 This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by lynda.com, the online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. For a free 10-day trial, visit lynda.com slash Vergecast. That's lynda.com slash Vergecast. lynda.com is for problem solvers, for the curious, for people who want to make things happen. Maybe you want to master Excel, maybe you want to learn some negotiation tactics, maybe you want to build a website, maybe you just want to boost your Photoshop skills. Go to lynda.com and feed your curious mind. You can learn about virtually anything there. You can learn how to build a note-taking app for iOS 8, you can learn how to do a data visualization, you can do better retina graphics with Photoshop and Illustrator. There's an entire course where you just learn how to get Sam Sheffer's haircut, it's kind of amazing. lynda.com will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics, all for one flat rate. So whether you're looking to just become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby, or you just want to learn something new, please visit lynda.com slash Vergecast and sign up for a free 10-day trial. That's lynda.com slash Vergecast. I want to say it took Mossberg four seconds to start trolling me on the air for this Vergecast. Hello everybody and welcome to Vergecast. What is today? Today is June 25th, it's a very special episode of the Vergecast. We are joined by our new colleagues, one Mr. Walter Mossberg, you're supposed to say hello. Oh hello. There he is. And the delightful Ms. Lauren Good. Hello everybody. So Dieter, I've got just tabs playing audio everywhere. So Lauren and Walt are joining the Verge as part of Vox Media's acquisition of Recode, which is very exciting. Right. They're gonna be around, they're in town this week to meet everyone. Literally it's just been three days of introductions. It's been awesome. Meetings, hello. Meetings, endless meetings. We had a good dinner. We had great food, thanks to Eater. Yeah, our friends at Eater hooked us up. And we thought we'd have them on the Vergecast this week. And then later on I'm gonna somehow swindle Walt into doing a podcast of his own and that's gonna be great. And then over, what the hell are you doing? He's drinking distilled water. No, it's not distilled, I'm just reusing it. Chef is in the hype seat. Can I just call hype on the giant bottle of water? Yeah, so this is how, okay, you don't call hype. Here's how this works. Okay. Beef. It's very close to, God. What have I gotten myself into? So this is the Vergecast. Let's start, let's start, let's start. This is the Vergecast where we discuss all things Verge for the week. Right. We usually stick to technology. We have formats where sometimes we get deep into entertainment, we get deep into culture. Liz will be on, we talk about science. And then sometimes we have what we call hard tech Vergecast where we just get really nerdy about technology. But the main format here is that basically it's chaos over here and Sam sits in the hype desk over there. And as we discuss various topics, you can ask Sam to hype check those topics. So we can, Sam, hype check the iPhone. It peaked a while ago. It's not like a six or seven now. Like it's ubiquitous. And the idea is for Sam to provide a number, but that the formula. There's usually some flavor there. The formula that generates that number is subject to much discussion. Because I think it should change over time. I think the hype level of things changes over time. No, you're totally right. Yeah, so that's the first agreement I've gotten from all week. So I feel really good about that. So just for the audience, we have been in meetings and literally just introducing people and hanging out and seeing how things work. So we've been a little off of the news cycle. And these guys haven't been on the show before. So I thought what we might do is introduce them, everybody, with a state of the union. And just talk about the big players in tech, what they're up to, how they're doing, where their hype levels are coming and going. You gotta stop drinking out a two gallon jug of water. No, one gallon. It's a one? That's one gallon. Okay, well it's still crazy what you're doing. Hype check your jug of water. 10. I... So this, Walt and Lauren is the Verge cast. Peter Kafka is live watching. Oh yeah, he's our biggest fan and he has already told us, Walt, that we need to speak into the microphone. You guys need to get away. Oh really? Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Peter. Because you know what? That's the first time Peter's ever told us to do something. I think it's the first time that Peter has watched a podcast streaming live. This is amazing. Yeah, probably. So that's our show. No one lets him on them. Have you noticed that? Oh. It's just really interesting. Peter, you're in the hype seat next week, buddy. That would be great. Peter lives in the hype seat. No, he lives in deep Brooklyn. Wow. Shade throughout at Brooklyn. Yeah. He wrote, it's a long story. Yeah. So let's, so the frame of this, we were talking just before the show started, is Eric Schmidt at Google was at a conference with Walt, on stage with Walt, their conference. Was it D or the code? It was D. It was the D conference when it was the legal code. In 2011. And he referred to it as the gang of four, which is Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, right? Correct. Notably leaving out Microsoft. Right, and I said, why did you leave out Microsoft? And his answer was something on the order of, they don't have a modern platform. And then he went on to make a point, which was, and I interpreted that as just, he's hated Microsoft since he ran Novell, which one person listening to this knows what Novell is, but it was a networking enterprise kind of company, and he competed with Microsoft. But he left them out, and he had a rationale. But, and we had Microsoft on stage the next morning, and they fired back. It was Snofsky. It was Stephen Snofsky. Yeah. Who was an important executive there at the time, and had been for many years. And he was actually showing for the first time ever, I think, Windows 8, which went on to, as you know, conquer the world. And what was the hype on Windows 8? I mean, when it, at the time, the fanboys were rabid for it. Right. And yeah, people are looking forward to Windows 10 now. Let's just leave it at that. Yeah, that's right. So, Snofsky made the point correctly, because Snofsky is a smart guy, he's a student of history, lived in China for a while, that the Gang of Four was also a term that referred to the kind of clique of dictators that ran China for a while. Yeah. And so, he was happy for Microsoft not to be in it. That was his point. But Eric actually, putting aside the Microsoft jealousy thing, he had an interesting point to make, which is still true today, I think, which is he claimed there had never been a time in tech history where you had four companies that were platforms that were so powerful and growing so fast simultaneously, and that it was just sort of an amazing time for developers and consumers of the products they developed. And that was sort of the way his thought process was working on that. What I think is fascinating is how all-encompassing those platforms have become. Right. Now, you can't, literally everything, I wrote a piece, what, last week, two weeks ago, where the entire media industry, the whole revenue of the media industry, or the music industry, is less than Apple's profit over three quarters, and they're totally dependent on Apple's platform to succeed and be the gatekeeper of everything they do. And Google wants the same thing in a slightly different way. And Amazon wants the same thing in a slightly different way. Right. And Facebook is literally just subsuming the media industry into instant articles. And it's amazing how big these platforms have become. And Microsoft is trying to reinvent its platform with Windows 10, yet again, the 15th time. Right. And I think the interesting thing is that all these guys, and most of them are guys, had a particular thing they were good at, or that sat at the center of their formula. Google, it was originally Search, then Android, Apple, it was and still is, I think, basically making hardware with software that kind of ties in vertically to the hardware. With Facebook, social, obviously. And with Amazon, it was selling things. But they're actually all now impinging on each other. Right. Like, you know, you could draw these Venn diagrams and show all the overlaps of all this stuff. So it's like a giant four-sided, or including Microsoft, a five-sided war. Yeah, I think we should include, because Microsoft's on the cut. We're actually talking about Windows 10. No, of course we are. It's really more. Of course we should. They're on the cusp of trying again. But I think if we were doing this a year ago, when Windows 8 was in full throat, I would say maybe you could leave them out. Like, that didn't work. No, I wouldn't have let even, look, there still are hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows. And that's what they do every day. So that is the legitimate platform that a lot of things, a lot of work, a lot of browsing and other things is done on every day all around the world. Right, Lauren? Yeah. Yeah, so let's get into it. And I'll just ask Lauren. So we're in an Apple moment right now. I'm just gonna go on the list. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. Let's do State of the Union, all of them. Somewhere in there, I'm gonna read some ads. And why do you think we're in an Apple moment right now? Just because they're the biggest? Well, they're huge. They're about to roll out Apple music. They showed off the next versions of all of their platforms, OS X, iOS 9. The iPhone continues to be a monster. They got Taylor Swift to put her album on Apple. They have the cultural weight that I don't think anybody else has. And I think when Google, I look at it, when Google had I.O. a couple weeks ago, there wasn't just the wall-to-wall saturation of Google. We did it on our site, because we cover Google. But the rest of the world wasn't paying attention to Google. Apple has one little tweet with Taylor Swift, and the world explodes. And I think that moment is still very strong for them. So tell me, what do you think is going on with Apple right now? Well, Apple music specifically. I mean, there's so much. Apple Watch, I mean, what part of this are we talking about? So the watch, I think, is fascinating. Please stop talking about the watch. You're not wearing one right now. I'm not wearing one. Walt's wearing one. Walt's wearing one. And I've noticed a bunch of people at The Verge actually are wearing theirs as well, but I'm testing something different right now. And yeah, I mean, it is definitely a moment for Apple. I mean, they revolutionized the way that everybody pays for, consumes music over a decade ago now. They're now trying to do it again. They're sort of, you know, they've taken this wait and see approach. Everyone now knows that streaming music is a thing, right? And so I think, you know, this is going to be a really pivotal moment for them in terms of their music services and actually what happens to iTunes as it exists now. They, just like they're doing with music, they took a wait and see approach with wearables and now they've just come in with a smartwatch. But, you know, I think the response to Apple Watch has been a little bit mixed actually. I mean, I think the early reviews were all sort of like polite and acknowledging it as a beautifully designed piece of hardware. Of course, like, you know, because we reviewed it right off and then Walt reviewed it early on as well, there weren't third party apps at the time so we couldn't really judge it, you know, totally accurately or entirely at the time. But now, like, even we've seen lots of apps come out and people are still like, yeah, you know, we're still gauging the value of this thing. So it's definitely an Apple moment, but it's like, there's still so much wait and see and we hate saying that as journalists, like, well, just, well, time will tell, but that's sort of what's going on right now. So I think you're right, but I would remind you that if we could get in a time machine and go back to two months into the iPod, the iPhone, if you look at the reviews, the iPad got weird, bad reviews in the beginning, like, no one's gonna buy this, and it became the fastest selling piece of consumer electronics ever, even faster than the PC. I actually think the bad iPad reviews and people getting those wrong is the best thing that could have possibly happened to the Apple Watch. Because I thought everybody was wrong, those bad reviews about the iPad were wrong, like, off the bat. But I think the mixed reviews of the watch are dead on. Yes, of course they should be. But everyone's afraid to, like, really say it because they might be as wrong as they were about the iPad. No, but, Neelai, they should be mixed because the whole package isn't out there yet. I agree, well. Because they just, thank you. It's Gen 1. Thank you. First of all, the hardware's Gen 1, but it isn't that. The hardware's fine for Gen 1. Yeah. It's, they just, as you know very well, they just released what you might call the first real SDK for it. Right. Where a third party developer can write to the watch as a device. I mean, what I said in my piece, which was based on wearing it for a month, was that I had the feeling, and I did have some apps to talk about that were finished, but they were these apps that, you know, basically are little stubs of iPhone apps because they weren't allowed to write directly to the watch. And so I wrote, it just feels like a lot of the developers don't know what to make of this shit. Right. Right. That's not gonna be true in the fall. And we all want. So why did they rush it out? Oh, to our, I don't think they rushed it out. They took years to do it. The question is, why did they do it in these two stages? Yeah. Was it really faster to get a bunch of apps out through the iPhone? It may have been a mistake. Who knows? There's also a learning curve with these types of devices, right? Like I was just talking to the Fitbit CEO yesterday, and we ran a story about that on Recode, and even he pointed out, and they've been around for eight years, we're still in very early stages of consumer awareness around these types of products too. So on the flip side of that, I guess, is if Apple had rolled everything out and saying like, okay, and here are a thousand apps you can run immediately on this watch, and you know, a lot of the app load experiences have been really slow, or in some cases you're swiping, and you're like, well, what does this do here? It could have been too overwhelming for a certain segment of the market. Apple, you gotta remember two things about Apple, and it goes through all these products, and one is they, you guys mentioned this, but this is a truism with Apple. They always wait. They always wait to see what people are pummeling around in a category, they decide it's interesting to them, and they figure out, can we do this better? Or more holistically, or whatever, and then they try, and that's what's going on. And then they usually really succeed and dominate the market. They do, they have historically. Secondly, Apple plays the long game, and they can afford to, but to be fair, when Jobs did not have this kind of money, he still played the long game. I mean, I had lots of conversations with him over the years. I can't ever remember him talking about quarterly earnings. It just couldn't have mattered less to him. He never went on the analyst phone calls. I think he did once. He did once to burn Android tablets to the ground. Right, but the point is, basically, he didn't care. So, I mean, I did see him super excited one time when the sales of one of the Pixar, the box office for one of the Pixar movies came in, because he was so happy about it. So they're in it for the long game. If you look at the iPhone, it was dead in the water for the first three or four months. I mean, dead in the water, and they had to cut the price. They had to cut the price, and he had to cut the price again. And it did not, if you looked at the sales chart on that, it did not, there was eventually kind of a hockey stick thing, but it was like a year, it was like after they had opened an app store and all that other stuff. Same with the iPod, and so it's way too early. The reason I have a watch is it's a platform device from the company that as the hype desk has just declared has eventually succeeded in all these things. How have I brought these two people together? It will, it either is gonna be a huge flop, or it's going to actually become a platform where people are gonna do stuff. Let's talk about Apple Music. I really wanna talk about Apple Music. There's so much Apple. That's what I mean by it's a moment. We can do the whole show on the watch. We can do the whole show on music. I feel like Taylor Swift's next album should be called Apple Moments. Oh my goodness. Tay-Tay, you heard it here. Yeah, I'd check Taylor Swift. She's the queen of the hype. She is. She really is. Okay, go through music. We talk about Apple Music on the show, I think every single week. It's been like two months. It's been dominating what we talk, because it's such an important thing. It is. And then Spotify. Music in general right now is upside down. Emily and I were having a conversation for the past year, year and a half. All we've talked about in terms of entertainment and technology has been television. Over and over again, we talk about TV. Are they gonna get the deals? Are they gonna make a TV? What's Netflix gonna do? Amazon's making shows. And it just sort of figured itself out. And now we're just moving on. We're like, okay, let's reinvent music again. And all we talk about when we talk about technology and culture right now is music. And it's just strange. It just flipped like that. We just stopped talking about television in the way that we did for the past 18 months. So you're saying this is all just one big head fake? No. Maybe Apple's finally gonna do a TV. Or you're really interested in music. No, I just think that the TV stuff has proven to be so hard for so long. Yeah, no, you're right, you're right. That it has slowly sort of sorted itself out. We were actually talking about this in one of our meetings this week, how there are a lot of smart TVs, but people are still hooking Roku's and Apple TVs. They're still using over the top solutions. Chromecast, whatever. Here's one thing I find really interesting about Apple Music, which by the way, they did an uncharacteristically terrible job of presenting as you wrote and other people wrote. It was the opposite of simplicity that they were. And I personally, I mean, I think it's because they had this part of their effort to integrate beats into Apple, which are different cultures. I was thinking about what you said. You go through it, because it's really interesting. You all have a perspective. So Jimmy Ivine and Dr. Dre, who created beats and ran beats and got $3 billion for it from Tim Cook, which for Tim Cook is couch cushion change, right? Nothing. He came out on stage. He had a lot to do with, I think, the design of Apple Music. And I happen to like him a lot. Yeah, I think he's great. He's a great guy, but he's a record industry guy. He happens to have almost a purity of vision about music. He cares. He really does care about human curation. Since that's an Apple thing also, there is a fit there. But in terms of him coming out and doing a presentation with Eddie Q, who has become his pal, it just was very muddy. It was very unclear what they're doing. And it's really not unclear when you break it down, but the way they presented it was unfair. I remember people were leaving and saying, oh, so Beats 1 is now the new iTunes radio, but it's actually Apple Music Radio, and Beats 1 is a channel within that. Yeah, iTunes Radio is staying the same with a different name. It's algorithmic radio. And Beats 1 is an old-fashioned, it might as well be 1957, except that it's global. And it's a linear radio station. It's so weird. Which focuses on the taste of the DJs. Yeah, but I'm not so sure. I'm no expert on this, but I'm not so sure that millennials won't find that interesting. I don't know. Even just the idea of multiple people tuning into the same stream and hearing the same thing. Right, right. Or they may find it drives them crazy. We have a millennial here for a reason. I think this is gonna be one of the most compelling things about Apple Music. I think even like my generation, we are all so connected. We have WhatsApp and FaceTime. You press a button and you're talking to someone on the other side of the world. You're talking about the greatest generation. That's debatable, definitely debatable. You won World War II, right? Oh my God. We could do an entire show of Walt and Sam trolling each other. Let's be really clear. I think that's gonna be really special where you can be listening to the same music as someone that's in a different time zone or literally on the other side of the world. And it's Apple and everyone knows Apple. And yeah, I think it's gonna be cool. It's Apple and everyone knows Apple explains a lot of things. It explains a lot of things. But my question is also around human curation, not just the idea of the linear terrestrial style radio being streamed, but do people really care about human curation when it comes to streaming music? I think so. Do you listen to a playlist and you're like, this was made by a human instead of a bot and I feel better about that. Well, those humans are icons also, like arguably known around the world too. In the case of Apple Music. But I guess for streaming in general, do you think people care about curation? Well, Emily, did you see Emily tweeted a picture of Beyonce's festival hits playlist on Tidal yesterday? And it's just so bad. It's just like, was this Beyonce? Did she do this? Did a robot do this? But Neil, I've had. Where did this come from? Nothing against Beyonce personally, but I mean, that's a gimmick. Quote of the Verge cast. That's a gimmick. That's a celebrity. But the point is when Jimmy and Dre and Ian Rogers, who most people don't know who he is, but he's been in the music business a long time, the digital music business, and he's a very smart guy. When they started Beats Music, and the DNA of Beats Music is in Apple Music clearly. Even some of the UI is in there. Their idea was not to get celebrities. They do have some. But that was not their idea. Their idea was to get the best country music magazine. I can't remember the name, but what is it? Does anybody here know? No. Or if it's rock. Country music. If it's rock and roll. Country music is the last music in the world to have actual guitars in it. And I keep trying to get into it because I want to listen to guitar songs, and then it's awful. And then this is like a monthly cycle of me. Anyway. So whatever that is, they had them curate a bunch of playlists. They had Rolling Stone curate rock and roll playlists. But Spotify has a set of... Pitchfork do that stuff. Yeah, but they did it first, and Spotify then also did it. And maybe it'll all work out that it's all the same. No, remember when Spotify launched apps? This was like a crazy idea they had. They launched apps inside of the desktop. And the one app that was awesome, and remains awesome, but it's rarely updated anymore, is the Pitchfork app. Okay, but Pitchfork was in Beats, and it's in, I haven't checked, but I'll bet it's in Apple Music. Where you can read Pitchfork and listen to music that's playing? No, no, no, no, no. You can't read it. Right, so in the Spotify desktop app, you used to be able to read Pitchfork, and it would play the songs of the music that you were... I really think that's sort of not compelling. But that's like, that's my Sunday afternoon with an iPad. I actually really like to do that when I'm listening to Spotify in the car. Right. I'm just kidding. No. You can't read what... No, but like the idea, so I used to read, you used to write music. Right over his head. I mean, you know what, coming from Recode, I think we have to lower it a little bit. Wow, wow, do you know what is happening here? Where the show is over. We're getting burned. What do you guys think about the price of Apple Music? What, $10 a month? Oh, I want to bring this up. Because here is the... I've completely lost control of the show. But I mean, in terms of the, not just the price that you're going to pay, but the model of it, I mean, like Mossberg has a theory that we've talked about. So here's the theory. It's more than a theory. Confirmation. I know it's more than a theory, because you've let the insane take over the asylum. I'm really excited. The show's getting boring, and now it's going to get exciting. And then there's going to be blood. It's going to be wild. Because our friend, Peter Kafka, who knows everyone in the music industry, wrote for a while about this, and will continue to write about it. So basically what's happening, for those of you out there who just want to listen to music and didn't really care, or are confused about why is Apple finally doing this when they wouldn't do it when Steve Jobs was alive, and whatever. What's really going on is the labels, who were saved once by Apple, when they started iTunes, the labels hate Spotify, because there's no money, essentially. It might as well be no money made from the ad-supported free tier of Spotify. So what they want is everything to be a subscription. They don't mind a trial period, but basically they want a subscription. So they went to Apple. And Apple also at the same time, iTunes sales began plummeting, so they needed to do something different. So there was a mutuality of interest there. But I know for a fact that there were discussions about, okay, if we want to get everybody to subscribe, and we want to defeat the free streaming, ad-supported streaming music, which by the way, not just the evil titans of the music industry, but even the artists and the songwriters all hate that, because so little money is generated from it. My question is why didn't they let Apple charge less than Spotify? Less than 10 bucks. And they actually had serious conversations about it. They had conversations about six bucks, seven bucks, eight bucks, whatever number of. Just as a differentiator from everything else? Well, just to kill Spotify. To kill Spotify, to achieve their goals, Apple's goals, but also the industry's goals. How would they achieve their goals if they're charging less? Because they would get more people to convert. Because it would still be better than the ad base. They would get people behind paywalls. Let's ask our resident millennial. By the way, I'm on the cusp, so I'm with you here in terms of millennialism. Sort of. Millennialism is a world philosophy. But does it matter to you if you're paying $8 a month for your favorite streaming service or $10 a month? It's negligible. Right, and so what ultimately is going to be the driving factor? Whichever one's better, and whoever has tool on streaming music, because I have yet to find a streaming service that has tool. Right, it's the one. I mean, whoever has the best music. So if somebody had tool, they could charge you 15 bucks and it would be all right. Would I pay premium for tool? Maybe. But my point is that the catalog needs to go deep. Well, no, but the catalog is. No, but the catalog is the same. The catalog is the same. But the catalog does need to go deep because they're, and everyone's gonna tweet at me about Google Music. This is what happens every time I say this. But Apple's catalog does need to go deep because you can just buy the tool record and then you'll have it. It'll be over, right? I mean. Mossberg's checking his Apple Watch. I know. Mossberg just excitedly showed me a, whatever. Peter Kafka, who's listening to this. Pinging the Apple Watch. For those who don't know, Peter Kafka. This is a first on the, oh, we talk about Kafka all the time. So Peter just tweeted that in fact, Apple wanted five bucks and thought at one point they had settled at eight. And he had a link because of course he wrote about it. Of course. Lauren, to answer your question, I'm going, I pay, I've been paying for Spotify since the day it came out in the US. And when on June 30th I'm going to sign up for an Apple Music subscription and after a month, a month and a half, whichever one serves me better, I'm going to pick that one. But by serves you better, what do you, that's purely based on catalog. It's not about the UI, the experience. It's about the UI, the experience. Like Spotify, there was one version of Spotify that I was able to tap the icon and it would be up in like two seconds now. There's like a six to eight second buffer. And if I miss that when I have service and I hop onto the subway, I like it, it sucks. It's over, yeah. Sam and I also argue on the show every week about. About Spotify. Spotify has a bad. I think Spotify's garbage. A bad user interface. See, this is what I want to hear. I don't like that it takes. We did a whole series. We did a whole series. Just so while we're coming to the first cast. I don't know if it's bad, it's usable. And let me just say, let me just say, I've interviewed Danielek. I like Danielek. I like music. I like the idea of streaming music. I think you could put a little more effort into making a good interface. We'll see what Apple is, Apple's interface is really like. Well, first cast again in a month and we'll revisit this conversation. I mean, I think Spotify's UI is garbage. Like, it's just, it's not good. I use it. It's the one I use the most. Do you use Google Play All Access? And it's just the tweets and the tweets and the angry email, like, yeah. About Google Play specifically. Yeah, because we have a lot of listeners who use it and I have it. I pay for that one too. The thing I use that one for the most is it doesn't, I don't have to watch ads on YouTube when I watch music videos on YouTube. That's great. That is an excellent reason to pay for that service. Their apps on the iPhone are garbage. Like, they're not good. And their app on Android is a little bit crashy. Like, none of these things are good. And the reason I have been, these listeners have heard this from me so many times, I'm excited for Apple's because I think they write the best software sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Not all the time. Not all the time. But they have a history of writing great software and because they compare it with their hardware. But one of the things that Walt said to me, which was like mind blowing, because it had never occurred to me to think about anything this way, was he said, well, look, you're trying to integrate recode, this recode group into the verge, and you're taking it slow and you're being respectful of everybody's feelings. That's what Apple is doing with Beats. So they're letting the Beats people do this stuff their way because Tim Cook knows, he said Tim Cook knows what he doesn't know when he's letting Jimmy and Dre do the Beats thing. And I'm thinking, that's why this sucks. Like, what I'm looking at is a product that is a series of compromises. Yeah. But you don't actually know it sucks yet because you haven't been with it. No, it just feels like a lot. Like, it's a different vertical mess. Having Artist Connect, having the radio, but then also a flagship channel within the radio, and then people's iTunes also being integrated directly into the streaming services. Like, it's a little. It lacks focus. It lacks focus. But it could be awesome. It could be one of those things where you say, yes, aside from maybe Artist Connect, like I see where this all makes sense once we start using it, which we haven't seen. I'm with Lauren on this. I don't mean, sorry, to be clear, I don't mean the product sucks. I mean the keynote, the messy. Yes. Oh, that was right. We all agree on that. You wrote a nice piece saying it sucked. I get it. But in this integration here, if you're. I've checked Neelai right now, because it's like a zero. It's dropping. We're approaching dangerous levels. Help, Walt is hanging over. It's just melting. We're at a puddle of burn here. It's not. It's not a puddle of burn. Okay. Can we talk about what Apple. Drop a puddle of shade. A puddle of burn, I believe is our episode title. Let's talk about what Apple is bad at. Yeah. Now, don't say cloud connected services, because that's just bullshit. Whenever someone wants to knock Apple, they're like, they can't do cloud services. And it's like, yes, they can. I wrote a VO script on my Mac on text edit, and I just popped it up right on my iPhone. Boom, interconnectivity. Super quick. Okay, I'll say one thing that. Wait, what you guys, what the audio listener is not experiencing right now is just Walt just staring at Sam, like Sam descended from the sky on like a plane marked like idiot jet. Sorry, we'll continue. Apple needs to get a lot better at cloud services. And it has to get better at that for people that can't write a VO script. Right? It has to, you know, whether it's iCloud file drive, is that what they call it? Or iCloud drive. iCloud drive, yeah. Whether it's the fact that they, it took them months to get my music right on match. They still haven't finished uploading my photos to iCloud photo library. How many photos do you have? I had 30,000, but they have a lot of people with much bigger libraries than that. They are not as good, and that's, and I personally, I also think that's why their maps thing wasn't what it should have been. Part of that is I like their stance on privacy and on device things, but it does cut them off from some tools that Google can use even while it's. So that's a good, we should, we have five of these to get through. We've done a lot of that. Anyway, that's their, so we've talked about their strength. And to me that's their weakness. And so this is an excellent transition, I think, into Google, Facebook, Amazon. Right. Because those are all, their platforms are all in the cloud. Right, Google has Android as its one hardware, hardware software, local platform. They don't make hardware, actually. Even the Nexus stuff they don't make, as you know. Right, but it's the one tangible expression of their software running on a local device is Android. Maybe it's somebody else's device. That was a beautiful way to describe that. Thank you. I'm not gonna show you my poetry. I don't know. Your Android poetry, what? That's great. Real MFA workshop moment on the first cast. I think that was Lauren's way of asking for a 10% raise. Yeah, no, that was Lauren's way of trying to build my ego up after it's been thoroughly decimated. No, okay, Lauren, we'll start with you again. Tell us about Google, what's going on? What's good, what's bad? What's going on with Google? Oh, God. I honestly don't even know where to start. Pick an area and we'll go with that. Phones. Phones, okay. Well, I mean, I think, you know, Google is, Android is very much the dominant platform in a variety of markets, and that strategy has clearly worked for Google. I use an Android phone fairly regularly because I have to as part of my job, but I have to say the platform I most go to is my iPhone, and iOS, and that sort of thing. What else? I mean, I think it's interesting what Google has done to an extent with Nexus, trying to introduce that into the market. I don't know, I kind of don't know what to say, but I don't have anything really, I don't have serious insights right now about mobile. I think of my iPhone as a vessel for Google services. That's what I use it for. Yes. I buy an iPhone and I load up the Gmail app, and I use Google search, and Google Photos is wonderful. It's just funny. And it's, again, I work at a company, we all work now at a company that runs in Google services. So that is very, that connects a lot of threads, and I think maybe if you work at an Outlook shop or something, it's not quite as dominant. But I literally, my iPhone runs, provides me a window into Google. Yes. A Google life all the time. Gmail, yeah, Google Docs, Gmail, search, everything, everything on Google. I think Google has done a really great job with Google Now, its virtual assistant. I think right now, there's a lot of talk of virtual assistants, Apple claiming that Siri is getting much better, and obviously we're gonna see new iterations of Cortana with Windows 10. Oh, there's Alexa news today. And then there's Alexa news today from Amazon, and everyone's like, this is becoming a very hot area, and I think that Google has done a really great job with Google Now. But Apple will, of course, argue that the way that they're approaching things in terms of all the information being local to the device is much more private than maybe Google's approach. Well, let me ask, this privacy, I think it's all a hedge on Apple's part. Right, because they're not as good. Because you think they've been flat-footed in software. Yeah, I think they got caught. I think it could be to an extent. Like looking in the wrong direction, and Google's like. It's partly a hedge. I get what you're saying, but I honestly believe they deeply believe it. Yeah, no, I agree with you. And it comes from Steve, and it's still there. And if Tim Cook has taken the lead in even challenging the government over encryption, this phone, I'm holding up, for those who aren't watching, I'm holding up an iPhone, which is pretty common, but it's encrypted, right? Google has said it's going to encrypt it, or maybe they have an option in the phone, in the latest version of Android, to encrypt it, but it's not the same thing. Apple's a hardware company. They just decided to go and encrypt the phone, and they did. I think Google obviously has won the war over the share of smartphones. They have. They are so far losing the war over the profits made by the smartphones, but they're not a handset maker. Yeah, that's not where the money is. No, they care about ads. It doesn't matter to them. But there is a big threat to Google. There's two, in my opinion. One is they're spread very thin, and that's why Larry Page has begun to pare back a bunch of their products that aren't generating either generating revenue, or he doesn't think they're leading, or they're not interesting, or whatever. And secondly, and this is the bigger threat by far, is the open source, the conflict between wanting to get Google services on Android. That's how they make money, right? Android is free, but you get this big Google search bar, and you get Google Maps, and you get Gmail, and you get all these things. And they then can collect information on you, target ads, place ads, all that stuff. They're an advertising company in the sense of that's how they make their money. But a rising share, over 20%, the last time I checked on this, of Android distribution in the world has no Google services on it. It's open source Android. I mean, the example most Americans know about is the Amazon devices, but it is extraordinarily common in China, it's extraordinarily common in other parts of Asia. They're trying to fight back with a thing called Android One, which they say allows for sub-$100 devices, but Ina Fried, our colleague at Recode, just wrote a story about how they've struggled quite a lot with that. Or maybe, well, maybe it was Mark Berg. One of them wrote it. I don't know. I think it was Mark. It was Mark. It was about the OnePlus and emerging markets. But the point is, that's a huge threat to Google, is ironically the growth of Android without Google. So other flavors of Android. Why can't Google just manufacture their own iPhone? Their own iPhone or their own phone? Their own flagship. Their own flagship, right? Yeah, they could. I think Andy Rubin, who invented Android and whose company got bought and who ran the Android group there for a long while before Sundar Pichai took over, Andy liked the idea of hardware. You will remember the famous incident of the thing called the Q. Oh my God. Which was a home entertainment device. Yeah, we had one in our office. We literally used it as a doorstop. Yeah, it was amazing. It was very heavy. It was a very super effective doorstop. They were very, they made it in the, they were gonna make it in the US. Right, in Texas. It was made of high quality materials, all this stuff, and they never put it on the market. You know, I think Andy had some tendencies to liking the idea of, at least the idea of hardware, but you don't have the margins in hardware that you do in software or in advertising. But it's not like Google's broke at all, right? Yeah, Google could do it, but just like it's, just like it's not as easy as people think for Apple to do the kind of job online that Google does, it's not as easy as people think for Google to do the kind of job that Apple does with hardware. People, just like humans, companies have things they're really good at and things they're not as good at. And you know, they could go to Foxconn. They could buy Motorola. Or they could buy Motorola. They could buy Motorola. And then sell it again. They could buy Motorola. Yeah, yeah, actually they did a phone. They did many phones. No, but they did a phone that was intended to take on the iPhone and the Galaxy. Which one are you referring to? The Moto X. That was, I. But it's not, it's not the Google. You could shrug, but. Right, it's not. No, Google owned that company. Right. Google helped Motorola immensely. There were Google engineers all over Motorola during that period. I just don't think they were punching as high as they could be punching, right? If they were gonna do it, just do it and do it right. This is the Google phone that you've been waiting. Well, no, I think what they. Sam, I completely agree with you. But we've been saying what that was. But the point is. With Microsoft and laptops for 10 years too. It's like, I think it was, what Waldo's saying is it's not that easy. And faced with the choice between we're gonna piss off Samsung and they're gonna continue forging Android. And they're the hardware maker that has the better carrier relationships and the distribution channels. They're the only Android maker that is global and profitable. Although less and less profitable. But I'm saying when Google had that choice between we can do this on our own and we can learn how to do it or we can give up and let Samsung do it and Samsung will play nicer with us. They just like offloaded Motorola. So then that begs the question, what is the next Nexus phone? Are we gonna see a Nexus phone this year? What does the Nexus program even mean to Google right now? Well, there have been rumors they're gonna drop it. I think they've denied them. So I assume they'll still do it. Naturally. But the Nexus phone is a, as we all know, is sort of a reference design. Right, it's like an enthusiast device. It's the Android phone I choose. Right, and it's the Android phone most people would choose. Most people in tech. Nexus 6 is actually a pretty nice phone. I mean. It's enormous. What do you have in Nexus 6? Do you have an Android phone too? Or do you swap? I have a Nexus 6, excuse me, a Nexus 6 loner at home. And I have a Nexus 4, I think that was given to us in some code conference swag bag. Have you bought a Nexus phone? No, I haven't bought it. Right. But I mean, I appreciate having unlocked phones around. It's really easy to travel with. I'm the proud owner of a Nexus 5. Nexus 5 is my favorite phone. Nexus 6 was a little big for me. If the Nexus 5 had a not garbage camera, I would probably use that as my main phone. We've talked about this a lot too, like when you did your review of the Asus Zenfone 2 last week for Recode. And this idea that there's always going to be the premium for the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy S6 or Samsung Galaxy Note that people aspire to. They're sort of aspirational devices, right? But you go to other countries and you see that not everyone can afford those types of phones. And there are a lot of handset makers now that are coming in at the low end of the market making actually pretty decent phones. And it's really starting to put pressure on things. I look at the Nexus 6 as something like that. Or I mean, I know it's not as... No, the Nexus 6 is expensive. It's not as inexpensive. It's roughly the price of an iPhone. But you look at different devices like that. And I think they're starting to put some pressure on. So anyway, to me, the danger for Google is they might be losing control of Android. Let's just say that. They might be losing control of Android. And they would say, well, we never controlled Android. But they do, they give you a contract. And it's supposed to be about faster updates and not forking and all that's great. But it also has in it, you have to use these Google services. You can't just pick and choose. You have to use this whole suite of Google services. This search bar has to appear on this home screen. Finally, once in my life, I can say that was my scoop instead of a recut scoop. I was the first person to publish that part. And gadget, long ago. That's fantastic. What do you guys think of Android Wear? The watch has to stand up. He's like, good scoop. You know, I've got to actually stand up now. The watch told me so. No. I'm waiting for Kafka to text me and tell me that they had it first. But anyway, the point is, so that to me. That's your Google? That's the Google. What about the rest of the Google suite? Because we should go to Facebook and Amazon. Because I think Amazon is really interesting. Because I think everyone thought they were going to be a big platform company. They were in that gang. And then the Fire stuff, at least in my estimation, has flopped. Now I agree. But I think Facebook is very. All right, but let's go through Amazon because we can do that pretty quickly. Yeah. Okay? So Amazon is obviously enormously successful in two very important vectors. One is commerce. I mean, there's a lot of other commerce companies. Some of which are doing very nicely. But Amazon is still like the gorilla there. And they continue to innovate. They disrupt themselves, which is the key to everything, I think, if you're going to be successful. But Amazon, I think, in the device area, which to be honest, they don't even need. But they just do it. They have the Kindle e-ink readers. Yeah. Which Dieter, Dieter Bohn just called. Dieter just did a review on it. The Kindle paper. The Kindle paperwhite. My wife has an iPad, but she just walks around with a Kindle and she loves it. And she's a voracious reader. Does she have a Surface? Just kidding. I have a Surface. That's how you end. That's how Walt, we were talking about. I have a Surface. You have a Surface? Do you use it? We'll get there. All right, cool. Ready? But my point about Amazon is, okay, so there's the e-ink Kindle readers. Everything else they've tried, even though they don't ever announce sales. I mean, we know the Fire was. The phone. The Fire phone was a flameout. But I think the Fire tablets. That was pretty good. Have sold. I stole that from you. I think that was in your headline. Yeah, we did a headline. I think the Fire tablets have been, if this was Apple and Apple was reporting numbers the way Apple does, which is pretty transparent, they would be terrible numbers. I don't think the Fire tablets could be considered a big success. What about the Echo? While we're talking about devices. The Echo is a fascinating device, but it's brand new and we just don't know. So I love the Echo. I bought one a couple weeks ago. I think it's great. And I think it will die as soon as Apple builds that feature into a speaker or lets other speaker manufacturers tie it into an Apple TV. Apple's got this HomeKit thing happening. So the idea that you could buy an Apple TV and it would sit there and be the brains of Apple. The one I've been needed actually. They have a new. That Alexa would be the brains of an Apple TV. No, no, no, no, I'm saying Alexa's great. He said he loved it. In the next clause he said it's gonna be dead. Yeah, I love, the idea is so good, right? And then Amazon's ecosystem is so limited that you can just see how Apple can swoop in and take the idea. But that's assuming that they got the virtual assistant, the artificial intelligence part, right, too, because part of the appeal of the Echo is this Alexa artificial intelligence software. Yeah, but it actually doesn't do that much. I think the appeal of the Echo is just that it is there and it is so much easier to talk to a computer for some things than type at a computer. Right, but what you're saying, that part, I mean, so it's a piece of hardware. It looks kind of, it's like an elongated speaker, essentially, and anybody can do that. The talking to it part that you enjoy is the artificial intelligence. Right, but I'm saying, so like, Google could do it too. The back end assistant part is commodity smart. It's like table, Alexa is table stakes smart. Table stakes. Right, you can ask her the weather. You can tell her to play some music. But it's not really, it's not a giant leap. It's not Google Now, right, where Google Now is like, Alexa never wakes up and says, get the hell out of here, you're gonna miss your flight, the way Google Now could do. But what is amazing is having a speaker that's sitting there always, and you don't have to push a button on your phone, and I just say, Alexa, what's the weather, like every morning now, by habit. I just wanna speak to this. I think this would make a great holiday gift for normals. The same way that, I feel like Roku is so successful because a lot of, and I say normals, it's like, you guys know what normals. It's like, not us, not people like us that do this for a living. But you go to Amazon.com, you see an ad for the Echo, and then you Google Echo and watch some videos and read some reviews, it's like, holy crap, I had no idea this thing existed. Let me buy this. It's priced to the right number. What is it, 200? It's 179 if you have Prime. No, but my point is Apple could make a Siri Echo. Right, I don't think they will. Or, and I think this is the move, because basically Amazon announced this today, right, that other hardware makers can plug into their API. There's no reason Apple can't say to other speaker makers, you can plug into our API and get access to Siri through HomeKit. Lauren, am I wrong about this? And you were there actually to ask both of them, because you were sitting right behind me, you were sitting, I don't know, next to me, at the Apple event, did they say something about developers finally being able to tap into Siri in some way? On the phone. Oh, only on the phone. Oh, right. Okay, but that's a step at least. Look, let me get back to my point about Amazon. I don't, if the Echo is a breakthrough and a big deal, and they follow through, and today's announcements show they're serious, so that could change everything. That could be, it could be the next device, other than the E Ink Kindle readers, in which they're successful. I'm only saying that right now, as we sit here, all the devices between the E Ink Kindle and maybe the Echo have not been. And the phone is a disaster. Yeah, and I actually remember, I saw that phone a while before it hit the market, and I thought, and they have serious people who have been at other companies doing hardware for a while, they thought, they were very serious about not just selling stuff through it, but actually being a phone power. And the problem was, and it's Microsoft's problem too, I mean, it's a funny thing in that business. You start late, and it's very hard to get people to think you've got the gimmick, or the, you know, that in their case it was you kind of think you kind of flipped it. That was real dumb. And it demoed great in Seattle when I was there, saw it, and then I got my review unit, and like, my wrist got tired, and it worked okay going right, but not going left in my case, and you know, you could dig up the review, I wrote about that. But, so, they may not need the device business, because they've got the other vector that I didn't even mention that we all know about, but average people who use Amazon don't necessarily know about is, they have this whole back end, you know. They are the servers for everybody else's. It's AWS, but what's interesting about that is, those are other companies, right? They're a platform provider, but they don't get any intelligence across all those companies. No, they don't, but they make money. But they make money, but it's interesting that that would be, that's like. But they are, in a way, that's kind of being a platform. Right, no, it is being a platform. So they're a platform there, and they're a commerce platform. And those are, that's both pretty powerful. Right, all right, so we should do, and while I know you have a hard hat, but we should do five or 10 on Microsoft if you have time. Because I think Microsoft, if we're in an Apple moment, there is a Microsoft moment coming with Windows 10. But in my estimation, that moment is coming, sort of, it's like careening towards us. It does not feel like an orderly, and by design, right? They've done a lot of Windows 10 out in the open. There's a lot of walk back on the new start screen and versus the desktop. It's kind of like back to the future with Windows 10. They've made, Tom Warren knows the exact count, I don't. But I think they've made at least three revisions of Windows 8, and now with Windows 10, there's gonna be another one that are basically backpedaling from the original concept of Windows 8. Here's the short, my short point of view on Windows 10, which is not about the quality of Windows 10. Windows 10 is designed much more for reviving their phone than for improving PCs, although. And that is shocking. I'm not saying it won't improve PCs, but PCs are not a market that's growing nearly as fast as phones, and so the phones is really crucial to them. They have a universal app format. So if you are a developer, Lauren, and you decide to make a Windows 10 app for. That's right, I'm a Windows developer. You are. Worst user story ever. You are. That's what I do on my Saturdays. I know. The Windows developers are listening to this. And your productivity is way down. Because of the cat. But anyway, so here's their idea. Get everybody to upgrade to Windows 10 on the PC, of which there are hundreds of millions in their install base. I don't know the exact number. Actually, I think they promised a billion devices. Yeah, a billion. And once you upgrade on the PC, then there exists a Windows 10 app that can also run on the phone. Right, they're universal. And then all of a sudden, the Windows phones. It's the same executable code. Right, have a whole bunch of apps. And that's been one of their big problems with phones. Here's the interesting thing. Historically, Microsoft has never cared about upgrading to new versions of Windows. It's been about 10% of their Windows business. It's been difficult because the hardware didn't support the new version of Windows. We've all tried it. We all know this. It's usually a good column for reviewers. We'll probably do it again. And but this time, they've just not cared about it. Plus, their partner, Intel, and their OEM partners like Dell, they wanted an HP. They wanted you to go out and buy a new PC anyway. This time, Microsoft's interest in the phone, which is such a strategic product, requires them to get all these hundreds of millions of people with PCs to upgrade to Windows 10 so that developers will say, okay, there's a huge market for my Windows 10 app. I'm gonna be really interested to see how many people are gonna wanna do that. Is it gonna be easy? All that stuff. Tell us about your Surface. Yeah, tell us about your Surface. I wanna know about your Surface. Which one do you have? I have the original Surface. Such a troll, Lauren. Am I trolling? That was built on an arm. And I bought it because it was the first computer, not counting the Xbox. I mean, the first standard computer that Microsoft had ever made. And I think they did a good job on the hardware on it. They did. And not the software. But they did a good job on the hardware. And I also thought it was smart to do it on arm. I thought it was dumb to call RT. And I thought it was dumb to put a Windows desktop on it. They should have taken those Office apps and let them be full screen like people are used to with a tablet. And by not having the desktop, they wouldn't have had the problem of people thinking they could just put regular Windows apps on there. I mean, I think they should have, our listeners totally know what I think. But I think they should have called it Metro and it should have been basically their answer to the iPad fully. Yes, you and I completely 100% agree on that. That's the first, we should just end the show. I don't know if I have a... Mic drop. It's not a first. There's no... Do you use any Microsoft products, Lauren? I've been using the Microsoft Surface 3, the relatively inexpensive one that they put out a short while ago. That runs on an Atom processor. And it's really very slow is my observation so far. So I don't love it. It's not the kind of product that you're gonna like, run heavy apps like Photoshop off of and do all of your heavy multimedia work on. I think this desktop apps thing to drive the phone is, A, when Walt said this to me yesterday, it's the most counterintuitive thing to think about Microsoft ever. That they're gonna use their desktop install base to court developers into writing phone apps is, I mean, that is like a jujitsu move. No, but that's absolutely true. I'm not making that up. But what is crazy to me is I don't know that mobile developers are racing the right desktop apps. I think they're gonna say just open a browser. Just build a better browser, Microsoft. Well, yeah, but they won't be necessarily mobile debate. So in other words, they want a better, maybe I'm wrong about this example, but let's say they want a better Facebook app. So Facebook, which typically, I guess, doesn't have apps on their stuff. That's what I'm saying, right? Facebook is gonna say open your browser. Like, do better job of HTML5 in your browser. So maybe this will be a spectacular failure. But this is their strategy. But here's the thing. Strategies take their strength, which is the kind of moribund PC market, but still with a large install base, and use that to do this jujitsu, to leverage it over to phones. But that's, I mean. And we're gonna watch that drama and see what happens. And I would actually love, I mean, it's funny I have this Macbook Pro sitting here. Mostly it's running web apps, right? Walt and I both use Mailplane. Mailplane is basically Safari with some stuff. I just started using Mailplane. Right, I've got Slack open. Slack is a web app. It's an app, but it's definitely running a web view in the background. And then it's just Chrome tabs for days. And that's what's open on this computer right now. And it's a really fancy Chromebook. It's very, it's beautiful. Don't take it away from me. Okay, but do you use any, oh, oh, can we say one more thing? Do we have to wrap up? Yeah, we do have to wrap up. You guys can keep going, but I'm gonna leave. What time is it? It's 3.05. And then on Twitter it'll be Walt walked out on Neelai. Hey, you know what? Here's the thing I know about great television and great radio. You gotta stage some stunts. You gotta get the people talking. You gotta give them something good. Well, we do have one thing to mention though before we go. I just have to get to a train, that's all. Which is that Recode has been working on its own radio show for a little while now. And so on July 8th, we are gonna be launching Recode Radio, which we're very excited about. And we're also gonna be launching something called Recode Decode, which is an interview show on Recode Radio. By the most feared and yet the most loved woman in Silicon Valley. The sparkly vampire. The sparkly vampire herself, Kara Swisher. It's gonna be great. Recode Decode, July 8th. We're really excited. Recode's first podcast. I don't think it'll, I mean, I don't wanna say it's not gonna be as entertaining as this one, but this is pretty fun. This one's all over the place. This was really fun for us. I have no idea how it was for the listeners. But it was Kara Swisher free. And then, and Recode Decode would be Kara Swisher. Adding Kara to anything is a real step up. Sam, do the rest of our engagements. Hello, thank you for watching and listening to this podcast. You laugh when I do my thing. Gotta do it, man. Go Sam. We are on Snapchat. If you've listened to the show and you've heard me say this, you know what's good. You should follow us on Snapchat. We are the real verge on Snapchat. I promise you it will be worth watching our stories. You should hit us up on Periscope also. We're at verge on Periscope. We take it to events. We take it all around the world. Something you wanna see there. We're on YouTube, youtube.com slash the verge. Subscribe if you haven't. We are going to hit a million this year and you're gonna make it happen. And now back to you, Neely. All right, and then obviously there's Recode Decode. We'll start, we'll be promoting that across the verge, but you can find the rest of our shows, Verge ESP and What's Tech on iTunes at itunes.com slash the verge. Sam on Twitter is Sam Sheffer. Lauren is Lauren Good. Walt is Walt Mossberg. I am Reckless, the only person without his first name on here. Thank you so much for listening. Hold on, I've gotta do a thing. And I wanna thank lynda.com for sponsoring our show today. lynda.com is an online learning platform with over 3,000 on demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology and creative skills. Free 10 day trial, lynda.com slash the vergecast. That's lynda.com slash the vergecast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Walt and Lauren for being here. That was Reckless, rock and roll.