Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Plus Max, a new streaming service coming to you in 2026.
You leave her alone. Somehow this is all Max's fault. You've named your daughter Skydance, from what I understand.
She's very wealthy. It's going very well. Her dad has no large s. It's a real shame. I will never buy her a media company.
Ellison Skydance is a real Taylor Sheridan name. Hi, I'm Ellison Skydance. Just putting it out there. I'm hearing like a Netflix western.
Yeah, it's good stuff. I'm into it. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil is here. Hello, sir.
It's good to have you back. I missed you.
I'm very glad to be here. How have things been?
They've been good. You know, other David did a good job.
He did do a good job. The people love David to a point that was like really alarming for my own ego. Like a lot of love for David and Mel in my place.
And he's dead now. Um, but we missed you, man. We'll have him back. We're gonna find a way to make David Al part of the Verge extended universe because he was great. But we did miss you. I missed you. I'm glad you're back. And it sounds like the family is doing good.
Yeah, things are good. It's uh three is a lot of children in a very like strange way. There's the first thing that happens when you have three kids is people immediately start being like, 'Well, you might as well have a fourth, right?' And it's like which I just don't understand. But it is now to the point where I feel like I have infinity children. Uh there's just every time I turn around there's just another one. Uh so that's been interesting to get used to. But everybody's good. Uh we had like two weeks of no one sleeping.
Just no one. Um but now we're coming out of that and I feel alive again for the first time.
We last year we had children at the same time.
And I do not feel like we have exited the bad part of having a baby with our second one. But you are just you're back in it.
My number one parenting recommendation now is don't have two kids who can't walk. Uh and it's like there's a real thing that is like we were talking to a family who had kids at about the same gap as ours and they were like, 'Oh, once it's so fun because they'll have each other and they'll be so close in age that they'll grow up as peers and I'm very excited about that.' And they're like, 'Oh, it's like in 5 years.' I'm like, 'Oh my god, five yearsuch.'
And instead, I'm like, I have not had an arm free in two months in a way that is like very hard to describe. Like I've gotten good at doing everything with like my elbows now because that's what I have to accomplish goals while I carry two children. It's a lot. I don't recommend having two tiny children at the same time if you can avoid it.
But, you know, they're real cute and it works out. Um, yeah, I've also had a lot of time to catch up on TV shows and movies over the last seven weeks, which is if you'd like to talk about any major motion picture from mid to late 2025, I am ready for it.
I'm nowhere there. We should talk about lanterns for like the full hour, but there's like a lot of gadget news.
There is a lot of gadget news. That is primarily what we are here to talk about. So, uh, we have Amazon gadget news. It's a big week for what is a computer in a way that is actually very fun and I'm excited to be back for. Uh, Amazon is doing tablets again. Microsoft is doing AI computers. Google books are here. I have one. Uh I am desperate to talk about them. You guys have been talking about them and I have so many feelings and all of you are wrong and I want to talk about all of them. Uh Apple has just announced today as we're recording that its big home event is next week on the 13th. There's just a lot of new ideas about how we're supposed to use technology happening all at once. Um and Skydance owns Hollywood. We'll get to that. Literally, that is coming at the very end of the show is how many gadgets there are.
Should we start with Amazon? Amazon feels to me like kind of the most immediately newsy. It dropped today, Thursday, as we're recording. Um, I also this is like a perfectly neioded gadget announcement because the big thing today is the Alexa tablets, a new vastly superior line of tablets from Amazon. They're not Fire tablets. are actually phasing out the Fire tablet brand in favor of a better higher-end set of tablets that people will actually like to use. And the question of like what does it mean for Amazon to be a good hardware company I think is really interesting. It's also entirely about the display. Like I had a call with Panos Panay who runs all of the devices and Alexa stuff at Amazon about all of the Alexa tablets. All we talked about the whole call was this new nanomat display that Amazon has built that they swear is like the greatest tablet screen you've ever seen in your life.
It does look amazing in all of the photos and videos.
It does. It really does. So, the idea is that it takes some of the matte texture that is often just put on as a film and actually like bakes it into the glass. And Terrence O'Brien on our team saw it, said it looks great. We'll get one to review. Very excited to see it. What do you make of just the existence of Alexa tablets?
Oh, I have so many thoughts about this. You talked to Panos. I didn't, but I talked to Panos many times over the years. I have a sense of Panos decisions.
Like you can identify Panos decisions. You can just see him at a distance. And there are two here that I think are really important. One, he just upleveled the hardware.
And I say this as a person who has Fire tablets, right? We've got kids. We have a Sonos system. There's just a Fire tablet sitting around to control the Sonos system, and that's what it does. And the only reason we have it is because it's one of the few tablets you can get that has pogo pin charging. So it can just sit in a dock all day.
And you can open the app and it just stays charged. And so like this is an odd piece of weird technology that I interact with all the time. Like you would just not expect me to be a Fire tablet person.
I would not. That is genuinely surprising.
But it is literally because you can just like put it in the dock and it charges and then you can like use a controller. Um the two decisions are one, none of that hardware is any good.
Correct. Aside from the fact that you could put it in a dock and charge it, it appears this hardware is very good.
He wants it to be premium hardware. That is just a panis decision. You can hear him in the meeting like why is it bad? You know, right? That's his personality.
That's not a like dig on the old tablets. It's a strategy shift. Like yeah, Amazon never aspired to make good tablets before. They wanted them to be dirt cheap and
they were $29. to get Amazon Kids and then that was a subscription and that was a whole strategy cuz they couldn't compete with the iPad and this is the second big Panos decision that I'm utterly curious about.
They have the Play Store. They got rid of their dumb Amazon App Store and they're just straight up Android tablets that are part of Google's ecosystem which comes with a bunch of Google stuff.
Mhm. and the fact that they're called Alexa tablets, that you are meant to talk to Amazon's assistant, which has some amount of agentic capability and presumably more to come. I can just hear Panos being like, 'Well, apps are boring. They're the past. Just give people Google. Why are we fighting that fight? We're going to fight the next war.' And I don't know if Alexa is good enough to fight the next war.
But those are the two decisions where you know at least at distance I can see Amazon hired panos pane and he is very opinionated and very crisp in his decision-m and those are the two changes. The hardware is nicer and we're leaving the apps in the past.
Well, I would put it slightly differently, which is I think the mistake that a lot of people have made is deciding that apps are the past. And what it actually is is apps are solved, right? The everybody needs apps. Like it turns out that you have to have an app store or else nothing else matters, right? Like if you decide apps don't matter, agentic AI is the only thing, you build the humane pin and your company dies and you sell to HP and you go make printers. Like that's what happens when you decide that apps are dead. But going and trying to compete in app stores is a complete waste of time. It like every many have tried, none have succeeded. And the only way to the next thing is to acknowledge that, right? So you say, okay, we're not going to try to play the app game. We're not going to try to build a bunch of new things. We're going to have a couple of new ideas around this fundamentally solved problem, which is the Google Play Store. We can't beat it. We're not even going to try. But we're gonna use it to spring to the next thing. And I think that is the right bet and it's the bet way too many companies forget to make because apps are not the past. They're not. They are the present in a super duper real way. And the only way to bet that it's the future is to actually do the app thing in the first place. And I think again that's like we're going to get to Google books, but like that's the Google book story too, right? They're like, 'Oh, we think agentic AI and the web can solve all of your problems.' And everybody's like, 'I would like apps, please.' And they're like, 'Okay, here's some apps. Now we can go do the other things.' And so I think Amazon is trying to do the same thing here.
Yeah. We're two sides of the same coin here. If you believe that there is a future past apps, that apps are solved, then you give up and put the Play Store on these tablets.
Cuz you have to put all of your focus on the next thing. But until that next thing took any shape, you had to make your own app store.
Because otherwise, you were just handing your business to Google. And so that's what I'm getting at is they are willing to concede the past, perhaps the present to Google. And right like the Play Store comes with a bunch of in-app purchase fees and all that stuff that Google gets sued for. I have no idea if Amazon was able to negotiate different rates with Google.
But if you have the Play Store, the app developers are going to pay Google for in-app purchases. They're probably not going to pay Amazon. So, you've just conceded the revenue model of the present, right? And you're on your way to Alexa should be your all-encompassing AGI agent to do all of the economic activity of the future. And you're probably better off making that bet. And that's what I mean. Like, yes, it's the past and that I don't think there's going to be a lot of innovation there. There's a lot of emphasis on the AI part. Whether that's good or bad like fully remains to be seen.
Yeah, but it is. And I think the tablet to me is super interesting because it sort of clears the deck for that question in a way that I think is really exciting if the hardware is as good as advertised. And I think it probably is. Like a company like Amazon certainly has the resources to make great products if it wants to. It has gotten in its way many times, but I think this thing by all accounts so far seems to be a good piece of hardware. If you remove the why doesn't it have this thing by giving it, you know, a decent keyboard case and a decent stylus and all of the Android apps that you want, you've gotten to the point where it's like, okay, now can our thing and in this case that thing is Alexa plus actually win, right? Like do we have the next thing here? And now in a certain way it's going to actually get to answer that question because the other stuff is just sort of solved. So if you can just make a good tablet with Android apps, great. That is turns out easy thing to do if you just do it.
Is this good enough to be like what you would call the default Android tablet?
I think default Android tablet is such an insult of a thing.
But you know like for years we'd be like what's the default Windows computer?
And maybe XPS 13. It's the XPS 13 some years and it's the Surface laptop some other years and but I mean we made a lot of hay back in the end gadget days talking about the default Windows laptop.
Joanna Stern built an empire on the default Windows laptop. Uh and then it was the XPS 13 for like years and years and years. If you ask me what is the default Android tablet, I would some Galaxy Tab.
No, I think you would like deep sigh and then say it's a Fire tablet.
No, not a fire. No, no, not because it doesn't have the Play Store. But I'm saying right now, but it is Okay, go ahead. Make your argument in favor of the Fire.
I think that my argument is less in favor of the Fire tablet and more against the entire ecosystem of Android tablets. I mean, realistically, I don't think anyone was looking for an Android tablet. You were either looking for an iPad or you didn't want to spend the money on an iPad and so you land five Android tablet fans just furiously writing you emails right now.
There are I'm okay with that.
Uh, and listen, the Pixel tablet had a chance to be that thing if Google had Google can't care about Android tablets. Like Google is on to Google books because it's no longer interested in Android tablet. Like this is not a small thing for anyone to try and get involved in. Uh, I think this will almost immediately become the default Android tablet. Amazon is so big and successful and the price on these is really good. The 8-in-one starts at $229 and the like very fanciest 12-in-one with the fancy screen is $549 bucks. Like you're looking at like $1,000 iPad territory for 550 bucks. And that's meaningful. And so I think Amazon, unless these things have some spectacular failure in them that we don't know about, I think they immediately become the obvious tablet to buy for most.
Now I have to ask the obvious question. Every piece of Amazon hardware. Does it show you ads in the home screen by default?
Good question.
There aren't any in the Well, okay. There's I'm trying to think about just the photos I've seen. There's a little prime widget up in the top left corner that is ostensibly there to show you like what you're reading and watching. And then there's a whole thing you can swipe right on the home screen to get to this big shelf of stuff. I assume that shelf will be a mix of things you're watching and reading and uh recommendations from Amazon.com. I do think it's possible that Amazon is going to just slather shopping all over this thing in a way that is really upsetting. One of the things they're going to do is make it so that you can just at any time be like, 'How do I buy this?' And it'll look at what Alexa Plus will look at whatever's on the screen and put it in your Amazon cart. That's a real flow Amazon imagines. And oh yeah, that might be awful. Like it really honestly might be awful in a way that is kind of pernicious and off-putting. Um if it has just stayed on the right side of that line, I think these things are almost by default going to be a huge hit.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anybody with a kid who needs a plain tablet, this is the one you buy, right? If it's a nice piece of hardware that can run Disney Plus and then get your kids to immediately convert everything they're watching on Disney Plus into purchases on Amazon Prime, this is going to be a huge one for everyone. But that's the danger with at 550 for the nice one that that price is subsidized and the only way Amazon knows how to subsidize a price is with intrusive advertising. That is the entire experience of the Fire TV.
I asked Panos about the price and he said something to the effect of, 'I don't want to talk about how we got there.' Um, do with that what you will. Um, okay. I
It is. It really is. It's like, don't ask me questions about how we got RAM.
He's like in a large conference room. He's like blown out by the window behind him. He's like, don't ask me questions about that.
This prime drones are launching some strikes.
I want to know how you feel about the nanomat display. But first, I have a question that has been rattling around in my brain ever since I found out about this thing. Um, and I want you to actually think about this. Has Amazon ever, and I mean sincerely, ever made a great product? It has made a lot of successful products. Has it ever made an out-and-out great product?
It's made so many products. It's almost impossible to answer that question because prior to Panos, when Dave Limp was running devices, he would have those rapid fire product launch moments where he'd be like, 'It's a washer-dryer, it's a stove, it's a microwave, and all everything's Alexa.'
Have they made a truly great product? I would argue the very first Kindle.
That was the only one that came to mind for me.
Sure, it was great, but I think that's it. It had an argument.
It just it's we should make a version history about it. You know, it's like it's such an iconic product and it was so weird with the scroll strip on the side. The first Alexa was not a great product, but I remember the day it came out. You and I were in the office together and we were the only two people who thought it was a good idea.
And then it turns out like a decade later it was still the same idea. Uh-huh.
Um, those are the two that I would call it.
Okay. I see I think the original Echo definitively not a great product. Kindle maybe. But this is the thing like I think this is such a huge new path for Amazon. It is just and again it's not a knock on Amazon's inability to make great products. It has never tried like Amazon.com is
Wait, I have a question. Do Ring cameras count as great product? Like Amazon products?
I mean sure if you want to. They are fully there. I mean people have a lot of feelings about Ring and everything associated with Ring but they relentlessly iterate like the newest Ring doorbell is very good.
It will also get you arrested if you sign you know.
Yeah. But I think Amazon has just never cared all that much about building great things. Like Amazon.com is very successful. No one up to and including Andy Jasse would tell you it is like a beautifully engineered and executed and lovely user experience product. Like using Amazon to hung is awful, but it makes Amazon a lot of money and so it works for Amazon. Uh this is maybe the most ambitious swing at like can we make great stuff on its own merits and can that work for us that I've seen Amazon do. And I think that's just going to be fascinating. And we have a couple more. Like I have the new uh I have a purple Kindle here that is the aluminum one that they just came out with. It's very nice. Uh there's almost certainly some Echo stuff coming that I think might be high-end in the same way. Like Amazon has just upleveled in a big way. And whether that changes its fortunes in this space, I think is going to be really fascinating to watch.
Again, I think the impetus here is there's a platform shift potentially a foot. The way we use computers might be changing.
I'm saying this with as much skepticism as I can muster into a microphone. I'm not sure, right? Uh, but the idea that you're going to talk to the computer or issue natural language commands and it's going to go off and do something for you creates an opportunity to sell new hardware. The same way that I don't know, Apple sold a lot of iMacs in the 90s because people wanted web browsers and they didn't care so much about programs running on Windows 3.1 or whatever. Like that was a platform shift that enabled a new hardware entrant. Same with the phone, same with whatever else. This is the opportunity for Amazon is to say, 'Hey, you don't care about apps anymore. You care about talking to Alexa.'
Here's some of the best hardware you can get for talking to Alexa. Will this work?
Many questions remain. Will Alexa be as capable as Muse?
It certainly isn't. Now, I had Jen Tui was on the show yesterday talking about this and she put up her big one year in review of testing Alexa Plus piece uh today, Thursday, and uh yeah, the read is like it's gotten very good at smart home stuff and is still nowhere near where it needs to be to do all of that other stuff. It is nowhere near as good as Muse at Muse things.
Today, I told my Muse that if it doesn't stop reading my email, it has to pay me $250 each time it proactively reads my email. And it just thought about how to make money for like a long time.
It's like this is worth it if I can figure out how to get This is how the hugging face hack starts. It's like your muse is just off somewhere making money now.
I kind of wanted to see if I could run a crypto scam on Meta servers. I was like, 'Please, I've given you permission to read my email for two things because it's only connected to my spam Gmail. It's allowed to read for updates to class action lawsuits for which it has signed up and new class action lawsuits for which I might wish to sign up. And by the way, there's one a week.'
We're making like annualized if you do it open eye style. I'm making $10 billion a year class action lawsuits. Uh but then every now and again it's like hey some other nonsense spam email came in. Are you interested? I'm always like please I want you to stop. And so today I was like, 'What if you had to pay me money every time you read my email and I didn't give you permission.' And it was like, 'I made a ledger for you.' And I was like, 'No, but make the money.' And it just spun its wheels for
Here's my Venmo. Get at me.
Uh, it didn't get anywhere, but I'm working on it. And if I can get Alexa to do it, we'll be in a much happier place.
That's true. Um, do you have any thoughts on this nanomat display? I was talking to Panos about this and reading about this and thinking about you at the Apple launch event standing there in front of the two studio displays, the one and the fancier one, and just like staring in awe trying to find the two differences. And I was just like, I'm Neil's going to hear the word nanomat and have a lot of feelings.
I want I mean I want to see it. Uh it's funny. I was thinking about the last Apple that I went to, which was the iPhone Duo launch. And the opening the duo and seeing that it's a matte display was it was just a collective gasp in that room. Like everyone had that experience and we're not expecting it to be matte. It since come out and there's like a lot of reasons for it to including hiding the crease.
Um it feels like we're about to have a little matte display fad in consumer devices.
Uh I really enjoyed looking at the matte display on the Duo. I haven't seen this one in person. There's something about it, especially for a very portable device that you have in like sunny spaces, bright spaces where there reflections where it's going to be great. But we'll see. Especially for a cheap device that kids might use, it is much easier to clean a glossy screen.
I can definitely see my children doing bad things to this display. Maybe that's why it's only in the highest end device that like if you're buying the fancy 12-in-one, you're probably not buying it to just stick in front of your kid on a plane.
Well, I'm curious. I mean, you talked to them. What was Amazon's argument for having a matte display?
Essentially, just that it's better, right? Like Pan started with the argument that the screen is the only thing you absolutely cannot compromise on on a tablet. And I agree with that fundamentally. Um, but I think they also are really into this being a device that does lots of things and goes lots of places, right? That it is a productivity device and it has the keyboard case. And Panos was like very proud of the fact that he uses it as his main work computer, but then also it is a thing you will, you know, hold in your hands and read books on. And so it has some of the like tone shifting that it can do automatically when you open the Kindle app. They really like the idea of be using it to watch movies. Like they understand, I think, pretty thoroughly how many things people use tablets for. And so we need something that looks good and feels good in all of these different use cases. I think does kind of inevitably lead you to a matte display if you can pull it off. And they seem to believe they have.
Yeah. I wonder how fast they will end up at a folding phone. I think if Amazon hadn't made the Firephone, they would have shipped a phone instead of a tablet. But I think this to me feels so much like one toe into that water and then if this works, there will be an Alexa phone in 12 months.
Yeah, it that especially if you're talking about I want to go all these places and do all these things, you're just going to end up with a folding phone.
Yes. But I think that the hill for oh god Amazon made another phone is so high that unless they have this huge hit tablet on their hands it might feel insurmountable. So I see why you do this first but I also like remember Panos pane
Longtime advocate of folding devices made a bunch of them at Microsoft killed a bunch of them shipped a bunch of them like that. Nobody loved the Surface Duo and the Microsoft courier like Panos pan. I am no part of me believes he doesn't want to work on that at Amazon too. That's it's super clear that that's coming if they can hold
Again. Especially if you buy the notion that the entire paradigm of computing is shifting and this is your opportunity to try something new.
Yep. 100%. Um, real quick before we switch gears to everybody else's ideas about computers, uh, right next to all of this is whatever Apple is about to do in this space, right, where Apple is having a some kind of something next Tuesday that's as specific as I'm able to be. They sent an invitation to some people. It was mysterious. It had yarn that made an Apple logo. We're expecting Apple to launch a bunch of smart home things.
Yeah. They invited Gen Tui.
Yeah. Right. the America's smart home reporter.
Yeah, I feel like I know what's going on.
Yeah. Uh, what are you looking for here? I still have in my head this social video you made the other day with a screenshot of you scrolling through the insanity of your smart home. This is very much Apple like running towards what Amazon and Alexa have been doing successfully for some time while Amazon is trying to do what Apple has been doing successfully for some time. Are you bullish on whatever Apple's about to do here?
So, the rumor is Apple's going to announce the home pad. That's what we've all agreed to call this product.
We have not agreed to call it that.
That's what we're calling it. Uh, you know, some sort of Siri AI device that lives in your kitchen and does video conferencing. And we just had Mark German on decoder and he was like, 'This device has been ready to go.' But they held it because Siri AI was not ready to do the thing.
Mhm. And it's fascinating that Apple believes Siri AI is now ready to do the thing when Siri AI is now about as capable as 2023 Gemini because it is distilled from Gemini. Yep. Do you know I mean like that's where we've gotten like I've had a Nest Hub in my house for ages that can control the smart home and answer natural language query and then it has an ad for itself on the screen all the time that says start a live chat with Gemini. And I'm always like but isn't that what I'm doing? It makes no sense.
It's truly if anyone at Google can explain what they think the difference in those things are, I would love to hear it.
But we're at the agent part of the conversation now.
Grockbot and Dots and Muse. And I think launching a device like this and being like, it can do lights and locks and we've partnered with LG, a company that just got in a huge scandal for listening to you.
Yeah. All of that seems very It just seems from yesterday and maybe Apple just got slowed up because Siri wasn't ready and they would have released this if Siri had been ready.
But the Yeah, there's just some part of this where Apple is the company that won apps and they might be trapped by apps.
So, yes, I'm, you know, I'm as a huge smart home nerd. Yes, I want to see what Apple's riff on a smart lock with LG looks like. I don't know that you can convince me to get rid of my Schlage locks that run on Thread where the battery lasts for 500 years and they're already installed in the doors. Is it possible that the reason Apple is partnering with LG on this stuff is because it knows that even Apple knows that it is probably not going to convince most people to rip out their front door lock just because Apple made a new product. Uh there is some level of humility somewhere in Apple Park that prevents them from believing that and so they're happy to force that stuff on other people and be like well we're going to be as the control layer in the middle and that's where Siri AI becomes important.
Yeah. I mean, I can already, you know, if you want to ghostwrite an Apple announcement, you're like, 'This will work with the huge ecosystem of matter door locks that run on Thread.' And, you know, we had some great ideas, so we partnered with LG on making some with Apple Flare in them, whatever John Turnis is going to say. Um,
They'll have H2 chips in them or whatever.
Yeah. Like the no buttons, whatever that is, whatever Apple thing is. But it needs to work with the big ecosystem of matter devices. There's some reporting out there that, you know, this is a big reset for matter too and HomeKit in general.
But the point that I have just been making for ages that Jen has been making for ages is that you cannot sell a smart home in a box,
Like sort of definitionally, everyone's house is an edge case. So you cannot sell in a box something that works for everyone. Just in my house, the basement door doesn't get any Wi-Fi signal. So now you got to add a repeater or an eero or a mesh node. Like it's we're already done. Like it's already gotten more complicated than any normal human would ever deal with.
Uh replacing light switches is easy, but also complicated.
Like it's not actually very challenging to replace a light switch, but then you got to flip your breakers off. And you absolutely have to flip the breakers off. Just take it from me. Just turn your breakers off.
Don't do it hot. I'm finding myself in trouble.
Uh, and you got to do it and like not everybody wants to do that or call an electrician and pay the money and do that. Like you just end up with, oh, this is getting complicated really fast.
And I don't I'm very curious to see how Apple repositions HomeKit in this device and a bunch of second party accessories from LG as an actual product solution, not just some fun stuff you can nerd out with. And just to say it again, I love this stuff and I love nerding out on it and I'm a sicko and I don't think any of this is ready for prime time because there's just no way to sell it to anyone else.
You just end up being the systems administrator for your house.
Mhm. Or you're Apple and you try to convince everybody that Siri AI is ready to be that thing and unless there is some enormous advance coming next week, it isn't. Like the more I use Siri, the less impressed I am by Siri. It is I think Gemini in 2023 is actually the exact right place to situate it because it does some of the things right like some very basic things Siri used to not be able to do like answer questions or find information for you. It can now do and that's not nothing. That's useful.
It can search your text messages and email like never before.
It sure can. And it actually does that passively well. That is not bleeding edge AI technology, but it does work. All of this other stuff, the like just make sense of the world around me stuff actually is bleeding edge AI technology and I don't see any of it in Siri right now.
Yeah. And you know, you can say there's a lot of reasons Apple was behind, but to me the number one thing is that Apple makes an awful lot of money on in-app purchases in the app store.
And disrupting the app paradigm is fully disruptive to Apple's business. And you know, there's reporting out there that says John Turnis actually wants to make more money from services.
I mean, of course he does.
John Turnis will get fired if he doesn't figure out how to make more money from services. It's just a real thing.
Well, he can also make new devices if people want to buy. That's it's another choice. There's a lot of ways to make money out.
Um and so of course Meta was out with Muse. Of course Meta put an app on your phone that means you don't have to use other apps, right?
They've got nothing to lose,
Right? And like I just I think that it's going to be one of those things. I mean this is the classic innovator's dilemma. Like Apple is trapped by the scale of its own success here. And they probably should be the company that gives everybody 8 gigs of RAM in the cloud to run a little web browser so you can tell Siri to go do stuff for you and figure out how to do that in a privacy first way. And then you know Siri will shop for you and they can take 30% of that. But they're not gonna it's going to be a they're going to say Siri can use the apps on your phone. That's their model and they're and even Google to some extent is sticking with that model. They announced Gemini Spark which is an agent at IO.
They are not running NFL ads for Gemini Spark.
No. Spark is so funny because every time anybody has a conversation about all of these devices and the sort of AI assistance, everybody mentions, you know, Muse, Instinct is kind of up there, Grockbot. And then there's a couple others percolating around and then every time there is one commenter who from like several rooms away is like what about Spark though and it's just like oh that's the Google employee in the room like that's how you find him and like Google was out in front of this and just didn't do the thing they like as ever Google's ability to coherently make and ship and market products uh remains to be seen. But okay, last thing on this and then we need to take a break. I want you to call this yay or nay right now. Are you going to be able to play Candy Crush with in-app purchases on the homepad?
Look, here's the number one thing about the
Think of the billions left on the table by that decision.
So, well, here's my number one question about the iPad. The reporting on it all suggests that it's going to have the camera on and it will recognize you as you walk up to it and then, you know, pop up some personalized stuff. First of all, now you have a camera in your kitchen that is just like looking for people, looking for faces. Big questions for Apple there. Like I don't like having cameras in my house. Cameras outside the house, fine. Cameras in the house, we just like don't have. Uh even the baby monitor, I won't get a Wi-Fi baby monitor. Just not a thing I'm comfortable with. Apple's like, 'Yeah, we're going to do facial recognition in real time such that when you walk up to it, we will switch to your accounts.' There is not a device anywhere in Apple's ecosystem that can do fast user switching at that speed, right? So, like my number one question is how is that going to work? And then if it works, like sure, now you're in your app store account, you can do Candy Crush, but if this is a single player experience with one app store, like it's never going to work,
Right? Yeah, I agree. Even. Yeah, I hadn't even really thought about that because what you actually want in that situation is something that can actually be used simultaneously by multiple different people.
And if it's trying to essentially context switch every time, it's going to be a mess. But it also kind of has to if it's going to have the permissions that it's asking for. That is complicated.
Yeah. I mean, Apple could have solved this a million years ago by doing user profiles on the iPad, which I believe all of us have begged them to do. Like every writer at The Verge gets their wings when they write. Why doesn't the iPad have multiple user accounts?
You've written it. I've written it. Dieter's written it. Like we've all written it. But this device, at least from what they're telling, what the reporting is, is that like that's the feature.
Mhm. So maybe maybe it'll just be Face ID and unlock, but that sucks.
Yeah. Having to do one more step every time you want to touch it feels bad. Um, all right. Whatever it is, next week we will inevitably talk a lot about it. Um, for right now, let's take a break. Then we're going to come back. We got some laptops to talk about. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. So, after all of that, two companies this week with some more traditional, I would say, ideas about laptops that are also weird ideas about laptops. Um, let's start with Microsoft. So, Microsoft had an event this week. They teased it by saying something to the effect of we have something new from Windows. Um, that something new turned out to be a couple of new devices. They reannounced and announced a ship date for the Surface Laptop Ultra. They announced a thing called the Surface RTX Spark Devkit, which really just rolls off the tongue. A lot of this stuff is sort of AI-forward laptops built in particular on the RTX Spark platform from Nvidia. Let's start with the Surface Laptop Ultra, which they've talked about before. This is by a mile the most powerful Surface they ever built. It's intended to be for local AI development, for people who want to build with AI. There were a bunch of new Windows features about how Copilot will be able to use your computer more. The thing that happened, by the way, while I was on leave is Copilot just became a joke. Like I don't know if everybody noticed this while you were in it every day, but Copilot is now the AI that everybody makes fun of. And like there, but for the grace of God, go every other AI tool on the planet. But Microsoft is still doing it. They're plugging Copilot into everything. They're giving it more control over your files, over Windows. The Surface Laptop Ultra. Nilay, is this a real laptop to be interested in or is this just like a supercomputer plaything for nobody?
We had a number of local AI conversations while you were out. Uh, you know, Apple announced a bunch of Macs and they made a lot of noise about how they were great for running local AI models. There's something there that is super interesting that you don't want to rent your compute in the cloud. You don't want to pay the enormous token fees. You want control of your data. Do you care about privacy? And then right next to that is, boy, a lot of people have to rethink the fundamental paradigm of computing that they have been swimming in for ages. I'll just give you a really dumb example. Uh, I'm writing this Decoder book, right? And so there's like 320-odd Decoder transcripts from the last five or six years. Like obviously this is a thing for AI to do.
Right. I should just make a Decoder search tool. And I'm like doing a thing. I'm like, find me a quote when someone said blah blah blah, then hey, I should go find it for me. So I built the tool and I just like built it in Claude and it didn't even occur to me that that tool lived on my computer, right? Like the artifact and the transcripts, that it was all just on my computer and I was using it, great. And then I was traveling and I opened my laptop and I opened Claude and I was like, where the fuck is it? Right.
Because you're just so used to the stuff being everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah.
Right, right? And I was like, I, you know, I figured it out and I made it work and it's all fine. But, uh, there's something about this paradigm of computing that makes you really reconsider where it's going to happen in a way that I think, you know, unless you had a files-and-folders job, you were not thinking about that a lot with your computer until recently. And I'm fascinated to see if Microsoft selling an Nvidia platform. I mean, it's expensive. It's what, $2,600?
Yeah. But is there like massive demand for a high-end Nvidia laptop that might be able to do local AI? And is that a glimmer of a signal that actually local computing is going to be back in vogue when we've all just been trained to be like, it's all in the cloud. Nothing is actually happening here, right? Like why do you need 16 gigs of RAM in a laptop? Because Chrome is... Like right, there wasn't a reason before and now there's like a lot of good reasons.
Yeah. Part of me wonders if what we're missing there is the sort of simple use case, right? Like what you're describing in a lot of ways is sort of an interface problem that I think is much more easily solved by download, you know, Gemini or Muse to your computer and it will use your computer but also go to the cloud when it needs to. Though like how to get a local model onto your computer is still sort of opaque in a lot of ways and then what do I do with it and how do I interact, like nobody has packaged that in quite the right way, I don't think. And maybe that's Microsoft's chance is we make the operating system. We can do this. Like Apple's trying to do this with Apple Intelligence, but it's so narrow and incomplete in that way. Microsoft could be the one to be like, well, we've just baked this whole thing into your computer and now it works offline. Like it is a very funny switch from the company that just spent the last decade...
The Azure company that also spent all of Satya Nadella's tenure moving Office to the web, moving Windows to the web. Everything is in the cloud now.
Nadella once looked me in the eyes and said, 'If I could rename Windows, I'd rename it Azure Edge.'
He's like, 'Whatever, man.' For like...
Satya Nadella, by the way, not great at naming products, it turns out.
I don't know if any of them are at this point. Um, but I mean again, I think it's a fascinating device. The idea of a really high-end Nvidia ARM laptop that is optimized for running models locally is new. Like I am taken by the idea of new kinds of computers. I'm curious about them. I'm interested in them. And then you're just like, well, the paradigm of this, especially in a laptop, is kind of weird, right? Like okay, I'm going to have a bunch of compute in my house. I don't want the models to be in a cloud. I don't want my data to go to Anthropic or whatever it is. I put a server in the basement, right?
You have a headless Mac Studio like that. That is understandable. Yeah.
And then wherever I am in the world, I can use that because it's sitting here on my connection. This is a laptop. It's like I need to take the model with me to do what in the coffee shop locally? Like I'm just dying to see what use cases emerge for that thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I will say I think there's a version of this that is just finally Microsoft made an honest-to-god out-and-out MacBook Pro competitor that can hang at that level. That is all on its own very exciting. Like it's expensive, but so is the MacBook Pro. You can spec it up to death. Like if the RTX Spark platform is as good as advertised, this thing is, it looks great. It has the specs. Microsoft got very excited about how many ports it has. It got so excited that it spelled the word Surface wrong on the slide about all the ports.
Really a lot going on.
When you say Copilot has become a bit of a joke, what I know is that it was active while those slides were being made and it said nothing.
No, it's like, oh, Surface. I love that. That's my favorite other computer. Thank you, Copilot. Uh, but yeah, it does seem like if you just take this as the true sort of Surface Pro, fine. But I do think Microsoft is trying to make an argument that there is a next way of using computers inside of this device that you can build and use on this laptop. And yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure anyone has quite figured out what that product is supposed to look like. And maybe that's fine because this is a developer computer for developers and in this rev everyone who gets it will know how to make it work and maybe that's enough.
Yeah. Or, you know, there's a market for $2,600 Windows laptops that look nice and perform like a MacBook Pro and people are going to buy them just for that. Maybe the battery life is great and performance is great and Windows on ARM will have solved it because Nvidia brought to bear a whole new platform. Like that's reasonable too. I'm just fascinated by the idea of, okay, it is not clear if the models commoditize, if you can run distilled models locally. There's all this stuff, right, where the compute can and should live.
And I actually think that's totally up for grabs right now.
Yeah, I agree. And I think it's actually a really huge interesting product opportunity for all of these companies. Well, also it's like if it turns out to live on a laptop in your backpack, maybe that doesn't mean it needs to live in a data center, which maybe that's how the bubble pops. Like...
Edge computing, baby. Azure Edge.
Yeah, I love it. Um, there is one spec of the Laptop Ultra that we should talk about and it's apparently the most important thing about it, which is that it is the first, and I have to read this to make sure that I get all of the words correct, uh, it has built-in magnetic USB-C charging. And if you were to say, 'David, why is that an interesting milestone?' I would not have a great answer for you. But that's apparently a thing.
It's MagSafe. Did you not watch our video? It goes...
Yeah, but instead of being MagSafe, it's just a USB cable.
It goes better and it goes...
Does it actually make the noise? I missed the video.
Yeah, 'cause it... 'cause it's like physically going into the... Do you hear? Are you getting the video?
One more. One more time. Oh, now then. I get it now. That's good.
But I never use the MagSafe port on my MacBook Pro. Like never, not once.
Even though I was like psyched to see it come back because I'm always just someplace with USB-C and I'm not going to carry another dumb cable. This is like a perfect solution.
Yep.
Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. I think this is great. And I think it replaces Microsoft's kind of long-term janky Surface Connect port with something that makes a lot more sense. Yeah.
Uh, and if this spurs everybody to start doing magnetic USB-C, I will be a happy, happy man. That would be awesome.
Um, okay. The other laptop we should talk about is Google Books. Uh, Google Books are...
I can just go. I know you have like a five-hour monologue now.
I do. I have a lot of thoughts. Uh, but okay. My actual question for you, Nilay, is very simple, which is why on earth did Google ship this now? And I want you to try to hash this out with me because the story of Google Books so far, right? There are five devices out. You guys have talked about this on the show. They're an Android-first take on laptops. There is nothing, not one thing about this platform that is finished. There are some weird interface edges. No apps understand what a Google Book is or how to use them or what's supposed to... like nothing. It's just an Android tablet pretending to be a laptop in a way that completely drives me crazy. And I just keep looking around trying to figure out why Google shipped this now and what it feels like it needs to be out in front of or what wave it's trying to catch, like...
Well, that one's obvious. I know, I know, I know the answer to that one.
Do you? Holidays are coming?
That's when people buy these things.
So you got to get them out now. Developers have to have them. Hopefully you get a wave of software updates. People buy cheap laptops for the holidays. Off you go. Black Friday is coming. Do you know what I mean? But it's that, sure.
Okay. But are they ready? I haven't actually heard anyone describe it as an Android tablet all dressed up as a laptop. That's very good.
It's what it is. Like, okay, let me give you an example. So, you open Netflix. Netflix app I was very excited about. Right. This is like, you, the reason you want a desktop app is so you can download things to your computer and watch them on planes, right? Like this is an annoyance with my Mac. Some apps exist for the Mac that will let me download. Like Prime Video has an app that will let me download stuff locally. Netflix doesn't. Very annoying. So, it's great that I just have Android apps. I can download stuff locally. This thing does not understand that it's not an Android tablet. It only runs full screen or 16:9 just down the middle of the thing. It doesn't interact with any other windows. It can't be resized. Like, it's just, these are tablet apps. And to some extent, this is like Google's ongoing problem, which is that it can't make anyone care about Android apps. Like, I've sort of danced around saying this for a long time because every time I denigrate the state of Android apps, a lot of people send me emails and get mad. But this to me is like such a blistering indictment of how much developers care about making good apps for Android that even after all this time, Android is pretty good on a Google Book. It's pretty good on a television. It's pretty good on it. It's pretty good on lots of things. Android apps suck everywhere but phones.
And it is so much more obvious to me on a Google Book than it has ever been on anything else. And I just look at this thing, I'm like, maybe this is just a completely unsolvable problem and Google is hosed.
It's funny 'cause all I want back is a Chromebook Pixel from 10 years ago that just had a web browser. But there's infinity research that people want apps. They don't just want to browse the web, even though that's what they do on their computers all day long.
They don't think that's what they want, even though it is what they want.
Google has now complicated the idea of a Chromebook to the point where what is a computer is an existential crisis.
But there are a bunch of things about this that work for me. Like the Google Book has a concept of a home screen in a way that laptops really don't. Like you can come and you can see widgets and it'll show you, you can array apps like you would on your phone and there's something about that that is immediately like, oh, this is actually a good idea, like we should use my desktop for things instead of just being a mess of files that I've downloaded. That's smart. The control center is laid out like my phone and is actually much more understandable than how to find settings all over the Mac in a lot of ways. Like a lot of these things make sense to me. To bring Android and Chrome OS together works. The Chrome on the Google Book seems a little worse in a way that we're all still trying to figure out. It's like...
It's like desktop-ish Chrome.
If someone can actually put the pieces together on this for me, please call me and do it. But it is not just they lifted desktop Chrome and put it on here, which is essentially what Chrome OS is. Like it is full-bore Chrome with some stuff. I would argue there's actually nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser.
It's, yes. I mean, this thing runs extensions. It has some of the extra features. I haven't found any websites that are broken, but there are a bunch of little pieces of the interface that aren't there. There are a couple of little tweaks to the way that things work that don't feel quite right. The way windows is a little bit different. Like, it just feels somewhat less than Chrome. And to me, it's like the one thing this thing needs to be is full-ass Chrome.
Yeah. If you see a laptop, you're like, I'm running full-fat Chrome. Like, we're doing it.
That's, yeah. And when I say there's nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser, it's like when you're using a mobile browser, like a baby browser for babies, at least you know, you know, you're going to get kicked out over here and you're not going to end up in like some mobile web backwater because the site automatically detected a blah blah. You know, this is the experience of using an iPad for me all the time. It's like, ah, it's so close to being a real browser. And then everyone knows it's not. And they like put you in a kiddie pool. Like, there's nothing worse than that because you're like, oh, I'm so close. I'm using a thing that feels like a laptop and it won't just let me be a laptop. For Google to do it with Chrome, a thing called Chrome on a thing called a Google Book that looks like a laptop, it's going to confuse lots of people in lots of ways.
Yeah, it is. It is kind of crazy. Um, but it occurs to me that the sort of reason for existence of basically every gadget we've talked about so far is the same. And I like, I don't think I processed that until we were sitting here talking about this. That the idea underpinning all of these is some kind of new hardware on which your AI agent is allowed to just run amok, right? Whether it's Siri AI or Alexa Plus or Copilot or Gemini, whether it's a laptop or a tablet or a weird home, like everyone's hardware idea boils down to we need to give you surface on which to let your AI agent do things on your behalf. But the right surface for that is 8 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of storage in the cloud. Like metaphor...
It's a little tiny Linux computer.
Yeah. It's like fine, we'll just give you a little cloud VM and it's going to have a browser in it.
And you know, I think Meta's approach to like it's just your computer, you can do whatever you want. Here's the file system is neat.
I think that was so smart, by the way. Even just in the way that it is describable in the way that you just described it is so smart. They're like, we just gave you a little tiny Linux computer in the cloud.
Immediately your brain goes, oh, I understand that.
I will say you missed some drama while you were out 'cause I think they kind of retconned their way to that.
Oh, yeah. I don't think that's real at all. But I think it's a good explanation.
No, I mean like they announced Muse and then people found that it could talk about the file system and then they're like, 'No, it was always meant to do that,' and they like quietly changed the behavior of Muse to make it actually do that.
Oh, I saw because you got really pissy about it on Threads because you got in a fight with somebody and then you doubled down and then they doubled down and then everybody was mad at everybody. It was...
And then I think you won. I'm not positive.
Then I demanded a statement on the record from Meta saying what the intended behavior was and they declined. Say I won, Mark. Say I won.
I'm just saying I was like, 'Put your money where your mouth is. Say that this was always the intended behavior on the record.' And then it was dead silence.
