoy this segment. So shout out to the people whispering to Tina. I know we have listeners out there. I know you're listening, Brendan. All right, I got two this week for you, and one's just a toss up to you for 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 or 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 desires to be the speech police, usually when it comes to picking between consumers getting better, faster, cheaper Internet, and the needs and wants of AT&T and 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 that 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've discussed in the segment. 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?

[Nilay Patel]

You say, now, now, children, I love you both equally.

[David Pierce]

Brendan does not realize that his job is to be the neutral arbiter of these disputes and be the regulator, because he's so captured by interest all the time. Right. He's just a fundamentally corrupt idiot.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

So this week, Amazon filed a petition responding to SpaceX applying for permission to launch 1 million satellites. So SpaceX applies for permission to launch a million satellites to do data centers in space.

[Nilay Patel]

Why doesn't the Verge do more stuff like that? Can we just apply for permission to. We don't have to launch a million satellites. Let's just see if they'll let us.

[David Pierce]

You can feel any way you want about Elon Musking. I will launch a million satellites to put a data center in space. Whatever they do it. This is one party asking the FCC 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 constellation would take centuries, even assuming the availability of all global launch capacity to do so. And the argument is, 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

And Amazon is, of course, very well positioned to say these things because they have their own satellite constellation they want to launch. They have the money and the resources and the time and the Jeff Bezos to spend the money on 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.

[Nilay Patel]

This is a good fight that should happen.

[David Pierce]

This is the system working. Yeah, we asked for permission to do this. Does anyone have any objections? Amazon is like, we have an objection. Brendan. His little brain misfires because there's no poor little consumer paying their $80 a month 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 request for permission, evaluate the objections, and come to a ruling. Brendan, what does Brendan do? 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 satellites short of it, meaning its upcoming deployment milestones, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in to order formed it.

[Nilay Patel]

You know, there's a, 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.

[David Pierce]

You didn't nail it. He picked a winner. The process is you ask for permission, you file petitions saying, I support or oppose this thing, and then you evaluate it. You're, you're 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 has even begun to play out, saying, you suck. I pick Elon and Brendan because he didn't have a consumer to screw over, but he has to just do something corrupt at every turn or violate his weird programming. Did something corrupt. I'm telling you, this is dumb. You can, you can feel however you want about Elon saying he wants to put a million satellites in orbit to build a 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 junk up the skies and lead inevitably to Kessler Syndrome. Whatever feelings you want, all of that 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 a side before the process has begun to play out. That is just naked corruption.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And saying, don't send me petitions, says guy whose job it is to receive petitions. Like, yeah, what are we doing here?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. By the way, to your point about he thought the tweet was a banger and it's not. It's very funny that Brendan, who oversees our nation's telecommunications provider, think that it's a clear black and white trade off for Amazon between filing petitions and launching satellites.

[Nilay Patel]

There's only one employee at Amazon who knows how to do both things.

[David Pierce]

Like, I don't know, man. I feel like the lawyers can file as many petitions they want and if they stop, it won't affect the satellite launch plans.

[Nilay Patel]

Maybe the lawyers also launched the rockets. Amazon's a wild place.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, Like, Amazon's like, Claude launch their audience. Like, what do you think is happening?

[Nilay Patel]

God, like.

[David Pierce]

And maybe you think they're being anti competitive and they're just trying to buy time to launch more of their Leo, whatever. Like, 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. And I'm sorry, David, this is, this is where you come in.

[Nilay Patel]

You're going to make me talk about David Ellison.

[David Pierce]

I'm going to make you talk about Warner Brothers and Paramount. So Warner, you know, they decided to go with 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 about Netflix buying Warner, said to CNBC that he expected the Paramount bid for Warner to be approved, quote, pretty quickly, because it's cleaner, quote, cleaner again, Just, just.

[Nilay Patel]

Why even pretend there is process at this point? It's just. They picked a winner.

[David Pierce]

They picked a winner. David Ellison said he was going to screw with 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. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on 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.

[Nilay Patel]

My Brendan Cars a dummy T shirt is raising a lot of questions. Answering.

[David Pierce]

I'll give you a T shirt, Brendan, that our listeners made for us. It's a great T shirt. I only have one because it's a, it's, it's, it's like a precious fan made object. But Brendan, I will give you my Brendan Carr as a dummy T shirt. You can have it if you face me in the thunderdome of this podcast.

[Nilay Patel]

A shirtless Nili against a Brendan Carr is a dummy wearing Brendan Carr. That would do numbers on TikTok.

[David Pierce]

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 they want to see Brennan Carr without a shirt on. Anyway, that has been Brendan Cars of Dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

[Nilay Patel]

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 Zaslav. The Davids, as I call them. It's been a tough time for Davids.

[David Pierce]

Like, we're not.

[Nilay Patel]

We're not being represented.

[David Pierce]

Super. I will say, it does seem like at any moment, you could take over Warner Brothers. Yeah, I mean, the likelihood of you getting to run Warner Brothers is statistically higher than him.

[Nilay Patel]

That's true. But it also seems like David Ellison is just sort of running through the Davids now. So, like, David Ellison might host this podcast at some point. I don't know.

[David Pierce]

He's not going to do that as well.

[Nilay Patel]

That's. I'd be great. I would. I happily turn it over to him, as long as he wears the shirt.

[David Pierce]

But.

[Nilay Patel]

So, anyway, so David Zaslav went to the Warner Brothers lot, I think, to have this big meeting with the, like, 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 from 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. There are a lot of questions about who Casey Blois, 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 had. 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 and is fine and. And that there will be no process, there will be no meaningful review, that this will all just get waved 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.

[David Pierce]

And the thing, the specific thing is not whether or not James Gunn is going to make Superman ever more woke. It is cnn.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

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 as the Trump administration gets more and more confused about why we are at war. Like, you, you just can't. You can't. You can't have CNN all day being like, it's pretty, pretty good war. Right. Even.

[Nilay Patel]

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 this.

[David Pierce]

It's not going great. Yeah. So, like, it's what, whatever you think of, like, should you let Zack Snyder make a 4, 3 grayscale Justice League, which again, was AT&T's idea, or should Batman be super woke? I don't know. Maybe that's good or bad. 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.

[Nilay Patel]

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 Hollywood, did he do it all with his dad's money? Like, yeah, sure. But he has been in this game for a while. But the thing that really bums me out the most.

[David Pierce]

But I'm just saying, even if, 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 and 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.

[Nilay Patel]

I would say there's almost no evidence that there is demand for that.

[David Pierce]

Who knows, man? Like, whatever you can evaluate that that is not what the Trump administration cares about.

[Nilay Patel]

No.

[David Pierce]

What they care about is cnn.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And David Ellison has promised Trump that. It's been reported. He promised sweeping changes at cnn. Yep.

[Nilay Patel]

He did say in this event that it would remain editorially independent, which I would say is also what he has said about CBS News. And that is do with that which you 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 Brothers Discovery. A thing 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, it's the, it's the one and only guarantee. And he did the thing that they always do, which is essentially promise 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, with no inside evidence that that's a lie. It just. There is no way that is not the case. That is where those savings come from. Like maybe they're, maybe they're going to sell one of the lots. That's a thing that's been talked. 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 who have the same job at two different companies. That is what is coming.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, no, without question, it's what is coming. Actually, I can add a tiny little bit of reporting to this, please. So you and I have spent years covering all these platforms, like the streaming platforms and their user interfaces and the people who build them. We, 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 HBO Max and the platforms that Warner has been using. HBO Max is like a particular disaster. Right. Started as HBO Go and HBO Max and then two different things and emerge 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. It's just streaming video. This is kind of like a white label solved problem. And unless you're focused at Netflix levels of algorithmic discovery, which is where your focus should be, you can't just show up and be like, oracle will make this better. The core parts of the platform, particularly in the case of hbo, where they had to go through like massive gyrations to fix the problems, they're like, yeah, the problems are kind of fixed.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, you can stream Game of Thrones without crashing now. We're good at that.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, they got there. It took them a Long time. They spent a lot of money, but they got there. Paramount again. Those folks are like, what has he been talking about? Like, this team 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 a thing. Which he's not saying. He's just waiving the idea that Oracle Technology will fix things at a slide deck. There's nothing to fix. So I don't think there's $6 billion of 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 don't know, man. It's all bad.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

It's the good news again. Much like Alan die going to meta to destroy it from within is that buying Warner kills you. You trip and every, apparently every media CEO has to flirt with the idea of killing themselves in this way.

[Nilay Patel]

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 Warner Brothers. This is what happens.

[David Pierce]

This is, this is going to be the end of the Elson family.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, agreed. All right, let's do. Let's do one more each and then, and then let's get out of here. What's.

[David Pierce]

Okay, I want to make this a true lightning round item because it's. We're going to go deep on this in a different way. So last week, Grammarly just stole our identities.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

You might recall this is like a huge story. It spun fully out of control. So last August, Grammarly launched a feature called Expert Review, where you could, like, you know, Grammarly, like, expresses itself as a keyboard on your device where you, 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.

[Nilay Patel]

No, thanks.

[David Pierce]

I know, man. That's what they say. And so their big idea was that in Grammarly, you could submit your writing to be reviewed by experts. And the experts are like, it's just an AI. And then to make it more compelling, they decided the AI would be me and you and Casey Newton and Julie Angwin and all these other famous journalists. Bell hooks is in there, which is particularly wonderful. Like, literally just like you name any author that's been published a bunch, they're in this feature. I think we can all evaluate how many people use Grammarly by saying that this feature launched in August and we noticed it yesterday.

[Nilay Patel]

I was just about to say

[David Pierce]

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 Alster and 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 a nothing burger statement. Then they rolled out email in opt out. So if I wanted to not be in their feature, I could email them. Which is not how it's supposed to work.

[Nilay Patel]

No, it's like do this magic incantation and then we will take you out of the product.

[David Pierce]

And then I heard from friends at other huge publishers being like how'd you find this? Or lawyers want to know. You can tell that the sort of like legal drums were starting to go. Julia Anguin who is an excellent reporter filed a class action law and then Grammarly fully rolled it back and said we're very sorry, blah blah blah. The reason I'm saying this is lightning round item is because Shashir Malhotra, the CEO of Grammarly has long been scheduled to be on Decoder next week.

[Nilay Patel]

Amazing.

[David Pierce]

Like, well before this happened he was going to be on Decoder. So he's still scheduled to be on Decoder. I think he's going to be on the show. We're taping that next week. We're going to try to turn around as fast as we can. So I'm just going to stop it here because I wanted to come on

[Nilay Patel]

Decoder but now it's, now it's out there that Shashir, you have to, now you have to show up.

[David Pierce]

You gotta show up. And if you don't, then I'll just do that episode of Decoder with an AI version of you.

[Nilay Patel]

I like it. I think that one is. It's. It's gonna get, it's gonna 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 Nilai Vibes in, in some editing.

[David Pierce]

My vibes like the. It was the worst edit of all time. Like that's not how I edit. But. And I, and I want to say this as clearly as again as 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Correct.

[David Pierce]

You cannot do it.

[Nilay Patel]

Not a chance. Chance.

[David Pierce]

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.

[Nilay Patel]

That's true.

[David Pierce]

And I'm curious to ask a lot of questions here, but I think the number one question in my 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? Because those things aren't. They're not even in the same universe.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, no, it's. It's. The whole. The whole thing is. 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 lockdown.

[David Pierce]

It's making a red SEO slop.

[Nilay Patel]

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 being sourced to me, but it's also just a bad idea and not correct, and it's 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 Grammarly for much of anything beyond that.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Anyway, he's coming on the show, so we'll see.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Okay. For my last lightning round item, I have kind of a thing and a half. First, just some super quick follow up from Tuesday's episode when I was talking to Lauren Finer about all of the stuff going on with the Live Nation Ticketmaster settlement. One of the things we said was that it seemed like the deal met 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 Ticketmaster. 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 on Tuesday. There's also a bunch of, like, shenanigans still happening with Live Nation Ticketmaster. Even though that settlement happened, it looks like court's coming back as soon as next week. We'll catch up on that when the trial restarts 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, Allison Johnson on our team has 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 the what is a photo apocalypse of it all, the big new thing that got announced in the course of this phone being announced was this thing that Google and Samsung called, I believe, Task Automation. And this is the AI 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 has not shown up on yet. But this thing is supposed to be out there. Allison has been testing it. She, she has had like some pretty interesting experiences with this thing, but it like it kind of works. Your phone can use itself. Um, let me just read you one paragraph that she wrote just to give you a sense of how it works. She writes the first prompt I gave it was pretty simple, order an 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 all in 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, 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 like, she had it order Starbucks for her. There's just like a, a set of things that this thing appears to be able to just commandeer your phone and go do on your behalf. And that is nuts.

[David Pierce]

I mean 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. And my feeling has always been Google is smarter than that. Right? Like, they know they can't announce broken Siri, which is what Apple announced. Like, here's a Siri that doesn't work is, like, not a choice for them. And 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. And then you kind of expand to, like, the universe of things.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, they're also interacting with a database, right? Like, it's. It's. Anything with this kind of incredibly structured data is where it's going to be.

[David Pierce]

So I have a great question here, because Samir, when he was announcing this feature at the event, said, we can do this any way you want. We can do this via mcp, we can do this via API, or we can just click around in these apps. So it's unclear. I know Uber Dara has been on decoder and he's like, we are happy to integrate with this stuff. It doesn't matter to us. I don't know how they're integrating with the Starbucks app, so 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.

[Nilay Patel]

Alison's experience so far.