 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast, the week of January 27th, 2014. I'm Josh Tapolsky. I'm Neal Ipatel. I'm Dieter Bohn. And yes, that's right. You've entered the Bohn zone. Yeah. Yeah. We've sold Ross Miller to Lenovo. Ross Miller has been sold to Lenovo for far less than what we paid for him. But you know what? He's in a better place. Yeah. Lenovo. Lenovo factory. Yeah. No, Dieter's here, and this is, of course, the Vergecast. We discuss the week in all sorts of funky, exciting topics. This week, plenty to talk about. So much one-on-one. Nazis. Nazis. Google. Google Nazis. No, Google Nazis. Yeah. It's amazing what you find. Out of control maniac CEOs. Out of control CEOs. In control CEOs. Yeah. Cool, collected CEOs. Yeah, cool, collected CEOs. What else? What are the other topics we have? What are some other things? Oh, man. Facebook did a thing. Facebook. Nintendo did a thing. Nintendo. Robots. I want to start with the biggest news of the week, which is- Robots. ABC has commissioned a show called Selfie. ABC has commissioned a show called Selfie, which will feature... I don't know anything about the show. Can you tell us about it? I just literally... Is it a show based on Instagram? My immediate instinct to close that tab kicked in. Hold on. It's a show based on the experiences of Instagram users. Hold on. I'm making that up. I have no idea what it's about. It's happening on the website here. I'm sorry. I just need to have a drink. It's a show based on people who have faster internet than I do. Yeah, exactly. We have a little bit of a problem here in the... By the way, I hope everybody could hear that. The comedy inspired by My Fair Lady tells the story of a self-obsessed 20-something woman who is more concerned with likes than being liked. I'm sorry. Did you say My Fair Lady? Yeah. During a very public and humiliating breakup, she comes to the subject of a viral video and suddenly has more social media followers than she ever imagined, but for all the wrong reasons. Classic. She enlists the help of a marketing expert at a company to help repair her tarnished image. This is the worst. That is some convoluted... That is some extremely contrived shit that I just heard. That show immediately goes from that concept, whatever that is, to three attractive people who constantly stay in one apartment set telling each other jokes about what happened outside of the apartment. You mean don't trust to be in apartment 23? Yeah. One of my favorite shows. Or happy endings. RIP. Don't trust to be is a really good show. No, it's not. You're crazy. I watch... And here's why. There's only one reason. The startling return to form of James Van Der Beek. Now he's on a new show. I know. With E from Audra Raj. That show... Yeah. Nobody needs that. Nobody needs the B from Audra Raj. That's gonna be great. But the B is back. You know what? I have no comment. That show brought him back. I have no comment on that, but what I do have comment on is I watch an episode of Two Broke Girls. Oh, yeah. Why? Like... Did you hate watch it? I mean, well, it was kind of by accident. I've never seen a whole episode. I've seen like a minute of it. Yeah. Like, holy... Hang on. Holy shit. Holy shit. Is that show... It's crazy bad. I wanna know what this accident was. Did your remote... It was like... No, it was like I was watching TV. I can't go over there. I was watching TV. It wasn't an accident. It was like I was watching TV. I was flipping and then I just landed there and I was like, oh, you know what? I've never really watched an episode of this. And then I left it on while I was doing other stuff. And it was so bad. So first off, it's badly acted. It's badly written. It's super duper racist. Like crazy... Really? Like every character is some racist character. There's a little Asian guy who's got a funny accent. And then there's some woman who has some weird Eastern European accent. And then there's a Middle Eastern cook and he's crazy. And there's like... It's just super racist. Everybody's this weird caricature and horrible, just horrible, mean, not funny. There's definitely an article on the Garkey and it's called Two Broke Girls So Racist It's Baffling. It is baffling. It is like a show from the early 80s sitcoms where... I mean, literally like every character is just an insane cartoon version. It only made 50 on Complex's list of the 50 most racist TV shows. It's also the most popular show in America, like second most popular show in America or something. It's like the third most popular sitcom in America. Anyhow, unrelated to everything we're talking about, but we were talking about Don't Trust the Bee. I mean, Don't Trust the Bee in Apartment 23 is probably like high art by comparison. It's got the beak, man. I can't... Anyhow, so let's talk about what's going on in the world. There's huge news in the world of technology. We have a lot of things to talk about. I don't even know where to start, but I think we should start at the obvious, which is... Google. Google. Google. Yesterday... Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. They're trying to. Well, how much are they selling? 2.9 billion. 2.9 billion. Yeah. Yeah. So they bought Motorola for 12.5 billion. Yeah, right. And this is like immediately, now that I've said those two numbers... We're gonna argue on math for the rest of the hour. Android fanboys will begin tweeting at me various versions of where... Listen, I'm sure that they're... Or somehow that means they made a profit. I'm sure there's a completely fine way to justify... There's zero way to justify. No, and I'm sure you can say, well, the patents will in the long run be X, Y, and Z. We can get into it. We're gonna get into it, but I think there's no... I don't think there's a possibility that what Google wanted to do was own Motorola for how many months? 21. Was own Motorola for 21 months and then sell them off immediately. I don't think that was the plan. It's not the plan. You may be able to define or to extract some sort of victory from this if you have a plan and you have a really creative way of thinking, but there's no possibility that they bought them and they were like, you know what we're gonna do in a year and a half? We're gonna sell these guys off to Lenovo. Because that'll look really good for us. It'll look like we totally know what we're doing. And they moved Dennis Woodside, who was a high ranking exec to be the CEO of Motorola. He was allowed to recruit openly at Google. He brought over a lot of really smart people. He brought Regina Dugan, who was on the Verge 50. She used to be the head of DARPA. He took her out of Google, brought her to Motorola to be like, just be smart here and help us make cool things. She did that Project ARA, Project ARA. Which they're apparently keeping at Google. And it's crazy that Google's like, well, that didn't work, but that's cool. You come back here and work for us again. She's taking her whole team back to Google. This was a plan. They built a factory to manufacture phones in the United States. They were trying to succeed as Motorola. They were doing everything right except for cell phones. Yeah. Well, that's all. This is so awesome looking, by the way. Like, yeah, I do want the ARA. I feel really bad for Pierce. Because yesterday, because they launched the Wood phones yesterday. You can start buying them now. And this one is not so great. But I think we were just talking about- They had them for a little while. The bamboo plus white combination, Joshua was saying the plastic is like the wrong- It just feels extra plasticky by comparison. To the awesome wood. They just launched this and David had a cool little story with great photos. Like how Motorola is making Wood phones. And then that happened. And then this morning he put up a Lenovo review. And I was like, oh, Pierce. Over to you, buddy. It's actually really cool. The Wood thing is a great, it's something really different than nobody's trying to do. I think it's interesting. But the Moto X has been a failure. I don't think there's any other way to look at it. It sold, the last numbers we saw something like half a million, which is garbage. How many iPhones do they sell in a quarter? 51 million. Listen, I mean, I don't expect Motorola to sell 51 million, but a couple of million. You know, 500,000 is- They didn't even need to sell that many for it to be a success. It's got no, listen, the phones that are, look, I mean, Samsung is selling Android phones, at least in America. When I see people, here's the two, I do see occasionally people with Motorola Droid devices. I've seen a handful of those. It's always a Droid Max. I think Verizon, yeah. And it's the one differentiating feature I think we all like. It has a gigantic battery. I see the Droid Mini on the subway sometimes. I've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen it. Maybe it's like, you know, when you want something, you see it everywhere. So I see Notes everywhere and I see a Droid Max everywhere. So that's what you want is a Droid Max? I want a giant screen with a huge battery. I get it. I mean, I think, but I think that you see Droids, that's sheer force of Verizon marketing. I don't think I've ever seen a Moto X in public. I don't think I've ever seen a random person with a Moto X. They advertise it. They've advertised it everywhere aggressively. It clearly has not had much of an impact. You know what the missing opportunity of this was? It's great that you can go online, like build one and customize it, but they actually needed to shade more towards that project era stuff where you could have bought like the frame and like put different backs on it. But this is, that's exactly what they did with the Moto G. But don't you feel like this was the start? But regular consumers clearly like, I mean, I actually wonder if- Cases are like the biggest sellers. The number one accessory for your phone is a case, right? Cases are big sellers, but it doesn't seem like colored phones are making much of a dent. That's what's interesting. But I think the reason cases are really popular is because you can get rid of it and your phone's still there. So if you somehow integrated the phone with like, it has a built-in case, you can change it and make it different and customize it. Like you're tired of an orange phone today and now you have a blue one. I think that's a good point. I think if it was an interchangeable like backing, that's actually one of the cool things about the S4 is that you can, the back is essentially like the entirety of the back of the phone once it meets the band. So it's just like the whole, you can just swap it out. And you were saying the Moto G, they got there. Yeah. Like the whole, even the rim. The Moto G is like nasty. Is this the Moto G here that we're looking at? No, no, in the video. Yeah, I think this is G. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you gotta allow that. Yeah. But here's the thing. None of this is making an impact because they don't have the marketing budget. I mean, even with all the marketing they did, I mean, first of the marketing wasn't that good. It was like, hey, it was like we make a phone that you can get in different colors. That was the entirety of the market. They were exclusive to AT&T for a while, right? When was the last time AT&T got a phone as an exclusive and it went gangbusters? Like whenever a phone goes as like- Was the Galaxy S4 on AT&T? No, the iPhone. Everything that's in the iPhone. No, no, no, but when the S4 first came out, I think it was only available on the- It was on all of them. Was it? It's always, the S3 and the S4 have been always on all of them. That's the way you gotta do it. Yeah, that's the way you have to do it. They might've been like mildly staggered, but they announced all the same phones. This is like, here's the problem. The differentiating factor is you can customize, which I think is really cool, but I think smaller screen battery is like okay, not the greatest. Lower resolution display, not a great display, camera is eh, like it's a mid-range phone. I think a very good mid-range phone. I think an excellent choice. Still an excellent choice as a smartphone if you're a buyer looking for a phone of this size. But- I mean, I'm gonna buy, like now it's maybe this is just like sadness and nostalgia. You wanna buy the- I'm gonna buy the one I wanted to buy. The second best American phone you could buy. Now after this, the only American phone is the iPhone. You guys quoted this in your piece and the thing I said about it. Their software stuff was actually really good and innovative. I think really improved the experience. I don't know that it was ever- Well, so Ben and I pulled apart the timeline, right? Google bought Motorola and I have now been told this. Now that the smartphone patent wars are over and it's kind of like it's at a low boil and Apple and Samsung are just gonna sue each other on the side of the world for the rest of our lives. I mean, that's what's gonna happen. It is what's happening. But it's like it's in terms of all of the big stuff that needed to shake out has shaken out. I've been told this over and over again, which is that Google bought Motorola to try to block the iPhone from- They wanted to stop iPhone sales in any way they could. How? Why? Because at that time, Motorola had 24,000 patents, but most of those patents were on like radio technologies, right? They were on things like Wi-Fi and GSM and MPEG-4 and like standards, right? That's Motorola was big in developing standards in their old company, their innovative company. And so it was unclear, like the public policy was not shaken out whether if you contribute to the Wi-Fi standard and someone builds a phone with Wi-Fi, can you block their product from the market? And the answer at every court in the world, every court in the United States had heard it was no, you can't. Because by contributing to the standard and saying, use our stuff, you've already said you can use our stuff. And all you're gonna argue at now is money. And if all you're gonna argue about is money, you can't keep the products off the market because that reduces competition. That was the answer. It was the answer in Europe. It was the answer at the United States. And in court, it was the answer in the International Trade Commission in the United States. And so Google, that answer wasn't shaken out. So Google made a $12 billion bet on let's try to block the iPhone. And when Apple can't sell the iPhone because we have the essential patents on Wi-Fi and GSM, they will have to negotiate an Android license with us. And if they had won that bet, this would have been brilliant. Like just flat out brilliant. I mean, was it worth, was it worth, I mean, do you honestly believe they made a $12.5 billion bet on that one thing? I do. There had to have been another. No, I've been told like at this point, the number of people and the type of people who have basically said they were trying to block the iPhone, like that's what they were trying to do. That's what Sergey Brin told you. Larry Page, Larry Page personally. It was some people like that. So that's what they tried to do. And they lost. And whatever. And the patents, like they're gonna keep, Motorola has 24,000 patents and patents. They have patent applications. Google's gonna keep most of them. 10,000 of them I think are going to Lenovo because they're about manufacturing. So who cares? But the patents are worthless. Like they ended up being worthless. And so you can say when Google bought Motorola, they valued the patents at $5 billion. So they bought it for $12.5 billion. We can round up. Fine. They valued it at 5.5, we'll round up. Patents worth $6 billion. So they have $6 billion of value left. They sold the K-Walks business for $2 billion and they sold the manufacturer, the phone man business for $3 billion. So they're still just, okay, fine. You lost $1 billion. Which is nothing to Google. Plus you lost another couple billion dollars in operating costs over the past few years. You have a failing business. But when you paint that picture, it doesn't sound that bad. But the value of the patents is just, it's nothing. It's paper. It's the value of paper. Well they were valuable enough to cross license with Samsung. Yeah. Unless there's a patent. We should get that. Unless there's patents there that we somehow have overlooked the value of. The value of the patent, and this is why this deal blew up in Google's face. The value of the patent is not the technology that it describes, right? Because obviously Samsung can just make the technology and Apple can sue them. You can violate it, whatever. The value of the patent is how much you can get from other people for it. Because all the patent is, is the monopoly on the ability to make, use, and sell something. So I have a patent on this phone, you can't sell it. If you want to sell this phone, you've got to pay me, right? Or I can keep you from selling it and then I can get all the money from everybody else. Well Google has no ability to get money from people for those patents. Right. Even in the cases where Motorola tried to do it, they sued Microsoft. They were going to block the Xbox 360. If you want to sell them, you've got to license their MPEG patents for them. We want four billion dollars. The court was like, no, you can have 1.7 million. What's weird about it is- A million. A million. Yeah. What's weird about it is it just feels like Google, I mean, they didn't even really try to utilize the patent. I mean, there was a couple- Google has been running on saying we're never going to sue people. Right. They kind of trapped themselves where I get that they have the opportunity to do it and maybe to be more aggressive with it. But then you see the court cases are, I mean, the court cases are Apple and Samsung. And Samsung is, we can say Samsung is a proxy, but the court case is not against Google. And Samsung can't defend itself with Google's patents. Well- They kind of tried. Remember Google signed over some to HTC that they licensed for a dollar. Yeah, yeah. But HTC and Apple settled. Right. Nokia and Apple settled. They were suing each other for a minute too. They settled. And the funny thing is that the game is not about, consumers see it as, I think, Android fans are looking at it going like, this is about the stuff they made. I think that people who bought into the possibility of Motorola and Google creating some really awesome stuff together are like, this was supposed to be about that, like what happened? And I think that it's so much not about the products anymore. The whole game right now of tablets and smartphones and the devices we use every day isn't about, there's really just no players. There's two players, there's Samsung and there's Apple and everybody else is kind of just pecking around for a couple of people here and there. How many Nexus phones do you think they're selling? I'll bet it's fewer than the Moto X sells because they advertise them far less and they are ultimately more expensive when you buy them at a store, if you were going to buy them just like at face value, right, if you walked into a store versus going online. So the whole thing is like, what does Google do here in the sense of Apple sold a lot of phones. They make a lot of money selling phones. They might not have sold as many phones as the street said they were going to, but they did very, very big numbers. And I don't think anybody Apple is too bummed about, you know, the 5C apparently was a bit of a miss. We're going to give them the earnings. We will talk about it, but I'm just saying like, so who competes there? In order for Google to have like made the Moto X or a Motorola phone a success, it would have to compete on the same playing field that Samsung is competing on and that's marketing. That's a ton of marketing money. And had they done that, that would have screwed up the relationship with all of their OEMs. I mean, this is literally, I mean, somebody, I just want to tweet this. They're like, it's like Mike, they're like old Microsoft and it really is. They are now, they have now put themselves in terms of this stuff in a position that Microsoft was in not that long ago. And as we can see with Microsoft, it has been a total clusterfuck trying to figure out how you make a product that competes directly with your partner. I mean, I work for Nokia right now. I'd be like, well, we're screwed. Like it has never been done. Like Palm split itself into Palm One and Palm Source. Then they bought handspring and they combined again. Like that was a huge fail. Apple tried to license Mac OS to the clone maker. Steve Jobs came back and was like, this is stupid. The only way it works is if, is if for Microsoft, as if no one else makes Windows phones and Microsoft proper doesn't make Windows phones. That Nokia is literally the only maker of Windows phones as a subsidiary of Microsoft. And they either collaborate on things like tablets. I mean, but at some point you started to go like, okay, but tablets, your tablets are PCs and so now you're competing with PC makers. And so if you lose those guys, you're totally screwed because Microsoft cannot sell the amount of PCs that Lenovo does or that HP does or that these other parts. And they're all like, meanwhile, HP and Lenovo are like, Hey, Android is pretty interesting. And HP is releasing phones now in India, China. They're all over the, like the Microsoft thing is like the parable for like, or not the parable. It's the next version of this. Google is the parable for Microsoft. It's like Microsoft's trying to desperately turn into Apple. Google's busily turning into like the old Wintel Microsoft. And like we're just switching these roles. But I think so the parable for me is like, if you're going to buy a phone company, you need to desperately, desperately, desperately want to win. And if you can't put everything behind it, if you're going to tie one hand behind their back, you're going to fail. This is Palm and HP. Palm and HP is exactly the situation. Here's the thing, like you have to be all in and you also have to be willing to do something that maybe works against you in the short term. I mean like I think if Google said, Hey, we're going to offer the open source components of Android as a basis for your platform. But if you want to use our apps, like we will charge you because there was a story recently, which apparently was not the case, but they're charging licensing fees for the apps. If they had done some variation of that and said, we're going whole hog on hardware ourselves and like you can either be with us or against us. The licensing fee thing is like, you know, we checked around that story and check out, but we have known for a long time, and this is goes to right into Samsung and why they sold Motorola. We've known for a long time that they restrict those apps unless you do what they say. That's true. Google's even said it to us. I mean the most famous story of that is, oh God, what was it? It's not the most famous story anymore. Well, not anymore. Well, now the Samsung one is, but before it was the sky of GPS. They were going to be in the droid and Andy Rubin called Sanjay Jha and was like, you're not shipping the droid because you got this weird wifi in it and you're going to use our location services. That's like, that's Google. But we also know that they, sorry, go ahead. But to get like Gmail and maps and stuff on your phone, you've got to do what they say. There have to be certain requirements. Well, to a certain point, but the question has always been who has the leverage in these relationships? Who's the manufacturer and it's never clear. And so like the, the, the thing that we're leading up to talking about is that Google and Samsung signed like less than a week before this Motorola deal, a cross licensing deal. And then there's a rumor. And I remember, and they nabbed it and I remember Josh was like, is this important? I was like, no, because I would, now in hindsight that was ridiculous, but it's like, they're always on the same side. Like, of course they signed the deal. Thank you. They finally vindicated. But like, but like going from that to, I bet they're going to sell Motorola. No, you couldn't have made that. You couldn't have made that deal. But, but, but then the other part of this is that there's a rumor that, uh, Samsung is going to de Samsung eyes. It's Android phones and it's going to start promoting, you know, Google stuff more and it's not going to be so touched. I mean, I think, but I think this is based on the maps app or something. But I think this is, yeah, it's, it's John Gruber said that. So yeah, the story, the story literally earlier this week, I mean, why did Steven based on what, based on what? So, uh, maps. So Ena freed at, at Rico dot net re slash code.net. Uh, no, there's no slash in the actual, when you say it out loud, you don't have to say it with slash. You just want to say, uh, anyway, uh, she had a story that was like Samsung announced it's tab pro it's CES it's 12 and screen and the Google was like, cool. And they saw it and they saw that weird windows phone fake UI that they have called a magazine. Yeah. Uh, and they freaked out. They're like, okay, we're, you've gone too far. You're going to come back in the fold. Um, I assume Matias Duarte was like, will anyone ever see my work? That's how I just imagine. And the sad thing is he's like, he just like wanders around designing things, but nobody ever sees it. But it's true. But here's the thing about it. Like it really does that stuff really matters. And when you use like a nexus device versus like the Sony, I really liked, there's a couple of things on it that it's still like sonified, which is not that big of a deal. But on, on, on Samsung devices, it's not just that the visual design and that the UI is like completely blown apart, which it is and bad. The guy was just messing around with the note three for, for a few days. Um, it's not just that, but they disconnect all of what is like native and natural to the ecosystem of Google. It's like, yeah, it's like suddenly you're in, you're being asked to like be in a Samsung store for movies and a Samsung store for music and all this other crap. And it's like, listen, there's no way in hell I'm going to use your Samsung services. Like I have no faith in them and no interest in them. And, and, and so like, but it does break the whole, right? So the story was, they saw this magazine stuff. They saw that like Samsung was even more breaking the UI and the paradigm, turning into windows and they got them to agree, um, that they would stop it. Well, that's the story. And I think that agreeing to stop it, plus like, you know, the concessions were okay, fine. We'll stop it. But Google, you have to give us all of your patents. I mean, do you think the Motorola deal is part of that? And then that's it. And then it's like, well, and look, why? If you're Google at that point, it's like, listen, we will, we will, we will commit to making a more holistic Google experience on our devices, but we don't want to be competing against Google when it comes to hardware. Right. Right. And I think if you're Google, so does that fuel, does that fuel shit or get off the pot? Which one is shit? Which one is shit? I think that doesn't apply in this situation at all. No, with regard to like believing in Motorola and like pushing it. But here's the question. Here's the question. I think we all have two different, very different visuals. So does this mean, does this all fit with the narrative, the story that we've been hearing that everybody's rumoring now that they're going to kill the Nexus program? I don't believe that. That Google's going to kill the Nexus program? I don't know. It kind of makes sense. It's like, stop making like the Halo device because Samsung wants to make the Halo device. Stop trying to compete with us as a hardware maker because we want to be the leading hardware maker. Right. So this is- And like, we'll join, like, here's what Google needs, buying and lock it. I just had an argument with somebody on this, not an argument, but a conversation on Twitter about this. It's like, you need lock-in. Like, I was having a conversation about Apple and market share and people were like, hey, they're doing fine. They made all this money. And it's like, yes, short term, they made all this money. Long term, that may be fine too. But like what Apple needs, what all these companies need is lock into their ecosystem because like once you buy the subsidized device, like then what? And what's the next time? And so like if you don't have that stuff, it becomes, your business becomes slightly less viable than it was, right? If you don't have the lock-in. Then this is the question in between Google and Samsung, who has the power right now? Who's got more leverage? Because you've got the patent agreements, you've got the UI thing. I think they have a real- And then you've got Google selling off more roles. But if you, you asked me that question earlier and I think it's, they both got themselves to a place where they agreed to do the same thing. Right. What they do is let every other Android manufacturer go like, I don't know. And Samsung to take over even more they already have. Who are the other? HTC, failing. HTC, LG, Sony. Motorola, failing. Sony's doing well. Actually, Sony's doing really well. How well are they doing? They're third place or whatever, second place. Okay. So, but so Sony, so then they'll have the same conversation with Sony, but then Sony and Samsung are gonna have to duke it out. Right. I don't know how that- But here's the thing. Like if you look at that classic Wintel model, which is like kind of what I'm looking at now, right? By the way, Sony's making much better devices than Samsung at this moment. Yeah. If you compare this phone up against the GS4, if that's its competition, it's a way better device. Sony's great at hardware, right? Yeah. Like they have their classic Sony software problems with their great at hardware. Yeah. The software is the problem. They should just literally go stock Android. It's so close now that whatever, but they can't actually, again, Sony can't because they want you to lock into their ecosystem. They have their little PlayStation mobile store and they've got their video store. So that's like a handful of apps. Like if Sony- The handful of apps that get in between all kinds of experiences. If Sony would ship the Nexus device, that would be pretty cool. Yeah, but they're, I mean, I'm more forgetting of Sony. It's a giant phone, yeah. Saying that you should come to our movie service because they own a movie studio, right? Like they own Sony music. Like do you know the best way to get access to like Taylor Swift songs is buy it directly from Sony. Like, isn't that what you want in the end? I mean, maybe. Who cares who you buy it from? But do you want to buy it from Google Play? I don't care where I buy it from. What I'm saying is like Sony is the creator of a lot of these things. But I think that's Sony's, but I think that's actually Sony's problem is that they think that that is more meaningful than it is. Like what you're saying, I hear what you're saying, but the truth is like, I don't care where I buy my music from as long as I can continue using the service and I know that they're reputable and reliable and they have the shit that I want. Okay, even on those metrics though, like I trust Google to stick around. I trust Sony to stick around because they've been in that business. I trust Sony less than Google to stick around. If I had to- But that's like shades. Samsung is like, well, maybe this business won't work for you. You're like, stop. No, I don't buy Samsung as a media. I don't buy Samsung as a media. Samsung is a- Like in selling music on their phone? Oh, music. Oh, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. I think- Like selling media? Like I'm not going into that. No, no, no. I don't think so. I don't trust or desire Samsung for like media or services. Right. They may- No, I don't trust Sony either because Sony's going to give preference to their stuff and not to everybody else's stuff. I mean, that is why that is part of the- But Sony's like been, they just have the brand weight to do that. I think what Neal is saying is like they're at least like a trusted longstanding brand that has like done- They're like the media. The PlayStation and Sony Music and all these things like have existed for a while and they are so- It's like the equivalent of Apple's iTunes ecosystem. I'm not saying like Sony like they blew their opportunity to own the music space. They just absolutely blew it and now they're like struggling back. But like I'm saying in terms of, you're right, in terms of their hardware, they've always been superior. In terms of their software, Sony classically is like falling behind. And if all they did was they gave you stock Android and they added in the PlayStation store and a better camera app. I'd be like, that's fine. That would be great. But people don't, but that's the problem is in what Sony hopes and believes and I think recognizes as relatively true is that people don't, average consumers probably are more comfortable with the Sony Music store than Google Play Music because they don't know about it. Right. Like they don't know it, but Sony, you go like, oh, it's Sony. That's the problem because they're going to keep- Also Google Play Music, Google Play anything, worst branding ever. It's awesome. No, it's not the worst ever, but it's not great. It's pretty bad. The problem- How can you add? How can you add to it? The new ads are great. Play everything or whatever. Grammys? Yeah. They've been pushing it harder, but that's the thing. So you still have, what do you do with Android here? You've got this open thing that anybody can use. I'd say since Sundar has been in charge, what you've been seeing is the gradual exertion of control. Yeah. And they've got, so Android is open, it's everywhere. But if you actually want to compete against Apple, who is, like you said, just sitting there selling phones. Yeah. You've got to figure out- And services. Yeah. And cohesive services that nobody's questioning. You don't buy an Apple phone and go, what will I use to download my music? Right. You either, if you don't subscribe to a streaming- That's a daily problem. If you don't subscribe to a streaming service, which most people don't at this point, you are literally still buying with no problem albums from iTunes. And that just feels like a totally natural, enjoyable experience. App Store is the same way. The iBook store, I don't think that's made quite the impact, but it's there if you want it. Google doesn't have that level of security and safety yet in their services. They do in their services like Gmail, but not in their retail services. Although Gmail did have a bug where you pushed the button and it did stuff to your other email. Yeah, but that's pretty rare. Yeah, it's pretty rare. I'm just joking about that. I'll take that over just having to use Apple Mail any day. Yeah. This is the worst mail client. I can't believe people use a mail client like that every day. It seems crazy to me. Yeah. Well, you don't want to get screwed. It just blows my mind. Yeah, I don't care about... You can screw me actually. Here's the deal. Here we go. Breaking news. Google Financials, the call is happening right now. Motorola itself lost $384 million. Their losses were increasing. That didn't work. And then Google overall made 3.9 billion in profit. They made one Motorola in profit. 3.9 billion in profit overall. Up from 3.3 billion a year ago. What was Apple's profit this quarter? I don't remember. Can we pull that up? And the revenue was up to 15 points. So Google's doing fine. Motorola was doing terribly. I think Google's doing okay. I think the question is what does Google do in the future? But here's what I see. It was record revenue for Apple. Profits were 13.1 billion. 13.1 billion. With a B. They have a lot more to sell than Google does, frankly. And their margins are really great. Here's the thing though. There's a real mess going on. Things have not gotten any more organized. They've gotten messier. Apple scale. You don't think about it. I always think of these companies as being about the same size. But their scale is just ridiculous. Apple did $57.6 billion in revenue. Google total did 15. That's crazy. And the thing that's crazy about it is we've just become anesthetized to it. Because every quarter, it's like, oh, record profits, record revenues for Apple. It just keeps getting bigger. They're huge. You look at the top 10 companies. We can just go, right? Oil companies. We're doing earnings here. We can run through Google earnings? Well, I mean, Google's earnings are happening live. We can talk about Apple because they're happening. So there are two big stories, I think, out of the financials. So they sold a lot of iPad Airs, which I think they deserve to. It's a great product. I think iOS 7 is like, actually Gruber had a line today where he was like, iOS 7 is the least playful. And I think that crystallizes my problems with it. The least playful? But by least playful, do you mean most crashy? Because that crystallizes my problems. It's super crashy. But it's not a fun operating system. It's very utilitarian. And they just took it back too far. And all the blurring and the swoopiness, it's like, there's something about it where they just, the pendulum swung too much. But regardless of that, I really like using the iPad, much more than my old iPad. So they sold a lot of iPads, sold a lot of iPhones. The big story was Tim Cook dancing around the fact that the 5C has not sold very well. He was like, makes it stronger to the 5S. We didn't expect people to be as interested in the 5S. The percentages weren't what we expected them to be. So he never said it sold poorly. And then this crazy thing where he's like, you know, they just really love the touch ID sensor. I was like, dude, that's not why. That's like definitely not why. So the touch ID sensor is terrible and works really badly. I hear so many mixed messages on this. I find that it's almost 90% of the time when using it, it does not get the correct read. And I end up having to put my 5S. I've been using a 5 for a while now. And I need to make my own call on this touch ID thing. Because I'm hearing lots of people say it's the best. It's just very minor though. It really doesn't save that much time. I mean, you're literally talking about the difference of- If it means I don't have to plug in my iTunes password and I download an app. That's actually the biggest. The biggest part. So there's that. But of course Apple could just change the way they, they could just say, put your password in and like every seven days we'll recheck. Like not every time you buy something. Well, you want to, anyway. And I guess if like your annoying, I guess if your annoying horrible kids have managed to unlock your device and are buying things on it, maybe just get them their own phone. Here's your own stupid phone. You horrible bastard. Take this. Anyhow, go ahead. So the other piece was he said regarding touch ID, we have, you know, that's one of the mobile payments is a reason we're like looking at, we built this thing. So he hinted at that. He hinted again, very, very like, it's funny how much more explicit the we're going to have new product category. New product category. Oh, so Gene Munster- It was a response to Munster. So Munster goes, look, you know, like sounded all sad. He's like, you know, I just want to make sure like every, even saying you're going to have new products in 2014. Is that still true? And Tim Cook was like, yes, absolutely. You just heard the glee. Yeah. I mean, absolutely like new, they're going to- Yeah, new product categories this year. They're going to have an iPhone. That's everything consensus is. They're going to wearables. Well, it's a new, that's a new- And they're going to- Well, it's got to be done. Hey, he said they built a Sapphire factory. The Sapphire factory is going to be a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. And then- And then there's rumors about the Apple TV. The Apple TV became its own product listing on the store. And then we ran a story. The iPod sales have just collapsed. They're gone. Yeah. The iPod is like, let's be clear. The age of the iPod, this was our, the age of the iPod is over the time of the iPod where it ruled was, which is like 15 years or something. How long has the iPod been around? 2001? Yeah. That's when it came out. So not quite 15 years, but a long time. And wait, what year is it? 2014? Yeah. Whatever. Pretty close. It was like, yeah, October 2001. It's pretty notable. Like iPod sales on a pretty steady decline. Tim Cook even said, we know they've been slowing for a while. It's almost completely cannibalized now by their other products. I mean, basically everybody is getting a smartphone. Lots of people are getting, or an iPad, lots of people are getting either one of them. They both do the same job. I mean, the iPod obviously lives on as a piece of software. It's the music software inside. It is remarkable how many iPods I see on the subway still. Since I'm in New York, I can see everywhere. There's a lot of legacy. I mean, people own these devices and you can use them for years, but the moment where the iPod was this sort of defining device is over. And I think like it wouldn't be surprising in the next couple of years to see them discontinue or severely limit what they're making as far as iPods go. I have a weird, crazy, well, there's like a sadness there to me for that because the iPod was defined wholly by music and it came at a, I don't know, just a period in my life and I think a lot of our generation's lives where it was, I listened to a lot of music and it was like, this stuff is on my iPod. It's always here. I don't have to connect to like a cell network to listen to it. I think it's arguable it saved music. It saved music industry. Like iTunes, the iPod, like they did that thing. And not only that, but gave it a whole different, you know, gave independent artists a whole different life. Gave. Oh man. The original, the original commercial. Oh, this commercial is so bad. It's crazy. It's so ridiculous. I mean, this dude just rocking. He can't stop rocking. And then he got it. He's like got a firework. Fireware. Yeah. It's so weird. And like that thing that he just did, does it happen? His head, his head swing. Oh God. Oh no. Stop that. Hey, the nineties. This is basically the nineties. I mean, I know it's 2004. I mean those pants, like what are you doing? Is this the dude from House? No. What? No, it's not, but it looks a lot like. No, this is the, this is. I mean this guy cannot leave his house. He's rocking so hard. Do you understand? This is the last work this actor ever did. And you know what? It's iconic. The shit's on his reel. It gets all over her. It is. I mean, this was the first one. They were so proud of themselves. Oh man. They should go back. They should go back. So, you know, I was just joking. It's like every morning I wake up and I try to figure out what music service I'm going to use. And like all my playlists are like at 50 different places and nothing is as feels as contained and as smart. It was like somebody, I think it's very much like the iPhone where somebody finally was like, Oh, you have the answer. Like everybody's been trying to get at this. We knew it was going to happen. It seemed like it had to happen. And you finally just gave us like this complete answer to the question. And now it's the same way with everything else. You know, it's, it's, it's kind of a confused landscape. It's that you're not sure where you're going to land. There isn't, I was just talking about this with somebody, you know, the idea that when people, when records were at their, at the top of their game, when everybody's buying vinyl, nobody was sitting around going like, what'll the next thing be? They were like, records are awesome. Like period. And when cassettes came along and started gaining popularity, I'm sure people were like, I mean, I know the eight track was in there a little bit, but people were probably like, what do I want this? This is crazy. You know, CDs, I remember it took forever for CD adoption to become a thing, you know? And this is now it's different because it's not about formats necessarily. It's really about quality. Yeah. I mean, it's about, you have a million different ways to listen to music now, a million different ways that you can take something with you. Like what type of thing you take. It's commodified too. It's, I have a million different ways to listen to the same song at about the same quality. Right. Yeah. Right. Like if I want to listen to. There won't be another, there's not going to be another huge shift. I think quality may get better storage, you know, or lack of thereof, you know, networks may get better. Quality is better on a, on a service like Spotify, quality gets better for you all at once. But now there's so much. We're upgrading our streaming. There's something about the effort of organizing your music and moving it around and like that connects you to it. That connects you to it. And then with the services it's there, it's not whatever. That's why, that's why I think audio had the best idea, but then again, we might just be old. Yeah. You know, kids these days, they just put on Spotify or whatever. Yeah. They get on their hoverboards and put their invisibility cloak on and fly off into it onto it. They go watch that. So the club, they go, they fly up to the club on the moon. Wow. Where there's a huge concert. We can wrap up Google earnings here. I don't know what that means. Yeah. What's that? What happened with Google? So they beat their, they beat their estimates. They beat the street. Beat the street. Well, no, it missed, it missed them. But they missed the streets, but the stock went up. That's what happened. Great. So she wasn't that upset. She was happy with them. Let me see what Twitter says about this. Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay. We should move on. I think that's enough Apple and Google for today. I'm tired of talking about them. I hate them. Let's, what's next? I reviewed the pebble. Yeah. It's on my wrist. It's right here. I thought you were going to like lend that to me. What happened? I'm waiting for mine to get here. Oh. You played with this? Dieter said, yeah, I played, I've seen it. I played with it at CS. He's like, I'm like, get that away from me. I don't even want to touch it. I look, I really like it. I, I still don't really want to wear it, but as a, as smartwatches go, if you really, if you really have like a hankering for a smartwatch, like I wouldn't buy another one besides this. Yeah. This would be the one that I would buy. I mean, it looks like a watch. So do you read the conclusion of my review where I, this is the first Palm Pilot. No, no Palm V. Palm V. Palm V, which is actually industrial design wise has a lot in common with it. Yeah. Cause it was like, it was metal. Remember it had like a metal housing, right? And it, it was like a graphite color. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they had different colors. I think the Palm V in terms of design, it was a little bit better than this. Yeah. Well, this is, this is, you know, this is the first one I would wear. It's, it's a, it's a decent looking watch. It's I don't wear watches that look like that. Right. I mean, I have been trying out the Fitbit force, however, which is actually also functions as a digital watch. Yeah. But you gotta hit the button though. You have to hit the button. I don't know why they don't just make it like a motion sensor thing. Right. They have motion sensors. Right. It should be like a certain kind of like, if I really snap, just do this. Why don't they put old school 1980s style displays on these things? Like big LCDs? Like Casio. Just an LCD like that is just always on. This is how you're going to get this courseware out. You can download one for that. No, I meant for the Fitbit. Why they have this, why would they do that? This is a very cute little thing. Because then you don't have to hit the button. Or do motion, it's just there. Oh, you mean an additional secondary display, an LCD display. I don't know about a second one. I think you're kind of dreaming. I think that's a weird, bad idea. All right. I think you just suggested it's horrible. That's like how for the longest time, like Lexuses had that clock still on them. Yeah. Oh yeah. You'd get one of these. It has like Lexus. With the two buttons. Yeah, it's like, dude, that's an eight cent clock. Like it's a Lexus. Like don't do that again. Yeah, but what a luxurious, what the hell? Well, it's better than having to hit a button. Oh, in fit, yeah. Well, a lot of the luxury cars have analogs. But like a fancy analog clock is one thing, but the Lexus would like have a digital clock against the center of the set. I don't know, but fancy. They're like, they are also eight cents, but they're, they have like a hand on them. It's like you're an old guy now. Three year old guy clock. But I think, I think this, I think your review is fair. I think I, I. Yeah, you didn't talk to a bunch of people. Like I just think if Apple, like people ever be showing this concept of the iWatch, which actually Wire did a really nice, on one of their covers recently, they did a mockup of an iWatch, which was, which had like a leather strap and was sort of like had rose gold on it and was like actually kind of cool. Like it looked like this weird blend of modern. That's actually what I like about the Moto X with the wood backs. It's weird blend of like modern and retro. Yeah. Until you see the front. If Apple does well, but if Apple does this iWatch that everybody's talking about, I mean Pebble is just, their business is finished. Like they can just, they're done. That's what I'm saying. Your search history on this computer, Neal, I. This is not my. Parade of fail. So I only use this account on this computer when, when we do the purgecast. My search history is like two broke girls. The word racist spelled wrong. Neck neutrality, fake chart and brave new world sequel. Sounds right to me. I have no idea. I remember all of that. I remember when all that happened. Yeah. What the hell is it? I was gonna say like, you know, Pebble just into the manufacturing, the designers, the software people to compete with Apple and nobody does. And as we've seen, Samsung doesn't. I mean, at least as far as watches are concerned, like they can sell a bunch of phones. I mean, there's reasons for that that are beyond design and manufacturing, but right. No, here's the thing. The thing that makes the pebble good is like, yeah, okay. It's reasonably designed. Now the first pebble was also good. I think in retrospect, the design didn't age even a year well and it's got a bad display. Like it's kind of a little too big. Everybody likes, everybody's okay with the display except for me. I think it's terrible. Well, I think it's too, if they could just make it black and white instead of this weird blue, I'd be happy. But the software doesn't try to do a lot and that's the whole game, right? I just want this to, I just want this to tell me what my phone is doing. Right. Right. Or like, and now you can send minor data to your phone. So I wonder if that's going to be the, I've thought a lot about this when thinking about Apple's potential product. Will that be the track they take where it's like, this does a couple of things like, you know, they're kind of notorious for making limited, the versions, first versions of things very limited. I mean, I feel like if an iWatch were to come out and it was like, we have an app store for it and it does, it can, you know, there's games you can play on and there's all this stuff. I think it would be a big mess. I feel like they're going to do a thing that's like a really good watch. Some fitness tracking stuff. Yeah, they'll do that. And like, we'll get notifications from your phone and show it to you on your wrist. There's all these rumors that they're hiring all these sensor people to do like even better fitness tracking. Yeah. Yeah. So like, yeah, they'll do that stuff. I think for my theory is that they'll, they will make it be able to connect to apps on your phone, but because they're Apple and they have total platform control, they will get to say something like, well, if you want to update your app for iOS 8, you've got to put in an iWatch like screen. Right. And like, they can just do that. Right. The same way that right now they're saying, if you want to update your app for iOS 7, you got to redesign it. Right. Or you got to optimize for it. Right. And they'll be able to say like, you know, there are some apps that make no sense for them to have an iWatch screen, but they can say like, you can get at the iWatch, but to do it, you have to do it our way and in this fashion. Right. And that makes it more of an extension. What's the iWatch price point? $399. The first one? It feels like $399 to me. I think that's probably right. I mean, this thing is huge. I mean, are you thinking it's good touch screen? Right? Yeah. It has to be. It doesn't have to be. That's not. Yeah, but this is a mess. I don't see Apple making a device that is an iDevice. The color touch screen like makes it bigger and makes the battery not great. The rumor for a year now has been that they were having battery problems. Well, the battery thing seems like the biggest issue. Right. I mean, the iPhone cannot last a day. Right. I mean, I'm stunned and surprised having just been reusing an iPhone again for a little bit how bad the battery life is. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I plug it all day. It's a terror. I don't want to deal with it. It's a terror. You do plug it all day. The battery life on this thing is ridiculous. Is it really good? It's really good. Like, it's really good. Like, I... You should let me borrow that. I can't. I don't think so. Okay. I can't remember. I'm sort of like reinvigorated about the Z1. Like especially after our last VergeCast where you guys were looking at pictures, you're like, oh, that's definitely the iPhone. I'm like, nope, that's the Z1. I actually feel like, you know what? It's a really good camera, but all the other stuff is just like stupidly good. The worst thing about this is the screen viewing angles. No, it's a glass back. It's really... That's the worst thing about that. That's terrible. That doesn't bother me. What's really interesting that I just discovered is that there are a few scratches on the screen. That screen is not great. There is a... This is a... The thing that says Sony on it, there is a screen protector on here that Sony puts on their devices that you can remove. And there's just a screen under here that also has glass on it. Like, this is a adhesive thing. It's like really, really well attached. There's videos online where people are like, yeah, you just get a scalpel and put it under... Not a scalpel, like an X-Acto knife. You put it under here to pull it up and then you peel it off and it's like, it's just a protector. And then your screen gets destroyed the first time you're talking to it. I don't know. Cool. I don't know what the glass is. You just open your phone, you just look directly at the screen and just start breaking into pixels individually. But I don't know why you would take it off. That's the thing. Like it's basically the screen. So I can't understand why. Anyhow, what were we talking about? We were talking about Apple earnings. We're done with that. So now we should talk about, we're just staying... We were talking about IWIPE. Oh, Pebble. We did the Pebble. Then we were talking about IWIPE. We should watch. No, the next... Actually, a surprisingly big piece of news in a very minor way. TMNT, the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pictures from Michael Bay's movie. That looks okay. Did everybody see those? Paramount freaked out and was like, to everybody in the world, you need to pull these or we're gonna sue you for copyright infringement. Or trademark infringement, whatever the hell it was. That was great. But they're also available all over the internet. Just Google it. Yeah. I mean, seriously, like our legal people were like, yeah, they know they're gonna lose and they can't take them down from everywhere. They're just making a big show out of it, so yeah. But they actually kind of look like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the movies, from the old movies. They do. Michael Bay, he's doing it. So that's cool. He's gonna have a meltdown with the turtles in the sewer. They're a little bit closer to comics. Him and Shredder. What? No, never mind. I read the comics. Shredder. He is Shredder. That would be the best. Oh, there are also pictures of Shredder. Yeah. Anyhow. And he looks all right. I hope Krang is in the movie. Krang is the brain inside the robot body. I'm aware of Krang. He's a role playing game. All right. Oh, my God. Are you serious? Yeah, of course. Wow. You should get together and play something, too. Do you wanna talk about Nintendo phone apps or Facebook paper? Paper? I think it's what you were working towards. Am I crazy? I can't tell. I was sort of headed there. So paper? Yeah. What do you wanna... You did a big thing. Yeah, so it's... Paper is like newsstand. Yeah, so we thought it was gonna be... No. Well, that's the thing. It's supposed to be like Flipboard. That's what we were expecting. But that's there. There's all the little news things. But on top of that, it has the standard Facebook News Feed. Yeah. And you can write to it, and you can do messaging, and you can add and remove friends. I thought they were just showing a video of people playing with actual paper. No, this is their... Actually, that's what that video is. This is hilarious. But it's their commercial for the app. But here's the thing about it. It's really good if... If you use Facebook at all, use this app and not the Facebook app because it's faster, it's prettier, it's nicer. This is... My Android phones... Is there anything that you want from Facebook? I use... But here's the problem. Where's the information being curated from? So the Facebook part is just your Facebook. Also, is there an Android app? Because I have... No, not an Android. It's just iPhone right now. Oh, cool. And then the News Feeds are curated by people that Facebook hire. We're on it, by the way. We're one of the news sources. That's wonderful. Well, that's great. There's more breaking news. Ross is literally flashing red at me. Uh-uh. Breaking. Pentagon announces nomination of Michael Rogers. US Fleet Cyber Command is head of the NSA in US Cyber Command. Oh, cool. New NSA boss. Great. Michael Rogers, I know you're watching this or someone... Michael Rogers, we'd love to speak to you. Please talk to us. About your plans for the NSA. Yeah. And how you will further spy us. Yeah. I mean, Ross, you can just see what you're typing right now. You might as well just tell him to call me. Just tell him to call. Yeah. Just can you put in Eli's phone number in Google Doc that you're working from and he'll just be able to ring us immediately. So you wanna know what his interview was like? He walked in and they're like, you think we're gonna hire you? And he's like, yeah, I read that you would. And they're like, you're hired. He's like, I already had you. This is the guy who's gonna hire me. I already know you're gonna hire me. This is the rumor. Yeah, it's the rumor. No surprises here. I mean, like, I don't know. We watched the State of the Union. We were waiting for anything about that stuff to happen. Nothing. Yeah. It's like Obama gave a speech where he said the word metadata was fascinating. The best thing about the State of the Union was Biden going... Yeah. I mean, what's funny about the State... Do we know who he was pointing at? No. Polish. Any human being. Somebody who he really likes. Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is that it was all completely overshadowed by the dude from Staten Island saying he was gonna throw a reporter off of a balcony. Like, literally, if you watch the news right now, it's like, yeah, Obama and the State of the Union, whatever, but have you heard about Michael Grimm and him throwing a guy over a balcony? It's like, that's cool. You think that he... Which was more boring, the State of the Union or the Grammys? Ooh. Well, Grammys was started off strong. Yeah. And got boring. Yeah. Dude, it was like three hours and 45 minutes. It's crazy long. They ruined one more than it already had been. They ruined Metallica's one. Yeah. By like... That was terrible. The high hat, all you could hear was... Oh my God. The high hat was so loud. So loud. The whole time. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Some great performances. I'm laughing that hard because every time the high hat started, John, our producer, would just... He would just tweet like, oh my God, that's me. Yeah. No, no. The high hat was crazy. But the Grammys... I like how we're just taking away from... I don't know what the hell we're doing with the Grammys. The Grammys were great. Okay. The Beyonce, Jay-Z performance at the top of the show. That was great. A killer. Even though she's totally insane. Was really, really cool. Yeah. Dark Horse, forget about it. Yeah. Awesome. The best. Like so goth. Look, I like the Imagine Dragons thing too. I did. No, that was terrible. I liked it. That was terrible. I did a little Taylor Swift dancing. That was... Oh my God. Taylor Swift dancing. It was amazing. The worst thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Come on. It was like my brain... She's the only person in the room who was trying to have a good time. My whole brain was assaulted. My eyes and brain were assaulted by... Look, I like... Her boobs are so like... Her boobs are like mom... Her boobs are such mom boobs. It's out of control. Listen. Later in the show when everybody was dancing, everybody was dancing like that and it made me feel so good to know that a giant room full of the most famous, richest musicians on the planet can't dance any better than I can. It was awesome. I don't know. Some of them could dance better than you. Usher was there. Usher was like, he's like, I got to tone it down. But not Taylor Swift. There were a lot of bad performances. There were a lot of bad performances. There was a lot of parties. There was a lot of parties. There was like a Casey Underwood or something. I don't know her name. She's basically Carrie Underwood, but she's like... What is going on right now? I don't know. Oh. By the way, this piano thing... Oh, I should've done a punch there. Leave her alone on that too. This piano thing. The piano thing is all bullshit. That was such like theatrics. And also like... I have this theory. It's like Tori Amos call. The reason that Beyonce performance was good... She wants her hair... This piano thing is all bullshit. That was such like theatrics. And also like, it's like Tori Amos call. The reason the Beyonce performance was good. She wants her hair flipping back. It's cause all of those performers were like, screw it, turn on the auto tune. And I was just running into- Not Katy Perry, she definitely did not have the auto tune on. Daft Punk, Pharrell definitely did not have the auto tune on. No, that was like, John tweeted, like, remember when I put rock music for singing on national television that you had to be able to sing? And it is like true. It's like, I know like Pharrell can sing certain parts of songs, but like, there definitely are parts that- No, that performance of Get Lucky was the worst karaoke I've ever heard. And he's like Stevie Wonder's there just jamming. It's like, dude, Stevie Wonder's here, like, get it together. I was hoping that the shade in front of Daft Punk would actually never come out. It made me feel bad, I was like, oh my God. I was hoping the whole time the shade would stay up, but they would just, they just wouldn't follow it. They would never come out. They're like, yeah. No, but it was awesome when they lowered it. I mean, it was really great. The best part about Daft Punk being there was, and I took a few pictures of it. I literally ran up to my TV and was taking pictures. Daft Punk just like casually being there in their robot helmets. Just like the whole time, which I have to say is the best. Like, it's so awesome for them. And they won so many Grammys. First off, we don't know if it was even them. That's the first thing. Second- Oh God, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, they could send Daft Punks all over the place. What's so great though is like, I mean, you could do whatever you want inside that helmet. You could make any kind of face you want. They could be having a cell phone conversation with somebody on a Bluetooth headset. Like, you don't know what's going on inside. I think you'd be watching a movie. Like, I don't know what's going on inside the helmet. But what I do know is it's their choice. Everybody else has to be subjected to reality 24-7. Anyhow, I think so. I'd like to have a helmet. And they open the curtain. Also, their faces are completely covered. So they don't have to worry that they get a zit or something. They're happy. It's amazing. Well, we don't know if they're happy, but that's the beauty of the helmet. So the question is when they're like not performing, they're sitting around in the living room watching TV. If it's so comfortable- In the nude, but with a helmet on. In the nude with a helmet on. Yeah. I would think that if I wore a helmet whenever I was in public, I would start wanting to wear it when I was at home. I can get you a helmet. I think they, so people do sell really expensive replicas of those helmets, which I definitely have considered purchasing at one point or another. But I think that they, I mean, look, there are pictures of them. They used to not wear the helmets. Like long before Daft Punk wore helmets, they had faces. Then they lost their faces. And their faces were forced to wear helmets. Exactly. Yeah, Chris was saying they could be the first immortal band, right? Because all they have to do is like hand off the helmet. It's true. It's like- Yeah. It's like- Like Daft Punk will be here forever. It's like James Bond only. Sort of like how, oh, here they are on eBay. Wow. This is crazy. There's some really expensive ones like that have the electronics and stuff. Look at that, $1,500 with gloves. Like seriously, if, I mean, let's see the picture of somebody with it on. Yeah. So here's what's crazy about it. If you do spend $1,500 on this and you're like the right height and have the right style, pretty much you could go to like a club and people would probably think you're actually- But you need a friend. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're the kind of person that- I've never seen like one robot solo. Yeah. I don't know what's going on here. Can we see the other helmet? Is there somebody, I don't, this is not my favorite helmet. I prefer the- This is not my favorite helmet. The other thing I like about Daft Punk- Yeah, this is the- Don't try that, that's a good one, yeah. The Guy Manuel one. This one is awesome. Did they make a motorcycle helmet that looks like this? Maybe they have to at this point. This one is not exactly what he had on the other night. You know what's funny is that record I think is not, it's a good record, has some good tracks on it, but it has some extremely weird moments. Yes. And as a whole- Like the Paul Williams track, Touch, the worst, one of the worst songs in the world. Like it's really bad. And like I get that they were like into a certain style that they wanted to do. That record is, I would say this, it's- What's the track with the German dude speaking? Everything is forgiven because of that track. That's Giorgio Bagmurader. Yeah, everything- That song is amazing. But it also sounds like the band Zombie, if you've ever heard them, and it also kind of sounds like Trans Am, if you've ever heard them. So like it's not, it is really good. That's my favorite song on the record. Actually that or Doing It Right. I mean, Doing It Right is really, really like, Doing It Right is like a perfectly formed single- Oh my God, somebody just tweeted the best conspiracy theory at me ever. Let's hear it. It doesn't involve Daft Punk. Did someone die at the end? Daft Punk punked everyone at the Grammys. They were in sitting, they were in there, in the audience with their helmets off, along with the robots, like sitting behind them. That's possible. No. Wait, is there proof of that? Yeah, let me- Is there a conspiracy theory of that? It's like- You're trying to airplay into the podcast right now, aren't you? Just do it, just search. I don't know what to do. Just do the search, Daft Punk, you know, Grammy conspiracy. Literally brought up the like, airplay thing. He's like, oh my, where do I put it? I don't know. I would do Daft Punk Grammy conspiracy. C-O-N conspiracy. What are you gonna do once it's there? That's not gonna help anything. I don't know, man. It's this one. It's a Reddit. No, it's actually this right here. Can we get any live screen up on the screen? No. Screen my screen. This is not helping anything. This is the thing I was just- This is one of the best moments ever. Bridge cast, ladies and gentlemen. These are the, I mean, they're probably wrong. This probably isn't true. Wait, really? Can we, can I see this on the big screen? I wanna get a look at this. Oh, there we go. So here's a picture of the dudes recently. Pump it up behind Neely, would you? Okay. And then here are some guys sitting behind them in this like, sunglasses. That's like very possibly them. Oh, it's possible. Wait a second, wait a second. You're saying the guy in the sunglasses on the left? Yeah. Right, scroll down? And then this is them. I, I- No, those are not the same people. I like this theory. Those are not the same people. No, no, I like it. They're not the same people. Okay, fine. I mean, I guess it's possible, but I don't think it's the same people. It would be incredible who it was. It would be incredible, but I don't think it's correct. I mean, it would be easy to figure this out. It's on Reddit, so let's see. I'm being- There you go, okay. So there's the person who's like, yeah, here's who the people are. It's not them. Wait, who? It's the guy in the comments who's like- No. You know, I think the glory of Daft Punk is that you can believe anything you want. No, what's great about it is that somebody would even suggest that. That's why the helmets are awesome. They're like, there were other people in the helmets and they were sitting casually next to them. Like, that didn't happen. Is there a way that I can transition from here to Macklemore to John Leisure? No. You mean Macklemore? I said Macklemore. Macklemore had a big night- Who apparently has a little buddy and that's like in the name of his band and I can't remember his- Ryan Lewis? He said he has a little buddy. He's the guy who makes all of Macklemore's songs. When you- By the way, hold on. Can we play my game? I have a new game that I play. When you see a picture of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis together, imagine that Ryan Lewis has a small remote control somewhere that he's using to control Macklemore. Now, can we find a picture of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis together? Okay. Here we go. You ready? You imagine he's remote controlling him. How long are we gonna wait for this? I don't know. It's up to Neely. Neely found the one site that cannot load photos. I just meant that whenever they talked about it on the Grammys, it was like Macklemore and- I think if you see them standing together, you'll begin to wonder- This picture will be particularly good for this. You'll begin to wonder- Is that old? Who is this guy? I don't know who these people are. You've completely failed. I went to their website. Google image search. Right here. Okay, here we go. Great example. By the way, this picture is hilarious. Right? Okay, just imagine down, you can't see it, but in his right hand, Ryan Lewis is holding a small touchscreen remote control that operates Macklemore. Can we see another picture of them together? Here we go. This is great stuff. This is great. Yeah, okay. Yep. There you go. Now you got it. Okay, it makes total sense here. He could easily be in his pocket right hand. Yeah. Okay, let's see another one. Can we get another picture out? Oh, he goes right behind me. Holy crap. He's right there. I mean, would it be amazing to discover that he's a robot, right? No. That's the only picture you have? I got a whole bunch right here. Oh my God. His hand in his pocket. He's hiding it. See that? What else we got? You can't see his hands. Can't see his hand right there. Hand off screen. Oh, okay, okay. No, but this one. Maybe it's his wristband. Maybe it's his smart. Yeah, okay. I saw he's hiding it. His hand is hiding. He does this a lot. And I think that's what spurred the thought. I don't know what's going on with these. Okay, great stuff. Macklemore sent an amazing, amazing text to Kendrick Lamar, like apologizing. Thank you for robbing him. But here's the thing. But here's the thing. Somebody on Twitter did the most amazing, they had a picture of the text, maybe one that not everybody saw. I just need to find this so we can show it to people. Because this to me is like one of the best. Really? It's one of the best things ever. Yeah, hold on. Let me just, this is gonna be so hard to do. Is this it that you got robbed? Yeah, there's another one though. Hold on a second. This is gonna be a horrible moment where I try to find. How do you find your favorites? How do I find my favorites in the, this is so horrible. Oh, here we go. Oh, on the, yeah, you're. Oh yeah. Oh, you got it? Is this it? No, there's another one. Hold on. Here it is. How do I send this to somebody? How do I? Are you sure this isn't them? Can I share my screen with you? I think it's them. I told you. I'm on board with this theory. I'm going to. I believe it's them. I mean, maybe it's kind of dressed as them. What's the best way to get you this tweet? How do I? Tweet it at me. If I tweet it at you, are you gonna be able to get it there? Or send it to me in chat? Send it to you in chat. Oh wait, I won't get it here. Is this? Where can I? Retweet it right now. This is some quality. Oh yeah, that's it. Go to my favorites. Go to my favorites. We're literally on. This is great. No, no, no, just go to my favorites. Go to Josh Topolsky. Oh my God. You're right there. Go to Josh Topolsky. We're gonna follow up through faving right now. No, that's okay. Now hold on. I have no idea how to find favorites. Hold on, scroll up. Scroll up. Scroll up. Is it on the left, favorites? Oh, weird. You didn't know that? Oh, you gotta be signed in. What? You can't see somebody's favorites? Come on. You can't see somebody's favs? What did you want me to do? Send it to Ross? Yeah. Text it to him? Hip chat it? This is really. We're gonna see your password. By the way, this is not worth. Jordan. Oh my God, now we know how many characters it is. It's all of the characters. Here we go. Here we go. You and Jordan are in a race. Keep going. Yeah, this is so not worth it. Is this me? There we go. Can you open that up? That's not worth it at all. This is a letter. Macklemoreman. Macklemore on. Sorry, my brother, I think you deserve the Grammy. I'm totally lower shades, Macklemortified. Anyone who thinks otherwise is lower shades. I'm Macklemore on. Come on. No, pretty good. That was totally worth it. Totally worth all this trouble. Why is there a pen? That guy deserves a lot more credit for that tweet. I just wanna say, he only got 90 retweets. Can we get his number up? I don't know who he is. Is it still dad Ross? Hello, what happened? Did our thing go down? We went away for a minute. Oh good, then nobody saw that, right? Well, the stream went down because of. We're Macklemore-ified. Yeah, we're back. See, see, anyhow, not worth it. Hopefully somebody had a guffaw over it. It just was too much build up. Anyhow, what were we talking about? You wanna talk about Macklemore? I was talking about, I was gonna go from there somehow. Macklemore, John Lundra's favorite rapper. Oh God. And then I was gonna do a thing. Oh, John Ledger. But I don't really know how to get there. John Ledger. I mean, how much do you want? Do we really wanna go into this? People are asking me to talk about it. I mean. Yeah, but you know, we're. We were. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. I'm not gonna podiaquily yell that. This is great. And then he deleted all the tweets. Oh boy. The CEO of T-mobile deleted like, angrily. We're going down. Incoherently tweeted at me. We're doing this. That we're no good. The verge is bad. That you should read Inafree and DeRico. He's like switch to Rico. It was really weird. Like I don't know. But then he deleted all. Literally the. All I did was tweet him a screenshot and I was like, if you're gonna like throw shade at me, just know that it's still here. What's weird about John Ledger being mad at the verge for some reason is that. We're on his side. And I like, I don't know, I feel like the last time I talked to him, I was like, yeah, I'm thinking about switching to T-Mobile, because I like what they're doing. But you know, I guess he didn't, that fell on deaf ears. I do think it's insane and psychotic that they put out this fake press release with fake quotes from Ralph De La Vega in it. It's nuts. And not nuts like, whoa, they're really sticking it to the man, but nuts like, this doesn't make sense to me. Like, the thing about T-Mobile is their ideas are actually pretty good, and I sort of respect them for what they're trying to do. And like, John Legend doesn't have to stab somebody in the eye every time he talks to get his point across. I feel like it's enough already with the, you swear and you're wearing T-shirts and you're a badass. You like, pulled up on your motorcycle and ripped off your leather jacket and you've got a bright pink T-Mobile T-shirt and then you put your Batman hood on. He put up this ad everywhere, this is what it looks like when a huge corporation's wetting their pants. I don't think that's what it looks like. What it would look like is there being, It looks like a huge corporation's competing with you. Well, first off, the corporation would have to be wearing a. Look, I'm happy that they're scaring the shit out of AT&T. My entire career is built on yelling at AT&T. I like the idea of a corporation wearing itself if you think of it as like one of their corporate buildings wearing a huge pair of pants with a wet spot in the front of it. Like the incredible picture of the AT&T building. T-Mobile should drape the front of an AT&T building with huge slacks with a wet spot. And that's what it looks like when a corporation's wetting itself. We don't talk about this a lot, and we actually, we only have a few minutes left because we have to be done. Oh yeah. We have a spot on time today. But I will say that I am firmly convinced that like he knew what he was doing. He was playing character for a long time. And now he has like become the character. Yeah, it's like when you tell a lie for long enough, you start to believe it yourself. You know where I heard that? An episode of Mr. Belvedere. Wow. About the older son of Mr. Belvedere discovering. I was just stuck with you this entire time. About the older son of Mr. Belvedere discovering that his parents, like his mother was pregnant with him before they were married. And they'd been lying to him about it the whole time because they didn't want him to feel like he was, you know, conceived out of wedlock. And his dad sets him down like towards the end of the episode. It's like, you know, son, when you tell a lie enough, you start to believe it yourself. And I was like, whoa, that is some deep shit. That is some deep Mr. Belvedere wisdom. I was like eight when I saw it. The next time we do a John Lunger super cut, we end with this scene for Mr. Belvedere. Did anybody find that episode? It was a very special Mr. Belvedere. Oh, God. By the way, most of you who watch this probably don't know what Mr. Belvedere is. Check it out. Check into it. I think you're really gonna enjoy it. I actually got a lot of tweets when I went to the Pebbler review and I was like, this reminds me of the Palm and I tweeted it. I got a lot of tweets from people who were like, we don't know what you're talking about. Yes. And that makes me very sad. Listen, millennials, okay? We're old people. Goddamn kids. We're old. We're basically- Being cast in 10 years is just gonna be so crotchety. It's gonna be a bunch of Andy Rooney's. Why would the lawn be a robot? Why wouldn't it be a robot? That's a good question. If I'm gonna have a lawn, I want it to be made out of robots. The robotic lawn is made by a robotic lawn mower. I don't know. All right, one last thing. That's definitely the end of the first guest. One last thing. One of our worst. Okay, let's see. We didn't talk about Nintendo making phone apps. Oh, Nintendo. Yeah. So they have bad earnings. They said they're gonna make a non-wearable health device. Which is insane. No, it's... Okay. It's gonna be a new scale. An awesome scale. Yeah, it's smart, but the idea that a non-wearable health device that isn't really a video game is going to save or help Nintendo in any way. Maybe it's a mirror. You don't know. Maybe it's a mirror that you put in your bathroom and it tells you whether you're fat or not. We're gonna start making profits again by 2015 because we're doing this. Right. It's like, okay. So Awada said, Nintendo will use smart devices to make connections with customers, but he ruled out releasing existing games on those platforms. Believing the company is unable to show its strength as an integrated hardware software business elsewhere. But it's... Which is wrong. Well, but... It's wrong. But also, it just... It just, service apps will be released this year. The company will seek to use smart devices for services such as selling games that have been previously confined to game consoles. Such devices are likely to provide better experiences, Awada recognizes. Such devices are likely to provide better experiences than Nintendo's own hardware for certain features unrelated to games. And it's like, have you ever... I know, what does that mean? Like, you get to like manage your... No, sort of held the D.F. Just hand. You manage your like backpack in a game. Just because Nintendo made shitty consoles doesn't mean that it's the right strategy to put them on other, on phones. Like, they made a bad console this generation. I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to do the thing Sony did with the PlayStation phone and the phone stuff. That was a great success. And they're not trying to do that. No, but they're not doing that because they don't want to release their games. No, but they're not putting their games on phones. They're doing, they're like toying with things that are in the periphery of doing that, but they're not going to straight do it, right? That's what this is about. And like read, you know, stand by for reporting on this. I'm thinking more, I'm not Sony. I'm thinking more of like smart glass. Yeah. Like that's kind of what they're doing. Kind of like that, yeah. Only you can buy stuff. Yeah, but that's... I mean, I've used smart glass exactly once. Smart glass, when you play... You're talking about the Xbox thing? Yeah, I mean, with the game. I used it one time with the game and it worked terribly and it was not, it wasn't a great addition. The one place it's awesome is on Xbox One. If you play Madden, you can like do all kinds of stuff with smart glass. That's neat. I mean, that sounds cool, but like... Other than EA, name a company that's not as influential and important as Nintendo that only makes phone games. Yeah, no, I mean, the argument is, and I've heard it from everywhere. I've heard it from Microsoft. Like why is an office on iPhone? They're like, well, there's no big company that makes real money selling software on mobile. Right. Okay, well that's... No, the scale doesn't work. Right, so I assume Nintendo's making the same argument, but they're Nintendo. If they put Mario on the iPhone and they sold it for $15 instead of three, they wouldn't make the money. I mean, I think the problem is that... If they did it for 15 or 20 or whatever, like that could be interesting. Yeah, but they're an intent like... Well, they're like, culturally, they fundamentally don't believe that that's the right thing for them to do. I think there's also this issue. I think there's also this issue that like their hook was motion gaming. Well, that was so easily borrowed. No, but I mean, now that the Kinect exists, I feel like that's taken a lot of that fire and excitement. I think like when kids are like, oh my God, mom and dad, we wanna like get a game system that does this like crazy motion stuff there. The Kinect is the thing that they look at. They're not thinking about like... They're not thinking about this weird huge controller. Like I played the Wii U... Every time I use the Wii U, I'm like, why am I using this? I played one game on the Wii U. The zombie game? Zombie U. And it was really fun. I never finished it. Cause it was like after a while, I was like, okay, like it's cool. Like I get all this stuff, it's really exciting, but I just kind of like my interest waned and then there was not another game. There wasn't another game where I was like, this seems really cool. And I get that there are things you could do. They think their biggest problem is they didn't build, they needed to do two things. They needed to build some awesome new way to interact with your games, which they kind of did, sort of, it was like pretty crappy experience in a way because it's a capacitive and all this stuff. But then they didn't build a console that's competitive. They didn't build an Xbox One. They didn't build like a hub for your entertainment. And unfortunately for them, things have moved on. Do you have your TV plugged in your Xbox? It's a question I ask everybody. No, I don't because there's several reasons I have not bought an Xbox One. I don't know about the white one. I don't know if it's plugged in because I don't plug in, yeah, it looks cool. Yeah, the white one looks like a crappy Xbox One. Yeah, I think the black one looks better, but I don't have it plugged in because the sound, it's not passing through sound. No, I keep asking everybody if they have the TV plugged in the Xbox One. I already have enough sound problems. I don't need to add one by like adding the Xbox. I mean, most people are taught to. That interface isn't that much more useful than like Time Warner's refreshed interface. It's only slightly more useful. That is the weakest praise of all time. No, but I'm just saying. That's like, there you go. I'm saying like, yeah. That's like the TV marker. It's the lesser of the evils, but it's not like such a revolutionary way to interact with my TV that I'm like, oh my God, I have to use this all the time. Yeah. And then I think includes the Vergecast. Yeah, we're done, we gotta get out of here. We'll be back next week. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us, vergecast at theverge.com. You can find us on Twitter, theverge is at Verge. Oh, I'm sorry, you can leave a comment in the post when it goes up, you can start a forum topic. You can tell me how much you think Android patents are worth. You can yell at me, well, you can find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Joshua Topolsky, Neelai is Reckless. Dieter is Backlon, B-A-C-K-L-O-N. There's a perfectly great reason for that. I'm like a broken record. I can't do the same things I always do. It's really annoying. And, oh, and that's it. That's it. That's all we got. We're gonna be back next week. Yeah, it's gonna get weird. By the way, if you haven't seen it, check out the latest 90 seconds on the Verge, which I just, did it air today or yesterday? Yesterday. Yesterday. Yesterday, featuring Bryce Slade, who's one of our newest, one of our hot new performers. Nobody on YouTube understands. That we really like, and in fact, after I sign off, I'd love it if we could just run 90 seconds. I don't know if you guys are set up for that in the booth, but you find a way to make it happen. But anyhow, that's the Verge cast this week. We'll be back next week. John was more than ready. And it's always, it's always, frankly, look, I'm gonna just say it. You know, what we hope will happen with you and your family is not gonna be the outcome. The outcome is far worse. And you know, it sucks, but that's the way it is. demande ton이� Chad!