 Hey and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of January 21st 2013. I'm Josh Topolsky. I'm Neelay Patel and a special guest here with us. Ben Popper. Ben Popper. Yeah. A reporter extraordinaire. A popper. So beautiful man. Jalapeño popper. Soon to be a father. Yeah. Forthcoming father. Yeah. Owner of many chickens. Owner of a number of chickens. Part time urban farmer. Part time herb farmer. Also herb farm. Herb farm. Yeah. It's a herb farm. Herb. It's British. Herb farm. It's terrible. We don't know where Paul is by the way. We don't know Paul. Paul was supposed to be on the, he was supposed to be on the Vergecast today. We don't, we don't, we can't find him. Paul is a wall. My guess is he's either his, his bone battery is dead or he's dead. Either way, either way, great loss. Terrible loss for humanity. What's going on with my hair here? This is really just like just hanging out there. Anyhow, we got to talk about breaking news right now. Yeah. Yeah. Breaking breaking news. Minutes ago, JJ Abrams is going to direct the next Star Wars. What? Yes. And, and, and, and I have to say, Neal I told me, and I had to do a double take, like Star Wars. Yeah. Right. So by the way, is this, this is unprecedented. I think that a director has done a Star War, we'll do a Star Wars and a Star Trek movie. Yes. That's right. I feel like I have to say there needs to be some kind of crossover. There needs to be a wink. I'm sure there will be, I mean, he he's, he's into the winky stuff, but like this is a disaster. It's a disaster. I understand that the new Star Wars movie is going to end. They finally get the hatch open and then it ends episode. I mean, who's that? John? Yeah. He likes that. I mean, what? Hey, everybody's like, Hey, it's a bad idea for them to go back to the Star Wars. Well, and I understand they sold it to Disney and Lucas is out and like whatever fresh new talent. I think the mistake is not making a Star Wars a very expensive, beautifully produced Star Wars series on television. I think that's what they should do. They should just make game of Thrones for Star Wars. Oh yeah. I mean, I would watch that religiously and I think that a lot of millions and millions and millions of other people would go deep, go deep into the novel. They have the whole, the cannon, you know, they've got this whole huge arrangement of, of stories and backstories and side stories. Like they've got tons of books, right? Just so much content to pull. Who would you pick to play? Go give me the leads. Who would you pick to play? I don't know. I don't know where we're at. Where are we at? The story? I mean, you tell me, I mean, we're just going to start with the canonical, you know, starting with like new hope group. We're going to start on Tatooine. You know, we're just going to pick up like, like at what point is, is, is Luke born? Is he, is he, he's a sort of, he's a teen teen Luke. Yeah. He's a tween. Yeah. That's Bieber. All right. Let's let's say teen Luke. Bieber. Bieber's not casting a drug, like a singing drumming sensation. It's like, if they like have to work it in every episode, it's like, it's like, you know, he's, he's a, you know, uncle, uncle Ben comes to, and he's like, what's all that racket. And he's like solo. They go to this base canteen and he like jumps up on stage. I don't know what, I don't know why he's playing guitar. I'm sure. Let me just see what happens when you Google hottest teen vampires. That doesn't make any sense. I think that for a young Luke best team vampire, I don't know any young stars. So I think it would be weird if I was like, obviously somewhere in the young description of tiger beat. I'll be honest with you. Tiger beat actually write some really in depth stuff. They had a great expose here on the vampire diary's webpage. These are C lists, dude. Yeah. But you want, you need HBO. We're talking high class. You could get anybody. Yeah. But Peter Dinklage would be Yoda, you know, thing. This is wrong. This is wrong, but he would make a good Yoda Yoda. He'd be like more of a, he'd be a bigger Yoda though. Yoda is really tiny. Yoda's like two feet tall. Is there really a guy named Steven Armour queen in this world? Yes. Anyhow, we've done no casting whatsoever. Well, I think anybody named Steven Armour queen. Anyhow, this is the verge cast where we talk about the weekend. By the way, Steven Armour queen as Luke Skywalker is a great, it just sounds like it's Luke Skywalker from two live cruise. He's still with us, right? On the, he's still in the living room, right? I think he's around. I'd like to see Luke Skywalker. That would be a really different take on the mythology. Any other diverge cast where we discuss the week in technology, culture and culture, culture. And, and this was a crazy week. We've had a crazy week ending with, or getting towards the end with this JJ Abrams news, which is totally bonkers. YOLO, you know? Oh, right. And the YOLO, we saw the YOLO smartphone announced today from Intel, uh, which they, and they've done it's an, for Africa, it's an Android device and they've done nothing to promote the fact that the name is like super trendy and really useful. Right. But they do have will.i.am on staff making these kinds of decisions. That's a lie. He's into, no, he's officially Intel's like director of innovation. Will.i.am. Yeah. What is Will.i.am's voice? Like I imagine it's like, Hey man, it's not like that though, is it? No, not at all. It's like, uh, but that's also your Tim Cook voice. Hey, hey, hey, hey, no, Tim Cook is like, Hey, I'm down here. It's me, Tim Cook. We had a record, record, record, record, record year. Record order. Too bad about our stock though. We'll talk about that. Our stock's been totally destroyed. Yeah. Down really bad. 13% 13% now on a bit of a slump. It is, it is, it is. I feel, I really, really feel for the guys who were like bought it at six and they're like, it's going up to a thousand. And then it went to like seven. Really? Here we go. And now it's like four 30 and I'm like, wait a second. I don't think Gene Munster hasn't gotten out of bed in like three, maybe four days. Gene Munster. He doesn't need to. Gene Munster is part of the problem. All right. We should get to that later. Let's do we want to bring theater in? Yeah. We had, we ran a huge story live via satellite this morning. We had a huge story this morning, which is still like, uh, still rocking along. It's doing bonkers traffic and people have really been into it. Um, we did this story about Google, uh, and their design, their kind of like rebirth of design or actually just birth like number one started design. Um, they've, you know, Google has in the last year or two years really altered their, the UI and UX of their products unified. They've unified, but they've also dramatically altered. And in fact, I think like in the mobile space, they've done some really innovative stuff. Um, and in webs, in the web space as well. But so we did, we kind of went into the guts of Google and we said, tell us, yeah, tell us your story. And Dieter bone and Ellis hamburger worked a ton on this report. And collectively, Ellis apparently would work so hard on the last night that he wasn't available to come in. They worked, they worked so much on it that we had to, we were trying to invent a name for them, which is either hamburger bone or, um, what was it? Dieter, Dieter hamburger. Can we get Dieter hamburger on the line here? I think we have him via Skype. There he is. Dieter burger. Hey, Hey, tell us, tell us where are you? That's a beautiful backdrop. You have, this is, this is the, the virtual offices. The last time I was there, they didn't have any artwork or anything. This is verge. I love it. It's amazing. You can see we've got a beautiful, look at that table. You have a TV over there. You have classy. Now I can't see what that image is over your shoulder, but it looks like a, like a cartoon duck face with really small eyes with a, wearing some sort of wearing some sort of wearing some sort of like, um, chunky sweater. That's not what he is though. Is it? What is that? No. What is that? This thing right here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, well done. Yeah. It's a, it's a space helmet. It's a pretty close, pretty close cartoon duck face. Where the chunky sweater is basically like space helmet. Can you, can you tell us about, first off, thank you for joining us. I mean, not like you had a choice. You, you work for the verge. So say no, I don't think so. Um, tell us about this, this Google piece. Tell us about what you learned. So, I mean, we, like everybody else, we noticed that Google's apps look really good, especially on the iPhone. So we said, Hey, Google tells what the story is and they said, come on over. So we interviewed a whole bunch of people. We interviewed Matias Duarte. We interviewed John Wiley, who leads up the search team, a maps guy, their Gmail guys, a Chrome team. And they, we said, how'd you manage to do this? And the story basically works like this. Uh, when Larry Page came up, came on, he said, look, we need to get better at design, do it now. And they formed like this like super team of designers and they picked a direction. They call it, they code named it Kennedy. And that turned into what we saw on search and Gmail and everything else on the web, but just a few months later. And then they just continued that sort of urgency and that way of working where they have like a core team of designers that sort of does the vision. And then they distribute it out to all the different product teams. And that's allowed them to make rapid improvements on their apps, especially on iOS. Uh, so like Gmail went from being terrible to being really pretty good. Maps of course came along. Um, and so like the, the super interesting thing is they're not doing this the same way that like Apple does design. They don't have, I keep calling it a grand pooba, but that sounds really weird. They don't have a grand master of design. They just, they've got a core team of guys and then, you know, the, whatever the latest thing is, they say that looks really cool. Let's use that to build on it, to keep building the design language forward. Yeah. I mean, he was right by the way, like they really did need help in the design department. I mean, it, I mean, it's, you kind of forget how bad some of Google's design was. I mean, it was terrible. They were knocked for it constantly. Um, but now you look at what they've done and you look at stuff like Gmail, you know, which still has its kinks and quirks, but some of this, like the Google now we're looking at right now is just, um, they really did some impressive clean, you know, they, they let stuff breathe while that shirt, the Matias is like, he has all this crazy clean design. I think he's messing with us. And then he wears the most insane shirts. I think Matias is now just kind of screwing with us, but every time we hang out with him, he's got like a more outrageous shirt on. The next one's just going to be like weird spikes that defy the laws of physics. Like, it's going to be like, his shirts be a black hole that you see through him on it. Anyhow. Um, but, uh, I, I have to say, I mean, I thought the report and the video, can I just, you know, I'll, we, how long, how many takes did you do of the, the bicycle? Did you fall off the bikes at all? If you guys haven't seen this video, by the way, you should watch it. Yeah. The, the sun was going down. And so if you see some of the, uh, the standups where, where Ellis is talking to the camera and it's like dark and it looks like it looks like a scene from heat. Um, so we were fighting the sun going down. So we, we managed to get it done in maybe like four or five takes. I think this is incredible. And these are the Google bikes, by the way, that are just hanging out on cameras. You can just grab and ride around. Right. Didn't that comfortable actually? Yeah. Well, they don't want you to get that way. Be too comfortable. You gotta get back to work. You only did a thousand. So let me ask you this. So Google was famous and I know this is like a Larry page thing, but during sort of when Marissa Maya was there, she, the Google is really famous for we're going to AB test 41 shades of blue or whatever. This was actually a famous quote from one of their design. Right. He quit. They were like engineering, which blue they were going to use. So is there any element of that still going on or is it now just completely designer driven? So there's still AB testing stuff, especially on the website. Cause obviously it's a lot easier to do testing on web pages. But they're not doing it down to that granular level. They're still letting, what they're doing now is they're letting their designers kind of create an overall vision and make decisions based on like their aesthetic judgment and then AB testing where appropriate, instead of like AB testing everything and not having an overall design vision driving what their stuff looks like. Yeah. It does seem like they're, they've actually accepted, I think Google's done this in a lot of places where they've just accepted, Hey, you can't engineer your way out of every problem. Sometimes you actually just have to design it or build it by hand. But I think it's like more Googly cause they're all working on it in concert and suggesting things. Not a Steve Jobs or a Joni Ives saying this is the way it will be, you know, an aluminum band, come hell or high water. Right. No, it's definitely, there's definitely seems to be a, I mean, is this, is there a, yeah, is there a dictator here? Or is it more like they're all collectively working to make this stuff. So it's, it's a very like Google way of thinking about it. There there's no dictator, but there is this sort of central team of designers that is called UXA, which is sort of like a really secretive kind of group. Yeah. There's not a whole lot of information about them out there on the web other than like job listings basically. But that group kind of came out of the team that built that this first Kennedy redesign and they, they make the vision, but then when it comes time to actually implement it in a product, it's not like the, you know, the designer working with the product team has to like go back and say, is this okay? Is this okay guys? You know, they just implement it and work with their team to put it out there. And that's one of the reasons that you'll see, you know, small variations between apps. So, you know, the, the low, the loader on the Google plus, when you pull it down as like those four bars and the colors change. And then they iterate it on an app with Gmail with the little circular spinner thing. So like they're building off of each other, but they're not like in lockstep. They're just sort of, you know, in writing together. The, the, the, uh, this UXA group is in New York. Is that right? Are they all based in New York? Yeah. And, and well, so most of them, yeah. I mean, I'm not, you know, we don't know the full story on it. Uh, we know, you know, it's a few people, right? Cause they actually are really closely with everybody. They're actually trying to keep some of this like a little bit mysterious. This is the area 51. Yeah. Do you think, do you think they, they are, are they worried about poaching or are they trying to, do they just want this thing to be able to operate in, in, in total secrecy like this, this other group they have? So the thing you need to understand about Google is, uh, none of it's top down. Uh, you know, Larry Page has made some changes, but it's still a whole lot of independent teams. And so if you want to get something done and, and effect change across the company, you know, you need, you need, you know, you need the remit from Larry to do it, but you can't just walk into a group and be like, all right, you guys do this thing because they're all collaborative and they all need to work together. Right. So I think that like having this team be kind of under the radar means that they actually get to be collaborative and get to work with people instead of dictating something. And I think that, you know, that's a very Google way of thinking about design and you know, who knows how long it'll, it'll be kept up. But for now it seems to be working really well. So what I think is really interesting is that it's kind of like all this doesn't matter for Android, right? So Matias is there, um, and they, you know, they, they, I think Android has begun to look extremely beautiful. Like on my Nexus four, I look at them like, this is awesome. Yeah. Um, but like Samsung sells all the phones and they just do whatever they want. But then there's their iOS apps where they're able to fully express their vision of design because they control the apps. And I look at Gmail, the Gmail app on my iPad, and I'm like, this is amazing. I do my email in that app now. Well, it's amazing in some ways and also sort of, well, it's frustrating. It has, it has, it has execution from a visual design standpoint. It looks really good from a UX standpoint, from an actual, like how you get from point A to point B, you know, like picking a label is, is way more steps than I think they could have come up with. You know, I think, I think you have a lot of, I think you have far more labels than I do. I don't, even if you have one label, you have to get to labels. You have to go through like three button presses. You push a button and then another button and then another button. Yeah. In the video, you know, they were saying how maybe some of it hearkens back to like that original Google splash page, right? Super simple with the colors and a little bit of cartoony. And I like how this is clean, modern design, but it's also like hand drawn, you know, it's a little playful. Right now, like the city drawings are really, I actually feel like it is that exact, the funny thing is, you know, you talk about like this extreme digitally native with Microsoft, you know, whatever they call it, not digitally native, but digitally authentic. Yeah. Right. And then, so, you know, you look at, at, at windows and it's, it's very much windows and windows. So it's a spectrum. It's, you've got Apple way on the other side, Microsoft, it's completely flat and sparse. And Google's like charting a course right down the middle. And Google's like, you can have a little bit of playfulness in the digital stuff, right? But not like so playful that it's leather stitching. And I think they got it right. You know, they realized, I mean, I, and I feel like that's for the web as well as back on devices. It's just enough from real world stuff. But that's my question, I think, to Dieter, which is they're expressing this on the web, which is their native platform. I think that's still Google's native platform. They're expressing it on iOS, I think very well. I think their apps on iOS are best in class in terms of UI, maybe not always in terms of execution. I think there's issues, but they're, they're really beautiful. And then there's like this disaster of Android, which is their platform. Well, so there's one place on Android that's not a disaster. That's Google now. And I think that shows both on Android where they had a, they had a fresh, clean space to design in and on iOS where like, they, you know, there's, there's no like legacy there. There's not a long legacy that they have to work with. And so when you've got a fresh, clean slate and you've got good ideas, you're going to get good design. The problem with Android is that it's not a clean slate. My guess would, might, I would have to clean slate for Samsung. I mean, if the galaxy S four comes out and Samsung wants to change touch with completely, it doesn't matter what Google did. But I think that, but I think that my impression is that they, you know, they had a break with their design language at honeycomb, right? Honeycomb suddenly something changed where they were like, we're not going to do what we were doing before. We're going to take it in a totally different direction. And, and that since honeycomb has been progressing. And I feel like they're at a point looking at Google now, looking at some of the changes they've recently made to Gmail, looking at some of the stuff that happened in 4.2, like the camera UI, for instance, which is a totally rethought UI. My impression is they're going to hit Android five and it is going to be like Google now, everything does that match up with the timeline? Like Larry page comes back and then honeycomb and does that match up with the time? I think the honeycomb timeline starts with Matias Duarte being there and, and starting to say like, Android's going to have a design. It's going to have a sense of design. Like the thing there was that Android up until that point had an extremely weird, bad, like we threw a bunch of parts together and some of them look like this and some of them look like that. And there were places where you would select text one way. And then there were other places where you'd select text in other way. Like I wrote, I remember writing my review of gingerbread and whatever the device was. I think the nexus S and just saying like, this doesn't make any sense. Like why are you selecting texts in two different ways in the same device? So they like kind of clean the slate or started cleaning the slate on that stuff. Right. I think that, um, but I think there is to your point, Eli, there is a design. There does seem to be like a disconnected point, you know, right. But, but also like, think about how long it took for them to get to bring Google docs into their new design language. It didn't happen overnight. It was like Gmail and then a couple of other things. Well, I just, it, the calendar still looks a little bit. I'm actually just, I'm very curious to see if theater like asked this question. I mean like Android scene, it's a complete wild West because you can, the OEMs change everything about it. Nobody ever sees the Android. Nobody ever sees like there's one, there's an export. It's so sad. Only Googlers who get the phone. A small part of the audience that sees it's really kind of depressing to me. What was your sense there when you mean, did you talk about Android a lot or are you mostly talking about the web and the iOS stuff? Like you talked to Matias. We talked with Matias Duarte a lot about hollow. Cause I, you know, I started out like Google now it doesn't look like hollow. He's like, wait, wait, wait. Hollow is actually like a, it's not a design language per se. It's more like setting up the rules for how the universe works. So it's like the physics of the Android universe and things move this way and things move that way. I kind of understand that, but there are definitely hollow design guidelines. Yeah. Like hollow actually, we have threads in our forums that are like list all the hollow apps and they all look the same. Right. But I mean, I think it's because, but you do say like, you're going to use panels and suddenly people go like, well, what should my panel look like? And you've got this off the shelf. Anyway, continue, Dieter. We don't need to. Dieter. Oh no. So like Matias Duarte makes the case that hollow is flexible enough to have something that looks like Google now sort of fit into its framework. And I think it's just a matter of like they just need to decide what they want Android to look like going forward and keep pushing consistency and not make quick changes on one app, but not the rest. So it's sort of, they just need another project to sort of get everything together. And I'm really hoping that's what the next version of Android is. But I do think it is. If they're able to execute quickly. Yeah. But it is telling, right? It is telling that they are not, that version of Android is never shown to anybody. I mean, they don't, who sees it? I mean, even in a Motorola device, which is now at, you know, Jelly Bean 4.1, like at my Droid, Razer Max HD 7. Cool dignity. Yeah. Cool. But like even that has, they altered icons, they altered the dialer, they all, there's pieces of it that have been altered. And it just, isn't that, I mean, I don't know if you discuss it with them, but that must be, I can't believe that Matias Duarte or any designer is satisfied when you say, Hey, great new design, beautiful stuff. We're going to take this and just totally revamp it and change it. Like, I don't believe. And we're going to call it TouchWiz. Yeah. And I don't believe that kind of like this company line where they are like, we love that it's, you know, Holo is just the physics of our world. We don't really want it to look good. Like I don't believe that. But didn't Larry Page get a little aggressive in that interview he gave to Wired like a week or two ago, we hit this where he said, Facebook doesn't make good products. Like they don't make good mobile product. He's kind of highlighting what they're doing and also calling out the competition. So, right. But Facebook's not the competition in an operating system. Right. I mean, in the sense that, that, that, that, you know, they have to be able, this thing has to live on a thousand different phones. But in the sense that they both want to be the apps on the home screen of your phone that you use first. Yeah. No. What's so good. But that's, and that's definitely true. Dieter, I think that Google now is an attempt to not be the app on the home screen of your phone. Right. It's an attempt to make Google like be a forceful presence in your life. It's like, up in your shit hole. But the app itself is not, doesn't push into the rest of your phone in the way that the web presence of it does. I think, I think the goal of Google now, I mean, I think Google now will eventually be the home screen of an Android phone, but you will pick it up and unlock it. All that widget crap will be an optional thing. But the main thing that we'll see is Google now. I mean, cause that may be a, that may be a view. No, I mean, I think he'll unlock the phone. I would love if Google now were like my lock screen where I could, you know, I can swipe to the right and get my camera or swipe to the left and they've got those widgets. I don't care about all that. Just don't give me a weather widget over there. Give me my Google now on my lock screen. That would be amazing. That would be all about that. It doesn't seem like it would be very hard for them to do that. They're just not now isn't there. It's just not a finished product. It's not there yet. Now it's not there yet. Now is next. Now is coming. Now is coming soon. At the end of the earnings call Larry Page kind of, did you hear that where he was like, Google now is amazing. Like it's really a focus for us. We're going to this science fiction place. Like imagine if Google now is so good that all the questions you finance guys just asked, we would have just answered without you even asking them. That would have been great. Did he actually say that? He said that was like the last thing he said on the call. Yeah. That's the place. That's where that's where Google starts to veer into creep, creep, creep Google. Where they're like, what if it knew what you wanted to eat tonight? What if we were just already feeding you? Yeah. What if, what if Google now could hold a spoon to your mouth and shovel in human food? Maybe we'll be able to do that. So did you get a sense of what's next for this design team? Like, are they going to stay? Are they going to get more centralized? Are they going to stay all distributed? Are they going to keep revamping the products? Is it iterative now? Yeah. Dieter, we know what's now, but what's next? I think the next is more of now. I think we're going to see more of what Google now is doing across multiple products. We've already seen it. Like it's in search. Some of those cards are showing up in search and there's a different kind of metaphor. Like those cards are when Google gives you the information instead of a link out. So we're going to see more of that. And I think in terms of like their process and how they're doing design, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And they, you know, they finally got something that's working and it's this nice middle ground between the way Apple works and you know, the way Google used to work, which was, you know, utter madness and everybody doing whatever they felt like. And so like they've got something that like works for the company and I don't see why they would change it until things start breaking again and start looking bad again. I think it'll be interesting to see what the competition does in the sense that we know what Windows Phone is doing. They have a pretty strict set of guidelines. Beautiful handcuffs, man. I told you. I'll be honest with you. From the beginning that was going to be beautiful handcuffs. Can you even think of a single Metro app or you're like a third party app where you're like, yeah, this really knocks it out of the park using Metro design language. No, because the goal of Metro, and this is a fine, a fair goal for Microsoft. The ultimate goal of Metro is to make every app look and feel like an integrated part of the system. Right. Which is fine. Which is great. But do any of them pull it off in a way that you're like, this feels like a perfect integrated part of the system. Because there's no, the incentive for an app developer is to not do that. Right. Way out. You mean to differentiate? Yeah. Like Android phone makers. I mean, there's just, I don't know how you convince any, even the Skype app, which is Microsoft. But I wouldn't mind, what I worry is that Metro in some fundamental ways is like not a 100%. It's not, it's not a- If the world was a perfect place, Metro would be awesome. Right? But I think there are Metro, but okay. But so I was going to say like, we kind of know where Metro is. Not to get on, I don't want to get on a Metro rant. Oh, God. I think OS is, and I think the conventional wisdom is it's due for a refresh of some sort. Yeah. I mean, maybe they're not going to do it because OS 10 has been looking pretty much like OS 10 for- I think if you're at Apple today and you're looking at, and you're looking at the Apple mail client and then you go look at Gmail, I think you're thinking to yourself, wow, we just got shown up on our own. I don't know about that. I think people- Because I opened mail- I think people at Apple look at mail and I know a lot of people who are Apple, you know, major Apple fans and like love what Apple does and they think mail is a really effective tool. It might be an effective tool, but I'm saying, you know, actually Gruber wrote this- Gruber, we talked about mail. He uses mail. He doesn't touch Gmail. He doesn't even know what it does. He doesn't want to know. He said this thing, which I think is interesting across the industry because we're starting to see this like five inch 1080p display, which is insanely high resolution, just hit the entire industry. And he's like- Thanks Sharp. And he's like all- Is it Sharp? I don't know who makes it, but it's- The display. It's great. It's beautiful. It was on the- I mean who makes it. I think it's LG and I think probably Sharp makes it too. What was that face for? You just grilled him. You locked him up. You were like, who makes it? Well, I expect D-Line knows this stuff. He's like- So if you guys don't know this, when we hired Ben, and I just want to point this out, Ben showed up and it was like, I'm never covering gadgets. Never. Never you saying that. But actually, I came around to this because there's so much cool stuff in hardware. When we were just having that talk about Google and their design, and then you guys started talking about phones and I like tuned out or whatever. I was thinking about how dope it would be to have the Google Glass on and to be like, okay, you know, like you change the themes in your Gmail. You'd be like, you change the theme. So you'd be like cartoon or like Chrome. Yeah. You'd be like Google Hangouts projected on top of the people you're talking to. That would come from Verizon. Everything would have Verizon on it. I would do like a fresh skin on the world. Every day I could do like a different skin. That's totally doable too. Yeah. I'm just saying the problem is that would be provided by Verizon and you would look at a store and it would be like the VZ zone. But it's like you're getting caught in this dystopian thing about the carriers and the OEMs and that's why you live in an imperfect world. That's where I live in my head. Go where Ben lives. I like that. Let me just finish this. Ben's one thought. Pots, pots. John Graber, his whole theory is we, Apple stuff was designed for lower resolution displays. Yeah, I heard that. And they did all this cruft to hide how bad the displays look. And now they look bad on high resolution displays because they're not actually, it's not actually fine wood paddling, right? It's a cartoon. Or there's just one toke over the line when it comes to like a certain type of design. Like they didn't start with stitched leather. They didn't start with ripped pages. They actually started with like stuff that still felt somewhat digital. I mean, if you look at the original, if you look at like the clock, the alarm selector on the iPhone, you know, and I think it's actually unchanged. Let me just, let me just punch this up here on my iPhone that I have, I happen to have sitting here and punch up is a thing that people do, by the way, that's an official, it's an official type of terminology. So if I want to set an alarm here, let's do, let's do this. So this thing here, this is not really like a real world item. I don't know what that is. It's representative of something like a real world item. But have you ever used anything like this in the real world? You should show the people. Okay. Well, it's like a very old school analog might look like it's a dial, but, but, but no one in this generation. And even in the previous uses anything like this, it's almost an industrial kind of reference. Put your punch card in and like flips it when I unlock a crappy bike lock, something like that. But so, so like, and this actually doesn't look like an object in the real world to me. It looks like a weird digital dial that has some familiarity to real world items. Like, but I think you're making a really good point. Like, you know, it was designed for crappier screens and now these better screens are coming and suddenly you realize, oh, it doesn't look good. It's like that uncanny valley thing, right? Where it's like when you couldn't really see it that well, it looked great and like kind of had its own vibe. And then when it got, the picture got a little too clear, you were like, oh, this is terrible. That's true for something. But I do think that right at the start, I mean, from, from day one with anything that went beyond some of their, some of their stuff was like once they got into the linen and once they got into the stitch leather and they started like really going hard on real world materials. My point about this clock is that it doesn't look like, it looks like a thing that has a relationship or is familiar to me in a real world sense, but is not a representation of an actual real world thing. And so, or one that I'm very familiar with or most people be familiar with. And so it's, it feels clever and useful. And I think that they went away from that cleverness into the zone of it's going to be a knob. And then somebody was like, we're going to do it. It's going to be like a knob. And they're like, oh, you mean, so it'll kind of look like a knob. They're like, no, no, it's going to be a knob. And when you, when you turn the phone, it'll be like, there's brushed metal on the knob and you'll see, it is a cool detail, but like, you know, that's the thinking is we want it to be like a real thing. Better to like invent your own design world than to like try and make this photo copy of the real world. Because I think that the real world has great cues for design, obviously, or else nothing would exist. But, but, but deep, but a cue for design versus a just absolute copy. It's very different. Anyhow, we should move on because we want to talk about theater. Thank you for joining us. And thank you and Ellis for producing such a wonderful, awesome piece. And I do want to say like, you know, Ben was involved at intervals, Thomas Houston from features was, had a huge hand in it. James, James, our video team, James, who did the design, our video team, everybody. And I'm not sure everybody who did the video part, but was it Billy and Jordan? I don't know. We have a billion Jordan and obviously we have editors and Rondo and all. Anyhow, but it's like many things that we do at the verge was a big team collaborative effort. And I think like it is so amazing to see it come together like this. And you look at that piece and you just go, we had cool, a cool story. We told it in a cool way. It looks really beautiful. It's really readable. It's got this great video thing. And so I'm just, I'm just like, I'm always, I get excited. I mean, you know, I don't see these all the way through. Like I, it's like the ideas here and then they, they end up on the site and I'm like, wow, this is exciting. Deeter Deeter before you go, you know, there was a poll on the web yesterday about who is the best looking urge writer. And your way bone zone was way out ahead. It wasn't even close. What about Alice? Look at him. He's blushing. He's turning tomato. Wait, where was this? Somebody just threw up a poll. I saw it on Twitter. I clicked there. It was like six of us. I was not even on it. It wasn't really fair. You were on it. I'm like real. I think you were second. And then the bone zone was like, oh, I know that. I've seen a lot of like mean tweets about how ugly I am. I get it guys. I'm not very handsome, but you know what? What I, what I, but Deeter is handsome. Although we saw a picture today, we said, Deeter, this is really funny. Deeter, we got, we had took team photos when we had our all hands back in September. You guys don't care about that, but we have a bunch of really terrible photos. No, they're great. And, but you and Thomas Ricker are like before and after you're like, it's like, you're like young Thomas Ricker before the drugs and alcohol caught up with him. I mean, Thomas looks like a bad ass, but he looks like a bass. He's seen some shit. He's late period. Late period bone.com. Check it out. Everybody. All right, Deeter. Thank you so much. Look like Thomas Rooker. I'll be a happy man. Wouldn't we all, we'd all be happy. All right. Thanks man. And keep, keep, keep on rocking in the free world. Why? Too many words. Okay. Before we go on, Hey, control room. I am being told that our live stream is skipping like crazy. They know. Okay. What is that casual head nod in there? Like, it's a big deal. Hey, Oh, well time for more. The uploads. Good thing in our new office, we're getting a big fat nasty fiber pipe. Sorry. Inspiration fans. Sorry. If you wanted any sports video or news right now, great 49ers video. I know. Did you see the headline on that? Zing. Really good. Who did, who worked on that? Somebody worked that headline over almost like it almost like something you should give that guy an award. I'm actually pretty psyched because I love MMA and they do the MMA hour here. So I feel like I'm sitting in like, you know, close to, did you watch the one that he did with the dude? Oh, like long, I know all about it. What was up with that? That guy is, you know, he's like, he's like professional wrestling, you know, where you'll play this character of like the heel, but he's also like, he took it a little too far, you know, like an Andy Kaufman or something like that. That's cool. Yeah. Um, yeah. You're in MMA. You actually are a professional Jiu Jitsu fighter. That's right. My gym is like four blocks from him. So you ever considered doing MMA, like getting into some, I think there's a lot of brain damage in MMA. So I stick to Jiu Jitsu based on that interview. I'm sure your wife would not be very pleased. No. Do you, but do you fight? You don't do like, uh, I do. I do very, very sort of, uh, grappling like a new grappling, no punching and kicking the head. It's pretty homoerotic. I'm not going to lie. It's like hugging. Who is the violent hugging? Sometimes I grab a single leg, I run the pipe and I go to a rear naked choke. That's who hasn't done that last night twice. Um, do you, who is the fighter? There was a fighter who was a UFC fighter who was, was like the whole guy who was really popular in like the early two thousands. He won like constantly. Do you know what I'm talking about? So there's these guys from my family, a family, the Gracie family, the Gracie. So I train with them four blocks away. Shut up. Really? Enzo Gracie, cousin of Hicks and Gracie and Hodger Gracie. And you train with, they all have, they all have an R in their name and they all pronounce it like an H. That's a Brazilian thing. Yeah. But you train with the Grazies? Yeah. So they have like one of the biggest academies. I don't, I mean like it's not like me and like the ultimate badass. He owns the academy and I'm a student there. Okay. One of many, you know that you're learning the Gracie techniques. Yes. I'm learning the Gracie family technique. Is that a situation where like in a, in a, uh, you know, somebody is mugging you. Self-defense. Is this a self-defense thing? Excellent for self-defense. Really? They teach it to the Rangers. So they have a guy has a knife. Yes. Who has it? By the way, who mugs with a knife? Nobody. Nobody. A taser these days. A guy has a gun. A taser. If a guy has a gun, I will give him my money. I could hand to hand, this could be a thing. They teach you that. Like once you got like a little bit of confidence, you know, you're a white belt with a couple of stripes. They're like, listen, in a self-defense situation with a gun, don't, don't try any of the things we taught you in here. Even if you're successful, like the gun might just go off anyhow. Don't let it go to your head that you're good in this class. What is your belt? I have a blue belt. That's, and how close is that to black? It's white, blue, purple, brown, black. So you got a ways to go at least 10 years. Oh geez. I got a ways to go. That's a long time. Now that we've discussed all of your physical fitness, what else is on our topics list here? Well, Ben's piece, man. We could talk about my piece. Yeah. Ben did a crazy. So after the election there was a lot of your political, your political hot politically charged piece. Yeah. No, there was a lot of talk about how the Obama campaign had this like technical operation, this app, this like, what was it called? Get out the vote. Narwhal. Narwhal. And then Romney, which is a, which is a mythical, uh, like whale with a seal with a unicorn seal with a unicorn. Yeah. And then the great episode of Futurama that's centered around. And then Romney had, yeah. And then Romney had one that sucks called Orca that's supposed to eat a narwhal. Yeah. But it crashed. But it hit an iceberg. I don't think he lost. I think he lost a significant amount of votes in the swing States in the swing States. Well he lost, it's like, but it wasn't that sudden how like an algorithm failed and those votes appeared. It was that, yeah, now that things failed that we're supposed to tell them what to do. People out there are supposed to turn out their vote. They try to open the Romney app and it just crashes and they're like, I can't, you know, I don't know which doors to go knock on. Oh boy. Oh boy. Anyway, but that's, that's that part of the story. So Ben, you want to walk us through it's happening now with the Obama side of narwhal. Let's so the post-mortem the election was, you know, the Democrats had a big tech advantage and they sent guys out to Silicon Valley and recruited him from Google and Facebook and Twitter. And you know, they took sabbaticals and went to work on the campaign. Um, but I actually got a call just sort of over the transom, some of the developers from the campaign, which is now ended. And when campaigns in, it's kind of this weird, you know, the entity continues but the campaign is over. It's kind of weird. So this guy's still technically part of the campaign. Yeah, they tear it all down. And they were basically wanted to voice their anger and their frustration that the code, all the architecture that they wrote for the software, the email, the mobile app, the website, the donate, um, was going to be in their opinion, mothballed at the DNC and not used and not shared with other democratic progressive organizations. So there's two problems with that. One is that they built off of open source software. And so there's this ethical philosophical thing that developers have. We should share it back with the public. Right. And the other half is, you know, bite right then, then Orca Orca can get it right. So the, you know, well, okay, so it's funny during the campaign, these guys are saying, you know, they used to scrape our sites, they would look at our tech and steal it. And there was actually a point where the Romney donate page like did a find and replace and they forgot to change enough of the text and they got caught during the campaign. It was like Romney donates tech is the exactly the same and even like the text on the page is the same as the really except for like Obama is replaced by Romney, like same graphics, same HTML stuff. Yeah. Okay. So they were already doing that, right now. Um, and I think the idea is if we don't respect open source principles, we're not going to have this same advantage recruiting tech folks next time around. And then there's the idea of bite rod. And me and Neil, I talked about this, but a campaign is like you spin it up and you spin it down and the time in between, you don't think about it. But if you have software and you don't touch it for four years, all the API's are going to be broken. It's going to be out of date. It's worthless. You can't just be maintained. Right. You have to keep working on it, improving it. And because the guys who run these campaigns, they literally do think of spinning it up, which is classically it's we're going to print out a bunch of forms, put them on clipboards, hire a bunch of like phone lines, and then have volunteers sit there with a clipboard calling the phone shred, shred that stuff. We didn't use when we're done. Right. And then, you know, four years from now we can just print out the forms again, hire a bunch of phone lines. We're back up. I mean, it's a, it's a new age and it's definitely, you know, you can't, I love the, I love the concept of bite rot and the, the, just the, just the, the idea that like it doesn't go to sleep now the way that it would have gone to sleep. Right. Yeah. But they, but don't they start spinning up? Aren't they right now planning 2016? I mean, I find it hard to believe that there is not a group of people sitting in a room right now working on algorithms for what 2016 is going to look like. So, but if it went to the DNC, you know, I talked to a couple of people, they have less tech staff than they did in 2009, you know, they're not really equipped, you know, like the campaign was. How does that work? They laid off some people who worked on the tech side, you know, they don't, they didn't keep that side staffed up. Yeah. The DNC, you know, which is separate from the campaign. The DNC would be the organization that goes on during those four years and decides what might happen to the tech and stuff. Right. So you know, they definitely don't have the level of talent. The DNC is the CEA of the, right? What is their job? Like they're kind of getting ready to plan the next convention. Right. Exactly. Right. They're doing that. And they're also like, you know, they're in charge of like, I don't know, primaries and stuff like that. Right. But they have no actual power in terms of political power. Right. I mean, the DNC is a kind of a organizational. It's like an administrative. Yeah. It's an administrative. It's like, we need to get the, all the Democrats like a memo. I mean, so to me that what this is running into is politics. I think it was valid. We talked about it a lot on this podcast, like the use of technology, like dramatically shaped politics in the cycle. Uh, the, it was validated by the fact that Obama won and this technology was good. This was a, this was like, there's no, this isn't like Twitter where there's a company and a product, like they're done. Like those people have accomplished the goal. I think the, we know what the answer is. I mean, they need to start thinking of part of their business as making really good software. Right. So they made a good suggestion. Somebody made a good suggestion, which was they could license this stuff out. They could be like, listen, we have the best tech. We won the presidential election. You can license this from us for your local campaigns and whatever. And that will be the way to keep it self-sustaining. We'll employ a couple of people and license this stuff out. But nobody wants to do that, which is, you know, there's a company, but you automatically cut your market in half, right? Cause they're not going to want to license it to the Republicans. Right. That's true. But there's this company, blue state digital. Those were actually the tech guys who worked on the Howard Dean campaign. And then they went private and they helped work on the first Obama campaign. So the model has been, if you work on the campaign, then afterwards you take that tech and you, you make it into a startup. You make a business out of it. Right. What do you, what businesses do you think they could make out of this technology? Let's let's let's ideate here for a moment. Well, actually it's funny cause they were saying, you know, you could use this for anything. Like this donate button could be used for, you know, raising money by anybody. It doesn't have to be a political campaign. It's just great web architecture. We were some, they were saying we were some of the first guys to really work on responsive design like polygon has. They said we were doing that, you know, really advanced stuff with that before anyone. So we'd love to share that. Maybe we should talk to some of these guys. We should get a donate button. Bring them into Vox and donate button. I've had people say, you know, Hey, I'll pay X amount of dollars if I don't have to see ads. I feel like there would not be enough people for that to be like, make any sense for us. It would be sweet if you could give somebody a cookie and they could pay and not have ads just like that. Give somebody a cookie, an actual cookie. What's that exchange like here's an O mail raise in. But the donate button, that's an interesting one that that doesn't strike me as the one that's the most valuable. They do. They did a lot of great stuff. I mean, donate buttons are not the most valuable piece of what they did. What they did, the most valuable piece of what they did is they came up with ways to analyze voter data and tell people how to act based on the voter data. Yeah. That stuff's a little, I didn't get into it, you know, the voter rolls, but they actually created this organization that has the right to lease and license that stuff out. So it's very obviously prickly cause it's a lot of private information to the Republicans, to a Republican, to anyone who, well, I don't think they would release it to the Republicans. I don't know. I can't speak to them, but then, you know, they create an organization after the campaign to basically say, this is the gold mine of data we've got. Yeah. And I think this is, if you're, this is, if you're a, if you are a coder, like Republicans got to be recruiting hard now, right. For software guys. I mean, if they were smart, they must know, they must know they failed out on that stuff. So if it were, if I were, if I were the RNC, I'd be like, we need to get a team together. Right. It's tough. You know, Nate Silver did a piece on this. Like what are the demographics of the places where coders live, San Francisco and New York, whatever. And the politicians definitely, how does this break out? How does it break down? So the politicians can't hope to match the pay of the private sector, like a Twitter or Facebook or Google. So basically the people have to do it because they believe in your, but a Romney could. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, Romney could tenfold. Yeah. Yeah. He's a multimillionaire. Right. Let's talk about, Oh, I was going to make a vine on the broadcast. Oh yeah. So vine, everything changed again. Yes. Yeah. Everything changed. Yeah. There has been this, uh, you know, race battle. People knew this was coming, a competition to create the Instagram for video. Yes. Oh yeah. And today. And, and, and we, there was, there was some maybe sense that that cinema gram had started to get a little bit of traction. My feeling was suddenly I was starting to see them pop up. Uh, but Twitter has, this is broken. This is a broken, this is a broken arm. Um, but Twitter has now put the kibosh on their forward motion by creating vine, which is a standalone app that lets you create six second videos, which you can stop and start at intervals. Right. There's no editing. Sort of. There's some interesting differences. So like cinema, gram, some video of it, cinema, gram is gifts, right? It's just that format, you know, silent, right? Uh, and you can play them forwards and backwards and silent. They look like gifts and I love it. And I think there's a lot of cool stuff and there's cool like people doing backflips and cool sports highlights. And also like loop the loop thumbs. There's all this like teenagers doing silent comedy, like teenagers doing like Charlie Chaplin routines, which is amazing. So the difference obviously with vine is that their sound, which totally changes everything and the way the app is set up, it's kind of like you're supposed to shoot a montage. Neely will show you his shot. And it's also, and it's also, um, you know, in a way this is like very snapchatting. I feel cause snap, I get a lot of snapchats from like my brother is in Florida visiting my parents and he's been sending me snapchat videos of like five second clips of them hanging out or whatever. Um, so, but you could, this has sound. Yeah. So it's got, it's, it's this HTML five format, which I think is interesting. You know, it comes as a feed. Like that was the thing I didn't think it would work is like a feed with sound because it would be too confusing, but it's neat. Like you scroll down to it and it sort of unlocks it, unpauses and starts from the beginning and plays with sound and only the sound from one at a time plays. So like I got to download it. Can I use my Twitter credentials to get into this? Right? Yeah. Obvi, obvi, obvi. It comes as a Twitter card. It goes right there on the front page vine, but they do integrate with Facebook and you can find your Facebook friends and share to Facebook. They have an Android app. No iOS only. That is so old. It's iOS and a BB. I uploaded my vine. Seriously? No, I was going to say, like, John, can you, can you find my vine? That is so old of them. They need to relaunch. Can we get some Medivine? Yeah. They need to launch with both. I think that's really unfair to the Android users, the people who supported them. But I think it's cool. The idea that, you know, like right now, if you were to do a video live of something and try and upload it and share it quickly, it would be hard. But now you could take a moving image easily with sound and share it, you know, pretty frictionlessly the way Instagram made photos. Just everybody. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. It's cool. Yeah. This is, um, this is good. I think this is a big deal for video except, you know, I mean it is, it is funny that it operates very much in the way that Twitter operates where you've got this huge limitation and that obviously is meant to be right somehow that's going to six seconds. But I think that's a good limitation service that did little like 32nd. There's been a lot, right? What was the web? There was a web service. I don't know. There's somebody said to Coob. Have you ever heard of a Coob? Oh my God. No. What's that? It's like this horrible flash version of this where it's like you could record it through a second part of the part of the action here is that like this is HTML five. It's built in a, I just created my account. Good. I'm going to do a, I'm going to do a vine right now. I'm going to vine you vining. This has got to be some of the worst of all verge casts. This is a meta vine. All right, hold on. Let's see here. I don't want to, I don't want to see these people in my feed. How do I get these people out of my feet? God, it's just doing whatever it wants. Vine you crazy. Just can't it just get put my Twitter friends onto here to automatically. You should stop doing that. This is already way too much work. I've already made a vine man. I'm doing, I'm vining you guys. I did tweet my vine. Okay, hold on. Vine has been tweeted. It just froze. Twatted. It doesn't, it froze. You don't understand how it works. You have to hold it. You go like this. You hold it. The longer you hold it, it goes. So it's like you're holding it. It's taking recording. Then you stop. It's not, I don't see anything though. It's frozen. It's taking recording. It's frozen. Keep holding dude. It's just frozen though. Yours is just frozen. It's broken. I've actually crashed. Here's what's going on with my vine. Can we get a closeup of that? Get onto my close, get onto my, my single shot. This is just frozen on a blurry shot of. When Topolski speaks, people listen. So this app is now dead in the water. That sucked. That was not cool. End of that app. Okay, here we go. I'm going to try this again. They have a little momentum. Do I still have a vine? Okay, I'm vining. I just vined. See? That hasn't loaded yet. Everyone vines all the time. I have to say it. Like I, um, I will say this. I generally hate apps. I don't like them. I'm not an app guy. I just, all these, you know, anyway, but I think this is great. Like this is, I don't actually use Instagram. The potential for sending, you know, moving images that are sexts is just mind boggling. The potential to do harm to yourself and others is mind boggling. Uh, okay. Is there, yeah, I think the penis detection software on this is like a little bit better than chat roulette. What is, um, what is it when I'm, when I'm, so there is dong recognition when I'm, when I'm, is it vining? Is that just like, is that like on GitHub? Like you can like download the library. Am I, hold on. I gotta know. Is this, am I vining? You're vining. Yeah, you're vining right now. Is that V-I-N-I-N-G? You're vining down. Yeah. Cause it looks like vinning. No, V-I-N. Like Charlie Sheen? Vinning. Is that, it's like a really old Jewish guy saying winning. What? That's incorrect. I'm vinning. I'm allowed to say that. This is stupid. Sorry, man. I think V-I-N-I-N-G. It's terrible. No way. V-I-N-N-I-N-G. No, it just looks wrong. Just go with vine time. No, I'm not doing that. Share on Twitter. Yes. Share on vine, share on Twitter. Vining from guys. Isn't this the best Virgcast stuff you've ever heard in your entire life? Vining and dining. Wow. You know, Ben is fired. I'm bringing it. First of all, I just want everybody to know that I have now fired Ben on the air. Goodbye, Ben. Bye. He deserved, let's be honest. He had it coming. Yeah. Here we go. Here we go. Done. Vining from the Virgcast. It's on. Oh, there it is. What? Stash is looking. That's your vine. It threw up the vine. Can you, hey guys, I just tweeted mine. You can see my vine. They're all, they're all the same. This is going to be completely bonkers when people start using it. All right, come on. So I was talking to a guy today though at Spreecast and he said something interesting, which is like, you remember during occupy wall street, people will be out these little backpacks and they'd be shooting live video. And like pretty soon he was saying, we're going to be able to do that two ways. So like I'm at an event and I'm like talking to you and looking into my phone and I'm just doing that with just a phone as if I was like a CNN truck with a van and a satellite. Like that's going to be coming pretty soon. It's pretty sweet. Yeah. You know what I mean? You mean like real time interviews? Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, a face time, but only six seconds. No, no, no. Like, like a real time interview. Yeah. Like just keep it on 4g, just run it. And you know, that would enable anybody to do really interesting stuff. Citizen journalism. Yeah. Yeah. I, I reported. Yes. I report. I report. I report. You decide. All right. So vine is, we're going to see, it's a new thing. We're going to check it out. It's going to be good. I just want to find my friends. I just, you know, it's funny cause I didn't call her, try to do this. Wasn't this their last pivot? Yes. And I just like failed out. So why will this succeed? But they sold to Apple. So they're technically a success. Whatever world you live in has completely skewed, skewed ideas about what success is. Speaking of completely skewed ideas. Yeah. Apple just had a record. Wow. What a segue home. Super pro segue from my friends here. And I don't see, you got it. You got to stop using vine. No, I'm into wine. Let's talk about Apple. So we're talking about bizarre worlds. Inverse bizarre worlds. Yes. Apple just had its record day of record days. They have more records on this day of records than any day before. We actually counted Ross Miller sent me an email. He was counting cause he's at Sundance. More iPhones, more iPads. They use the word, they use the word record more times than any other earnings release. Yeah. Ross has some sort of fever. He woke up from a fever dream and did it started charting. How many times? Let me just say it's snowing in Sundance for Ross. Apple had a record. Do they know it's Christmas? And so of course after day of record of records, your stock goes down 10%. Yeah. It's way down. I bet it's 13 now. I mean there are, there are, there are, there are reasons this happened. Yes. There are actual financial explanations. 12.35% to a lay person like myself. It's like they made more money than ever. They sold more stuff than ever. Right. They beat, they missed expectations by like narrow margins. Like, like, you know, a rounding error. Right. You know, we predicted 54 billion. It was 52, 53 billion. Their stock went down 13% today. It's crazy. I mean, I understand this. Yeah. I mean, I have, I understand it. I don't think that I agree with it, but I understand the logic. Explain it to us. Their growth is slowing down. So they had a record, but the amount that their revenue grew slow from the way it used to be growing leaps and bounds. And what does that, what does that indicate? So you're moving from being a growth company, which is growing leaps and bounds to being a mature company, which is in this case just printing money. But what the people, the stock traders are interested in is what's your momentum? Are you getting better every quarter than you were the quarter before? Right. You know, what's your market? If, if you've already sold an iPhone to everybody in North America, how are you going to get, you know, 10 times as big? And they're saying, Hey, we're going to make a cheaper iPhone but that's, you're looking at developing nations. And we know that that when invest, when it comes to investors, they don't look at rim who's selling phones to developing nations and go great strategy for growth because they love Apple's high margins, high margins. Right. Cause it's their luxury goods basically. They were selling luxury goods at a pace that at no other luxury goods maker could touch. So on the call yesterday, so after they released your names, they have a call with Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer is a CFO and the call was really strange because what they were really talking about in the call was not, you know, they, they, it was very boring. Like last quarter, like cook, like went on a rampage and called surface a bad product and we're never going to make a seven inch tablet. We think that iPad mini is the right, all this stuff. This quarter he would basically said nothing. Gene Munster straight up asked him if they were going to make a TV. I could tell you this, it's an area of intense interest for them. Yeah, no, he gave the same actually, actually what he opened with, he laughed. He literally Tim Cook laughed at Gene Munster as this analyst who's constantly predicting the Apple will make a TV. Um, cause his question, like Munster's question really was like, I mean, is it hard? Are you guys trying? I bet it's hard. Is it hard? Is it hard? Tell me if it's hard. I mean, that's what it sounded, you know, like I bet you have content problems. Is it going to be a box or TV? Is it trouble to strike deals with an industry that doesn't want to give you any money? He ends his question and there's just like moment like where you can hear all the other analysts like laughing and, and cook is like, you're asking questions I'm just not going to answer. Yeah, but I think it's true that Apple needs a new narrative and that could be, we have a TV. That's the one there. But so, but here's the other, I don't think that's the new narrative for the company, but then all the other analysts, they would, we were asking whatever their two part question was like, how are DRAM prices affecting your supply? And then the second question was, Oh, Apple, you've changed your guidance. So the thing that used to happen was Apple would blow away their earnings and then they would release some like fake low ball numbers, but what they think they're going to do the next quarter and then they would blow away that guidance. So wall street stopped listening to those numbers. They started coming up with whatever other crap they wanted. They were letting wall street dictate their guidance. So now they're like, we're changing our guidance. Instead of giving you one number, we're going to give you this like massive range and we think we'll hit somewhere in that range and they're either going to make $1 or $100 billion. The range is like $5 billion. It's a huge amount of money and the range is only, I believe for their like revenue, not for their profit, which is the more important. Yeah. Apple beat their own guidance yesterday. And you know, when they always beat their own guy, they always, you always, you always have. And you know, like we looked at other companies like Google, which missed its marks and was up 10%. So it's definitely, and Netflix, which made like, you know, Netflix made the most infinitesimal profit, you know, and, but was up 40% because it's about, you know, narrative. They were saying, look, our subscriber number, our subscriber growth suddenly is really turning on. We know, we know, we know that, that, that wall street operates in a, in a world of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I mean, it is true though, but let's, let's be clear, right? I mean, just like when you get right down to trading, right? It is not, people are not trading. Like sometimes they're using data that is real. A lot of the time they're using like a vibe, right? They're saying like, this doesn't feel right. Or the data is telling them that it's giving them some bad vibes and then it's like a domino effect. Once somebody has a bad vibe, once somebody big enough or enough people have a bad vibe, then it's like a domino effect. But it's true that Apple is, I mean, you don't know, you don't have a sense of expectation right now. I think you have a sense of the TV has been rumored forever. Their wall street journal has reported, has reported repeatedly that they've had content issues. There were some stories, but it's, I mean, here are just some numbers and MG Sigler tweeted this and I was looking at it. Of course, of course it is because it's his job to defend Apple. Yes. Counting the water. Fair enough. It's right. Microsoft's revenues last quarter were 21.46 billion. The revenues for the iPhone this quarter, 30.66 billion. Right. Not counting the iPad, not counting the Mac, but he's missing the picture. That stuff is not connected. Like, no, but I'm saying the iPhone business for Apple is bigger than Microsoft's business. It's staggering. And they got that. It is incredible. They got that premium. So the thing you're saying Josh about like it being, you know, fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you're trading on a day to day basis, a week to week basis, month to month, you know, it is going to swing wildly like this. You know, if you're longterm, it's more about the fundamentals of Apple, right? Like if you bought the stock two years ago, you know, you made a ton of money because the company has had an incredible run. You had made a lot more money six months ago, five months ago. Right. If you got off at the top. But you know, I think it's interesting what you were saying, like, what are we going to see next? Like what has been sort of the stuff that they've released, you know, since Tim Cook came on, we wrote about this, like, you know, a slightly bigger iPhone, a slightly smaller iPad. You know, people want to see something different. Design that we are now talking about all the time. Like, Hey, what's up with this stuff? They've had software, it's behind senior execs leave. Oh, they've had a ton of senior, they've had an enormous amount of, of upheaval in the senior team. Scott Forrestal. They had this stuff with, with who's the Mansfield, Bob Mansfield, where he came in and he was out and then he was back in and brow leading the retail. Right. He's gone. Right. They just got rid of some other some didn't get rid of, but he quit an SVP in retail. Yeah. No, I mean like there's, it's like regardless of all of that, right? The company is like cruising along. They're doing, they're doing exactly what they always do. And I think, and I think it's, I think it's insane. Don't get me wrong. Like when people were tweeting yesterday about how they missed their, they missed their, the, the, uh, light on revenues. Right. Yeah. Which is amazing. We were treating revenue. I mean, this is the title. His headline was Apple whiffs. Like this is whiffing. I want to whiff every day, every day. I want to whiff like Apple whiffs, but it's like, it's like, but there is, I think is the momentum question. If you're Michael Jordan and you don't come up with a new dunk every game. Like I've seen this dunk before or, or it's like, it's that, you know, you think like we know what he can do dunk wise and he's not going to do new dunks. Right. Like, and the hype about his, for his hot new dunks. Right. Horrible analogy. We've seen the best of his. We've seen the best of his. We've seen like all the, we, I think the impression now the narrative is, I mean, jobs is gone. Right. That's a real thing. Like it's clear. Like if you track it from the death of Steve jobs to now there is, I like would find, I would find it hard to believe there's no correlation. There is a correlation between the sense that Apple is continuing to climb the mountain versus that they've, they're at the top of the mountain. So here's a, they hit the top. Tim Cook, you know, he's the logistics guy who came in and he can continue to run the business, you know, tremendously well and they will mint money. Yeah. But is he not an innovation guy? Well, Joanie I've stepped up and Howard Linsen said this great quote, which I think a lot of people repeated on our site, which is Apple has never traded on its profits. It's traded on its innovations. You know, that's how this, this sort of the value of the stock is assigned. Right. And I think that, that, that there, I think that, you know, in, in Silicon Valley, in the tech world in general, you really are only as good as your last product. And I think that, you know, their last products were, were really, you're watching, this is making me hungry. I know, but you're, you really aren't only as good as your, as your last product in that people are very fickle. Consumers are extremely fickle, particularly technology consumers. I mean, I think what we've seen, you know, I, I've talked about this before, I think probably a bit like the browser fickleness is incredible. You know, I remember when I use internet Explorer and then I switched to Firefox and then Firefox was lame and I switched to Safari and then Safari was lame and I switched to Chrome and now I'm on Chrome. And by the way, the next guy who comes out with a better browser, I'm probably going to switch to it. And it's like, people are very fickle. You really need to keep like, you gotta work really hard in technology to retain them. Apple is there's like, I think the thing is, is Apple, have they have their days of innovation past, have their great products ended? Right. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's going to be, I think if Johnny Ive, but I will say this, if Johnny Ive and his new bigger role in software, if whatever their next big thing is, isn't really great, isn't actually like, Whoa, this is cool. Like people are going to be really into this. If we're not impressed by it, I think that's it. I think that's an issue. What I think is really interesting is that's a big sign. I mean, I think Apple still makes the best hardware in the business. Right. But what's interesting is that I don't think Apple has ever really wanted to be cast as a hardware company. They want to be cast as either, you know, the best software makers in the world, or I think what they would really prefer is to be the integrated solutions company. Right. And end to end is the goal. Right. And I think, you know, I don't think anyone's close to surpassing the way they build hardware. The scope of their end to end is staggering. Like I think this is the thing to think about. Apple cemented in the world, the concept that you needed to control every piece of your business, not just you make great hardware and great software. You want to sell music? Uh, here's all the music. Here's the music consortium. We got this right. Or here's universal. We got this. It's Apple's like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make the best hardware. We're going to make the best software that goes on it. And then we're also going to come up with the best services and content distribution for that stuff. I mean, they're trying to do services. They're trying to do mail and cloud storage and, and sinking and stuff like that. They're not really there yet. I don't think, you know, they're the biggest seller of music. They're, they sell a lot of video. Uh, they would sell more if they had televisions probably if they could actually sell people televisions. But, but the scope of what they're trying to control is insane. I mean, that's part of the problem, you know, like, I mean, it's part of the winning side of Apple. It's also part of the side that's that's hurting right now, which is like when you control everything and you have a miss, like when, when one of those links in the chain is a little bit broken or you have a little bit of an issue like Apple maps, it can make all the rest of it feel, you know, it pulls the, it, it stops the whole thing. You know, I think we were talking before about how Google is like structured very differently. And so we knew that Steve Jobs was the guy making the decisions. If you came in with an iPod and he dropped it in the fish tank and could see air bubbles, it wasn't good enough. Right? Like he was like, go back and work on it some more. So now that he's not there, it's like, who's that guy? Tim Cook doesn't seem like that kind of guy, that kind of perfectionist. I think Johnny Ive is always seen as the natural successor to him in terms of creativity, product manager as the product manager. But you know, now he's got a hand in software, so we'll have to see, but I think there is something to that. Also Google is known to fail, right? Google has a reputation for failing and making, you know, Jobs has that reputation in some ways, but, but his, his, the bigger reputation is as, as, as a success. Well, so, but here's the thing, and I think this is, this is Apple saving grace, right? If they are the maker and I believe that they continue to make the best hardware and the software they need to revamp thoroughly. But these devices, the iOS devices, I sold 75 million of them in the quarter, right? They sold 4.1 million max down from 5.2 million a year. There has to be a crossover point there. Well, so, but this is happening for them. Like they're, um, Brian Bishop wrote a report on this for this morning, which is, yeah, you know, they had problems shipping the iMac and they weren't on sale until the end of the quarter. So the numbers dropped, but Cook was like, if you look at our portable sales, they're tracking IDC, which is like the big numbers they're tracking the PC market. And that's like the first time they've ever said that. What they usually say is we're outgrowing the PC market. Every one of our computers is selling faster than the PC market. Like the PC market grew at 6%. We grew at 25%. Cause people want max more than PC. So our market share is exploding. Now they're like, we're tracking the PC market while their sales of the mobile devices explode. And so their business is changing dramatically. Like whether or not they want to admit it, which I don't think they do. But they changed it. You know, Cook is like, we welcome cannibalization. It's a great opportunity for us. But if they're, they're now moving to a point where they're wholly dependent on their end, end integration working. Cause if you buy a Mac and iTunes doesn't work, like you put Spotify on it, you never think about iTunes again. It never occurs to you that you have to think about iTunes. Most people aren't doing that though. But that's beside the point is that people aren't buying the Macs. They're buying the iPads. If you buy this and you use Spotify, you run into all kinds of places. But then Apple gets into the most dangerous, one of the most dangerous spots for them, which is one that I tweeted about the other day when they pulled this 500 picks app for having nudity in it or whatever they found objectionable, which is this is, and this is what people didn't understand what I was saying. And I just, it's worth reiterating. Like imagine a world where iPads are the dominant computer, which is the world, which is where we're headed, which is here's the deal. Laptops are dying. Like sales of laptops are dying out. Tablets are on track to replace and then exceed sales of laptops. Apple has the leading market share in tablets by a large margin from what I understand. I haven't looked at the most recent numbers, but it's probably in the vicinity of 70%, 75, something like that. Not the penetration that Windows has in PCs, but certainly a high penetration that's growing. Their competition still is not caught up with them in any significant way. So imagine a world in five years, two years, three years, let's say where everybody uses an Apple product as their main computer, as that's how you get on the internet. That's how you find stuff. That's how you use apps. And Apple is using these, what I consider to be bizarre, bizarre and somewhat concerning ideas about what is permissible, including, but not limited to the mail client you can use, the browser you can use, what you can look at within those apps. It's like the only app that you can look at nudity in is Apple's supported browser. You can look at another browser, but Apple ships a browser. You can look at the nastiest porn in the world. It's like, at what point does that stuff not match anymore? This is like Josh Kopstein's ultimate nightmare, right? Every kid in five years will be born buying an iPad with a store that decides what software you can have. This is why at some point there will be, someone's going to bring a case. If that market share happens, you're going to see litigation that is kind of like what we saw with Microsoft in what, 95 or whenever it was when they were litigating over the browser stuff. Someone's going to say, you can't do this anymore. You can't be Apple here. There has to be some restraint that is loosened. The same way things, this happens to Google now when they introduce their own products in search, right next to it. These are our flight results and here are the search results that you wanted. You can't really tell the difference. They're right next to each other. Yeah. But Google just slap on the wrist and get out of here. We got to wrap up. Do we want to talk about, was there anything else we want to talk about? Apple has one secret weapon. Is it the jobs? Oh, they got one movie. The movie that is going to change the tide. Another pro segue from Ben Popper. I mean, you mean, give it up. I think you mean jobs. J-Hobes. Jobs. Jobs. The new movie starring Ashton Kutcher. Disclosure. He is a advisor to Vox media. He is. Or Vox as I like to call it. He's like Will. I mean, he's our innovation creationist specialist. He's actually working on iPhone cases for us right now that have an awesome interchangeable lens. But there's a movie about the early days of jobs. We saw a clip from it today and he does, I will say this, Ashton Kutcher looks exactly like Steve Jobs when he was young. But when he speaks, it's like pure Kelso. All you can hear is Kelso. It's like Kelso talking about the advent of the modern computer. And it's weird. And I don't think I like it. You know what? Ross, I believe Ross Miller. Ross is at Sundance. Ross is at Sundance. We are going to have the premieres tomorrow. We are going to have exclusive shaky cam footage. No, no, no, no. We're going to pirate. We're going to have exclusive content related. We're going to vine the crap out of it. Here it is right here. We're going to have exclusive review. By the way, you know, Wozniak today said to some other outlet, this scene never happened. I was just working on it for my own. It was a hog. Exactly. Exactly. For your own. For you. It's what you wanted. It's what your gut and your instinct wanted. Your big, evolved brain wanted something and it didn't exist. So you just willed it into existence. Jackie. What do you call the system? The operating system. The operating system. And it just shows. Yeah, it's just a real time display of current operations. You can see what you're working on while you're working on. This is freedom. You try to do and to do and to build and as artists, as individuals, you're overreacting. Even if you were developing this for freaks like us and I doubt you are, nobody wants to buy a computer. Nobody. Somebody know what they want if they've never even seen it. Boom, boom. Nailed it. I'm sorry. I don't know. That voice is just killing me. All right, I got to go. I'm late for dinner. By the way, I'm very mad. Baltimore sun. Steve Wozniak challenges accuracy of the clip we just watched. But it's a movie. It's a movie. How much stuff is in Pirates of Silicon Valley that never happened? Like the scene where Jobs stabs Wozniak while on acid. Woz commented on Gizmodo and then the Baltimore sun somehow picked it up. I don't even know. Everything about news on the internet is terrible. Not close. We never had such an interaction in roles. I'm not even sure what it's getting at. Personalities are very wrong, although mine is closer. Don't forget my purpose was inspired by the value. The nerd personality does seem to be nailing it there. It doesn't say much. That's pretty close to me. Yeah, I don't know, man. We got to go. We got to wrap it up. That's all over. That's the Verge cast this week. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us at vergecast at the verge.com. You can leave us a comment on the post when it goes up. We love that. We'd love to read your comments. They're always so, oh, my vine got fined. I so polite. Um, and uh, and of course you can find us on Twitter. I'm Joshua Topolski. Neela is reckless. Yes. Ben Popper is Ben Popper. Also reckless on vine. He's also re I'm also Josh with Topolski on vine. Yeah. Ben Popper on vine. Hashtag Yolo. That is not a way to find me. Ben is fired once again. And the verge is at verge. Um, and that's show we'll be back next week. And until then, um, so sorry to hear about what happened. Rock and roll. Paul. Yolo.