 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of July 16th, 2012. I'm Joshua Topolsky. I'm David Pierce. I'm Ross Miller. I was doing the Bain voice before we started. And anyhow, but I'm not going to do it now. You guys are not going to get it. I think we're done. You're not going to get it. Maybe later on. You're just going to break it up. And anyhow, this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in consumer technology, technology culture, and just regular plain old culture like the Dark Knight Rises premiering tonight at midnight across the country. And there's a giant line across the street where there are people in line at five o'clock, 10 after five. Like 300 people standing in line for the show. Oh my God. Can we get a paper towel? Michael, I don't see you jumping in action here. What do you mean? This is going really well so far. Michael says there's a delay on the stream, therefore he saw it after it happened. As if that's an excuse. He told me that he could predict when horrible things were going to happen. There's time dilation between this room and that room. Oh boy, that's going to be a GIF, isn't it? Like, oh boy. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I was so excited about the Bane impersonation I was about to do. Which you should now do because you've already had the ramifications plaster all over David's laptop and the table. Would you say this is equivalent to Gotham being in ruins? Are you Gotham's reckoning right now? Yeah. Gotham's reckoning. What did Gotham do to Bane that made him so angry? Poor Bane. Spoilers. Poor Bane. You're just addicted to a... No, he's probably not even on drugs in the movie, right? This is not... We're not talking about The Dark Knight Rises. No. Can we? Even though I know how it ends. You know what did happen? Turns out Batman is a lady. Boom. Bad lady. There you are. Thank you. Why are you giving him the... No, do not pass it to me. I don't know. Oops. It's broken. So as you can tell, Neely and Paul are not here. Paul is in Utah. Neely is interviewing a person of interest. That's brilliant. Intrigue. A person of interest. Anyhow, we've got great, good, cool, fresh buddies here. And Batman. And Batman. And Batman. Don't make me do it. I'm done. I'm done. We've got Batman impersonation in public. I think to great effect. I don't mind telling you. So anyway, but no, this is a crazy week. Surprisingly for... It's a crazy hour, actually. Well, the hour has been crazy. But it felt like a light week of news, but we've actually had some significant stories. I mean, some really significant stories. Well, let's start with... I mean, I think the biggest story was Marissa Meyer. As the new CEO. Or Marissa Meyer. Depending on who you are. Is it Meyer or Meyer? I think if you're her, it's Meyer. I'd like to take a vote. Charlie Rose has Meyer. Meyer? If Rose says Meyer, then that's what it is. Anyhow, Marissa Meyer became the CEO of Yahoo, and she's preggers. She's totally pregnant, guys. Is she gonna be able to run a company? I don't know. What's gonna happen once she's got a baby? Did she like her and the child? She's gonna have to spend all her time with the baby. She's not gonna have time for the baby that is Yahoo! Exclamation mark. Somebody's gonna burn this building down before this podcast is on. Why, you think we're gonna get like a hate Molotov? That's possible. Is there like a nice Molotov cocktail? Like, I like you, check it out. A Mazel Tov cocktail. A Mazel Tov cocktail. You just throw it, and it's like, the rainbow's coming out. Does that still explode, though? It's just like, it's fireworks. Does it still burn you up? No? Okay, all right. Anyhow, Marissa Meyer, CEO of Yahoo, big deal, she left Google. And there's some debate as to whether she left Google as a well-loved hero of Google, or if she was not that well-liked by a lot of people. Well, yeah, because there were these stories that she, I guess her last position was, was it the head of location services? I forget what the title was. Yeah, I was just trying to. She was the head of all that. Yeah. And I don't know what it actually means, but it seems like she had run the teams with Gmail and all kinds of their other, all of their other huge products. Prior to that. Right. And so I think a lot of people, I don't know whether this is accurate or not, but I think a lot of people assumed that this was like a step backwards and kind of out of the limelight of Google's cool products. Yeah, I think that is part of the assumption. Yeah, so she was VP of the location service, then they hired a senior VP to oversee her. At that point, she was out of the inner circle. There's an inner circle that Larry Page had. She was in it for a little bit, then she got taken out for whatever reason. The whole thing reeks of cronyism and a boys club and a glass ceiling and I think discrimination. And Eric's made a nice leather chair with a cigar. And discrimination against pride in people. Are you just trying to even out for your other comments? So nobody burns the other down. I'm enraged. What if Bain got ahold of this information? What would he do? He'd make Larry- He's Google's reckoning. He'd make Larry pay. He's Google's reckoning. Larry's punishment must be more severe. Or Sergei's or Eric's. Eric Schmidt's punishment. Schmidt's punishment must be more severe. All about Schmidt. Yeah. You know, anyhow, but so that's all we really know at this point. She's gonna turn Yahoo around. She's gonna create a great Yahoo email experience. She's gonna pick the right colors. There is a story about Marissa Meyer that I thought was really interesting, which is the 41 shades of, not 50 shades of gray, but it's like the 41 shades of blue. It's like 41- I haven't heard this story. It's like that, a designer left. I should have more detail. I can't think of his name right now. So yeah, there's a designer left and he wrote this scathing post about his experience at Google. And without calling her out, back linking to her, he's like, there's this one person that was like, such a stickler for detail. And since like, we talked about every pixel, we argued over every pixel, 41 shades of one color and they could not figure out the right one. But they were also, isn't there some insinuation that they were like trying to engineer what color would be, there was like some algorithm for picking out the color. Oh yeah, they had something like that. They had something like that. They had tested tiny different shades of blue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that it wasn't for a designer, was not a very fun place to be apparently. So the point is, like to take it from that, she has a strong attention for detail. Well, I will say, and I will say, and I will say like, if that's true, we've seen this era of Google design in the last, and when's it, how long it's been about a year, maybe a little bit longer. Are you gonna call it the Matias era? Well, it's not just Matias, but it just seemed like somebody kind of let design loose at Google. I mean, Google has been, was really ugly up until, like remember what Gmail used to look like? And we were all like, how could you change it? And now like, look at old, old Gmail is like seriously assy, is how I would describe it. Well, and all their other products. It's like an ass, it's like a butt. Yeah. Okay. It is a butt. It's just like a butt sitting on a table. And not a nice one, not a sexy butt, a gross one. Well, and all their products used to look really different too, and now they kind of look alike, which is nice. Yeah, they look like they were designed by a hundred different engineers in different places with different ideas. Now it looks like it's a cohesive whole. Right. And it looks really good, I think. It does look good. And so maybe she did stand in the way of that. Well, we don't know. We'll know if Yahoo gets even uglier. But also it's like, if they're hiring Meyers, like top role, Yahoo wants to become a product company more than like a sales and service company. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing I've been wondering this whole, throughout this whole thing, it's like they had, I can't remember the guy's name offhand, but they had another guy who they were thinking of hiring, the CEO who was like a media guy. And they didn't hire him, they instead hire Marissa Meyer, who's very much technical and she's an engineer and she has a computer science degree. And she's pregnant. She has an actual degree from a college. I know she has a computer science degree, but we cannot forget that she is pregnant. It's very, okay. No, and the thing, it's Ross Levinson, thank you, Chad. That was his name. Ross Levinson. Ross Levinson. But so what I want to know is like, what is Yahoo? Like what do they fancy themselves? They lost search, that's over. The what company? The what? But that's what I can't figure out. Like they're huge as a media company. Like why not just own that? Who is Yahoo? Let's talk about what, I mean, they own Flickr. Yeah, they own Flickr. They have some assets. Do you see the great, there was this great, like dear Flickr or dear Marissa Meyer, please fix Flickr. Do you see this? No, who's it by? I forget who it was that put it up. I mean, Flickr has like, Flickr has the guts of a really good product. Yeah, it does. I think it still has more of mindshare than like, say, Picasa or other like photo services, Instagram notwithstanding. I mean, I think that there are some really valuable, Google, oh sorry, Yahoo as a company with products, say, you know what, come on. Hey. Come on. I don't know what's going on in here. I think they have some really great stuff. They just have to find a way to utilize it. You know? I mean, Flickr is a great example. You know, their email actually is not that bad. No, and they've improved it a lot in the last six months. Could they improve it more? Could they integrate it better? Or better question, can they get people to try it again? Because I feel like there's a mindshare issue at this point. Like how can you, I mean, if they could do something, if they can do something that actually moves the ball forward versus just putting a nice coat of paint on mail. I mean, AOL did the same thing. They were like, we have new mail, but it was just like mail with like a nicer skin. You know, honestly, I was thinking about like, is Gmail still the only major email company to like use labels instead of folders? Well. That's another big thing. Yeah, I mean, they have a lot of really pretty advanced stuff going on, filters. Right. You know? Oh yeah, who pipes has always been a great service for us. Like it's like a, it's a minor thing, but it's something that you do. Yeah, but what if you could turn pipes into a really cool consumer phase? Exactly. Like if this, then that is almost like pipes in a way. Right. Like make pipes in a way that sets. It's pipes because it could use their interface. Buy, buy, here's what Yahoo could do that would be cool. Buy if this, then that, and like make it, like give it like a pipes interface where you can, you know, some really straightforward, you can just piece things together. I mean, don't give it the pipes interface because that's bad. But like if this is the, that's the UI, and then pipes is like the server that powers it. Yeah. That's a great combination. But do they care? I don't know. Well, and that's the thing, like there's still, Yahoo's still this giant company with a ton of employees and a ton of revenue. I mean, Yahoo, Yahoo invented, invented widgets. They didn't invent widgets, but they bought, they bought, what was the company? Confabulator? Yeah. And then they had Yahoo widgets. Pulled out in 2004. Yeah, I just don't know where that came from. But, but you know, that was the only other thing that did widgets really like what Apple was doing. And they had some really cool stuff. Like, is there some way, like become, I don't know, become like a widget powerhouse for Android, like have Confabulator widgets be on Android. And honestly, with Marissa Meyer, who spearheaded iGoogle, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. Like a page of widgets. Or just like, I mean, I'm saying, take some of the stuff you already own and utilize it, that's consumer-facing. You know, but utilize it in a way that's cool and useful and helpful and does something interesting and new. Right. Not like a me too product. I think that's the thing. I mean, it's a big challenge for anybody, whether it's, whether you're pregnant or not. Okay. But especially. No matter how pregnant, but especially with that baby on board in the oven, Bon in the oven. Is that what they say? That is gross. That is disgusting. I can't believe people say that. That is an affront. That's an affrontery to all humanity. Are buns in the oven gross? Actually, affront is enough. You don't need to add the. It's just an affront. It's. You can say, I wanted to use the word affrontery, but there's no need. I don't even know if it is a word. It's not really a word. I'm sure somebody in chat will be telling us if it's a word. Yeah, I'm sure. Thumbs up, thumbs up, it's a word. Don't care what you think. Nobody. I'm gonna make it a word. Nobody cares. I think everybody hates you. I think, Cray Sean was just giving me the wrap up this bit thing. I won't wrap it up. You need to make me go longer with this bit is what's gonna happen, my man. You better watch it. You better watch yourself. Check yourself anyhow. I'm just rambling. I'm sorry, it's been a long week. In other news. In other news. So, everybody, every company on the planet, literally every single one announced earnings today. Like in the last hour. Yeah, like right now. They're all on calls. Tell me about them. So, Google announced earnings. Because we're good. Which we're good. We can basically run through this pretty easily. $2.8 billion in net income. Yeah, it's amazing how well you know this, Josh. $12 billion in revenue. Yeah, and Motorola took a loss, but who cares? Because they're Motorola. And it was also $233 million, which is not a lot. It's $233 million. It's a lot of people's bottom line. It's $233 million in the midst of other successes now. I mean, if they'd have been on their own, Motorola Mobility on their own, would have looked a lot more punishing. Yeah. Well, and what I thought was really interesting is their paid clicks were up 42% from the same time last year. That's crazy. Which is huge. I would have thought this would be as big as it would ever be. It's a quantity thing, though, because the cost per click is down 16%. So it's like, they're making less per click, but they're doing a lot more clicks. Well, I mean, I'd like to see how that balances out. But up to 42% is huge. I'd like to know what is driving that. Do they say? Do they say specifically what's driving it? Do they have prettier clicks? I mean, yeah. Have they done? Are they doing new ad initiatives? Is it just better? I mean, is it just better advertising? Are people more responsive to ads right now? I'd like to know how that's happening. I mean, the thing I've seen, and this is totally anecdotal and has nothing to do with anything, really. But it's circumstantial evidence. Right. But I've seen, even just like in Gmail or in the sidebar of Google and stuff, way better targeted ads recently. I watched Laura click on an ad the other day. I was shocked. Whoa, my audio just went out in one of my ears. I wonder, because they've been doing a huge shop consumer focus. And to your point, there are times when we're looking at a product, and they'll have the shop page. And we're now more tempted to click on that. Yeah. And that may be counting toward their ad revenue. I'm totally, this ear is totally out for me. Oh, I literally have nothing actually on this. Oh, you don't? No, I'm going to take this off, actually. It doesn't matter to me. You're taking it all off? It's off. Wait, you just came through and you yelled. Going offline. It's coming through a little bit. A little bit? It's not happening. All right. Why do we wear these? To talk to each other. But we're in the room. Nope. We're not, actually. We're all, oh, this is, I'm going to keep mine on. How about that? Screw you guys. David, join us. Join us, David. Oh, it's great to be here. Wow. This is amazing. It's so much better. Even on my hair, it looks a little funky. Got a little, oh, man. What is that? OK, but so Google's kind of boring. Yeah. They just, you know, they made money. Good job, Google. They have $43 billion in cash. This is weird. And that's less than the last quarter. So what have they been buying? Everything. Google's made, Google's made some acquisitions. But OK, let's go through. Microsoft? Microsoft? Yeah, Microsoft's also announced, and Microsoft's were much, well, Microsoft's were kind of off. There are two records. There are two records that are important. It's the first quarterly loss since the company went public. Yep. So more or less, first time ever. And it was a record revenue of $18 billion. Right. Their loss was $492 million. Yes, there was. Yeah. Mostly due to the write down, the $6 billion write down of their AQANDA acquisition. You may notice a lot of these figures come up in Josh's 90 Seconds on the Verge later. Let's just say that I did a 90 Seconds on the Verge today. And it covered the earnings. There was a lot of memorization of numbers. That's right. Thank you for doing that. Yes, my pleasure. Thank you for allowing me to do it. Look, it's a pleasure of mine to see you squirm at trying to figure out every single number. I don't like this. I'm putting these back on. Really? You hear me too much. It makes me very uncomfortable. It's too real in here. Things are getting too real. I'm living free. Oh, so wait. Both my sides are back. That's weird. You know what I thought was really interesting, though? What's that, David? In, let's see, who wrote this post? Brian wrote this post and said, the company's entertainment devices division, which includes the Xbox 360, recorded the most impressive growth with revenue for the quarter jumping 20% to more than $1.7 billion. So we've been talking all this stuff about the Xbox 360's reached the end of life. We're all waiting on this new thing. And yet, they're still growing and making more money than ever. Yeah. I mean, you can't, I mean, I use, I really can't believe how much I use the Xbox now. Now that it has HBO Go and Amazon, I'm like, I basically do all my video watching on there. I even paid for a movie recently. What? I'm going to do it tonight, too. What was this movie? I don't know. What was the movie? I don't want to tell you. 27 Dresses. No, I was friends with kids. And it's the Jennifer Westphal. 27 Dresses isn't that bad. You take that back. No, 27 Dresses is terrible. How dare you? No, no, I'm speaking as a man who likes a rom-com. I'm not saying it's terrible. I saw that in theaters. Did you really? Yes. Wow. Friends with kids. The trailer looks good. It's not that good. Thumbs down. I really didn't think. Can we just admire this for the rest of the verse? I don't understand what's going on. Just for anyone who listens to the show and doesn't watch it, you are missing out right now. What was my line? Josh, your biceps are in the middle. What was my Bane line? Your punishment must be more severe. Let's see if I can do it again. You're punishment must be more severe. Why haven't you killed me? You're punishment must be more severe. That's strong work. Can we take this down? This is actually very, very disturbing. One government in ruins, you can die. I don't know what you're saying. Where are they? All right, anyhow. Sorry. What is wrong? We're such babies. Windows, Microsoft. We're such babies. Windows. Oh, yeah, right. But Windows 8 is coming out. It wasn't actually. I mean, they posted losses, but they made a huge, terrible acquisition. When you're out of $6 billion, I feel like that quarter, you kind of lose it. It's not a right down. It's a right down. One thing you could say is Microsoft isn't currently soaring. They're not like, we're killing it. It just is like, we're not out of going out of business. But the thing is, we say that because I feel like they're not growing by these crazy amounts, but they did $18 billion in revenue in the last three months. They wrote down a $6 billion acquisition. There is that. I'm not saying there's not that. But that is one point for them. They have a failing mobile product. I mean, it's not doing well. In Nokia, speaking of Segway, Nokia posted a $1 billion operating loss. And they say they sold 4 million. Lumihanza has only 600,000 in America. So 4 million is not bad, but there's no US penetration at all. And market share, the needle has not moved, really. And it's a slow burn. It's very slow. But the burn is slow. What's really interesting about that to me is that it means nobody's buying the Lumia 900, this big flagship phone that AT&T promoted the heck out of. If they sold 600,000, I'm not impressed. I'm not impressed. Well, I mean, it's 600,000 more Nokias that were sold last quarter. Touche. There's that. I mean, it's better than nothing. Yeah. Right. Though they did post an operating loss of $1 billion. So maybe it isn't better than nothing. But I mean, with Windows Phone 8 coming out, is that a starting over point? Because Windows Phone 8 is much better than 7. I mean, how many times can you start over? How many times? How much money do you have in your bank account? I don't know. That's really what it is. I said this when I did my review of the Lumia, and I still feel this way. It's like webOS all over again, where it's like, how many times will we go, this is going to be it? How many times have we said that about Yahoo? Finally have the right device. We finally have the right support. HP is supporting them, and you've got the right devices, and the software is really tightened up now. This is going to be it. I don't know. So many angry Microsoft fanboys right now in chat. As long as they're funding, they're going to keep doing it. For example, Yahoo has started over. You mean Yahoo? Yahoo. Oh my god. Has started over like five or six times in the last couple of years. But it's a different kind of business. That's like saying Microsoft has started over. Well, and I don't know that you want to pattern yourself after Yahoo's last five or six years. Yeah, just look at Yahoo. They're doing OK. But the point is, and they're still around. Maybe Marissa Mayer will become the CEO of Microsoft. So the question is, if Palm wasn't acquired, would it still be around trying? It's not around trying. But it was also acquired. Either way, it wouldn't have been around. Nokia has a lot of money in the bank account. They can do this for a couple of years. They can screw up. MeeGo. MeeGo. They could have done it. Really? No. But I mean, who knows? I don't know. Tizen. It's coming, man. Let's just say this. If Windows Phone has, what, 2.3% market share or something, what was the last market share number? Something like that. I can't remember. But it was something like that. I think it's not inconceivable that if Nokia had pushed hard on MeeGo, had gotten developers psyched about it, and had produced good products. And the N9 is pretty good. It's a great piece of hardware. And the software is really pretty interesting. And despite that, it's- I'm just saying, if they had had full force behind it, could they have acquired 2%- oh, I'm sorry. I just spit on you. I apologize. I don't know how that happened. Could they have acquired 2% market share? I mean, I don't think the situation's any different. And I agree. I think they could have gotten 2% market share, because it's the same story. Nobody else is making good Windows Phones. So it's basically Nokia's OS at this point. What's a good Windows Phone? Ross's Samsung Focus 2. No, what I'm saying is- But what does it matter? A nice piece of hardware obviously doesn't matter. People aren't just buying things because the hardware is nice. Right. It's hard to buy a piece of fashion that's a two-year commitment. It's like the bold hardware. The bold hardware is really nice. Yeah, it is. It's really nice. But if I just got one, I don't have to worry about it. You want one, right? Yeah, it's kind of- well, you're not going to buy one, because it's not fun to use. No, and then I hit the menu button and scrolled through. Yeah. And I was like, I'm not. You're loading up Calendar, and you get the little spinning thing. You know, it's not good. So the point is that people aren't buying based on hardware. If they were, I would have a Lumia 900 or 800. Yeah. 900, sorry. 900. Yeah. The 800's nice too. I'm just saying either one. But I'm not going to buy it, because the hardware is the best hardware on the market in my opinion, like in terms of look and feel. Yeah. The best. The most awesome. I love it. And the software just isn't there. You know? Anyhow, not to bash it, but I'm just saying, if Nokia had taken MeeGo and really pushed it, they're not a small company. You know? If they had taken MeeGo and pushed it, and pushed developers, and said, look, you can port your apps. I mean, look, it's Linux based, right? Right. You can port. I mean, how easy would it be to port an iOS app to that framework, to that device? Or a webOS app? Or even an Android app? My guess is a lot easier than it is to go to, or at least somewhat easier than it is to go to Windows Phone. I'm just saying, you may have had an opportunity there to do something interesting. But we'll never know. But maybe we will. 2%, 3% market share? Like, I think that's not inconceivable. No, I don't think so either. I mean, Palm still has like 2% market share or something. Right. Like, Palm OS. I feel so bad for all those people. I know, right? Didn't you buy a Pixie? What happened with that? Yeah, I bought a Pixie the other day. How'd that go? Well, I went back and read my end gadget review of it, where I was like, I cannot recommend this phone to anybody. Except for yourself. No, I forgot. It is terrible. I mean, it is a piece of crap. I mean, it's absolutely terrible. But WebOS is pretty great. WebOS had amazing features. Why are we talking about WebOS again? But man, I got to tell you, those phones, I mean, the Pre was better. I remember I did a dual review of PrePlus and Pixie Plus. And I was like, the PrePlus is $50 more than this thing. And if you're going to get one of these phones, the PrePlus is obviously the phone to get. Right. And it's a pretty great, you know, at the time, was a pretty solid device. It had some really interesting, you know, it had huge potential, I thought. And I said, like, if you believe in WebOS as a platform, this is an awesome phone. The Pixie, on the other hand, was not awesome. And it was not awesome last week, two weeks ago, when I used it. Fair enough. So the other company that had earnings this week, or today, right now, was Verizon. And Verizon's kind of same story as Google. Like, oh, we keep making more money. Cannot stop making money. They sold 2.6 million iPhones, 2.9 million Android phones. Is that number right? 2.7 million iPhones. 2.7 million iPhones, 2.9 million Android. Which is interesting. It's down half a million from the last quarter. iPhones. What's down? iPhones. It was 3.2 million last quarter. It sold half a million fewer iPhones than the last quarter. Really? Yeah. Right. I wonder, I think. Galaxy Nexus effect. No. I think that. I don't buy it. Nobody knows what Galaxy Nexus is. Well, I think it's interesting. I've actually seen a few. Go ahead. I think people have finally figured out when the new iPhone comes out. And I think now, it's, I think this is going to start happening every year. After five years. No, seriously. They're like, wait a second. Like, my dad needs a new one. My dad needs a new phone. And I've told my family, like, if you buy a gadget without telling me, I will punch you in the face. I said this to my family. To your mother and father. I said it to both. Are you going to punch your mother in the face? No, because they don't do it anymore. They don't buy gadgets without me anymore. But did you punch your mother in the face? I was punching them in the face a lot. I mean, you got to do what you got to do. I'm just trying to take care of my family here. You're trying to take care of your family by punching them in the face. Yes. It's cool. It's preventive. I hurt because I love. I'm talking to my dad about buying a new phone. And he was like, oh, well, I hear the Galaxy S3 is really good. My dad sort of knows what cell phones are. Yeah, I don't think your dad gets to play in this. But then he's like, oh, but I hear the next iPhone is coming in August. And I was like, how in the world did you hear that? Where did he get August? Apparently that's the word I'm. You tell him to stop reading those other rags at readtheverge.com. That's a really good idea. But I think people have figured out that the iPhone comes at a certain time every year and now are going to wait. The iPhone comes but once a year. Exactly. Yes. And now people will wait. Well, I think that may not be untrue. And we'll have to see. And LTE is a big one. Well, LTE is a big deal. Well, actually, the other point, there's a couple. Two other figures I thought were interesting here. Of the 2.9 million Android phones, 2.5 million were LTE. That's crazy. So like, Verizon's gone all in with LTE. They're getting people at least to use the network, even if they don't realize. So needless to say, the next iPhone is probably going to be an LTE device. Well, hasn't Verizon said we're not releasing smartphones to LTE anymore? But then they went back with Blackberry. I mean, if the iPhone is not an LTE, Verizon's not going to just stop. No, I mean, I'm going to tell you something. I cannot possibly see any scenario. I would bet $1,000 the next iPhone. $1,000 US dollars. $1,000 Linden dollars from Second Life. Sold. I would bet dollars to donuts. I would take those $1,000 and put them to donuts. Which is approximately $200. I'd do you bet dollars to donuts. What does that mean? Does anybody know what that means? What's the cost of a donut right now? Average donut cost? It's $0.99 at Dunkin' Donuts, because I just bought one today. I bought one literally on the road over here. Wait, hold on. Crayton, what are you trying to say? I thought it was less than that. I thought it was $0.50. Well, if you buy by the bulk. But individual donut is what? Average price. What do you use? Are you using the Dunkin' system? The Dunkin' system. I mean, are there other systems? There's a crispy system. When was the last time you had a crispy green donut? Or if you live in Greenpoint, there's the Peter Pan system. I'm down with the Peter Pan system. Are you? Peter Pan donuts are amazing. Have you ever had the donut ice cream sandwich, where it's like a donut? What? I think it may actually be, oh no, it's a donut cut in half with ice cream in the middle. And it is? I have to go. I need one right now. Did Michael just exclaim, oh my god? Dude, it is delicious. Delicious. Tina Fey, also a big Peter Pan fan. Fun fact. All right, that's good enough for Tina. My side went out again. Anyhow. So the last thing about Verizon. Finally, for the first time ever, I'm surprised it took this long. Oh wait, I didn't finish my point. Oh, get your point done. Dollars to donuts. The next iPhone has to have LT. There's no way they can do it without LT. Especially now that the iPad has. Yeah, the iPad has LT. I just don't see. But the question, the really interesting question is, can they keep this battery life with LT? And if they can, what kind of crazy black magic are they using? Others have done it. I get a full day out of my iPhone and nothing more. And it's on 3G. And every LTE phone I test, I get a full day and nothing more. I feel like that's just kind of where we're at now. The iPhone has gotten. I feel like the 4S battery life is not. It doesn't seem as up to. Let's look at the new iPad. It's got four times as much pixel surrender. And it's LTE. And it's not a bad battery life. I think Apple's figured it out. Yeah, but it's a much larger battery. It's a much larger battery. Isn't it double capacity of the last iPad? Right. Is that ridiculous? Rumor has it they've made the iPhone screen thinner. I'm sure they're making other things lighter. So they can just put more battery. At some point, five years from now, it's going to be battery and screen. That's the entire iPhone. There's not going to be any. How is the processing going to happen? It's going to be in the screen. BPU, battery processing unit. You like that? That was good. Bam. Battery access memory. The last thing about Verizon, we move on. For the first time ever, over 50% of its customers are now using a smartphone. Yeah. Well, that's in line with the national averages. Right. It was 47 before. Now they've finally crossed the halfway point. And obviously, it's only going to go up from here. I mean, everybody's going to be using a smartphone. Smartphones are hot. Especially now that we have these shared data plants that you can share among devices. Are you segueing? Are you segueing to some shared data? No. Do we want to talk about this? I don't care about shared data. Might as well. Should we take a call? Let's take a call. Cool. We're going to get our number up on the line on the phone here. Could you be pregnant and run Yahoo? What is the, what are we getting up on the screen? Call into the Vergecast. Call in. We'd love to talk to you. The number is 888-418-4074. And what's the topic? What do we want to talk to people about? What should Yahoo do? How would you fix Yahoo? How would you fix Yahoo? You play the CEO. You don't have to be pregnant. What is your one, like, your top idea? It helps if you are. And tell us here on the Vergecast, and we'll tell you if we think you're right or not. I'm just going to drink. And if we don't think you're right, we'll ridicule you and make you regret having ever dialed that number. The winner gets to sue Yahoo for stealing the idea. Yahoo. This guy cannot say Yahoo. Yeah, if you call that again, we're going to have a problem. I'm sorry. 888-418-4074. What else is going on? Well, we wait for a call to come in. Oh, the lines are exploding. All? The lines are blowing up. Three of them. Four. Four. Four lines exploding. Oh, here we go. We've got a check box. Call, you're on the air. What is your name, and how would you fix Yahoo? Hi, I'm Steve. And I think that Yahoo is basically far behind in mostly its search. It's a brand awareness. And then it's email. A lot of people have switched to Google for their search. I mean, Yahoo started to use Google Search more than an email. I don't know anybody who uses Yahoo. Email accounts that I use and get Yahoo. Steve, are you on a cell phone? No, I'm on a computer. I'm from Germany right now. Oh, you're in Germany. You're having some crazy, weird cutouts where your voice seems to echo off into an explosion of static. I'm picturing you in a giant warehouse. Yeah, are you in a warehouse in Berlin? Are you in Hamburg? All right, Steve, I'm sorry. We're going to have to cut this short because we can't hear you. I apologize. It's nothing personal. Try again soon. Except it kind of is. Hi, you're on the air. What is your name, and how would you fix Yahoo? My name is Steve Robles from Central Florida. And I would fix Yahoo. I would really play off the flicker angle. Because that's still the main photo service I used to really archive and save my photos in the cloud. And I feel like that's the one. Now the Facebook is probably Instagram, and who knows what they'll do with that. Really try to create a great service for photo sharing, album sharing, journaling. And I really play off that. I can really go to the mobile and iPad. What would you do specifically with flicker? What do you think it's lacking right now? I still feel like it looks kind of janky. And even using it, being able to organize your photos, is kind of not very intuitive. It's really hard to use. It's hard to like, I want to look at a big version of this photo. It's really unintuitive. There's six different screens to view different sizes. It's got the black screen, and then it's got the white screen. And it's got the, I don't get it. Right. And it's like, if we've ever figured out how to move a photo from one app to another. Right. Right. It's like, it should be drag and drop. It should be like really like, it should be very like HTML5-ish. It should feel like a modern app. It should feel like a web app, and it doesn't. It feels like crap. Right. Right. And Instagram, it's great for sharing one photo. And I created one iCloud photo journal, and I didn't know what to do with it. Where do I send it, or who can see it? So I just really think they should play off the mass photo sharing, archiving. I feel like my photos will be safe there, that kind of thing. Yeah. Anything else? What else? What about, hey, remember Buzz? Remember they had a service called Buzz? It was like, dig? I thought that was Google. No, no, Google had Buzz too, but Yahoo had Buzz, and it was like, dig. It's apparently just not a good name. I mean, honestly, I never go to yahoo.com, so I really can't. No? What does it do? I don't even know what it does. Really? Do you use Yahoo email? Yeah. No, no, no. Do you play fantasy football with Yahoo? I actually don't. I don't. That's the one thing I still do. Yeah. That's the biggest thing they have in there. Fantasy football? Yeah. Yes. And it's bad. It's really janky. It's OK. Not that I would know. In Facebook, I see a lot of people read Yahoo articles, and I see it in my Facebook news feed, but I never want to install a Yahoo app on Facebook, so I just never read them. Their Yahoo news footprint is really large. Like, they are a presence in news online. They bought Associated Content, which I think was not a good purchase. And then they changed the name to, what was it? I don't know. They could just change the name to kind of extremely mediocre content that nobody should read. Yahoo Contributor Network. Yeah, the Contributor Network. I think it's a miss. All right, well, Steve, thank you for dialing in, and good point on the Flickr stuff. Thanks for having me. Caller, oh, I almost did it again. Caller, you're on the line. What is your name? How would you fix Yahoo? Yeah, I'm John. And well, I mean, basically, like you were saying earlier, Yahoo still has a lot of services that people identify with. And I mean, if they would just come out with some cool, really slick apps, you know, I'd totally be down to install them. I mean, they're just, they have a lot of services, just like anybody else. So I mean, if they make awesome stuff, I mean, why wouldn't other people use them? Would you consider using a Yahoo OS on a phone? I mean, would I have to buy a new phone? Because that just sounds kind of ridiculous for me to go out and buy a new phone. I mean, I just made that up. It's not a real thing. I'm just throwing it out there. I'm just wondering. I just popped it into my head. Like, they could do their own phone OS. YOS, YAS, Yoz. Yoz. Yoz. Yoz. That'd be great. It's an exclamation point. Why would I want it? Why would you want it? Sick flicker integration. Just says, at a glance. So Yoz actually brings up a good point, though, the Yahoo thing. If they make a great product that doesn't have the Yahoo name, is that better for it or worse? Like, if they just start making it? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, do people care about Yahoo as a brand? See, you know what I would do is I'd change the name. Right? Yoohoo. Oh, come on, man. It's delicious. John, what do you think? Would you change the name, Yahoo? Or do you think that's important to retain it? Well, I just don't know what the point would be. Like, oh, Yahoo is now something else? Like, people would probably just put a big question mark on it and probably throw them off. What if it was Yahoo with a question mark on the end? Instead of the exclamation, like, Yahoo? I mean, is it? You don't know. All right, John, thank you so much for dialing in. Really appreciate it. Thanks. Actually, I'd like to. All right, I'm going to take one more call here. I'll do that. Caller, you're on the line. What is your name? And how would you fix Yahoo? I think you scared him. Scared him off. Hello? Steve from Germany again. OK. Well, it was great having you on the call. So I was watching David do this, and it actually was interesting. Just going to yahoo.com. What do they consider like? Yeah, what is it like? It's news. You know what that reminds me of? AOL.com. Yeah, well, and speaking of punctuation, AOL was like, we're going to add a period. Maybe Yahoo should be like, we're done with the exclamation point. I never thought about that. Semicolon time. Yahoo, period. No, but they're serious. They added a period. And lowercase the O-L. And Yahoo has an exclamation mark. Well, you learn something new every day. Never realized that. I really like Yahoo. What else? What else do we have on the news? So the other big thing that happened this week was Office 2013. Yeah. It was revealed and shown off. So much Microsoft news lately. I mean, it has been nonstop Microsoft news. Every single day, there's been at least one Microsoft story. It's like two, three weeks. I'll give them this. They're staying in the news. Yeah, they are. Yeah. It's mostly positive. Except for the Vanity Fair article. Has that come out yet in full? That was out the day we covered it. It was on newsstands. Welcome to last week. Yeah, I don't read. Kind of a hit piece. Then they totally glossed over the Kinect and Xbox and that thing. Right. It's like everything's been a failure, except for these things were big successes that we're not mentioning. Yeah. We don't want to talk about that. Anyhow. And it comes at a weird time, because the surface is great mindshare. It's now positive momentum. It's like a hit. It's a hit. I don't know. Anyhow, Vanity Fair. I don't trust my tech news to them anyhow. So it's not a problem. But so Office. So have you had a chance to play with it yet? I have not had a chance, because you have the Windows 8 tablet in the office. And I don't have it. What was this? We used the Samsung? Yeah. So what do you think? I'm cautiously optimistic, I would say. Well, I watched your video. And the ribbon is troubling for a touch surface. Right. I have to assume that this is not done. I mean, I think the sense I got in talking with Microsoft was that it'll look like this, basically. The ribbon's going to be there. They're almost kind of ashamed of it. They made a big deal in our meeting of saying, look, you can hide it. And it'll never show up again. They should be ashamed of it, because it's like the tiniest touch point. Yeah. But what I thought was really interesting is there are, like the bigger Office itself, like the individual apps, haven't changed that much. They have nice topography and whatever. But what's really interesting now is just the way that they do and deliver Office. Because now you don't buy it. It's not just on a disk that you buy at Best Buy anymore. You literally stream Office. So if you go to, I don't know what the website's going to be, office.com, and you say, I have a PowerPoint document that I want to edit on whatever computer I'm on. Are you yawning at him? Is he boring you? I'm sorry. Oh, this just does this to me. I mean, he's about to get into like Excel and Word. I'm just preparing myself. All right, so you go to office.com. You go to office.com, and you say, I have a PowerPoint that I need to edit. And I've never used this computer before. And I just need to deal with PowerPoint. It's in your SkyDrive, which is cool. So everything's successful to you everywhere. And you just say, I need it. And literally 10 seconds later, you're using PowerPoint, the full desktop version of PowerPoint. And I don't really know how it works. I think it's magic. Well, what about offline use, though? No, and it streams in the background. And you can use it. I mean, you need an internet connection at first to get it. Well, how do you know when it's ready to go? I'm not sure. I haven't. So you're saying that you start using it immediately as it downloads the software. Right. And so you have, if you want it to go away when you're done, you can have it go away when you're done, if you're on a public computer or whatever. So instead of having my one five gigabyte install of Office, it's this just service that's available to you everywhere, which for me is like the dream. I hate Google Docs. But it's only compatible with Windows 8 machines. It'll be Windows 7 and Windows 8. OK. But I can't do it on my Mac. No, you can't do it on your Mac. Because that would be magical. And what about iOS and Android? Say I use a Windows machine at home, but I probably don't have a Windows phone. OneNote. Actually, OneNote is interesting because OneNote is like Microsoft's experimental playground. Like Excel, Word, they all look the same. But you have OneNote for both. And that was the thing that I thought was the most interesting about all this, was that these aren't Metro apps. They run in the desktop. You can get them on WinRT, and you will with WinRT tablets. But you can't. They're very much full desktop apps. But they made both desktop and Metro versions of OneNote that look and feel completely different. And OneNote, the Metro version is great. It's fast and really easy to use with touch. And the fact that they got that right makes me excited for Word. Well, the thing is, I think they're afraid to mess with Word in Excel because so many people use it. But OneNote, it's like, let's just throw things at it. And if it looked good, if people like it, we'll move it to Word. Yeah, it could be. And everyone keeps looking at this wheel that was in OneNote. They're like, oh, it's courier style. Which is the big buzzword for everything that people want Microsoft to be. The I'm sorry, I moved dramatically. Everybody's making fun of you in chat for why you can't leave your mic on. It's annoying. I hate this thing. I just want to be free. Why don't we have lav mics or something? I don't get it. Do you want a lav mic? Not really. No, I don't. You should get one that hangs from the ceiling and just hangs on the back of the seat. So the courier circular menu is actually something that's of interest to me. When I look at the ribbon, it's like, why couldn't you do something more intuitive instead of having the ribbon? I just feel like. To be fair, it's actually very addicting to start moving the mic around. I just feel like you're innovating on this. You have this radial menu or whatever. Why not do something else? Why not try to get rid of the ribbon? Like a sea of options that are hard to click on with your finger. Especially for something that they're trying to make touch optimized. I mean, as Job said, you have to wiggle your fingers down. Yeah. But the thing is, I think, Microsoft, like we've said so many times with Windows, it's shackled by its past. If you change Word too much, they're going to start going to Google Docs or something. Are they? I don't know. Who are they that you speak of? Probably Enterprise. I mean, probably business. I'd like to know what percentage of Word users use. I bet 90% of Word users use only the most basic functions of the software. You know? Yeah, that's true. If you gave them clearly exposed. Underlined. Right. I mean, I use Word once in a while. I only use the most basic functions as quickly as I can and then get out of there. I mean, but Microsoft's biggest market is Enterprise and all this stuff. And I agree that they're locked in. Say, turn on the ribbon. Switch on. I want Pro Mode. Put on Pro Mode. Right. And then give me the ribbon. And then for everybody else, give them a regular interface that makes sense. Yeah. And the part that's heartening to me and means they might actually do something about it is that they did that with Windows. Windows 8 is completely different than Windows 7. Right. And yet they're still going to do it. And businesses are going to get it. And they're just going to get used to it. Because Microsoft is saying, this is better. We think it's going to be fine. Right. And Office is this giant cash cow for Microsoft. And so I guess I get not wanting to change it. But I feel like they're not against doing it. And that's to Microsoft's credit, which I think is awesome. Finally. You feel good? Not really. You look just luxurious. You guys missed my epic battle. But we're not going to see this version until the release of Windows 8, which is October 20th. 26. Is that right? Yeah. Day before my anniversary. Great gift. Be a great, great gift. Anniversary gift. Can we all be live tiles for Halloween? What? Creighton liked my idea. Creighton and I are going to be live tiles for Halloween. Why didn't Michael just yell dude? OK, so you guys don't like this idea, but this is a great idea. No, no, no. I'm open to it. Go on. No, that was it. That was my whole idea. That's your whole idea. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't just bring that up. We're moving on. Pitch me. Yeah. OK. Why should I be a live tile? How can I be a live tile for Halloween? Tell me, oh, David. See. Yeah, let's hear this. Play it on us. Come on. OK. So. To your plan. Update us. So the way I see it, I mean, I guess I can tell you how it would practically be. Or I can tell you the idea, the conceit. We're all ears. Say this is like a step by step process. I'm building the costume right now. So you're building the costume right now. I want to hear philosophically and practically how the costume is going to work. Well, philosophically, it's always changing. It's never the same. It's always up to date. So what I'm. Like Scanner Darkly style. No, that's terrifying. There's no like Uncanny Valley weirdness in my live tile costume. I don't know. This is a terrible idea. I'm very sorry. No, no, no. Keep going. Keep going. So I mean, basically, you could just have a whiteboard that you're always changing. Or you could get real crazy about it and have like you'd be able to rotate it and pre-plan. So when the clock changes or it becomes like the sun sets, you can rotate your costume. And then it's like, oh, it's night time now. What kind of live tile would you be? Yeah. What are you going to be? Weather? I think I'd have to be weather. Weather is very important to me. Can I be heart and have a monkey? What does that even mean? Creighton's male. I just decided for Creighton. Creighton, you're going to be somebody's old busted Yahoo account. You're going to be your own busted Yahoo account. Why does it always say zero messages? No, that's updating live. That's live. Push. All right, I don't know what's happening here. What else do we have? So there was an iPad prototype revealed. Oh my god. This thing is crazy. The one inch, like, iBook. This thing is crazy. All right. Tell me about it. No, I don't have anything to say. It was revealed in the Johnny Ive deposition. Right? It's a prototype from 2002. Somewhere between 02 and 04. It looks like it's very simple. It looks like the front of it dead on looks like an iPad without a home button. And when you flip it on the side, it looks like the old white MacBook. Right, the iPad. It looks like the screen and lid of the iBook. Can we show? Scroll down. Can you scroll down? Do we have any of the shots from BuzzFeed? There we go. Can you go to the BuzzFeed link? Yes. Can you click on one of those? Yeah, that's good, I guess. Go to the other one. Close up one. Do we have it? Oh, these are in the filing. So we run BuzzFeed first found these. And then can we see the close up? This one. Look at this. How cool does this look? How heavy would this have been? Like 20 pounds. Do you remember before the iPad came out, when you had these big 2.5 inch hard drive MP3 players? I mean, this is literally the lid of an iBook. Do you think that was usable? Like someone was actually testing in OS. Yes, I bet it was. But I'd love to know what the touch screen technology is. What is it? Also, what's the point of the ruler? I mean, just for scale? Pretty much. Just get an idea, guys. It's an inch thick, which doesn't sound like that much, but is kind of insane. Well, look at it. That sounds like a lot to me. But I mean, this is basically an iPad. Yeah. Right. So it's the same idea. I was pointing to the screen. To this is what I was doing. You're b-rolling. It's right here. Do you want to rub it against your face? No, I don't. I really don't. People like when you do that. I'm sorry. I'm going to apologize. I'm out of it. I'm very tired. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. I was tossing and turning. Because you're so excited about the Dark Knight. So excited about the Dark Knight Rises. And all the bad reviews have just got you sad. I can't. There are not that many bad reviews. Don't tell me that. Say some calls. Have you seen the Dark Knight Rises? I want to hear what you have to say about it. Don't you dare. No, I don't. Tell me how to do it. No. Nobody called. I want to know the ending of the Dark Knight Rises. Can you tell me? Let's try to guess. What do we think? I can't stop thinking about what the big secret. See, what kills me is I have a friend in production who saw it last night. So he knows everything. Has he been calling you all day? He's like, you need to re-watch this movie and this key scene. Oh, really? That's what it is? No, stop. Does it bother anybody that all movies now have spoilers? Like you can't see it. No longer movies without spoilers. Like it used to be like if Susan Cain, well, there is a spoiler, there is a bad example, OK? But there are lots of other movies that don't have spoilers. So I'm going to confess, I am a spoiler junkie, especially for TV. Sure. Because once a week, you like to spoil things for people. No, no, no. I like to read the spoilers. It's like Wednesday night was lost. Friday and Monday, there was lost spoilers that would tease the next episode. I'm getting a little bit at a time. And then I see the experience of it. I just feel like, OK, we know there's going to be a twist, right? There's a twist in the Dark Knight Rises. Well, he's a woman. Badly. Full circle. There's a basement full of dead cloned Batmans. And every time he's here. Oh, whoa. Don't be talking about that. Talking about what, Rush? I think you know what I'm talking about. Do you know what I know? I know what you're talking about. I know what you think I know. I think you know and I know the same things. I'm so uncomfortable right now. Does the word Tesla mean anything to you? How about Bowie? Did you just hear a spit take? Does Bowie mean anything to you? Does Bowie mean anything to you? Anyhow, OK. So no, I was tossing and turning about. Oh, everybody bought Nexus. Did you get a Nexus 7? I did get a Nexus 7. We didn't talk about this last week, so we should talk about it. Did you get a Nexus 7? Not yet. You didn't buy one. Michael Shane just got his. You want to unbox it live on the air? It'll take 4 and 1 half hours. It'll be great. Is it hard to open? It's impossible. Did you see the YouTube video? Oh my god. Like, all these different unboxing videos. It made a montage. I forget. Why is it hard to open? I don't remember. Can we see Michael come in here? So there's like this invisible tape on all the sides that you can't see. No, no, I don't want to do it. You're going to do it. They're like vacuum sealed to each other. A machete? Apparently. Go in there. So while he's doing this. Michael Shane, everyone. Wherever you want. David, I'm going to get really close to you. What? Oh, OK. All right. Cool. I'm getting farther away from you. I'll move over. Is there a room here? Is there enough room? Wow. Graphic. All right. Look at this. Michael Shane, everybody. Everyone admire Michael Shane. Michael Shane. Phenomenal shirt. He's got a great shirt. The shirt has a skateboard, and there's a hoverboard, the hoverboard from Back to the Future next to it. And the skateboard is saying, show off to the hoverboard. All the audio listeners really appreciate that. Yeah. It's from Threadless. From Threadless. It's from Threadless. Nice plug. All right. Michael Shane is going to unbox the Nexus 7 here. Can you do this? Sure. Can you just right there? What's in the box? Michael Shane is going to unbox the Nexus 7 on the air. Let's see if he can figure out how to open it. Whoa. This is like reality TV. How do you move that? Why don't we do handheld? Uh-oh. Something's happening. Oh, man. This is really getting wild. Let me move this. I like. This is just impromptu insanity. Wait. No. Hold on. You've got to start from the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. You get that? There we go. Oh, there we go. OK. Great. There you go. By the way, I think they did a great job on the packaging for this. But we'll see. Brought to you by Bud Light. Bud Light, the official beverage of a Nexus 7 unboxing. Bud Light. Goes down smooth. Comes up even better. All right. I don't know what's happening. What's wrong? Go ahead, Michael Shane. Begin. Can we get a timer on the screen? Can we bring up the exposure? OK. So now they're holding on. Let's show. David. There's tape. What was the Price is Right theme song? There's tape on the back. Can you see that? I'm trying to get. There it is. Do, do, do, do. Right there. OK. Go ahead. Why is this so hard? You just need something to cut it with. Here, let me show you how we do it. You think that's the only? This is genius. Yes. Can we just pull it? Does anyone have a sharp knife? How about this right here? Really? Yeah. What's wrong with this? No, no. Nothing. There we go. Hold on. I think that's a little aluminum is not restored. Grade A television right there. It's bendy. We have a stopwatch going. Right. Now I'm under pressure. Zoom in on that. Do, do, do, do, do, do. I like this. I have nothing else to do but hum right now. I'm sorry. This is a lot of fun. You may not realize it. See? You thought the hard part was over. Wow. That was so difficult. How did he figure out how to get that open? I don't understand what the problem is. The problem is not everyone has janitor keys to unbox their Nexus 7. You think a standard front door key will not do the trick. No. Slice through. You need to move this. No, you need janitor keys. David, how much for a key that will slice through tape? Look at this guy. He really knows his unboxings, doesn't he? There's a manual. Let's get this. Let's do this. Hold on. This is a gorgeous box. Because I used to unbox professionally. Hold on. Really? Yeah. Give me that. There we go. OK. Hold on. Let me just. I like to wrap this under here. Hold on. Give me that. No, no. Don't unwrap it. Can I look at the box? Yeah, here. All right, there's no wait, there is something written. Oh, it's just a. Here we go. It's an address. Very soon. Here's what I would do. Yeah, I would. Yeah. I just get it something like this. Maybe it's not. I'm holding that. Is not going to stay. Put that right there. Professional unboxer. By the way, I apologize to the audio only listeners. Just put this around there like that. So that it's not indecent. It's a blanket. It's like it's wearing like a little like toga. Just get that like pants, instruction pants. Gorgeous. With a little hat. There you go. It has an access of it. There it is. It's wearing an instruction pants. A Daniel Boone cap. And a AC hat. And I think it looks pretty good. Give it a tail. Give it a little ponytail. Get it. Stick it in there. No, no, no, no. Just stick it in there the way it is. I hope you're listening audio only now. Little ponytail there. Oops. It lost its head. My goodness. OK, here you go. Congratulations. I have no idea why we did that. I don't know. But you know, it was fun. That was great. Screw it. And we proved that it's actually not that hard. And we proved it's not that hard to unbox. It's journalism right there. Anyhow, Nexus 7. You have one? You've been using it? Yes. So I've been using it. I had like a first generation iPad. And was debating between the new iPad and a Nexus 7. And Varnon XS7. And for the most part, really like it. The speaker is awful. Oh, I thought the speaker was pretty good. Really? Maybe I got a bad unit. But mine is like just basically unusable. Really? Yeah, it's really bad. You said for the most part it's good. But you didn't say, equivocate, is it better for you than the iPad? Or is it worse? So the thing I love is the size. Yeah, the size is great. Seven inches is amazing. I really think it is. But Jelly Bean's also really, it's not just about the size. No. It feels like a real product. Yeah, oh yeah. It feels like a real product in the way that like. Project Butter is very much a real thing. I mean, it feels like a real product in the way that many tablets before it did not. Yeah, right. To my eyes. I mean, is that just because it's smoother and faster? To my eyes and fingers. It's smoother. It's faster. I mean, one thing I'll say is like the lack of tablet optimized apps. I think Pocket does a pretty good job of playing. You know, the Google Plus app is good. Pocket is good. There's a few, you know, oh, Evernote is quite good for it. Yeah, they just updated this week. Yeah, I mean, there are some really good apps there. And then there's like a sea of just very mediocre garbage. But games, the games are pretty good. I think like Shadowgun and Dead Trigger are both really fun to play on it. They look good. Well, the other upside of a seven inch tablet, especially for Android, is that all the apps that look terrible on 10 inch screens look somewhat passable. Twitter is not painful to use. I mean, it still needs to be. I mean, they need to do, they need to go hollow. And by the way, I know that I'm not want to talk because our app is not full hollow. Oh, that's something to talk about. We have apps. Yeah, we should talk about that. But they should go full hollow. And by the way, we will also be updating. We're going to go full hollow. No, we're updating those apps. And I'll talk about them in a second. So I mean, the thing is, I'm not, maybe it's just me, but I'm not as excited about the Nexus 7 as I am the Galaxy Nexus with Jelly Bean. Like, that was a cool thing to me. Because Google Now. Go on. Sorry. I'm listening. I'm just hearing a lot of weird high pitched sounds outside the studio. But no one else can hear it. But anyway, yeah, Google Now is like the cool thing for me for Jelly Bean. It doesn't make as much sense unless there's a cellular connection. I think Google Now doesn't seem that interesting to me on the tablet. It seems really interesting to me on the phone. Exactly. Yeah, and I use it all the time. Yeah, it's amazing. It does cool stuff. And it made me realize how bad Siri is. Well, I mean, it definitely does things that I need it to do. Like, it says leave in 15 minutes to get to X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's true. I do need to do that. Is this cool? I'm just trying some new positions. Now I have this thing completely straight. I like that. I kind of like that. This is a little more pro. There. It's pretty pro. You look pretty legit right now. I'm fairly legit. I'm like 98% legit. 2% illegitimate. That's still way too legit to quit. Really? Did you just do the hand signal for too legit to quit? Is that what you did, Creighton? Really? There's a hand signal? Thank you. Are you kidding me? What? Wait. What? What? What? What? Are you high, man? Seriously, hold on. That's like 50% of the song is the hand stuff. I don't think I've ever seen this video. I'm sure there's a guide to this. Hold on. Hold on. Oh, man. All right, here you go. David, follow along at home. OK. 2. Legit. Yeah. 2. Yeah. Quit. Quit. It's like, I'm not going to. 2. Oh, I love that. All right. So that's amazing. So it's 2. All right, hold on. Legit to quit. Now in real time. No, no. Don't do it. He's got to learn. We just play the song. He has to learn. Can we play the whole song? I'll do it later. I'll come back next week with the ability. Yeah, we got the rights of too legit to quit. You didn't know that Vox actually, we paid for the rights of too legit to quit, just in the hopes that someday we'd find a way to use it. We knew someone on staff. We figured Sam didn't know it, so we could use it later. Sam Sheffer? Sam Sheffer. The man who knows nothing about pop culture. Yeah. Anyhow, we should talk about the apps. Last talk. Oh, wait. This is a topic. One more thing I want to talk about before we get to that. I'm listening. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson not denying FaceTime over 3G data packages. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about this. We saw a post somewhere, where was it? 9 to 5 or somebody else had it. That's right. Where AT&T, in the latest beta, in the latest beta, of iOS 6, according to some developer somewhere, there is a warning that says, when you try to put on FaceTime on 3G, it says, in order to turn on FaceTime over 3G, please contact AT&T. So the suggestion is that video calling using FaceTime over 3G, which is just your data, which is just using your data that you pay for already, that would need to be engaged as a separate service, which, we assume, would cost some amount of money. If this is true, if AT&T is doing this, go to an AT&T store and just start smashing their windows. Just get a baseball bat, get a brick, get whatever, and just smash away. I want total anarchy in the streets. I want the National Guard called in. I want curfews. I want hell on earth. You are banning it up right now. I want to see some Bane style. I don't know exactly, but I want to see some what I believe will be Bane style action. This is Ralph de la Vega's reckoning. Directed towards, this is Ralph de la Vega's reckoning. And Batman can die when AT&T lies in rubble. Wow. Wow. No, but I will say this. This is an outrage, and people should be pissed. Hypothetical outrage. Hypothetical. Again, if not, AT&T, great, love you. Can't wait to have lunch sometime. But the thing for me is if his- Like, I have lunch with the entire The Amazing. It's the guy in a suit with a giant bald head. The globe comes over with arms, and he's like, where do you want to eat? But that's the way he sounds, by the way. How does it eat? Through one of those slits. Through all the slits? Yeah, it just absorbs like a hamburger. Just gets absorbed through the slits. It's like dripping. There's like parts of it dripping out. There's like a lower slit for excretions. Oh, jeez. Sure. Sure. We're talking about the AT&T. Hypothetical. Hypothetical. What? The singular guy comes out of the ball. What's a singular guy? Does the singular guy live inside the ball? Oh, singular guy. He's like trying to get out, but he's been eaten alive. Help me. He's like, kill me. Like an alien. Anyhow, spoiler alert. Anyhow, so no, we don't know if it's actually happening. Well, but the thing is, if he's going to come out and say, it's too early to talk about pricing. Is this Ralph de la Vega? Is that what he said? Randall Stevenson. Randall Stevenson. Oh, Randall Stevenson. What did he say? He said, it's too early to talk about pricing. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. That doesn't say we're not doing this. We don't know how much it'll cost for you to use your own data on top of the price we charge you for your own data. But it will be something. No, I mean, it's an outrage. And I seriously, I encourage, I mean, if this happens, you should boycott. I will be switching services. I mean, there's just no way I can abide this company fleecing its customers like this. Well, and what's the same thing? I can do all kinds of different video stuff over 3G right now. That's data intensive on my account, because I pay for a certain amount of data, which they've been ratcheting up further and further. And you know what's always been the dumbest workaround for these weird limits? They have download limits, for example. Just use a MiFi. And it's weird. So ATD's network can handle it if it's a MiFi. If it's a phone, it doesn't know what to do, or it charges more. I mean, this may be nothing. It may be maybe they want to make sure that you want it. Maybe it's something that's like they just want to make sure that you actually want to engage that, but it will use a lot of data. So they want to say to you, hey, you have to make a decision to turn this on, because it's going to incur a lot of data charges potentially. That's fine. That's not what's happening. There's no way. Again, I want Bain-style anarchy. I want AT&T terrorism. I think it's illegal to call for smashing of windows. I'm not sure. No, you said hypothetical. It's fine. Hypothetical. If it's hypothetically, I want you to hypothetically do this in a hypothetical world where they do charge for FaceTime over 3G. I mean, this is the most aggressively broken net neutrality thing I've ever seen. And we've talked about this for forever. Oh, what if Comcast makes you pay? Well, he'd be swearing and freaking out. He would make my rage seem tame by comparison. He would have smashed windows. This table would be thrown onto a police cruiser. Then he would jump out of the window on top of the police cruiser and rip the police officer out of it. He would be going bomber-psycho. I'm imagining this is what Bain might be doing. Because I can't stop thinking about Dark Knight Rises. The pain that Nealai has, he makes him have to wear a mask. Yeah, he's like, how could you net neutrality? How dare you charge for FaceTime over 3G? That's what he'll sound like. The weird thing about Bain is he's kind of soft spoken. He's now an anti-hero for you. He's kind of a hero. He's just a hero. Well, and was this just a rumor? Did this actually? I look at you because I assume you know everything about nerdy comic book things. What? What? Honestly, this was part of the culture cast. I'd be fine. What were you going to say? That when they did the extended preview before Mission Impossible 4, that Bain was completely inscrutable. So they had to change. Yes. Yes, that's right. That's true. The original trailer, or the teaser, if you've ever seen it. I actually haven't seen it. It's impossible to hear. But also, now there's this. Should we say four? You mean three? No, it's four. It's a protocol. Sorry. Three is amazing. Three is the best. Four is the best. Four is the best. I disagree. I disagree. Really? Yeah. I think four is a little over the top. It was like Die Hard 4 was a little over the top, but also awesome. No. I didn't see Die Hard 4. There's no parallelism with this one. Anyway, so you were saying? Die Hard 4 was terrible, actually. I did see it. And it's terrible. It's got Justin Long. It's pretty bad. Anyhow. Cause and effect. Go on. But they're also saying now that they had to overdub all the dialogue shot on IMAX cameras because they're so loud. Really? That I didn't hear. Yeah. And the new, I was just reading this somewhere, that they were saying that, I was reading a review of it somewhere. And they were saying that they had to re-dub all, which I think is maybe the excuse they're using for the original horrible. But what is it with Christopher Nolan and horrible voices in Batman movies? I mean, the Batman voice is totally ridiculous. He sounds like he's about to sneeze every single time. He's like holding it. When you first heard it, I definitely was like, what? I was like, what is going on with his voice? This is ridiculous. Honestly, it depends. Like, in some parts of Batman Begins, it's not so bad. But by the time The Dark Knight right his, The Dark Knight hit, it was oh. No, no. And it's like, but he has a thing. It's supposed to be like a voice changer in his mask. Right. It's like, there's a description for it. I mean, there's like some reasoning for it. I always just assumed he was putting it on. No, no, no. There's like a thing that changes his voice. So it just changed. It makes it sound like he's about to sneeze. Yeah. I'm going to really quickly. No, but you know what? They've always been kind of weak on this stuff, like the goggles, the stupid goggles. At the end of Dark Knight? Yeah. It almost ruins the entire movie. Oh, they're so bad. I mean, I remember when we saw it, were you in Canada? Were you at the, I don't think you were there. I've never been to Canada. I know. This was at the. As far as I'm legally aware, I've never been to Canada. This is an old, old, old end gadget gathering. Was where I first saw the. That was actually right before I got hired. It's right before you got hired. And we all went to see it at IMAX. And I was enjoying it up until the goggles part. Then I was like, this is ridiculous. Like just utterly horrible and ridiculous. Well, it's only ridiculous because Christopher Nolan has been so, they've reboot Batman as a semi-realistic. Yeah, it's like the technology. It's not that like, it's not like, I cannot believe we've been talking about the Dark Knight. It's not like it's a flying Batmobile or anything. Well, but that's different. You can imagine a flying Batmobile. That technology is unimaginable. It's not possible. It's not even remotely science based. It's like fantasy. Although if we want to get like, nitpicky details, though the cape that can't fly, there's a huge article about it last week. Like the cape is scientifically impossible to use for gliding. That was a great article. You don't know. You don't know that. You weren't there, man. You don't know you weren't there. You don't know. You're not Batman. Anyhow, yeah, you don't know about. You're not my Batman. You're not my Batman is right. I think we have to wrap this hell world up. So talk about apps. So we can get in line. Verge apps. Oh, Verge apps. Sorry, before we wrap this hell world up. It's nightmare hell ride. It's nightmare hell ride. So we released Verge apps for iOS and Android. They are version one. They're our first pass. We have a lot of plans for them. I hope that you guys will. They're good. I mean, I think they're very good. They're solid apps. But we have a lot. Just as usual, there are a lot of things we wanted to do that we didn't get a chance to do because of time restrictions. We're working on them. We're continuing to develop and tweak them. We have tablet plans that are revving right now. What we don't want to do is just another me too app. We want to do something that's right, that's really good. That doesn't look like crap on the Nexus 7. That doesn't look like crap? Well, yeah, on the Nexus 7 and for the iPad. The iPad will be the first target probably given the fact that it has all of the market share. But anyhow, the apps are out. They're available right now. People have been really receptive and responsive and have really enjoyed them apparently, and that's great. We hear the feedback. If you've got something that's like, why does it do this? Believe me, we're making a list and we're taking all that stuff to heart. And we're going to rev on them and make changes. And it's like a number one goal to make sure that you guys are happy that you like them. You meaning the reader and the user of the apps. But they're cool. They have some really cool features. They have features that I wish our site had. They've got this following feature where you can follow when you see a story stream pop into it. And we need to make story streams easier to find. That's something we need to do on the site as well as in the apps. But if you see a story stream in our news flow and you hit follow, you'll be updated when there's news stories attached to that. You can do that on Facebook too, which is pretty cool. Yeah, you can do it on Facebook. Actually, if you like a story stream, I think I posted about this actually. If you like a story stream, you'll get updated when there's no updates to it. It's very cool. So good way to follow the news that you're interested in as a human. Hey Josh, where is the webOS app? Our readers want to know. There's a lot of questions about webOS. For my pixie. And development is sure, steady, sure, but steady, sure and steady. We were looking forward to a great webOS release five years ago. And the day before Verge. People were asking about Windows Phone. And when we have the resources to put against doing more apps for other platforms, we're going to obviously look at, you know, Windows Phone is on the first top of the list there. And then MeeGo once Nokia starts going. And then MeeGo. And then Tizen. Tizen. No, I mean, we want to do it for every platform. We just have to, you know, there's monetary concerns for us. There are timing concerns for us. And we have to, you know, serve the audiences that are there first. Fortunately, our mobile site's pretty good. Our mobile site is good. Except for the weird scrolling in the hero. That's a whole different thing. Please. Please don't talk about that. Please leave. No, but we're working on these things. We're happy to have them out. We're excited about them. And we will be iterating on them. So go download them. Check them out. They're actually really great. I mean, I find that they're extremely useful for getting news quickly. Just you want to check in on the latest stories. People who are used to blogs will be happy to know that the stories are presented in a reverse chronological order, which will be very understandable and pleasing. And reverse chronological. And reverse chronological. That's it. That's all I have to say. Anything to add, guys? They're awesome. OK, yeah. And then finally, I'm going to say On the Verge. New On the Verge, July 26. We're going to announce information. We've got some cool guests lined up. We have some cool giveaways. Oh, can we, Creighton, can I talk about the giveaways? I can't talk about them yet. Nope. They exist. There will be them. They're not. No, that's fine. We might be giving away Creighton. Creighton is being given away. Win a date with Creighton. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He's got very floppy, dark hair. He wears cowboy boots. He loves to laugh. He loves film. He's like face palming right now. He's tall. How tall are you, Creighton? He's cute. Good looking guy. And you can call him Creishon. And you can call him Creishon. Guys, guys, guys, creidate.com. creidate.com. Check it out. We need to get that immediately. That's what we'll be giving. No, so July 26, it's next Thursday. And we're in our new space, the super awesome, great new space right here in the heart of Manhattan. It's called the Manhattan Center. It's where we shot the Jimmy Fallon episode, actually. And it's very cool, way easier to get to, and just like a really nice studio. We're excited about being there. And we have a lot of cool stuff planned. So get ready. Get excited. Get pumped. Are you pumped? Get in line now. Are you excited? There's a post tomorrow. There'll be a post up tomorrow morning. Which wasn't live. Tonight, tomorrow morning, we'll have a post with some information coming up. OK, that's it. I think we should wrap this up. Yes. Yeah? OK, that's the Vergecast for this week. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us at vergecast at theverge.com. You can find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Josh Witopolsky. David Pierce is PierceDavid. And for some reason. You can do this. And Ross Miller is OnoroscoNoey1R. Why would? Four O's. Is that right? There is an R. Yes, four O's. There's one R there. Four O's. One R. One R. So you can also leave a comment on the post when the post goes up. They know that already. We know you're going to. And we know what it's going to be. Complaints about our video player. Oh, speaking of, we are working with Uyala, who is our video provider, to have a better solution. Oh, and this is great to know. In the iOS and the Android app, all videos fully watchable. Very exciting. So here. We did notice it takes about 20 minutes for them to work after they go up on site. Oh, there's a little bit of a delay, apparently, from when they're available for mobile. There's like a 20 minute delay. But something like that. But we're obviously working on that as well. But they're all like, you can go watch videos on your phone. And last thing. Yes. If you want more Josh Witopolsky today, check it out later tonight at 90 Seconds on the Verge. 90 Seconds on the Verge. There's going to be a lot more of me. You're going to love it. You're quite the salesman for this thing. Yeah, you really are. I've got to pitch this thing. It's got to keep going. And that's the Verge cast for this week. We'll be back next week, but probably on Friday, given the fact that we're doing On the Verge on a Thursday. And that's it. I wish you and yours the very best in the upcoming days and weeks. Paul. Don't spoil the dark night. Rock and roll. Let it rip.