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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of adding the cupcake in post. But they're different cupcakes. David, we can't do this now. Nei, we can't do this yet. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Patel is here. Hello.
Okay, the disclaimer on Samsung's cupcake video for the Galaxy S26 literally says, "Not all the features on the AI phone are AI based." And then right below it, it says AI stands for artificial intelligence.
AI is nothing and it's everything and it is whatever you want it to be.
So, it is one of the better disclaimers I've ever seen.
It's nuts. So, a lot of news this week. We have been promising it's gadget season again, and it is in fact gadget season again. Uh, we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon. The big Samsung Unpacked event just happened. We have a lot of new phones to talk about. We have new headphones to talk about. We have just an unbelievable disaster of a what is a photo conversation to have. Um, there's also uh the sort of Xbox news has been happening over the last several days. We've got a bunch of stuff there to catch up on. A lot of gaming things going on. We've got Brendan Carr is a dummy because he just he continues to
Brendan would like to use the power of the state to make us begin the Vergecast by reciting the pledge of allegiance
and I kind of wanted
Damn it. Anyway, uh lots of news to get to but um let's start with Samsung because I think this is in many ways like the first big phone of the year and kind of an interesting one in a bunch of cases. So, let me just quickly lay out the news and then we can get into all of the ways in which this is a deeply bizarre thing. Um, so there's three new phones, Samsung Galaxy S26, 26 Plus, and 26 Ultra. There are new Galaxy Buds 4 and Buds 4 Pro. I would say most of the hardware that is relevant to most people is sort of small iterative upgrades. Um, Allison Johnson, who was at the event, actually made us a video and sent it back. So, let's watch that. She's got the rundown.
I just got a look at the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and it's looking a little bit more like the S26 and the S26 Plus this year. There are a couple cool hardware things happening. There's a new privacy screen is actually really rad. The apertures are a little brighter on two of the cameras, but really this is a software update this year. There's something called now nudge which is a little bit pixel phoneish where it'll suggest things in the keyboard for you to look up or respond with. There's something called horizon lock in the camera app now. It's kind of a GoPro feature and it keeps the horizon level no matter how you turn the phone. It's kind of wild. The gallery app has a ton of new ways you can use AI to mess with your photos. You can make a nice looking cinnamon roll look like a snail or you can put a little hat on a koala which I think is a really important use case for AI. So there's audio eraser for third party streaming video apps too. You can open up YouTube and toggle it on so you can isolate the sound of someone talking and tune out background noises. There's also a new Gemini feature here where it will take action for you in Agentic AI and order you an Uber just by using natural language. We saw a pretty on the rails demo and seemed to work. Um, but I have questions about that and I'm going to want to try it out myself.
A lot there.
Yeah. So, three things there that we should dive into in order. Um there is agentic AI, a fascinating piece of this. There is the privacy display which somehow after last week has already become my brand. And then the third thing after the display is the what is a photo apocalypse that is upon us. Where do you want to start?
I think let's just start with the display. I think display is so cool. Um and what's cool about it is that it is an actual like tech feature. It's not just an overlay on the screen.
Yeah. So, the way Samsung has built it is there's basically two sets of pixels on the display. There's the standard sort of wideangle pixels and there's much more focused pixels that just like hit vertically. And so, you can turn off the ones that have the wider field of view and you get this effect of a privacy display. The reason that's important is because it's Samsung and you can toggle that privacy display on and off in 10,000 different ways, including geo fencing and routines, including specific apps, including like I think when just the passcode screen on various apps shows up.
I think that's so cool. Like I agree. Just fundamentally, it's so cool to be like, "All right, if I'm not at home, turn on the privacy display." Yeah. Just like light this thing up. If I'm not at home or in the office, just light this thing up and keep David away from me. Or if I'm typing in a passcode, make sure that the screen goes private. Like I think that's neat. I think like all very customizable features. Will anyone ever use all of those settings? I don't know. But it's very Samsung to be like not only is it a privacy display, it's one that you can geofence and light up in like routines and automations.
I wondered about the defaults of it too because there does seem to be a way that Samsung could dial that that is incredibly useful and also that users almost never notice, right? Because you're mostly looking at your own phone head on. So if Samsung is smart about the defaults and says, "Okay, when you're, I don't know, out in the world or just for your notifications or just every time a password prompt appears, we're just going to turn that on by default and not even tell you. And if you want to mess with it, you can, but we're going to be thoughtful about it at the beginning." That could be incredibly useful for tons of people who never want to think about it.
Yeah. Knowing Samsung, there will be a million popups and tool tips that tell you every single time you can possibly use the privacy display to do anything and it will make everyone crazy and they will turn it off.
But that's what the power of AI is for. Bixby will be there, a dog with shoes to help you through all of the tool tips and prompts.
Were you so happy to hear about Bixby? I was happy he's back. I think Samsung has yet to concede that Bixby is a dog with shoes. The joke here, by the way, this is like an old deep cut of the Verge is every time I hear the name Bixby, I think of a cartoon dog wearing shoes like a butler. Like that's what it sounds like to me.
It's a dog in a butler, but he's like wearing comically oversized shoes and he's always falling down.
Yeah. But he's like a gentleman.
He's a gentleman dog wearing shoes.
I don't know. That's just what's in my head every time I hear Bixby. Samsung uh historically has taken my suggestions. Their booth at CES, they officially have started calling it Samsung City, which is the name that I gave it years ago.
So, I got one. If I could just get official Bixby. You can do it now with AI. You can just prompt the phone to generate a dog with shoes.
I was sort of surprised to hear Samsung even say the word Bixby because Bixby never went away. Samsung just sort of like left it over here and just sort of neglected it.
I mean, what they're saying about Bixby now is the same promise they've been making forever with Bixby, which is it's an on phone assistant that will get you through settings.
But now with AI, but now with the power of agentic.
And so maybe you can be like, "Turn on my privacy display, Bixby," and it'll like do it.
Yeah, I don't know. There's some combination of things there. I do think that in general the privacy display is very smart. I hope that they've hardcoded the identifiers of your phones into the S26
so that when you're nearby the privacy display turns on.
You know, it's just Face ID, but it's my face.
Exactly. It's like these MAC addresses have been associated with David Pierce.
Honestly, it's just he's near you. Uh we're locking this down. Honestly, Samsung, you're allowed to do that. I deserve that. It's okay. Um, but we should talk about the photo stuff because like Allison said, this was mostly a software update. Um, one notable thing is two of these phone models are $100 more expensive than the last models. And the way Samsung is justifying that is mostly by bumping the storage. Um, this is a thing I think we're going to see a lot this year that they're going to make the cheap things a little better and make the phones more expensive.
Yeah. And that is one way that they are going to try to solve a lot of these memory shortage problems and tariff problems and all sorts of ongoing stuff. Um, so that is a trend to keep watching out for over the course of this year. But I want to talk about the photo stuff because you had like a truly visceral reaction to one particular part of the Samsung keynote. And uh I just want you to describe how you felt as Samsung was showing off some of the new AI assisted photo editing features for the S26 line.
I watched Samsung demo the AI powered smartphone camera in the S26 line and my literal reaction throughout the entire segment was the Galaxy S26 Ultra should be illegal. Like they're right up against the line of governments around the world should shut this down. It is beyond dangerous the things they are letting people do with these cameras. The kinds of images they're allowing people to create. And I don't mean just like deep fakes and weird groam. I mean they're messing with the nature of reality in such like trivial and like hokey jokey ways that I honestly don't think that they can be responsible enough. And I'll just point to two lines. In a blog post, Samsung just flat out says that smartphones are moving beyond capture, right? That the point of a smartphone camera is no longer to just capture images. It's to make other stuff. That is a huge thing to say and it's something other companies I think have gestured at, but I don't think anyone has said it quite so directly. Like Google has been running at this for some time, but Samsung as it is want to do really took an idea and just exploded it into a thousand bizarre pieces.
Yeah. Two years ago when I reviewed the I think the iPhone 16, we basically ran down what all the companies were saying about photos. And at that time, Apple was very clear, you know, they're trying to capture reality. Samsung was like literally I think their quote was like photos haven't been real in forever. Like do you want a picture of the moon? We'll just make you one. Like in their way. And Google specifically was like the thing we're trying to do is capture memories. And there's a lot of space in all of that, right? Like just a lot of space in all of that. And all of that is still based on the idea that a photo should reflect some kind of reality. And on the one hand, you have Apple saying like it's this moment in time where these things really happened. And the other hand, you have Google saying your perception of event we can sort of get you there. We're going to merge all the faces. Everyone's looking at the camera. And you can really, we've spent ages arguing with this. Samsung is like throwing caution to the wind. They are beyond this. We are beyond capture. And now they're like, "The point of this camera is to develop purely synthetic images that reflect nothing that ever happened."
Read the other line that they said because this is where it trips over into something deeply dystopian.
In the middle of the keynote, they're demonstrating the phone and the camera, and they say, "The phone should not just help you AI remove things that shouldn't be there. It should help you add what should have been there."
Help you add what should have been there. What? What are you talking about? In the demo, they... There's no going back from that. Like in a super super real way, there is no going back from that statement about what your camera is.
Yeah. In the demo, and we should run it so people can see it. The demo is uh it's people in a cafe and they are like, I wish my dog was here. And they make it so the woman is holding the dog. We should run it. It's right here. Like when you've captured an almost perfect photo, just missing that one thing that would tie everything together, like your pet. You can simply merge them from another shot. Just describe how you want to combine the photos and watch Galaxy AI complete the moment. It's easy, intuitive, and all done on your Galaxy S26 series.
Great. It's a woman in business attire and what appears to be your son and they add the dog into the photo and this is great and the audience claps. What if just for the sake of the argument I wanted to add Jeffrey Epstein to that photo?
Do you think the audience would have applauded if you had a separate photo of Jeffrey Epstein? Something you'd like to admit on this doesn't have a folder of Jeffrey Epstein images?
No. You know what I think is so interesting about this is, and I hadn't really noticed it until you played that video again, but they framed this as if it is the same thing as combining two photos so that everybody's eyes are open, right? And it's like this is a thing that we've been talking about for forever. And I think you and I get called sort of alarmist occasionally for being like, "Oh, they're just making it so that everybody's eyes are open." And Samsung wants you to believe this is a natural extension of that. This is a completely other thing. This is you have not found the best version of the photo. You have invented something out of whole cloth and like it's not like the dog jumped out halfway through and you put it back. Like you took a dog that was not in the room and you put it in the room.
Yeah. For the audio listener, the picture of the dog was a dog in a field, right? There is no longer an argument to be made that this photo is a work of fact. Like you have just created fiction.
Yeah. And the thing I'm so struck by in all this is all the alarming things you're talking about, right? Like the Jeffrey Epstein is real. We've been going through this and there is already a lot of deep fake Jeffrey Epstein stuff out there and now anybody is just going to be able to do it on their phone. And that is like over and over you in particular have said that the thing that changes is that when you make this stuff easy more people do it, right? Like the argument scale is what makes it dangerous, right? And over and over that keeps being correct. And take all of that for what it is, right? But then put next to it, who is this for? Like I don't know anyone who makes this kind of thing and then feels good about it. It's either for these like craven cynical post on Instagram the perfect thing kind of photos or it feels icky. Like I like to pull people who get new pixels and start to mess around with some of the like magic photo stuff where it'll just even correct small things, right? You can slide yourself over on a bench to get a better shot or you can make sure everybody's eyes are open. And everybody I ask about this has this slightly icky feeling that this is no longer the photo I took. And you never quite forget that you changed the photo. So the best case scenario for this thing does not exist as far as I can tell. And so we're trading this like deeply dangerous thing for a use case that I don't think exists.
Oh, I have a use case for you. You'll enjoy it here. Just think in your head who would use the following feature. Uh personal details such as a spill on clothing can now also be cleaned up with Galaxy AI's new ability to change outfits in photos.
They skip right past will remove the spill and they're like whole new outfit. Yeah, I mean you can again watch the demo that they present it as what if you take a photo and you like your own smile but you want to be wearing something else and it's like well I can think of a whole class of people on the popular platform X that love changing the outfits the women with beautiful smiles are wearing.
What are the guardrails? But now I can download it and do it on my own phone. But now I can download it and do my own phone. Look, I don't know if there's guardrails. I don't know if they're going to, you know, whitelist certain words or prevent certain words from being used in these tools. I don't know if they're going to add some of the absolutely useless metadata protections that we've been covering. Uh just weather actually has a whole piece about how the tech industry is sort of like C2PA washing all of their AI slop. They just keep saying they're using it, but it's not doing anything for anybody, right? I look, I don't know if Samsung is doing that. We will ask all of the questions, but this is the downside of pretending that this market can regulate itself.
Yeah. Like straightforwardly, this is the downside. This is a no holds barred competition. People like it the same way people like sugar and these companies are all trying to sell one more phone and unless you make them stop doing deep fakes, they will sell you the ability to do deep fakes at scale. And I'm using deep fakes loosely here, but we are now right on the cusp of Samsung saying you can make photos of people doing things they never did. Just that's what they're advertising here. That's what these features are. Wearing clothes they were never wearing in places they were never in next to people they were never next to. That's these features as easily as possible too. Like with almost no work.
Yep. natural language prompting. And so, yeah, I know people are going to yell at me and they're going to say I'm an Apple fanboy because I think the Galaxy S26 camera should be legal, but I'm convinced that unless someone stops these companies from going down this road, the next turn of all these cameras will be even more dangerous and they might not even have lenses. Like we're that close to saying, "Okay, the photos these cameras create are not even depictions of light hitting a sensor. It's just whatever the AI dreamed up based on the training data it has of you."
Do you remember that? This is a couple years ago now. There was an art project that we talked about that was essentially that. It was a camera that had no lens and no nothing, but it understood GPS coordinates and what it was looking at. And so you would press it and it would use all the available data around to sort of assemble a photo for you. And the question it was trying to ask is is this a photo? Like is this what we're accomplishing? And we are just barreling towards that with all of these things.
Yeah. And even in the ways in which they say they're taking photos, there is more AI in the processing pipeline than ever. And so like it stops being even an attempt at accurately depicting reality almost immediately.
And it's very clear that again that's what these companies are doing on purpose. And again I just come back to like who is this for?
No, I'm saying it's sugar. Like if you let my kids like do you... People like these photos. They like these edits. They like saying make me smile. They...
I think people like sharing on Instagram. I don't think people derive actual joy from these photos. I think...
I mean my dad just turned 80 and you know like my cousins were all trying to share photos of my dad when he was younger and like the number of miserable AI edits that came back to me from my family just being like this photo was dark so I asked media to brighten it up and one of them was like your my dad had a different face.
Oh my god. Okay, wait. You just brought up a thing that Okay. Can I tell you the strangest thing that has been happening to me all week? So, my 3-year-old son is obsessed with Spider-Man. Like, it's the only thing on earth that he cares about. And uh out of nowhere, like a week ago, um well, like two weeks ago, he started asking to see pictures of Spider-Man on my phone. So, he would just sit on my lap and I would just like Google Spider-Man and we would just scroll through pictures and that made him happy. And then all of a sudden, he starts going, I want to see pictures of me with Spider-Man. And sort of stupidly in retrospect, I realized, oh, Gemini can do this for me. So, I was like, I'm going to play with Nano Banana, see if this works. So, I take a picture of us, a selfie picture of us, put it into Gemini and say, put Spider-Man in this picture like he's hanging out with us. And it just worked. Um, the funniest part about this is the first time it said it wouldn't do it because of copyright issues. And then I copied and pasted the prompt again and it did it. Uh, and this has been my experience all week. So, I have spent a lot of time this week putting Spider-Man and Ghost Spider and Iron Man and Hulk and all these things into photos of me and my son. And once, no, more than once, but once in particular, it just completely replaced my three-year-old son with a superhero. And he thought it was weird. He had this moment. He like he couldn't process what had just happened. And I've spent this whole week being super conflicted about like I'm sitting here making AI pictures with my son that make him happy. Like he's enjoying this thing and he doesn't understand all the reasons it's weird and bad, but I do and like what am I showing this kid that are just fake pictures of him with Spider-Man?
I'll give you like 10 different examples of this in the history of tech. Um the loudness wars in music are an enormously good example of this. In the late 70s and 80s, there's like a lot of dynamics in music. like the quiet parts are quiet and the loud parts are loud. And you can just hear this in a lot of classical rock albums. As we go from the late 80s into the 90s and particularly in the 2000s, everyone realizes that people like louder sounds.
They just like louder things. They just perceive that to sound better. So music just got loud.
Like the amount of compression on a track just was insane. So the quiet parts were basically as loud as the loud parts. And everything was super loud.
Just really loud. And dynamics were crushed out of music. like you couldn't tell the quiet parts and the loud parts and consumers could not perceive this. They were like, "Everything's loud. It sounds awesome." And eventually the music industry and a bunch of recording engineers and like artists were like, "Stop it." And you just go read about the loudness wars. Like this is a real thing that happened. But an industry was like, "We have to get away from this problem. Like we're doing something bad to ourselves. We should stop it." That's one. Um the retail mode setting on TVs.
I was just about to say brightness wars.
Yeah, right. Like they're just super bright and the settings are all jacked up and motion smoothing is turned on because in the store that's the one people like. But then when you're watching a TV at home, you're like, "This is horrible and I don't know what to do about it." And Tom Cruz has to make PSAs being like, "Turn on filmmaker mode. I beg of you because you're ruining my art."
This is an industry that in order to just move units destroyed the fidelity and truth of its own product. you there. It's just all over the place. Like this is a thing that happens particularly in representations of art. This is just the next turn of it in my eyes that the smartphone industry knows that people like retouching their photos, they like editing their photos, they love filters, they love beauty filters, they love looking skinnier. There was a time several years ago where the split between what the Asian markets would accept in terms of beauty filters was vastly different than what the American market would accept and all these companies had to walk a tight rope of saying we don't have beauty filters but here are some apps you can use in Asia right and like Samsung basically was like we have beauty filters like um I mean we live through it and I think that that time is kind of over there are filters everywhere Every Tik Tocker has a beauty filter on all the time. Instagram is literally on trial right now for making its product more addictive and dangerous to children. And part of that conversation is what filters are allowed. Adamary and Mark Zuckerberg were both on the stand over the past two weeks talking about what beauty filters they would allow for teenage girls. Like this is real high stakes dangerous territory for all of these companies.
Yeah. and then hear Samsung joking about how it can change your outfits and put dogs in your photos as though those are the things people are going to do, right? When in reality people are going to do horrible things to photos of women with the ability to change outfits and they're going to make all kinds of deep fakes of people in all kinds of situations they weren't actually in. And there's no way you can claim that you don't know these things are going to happen, but you're trying to sell more phones. So, you make the music as loud as possible. You make the TV and the screen as bright as possible. You turn on motion smoothing. You create a deep fake camera and you say this is what the market wanted. And I'm telling you there is a mechanism to regulate this industry. You can do it. One part of it is the industry itself saying we've gotten out of control. We should pull this back which has happened in the past. You get Tom Cruz to just say look I need filmmaker mode.
Yeah. I don't think that's happening. I don't see that anywhere in this industry right now. And the other one is to say, "Look, these features need to be illegal. You should not ship these features to this many people." And I know we're going to get people say, "Well, Photoshop could do it." I know we're going to get people say, "Look, the metadata will solve it." We have coverage of those things in detail on our site for years. We will link the piece where we take down the Photoshop argument like inch by inch because it does not work at scale. Yes, Photoshop has existed for years. Most people don't have it and they can't use it, right? You make this a natural language prompt, that is a whole new category of danger. C2PA does not work. Content authenticity does not work. And even when if it did, platforms like X don't respect it. They don't display it. So, it doesn't matter because you're still distributing content people cannot understand. I'm like fired up about this because we've been covering this for years and it has usually been people laughing at us because I'm crashing out about photos of the moon, right? And we just did it. We just jumped over the bar and now we're making deep fakes on the phone with natural language prompt and calling it a camera and there's something very bad there. And I think the moon bit is a useful analog here because the reason the moon part of it is scary is because it ends here, right? Like this is the end of that thing because once you start down this road, this is where you land. And you can't have the good silly fun outfit try on part without the horrible nude deep face of women part. You just can't. Like you don't get change my outfit without put this woman in a bikini. You don't get it. It doesn't exist. There is no indication so far that those safeguards are either possible or that these companies are interested in doing them or have been remotely contemplated. And maybe Samsung has made it so if you type bikini into this prompt, it won't do it. They have not made one handwave at this possibility. And I will tell you from our own audience, some people are gonna say, "But what if I want to put myself in a bikini?"
And now Samsung is in what amounts to a content moderation nightmare.
Yep. So I look, we're going to ask Samsung more questions, but my point of view is we have crossed a line here where the market, the audience, the people should say, "Nope, you've gone too far." The industry should start saying, "We've gone too far." And if that doesn't happen, I am confident governments of the world, maybe not the United States government, which apparently doesn't function anymore. But governments around the world are going to start very quickly saying these features should be illegal.
I think you're right. And I think there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that that first step will happen. The idea of someone in the industry saying, "Well, we've gone too far. We have to go back." Like, if anything, everything is accelerating in that direction because again, you need to sell more phones. The goal is to sell more phones. And I actually think the brightness one is a fun example because a lot of people buy bright TVs, take them home, realize it looks like [__] and fix it. But it gets it out of the store. And so all they care about is the thing that gets it out of the store. And like we make a joke about turning off motion smoothing. Motion smoothing's on because it makes you buy the TV in the store because it looks nice in some sort of unknowable way. This is even if it's not a use case and I firmly believe that for most people it's not. It is a splashy thing that they get to put on the website that will generate headlines and make people buy their phone. That's and they will live with every consequence downstream of that if it gets you out of the store with that phone because somebody at a Verizon store can demo that thing for you and it'll seem kind of neat.
Yeah. And I don't know, man. Like we were at the Boston Children's Museum last week and I opened Lightroom and I took a person's face out of the background of a photo of my kids and you're right. It feels I know I did it. Yeah, everyone I sent that photo to was like, "What a great photo." And I was like, "I'm living in it. I'm just I'm living in the ambiguity that I talk about on my own show every week." But that felt at least I'll just give it back to Google. Google their line forever has been, "We are here to make memories," right? And like there's some fuzzy amount of stuff that you can allow in the service of making a memory. And I was like, "Well, my kids really were in the museum. I was actually here. I actually took this photo." Yeah. I don't remember this person's face in the background. Like the moment I'm capturing looked like this to me.
I don't know. There's a lot there. There's another hour of philosophical crisis in that moment.
But at least it's still mostly true.
Yeah. This is just fakery. And I don't know if there's going to be anyone who stops it before some people get really hurt, but it is obvious how some people will get really hurt here.
Yep. Agreed. Um, one more Google thing we should talk about before we stop talking about Samsung. And I say Google because there is a fascinating Gemini Bixby Samsung AI thing happening here. But one of the other announcements at this event was agentic AI like in a very straightforward way. They announced that your Pixel 10 or your Samsung Galaxy S26 is going to be able to do agentic Assistant stuff. Um, Samir Samat who runs Android at Google really tried to breeze past that. He was like, "Some people call it AI. I just call it getting things done." And it's like, "No, you also call it agentic. You've been on stage saying words like agentic AI for the last couple of years." But the things they showed off are like you can now ask your phone to book you an Uber and it just will do it for you. You can ask it to order food and it will do it for you. Like this is straightforwardly the stuff we have been talking about that Apple is trying to do with Siri that Google is barreling towards this Gemini. This idea of like your phone should just be able to use itself on your behalf. They just did it. It hasn't shipped. None of it is real. We'll see how any of it actually works. But like Google and Samsung just announced the thing like they did the next phase of phones according to everybody today.
Yeah. I mean, this is what Apple announced in its demo video in 2024, WWDC. Yeah. Right. You talk to Siri using app intents, which was a framework they announced at that WWDC. Siri will run around and use the apps on your phones for you and call it a day. I don't know if that's exactly what Google was showing here. They have some ability to use MCP on the phone, model context protocol, which is how you would use these apps. It is the big standard that Enthropic is pushing that everyone has signed on to. Allison got a demo with Samir. He talked to her about it and the demos that she saw were literally Gemini using apps on the phone and they had opened the apps virtually, right? So they weren't actually running on the phone in the foreground. They were just like virtualized instances of the apps.
Yeah, it's like a phone inside your phone that Yeah, it doesn't it's not a good UI. It's very odd.
Well, it's not supposed to be a UI for you. It's a UI for Gemini. So Gemini basically gets its own like dockerized version of Android to run in and it's virtualized your phone and it's running apps virtual. It's like that's all very cool and it's like clicking around in there.
We have to see if it's going to work.
But Samir's point of view is you should not care how it works.
Right. Either we're clicking around on these apps or we will have MCP or we will use the app functions framework which is their version of Siri intents. like they have a lot of ways for Gemini to use these apps and they're just going to use them. And you know, I have the same questions for Google as I do for Apple. Why would app developers want to do this? If you're a Door Dash or Uber or whatever, why would you want to get disintermediated and not get to show your interface and your ads and whatever to people? I call this the Door Dash problem. We've done a long decoder on it. And so Allison asked Samir about this and his answer is fascinating. He said, "This technology is happening and the question is how do we figure out the right ways to embrace it together?" It was ice cold, dude.
Ice cold. He's like, "We're gonna do this. We're doing it. It's like...
Here we go. Like the phone can click around the apps for you, and if the apps are on the phone, we're going to click on them. And like, fine. Like, I think that is super interesting. I saw a bunch of people online, you know, we post about it, say, "Does it work? This is vaporware, too."
It might be. It's vapor till it ships, right? And they say they're going to ship it soon in preview. We'll see if it actually works. A lot of the stuff has not actually worked. I'm more willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt than I was with Apple two years ago. First of all, Google has Gemini. It's the thing they made, and it's so good that Apple's going to use it, too.
Yeah. Google is the reason that in theory Apple is going to be able to pull this off, which means Google has many more advantages to pulling it off. I also think that the thing you described, the sort of agnosticism towards process, is really smart on Google's part because Apple has really tried to leverage the fact that developers will do whatever it says to make Siri App Intents be the thing. And it's been doing this with Spotlight, and it is like developers are going to open up their apps to us because we are Apple, and that is what we are requiring. And developers largely told Apple to just suck it. And so Apple has since turned to really embracing MCP as a more open way to do this. But even that required... Apple's version of MCP is still very much an Apple walled-garden version of MCP.
But for Google to say, okay, well, if you want to have a really great experience with our app that is clean and simple and works for everybody, we have this app functions thing. If you want something that you don't really have to worry about, you just sort of open up your database and we'll come play with it, do MCP. And if you don't, we're going to use your app anyway.
Yeah, it's a leverage play, right? Like Google is like, it actually doesn't matter whether developers buy into this or not. We have the technology to just go use their app. And actually, the problem is the experience is going to suck, and so they're going to have to play ball. Like this is such a forcing function if Gemini is actually good at this for everyone else to just fall in line. And that's what I think Samir means. He's like clear in that statement of this tech is happening is we don't need your help to do this. Yeah, we'd love your help. It'll be better if you do, but we don't need your help to do this.
And I think that's why I'm also saying I'm willing to give Google the benefit of doubt. They shipped Auto Browse in Chrome. Yeah, it works, you know, in the way that these agentic browsers work. Like it'll stumble around the web for you and get you an outcome. Um, they have an, uh, commerce version of MCP called UCP, which I think is hilarious. Um, uh, and that's just for retailers to participate in because every retailer wants to do agentic commerce in some way.
People are very alarmed by this, by the way. We should do a deep dive into the UCP stuff at some point, but the idea of like Google being the arbiter for pricing on the internet terrifies a lot of people.
Yeah. And then if you ask Google, they're like, "Everyone just wants our demand." And so, like, there's a real mismatch here of how everyone...
Both those things can be true at the same time. That's what monopolies are for.
Yep. Uh, especially big monopolies of search demand, of direct intent consumer demand. Google knows exactly how to use that power in the...
Weird. It's almost like it lost two lawsuits and has really no cost to show for it so far.
Uh, and then there's just this last piece, uh, where again I'm just willing to give Google the benefit of that. They shipped Gemini and personal intelligence. They shipped Auto Browse. Like this isn't a far jump from the stuff Google's already been doing. And then right next to that, you know, this whole industry has been tearing itself apart over OpenClaw like the past two weeks. Yeah. And like what is that? It's a little agentic system that runs on whatever computer you want it to run on. It's going to bang around the web and do whatever it wants. And it's like, well, that works. And like one guy vibe coded that until he got himself a job at OpenAI. Like, you know, there is a turn happening in AI that we should talk about where it, you know, I think our podcast is as skeptical as it gets with these AI tools. We have covered more of the failures of these companies hyping things that cannot happen than maybe any other tech podcast. Uh, with always with an eye of, well, the stuff that works is good.
I spent three hours on a train this morning doing Claude Code stuff and it was awesome.
Yeah. Like there's something happening. There's one turn that got made here recently where I think the reason Samir doesn't want to say agentic is all of that stuff is wildly overhyped. Mhm.
And I think this is very much, you know, I've talked to Dara, the CEO of Uber, and he's like, "Yeah, we're willing to try anything." So now you can call an Uber using Gemini on an Android phone. Like that's like they're constraining this so they can actually deliver the things. And it's particularly constrained to ride hailing and food delivery, which are, by the way, not hard problems in the scheme of like accomplishing goals on your phone.
Ordering an Uber is a pretty easy one. There's a reason that like one of the first cool Alexa things 12 years ago was ordering an Uber. It's a pretty straightforward set of computational problems.
Yeah. They need to know where you are.
Yeah. But things get vastly more complicated immediately after that, right? Like and that's the long tail of stuff you have to get right in order for this stuff to work in a useful, reliable way for people. Like Uber and DoorDash are the setting timers and playing music of our time, right? And those that last generation never really found a way beyond that.
Neither has this one so far.
Yeah. I mean, I would even say DoorDash food delivery is exponentially more complicated than Uber. Like you call an Uber, the set of outcomes is pretty limited. It's like where are you and is it going to be a Camry or a Highlander? Like that's it, you know? And like some people want a button to make sure they don't get a Model 3 because they get car sick of Model 3s. That's it. That's like your whole universe of choices.
Um, you know, I want a sandwich is like a much more complicated thing to sort...
And like we'll see if any of this stuff works. I just I think the kneejerk attitude that Apple couldn't ship it. We've talked a lot about assistants in the smart home and how complicated they have found that problem. I think Google is on purpose constraining what they're doing here to make sure it ships. And you can see that they have already set up basically every building block they need to make this work.
And so, yeah, we got to see it. We're going to test it out. I just I don't have the same like it's a vapor that I have towards the Rabbit R1 or like whatever else. Like we know Samir, you and I have both talked to him at length about a whole bunch of stuff. There's no way he's getting on stage and putting himself in a position that anything feels like what Microsoft put itself into with its Copilot ads for Windows. Like that's just not happening. I really do think that there's a reason it's food delivery and ride sharing to begin with. And I also think you can see in all of their other products that are actually shipping today like how they can be confident that they can do everything else they want to do.
Yep. Agreed. All right. There's more Samsung stuff to do, but uh Allison Johnson's going to come on the show on Tuesday and we're going to talk through more of the news. Um she also tried the Galaxy Buds. She's going to MWC, we should say MWC, which is like the big mobile conference every year that starts, I think, on Sunday, uh in Barcelona. There's going to be a lot of stuff. She'll be on the show. We'll have more to cover.
Can I just say the thing that's going to happen at MWC this year?
There's going to be a lot of noise about 6G.
It's coming. Get ready. I won't spoil it, but it's coming.
Okay, I'm just telling you this now. We will do surgery on a grape over 6G.
This is the vergiest story in history.
It's the year we are going to try to do surgery on a grape.
We're going to do edge-collated data centers that do self-driving cars and I'm in the back of that car wearing my augmented reality glasses doing surgery on a grape all over the low latency power of five, I mean 6G.
I can't wait. It's going to be amazing. All right, we should take a break and then we're going to come back. We're going to talk some Xbox news. We'll be back.
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All right, we're back. So, the other big news that's been happening this week, and it's kind of been happening all week, is uh this big shakeup inside of Microsoft and particularly on the Xbox team. Um the news in particular is that Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond who have been running all things Xbox and all things gaming at Microsoft are out. The Phil Spencer thing in particular seems like it had been a long time in the works. Um but there's a sort of messy shakeup as part of all this. Uh Asha Sharma is now the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. There's just a lot of stuff happening here and I think uh you and Tom Warren who's been covering this for us did a big Decoder about this, right? Talking through sort of the business logistics of all of it.
Yeah, by the time you're listening to this, that Decoder will be out. Tom and I spent I don't know, half an hour just unpacking the sort of Phil Spencer, did he or did he not retire as previously announced, his longtime deputy Sarah Bond, who everyone thought would replace him, didn't get that job. And I, you know, there's some controversy online about just the reporting around why she didn't get that job. She didn't get that job. And right, people at Microsoft have a lot of theories that they shared with Tom about why she didn't get that job.
Asha got that job. And so Phil had announced ages ago that he was going to retire. Whether or not the decision to retire now was Phil's decision, it remains an open question, right? But it is just straightforward to say the person that everyone assumed would get his job upon retirement did not get that job.
And you know, Tom, in fact the job went to someone who represents a pretty big pivot. Asha Sharma comes from AI work at Microsoft and she was the COO of Instacart. We should ask her about the DoorDash problem.
Uh so she's and she was at Meta before. So she is an operator.
Yeah.
And you know you can listen to that episode of Decoder. It's out right now. Tom gets into the weeds of like all the strategy. The thing that is worth saying is Xbox as a product has not been successful for a long time.
Correct. And I can actually point to when it wasn't, when it stopped being successful because I wrote the story uh when Microsoft launched the Xbox One. Do you want to see this one?
This is you. This is me and David as babies in early Verge in the office all night trying to turn a story on a tight deadline and I was like literally writing paragraphs and sending them to you to edit and while I would write the next paragraph because it was such a long night. So, Microsoft called me to profile the Xbox One team before the launch of the Xbox and I had like one weekend to turn this whole story on like a video, the whole thing. And I wrote this thing and I was like, "Microsoft wants to put a Windows PC under your TV. It's the only thing they've ever wanted to do." And the Xbox One is that thing. And longtime Vergecast listeners will know. This is when I started railing against IR blasters. Yeah. Because IR blasters are stupid. Like they are the hack to control a cable box. Or at least they were. And they never worked and none of these ideas ever worked. And the centerpiece of the Xbox One was an IR blaster. And I wrote that story and I remember reading that story and like within a year every single executive that I profiled for that story had been fired from Microsoft because this thing was such a flop.
I was and the reason it flopped is really telling, right? Because Microsoft comes out with this thing and they're like, "Okay, we've made this console that is so much more than gaming." So Sony comes out with the PlayStation 4 and is like this is a gaming console for gamers to play games and just wipes the floor with Xbox as a result.
Killed them and none of the TV stuff even worked on the Xbox One and it shipped for the Kinect which like had some good games. It was like the whole thing was nuts and it was just a bad idea and Phil Spencer is the guy who fixed it. All those executives got fired and Phil showed up.
Well, he was the guy who showed up. Did he fix it? Who knows? He sure tried to fix it and to whatever extent that he refocused Xbox on video games.
Well, he also had and used gamer cred in a very real way. Like he was when he came in perceived as a person who plays and loves and knows games and that is going to be valuable to the Xbox team.
Okay. Okay, so here's what I will offer you today in 2026, 13 years after David and I pulled an all-nighter in our office on 40th Street, New York.
I still like that story. I read it again not that long ago.
It was good. It opened with what is obviously now in retrospect a totally sleep-deprived metaphor about Trojan horses.
Who knows, man. Uh but it's good. It's a good story.
Uh yeah, we're babies. Uh we didn't have any babies. That's why we're up all night in the office together, just like half drunk writing on Xboxes. It was a charming time in our lives. Uh 13 years later, 2026, Phil is out, handpicked successor doesn't get the job. Asha, the new person from outside of Xbox, gets the job, and she says, "We're going to make this about it. We're going to get the Xbox back." And she makes a lot of noise about consoles and being refocused on consoles. She gave an interview to Windows Central with Matt Booty, the chief content officer, and she says, "I need to understand why these decisions were made and what the goals were."
You can just ask Phil why he made these decisions.
He's just right there. Yeah.
Phil's been on Decoder twice. I've literally asked him how and why he makes decisions. He's forthcoming with the answers. You get the sense that they're going to throw all that stuff away, right? What Satya Nadella wanted was fresh eyes on this whole project. And embedded in all of this is hilariously Microsoft's failure along with Epic to get Apple to open the App Store because you can really see that what they wanted the whole time was to unlock new gamers on phones, which is where new gamers are. They are not really buying consoles. Even Microsoft and Sony have this problem.
Yeah. And their whole plan was to ship a game streaming app on phones and win there, right? Because what is Microsoft? It's Azure.
So, so you put the game streaming app on phones and you run it on Azure and you've won. Hooray. And they couldn't do it. What were you going to say?
That's the thing. It's an Azure company is I think the thing that unites all of this to me and as I look through Microsoft has had a series of ideas about what the Xbox might be and how it might make money from gaming. Right? One of it was the Xbox is a game console but it's actually a Windows computer. And then it was well the Xbox is a game console but it's actually a cloud machine. And then it was like, well, it's a game console, but actually we make money from games. Like, the Xbox has never actually been allowed to be the Xbox. It has just had to be the vessel for somebody else's strategy at Microsoft for so long. And it's why I come back to Sony being like, we made a thing that plays video games for people to play video games on. Microsoft has not made that case for the Xbox like ever. And I think the thing that really threw this away for Microsoft and I think one of the reasons a lot of people are saying that Sarah Bond might be gone is this everything's an Xbox strategy that they underwent, right? Where a couple of years ago they start coming out with this idea that actually the Xbox is not a console after all that your phone is an Xbox and your laptop is an Xbox and your TV is an Xbox. And obviously this is a story about game streaming which I think is a good idea that is not yet materialized.
That idea would have worked maybe it wouldn't have worked with like smart TV apps. I don't know if it were Tizen apps. That idea works if game streaming was a kind of app you could ship on iOS and Android devices and if the internet is better like in a real way there are a lot of people because those apps don't exist.
Fair. Yeah. Agreed. So I think it definitely didn't get a fair shake to play that and I think it made a wrong bet that that world was coming and that uh they were left with streaming through Safari on your phone and that's not the answer.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean like we I think Microsoft, they couldn't go to open war with Apple. They just couldn't. But I think they were extremely supportive of Spotify and Epic and all of the other the Coalition for App Fairness uh trying to crack open the App Store in this way. And you can see in those cases, there's a lot of talk about game streaming and Microsoft trying to do this stuff in the background.
It just didn't work. It like that didn't work. They were not able to use the regulatory power of governments around the world to crack open the app store and actually turn your iPhone into an Xbox. And you can turn as many Samsung smart TVs into Xboxes as you want.
But if you can't solve the big problem, you cannot execute the strategy. And they just never gave up on it.
Right. And it's both a self-perpetuating and a self-defeating thing, right? Because if you don't have the numbers, you don't have the games. And so in Microsoft's case, what they had to go do is spend an absolutely enormous amount of money and then legal time and money going and getting the games by buying Activision Blizzard. And then you have to do all the things to make that defensible, which requires making a bunch of crazy decisions like putting Xbox exclusives on other platforms. And so all of a sudden, you've done everything but make a gaming console for people to play games on.
Yeah. And I do think you're right that what Asha Sharma seems to be suggesting is that there is a real sense of like let's throw all of that away and get back to being a thing for people to play games with. And the question to me is will the PE if that is her plan, will the people she works for bet on that plan long enough to even see it out? Because historically speaking, the answer is no.
Yeah, I don't know. I truly don't know. I don't even know if her hints about Xbox going back to Xbox mean consoles.
Maybe not, right? I do think it's weird.
It might mean weird Windows-powered Steam Decks made by third parties.
I mean, A, it definitely means that. But B, I do think I was reading back through a bunch of our coverage and uh a couple of folks covering this this week pointed out that it continues to be weird that Microsoft never shipped a handheld. That like through all of this stuff, Phil Spencer spent years hinting that Microsoft really liked handhelds, might do something. Meanwhile, the Steam Deck clearly a good idea, clearly has real product market fit. The Nintendo Switch, one of the most successful consoles in history. Like, it's not unclear that this thing can work. And Microsoft just has yet to in any kind of meaningful way throw its hat in the ring. Instead, it ships weird bad versions of Windows onto somebody else's hardware. And like if again the thing in front of Asha Sharma is like if all of the resources of Microsoft went to her, you reboot Windows entirely to make the Xbox work. And I just don't see that happening.
But like that's the one you'd have to do. If you're Satya and you're like the only thing I care about is making the Xbox work, you give Windows to the Xbox team.
No way.
That's what got them all sideways with the Xbox One. I totally disagree with that.
I think No, they gave the Xbox to the Windows team.
I think the thing that we have learned about Windows and gaming recently and it's all over the site. I'm not even saying I have the depth of expertise here. I'm saying that we have Sean Hollister on our team and we have Nathan and we have all these people who understand the actual dynamics of these products and what they are constantly telling us is that Linux is a better platform to run Windows games on than Windows is right now.
You're right. That's probably a better way of saying it. What Satya Nadella would do if all he cared about was Xbox was allow the Xbox team to stop using Windows. That's the answer, right? And that's where the Xbox came from. Like famously J Allard got to start a skunk works project and they allowed him to not use Windows, right?
Which was the entire the alpha and omega of Microsoft at the time was the Windows business.
And J Allard who started Xbox was like, I didn't do it. And I don't think that he J Allard had any pretensions about whether or not they were going to Trojan horse a Windows PC under your TV. They just got there with the Xbox One and they've been backing out of it ever since. You know, Tom's point to me was when they lost that generation, they'd lost forever because that was the first generation with digital games and once people bought the digital library, they weren't ever going to give it up in the way that you know your physical library, well, what are you going to do?
Right? Game doesn't work anymore anyway.
Yeah, once you're on a platform and you have an account, you have a digital library, like you're going to stay there. You can quibble with that, but I think Microsoft perceived that they had lost that in that way and they've just been trying to back out of it ever since. So, I don't know what Asha is going to do with the Xbox. I suspect what they're going to try to do is what Microsoft is best at doing, which is continue pushing on the idea that Xbox is a software platform that should go everywhere. The same way that they basically got out of the Windows Phone debacle by saying, you know what, we're an applications provider. We're a cloud provider, and if you want to run iOS applications, you can run them on Azure, and we'll be a better place for that than anywhere else to host your applications. And that worked. It made them a very wealthy company. Yeah, they're trying to do it right now with AI.
They are in some kind of weird messy divorce with OpenAI, and no one is using Copilot. And I suspect all of that made Nadella look at why did we buy Activision Blizzard for what? Almost $70 billion.
Yeah. It's the biggest acquisition of their history. One of the biggest acquisitions of all time. And it's like to get Candy Crush money. That's it. That's all we're getting out of it. Like we got to rethink this.
Yeah. And so I bet if AI was doing what they thought it was going to do and they weren't out there being like we have to make sure it delivers value, which is a thing that Nadella is saying right now. If that was going gangbusters, maybe this pressure wouldn't be so hard on the Xbox division, but it's not going gangbusters. And I think this strategy is not going to pay off the way they wanted it to. I'm very curious to see if she changes it. I agree. I think you're right that that is the most obvious pivot. And I also think in every meaningful way that is the end of Xbox. Xbox becomes a sort of infrastructural feature. It's a thing you can buy on Azure, not a meaningful consumer brand that lots of people care about.
They own all these studios. They said they're not going to let anyone off in the studios. They have all these angry gamers. This is their only consumer brand. This is the only place Microsoft can even dare to dream of reaching a young person is through Xbox.
Yeah. It's either that or you get your first job and Copilot is on the screen and it's like well this sucks and those are your two choices. So I suspect they will find a way to keep the brand alive if only to keep that youth consumer touch point. But man I don't know there's no way that they're going to just keep shipping consoles and losing. I think you're right and I think they're out and I think it's going to be fast. But we will come back and we will talk about that. We should take one more break then we're going to come back. We're going to do some lightning round stuff. We'll be right back.
Hey everyone, this segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss Helen Havoc, The Verge's publisher, and L'Oreal Group's global vice president of tech and open innovation. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.
Um, we're going to start with a Decoder classic question. What does tech and open innovation mean at L'Oreal? Who is on your team? What kind of projects do you work on?
Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in L'Oreal working with startups outside and it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech. So we do all those partnerships and our team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page and now how can we bring beauty and tech together?
How do you decide which projects to invest in?
Um, at the beginning I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech. So, we're really tech-centric and then over time we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so, we have a little bit more kind of process behind how we choose projects. Now, we try and kind of do things like upgrading the hairdryer to be able to do three out of four people have a hairdryer at home and so how can we make it better? Um or this year like the flat irons that we're using and um LED mask and stuff like that. So we do have a little bit of that kind of um process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity. So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think of some new clever ideas, too.
All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause.
