The war for Reddit, new MacBook Air, and Meta's Twitter competitor

Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of suddenly private subreddits. I'm your friend David Pearce and I am coming to you from Inside Mind Metacrest 2, where I'm playing Population 1, which is kind of like the VR version of Fortnite. And like Fortnite, you can't just pause the game because it's a live battle royale. But this is the VergeCast, the show must go on, you know what I mean?

So here we go, and hopefully nobody finds me crouching on top of this window. Anyway, we have a super fun show today. We're going to talk about all of the chaos happening on Reddit right now, with Christian Seelig, the developer in the middle of the whole fight. Then we're going to talk about Meta's reaction to the new Apple Vision Pro headset and that new Twitter competitor at the company is launching.

After that, we're going to talk about the new 15-inch MacBook Air with Monica Chin, who's been testing it, and I think just got the other Max in to test too. Lots going on this week, y'all. All that is coming in just a sec, but first I'm going to figure out how to jump off this windmill without dying, and I think somebody just got me. Here we go.

This is the VergeCast, we'll be right back. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven times WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, post and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports.

And mom. And this is and mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Welcome back.

Right now, you may have seen this already. On Reddit, there is an all-out war going on between the company and its users. Thousands of subreddits have gone dark. The whole platform even went down at one point.

All as part of a huge protest against new changes Reddit is making to how it operates its platform. There's more to it than this, and we get into a lot of it in the segment you're about to hear. But basically, the thrust of it is that Reddit has always given away access to its API for free. That meant developers could build Reddit apps or bots or just tools that work on the platform without paying Reddit the company to do so.

Now, Reddit is looking towards an IPO and just trying to make sure it can exist in a world where being unprofitable for almost two decades is kind of a bad look. And the company wants those developers to pay up. How it spiraled from that into a fight for the future and soul of Reddit is the story we're about to get into. And it really weirdly enough centers around one guy.

His name is Christian Selig, and he runs a popular Reddit app called Apollo. Nila and I called a Christian to talk through everything that's been happening to him the last few months and where all of this goes next. Christian, hello. Hey, David.

Hey, Nila. Hello. Hello. Okay, so Christian, this story is a mess.

There's so much going on here. We should probably just start at the beginning. Let's do a little bit of history lesson here. Is this story starts was April 18th, which was the day that will live in infamy to some extent.

And that's when Reddit announces big new changes to how it thinks about its API and you get a phone call that day. Is that right? Yeah, my phone kind of lit up and there was a lot of like, Oh my God, your app's gone. What are you talking about?

And then I saw the announcement was like, Okay, and then I saw there was a New York Times interview where they said, um, Reddit apps won't be affected or something like that. And it was an interesting choice of words that I've since found out was not correct. And then I got a few hours later and then I'm going to call a few hours after that and we talked it out and yeah, I kind of became the conversation that started a few months. What was your read of the situation that day?

For you as an indie developer, Reddit's like, we're making these big changes to how we think about our API, how other apps and services integrate with us. Like what was your read of what this meant for you? My initial read, the initial post is very light on details. It was kind of like we're looking to charge, but we're not telling you how much, which kind of made it difficult to digest that because if I'm selling you a cheeseburger, but I don't know how much I'm going to charge you that it's a completely different conversation kind of thing.

So, so it was kind of light on details. I was like, I'm going to wait for the phone call kind of to set my expectations. And honestly, the phone call went super well. Like the Reddit representative, uh, nice guy explained everything kind of was just laying it all out in a way that made sense to me that they can't keep indefinitely kind of financing these businesses with their data while they get nothing in return.

And it was kind of just one of those conversations where you did not a long, like that makes sense of kind of wondering if there was an agreement we were going to come to at some point. And the way they kind of set it up sounded really great. Like the pricing was in terms of kind of being equitable and making them whole and there'd be an opportunity to kind of have a more concrete relationship going forward. It sounded really exciting.

So it was kind of like the developers I talked to as well as myself were kind of like, okay, this could go well. It sounds positive, anyway, what the price is, but everything sounds good so far. When you say these businesses, there's, there's a lot of nuance in there because Reddit is pretty unhappy about the AI companies scraping all of Reddit to train large language models. And I suspect if Reddit was to go to open AI and say $20 million a year, like the user community would not be in such open revolt.

When they come to you and say that number, it's very different, right? So was the conversation with Reddit in the beginning? Was there that nuance in there that, hey, there are some businesses that we should charge a lot of money to and there are some indie app developers that we need to charge some money to for a variety of reasons and we're going to find a way for you that's different or was it we're doing this across the board from the beginning. Um, yeah, they didn't mention like the big open AI's in the world.

It was very much geared around like apps like yourselves have built these businesses over the years that rely on our data and we're providing it to you for free and we don't think that's kind of going into an IPO. We don't think that's like a tenable long term solution. Um, there wasn't any, um, breakdown by like third party apps would have a carve out of a certain price and then maybe everyone else or AI would have a, another price point. It was very much focused towards third party apps, at least on the phone calls on.

So, and the structure of that thing they described to you sounds totally reasonable, right? Like, and it's interesting to me that you had even thought that this was kind of coming at some point because it does seem like at some point these businesses have to figure out how to make money. Reddit has never been very good at making money and it would not be that hard to look at you and be like, well, he's built a profitable business and we give him all the data for free. Like, let's, let's figure out a way to sort of even the scales back a bit.

And I can imagine coming out of that phone call being like, yeah, this sounds relatively reasonable. And honestly did. And like to the extent also that there's like API's like Reddit chat and voting in polls and whatnot that, um, they've historically not made part of the API for whatever reason. And kind of the idea that, oh, we're maybe engaging in this more formal relationship where we're, uh, closer to a partnership where I'm paying you and you're giving goods of return, um, the possibility that, oh, we might even get more APIs available.

We might have better contacts at Reddit, et cetera, et cetera. Like this is a more mature, concrete relationship. Like that honestly sounded exciting. It almost provides a clear future forward where I'm paying you, you're giving me services and return like our relationship here is much more clear.

And in the concept of that's not really exciting, but it's one of those things where kind of the, the devil's in the details and how you get there kind of decides everything. What has it been like in the past? I know the sort of outside story is that Reddit has not particularly been interested in the past in like serving and maintaining a really good API for developers to use, but it's been open to you and has been free for a very long time. Like, is it a good API?

Like what does the experience been like over the years? To me, I, I thought it's been a great API. Personally, like I, admittedly, like I came to the university and started building a follow up to my breadth of experience with APIs as an enormous, so I don't have the ability to say like, oh, the Twitter API was so much better. But it was honestly very straightforward as well.

Documented, the only issue I guess is the years went on, like newer features on Reddit were suddenly not getting added to the API. But outside of that, yeah, it was well documented, it was easy to use. If I had questions right, it was responsive and if they were changing something in the API, they'd give a good amount of foresight and say like, we're changing this to this. This might break X, you should make a change by the state, we're happy to help you with that.

And it was honestly like a great relationship. That turn that's like, we're not going to stop adding new features to the API. If you just look back historically, that's the first red flag, right? That's the warning sign that maybe they don't love the third party app.

So do you ever take that as a sign or warning of any kind? Maybe I'm a very naive person, but in my head, I was kind of looking through like, oh, there's a new voting and polls endpoint, for instance, in the API. It's like, okay, what's that look like? And so you can kind of sniff the network traffic with the Reddit app.

And I was like, oh, they're hitting this like GraphQL endpoint. That is kind of like an internal endpoint. It's not the same API. I got Reddit.com or whatever that historically all of us have been hitting.

So I was like, okay, maybe they're moving to a model where they're going to test these APIs internally, make sure they've got all the kind of wrinkles ironed out, and then they'll make available. And then of course, the user's fine. And you're like, you know, maybe not. So yeah, I think there was a naive optimism at the beginning there.

And then I kind of justified it as they're moving to this internal stuff. But maybe they just don't have any engineers staff to kind of port them back. It's more of a negligence rather than a maliciousness. But it's honestly tricky.

I just want to say kind of what the intent was there. That's right. So then the second part of the story and where things get really wild and where we should start talking with the last two weeks was the very end of May, do you, I guess, have a series of phone calls that ended in posting like the Reddit posts heard around the world? I'm assuming that was like one of the biggest days ever in the Apollo sub-read.

Yeah. Yeah. So you're like, you really like juicy engagement that day. Congrats on that.

Yeah. And then everyone was like messaging me and like prior to that announcement saying like you've been saying price is coming up for weeks. And I was like, yeah, I know Reddit's been telling me it's coming for weeks. Like I want to know what you do.

And I'm like, okay, well, tell us. Okay. I got the pricing. Like here's the details.

And there's a lot of people interested in knowing the details and I kind of once they found out what those details were, it kind of snowballed from there. And yeah, it blew up a lot more than I thought it would. I would say, so walk us through that a little bit because the high points of it, basically as I understand are you get on the phone with Reddit and they're like, okay, we have pricing for you. It is essentially at the end of the day going to cost you $20 million a year just to pay for $20 million lying around in which case, like that's cool.

But walk me through how that conversation goes when Reddit calls you. First off, I don't, but if either of you do, we can talk after the show, maybe help a guy out. But no, so like the conversation wasn't like, I don't think they knew the cost it would cost me. Like, and so far as I kind of knowing that call would be quick and they normally block it like 30 minutes.

I don't like a little app that you could put in like the cost for API call and it would spit out like a bunch of facts, kind of like an Excel spreadsheet of being like, oh, here is what it would cost a month a year for the free users, like the subscription users. Here's how it compares to Reddit's the financial figures they posted historically. So like as soon as I was still under the figure, I could kind of jump into action mode and say like, this is what it's going to look for me. So they, the figure they said was 24 cents for 1000 API calls.

I kind of put that in and it was like, saw the zero start like increasing. And it was like, okay, so like I make, you know, $7 billion a month, which sounds like a ton, but there's, I almost have 2 million monthly active users. So there's a fair bit there. And I kind of just said, like, look, this is going to cost me like $20 million a year.

And I think there was kind of like, there's a few awkward silences where there was kind of the conversation like our intent isn't to kill 30 party apps with this decision. Like that's not what we're hoping to do. And it was kind of like, but do you see how charging $20 million is like a guy in an apartment would effectively have that. Like that would be the result.

And I think there was kind of like an understanding there, but at the same time, like finishing the call, I was saying like, I legitimately don't want to be antagonistic here. Like if this is something you feel like, given the figures I've told you and how untenable it is for me as a business, like if this is something that you want to take back and maybe we can talk about this more and maybe hear my concerns and maybe meet at a figure that would be a little better, like I'm happy to do that. I won't post anything until like you kind of landed on something concrete. And the answer is kind of like, no, this is the present, like, post it if you want.

So in like the half hour between that call and when they called me again, because they wanted to go over a few more things, I made the post it kind of went from there. Do you get the sense that Reddit knows that Apollo users are power users of Reddit? This is something I think about with social networks all the time. Is that their data blinds them to the reality of the platform?

So you might say, okay, there's only 2 million Apollo users. You just don't know that they happen to be 2 million of the most important users on the platform or the most vocal or the most invested. And you piss them off with a decision like this. Do you ever get the sense they knew that Apollo was important to that class of users or that were in the middle of the relationship that Reddit added with that group of users?

Honestly, like, and I said this with a lot of respect for Reddit, but I feel like this was a decision that like kind of got rushed out the door a bit and they didn't kind of do that due diligence on like understanding that stuff. Because yeah, there's a lot of stuff where like even just making a really big pricing announcement but not having any pricing to like taking like there was a lot of discussions where they were like, well, having in two to four weeks. And that's a great and then kind of six weeks past and they're like, okay, now we have it. Like there was a lot of it felt like it was kind of being decided on the fly.

And even insofar as at the end of January, I want to say January 26th, I had another call with Reddit like prior to all this where they were saying like, we have no plans to change the API at least in 2023, maybe for years to come after that. And if we do, it'll be like improvements. So for then kind of like two months, three months later for them to say, look, actually scratch that. We're planning to completely charge for the API and it's going to be very expensive.

Kind of maybe think like what happened in those three months? Like this clearly wasn't something that was like cooking for a long time. And I don't think they kind of understood how much this would affect people and the kind of response that they would get because they're honestly they're smart people. And I don't think if they kind of understood everything they do now, they would have made the same steps that would help not because yeah, and even there's like, there's quotes where they'll say like the average Reddit user and other apps uses like a hundred API requests a day or whatever it is.

Like in Apollo, like you can almost see like depending on how much more of a power user, how much more API requests they use, like my free users use around 200, which is relatively close to 100. But then like my subscription users use closer to like 500 because they're passionate Reddit user, like they're paying for something they're probably going to use more. And it's kind of like, yeah, Apollo does use a lot of requests because these people are really passionate about Reddit. And that's not necessarily that thing, especially if you're trying to monetize on a user level.

I don't know why the user engaging with a platform more would be inherently negative thing. So it's yeah, I think I've been more confused than not at some of the calls they've made. Well, so Reddit said we don't want to kill third party apps, but we just went through this with a Twitter API, which pretty explicitly wanted to kill third party apps. Do you buy that either at that moment or now with kind of two weeks of more conversations in hindsight?

Like, do you think Reddit actually doesn't want to kill third party apps? Because it sure looks like it does. I think at the outset, they were under the impression, I would be terrible and say, I think I honestly don't think they did. Or maybe I'm very naive.

Like maybe they didn't care about us at all, but they were like, we know you're important to a subset of users and we know they'll be a big blowback if we get rid of you. So we want to make some arrangement where we can keep you, but you're not paying the ass. But I think as time went on and they kind of understood where we were coming from and things like only giving us 30 days to make these like monsters changes, I think it started to muddy the waters where it's like, well, if you don't want us to die, why are you giving us such aggressive timelines and why can't you bump things out or listen to us? Or why are you acting this way?

And I think to a certain extent, like some of the blowback from like initial post from developers being like, this is going to cost a lot of money. I think they almost went on the defensive internally and said like, you know, these developers are entitled and they just want a free lunch or something. And I feel like a very personal one. I didn't really need to when it was just kind of like a this is going to kill my business.

Like can we have a path forward and it's kind of ugly when I don't think it needed to. Well, that's the other part of that question is like, even if Reddit doesn't want to get rid of third party apps, it sure seems at this moment, like it wants to get rid of you. I mean, it does. It's got so bizarrely personal and like Steve Hoffman in the AMA, he did about this stuff either explicitly or implicitly referenced you a bunch of times.

There's been this weird accusation about you blackmailing Reddit for $10 million and I listened to the audio that you posted. And that's a very weird interaction and I kind of think everybody was weird in that in action, but we can come back to that. But like this became about you in a very real way, both the sort of community rallying around you and then you've become like enemy number one to Reddit in this fight. How did that happen?

Is it just because you're the one posting the numbers about what this costs? I think it's a combination of that. And from one of the mod calls from what I understand, they said Apollo is the biggest API user at least. So I think there's a follow up and fortunate that it's pretty popular.

So I think there's a lot of eyes on it. But yeah, I don't know how it got so personal in terms of like my initial post. Like I tried to very much thread the line of like, here are my numbers. Like this is how much I use multiple but I never they gave me which gives me this number.

Like I'm not saying screw Reddit. Let's go, you know, Hoffman is the worst person imaginable. I was just saying like these are the figures and I don't think they agree with the statement that they made about being like equitable and based reality based on the public revenue figures they've given me. And I think that kind of blew up from there.

And I think they took a lot of offense to that when it was kind of like they themselves said they weren't interested in talking about the price anymore. So I was kind of my only option was kind of say like users, this is the price I was given. Like I almost don't know what to do here. And it's one of the situations where like every step of the way where they seem to have gotten progressively more offended.

I feel like if the roles reversed, they would have made the same decision. Anybody would have it was just kind of like a straightforward try to be communicative. Like at no point have I tried to be like these guys are the worst. Like it's always tried to be like, you're the numbers and I don't think this is reasonable because these numbers are so high.

If they'd offered to buy the ad from you, would you have sold it to them? I guess it depends on the stage. I mean, I'm just some guy. So like if the numbers high enough, sure, absolutely.

Like, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like the stage where it was clear that they weren't interested in having third party apps at around anymore just because of the pricing and some of the API changes around like explicit content and whatnot. At that point where it was kind of clear, like we don't really see you as part of our long term future.

If that was a point where they said like that being said, we would like to maybe work with your user base or take your user base and figure out a way to like make them happy in the context of the official app and like work with you and your app through an acquisition or something to make that happen. Like I honestly wouldn't listen to that. Prior to that it would have had to have been a pretty good number just because I love building a follow and like having and like being so in touch with so many people through the community, like it would have to be a big number just from like losing such a big part of your life and what you do every day. Like there's there's an emotional penalty to losing that that is like hard to quantify with money as superficial as it sounds.

What did it feel like when you saw, I think it was Craig Federighi put a poll on stage at WWDC a couple of times. Yeah. It has been a real moment for the set. How was that felt?

That blew my mind. I was sitting with a friend who works at Apple and I was like, I think I was tweeting something and he was like, kind of nudging me. He's like, you're going to watch this. And I looked up and was like, oh my God.

Like it came from absolutely nowhere. Like I had no idea that was coming and it was just the nicest thing. Like Apollo has been mentioned, like it's been in a slide in a few keynotes or like the state of the union or something but to have like Craig Federighi say like the Apollo name I was like looking around like a crazy person I think like there was like Ashin Kuchar was going to run out or something. But yeah, it was really cool.

And meanwhile, this is happening like right as you're publicly announcing plans to shut down the app at the end of June. That's a cognitive dissonance of that has got to just be insane. Well, I felt really bad because I was like talking to my Apple rep and I was saying like in the event that Apollo is like a part of stuff like I just want to be clear that like at this stage, I don't think I have to shut down like things with Reddit are still like we're talking and things seem civil and like I'm happy. So like and then it just very quickly degraded from there that I felt like oh crap like I hope they didn't I hope I didn't run them on the wrong way by like misleading them that Apollo was like gonna last forever when in reality like when I was at that keynote at that time it felt great because yeah Apollo is like so you're like things are gonna get better.

It's an keynote everything's great and then it kind of just fell apart from there. Which brings just to my favorite segment of every first cast. Let's do some math together. There's nothing like math in the radio to really bring an audience together.

Because I think there's been a lot of questions and a lot of debate about what it would look like to continue to run Apollo. And I think one of the things Reddit has said is that the way that the API works it should cost less than $1 per user per month. Your math said it would cost about $2.50 per user per month. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these numbers.

Okay. Yeah. And so there are a bunch of folks out there who are like okay we'll just charge just $5 a month. Give some of that money to Apple.

We'll keep the rest. Give some to Reddit. Everybody wins. There are other people out there who are like okay just make it subscription only so only people paying for the app can use the app.

And it doesn't seem like you went to I can't afford this. I have to shut down the app fairly quickly. I'm assuming you went through some of these other scenarios before you got there. Like walk me through how you get from I owe $20 million a year.

I have a very popular app too. I definitely can't afford this. My only option is to close. Sure.

So I talked to like a lot of the I was the opportunity to tighten it and there's like a lot of group chats running around and I talked to a lot of smart people and like I guess it's a too faceted answer I guess like at a high level. So say yeah just charge $5.00. Bob's your uncle kind of thing right. The issue there is that yeah I'm averaging for your average user uses about 345 requests per day per user.

And then if you extrapolate that over the month it would cost about $2.50 to support them. The issue is that's the average user. So a free user uses like 200 something requests and existing paid user uses closer to 500. So for that existing paid user who naturally uses more that's closer to 360 I think is the math that I would get for a bill for each of them every month in its current state.

And if I just charge $5 to them you take off apples 30% or whatever and you're down to 350 you're already 10 cents in the red per user per month. So that's kind of the calculus there is already pretty tricky. That being said if I had more than the 30 days there's a possibility that I could go in and like some of the stuff where I check your inbox every so often or I preload a page for you that I think you might scroll through I could kind of cut down on all those and maybe cut that 400 down to I know 300 200 like if I had more than 30 days. But even beyond that there's even a subset of users where like approximately 5% of my users use between 1 and 2,000 API requests a day where at the low end those would cost $7.50 a month.

And you can imagine the users who use the half the most are kind of the most likely to pay for things. So maybe kind of like the most obvious ones that would want to pay for the app and when you're looking at them costing like $7.50 a month each. It's kind of like do I have like a $5 tier that hopefully covers most people and then once you expire that is like a phone plan where I call you up and say like do you want to top off for the month and it's like and that's not fun. But that's like that's one facet of it like say I say I saw all that.

The other issue is that like with a very short notice of 30 days from when the pricing was announced to when we start in current charges I've got about like say like 50,000 yearly subscribers who have already paid for a year of service. So say like before this announcement based on the fact that back in January read it told that they wouldn't be changing the API all this year I sold David a year of Apollo Ultra for say back in April you've got still like nine months left on that subscription that you're owed because you already paid for it as you should be. And that was based on operating costs that I had for like design services, server fees, like I have a part time server engineer like I was like for a dollar amount a month or whatever was like that I can make a profit on that. But suddenly I've got like a dollar or two extra like a dollar minimum if I get those API requests really far down for those 50,000 people who have already prepaid I can't monetize them anymore they've already paid.

So starting July 1st those people will start incurring a bill of $50,000 a month for me that I have no way to monetize because they've already prepaid and that's where the calculus got really difficult where I was like okay I have a bill of yeah 50 and then like maybe the next month some of the people who were close to expiring would expire and it would go down to 11 months maybe it would only be 45,000 and the next month would be 40 but you're potentially looking at like hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills I would get for Reddit from people that I can't make a single more dollar off of because they already paid my old operating costs and that's where I got really tricky where I'm only using 30 days to like try to transition those users or have them age out and there's no like grandfathering in place or anything that's where it gets really difficult and you almost do the math and you say it would be cheaper to sort of like close up and refund all these people then it would be to just pay Reddit like hundreds of thousands of dollars for these users and that's where I got really tricky. Yeah so it's like you combine those two things and it was just like everyone I talked to was kind of just like I don't see how I would make this work and then when you add on the extra fact that like Reddit's kind of like the same these like bizarre things around like frets and black nail and like they won't answer your emails anymore it kind of becomes a thing like I can't pay for this how to make a profit out of it is very difficult and Reddit seems like they have no intention of wanting to work with me or third party app anymore it kind of becomes like what's the future here if that makes sense and that was kind of where I landed on it I was staying at an Airbnb with like seven other people for dub dub dub dub and I was just kind of like talking with them over and it was just kind of like that one thing I was just like I don't see any other route out of this like it's just kind of it's gotten dire and that was kind of when I started typing on my post and being like yeah this is kind of there's an alternate universe in there where the next thing you do is like leave Cooper Tino go to Sand Hill Road and like convince Mark K Andreessen to give you a bunch of money to get you through this is that is that ever a thing that occurred to you? Honestly no not so much because like I still don't see how like the path forward would be would be working like if I said like Reddit I can pay your 20 million or 50 thousand dollars a month or whatever it is I still feel like there is this like target on my back where almost they're gonna say like we don't want to work with you anymore or like the APIs that you do have there's something to break down or something or it just suddenly felt like the relationship was a lot more sour all of a sudden and I've kind of always loved that Apollo itself sustaining and I didn't need venture capitalists money that I could just say like this simple concept of like if you want something paying for it and I'll give it to you and that's the whole business like I kind of like the simplicity there it felt like something from 500 years ago where you just it's an exchange of services and I really like that and I didn't want to money the waters with DC money at any point so yeah I mean it's a great question but it just wasn't really anything I was looking to do. There's the other piece that I write that direct relationship IPU for software you give me software we're done Reddit can barely monetize its own users right like they're not making money the way they've chosen to monetize is mostly advertising which is not exposed in your app.

They've read it and come to you and said alright you can use our API lower the cost but you've got to start serving our ads. Like I don't know how I would have felt about that as somebody who's used Apollo like I would have been like that's pretty icky now I'm paying you for software but I'm getting their ads. Yeah yeah like but that's one of those things that I felt like if they did it would have shown like a little bit more effort to include third party apps and surprise they have to build kind of integration and yeah it's tricky because like if that was a path to survive like I wouldn't like it either I prefer not to have apps and I don't or ads and I don't mind paying for an ad for experience but if that was the only way to survive going forward like that's something I also would have entertained like a revenue share where like you make X amount of money we want half of it off the top like that's something that would have been fine like there's a lot of arrangements I think they could have gone with that just weren't quite as killer for lack of a better term. Yeah yeah let's talk about that a little actually because I think one of the questions I've had following all of this is what do you want from Reddit like if you could sort of rewind back to the beginning of this I'm sure that less animosity in all directions and also less money but like what could have happened in that phone call on May 31st that you would have just hung up and been like great cool perfect sounds good win win everybody let's move forward.

I think it would have been a matter like in an absolutely perfect world it would have said like okay we're also going to maybe like half the price because that would have taken like my 250 a user down to like the $1.25 which I charged to new users $1.50 so it would have been something that like hey my existing users I can at least afford to keep like them around like those they won't put me in the red that would have been great and that's when $5 a month becomes a reasonable thing right exactly and the existing users who have already paid would suddenly like the calculus there would be a lot easier to keep them around but like they sound like they're very adamant on the price which I think is unfortunate but like I don't think they're gonna bunch there so at this point it would just kind of be a factor like a we're gonna give you more time to transition this like if you have existing users we'll give you a few months to kind of make sure that you can transition them to new plans or figure in the arrangement where they're there you feel like they're made whole and you have sufficient time to kind of adopt a new payment model try out these new APIs test everything and have the proper time to do that I think time is almost like the biggest thing that they could have committed to that they didn't seem like they wanted to and then beyond that kind of just like I'd love for both parties kind of gather and say like man things kind of got worse than they were here like is there a path forward where we can just say like can we make this amicable going forward like there is some things that I think were proven to be incorrect that I think it would be great if they said like even if it was just a matter of saying like we were incorrect we were under false understanding what happened it happens yada yada yada let's talk but yeah just kind of like an olive branch to try to have both parties come to the table and just feel listen to again because just like kind of the still and while they put up over the last few weeks is kind of just sour things to an extent that I think like even if they were to say like we've gotten the price by 10 we're giving you a year it would make it hard to say like yeah but are you just giving it to the community or do you actually like want us around in any capacity soon so it kind of feels like that bridge is burned now I honestly don't if I got an email today where they were like hey we'd love to hop on a call and like give you a little bit more time to make this transition and we'd like to say like we could have handled this better I'd honestly be open to talking like I'm Canadian I don't hold a lot of grudges I don't think like I think it would have been like honestly silly fine talking yeah I don't think it's burned at all but at this age I'm not sure they want to reconstruct from the a little bit of charring that maybe did occur so you're now the symbol of a much larger thing that's happening on Reddit right like there was a post about a pile shutting down and that spiraled into an ongoing series of subreddit blackouts there are other asks in the mix now and they're important to note much of their accessibility right which I think even Steve Hoffman has said yep right it's gonna do a better job of this and then there's a set of asteron not say for content which it feels like they don't know that Apple has rules then like Reddit can't just like put porn in the app in the way that maybe they're being asked for but right now like one part of a series of asks from a pretty disparate group of especially moderators on Reddit do you think that if they fix the API pricing situation and follow up back on track that that would soothe the community at large I think it would go a long way honestly to at least making them feel heard because like in this whole saga I don't think I've seen Reddit kind of offered a given inch on like any of the things I would say Reddit's political skills that operating in a community are negative in fact well and it's weird because like prior to this like I almost always understood that Reddit is a company understood that they're like a very community focused and they kind of did do the bullshit corporate speak and it was weird to kind of see this week where like they engaged in a lot more of that than I've historically ever seen them do and it just went over but as well as I thought it would it's tricky yeah like I think giving like a gesture goodwill that hey we're listening we understand that there's something to put it better I think honestly would go a long way because I think kind of just the general while their specific demands the almost general thing I hear is that like Reddit is like plugged its ears and refusing to listen to anybody about themselves and I think there's some very minor concessions that they can make to make people a lot happier like even if you take the not safer work stuff which I've almost committed to them saying like that's never gonna happen but like it's so strange insofar as like there is like a it's still available through the API it's just not available through third party app API access and beyond it they already have things like quarantine subreddits for some of like the more gruesome shall we say subreddits where you have to kind of like going through the official app or the official website and like kind of like rubber stamp and say I'm willing to see this and only that is available through the API and they've already got mechanisms in place like that where like I kind of understand my users are frustrated and saying like you've already got these mechanisms where users can like explicitly opt into this content through first party tools and then access it through their party tools why don't you employ such a system for explicit content for instance and to my knowledge I'm really gonna clear answer there and it's like wait I can give the clear answer to them okay please it's because they found a number of loopholes that let the app slide through app review and they're terrified of changing anything such that they might not get through app review I mean that's that's the answer from every social network that I've ever heard is like once you have ticked enough boxes inside enough secret words or magic incantations you just never mess with it again that's fair and that's kind of in my experience with follow where like there was I think a while back like a bunch of other apps were pulled for not safe work stuff and like the apps or rules are pretty clear in that like if there is content accessible in that way to my knowledge like you can't expose a point of all these users have to explicitly opt in and have to be able to opt out and insofar as like that's the system I've had in the Apollo and I've never touched it since either but it's just one of those things where if they have that system working in the reddit app and in some capacity they have a system for that I don't see why that same system couldn't apply to the API at large you know I mean like I'm totally for a system that guardrails all that content and make sure that it's like incredibly difficult to get to an apple doesn't get angry but just extend that system that you've already built to the API I guess yeah this is what this is what I mean about the politics of it right like you can send that message like hey we don't even want to talk about this too much in case Phil Schiller is listening you just have to trust us we're doing everything we can and that's kind of the vibe from a lot of social networks but you don't you need the chips to cash to say you just have to trust me on this and it feels like you have more of those chips with the reddit community you have more trust in the reddit community than reddit itself and I'm wondering if you see that playing out in the dynamic between the company right now maybe and I think if I do have those chips it's just because I've been communicating through this whole process and that's all I mean like there was so many talks on the phone with reddit where I was just saying like can you make this pricing make sense to me like how you arrived at it and they just never would and like it's the same thing with the not-safer work stuff where they kept saying like we're gonna ask some people and see if we can get back to you on that and I still have not got back to on that and I think they just communicated community that like we think not safe work content is like an ongoing like really sensitive thing with with app stores in general and we want to make sure that like we have absolute control over how it's accessing and we feel that third party apps we don't trust them not to accidentally mess up and get off to trouble and like that would be an unfortunate answer but I think it would almost go over as being appreciated but the honesty yeah rather than kind of just not saying anything at all and just saying it's gone like stop whining but it's like the not-safer work thing for me personally like well I get there's a lot of moderators I'm like not safe work communities are gonna like be affected by this that I got why it's a big deal for them but like for me building an app like if I lose that it's not the end of the world it's kind of it's kind of everything else like that's one of those ones where I'm willing to drop if need be. So I think that we are in an absolute moment of change for what you might call the web 2.0 era we are seeing these social web companies most of them say for Facebook never figured out how to reliably make money and grow that's Twitter that's Reddit that's all these companies they're shutting down their APIs they're pissing off their users everything else is turning into a TikTok clone there's something happening here right and it seems like the open social networks could potentially have a moment I don't know if they're going to or not but you see the activity around blue sky or I'm asked on we have pictures of the new one from Instagram it's coming out called p92 that should interoperate with mass song we think have you thought about I'm just gonna take my users and go build a Reddit that works with XoV.5? Well even more specifically now this week one of the things a lot of users have been saying is we're leaving Reddit we're gonna go to like Lemmy and Kibin or the two that I keep hearing about let me spin around forever right and yeah is there a move that way that you think is real that you might want to be part of it's tricky because like I to a certain extent yeah like that does sound really interesting but it's like with mass don't for instance I love it but I've seen so many people even in the tech community who totally have the means to make that move if they want to who have just been to intimidated or just can't get off Twitter for some reason that like in the back my head that I'm like if these people who are much smarter than me can't make that change is that something that like is this just like a short term thing where we all had our time in the sun and it's gonna go back to centralized services or like it's hard for me to like and so far as like build another thing that like if it's just evaporated again it would be like a double breakup especially where it's like this has been so exhausting for the last few months that like the amount of work it would take to like for all the API and points over to like Lemmy or Kibin or something like that would be a gargantuan amount of work that like I'm not sure like at the moment I have like the capacity for and then for like just the complexity of making it work long term it's just like it's a big question mark for me that like at this stage I'm not sure I'm totally interested in pursuing but like it's also one of those things where I completely wish it the best and if something that was decentralized kind of became a norm I think that would definitely be a win for everybody. You're just saying you don't have the energy to yourself I get it I feel that too.

That's real. Yeah that's fair. So as it stands right now you're set to turn off the API token and basically shut down Apollo June 30th what percentage of you believes you will actually shut down on June 30th at this moment in time. Oh gosh like 90 percent 95.

Really so you're fully prepared for this to happen. Oh I would say like I've talked to like my reps at Apple to like get the process started like I like as much as I would love to say like this has been a big bluff and I'm hoping Reddit will like it was literally a matter of like Reddit hasn't answered my emails like in a while like every public statement I've seen seems like the CEO is quite angry over this like they don't seem to want to budge on the timeline at all like I don't see how I can make this work and there's certain like things like when we thought in Twitter if it shut down like there is there's processes you can do with Apple where you can say like a you can opt out of your refund or something like that and that's kind of something you want to get started before the apps actually shut down and run deletes it so they can ever see that kind of offer so like there's certain things I need to kind of get into motion that I can't just sit around forever hoping that Reddit will email me back or Reddit will listen to the community and it's tricky because like I've loved building Apollo and like even even about $3500 that had set cost like I was kind of excited for the opportunity like what could write it on that thing look like and I was really excited for that so it's kind of like hard for me to to say that but at this stage like it's just hard for me to like see a path forward where they're like reasonably willing to like meet me even a quarter of the way here it just seems like they're they're so angry for lack of a better term that I kind of just feel like it's better for me to be honest with myself rather than hold on to the hope to the last minute and then just completely fall apart but I really do that 10% of me really hopes that like I'll be able to say like I help them to call with Steve like we talked it out like there was some some pleasantries exchanged about like misunderstandings we're all good now like they're giving us more time to adopt the API and we're sticking around like I would love that but it's it's one of those things where it's like it's totally an in Reddit score and I'm happy to like talk whenever but I just haven't been able to reach them I guess how much is that 10% of you hanging on sort of the size and scope of this revolt that has taken over Reddit the last couple of days I mean because it really it went from like a small thing that a few people were mad about to effectively the size of Reddit like everyone is aware that this is a thing now and you I keep thinking of like Jennifer Lawrence and the Hunger Games with like everybody holding up the market J except now it's like the Apollo logo do you have some hope that that might make change do you have hope that they'll kill all the other third party apps except for you well just to take that to its natural conclusion well it's funny we've like a lot of us like to my knowledge pretty much all of the third party does like when they started going down any early team like I reached out to them it's like why don't we group check together and kind of just like talk and figure this out and like to my knowledge like the vast majority of them won't be able to survive this and for the ones that are kind of like testing the waters to see it's very much like this might be possible I don't think it's going to work very well but I'll maybe give it a shot especially like with the timeline stuff being as it is like I'll like it's going to be tricky so it's kind of like I think at this point it's not like is everything going to die it's like is there a way to unkill everything and honestly a big part of me is because like honestly I think Steve has historically been like a great CEO like he's not like he found the company so he's not coming in here as like a Wall Street business guy like trying to you know finagulant numbers like he deeply understands Reddit and I think he's in tune with that community aspect where you can't just bullshit them and they'll eat it all up like he knows right it and I'm hoping that like over the weekend and seeing kind of the feedback here that he sees that and says like the community feels very passionately about this and there's a way to kind of heal this where I can come up with a good guy and just make everyone happy just by giving like a few concessions rather than having this kind of like explode further and get out of control like it's it's to me it feels like it's a very clear easy win for him and Reddit that they can make that a small part of me is like it would almost be silly not to just because it would be so easy but I'm also going to this black at like no expectations like it happens but I kind of don't want to set myself up for like hyping this up being like yeah I'm gonna have a job again why that might not be the reality. Have you thought about what happens next if a Apollo goes away you're gonna go build a Twitter app and just because you're a masochist yeah. No I was thinking of the version of any junior journalist positions open or anything like I might be able to get into that I have a unique aspect on Apple maybe but but no I think like last year when the dynamic island stuff came out on the iPhone I built like a little almost like digital virtual pet app thing that I kicked into Apollo and I ended up spinning off into a different app and that actually makes like a little bit of money on the side that's actually really nice so I think I'm gonna kind of take a summer and see now that I've got full time to spend on that if I can kind of give out any likes and see where that would be like in September or October but yeah other than that I think it's kind of just relaxed a little bit I kind of haven't like had any like long-term time to relax in like nine years so it would be I guess there's so much science to losing a job.

Like greatest regret in life is I never took a year to be a bartender I'm just putting it out there everyone else can run it I don't think I'm allowed to go be a bartender for you anymore kids got to graduate college before I can do that and then we'll both be bartenders together but that's my choice. It's a long time Apollo user I beg you not to follow that. What is Reddit but a bar without boost. There you go.

All right we should let Christian go here Christian anything we should have asked you about any other rude things you want to say about Reddit please. No I honestly think like very highly Reddit and I just really all right well Christian Neillai thank you both we got to take a quick break and then we will be back to talk meta Mark Zuckerberg division pro twitter and whether anyone is really scared of apples new headset we'll be right back. Hey I'm mappi shell comedian writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4u page and I'm starting a brand new podcast wait wait don't swipe away it's called that sounds like a lot as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning you read three headlines and you immediately think oh that sounds like a lot I can't deal with all this but guess what I can deal with it and I'm gonna get into it every Friday I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world then I'll sit down with a comedian you can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying maybe an actor they go coming to them and gone too far you go why does the Sadie Hawkins day maybe a filmmaker since leaving that show I'm challenged sparing I just gotta hang out and try to do the one with a char and blind could be a politician basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs we're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio so yes you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast this is not the place to get the news but it is the place to feel a little better about it that sounds like a lot part of the Vox media podcast network. I'm Maria Sherpa and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition work ethic and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives actors entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. We're back so as I'm sure you know Apple launched its Vision Pro mixed reality headset last week and when it did everybody immediately started comparing it to one very specific competitor the meta quest which is kind of the default headset in the market right now.

Meta even tried to beat the Vision Pro to the punch it pre- announced the quest three a few days before we got the Vision Pro it's not coming out till this fall but we heard about it way in advance. Then not long after Apple's announcement Meta held a huge all hands meeting to talk about a lot of things as it turns out including the Vision Pro and a new Twitter competitor that the company is building. The Verge's Alex Heath heard that meeting and is here to talk about it. Alex Heath hello.

Hi so I want to talk about Meta two different things going on here in one meeting but just to set the scene a little bit here Apple's about to launch the Vision Pro Meta launches the quest three in an effort to like front run what Apple is about to launch and then Apple launches the Vision Pro and then Meta coincidentally maybe not coincidentally has an all hands meeting basically right after the launch in which they talked about it. Was this a coincidence do we think? It was a coincidence actually it was a wonderful coincidence for me as a meta reporter who also was on hand to try the Vision Pro but a coincidence nonetheless. Okay and so I would imagine there were a lot of people at Meta who had been very very curious to see what Apple was going to launch and as far as I can tell or at least as far as you reported Mark Zuckerberg saying not afraid this does not feel like it's going to run the meta business they're not out here like all the journaling apps are out here being like oh this is we're probably screwed now because Apple launched a journaling app.

I don't get the sense meta feels that way about the quest. Yeah I mean I think the context of when and how he was making these comments is important here because this was the first big company wide meeting that meta had done since before the pandemic started they used to do these in an area of the campus in Menlo Park called Hacker Square it's kind of the original famous Facebook campus and this was the chance for thousands of leaders across the company to come together in person for the first time in almost three years and it was Zuckerberg's moment to really address everyone after all the layoffs that meta has done the really rough couple of years it's had and so you got to think in his mind this is a rallying-crime moment this is a moment to get the troops excited about the company's vision and also of course talk about competition and yeah I would say you could hear it even in his voice as he starts to talk about the Quest 3 which was the headset that they pre-announced right before Apple and as he's talking about the price he starts to really get into the Apple comparison. You can hear in his voice that there's definitely a view inside meta that their ability to price this thing at $500 is going to be a real competitive advantage at least for the next couple of years and I think they're right you know Zuckerberg talked about you know we've already sold tens of millions of quests we're going to probably sell millions of the Quest 3 and meanwhile Apple is rumored and I've heard to sell maybe only a million of the Vision Pros in its lifetime as a device so for the next couple of years the headset market is still net us now we know that Apple has a history of coming in at the high end with new product categories and then iterating bringing down the cost curve releasing cheaper devices they're already working on a cheaper vision device that I've heard about that probably won't come out for at least a couple years but they're going to be coming down in price over time so you know as Zuckerberg again in a few years how he feels. Well that's the thing I'm kind of wondering is the other thing that Apple has a habit of doing is launching a product and then its primary competitor says something to the effect of we're not scared this is nothing you Blackberry said it Nokia said it Bill Gates said it like this is a thing that Apple keeps doing I mean Steve Ballmer data that's the most classic like absolutely after I reported on these comments and Zuckerberg made about the Vision Pros saying basically you know we're going to be okay everyone was sharing those clips of Steve Ballmer laughing at the introduction of the iPhone all those years ago and the price of the thing that's exactly right so I think there's kind of two genres of that right there's the one that's the kind of we're not scared rally the troops thing even though you are scared and then there's the other thing where you genuinely aren't scared and historically speaking those have a tendency of not working out super well for the people who don't think they need to be scared which do you think is true of Mark Zuckerberg right now was that a thing to kind of you know be good from morale within me or is he actually not worried about what the Vision Pro is at this moment.

I think it's too early for them to tell no one in that has tried the thing you and I are only one of the lucky few that have actually and Zuckerberg made a note about that you know he hasn't obviously tried it I think where he felt some solace and I'm not quite sure I agree with this interpretation but where he felt you know okay was that Apple is really positioning this device as a general purpose computing personal device it's not really something that they're seeing at least initially as a gaming platform or a social platform if you notice in their keynote that you and I were there for at Apple Park or in their promotional materials for the Vision Pro pretty much everyone is by themselves wearing the thing right staring into space with their eyes peering through which I think was actually a little bit bizarre on Apple's part but that's a whole nother tangent and meta meanwhile is the social media company and whether they're doing it right or not I would say that Horizon their 3D social world experiment for the quest has been a utter disaster and they know this so far but they're trying to position it as a social you know Zuckerberg is talking to me and others about really the magic of this technology is the feeling of presence feeling like you're with someone physically even when you're not and you know I will say like on quest past quest demos I've done with him and other execs like even as the legless you know early Sims looking avatars that they have it's true that like this medium does give you that sense of presence and Apple's going at that as well they're just they're doing it in a slightly different way in a way that's a little more broad and I think Apple's gonna do its classic thing where it's gonna let developers come up with the killer use cases here and that is way farther ahead on that track they've already got dozens of premium game titles for the quest they've got a whole fitness category with supernatural and social experiences as well so and beyond all that I think if Apple had come out with say a thousand dollar vision device that wasn't a pro device that was a mass market direct quest competitor that was maybe just like double the price I think you would have a very very different tone from Zuckerberg and and meta yeah that's when we would have gotten marks promising everyone that he's not scared for sure like not I'm definitely not scared not at all nothing to be scared about everything totally fine it's not a problem that would be on the tone if this thing had been a thousand dollars but I do think like to your point there were two things that he said that you reported on that really jumped out to me one was that the thing he took away from the vision pro announcement was that Apple hasn't come up with magical solutions to the things that make this really hard which I was really interesting and really true because the thing that Apple did was say we're gonna make all of this really good and it is going to cost $3,500 and the sort of vibe coming from Zuckerberg in that moment is like yeah sure we can make a good one of these two it would also cost $3,500 and so for him to say you know they have not found a magical solution to the problems that we're all trying to solve in this space I thought was really interesting and then the other piece is exactly what you're saying and it's the social thing and I think there's a whole other podcast we should probably do at some point about how Apple talked about this but it is so bizarre to me that Apple came out and was like we don't want to sell you a device that goes into the metaverse where you put on a headset and disappear from the real world and it's totally anti-social thing and they just showed people sitting on couches alone and then it comes out and it's like we don't want you sitting on couches alone we just want to strap you into a headset through which you totally disappear from the real world and go somewhere else and it's like both of these companies are sort of saying the same dig at each other from completely opposite directions and I kind of think they're both right and I just cannot wrap my head around this and this goes back to like you were saying this all last week when we were in Cupertino's like these companies are trying to do the same thing they're just coming at it from totally different directions they are and like you know as you know we've gotten to experience the vision pro you and I most people have it and yeah you're right Apple's marketing materials position it as this thing and they talk about the spatial awareness and letting people come in and out of the frame and that's a really cool experience you know we both saw that and experienced it the pass through the Quest 3 is going to have full color pass through as well and it's going to have a heavy emphasis on mixed reality so not full immersion more so than any device meta has done to date it's not going to have its high quality of pass through as Apple because it's not $3500 you can see the contrast in how Apple approached the product and that was what Zuckerberg was talking about was where they clearly were going we want to achieve a level of visual fidelity richness latency that feels as close to the real world as possible and you know in my demo of the pro I got that right there were no pixelations on text on Safari whether it was way up close to my face or way on the corner of the room right the Quest is different right you're not going to be like reading a long article in the Quest it's not a good experience because the graphics aren't that good so Apple guided towards this experience and it turns out that in the year 2023 if you want to have that experience it's cost $3500 with Apple margins so meta on the other hand is going how much technology can we pack into a lightweight you know the Quest 3 is going to be 40% slimmer than the Quest 2 how much technology can we pack into a headset that we can sell for as cheap as possible and this is ultimately where all this goes is Apple is a hardware company where they make money by selling devices primarily at least for now that's going to change over time meta is an advertising company and they see seating the world with these devices as part of that long-term strategy to eventually just make money the way they always do through software through services through advertising you know can you imagine like the Facebook ad system but over your reality right which is like as dystopian as you want to think of it that's right but that's where they're going so that's where they ultimately are approaching this differently and what I think was giving Zuckerberg a little bit of that confidence that you hear from the meeting that I listen to but again like talk to me and him again in three years and it's going to be potentially a very different situation I will say and this is something I just noticed being at Cupertino and then listening and watching the meta meeting the week after is there's a real palpable difference in conviction from Zuckerberg about this technology and about the importance of it to his company's future versus Apple I think for Apple it's going to be perfectly fine if the Vision Pro and that entire category just doesn't work out I think Tim Cook wants it to be his legacy but I'm not sure he's really sold on the device as it exists today the rumors at Cupertino where that he just isn't a big fan of the device frankly and that he's waiting to just see what happens with the category and he is really looking ahead to AR glasses which is that lightweight everyday pair of you know wearable computing you put on your face that you can take out with you that's potentially a much bigger market and that's exactly what Mark Zuckerberg thinks as well so they're both going at that direction but like you said in very different ways yeah it's not nothing that we didn't see a single Apple executive wearing a Vision Pro and you talked about this in command line your newsletter whichever they should go subscribe to and when meta announced the Quest 3 it was along with several pictures and video of Mark Zuckerberg wearing a Quest 3 like that's not nothing it's not nothing but also like that maybe not a good marketing decision based on how you feel about Mark Zuckerberg like I'm not going to say that they're making the right call there necessarily I mean he's wearing like a tactical vest and a Quest 3 like a great look at all the greatest look but he believes in his product yeah you've got this you know being very excited and it's just a very rich tech business rivalry story because the reason he's so passionate about this is really because of Apple and because of how Apple has had its thumb over Facebook during the mobile era with things like app tracking transparency all these App Store sagas that they've had with Facebook you know it's it's well known at this point that Apple and Facebook are kind of ideological opposites and that's been a real point of pain I would say for Zuckerberg and Facebook over the last decade plus and what really drove a lot of this work he's doing on headsets and the metaverse and wanting to shift to you know mix reality computing is let's try to come up with the next computing paradigm that may eventually supplant mobile and be a leader in that category and have our own platform so that we're not beholden to Apple this time again you know I think back to when I interviewed meta-cto Andrew Bosworth probably in 2018 2019 and he told me something that has stuck with me about all this Apple stuff where he said we don't know that if whenever Apple eventually comes out with a headset if they would even let us on it so we have to create the hardware to give us space for this next medium so they were already looking ahead to this moment all those years ago and thinking about this and I really do think that animates a lot of attention between the two companies today yeah that's super interesting and speaking of companies with whom meta has a lot of tension let's talk about Twitter and threads which is the other thing that you learned from this meeting where Chris Cox who runs product at meta told the audience a lot more about this Twitter competitor that we've been hearing about for a while walk me through it what did we learn yeah so there's been reporting on this from our friend Casey Newton and others kind of leading up to this that meta has been quietly building some kind of social media app that's going to directly compete with Twitter it's going to be text-based interestingly be based off of Instagram so you'll be able to bring your Instagram network with you to the new app on day one and I would say probably most interestingly it's going to integrate with Activity Pub which as we talked about on the Vergecast on the Verge a Bunch and you wrote that great feature about David is this decentralized social media protocol that powers Mastodon and a bunch of other apps think of it like email for social media where you can take your data with you between different email apps and so during this big meta all hands it was the first time that leadership had acknowledged that this new product was coming to employees and really gave the high level pitch for it Chris Cox the head of product for all the social media apps at meta framed it directly as the company's answer to Twitter is what he called it and had this little line kind of throwing shade at Elon Musk and how he's handled Twitter that got a pretty good reaction from the audience based on a lot of research we've been doing from creators who are interested in having a platform that is same run that they believe that they can trust and rely on distribution safety ease of use reliability and a way of paying attention to what they care about and they can show that how to save a place to build their values. So here's my question about this why on earth would meta do this because there have been people saying meta should just eat Twitter live forever and Twitter has been a mess for forever. Twitter has never made any money ever and we're still in this position where Twitter is a disaster of a platform and has been for a very long time everything that it makes is more popular than Twitter is just it's just a hell of a hole like why on earth would meta decide this is the moment when Twitter is like collapsing and the world is looking for something else this is the time they want to get into this and not only that they want to integrate with activity pub which is this new thing that everybody thinks is going to replace it but is also presumably going to be much harder to really scale and really monetize because it is decentralized. I just don't understand if i'm Chris Cox why this is worth spending time on right now.

It's a good question before I answer it did you all see Zuckerberg talk about this on like Sweden last week? No. Zuckerberg was interviewed by Lex Friedman recently and was asked about this and I thought his answer is pretty illuminating. You know I just thought that sort of a text-based kind of information utility is just a really important thing to society.

I always thought that you know Twitter should have a billion people using it. And that is something Instagram and Facebook have never really competed with. It brings up its own challenges as we've seen from Twitter over the years but that is something like the thing where cable news is basically just anchors reading tweets I can see why if I'm Mark Zuckerberg I would have been jealous of that for a long time. Yeah you know Facebook has had this really long interesting I don't know what the right word is fascination with trying to copy Twitter and it's never worked so I'm not sure it's going to work this time.

Meta also has a pretty disastrous track record of launching standalone apps on its own. The app name that there is the current working name for this new Twitter competitor is called Threads which was another standalone Instagram app that was launched I don't even know when semi-recently at least within the last five years and was shut down because no one used it so it's kind of poetic in that way. Next thing would be IGTV again competing with YouTube. Like we're just going to recycle all the fees old ideas.

Yeah I mean I've been covering Facebook long enough to remember when they changed the news feed gosh probably in 2012 era around then to focus more on real-time updates and public figures instead of your friends and family and that was because Mark Zuckerberg was seeing the rise of Twitter. Twitter was in the process of going public and people thought wow maybe this is the next billion plus user platform to rival Facebook and so Facebook changed the feed to focus more on news. Fast forward to today and Facebook is actively trying to down rank and de-emphasize news and public content in the feed. So it is an interesting time to be doing this and I would say that everyone in the social media industry is just looking at Elon's handling of Twitter and going can we somehow slide in here?

Is there an opening? And you know Mark Zuckerberg if nothing is very competitive and wants to take opportunistic shots and I think that's really all they see this as. They're calling it Project 92 internally which is the first text message was sent and it's kind of a bolt I think for them to even try this right now just because you know I don't know if like people want the Twitter experience anymore it seems like there's a lot of companies trying none of really taking off and then on the decentralized side activity pub is growing but it's still not mainstream. Blue Sky which you know I'm also interested in which is a rival to activity pub is even smaller.

So on day one meta coming in here will make Activity Pub at least 10x bigger there'll be the biggest server on Activity Pub immediately. What that does for the rest of the ecosystem is interesting. I think it's important to explain maybe why they're even thinking about this app working with Activity Pub. If you look at what happened with Twitter all of a sudden I think a bunch of power users of Twitter myself included went oh wow like this can just be taken away like the company can just be bought and either shut down or either on can start banning people or banning links banning your ability to monetize.

It started to feel really fragile and the promise of Activity Pub is that even if one server on the network goes down you can take your entire following graph your account information with you to another server. So if you're a public figure if you're you know I reported and they said in the meeting they're talking to Oprah big celebrities like that to come onto this app on day one I would imagine that part of a good pitch is look even if we decide you know meta the company that we're not going to support this app you know five years from now for whatever reason you're at least going to still have all that you know account and follower information and posting that you've done built on Activity Pub and you can take it to Massadon you can take it to another app it's not locked into our ecosystem. Right in a sense it's actually like a really confident swing from this event because they're saying the bet then is that just by virtue of having a big network lots of people already use it and they have really good monetization tools that they can be like yeah we're not going to platform we're still going to win because we have all of these other tools around it that we can offer and even as I'm saying this it's a kind of a really compelling pitch it might work. Yeah and you know even outside of Activity Pub I've always found it fascinating that like the largest social media company in the world still needs to go to Twitter to like announce things right you know Zuckerberg famously doesn't tweet from his at Finked account anymore though I know he lurks on there but you've got other top med executives posting there all the time and sharing product announcements the kinds of things that we come to expect on Twitter I think that kind of annoys them and it has for a long time that people don't come to their properties for those kinds of updates and this is again the largest social media company in the world by a wide margin so I have to imagine internally there's also just this feeling of man it's probably going to feel great to finally just have a bit of this energy that we've never been able to capture with Twitter they're definitely going to try you know whether it works I don't know I think using Instagram is actually really smart because if you think about the kinds of celebrities and social graphs on Instagram I want to say social graph I just mean relationships between who is following who it actually probably mirrors Twitter more than you would think and it's definitely met as closest Twitter like social graphs so I think it's smart for them to use that instead of you know WhatsApp or a whole new account system for this so we're gonna have a lot of advantages going into this and it's really just going to be on them to execute and build something that like Cox said in the meeting is quote singly run totally well it seems like this is happening fast so we're gonna have to keep talking about this because I also there's a whole like that of us response to this that's been really interesting we're gonna come back to all of that for now we need to take a break and then we're gonna talk about Apple's new computers and whether a 15 inch MacBook Air is the magical laptop we've been hoping for thank you Alex appreciate us always thank you so we are 250 years into this American experiment and I say it's going okay I give us like a C plus there is no perfect past but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are gonna human that's what we do I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people what's gonna determine the next 250 years of America and how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve okay so I'm just gonna be a jerk here because I'm a historian so we have to have a prologue explaining you know we the people okay you know I just don't remember from school house rock we the people I don't even form a perfect union I established justice what is it insurance domestic tranquility so you're talking about a foundational document so I'm building a document that will protect American democracy that's this week on America actually this week on net worth and shell I'm joined by tanks and after the meme king with over 15 million followers across tank good news influencers in the wild and his personal account tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is how much a single sponsored post pays why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how mean culture think preparation age starter packs and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll make you rethink what going viral is really worth and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash your rich bff.

Welcome back last week in addition to the vision pro and all that new software at WWDC apple also announced a couple of new max a 15 inch back book air a new max studio and a new macro the virgin's monica chins spent the past few days reviewing the back book air and I think just got the studio and the pro in office to test them out so we should get into all of them let's get right here to talk about it hey monica hello hello how is it I feel like every once in a while a few times a year you're thrust into what I like to call like pure Macbook hell are you deep in it now how does it feel yeah this is one of those things where like in the morning in our slack everyone posts like a long list of what they're working on I just write apple for two weeks straight and no one questions me it's kind of wonderful that's about right so there are three computers coming out one you've tested two you're about to test I want to talk about all of that but let's start with the the 15 inch error which is the one you've had a chance to review so far the wrap on this when it came out was it is a macbook error it is all the things you think about a macbook error it's just bigger now is that true like is that kind of how it came out in the review also that is entirely correct it's a 13 inch macbook error but it is now 15 inches okay it is really remarkably similar the experience using it is very very similar but the screen is a lot bigger okay so we've been debating on the show now for what like 10 days why apple took so long to launch this thing but I haven't asked you and I'm curious as someone who pays a lot of attention to this space this is the kind of thing apple could have done many years ago it's not like there is some earth shattering new idea about 15 inch laptops in here where has this thing been wait a minute guys yeah so I think there are kind of two things and of course I can only really speculate one is that in the past several quarters pc shipments have been very slow it's been a much better story for apple than it has for pretty much every other pc manufacturer that we cover here but apple has still seen a large decline in its sales and its shipments since like the golden age and I hate to call it that but for these companies it kind of was in 2020 and early 2021 everyone was buying this stuff so a lot of companies companies in the pc space writ large have sort of been tasked with how do we convince people to keep buying stuff when the stuff they bought in 2020 is still like not particularly old like it's not falling apart yet how do we keep this market exciting and companies have tried various different things like we've had companies that are trying to do fancy ai stuff we've had like hp's doing this whole customer service thing and calling itself a solutions provider now and I would not be surprised if this was like a you know apple trying to figure out how is it gonna reach new audiences and how is it gonna release something that is gonna create a new cycle around the products that's putting out right now yeah it's an interesting thing because I think one of the things you did in your review is basically make a list of all the weird things pc manufacturers are doing to try to get people to buy laptops some pretty weird stuff out there oh my god it's insane and like seeing it all listed in a row is pretty wild like all the new screens they're trying and they're like what if we put the keyboard in a new place and it's like don't do that like it's fine we figured this out a long time ago yeah we got invisible touch pads out there we got dual screens we got all this stuff so that's um I started made this clear in the review but I personally I'm glad that you know they released their VR headset that was you know big and flashy and you know no one's gonna buy you guys have talked about that to death I'm glad they released this as well because this is a thing that people actually want to have been asking for and that they needed they weren't meeting before so I hope that this was partially response to to that need the other thing in terms of like why it took so long I do think this is a more niche product than the 13 inch MacBook Air um I think there are probably at the moment in the current market fewer people who want something like this than who want something like a 13 inch MacBook Air and so I think it you know it kind of makes sense that they did this one last I think it's probably a smaller market but I that doesn't mean there aren't tons of people who want it I think they're very well might be okay yeah so let's talk about kind of the pros and cons of 15 versus 13 because I if I'm just thinking about it off the top of my head it would seem to me that the two best reasons to buy a 15 inch laptop over 13 inch laptop if in fact they are essentially identical otherwise is just more screen size right like I can just do more stuff on the screen and battery life that because the thing is bigger there's more space to put battery those strike me as like the two most obvious things did those both pan out in your review like how much difference is two inches of screen in actual life but the screen is definitely is the major reason the screen is huge I've been sort of going back and forth between this and like the 13 inch m1 that work gave me for the past couple days and like after having used this 15 inch over the past weekend or so writing review I really did get used to it you know being able to just have two tabs open and like zoom out maybe once or like not at all I just see everything like not have to scroll that much and like really have when I when I write reviews I tend to have like a ton of things open I have like my spec sheet I have the product purchase page I have like our hands-on I have like my draft and then I have like my other draft or the stuff I cut goes like I have a ton of stuff I'd really like to be able to see as much as I can and get between it all really fast and a lot of the stuff I'm reading is like really long and requires a lot of scrolling to get to where I'm going it was just a lot less work to do that kind of thing on this like gigantic screen and I really got used to being able to have two even three things over the time that I just really quickly referenced and to sort of being able to see like my entire draft of having a scroll and then when I went back to the 13 inch pro like yesterday morning I was like oh it sucks like oh my goodness I have to zoom out like seven times to be able to see like the whole verge homepage when it's when it's in snap layout off this is the worst you have two full-size windows or very close to it sounds pretty nice like I was thinking about I've been using a 13 inch laptop basically exclusively for many years I've kind of forgotten what it's like to have a 15 inch but then I sit down next to Neelai who has like a 16 inch pro and it is like the biggest roomiest looking thing and I don't have to put Google Docs down to 70 percent just to see the whole text column like two inches does I think make a big difference yeah it's massive and for multimedia as well you really get it feels more immersive to me and I might not be the case for everyone but like when I'm watching like my YouTube videos or whatever I watch at night like I'm just like oh I can really see like details that I wouldn't necessarily see watching on a 13 totally so it does I think it significantly it's a lot more room it feels like a lot more room if you're someone who wants like as large of a screen as possible on a Macbook but you don't want to pay for the 16 like this will level up your experience in terms of battery life I do get more out of this than I get out of the 13 inch air it was not like a massive difference and I would say the testing I have right now is kind of in the margin of error so it does have a bigger battery it has a bigger screen that is powering as well I would not buy the larger one just for the battery life over the 13 inch air 13 inch pro at this point but I did get like a little bit more I'd say what I would say to that though also is they all just have such long battery life I don't know that I think for a lot of people it's probably gonna be a diminishing returns situation yeah that's very fair so and actually we were debating this on the show I'm curious what your your take is would you make trades in other ways like if it made the laptop a little heavier or a smidge slower or whatever in exchange for like six more hours of battery life would that would that mean something to you or have we kind of hit that plateau where it's like it last all day you really don't have to think about it that's good enough so at a certain point I think that you know that's totally subjective and it's like what you like I'm firmly in the good enough category but like me I felt very strongly that like give that man three days of battery life and he's a happy man yeah like I mean if you look at like my personal preferences like you look at what I use I use their teens in my personal life and that's because for me there's a point at which the battery life is fine it's probably around like 12 13 hours and after that like portability is super super important so like I don't own a 16 inch Macbook pro even though that is like some of the longest battery life that I get because that's just it's too expensive and also it's just it's really really heavy yeah and I like to carry things around with one hands and I like also I have to carry like seven laptops around at any given time so I need a lighter the lighter the better for me in my back but you know I think if you you know some people want a super super light thing that's like a Windows laptop that has only like six hours of battery life and more power to you but that's that's not enough for me I need to not have to think about my outlets that much yeah I buy that okay so were there any other sneaky upsides to upgrading from 13 to 15 yeah the speakers are fantastic oh interesting they're really really good the base is like very like you know I listen to the audio on this stuff all the time the base is usually like in Audible or Super Tinney this base is really good when I mentioned this interview when I first started playing like my Apple music on this I like thought it was coming out of speaker I was like where where it's connected to it's really good it has a nice surround quality I think in terms of multimedia consumption this is like probably one of the best devices you can get okay like a combination of the giant screen and like the really immersive speakers like I can't think of a better TV watching experience that I've had on a device if that's what you're looking for nice so and the interesting thing about that is it seems like what Apple did is instead of just shoving all the battery possible into the bigger chassis which is what a lot of manufacturers would do they actually use some of that space to stick more speakers in and I think to your point about diminishing returns I think like good audio is worth that space to me more than like another couple hours of battery life so that that makes me very happy yeah and also like everyone else needs to figure this out I feel like the fact that no PC manufacturers are out here pushing as hard as Apple on making the things sound good so I don't have to plug in headphones all the time is like please everybody else get on board yeah it is definitely the best speaker experience I've had from this category this year it's really I that was a treat I was not even really setting out to test that functionality but that that was worth mentioning yeah that's awesome so alright so downside the downside I would assume is just that it's bigger like like both physically bigger and heavier and presumably thicker and like how much bigger we really talk about here in like day-to-day use so it's very thin so I wouldn't worry about like your son and lay not be able to fit it in your briefcase when you cut it 13 your briefcase it is like it is very noticeably heavier and I know like people coming at me for this I understand I invite you to come me I deserve it to an extent I just I just I want to be clear this is not me complaining oh it's too heavy for me this is me making sure I want people to be aware if they've never used a 15-inch before that they are heavier than 13 inches and if you are buying this expecting that because it has the word air in its title that it's gonna be like two pounds it is not nearly as it is more than half a pound lighter than 13 inch I meant I made this comparison the review but it is much closer to the weight of the Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop than it is to the 13 inch MacBook Airs wow okay and again in the 15 inch category it is very light though it is not the lightest 15 inch laptop you can buy but it is it is light for the category but I want to make sure people know that if you're if this is sort of your first venture in a 15 inch into 15 inch laptops like these things these are heavier heavier devices than you will be used to yeah and I the reason I think that's worth you know noting is that the air like a big part of the air's value in the past has been it's really really light and that's what one of my favorite things about the 13 inch air is that 13 inch air is carrying around really feeling carrying nothing and that is not the case with 15 inch air it's heavier you feel it like I had a walk around in a tote bag for all that's not my favorite thing to carry to tow bag it is not quite the same experience again if you use 15 inches all the time this might feel like to you but if it was your first 15 inch or just be prepared it's heavier it's over three pounds the thing that's very exciting to me about this is that trade-off feels like something that is going to be very obvious and people are going to kind of be able to self-select into right in the way that like if I want to decide which iPad to buy it is immensely complicated and I have we have to ask a thousand follow-up questions before we can figure out what iPad you should have if you want to buy a MacBook Air it's like okay do you want the lighter slightly smaller one or do you want the one with more screen that's slightly bigger inside the head like that's it that's exactly that's exactly how this should work right there's like a little more you know the 15 inch air like performed a little bit better in our benchmark testing that the 13 inch air did there's more cooling it did not perform quite as well in most synthetic cases at least as the 13 inch pro which has a fan did so it kind of sat squarely in the middle between those two I also think like people who are shopping for the air like probably the synthetic benchmark performance like it's not as relevant to you all like I you know having used all these for like as I mentioned before like lots of internet things and like typing in my draft while referencing a spec sheet like there's not a noticeable difference between any of these when doing that they are all fast it is all fine yeah I like to think of myself as like the upper tier of the average user like I don't have any apps I use day to day that are like outside of the realm of being a regular person I just tend to have more tabs open than most and for me still the m1 air is like above what I needed performance wise yeah like I have an m1 pro at my desk that has like a hundred like youtube videos minimized right now because like I'm just the kind of person when I want to watch youtube video I minimize it because I'm organized like that and it works totally fine I don't need an m2 for that but if you're someone who thinks you might want to do like light room on this or something but not enough that you want to go up to the pro like that's a difference that's worth potentially looking into right so and this is what I was getting to with comparison actually because I think the air comparison is mostly pretty straightforward for people but the question of do I want a 15 inch air or let's say a 16 inch pro probably sorts itself just because it's still a gigantic price difference and you either want to pay for more or you don't but it seems to me now that the biggest single difference in terms of like what most people actually experience between these two laptops is the ports right and the air still has the like woefully tiny number of ports that you get on the 13 inch air and the pro has at this one a pretty good complement of ports right like is that kind of the main difference between the two at this point I mean the pro performs as a better processor sure so that's what I would say is the main difference in addition to the many hundreds of dollar price increase but again I think for most people looking to buy these things they're both still going to be more performant than most people need so again like if you know what you need what the pro is great it doesn't matter when you're if you're someone who's thinking about the pro versus the air I'm assuming that you are doing some kind of photo stuff or your coding or your doing premiere and that case generally we would not recommend the air if you're doing that kind of stuff like regularly like we have people in our office who like use light room and do a lot of raw photo stuff and they generally have gone for the pro and have said that the air is not really adequate for what they're doing so that is the main differentiator is the m1 pro and if you look at the benchmark comparison to like our m2 chip like I'm talking about like I'm comparing all these m2 machines to each other if you look at this m2 air model and you compare those benchmarks to the benchmark scores on especially on graphic stuff that the m2 pro and m2 max are getting it's not even close like they're so far apart from each other so that is the main differentiator but I do think that similarly to how I the experience I had on this the positives of it or similar to the positives of 13 and tier I think many of my complaints are still there the biggest one is the port selection I know lots of people are totally fine with having two USB-C I think having two USB-C especially on the same side is not my favorite thing and I think I had hoped that maybe this bigger chassis would allow for at least some on the right side too because that does offer you a lot of flex I mean the headphone jacks over there but in terms of like where you can charge it or where you can plug peripherals in I think it offers a lot more flexibility when you have ports on both sides for example my desk because of the way it's positioned relative to the power outlet it's going to be very difficult to plug my monitor in on the left side and that is going to have to do some reconfiguring I don't love that that is like my own personal thing to work through but I would love you know that is a downside for me when I think I would buy this I don't think this port selection would be adequate for me at least in terms of having them on the left there's finder some people but I think it limits the audience somewhat and continues to on the other hand this is the port selection apple put on the previous air it seems like they have determined based on the sales that that did that it attracted enough people as is so I kind of I you know I admire that they seem to have figured out what they want the air to be and they aren't you know trying to throw stuff at the wall to make it reach more and more people and that's something you do see lots of companies do so true yeah just like just maybe one more port apple just one on the right side of the right side of the right side of the right side that's all I like my wife has a galaxy crumbook and just the fact that you can plug a power cable into either side of that thing it's such a it's such a lovely little like quality of life improvement people make fun of me for this all the time like there are always people in my comments section like oh like why you really need ports on both sides of the wall it's like I don't think you understand like the freedom that you suddenly feel the weight that has lifted off your shoulders when you can plug a charger into either or martyr into either side it really it opens up your world in a way that is difficult to describe if you've been using MacBooks your whole life you don't have to do that thing where you like turn it 20 degrees just to be able to get the thing to connect from the wall it's yeah no it is exactly literally life changing in like the stupidest way when I got my new m1 MacBook Pro I have to say this now I had like I had to get other cord from it because the one that I had wasn't long enough to reach all the way around on the left side like it's you know that kind of thing does matter it's difficult to explain if you're really used to having all your ports on one side or the other but I think it makes a difference in your experience yeah no I'm totally with you so compare this 15 inch air to the windows stuff that's out there right now and I feel like we've hit a place where to you know use a pun that I hate is a pun it's all kind of apples and oranges right like apples seems to have just started playing its own game in laptops but there are a lot of 15 inch windows laptops out there that are kind of right around in this price range is there anything in the windows world that stands up to what apples in terms of the combination of performance and battery life that this offers I have not seen anything the 15 inch lightweight space is already somewhat niche you know there are some big there are some big models and there are some that are lighter than this but generally I think there's sort of a stereotype right now that the 15 inch is the big powerful one and the 13 inch is like the weaker one for interesting sure Netflix thing and if you look at always the 15 inch category itself is a huge category but if you look at where a lot of revenue is coming from for PC manufacturers a lot of it is gaming laptops and the lightweight sort of ultra portable quote unquote 15 inch categories I think seems a little bit a little bit more of a niche thing right now you have models like the LG gram 15 the galaxy book pro has a couple 15 inch models here and there you know they're fun to use I like using all of them but in terms of the the battery life that this gets and compared with the the performance that we've seen on these synthetic benchmarks this m2 chip just like offers you a lot more and I think if you're if you're someone who's just like oh I just want a lightweight 15 inch laptop and 3.3 pounds is my ideal weight point like this would be the one I would suggest you for the moment fair enough all right real quick before I let you out the other two max are the new studio and the new pro you haven't tested them yet but I'm super curious both of these the studio in particular is just like a straight up chip upgrade right like that has anything else about that thing changed and the pro is basically just the studio with some extra ports so I'm curious just like walk me through the testing plan people want to know how are you gonna actually evaluate these things the first big question with the studio is gonna be how much has it improved from the last studio that we tested and so for that I'll just be doing a really close like everything we did in the last studio let's do on this studio how much improvement are we seeing then what does that say about these new chips since this is our first time getting a look at those and then we're gonna look at that versus the pro now we expect the performance of the studio and the pro to be the same because they're like everything about them is the same we'll sort of double check that and make sure there's no like surprise this one's cooling is terrible or something and then there's another question of just like why buy the pro why buy the Mac Pro I think a lot of people are asking that question right now yeah very very good question that's gonna be a little less up to testing and more of like you know talking to people seeing you know are you thinking about buying this would you buy this how much does the PCI stuff like impact your life so those are gonna be the those are gonna be the okay I suspect the studio has reached a point where it is kind of the default choice for this kind of computer right now it seems to see it that way too that it's like if you have a crazy system you need a lot of powerful things for the plug into the ports that the pro has terrific buy a pro it's seven thousand dollars but if you want apples most powerful desktop computer like most people that answer is the studio now right is that kind of the operating assumption yeah I mean in so far as these things have the same chips in them right like the studio is nicer looking in my opinion it's easier to slot into places you don't love the cheese grater I love the chip I mean maybe there's some people out there who are just like big fans of big fans of cheese grater five thousand dollars for a cheese grater right now yeah they'll be paying a lot more for it but so it seems to me like given how much more expensive the pro is like the burden should be on the pro to prove why you should pay more money for it and at the moment I don't really see intuitively like why would be worth that much more but we're gonna we're gonna dig in and we're gonna try to find out fair enough all right well thank you good luck I hope you're not in Mac hell for too too much longer thank you all right before we go let's head up the first cast hotline and see if we can help somebody our question this week comes from Michael hello this is Michael from natural gently my wife and I are starting to plan on having children and I have found that trying to find actual good sources of information on baby tech is a minefield of SEO and just horrible to find actual recommendations on security for tech related to baby I'm curious if y'all have any recommendations on either specific tech which would be great but even more broadly just how to find good sources of information about that and what to look for to be safe just any advice you have on that would be great I appreciate it have a great day I really like this question in part because as the parent of a six month old I am deep in the middle of all of this right now but I also like it because it's just a question about how do you trust things on the internet I will say for me two things have come in really handy one is just finding a couple of sources you trust this is just good advice for anything on the internet for me the website baby list has been incredibly useful I've just found myself going there and it's kind of like what the wire cutter is for gadgets like you can do a bunch of research or you can just buy the thing that I recommend and it works out fine baby list is great there's also a youtuber called dad verb that I really like there's a lot of stuff on baby youtube but dad verb for me has been somebody who I feel like I trust his taste and he has good ideas about things and this is the weirdest advice I'm going to give you I have found chat GPT and other chatbots to be incredibly useful for finding baby stuff don't trust any of the information that it gives you but what it's very good at is figuring out like which products a lot of folks talk about so it kind of gives you a place to start you can just say like what are popular strollers or what's a bathtub toy that a lot of people like and it'll just sort of throw options at you and then you can at least narrow down your research to a handful of things instead of totally starting from scratch with everything but michael mostly know that I feel your pain it's awful and you do things like google why is my baby coughing and it's a total disaster just don't panic and find a couple places you trust and stick with that so that's my advice but for more advice I call Jen Patterson-Touis who is both a parent and our smart home reviewer so is well versed in all of the questions about tech in particular that you should bring into your house here's what you said my sort of number one piece of advice if you go into use any kind of video monitoring is only buy from trusted companies companies that you know the brand name you know the security and privacy you can read their policies online or abbreviated versions of them you know how this company is going to manage your data but if you're concerned you can also do things locally apple home kit for example has a home kit secure video element that processes all video locally and so that's a good option there are a lot of great dedicated baby monitors that are smart but there's no reason why you can't just use a standard smart home security camera and adapt it to your needs if you want to do something like monitoring your child but honestly I think it's worse as a parent to have a video feed I think watching your baby all the time is a little you know for my personal experience I think audio is absolutely fine I don't you know I feel like audio is probably the best way you're more likely to hear something than you are to see something so audio baby monitors you know those work locally over local frequencies in your home normally 2.4 gigahertz which is as we've discussed in before it's a crowded band but it's just as useful to alert you to problems it's a bit of a minefield parenting tech the list that they tell you need all of this when you have a kid and then six months later there's this pile of boxes you never even opened things so yeah wait for a use case and then look at specific devices and look into the privacy and security there rather than like trying to kick everything out beforehand which can be complicated all right that is it for the varchcast today thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening there is as ever lots more on all this stuff we talked about especially the reddit chaos at the varch.com we'll put some links in the show notes but also you know read the website we have a story stream on all the reddit stuff it's super helpful it's a very confusing weird story and it seems to change all the time check that out if you have thoughts questions feelings or favorite subreddits that are still alive that you want to talk about you can always email us at varchcast at the varch.com or keep calling the hotline we're going to try and answer a question on here every week i think we're going to do a whole hotline episode soon so keep sending us all of your questions 866 v1 1 and as again if you don't want to call varchcast at varch.com that works great too this show is produced by intramurino and lem james varchmanters is our editorial director of audio the varchcast is a varch production and part of the varch media podcast network me and ly alex and i will be back on friday to talk presumably more about reddit but also instant pots smart homes and lots more we'll see then rock and roll