Today on the flagship podcast of undersea cable management: The Verge’s David Pierce and Josh Dzieza discuss the industry of laying and maintaining undersea cables that connect us to the internet. Tom Warren and Joanna Nelius join the show to discuss the future of Arm chips on PCs and whether or not we’re about to get a huge jump in performance on most laptops. Alex Cranz answers questions from the Vergecast Hotline about e-readers and the latest Kobo devices.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00:00 Welcome to the Verge cast the flagship podcast of undersea cable management
00:00:04 I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting here after a bunch of travel
00:00:08 Doing what it turns out I do like a few times a year
00:00:11 Which is basically get bored with all of my gadgets and instead of buying new gadgets
00:00:16 I try to just like change everything about the ones that I have to make them more interesting
00:00:22 So like I just took the monitor on my computer off of a stand which I've had it on for a while and put it
00:00:29 On to a monitor arm
00:00:31 Does that make any difference? No, but it feels new now and that's very exciting
00:00:34 Like I change the lock screen on my phone and I switched it from dark mode to light mode
00:00:40 Suddenly feels like a new phone the real best version that by the way is by a new case or take the case off
00:00:46 All of a sudden it's like you have a completely new device and it only cost you a few dollars or absolutely nothing at all
00:00:52 I also change the watch face on my Apple watch
00:00:55 I tend to like go from one pair of headphones to another pair of headphones for a while
00:01:00 I'll change the wallpapers on all of my devices
00:01:02 It just kind of makes everything feel new and exciting without actually making any meaningful changes
00:01:08 Because otherwise if I let this feeling go on long enough, I end up buying something
00:01:12 I absolutely do not need or like upgrading my perfectly good computer
00:01:16 Just out of sheer like need to have something new
00:01:21 So I figure a wallpaper is probably easier and definitely cheaper. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today
00:01:27 We're gonna do two things
00:01:29 first we're gonna talk to Josh Jezza who has spent a long time reporting a big story for the verge about undersea cables and
00:01:36 What that means basically about the infrastructure of the internet that the way that we connect to the world is just a bunch of cables
00:01:44 In the ocean that is both more interesting more important and more unstable than you might realize
00:01:51 So we're gonna talk about how all of that works and what it takes to keep it working
00:01:54 We're also gonna talk to Tom Warren and Joanna Nelius about the chip race that seems like it's coming for us pretty soon
00:02:02 Microsoft has been making noise about how it thinks this next generation of Qualcomm chips
00:02:07 Could bring Windows computers on par performance wise with the latest
00:02:12 Macs from Apple which would be a big deal and if Qualcomm chips are finally as good as they've been promised for a really long time
00:02:20 It could change the PC landscape in huge ways
00:02:23 We also have a hotline question about eink and e-readers because this is the verge cast
00:02:28 Of course we do and lots of other stuff to get to also it's gonna be super fun really fun episode
00:02:32 All of that is coming up in just a second
00:02:35 But I've now been using light mode for like three minutes and I hate it. I'm going back to dark mode
00:02:39 Got to make that switch. This is the verge cast. We'll be right back
00:02:44 Welcome back over the last few years one of those ongoing news stories that always makes me stop and think is whenever a company
00:02:51 Usually Google or meta recently announces that they're starting a project to build a cable between countries or continents or across the ocean
00:02:59 Like in 2022 both those companies announced these big plans to build cables pretty much all the way around the African continent
00:03:08 The diagrams of them alone are mind-blowing
00:03:10 Just imagine you were sort of loosely tracing your way around Africa three or four times all the way around
00:03:16 That's what it looks like
00:03:18 thousands of miles of cable underneath the ocean hitting land at these various points all around Africa and
00:03:24 Increasingly, this is what the whole world looks like
00:03:27 The whole internet is just right there underneath the ocean all over the world
00:03:31 The verges chaschezza has been reporting on these cables for months and he's found himself inside a whole huge
00:03:37 Industry that really nobody ever knows or talks about which is the folks tasked with laying and just as important
00:03:44 Maintaining and fixing these undersea cables if you're hearing this on Tuesday as this podcast goes live his story just also went up
00:03:52 We might have actually beaten him by a couple of hours. So keep an eye on the verge calm
00:03:55 So we figured we'd have him on the show to talk about it and explain this whole under the sea world to us
00:04:00 Josh is a welcome back to the verge cast. Thank you. You have spent however many months at sea
00:04:08 Learning about the weird machinations of the Internet. Yes, unfortunately in port, but uh,
00:04:14 Because it's still technically the sea. Yeah, it's good enough
00:04:17 So I want to like talk through this big story that you've been working on and just published for us
00:04:23 but I also want to kind of explain the
00:04:26 infrastructure of the Internet in a way that I think you're now sort of uniquely set up to do and
00:04:31 My sense is what you've discovered if we're just gonna start from the very beginning. Is that like yes, in fact
00:04:37 The Internet is just a series of tubes
00:04:39 Absolutely. It is a series of tubes. I was surprised at actually how
00:04:43 Tube-like they are like you imagine at least I imagine I feel like a lot of people imagine kind of big pipes at the bottom
00:04:51 Of the ocean, but it's actually just little
00:04:53 Garden hose with tubes running between continents. They have some fiber optic cables in the middle
00:04:59 basically just strands of glass that
00:05:02 Lasers pulsing through encode data and that is how data travels around the world
00:05:07 So give me kind of the big picture way to think about this infrastructure
00:05:11 Like I know it's lots of very long cables
00:05:14 But like how how sort of big and sprawling is the undersea cable universe? It's huge. It's um, there are
00:05:22 500 or so cables around the world around
00:05:26 800,000 miles of cabling
00:05:30 Often going through between sort of big population centers
00:05:33 So you have a lot going from UK Western Europe to New York, New Jersey on the other side
00:05:39 you have various parts of California going to Japan or other locations in Asia and
00:05:44 That is how you know, you think about these big global networks
00:05:49 You are even if you're not always like if two people in America in the US are emailing
00:05:55 They're probably just on terrestrial cables. But the second you're accessing data that's overseas in some capacity if you're
00:06:03 Watching YouTube videos that were posted from somewhere overseas
00:06:07 It's cashed locally in a data center
00:06:09 But it got there using an undersea cable from some other data center somewhere and if you of course
00:06:14 Zoom or email or whatever with someone overseas it's going through one of these cables, right?
00:06:19 Yeah, how would you think about in the sort of day-to-day life of a normal person? How important are these cables?
00:06:26 Do you think I would say they're very important, but they might not be directly
00:06:30 Accessing them every day if you're on a big continent like North America
00:06:35 You're largely traveling over terrestrial network
00:06:38 But services you interact with are dependent on these cables
00:06:42 So you have like big global platforms like YouTube and tick-tock that content is reaching you
00:06:48 Like the last mile is gonna be terrestrial
00:06:51 But it got to North America using a subsea cable a lot of financial depth data any kind of international transfer is
00:06:59 Happening on a subsea cable anytime you call a customer service and you're talking to someone overseas
00:07:06 That's on a subsea cable and then you have kind of the bits of
00:07:10 The Internet you have you might a little website
00:07:13 It might seem like it's local but you have you know software libraries and various things that could be stored somewhere else that it's calling
00:07:21 On and you don't necessarily
00:07:23 Know where it's coming from
00:07:25 So I would say every day you're doing something that maybe on the secondary tertiary level relies on these cables
00:07:33 Got it. Okay, and undersea cables if I understand correctly are not like a new
00:07:38 Internet II idea right the idea of having a cable that connects the United States to Europe and Europe to
00:07:45 Africa and Africa to Asia or whatever we know how to do this at this point, right?
00:07:50 Yeah
00:07:51 one of the surprising things to me and doing this story is how
00:07:55 Little this has changed over the years and I'm not just talking like the decades of the Internet
00:08:00 but like a lot of these companies trace their lineages back to the telegraph era and a lot of the practices are
00:08:05 Dating the telegraph era like you lay cables you repair cables pretty much how you did in the 19th century
00:08:12 Yeah, we're talking like mid 1800s right when the telegraph was starting to kind of move around the world
00:08:17 Yeah, you read these accounts of the early telegraph people and and it's quite a lot of its trial by error. It's quite exciting
00:08:23 It's people they don't really know how electricity works
00:08:25 They don't really know what the bottom of the ocean looks like
00:08:28 And they're just sort of setting out being like well
00:08:30 we strung a cable over through the English Channel like why not do the ocean and
00:08:35 Just more terribly for several decades before they eventually figure out how to do it. Okay. So today
00:08:43 What does it take to keep all these important garden hoses safe and working?
00:08:47 So they're breaking all the time. They break 200 times a year. It's like every other day a cable breaks
00:08:53 So we have 500 cables and 200 of them break every year, right? Yeah, they get 200 breaks
00:08:59 Sometimes they're on the same cable. It's complicated. But yeah, basically a good chunk of them are breaking
00:09:03 There's enough redundancy in the system that data can be routed around on alternate paths
00:09:09 So you don't really notice but you know, if they if 200 cables were to stay broken you would notice things
00:09:15 Very bad things would happen. So yeah, these breaks happen all the time 200 times a year and when one breaks
00:09:23 Traffic is rerouted along alternate paths. And while that's happening
00:09:26 One of this small band of ships will sail out with some spare cable and fix the break
00:09:33 You know as the internet has become more important. There was a report that was interesting a couple years ago that talks about how
00:09:39 Cables have not become more vulnerable in recent years. It's just that our dependence on them has grown
00:09:46 Exponentially. Hmm. So say in the 90s, there's a massive break some things break. It's not bad
00:09:53 You might not notice in your day-to-day life now everything breaks, you know banks stop working
00:09:57 Companies can't function supply chains break websites don't load we rely on it for everything
00:10:03 But the industry that repairs it keeps things running is basically the same. This is sort of handled by private companies
00:10:10 that have a bunch of contracts with cable owners and they have this arrangement that is sort of
00:10:18 you know days back half a century maybe where everyone kind of pays into a
00:10:23 organizing body that has a couple ships that stand by and repair any cables that break in a
00:10:30 Big zone and like the zone is the Atlantic Ocean
00:10:33 Big big zone. Yeah. So how do these cables break?
00:10:37 Overwhelmingly, it's people break them specifically fishing vessels break a lot of cables
00:10:44 you have these dredging nets trawl fishing that they
00:10:48 scrape these big
00:10:51 hooks across the bottom of the sea with a net and
00:10:53 They snap cables all the time. So it's not like a
00:10:57 Targeted attack on the cable. It's just this gets caught up in the fishing net and snaps kind of thing
00:11:02 Yeah, what if they just there's been hardly any proven?
00:11:05 Hostile attacks on a cable. It's almost all just sort of accidental damage
00:11:10 You have a fishing fishing vessel you have like a ship drags its anchor in the wrong place
00:11:16 Things like that and then you have natural disasters you have like landslides under the ocean basically earthquakes volcanoes
00:11:22 Weird currents things like that and then you know, there have been cable breaks that people suspect could maybe be from a malicious actor
00:11:31 But it's never really been proven
00:11:33 the one case I've seen cited was like during World War one when
00:11:37 Various that the UK and and Germany sort of sent people ashore to cut telegraph cables with axes other than that
00:11:44 There hasn't really been any documented cases of a of attack on a cable World War one
00:11:49 Lot of fights over tick-tock and World War one right from from what I remember. So you mentioned the the maintenance industry here
00:11:56 What is this industry look like this feels like this incredibly important?
00:12:01 Gigantic job like is this is this a huge teaming industry of huge teaming multinational corporations?
00:12:08 Fixing the internet. It's really not it's actually quite a small industry like
00:12:13 Ballpark, maybe a thousand or so people in the direct sort of maritime side of maintenance
00:12:19 Do you have all 800,000 miles of undersea cables? That's right
00:12:23 So you have there's about 70 cable ships in the world, but most of them mostly do installations which pays better
00:12:29 You have like 22 or so
00:12:32 dedicated maintenance vessels and
00:12:35 they're stationed around the world, you know a handful per ocean basically and
00:12:41 Their job is to you know, like firefighters
00:12:44 Stand ready 24 hours a day to sail out within 24 hours of being notified of a cable fault
00:12:50 So they belong to these consortiums they you know, maybe a couple different maintenance providers
00:12:56 Have a ship in a given ocean and they cover the whole area
00:13:00 and if you're a cable owner you call the maintenance provider and say I have a cable broken send a ship out and
00:13:05 They send the ship out to fix the cable. It's basically how it works. Wow
00:13:11 It's like it's like an adventure story every time they're like we have to we have to go explore the depths of the ocean
00:13:15 To find a broken garden hose and figure out what to do with it
00:13:19 It really is like drop everything we go to a random place in the middle of the ocean often
00:13:26 Wow 22 ships
00:13:28 Strikes me as not a lot of ships to cover a all of the problems
00:13:33 You've described and be just the sheer size and scope of all of this. Can they do it with 22 ships?
00:13:39 So they have done it with 22 ships. Okay fair. I guess. Yeah, the internet still works. We're still here
00:13:45 Okay, I think the the concern is that a lot of these ships are getting pretty old. They're like several decades old
00:13:51 there's not a lot of money coming into the industry and
00:13:54 if there were to be a big event like a big earthquake or a deliberate attack on a cable choke point or something like
00:14:02 That then you could have a real disruption
00:14:04 so the ships are really this critical component of the internet that so far have been able to
00:14:11 Keep things running, but it's pretty lean if there were a major event
00:14:15 It would be challenging I think in some cases for them to do the job
00:14:19 Okay, and who are these people? Is this like a is this a sort of manual labor kind of job on a ship?
00:14:26 Is this like a incredibly technically complicated job on a ship? Like who are these folks doing this work on these ships?
00:14:33 It's both manual labor and very type of complicated
00:14:37 You have a mix of you have crew who are sort of seafarers and run the ship and then you have cable engineers
00:14:42 Who kind of come from all kinds of different backgrounds?
00:14:46 But the job requires you have to be quite good at
00:14:50 geometry and and angles and forces and sort of ocean engineering stuff to
00:14:56 Know how to you know
00:14:59 Pull up a cable from several miles at the bottom of the ocean without things snapping
00:15:03 You're dealing with these big metal hooks that are used to catch the cables high tensions. It's like quite physically demanding work and
00:15:10 Then at its heart, it's these various
00:15:14 technical tasks that involved with figuring out where the fault is
00:15:18 Splicing the fibers which is just ultra precise work that's done
00:15:23 You know
00:15:24 You're fusing two strands of glass and to end with as perfect as you can get a connection and that stuff is it's you know
00:15:31 It's like
00:15:32 Neurosurgery, it's it's extremely delicate and you have to do it on a ship in the middle of the ocean, right?
00:15:38 Yeah on a rocking a ship that is in the middle of the ocean
00:15:41 This is like everything possible on incredibly hard mode at all times. Yeah
00:15:46 Yeah, it's pretty good as you see the the workshop zone is just like in the belly of a ship sort of surrounded by tarps
00:15:52 It's really not, you know
00:15:53 It's not this fat precision factory that you would want to be doing this work in so now I can't help imagining the like
00:15:59 Montage action scene of everybody snapping into action one of these things happening
00:16:04 So like walk me through the process a little bit. I'm in port in some
00:16:08 Centrally located city somewhere waiting for a call. I get a call from
00:16:12 I'm assuming it's like Google and meta who seem to be the companies that own more and more of these cables over time
00:16:18 They own a lot of the cables. They've a lot of the newly built cables are coming from the big big tech companies Google and meta
00:16:25 Primarily and then you have cables that are owned by you know, dozen sometimes
00:16:30 ISPs and telecom companies and things
00:16:34 Got it. Okay, and so each cable will have someone who's in charge of maintenance and you know
00:16:41 They'll get a message from their network operation center saying hey, we've got a cable down
00:16:46 Here's what we know about it. That person will then call someone at the repair organization
00:16:52 They could be public or private, but it's one of these consortiums. Usually I was really hoping there would be like a big red button
00:16:58 On somebody's desk that's like cable down and the alarms start going off in the ship somewhere
00:17:02 Yeah, there are alarms and big red warnings
00:17:05 But then it's a lot of people calling people around the world at weird hours
00:17:09 So they call someone at the on the maintenance side that person then calls the ship and says, you know get ready
00:17:14 We're gonna need X miles of spare cable for this cable system. We think it's here
00:17:20 We think this cut it whatever information they have and then they kind of plan out what the repairs gonna look like
00:17:26 Okay
00:17:26 And what what does a repair normally look like like walk me through a little bit of what it would look like
00:17:31 Actually on the boat trying to do the repair
00:17:33 Yeah
00:17:34 So the first thing you do is you need to locate where the fault is approximately and that's done on either end of the cable
00:17:41 Basically, you have people in the landing station on either end of the cable. So you on opposite sides of the ocean
00:17:48 Shoot a laser down there and it hits the brake
00:17:51 Reflects back and the time it takes to come back will tell you pretty much where along the cable the the break is
00:17:58 So like wherever the signal dies, that's that's the point you send them to exactly
00:18:03 Okay
00:18:03 And so you sail out to there?
00:18:05 With a certain amount of spare cable in your ship and a bunch of these big hooks that are called grap nols
00:18:11 Which I googled by the way, and they just straight-up look like Batman's grappling hooks. Like that's just that's just what they are
00:18:17 It's exactly what they are and there's a bunch of different kinds you have like multi grap nol things
00:18:22 You have ones with giant arms and blades
00:18:25 Depending on what the ocean bottom looks like whether it's muddy and rocky or what?
00:18:29 Cables are laid with such little slack on the seabed that you can't just you know, hook it and pull it to the surface
00:18:35 It's too hot
00:18:37 So the first thing you need to do is you need to cut the cable somewhere near where it's broken
00:18:41 Using one of these grapples but one with a big blade in the middle
00:18:45 so you drag this blade across where you think the cable path is and
00:18:50 Then you turn around with one of these grapples and catch one end of cable pull to the surface
00:18:56 Attach it to a buoy go back to the other side
00:18:59 Catch the other side of the cable bring it to the surface and then you do the splicing
00:19:04 So you splice like a piece of spare cable to that end go back to the other side that's attached to the buoy
00:19:09 Splice it to that end and then test it and you should have a working cable that then you have to lower back down to
00:19:14 The ocean floor. So it's basically like you're fishing for cables on the ocean floor, right?
00:19:20 Like how do they know if they've caught one?
00:19:22 It's exactly right like fishing based on just the tug on the line in this case
00:19:28 you have this enormous metal hook that you're dragging along the ocean floor and
00:19:32 as that's happening someone is in the bridge watching this one dial called the tension meter and
00:19:41 Watching it waver back and forth and one of the interesting things about it is it's an analog dial
00:19:45 it's not an ultra precise digital readout because
00:19:49 You want that kind of?
00:19:52 Fuzziness to be able to judge intuitively what's happening is tension rising or falling is arising and falling fast or slow
00:19:59 That you can't get from a bunch of numbers jumping around and so you're watching this dial and if it's moving up
00:20:06 Slowly kind of wavering maybe you're going through some mud if it jerks up quickly
00:20:11 Maybe you hit a rock and you what you want is this slow increase
00:20:16 So steady increase in intention that shows you've hooked this cable and you're dragging it along the ocean floor and that's when you know
00:20:23 It's time to reel it in interesting man. That's such a
00:20:25 inexact science
00:20:27 But that's like you just described like an art form more than a piece of sort of data analysis
00:20:32 It really is one of the one of the engineers I was talking to in Japan
00:20:35 It's it really is this act of kind of reading what's happening on the ocean floor imagining based on this dial, you know
00:20:42 I'm going I'm going over a trench and I've hit a rock. It's wild and how long does that process take?
00:20:48 Like days two weeks two months, even if it's hard to find the cable everything here is that just a massive scale?
00:20:55 so like if you're in deep water
00:20:58 The garden hose is several miles down and just the act of like lowering it down to the ocean floor and hauling it up can take
00:21:05 You know nearly a day
00:21:07 Because it's so deep and then so each step of this process takes several days
00:21:11 Splicing the cable takes about a day
00:21:14 It's just incredibly time-consuming and then so it's like if you don't catch the cable on first try then, you know
00:21:20 Several more days to try again and it adds up pretty soon. You're like you're out of sea for weeks
00:21:25 It just keeps reminding me of one of those movies where there's like there's the one
00:21:28 Shark that they're trying to catch and they're like we think we found it
00:21:31 It's over here and then they go and they don't get it and it's like, okay
00:21:33 Well, we think we know where it'll be next and it is this like sort of perpetual cat-and-mouse game that you're playing with this thing
00:21:39 Trying to get it into your arms and then you can do something with it. Yeah, it's remarkable how little visibility
00:21:45 You know they have onto the ocean floor and what's happening down there, you know
00:21:49 There are times when people are doing you know, a dozen passes back and forth being like well
00:21:54 That wasn't there. Maybe it's a mile that way and let's try over here and that's that's nuts. Why don't we know better?
00:22:01 This is one of the things I found myself wondering
00:22:03 reading your story is I feel like I could make a
00:22:06 Solid argument that the location of these cables should be like closely held state secrets that no one knows that
00:22:14 Because they're so important to the way that the world works that they should be
00:22:17 You know
00:22:18 It should be like the the bunkers where the president goes like you just it just should be all classified information on the other side
00:22:25 I can imagine a world in which we should do much more work to have much better knowledge of how these things work and where
00:22:31 They are and what's going on with them because they're so important and because laying them and fixing them needs to happen so quickly
00:22:37 But it seems like we're in sort of a weird middle between those two things. We're like we kind of know but not really
00:22:44 Yeah, it's a trade-off so you can go and you can see
00:22:47 Telegeography tracks cables you can see kind of broadly where they are in the ocean
00:22:52 If you're like a sea captain you get charts that have cable areas marks
00:22:58 you know with some degree of precision and
00:23:00 That makes a lot of sense because the biggest actual threat to cables is someone accidentally dropping an anchor on them
00:23:07 And so if you are worried about an attack and you make them a secret
00:23:10 You're probably gonna increase the number of accidental cable breaks on the other hand. They are vulnerable
00:23:15 It would be fairly, you know, you don't need a low-tech attack
00:23:19 You can just drag an anchor across the ocean floor in practice. The network is redundant enough
00:23:23 You're still talking about like a really small thing in a big ocean. So it's not quite that easy to attack
00:23:29 It would take a pretty sophisticated
00:23:31 Antagonist to actually cause a catastrophic cable outage. So so far it's been fine
00:23:36 But it is a topic of active debate I think and in governments. What should we do?
00:23:42 How should we protect these cables that are so important and for the people whose job it is to
00:23:46 Actually maintain them over time
00:23:49 What is life like you talk to a bunch of people who are sort of in this industry and in some cases have been for
00:23:54 A very long time, right? What's it like to be a sort of superhero keeping the internet running?
00:23:58 It's a very strange job people, you know when they join they tend to kind of stumble into it
00:24:04 It's not a very well-known industry. And so you have people who are working as cable engineers in some other area or
00:24:11 You know in merchant Marines or something like that
00:24:14 geologists in optics and they sort of stumble into it and you know
00:24:19 If they if they stay for a bit they can stay for a long time
00:24:22 Like decades a lot of the work is earned on learned on the job
00:24:25 And so people tend to sort of move around between different roles, but it's not an easy job
00:24:31 It's a weird lifestyle you rotate in and off ships. You're often far from home out of contact
00:24:38 You know it this is changing now a bit with Starlink, but like when you're on board one of these ships
00:24:43 Historically, you're pretty much cut off. You don't have great internet connections
00:24:48 You can't stream things or FaceTime or anything like that. You have the fast internet literally in your hands
00:24:54 You just can't do anything with it, right? Exactly. It's a difficult job
00:24:57 Just the lifestyle is hard, but people come to love it because it takes you to very unusual places
00:25:04 It's exciting and a lot of them have like a real sense of purpose
00:25:08 They're maintaining this infrastructure that the modern world runs on even if no one actually knows about it or what they do
00:25:14 Knowing you as I do. I'm confident that at some point in reporting this story
00:25:18 You tried to live the cable maintenance life yourself and you're like, yes, I will live the ship life
00:25:25 How close did you get?
00:25:27 Not that close. I did try, you know when I first heard about this industry
00:25:31 I was like, well, I should go on board for a repair and was basically laughed at
00:25:35 Several times, you know for various reasons the big one was security. It's a it's a secretive industry
00:25:41 they just can't have a journalist hanging out on a
00:25:43 Cable ship in most cases and then the other very compelling reason was that they don't know how long they'll be gone
00:25:49 So like yeah, you can come along
00:25:51 But maybe we'll be gone for a week or two and maybe we'll get called off to another repair and you'll be at sea for months
00:25:56 Uh, which is just you know hard to really plan around. That's fair
00:26:00 So were you were you able to get any kind of first-hand glimpse into this life? Yeah
00:26:05 so I ended up going to Japan to talk to people who work at KCS and
00:26:11 going aboard the ocean link, which was the ship that repaired a lot of the cables in Japan after the
00:26:18 2011 earthquake and tsunami and so it was in port for a period of time
00:26:23 I was able to go there and visit the crew and get a tour of the ship. What was the ship like it was?
00:26:29 Fairly big like 400 foot long sort of tall
00:26:33 Working ship. It's from the 90s. It's kind of old at this point, but well maintained
00:26:39 I'm imagining sort of a big fishing vessel
00:26:42 But instead of like nets and containers, it just has a massive spool of cable. That's basically right
00:26:49 It essentially is a massive spool of cable like the middle of it are these I think three big empty tanks that are just
00:26:56 Kind of spindles of wound spare cable. The interior is really empty
00:27:01 It's kind of like a it's built kind of like an aircraft carrier or something where there's no sort of beams or struts or anything
00:27:07 Because it's all just you have to string cable out of these tanks to the workstation and then out to the front
00:27:13 Where there's kind of a rolling
00:27:15 Puli kind of thing where it goes over and into the ocean got it
00:27:18 So it pulls it up and then you sort of spool from the middle boy. It's what a complicated system
00:27:23 It's counterintuitive how the how the ship is put together and how it all works
00:27:27 But that makes sense sweats you're working with a material that is thousands of miles long
00:27:31 It just creates all these weird logistical problems. Yeah, so you mentioned the the Fukushima incident in 2011 in Japan
00:27:38 Which was a big part of the story that you wrote kind of how they repaired and the reaction to all this
00:27:43 What was it about those repairs that was sort of different?
00:27:47 I feel like you found one of the hardest cases you could have to tell this story about what happened in that case
00:27:52 Yeah, so there are a few there have been a few major major cable events
00:27:57 This was one of them they tend to be earthquakes that caused the most damage
00:28:00 So so in this case, there was this very very large earthquake off the coast of Japan
00:28:05 it sent a large tsunami that caused immense devastation and
00:28:09 Part of that that tsunami knocked out the Fukushima nuclear reactor causing a nuclear meltdown
00:28:14 So you have this disaster on top of a disaster and then you have the other disaster, which is not really well known
00:28:20 But happened at the same time which is that the earthquake caused all of these submarine avalanches that wrecked the majority of the cables
00:28:28 Japan uses to connect to North America and the rest of the world and so while the earthquake
00:28:34 Tsunami recovery was happening while Fukushima was you know, people were trying to bring through Ashima
00:28:39 Under control the ship had to set out and try to fix these cables as fast as possible
00:28:45 While contending with the fact that there may or may not be a cloud of radiation over them
00:28:49 So yeah, I mean again
00:28:51 It just feels like so much of this process is just unknowns on top of unknowns on top of unknowns
00:28:55 It's just going out and trying to figure out. Okay, something happened to these cables
00:28:59 We don't know what or where or what it's gonna take or how we're gonna fix it and just bit by bit
00:29:06 They just solve it. Yeah, it's really just it's very methodical like you like you just gotta kind of follow the steps and
00:29:12 So they they looked at the cable map they figured out okay based on the timing of these faults
00:29:18 You know, interestingly a lot of them happened hours after the tsunami like like that night
00:29:23 basically
00:29:23 you have these big debris flows that sort of barrel down these canyons and end up wrecking the cables and
00:29:29 From the timing of the breaks they figure out that probably what happens
00:29:34 The seabed is probably very transformed. They're gonna need a lot of spare cable and typically you figure out, you know
00:29:41 It's not usually up to the maintenance provider which cables they fix first
00:29:44 It's usually kind of first come first served from the cable owners whoever calls in their fault first
00:29:49 But in this case the cable owners are like you guys figure it out like whatever whatever cable you can fix
00:29:55 Fix it and so they settled on
00:29:58 You know the one farthest from Fukushima because the other thing is that normally in a big event like this other ships
00:30:03 arrived to help but
00:30:05 There was so little known about what was happening with Fukushima and no one felt comfortable sending their crews into that
00:30:11 And so they were sort of the only ones doing it for the first the first period of time
00:30:15 so and then there was a moment in the
00:30:18 Fukushima response where they had pulled the cable up and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, right?
00:30:25 Am I right? What happens here? You get the cable up above the ocean and then you have to figure out what to do
00:30:29 What did they do? Yeah, so this was the first repair
00:30:32 They hooked this cable and they start reeling it in and it's under an unusual amount of tension and basically what happens
00:30:39 You know, they start reeling in very very slowly because every cable has a certain amount of tension
00:30:44 You don't want to exceed it because the cable could snap and so they're just moving very very slowly
00:30:47 It takes them nearly a day to get it to the surface and what they learn
00:30:51 when it gets there is that it's just been completely mangled and and what they think happened is
00:30:58 Some enormous landslide happened. It dragged the cable it buried it under a bunch of debris and now they've been slowly
00:31:05 Pulling it tighter and tighter and tighter until it reaches the surface
00:31:08 Now they can see it. It's on the front of the ship. It's on the the foredeck and it is
00:31:14 hooked around one bar with the grapnel and totally stripped and mangled and under a huge amount of tension and
00:31:20 See, basically at this point have like a thousands of miles long
00:31:24 Bungee cord like sitting on your boat exactly exactly attached to a heavy metal hook that if the bungee cord snaps
00:31:30 Which it's being strained at sort of each wave and and swell it will fly across the ship kill anyone it hits
00:31:38 Smash into the cable control room just do immense damage
00:31:41 And so the priority becomes you can't repair a cable under this kind of tension. That's this damage
00:31:46 They need to get it off the ship. And so they do this sort of complicated
00:31:51 Vicarious procedure where they they hook chains around each side of the cable
00:31:56 Swap the grapple out for a blade a grapple
00:31:59 Lower it back over the bow of the ship while they've evacuated the area and then once it's under the water
00:32:04 They release the chains
00:32:05 The cable is cut and goes back to the bottom and and they start over that feels like a really interesting
00:32:11 Test case because you know, like you said these cables go back a century
00:32:16 But 2011 is very much like the Internet and as we've learned, you know
00:32:21 Catastrophes happen things like this happen all the time in lots of places. That was a particularly bad one
00:32:26 But like earthquakes happen. We just had one in New York like these are things that happened
00:32:29 Did that were there any sort of lessons learned from that?
00:32:33 Like do you do you feel like whatever 13 years after that?
00:32:36 We're in a different era of how we think about undersea cables. Yes and no
00:32:41 I mean, it's interesting to look back on the coverage of 2011
00:32:44 Like a lot of the when the Internet was mentioned it was usually that you know, this is remarkable
00:32:49 The Internet fared remarkably. Well, it stayed up. Oh really? So for all the for all the issues the Internet stayed up in Japan
00:32:55 Yeah
00:32:55 and then so you have these reports and people were basically
00:32:59 Just you could only use the Internet to communicate in the immediate aftermath people were sending emails
00:33:04 They were tweeting people were posting videos
00:33:06 Other telecommunications were cut out like though the terrestrial cables were cut the cell towers were wrecked
00:33:11 and so they were really reliant on the Internet but you talk to the people who are at the operation centers and on the ships and
00:33:18 It was so much more precarious than people knew
00:33:21 Basically, they had succeeded in rerouting all the traffic over the remaining cables
00:33:26 But if one of those cables had gone down you would have started to see a real degradation in service
00:33:31 See where things would have started to drop it would have been difficult to communicate
00:33:35 and so it was sort of right on the cusp of being a
00:33:38 Communications disaster and the lesson that the industry learned from that is is largely around redundancy
00:33:45 There's not like a real geographic reason unlike the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait or something
00:33:51 There's not a geographic reason why all the cables were in one place there
00:33:55 It was a sort of habit like we always put cables sharing
00:33:59 They always kind of landed at the spot and so that makes sense
00:34:01 and so you had this these sort of choke points that then when a landslide comes through it wrecks a bunch of them and
00:34:08 There's more of an awareness that you need multiple landing points
00:34:12 But in practice that doesn't always happen because it's you know, cheaper to follow known routes or whatever
00:34:17 Yeah
00:34:18 So where where does it feel like this industry is right now?
00:34:21 obviously
00:34:21 it's as critical as ever if not more so like the world relies on this stuff more than we ever have and I feel like
00:34:27 purely anecdotally I've heard more about
00:34:30 undersea cable projects just in the last couple of years I feel like than I ever have and
00:34:36 That might just be because I pay attention to companies like Google and Meta and they're doing a lot of this stuff
00:34:41 But is there is there energy in this space to increase from you know
00:34:47 500 cables and 800,000 miles - are we gonna have more than that or multiples of that over time?
00:34:52 Do you think there we are in a cable boom right now?
00:34:55 there's a lot of new cables going in whether that means the net number of cables goes up is a
00:35:00 Debated topic because the cables are also
00:35:03 Higher and higher capacity. So some think maybe there'll be fewer of cables
00:35:08 They'll just be really really really high bandwidth, but but there are a lot of new cables going in and that's driven by
00:35:13 The tech companies primarily which starting a couple years ago
00:35:18 Decided, you know rather than purchase bandwidth on these cables
00:35:22 Let's have our own cables and so they started laying their own systems
00:35:26 largely between their data centers
00:35:28 and the reason for that is that they need a
00:35:30 ton of
00:35:31 Capacity to kind of sync all of their data centers around the world to keep these like huge content libraries up to keep their cloud
00:35:37 Services running and so they wanted to kind of that all under their own umbrella
00:35:41 But um that hasn't really spilled over into the maintenance side yet as mostly kind of the installation side
00:35:47 I was gonna say are we still it - we're still at 22 ships
00:35:50 Yeah, still not a lot of new ships there and and you know
00:35:54 Well, the new cables do provide a lot of redundancy
00:35:56 You also don't want you know
00:35:58 Your handful of super high capacity cables to go down because it's difficult to sort of move that track traffic over onto other routes
00:36:05 Yeah, as you were talking to people
00:36:07 Did you get a sense that there are new kinds of threats to these cables - whether it's?
00:36:13 some of the ones that have been there a long time getting old and not getting replaced quickly enough or
00:36:17 Climate change or like the geopolitics of the internet which are becoming a bigger and bigger deal all the time
00:36:22 Is there a sense that this could get worse rather than better as we fight about undersea cables?
00:36:28 Geopolitics are the big thing climate change will make certain things harder. I'll these cables all land on
00:36:35 Coastline which is sure eroding and sinking and that will be a problem
00:36:38 But part of the reason you're also hearing more about cables is the geopolitics around them have become really sensitive
00:36:43 Largely that has been China US
00:36:47 conflicts you have the US saying we don't want Chinese own cables landing in the US and
00:36:53 China also denying repair permits for the South China Sea or sort of slowing them down and
00:37:02 Concerns about routing cables through China's waters or into Hong Kong has caused this kind of reconfiguration of
00:37:10 the the network you have alternate routes going to the Philippines or a lot of cables landing in Singapore or
00:37:18 China trying to build up its own cable maritime industry so that it doesn't have to rely on on the West and these changes
00:37:26 are
00:37:28 Making it it's not necessarily harder, but a very different
00:37:31 it's just a period of change in the industry and and kind of one that is
00:37:35 Increasing getting increasing attention from from various governments that more governments are saying we need to control this infrastructure in some way
00:37:42 So and as you talk to people in this small kind of under talked about and under resourced industry
00:37:49 Is the sense that given all of that it is just change and this is stable
00:37:53 And this is how we're gonna keep doing things or did you do run into people who are like?
00:37:57 Screw all of this the answer is satellites and we have to get there as quickly as we possibly can or like is this just
00:38:02 What it is and we have to figure out how to do it better
00:38:04 There's a fair amount of concern. I think about the long-term
00:38:09 Sustainability of the industry it can't all be satellites. That was the other thing that everyone reminded me of
00:38:15 Satellites can carry like half a percent of the global traffic. It's it's gonna be cables. They're they're just way more efficient and cheaper to
00:38:24 Transmit data. There's a sense that they will have to navigate this. I think the industry has been pretty stable
00:38:30 For decades and there's some anxiety about these changes the big tech companies coming in
00:38:36 governments taking a greater interest the sort of geopolitical jockeying around
00:38:42 cable cable routes that are just gonna be
00:38:45 Tricky I think a lot of the anxiety comes from kind of the market forces
00:38:53 Involved like the big tech companies they have so much buying power
00:38:56 They can drive down prices and so they can negotiate lower rates
00:39:00 And so well, that means maintenance companies can operate year-to-year
00:39:04 It maybe means they don't have enough to invest in a new vessel
00:39:07 And so you have this kind of slow degradation which also means that they have trouble recruiting because no one wants to join
00:39:13 This sort of aging fleet. Sure
00:39:15 Yeah
00:39:16 Having done this whole process of reporting and sort of understanding how this world works
00:39:21 Does it change the way you think about the internet?
00:39:24 Like I feel like the more I learn about the actual infrastructure of the internet the more remarkable
00:39:29 It seems that any of this ever actually works and and I feel like I got some of that sense
00:39:34 From your story that on the one hand. This is this incredibly robust incredibly impressive
00:39:38 Group of people working on this thing that we understand and have worked on for a long time on the other hand
00:39:44 The internet is forever like one wayward anchor away from falling apart. Yeah, it's really it's one of these cases
00:39:50 I feel like you hear about every so often like the ways in which the internet is just sort of this cobbled together
00:39:56 Apparatus is way less stable than than it seems. This is just sort of an ordinary user
00:40:02 It does depend on just sort of these these random people whether it's like a software engineer. Who's keeping things running or
00:40:10 These people who are really good at you know, catching the internet cables with hooks in the ocean
00:40:17 That you know if it weren't for their sort of largely invisible work the the system would fall apart
00:40:22 All right, Josh, we gotta take a break. But thank you as always appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me
00:40:27 All right, we got to take a break and then we're gonna come back and talk about computer chips really really fast computer chips
00:40:34 We'll be right back
00:40:41 Welcome back a couple of weeks ago on this show
00:40:44 We talked with the Verge's Tom Warren about Microsoft's whole AI vision and specifically this idea of AI PCs
00:40:51 Still not really sure what that means
00:40:53 But Tom mentioned that Microsoft believes that a new generation of chips coming out from Qualcomm
00:40:58 Might bring Windows PCs up to par with Apple's latest Macs at least performance wise and that that might be a really big deal
00:41:06 Since then Tom has been doing more reporting on all of Microsoft's plans and I haven't been able to stop thinking about what might happen
00:41:13 If we really did get that kind of huge jump in PC performance
00:41:17 So I asked him to come back on along with the Verge's laptop reviewer Joanna Nelius to talk about what's coming and what it might mean
00:41:23 Tom hello. Hello again, Joanna. Welcome
00:41:27 Excited to be here. This is gonna be great. Okay, so let's talk about laptop chips the coolest sexiest thing in technology
00:41:35 Basically Tom you and I a couple weeks ago
00:41:37 You talked about what Microsoft is up to with AI PCs and this idea that like we're about to get this kind of
00:41:43 Massive uptick in the performance of laptops and everything is gonna be wonderful and solve all of our problems forever
00:41:48 I want to talk about what that actually means. So Joanna, you're a laptop reviewer Tom
00:41:53 You you cover all of our Microsoft stuff and between us. We're gonna figure out the future of Windows laptops. That's not good
00:41:58 This makes sense. Somehow we will
00:42:03 We are once and for all going to decide what an AI PC is and we're gonna do the world a great service
00:42:08 but Joanna, I want to start with you because I feel like we have been talking about this idea of a
00:42:14 Qualcomm powered PC being sort of a new and different and better thing for a long time
00:42:21 And that has not really come to pass. Is that fair?
00:42:25 Like is this am I the only one who has been dreaming about this for a very long time?
00:42:28 I mean, no, I think that's um, really fair to say
00:42:32 Now it kind of looks like it may actually come to pass
00:42:36 The jury is still out on whether or not it's going to overtake
00:42:41 Let's say Apple M chips or anything else
00:42:44 But kind of based on like what I've been reading and what I've seen
00:42:48 I think it will compete very heavily with everything else that is in the space
00:42:54 I don't think it's gonna be like yes, this is not the best thing ever
00:42:57 I think it's nice that we're gonna get another viable option and further just kind of
00:43:04 Differentiate what actual chips are in the systems that that we use
00:43:09 and perhaps our future purchasing decisions will be based on
00:43:14 What we actually need the laptop for and what chip is in it rather than just getting like an x86 chip in everything
00:43:21 Right. Yeah
00:43:22 So that's actually a good way to think about this, right?
00:43:24 and I think even just backing up a few years like to explain sort of the difference in even like the
00:43:29 promise between the two because I feel like there's the kind of Intel x86 world and then Qualcomm has been trying to
00:43:35 Carve out a different kind of computer for a while now. Like how would you frame the differences between the two?
00:43:41 Oh goodness
00:43:42 I think for that like I think we got a look at
00:43:45 Intel AMD Apple and now Qualcomm because they're all doing different things with x86 and ARM
00:43:54 Architecture so Intel x86, but it has the big little core difference the performance cores and efficiency cores
00:44:01 Apple does the same thing but on ARM AMD. It's just traditional x86
00:44:07 It's it's fine. Qualcomm is on ARM, but it doesn't have the big little arc
00:44:12 architecture, right and I think what's
00:44:16 Really kind of exciting and cool about all those differences
00:44:21 Is that because we have been able to shriek the transistor sizes on the actual chips so small
00:44:28 the
00:44:30 historical sort of issues that came with either
00:44:34 Clock based instruction sets or what is it?
00:44:39 RISC versus CISC
00:44:41 x86 has always been more hard hardware based
00:44:45 So with the drive into AI and you know Moore's Law kind of hanging in the balance
00:44:51 I think like there comes this question of well if we want our chips to handle these AI
00:44:57 Workloads, right? We got to move into an architecture. That's more software based rather than
00:45:02 Hardware and also I think it could potentially maybe lower prices a little bit like you can get you know, like
00:45:11 Today I hate I hate to use the term at work bang for your buck from like, you know an ARM
00:45:15 architecture, but like all these AI models like
00:45:19 Still needs something that's really really fast in order to be able to run them
00:45:24 So I think Qualcomm's approach is very interesting in that aspect because it has a long history in the mobile space
00:45:32 of kind of doing the same thing, so
00:45:36 Maybe it's gonna be you know, great right right out the gate, but if you're still sticking on the x86 platform
00:45:43 I don't know how much longevity that is going to have with Moore's Law and everything else since it's a hard a hard
00:45:50 Hardware based system. So that's my very nerdy answer
00:45:53 No, it's a good one and Tom
00:45:56 I feel like Microsoft specifically has tried harder to make this work than just about anybody and it's possible
00:46:02 That might be my own bias because like I find the surface line fascinating
00:46:06 So maybe this is a bigger Windows push than I'm realizing but I feel like for way too many years now
00:46:11 Microsoft has been like Qualcomm chips in surfaces. It's gonna be sick. You're gonna love it. Everything's gonna be great
00:46:17 I have that's just a lie. Like why is Microsoft so invested in this?
00:46:21 well
00:46:22 because it's the way that the industry is heading where Apple has pioneered with their own silicon like a
00:46:27 Transition like we haven't really seen before and they did it without emulation, right?
00:46:32 So they did it by translating those instruction sets. So essentially translating the way that app works
00:46:38 So you tell us do one thing and use one piece of hardware and it Rosetta which is Apple's thing translates that
00:46:44 And makes it run natively on that particular CPU. So my so tried this
00:46:50 Emulation stuff about a decade ago with Windows RT and surface RT, you know
00:46:55 There's that first the first iteration of surface was
00:47:00 That didn't really work out it was very slow there wasn't enough apps there was a confusing desktop interface
00:47:06 It was just a yeah
00:47:07 It was just a bit of a messy transition really because they tried to go this like
00:47:11 Steven Snowski was in charge of Windows and he really saw the vision of the iPad the full-screen apps and really wanted to impress that
00:47:18 On Windows that didn't really work out
00:47:20 so then they kind of went to Qualcomm with their tail between their legs essentially and
00:47:24 Teamed up with them as an exclusive partner to then do Windows 11 and Windows 10 sort of on arm stuff
00:47:31 It's better than those the dark days of Windows RT in that confusing mess
00:47:36 but it's still not quite there because the
00:47:39 Qualcomm chips just have haven't really delivered the sort of performance and like obviously I wrote about
00:47:44 Internally at Microsoft they're thinking these latest chips the Snapdragon X elite will sort of bridge that gap of performance
00:47:51 but the key thing I think will be
00:47:53 The thing that Apple's really nailed is the performance per watt and the efficiencies there and that's really important because you get really good performance
00:48:01 But it's not hitting your battery life. So you don't have like, you know a five-hour battery life
00:48:05 You'll get all day battery life is what they're saying
00:48:08 But what that translates into but if they can get close to like the m3 battery life and performance
00:48:14 Then it's gonna be pretty interesting time for Windows on arm, especially as there's like rumors of
00:48:21 Cheaper variants of the X elite. I think so story last week like X plus or something like that
00:48:26 So that could also open it up to more and more laptops because these have been pretty high priced items so far
00:48:33 It is very important that if you're going to you know, copy Apple's silicon strategy
00:48:38 You have to have a series of very confusing names that don't actually make any sense to anyone in terms of buying their chips
00:48:43 So I'm glad to hear that Qualcomm is just gonna name everything a bunch of words that don't make any sense
00:48:47 but it seems to me like
00:48:49 Personally, the reason I have always kind of rooted for the Windows on arm thing to work is that it feels like
00:48:55 There was this dream we were promised maybe not all the way back to the surface RT
00:48:59 But almost that far back of like a very thin. Yeah always connected with
00:49:05 The cellular connection that you get with Qualcomm stuff
00:49:08 laptop
00:49:10 Tablet that is more portable and lasts forever
00:49:12 Like I feel like it was years ago that they were promising like 24 hours of battery life out of some of these things
00:49:17 And it's like well sure it lasts forever
00:49:18 It will it will do one thing in the 24 hours that it lasts because the performance sucks
00:49:23 but Joanna like that sort of
00:49:25 Triumvirate of like power battery life and connectivity feels like it kind of doesn't exist in the Windows world right now
00:49:32 Right, like is it am I giving am I not giving it enough credit?
00:49:36 Like it's gotten a lot better like for sure the last maybe like five
00:49:42 Years or so maybe for like there's been a greater focus on power efficiency
00:49:48 One I think to Tom's point like it's very much being driven by Apple when they brought their M chip to market
00:49:57 You know, then it was like oh now it's game on like we really got to do this
00:50:02 and then there's sort of like the broader scope of like being
00:50:06 Conscious and conserving energy and everything else that's kind of also falling into it
00:50:12 especially with a lot of news reports that come out and they talk about like how much power like data centers just
00:50:20 Suck up and how much power is needed to run like AI?
00:50:25 Processes in the cloud, right?
00:50:28 So what we're already kind of seen is that companies are starting to rethink like, okay
00:50:34 Well, we need to like give people the ability to you know
00:50:38 Like run AI models like on their local device, right? Because that's what's going to
00:50:45 Give more longevity to what to what it is that they're trying to do
00:50:50 I confess as we've been talking about this time and in your piece
00:50:54 you wrote basically that Microsoft feels very confident that its new line of devices with the
00:51:00 Snapdragon stuff is going to match the m3 on performance match or exceed right that they feel good that it's going to be a real competitor
00:51:07 My immediate reaction is like cool
00:51:09 That's actually not the thing I care the most about in my laptop
00:51:14 like if you could give me something that ran Windows and got
00:51:17 85% of the m3 is performance and a hundred and five percent of its battery life. Like I'd rather have that
00:51:24 But I also like Joanna your point is really interesting that like maybe what we're actually heading towards is a
00:51:30 gigantic leap in the performance
00:51:32 We ask of our laptops if we're gonna start running these local AI models if this idea of an AI PC is going to become
00:51:38 true then like I
00:51:40 Sincerely believe that it's been a decade since most people were running up against the performance limits of their computer
00:51:46 But maybe we're headed back towards that and Tom maybe that's why Microsoft cares so much about this at this particular moment
00:51:53 Yeah, like it's interesting the way that they're they're thinking about it internally because it's it's it's a battle between Qualcomm and
00:52:01 Intel for this sort of AI processing and Microsoft shipped a laptop last year the surface
00:52:06 Laptop studio - that one had like some really custom
00:52:11 MPU from Intel because they hadn't obviously put it on the on the domain
00:52:15 Core ultra chips that they've started shipping
00:52:18 But even even that one is not very powerful like it can do the sort of basic background noise removal stuff
00:52:25 That's integrated into Windows
00:52:27 What I found fascinating about that push was that they didn't really explain what the MPU is really there for beyond that
00:52:33 I mean, that's the key thing that I want to see in May at this Microsoft event
00:52:37 It's like what is the MPU actually can be useful for these local tasks like they're obviously gonna have their own Windows features
00:52:43 But I'm more curious how devs will be able to like leverage this and software and stuff and speaking to Intel they they did some
00:52:51 Some recent stuff with some software developers where it can scan malware locally on your machine
00:52:56 So it doesn't take up your CPU, which is yeah
00:52:58 I mean that that sort of stuff's kind of interesting if you can offload that
00:53:01 But then what else do you offload like how much is too much?
00:53:04 And yeah, like it's gonna be interesting to see how that that works exactly
00:53:09 But I think more interestingly the way they count this is by T ops or tops or how you wanna
00:53:16 Yeah
00:53:17 and I think the Intel one the Intel core ultra ones that they call themselves as a IPC's are like 10 of that unit and
00:53:25 The ones in the snapdragon X elite and stuff for like 40. So a 4x
00:53:29 Oh, wow, like a four times bump on that and then the next-gen ones after that obviously gonna be even more
00:53:35 So so they're actually much less actually calling the Qualcomm snapdragon X elite laptops that are coming
00:53:42 Next-gen copilot PCs. So that's quite a that's where they're thinking is right because they're obviously
00:53:47 They want to come out and say Intel's core ultra ones just aren't gonna cut it
00:53:52 But they obviously don't have quite the same performance of for the AI tasks as the upcoming
00:53:57 Qualcomm stuff which makes sense because it's not on native
00:54:01 So and Qualcomm's been doing the MPU stuff for well for years so for quite some time
00:54:06 I think that's gonna be interesting battle about where do they offload this local AI stuff rather than push the
00:54:12 Copilot cloud stuff the privacy aspects like we spoke about the AI Explorer stuff where it's
00:54:17 Essentially gonna be a timeline feature on your PC where you can just say to it
00:54:22 What was I doing last week when I was searching for hotels?
00:54:25 Like what tabs did I have over pin and it'll be like here's all your tabs
00:54:28 so and it speaks to sort of like some of the way that we're seeing AI more broadly and
00:54:34 devices like you've viewed the humane the AI pin right like those sort of devices that
00:54:40 Leverage local compute or go off to the cloud for queries that hybrid mix or however
00:54:46 These companies approach that and when they get more powerful
00:54:48 It's gonna be super interesting to see how like Windows changes in a world where there's devices that are suddenly doing a bunch of stuff
00:54:55 That you normally would have picked up a mouse and keyboard to do but you can just use your voice with and it's always been
00:55:00 That promise right I can it's never never really got there
00:55:03 But it does feel like we're on the on the edge of that potentially happening
00:55:07 Well, but at the same time we're in this like impossible moment for kind of all computing
00:55:13 But I think Windows hits this may be harder than anybody is the Windows challenge has always been
00:55:18 That there are a lot of people who want to do new stuff on Windows and you can give people new stuff on Windows
00:55:22 But there are a lot of people who do stuff that hasn't been updated since 2001
00:55:26 Yeah, and they need it to work on their computer
00:55:28 And I think this is where you're talking about, you know
00:55:30 the Qualcomm stuff and the Windows on Arm stuff that has been challenging over the years is it's you can make the computer run and
00:55:36 Even if you make the computer run making the old apps that people need to do their jobs is a whole separate problem
00:55:42 Yeah, and I feel like now you're gonna tack on all this AI stuff and it's like, okay
00:55:48 If we were to just tear it all down start over and build PCs
00:55:52 Made for the AI stuff that you're talking about
00:55:54 That's one problem to do that that also runs the weird accounting software that no one has thought about in 20 years
00:56:02 But is crucial to how I do my business
00:56:04 Strikes me as a whole nother
00:56:06 can of worms and like
00:56:08 Joanna you you've been covering this up for a long time
00:56:11 Like yeah
00:56:12 Is that a bridgeable gap like I'm sort of I think the thing we've been burned about
00:56:15 With all of this stuff on Windows for years is that it is possible to do all of those things at the same time
00:56:20 And I still am skeptical the issue we're running into is not like
00:56:24 Necessarily like speed or anything like that. It's use cases, right?
00:56:30 So if we um, like go back way in history when Apple was trying to design it's like first
00:56:37 What was it the power PC?
00:56:39 But um, they were trying to do an arm PC like decades ago, right? But the reason why it never caught on then was because
00:56:48 Developers didn't want to port their stuff over right and it was so much harder to do that back then because of the speed
00:56:55 limitations of both
00:56:58 architectures right not to mention arm with its different instructions that relied on more lines of code and
00:57:05 It also relied on a lot more RAM to be able to do all all of that stuff
00:57:11 now the industry is like caught up with itself and
00:57:15 Hence why Apple came out with its with its M M chips now. I feel like we're kind of seeing more of the same
00:57:21 We got these AI chips with their
00:57:26 Neuroprocessing units in it that can do a variety of things at varying speeds, right?
00:57:33 But it's like the use cases that that I'm seeing for instance like generating music
00:57:40 From a text prompt like okay, that's cool
00:57:44 Like an actual like musician isn't gonna go and do that most likely
00:57:48 So who's who's it for like and I think all these like generative AI
00:57:53 Stuff we're still trying to figure that out
00:57:57 so there seems to be a mismatch between what the tech industry wants to do and
00:58:04 What laptop users basically want their laptops to do so?
00:58:09 Yeah, I do think we are we are due for a bunch of years of there being all of this really interesting new
00:58:15 Horsepower on these computers and a lot of people being like what are we gonna do at this?
00:58:20 But then like Tom to your point about background noise removal
00:58:23 Like that is the sort of thing that you can just sort of offload off of your computer
00:58:26 onto
00:58:27 this other chip that you never really have to think about it that just like instantly makes your computing life better and if we can
00:58:32 Find a bunch of those like I suddenly get very excited about the future of laptops and I get the sense Microsoft is
00:58:38 Heading down that road with Windows kind of as fast as it possibly can
00:58:42 Yeah, it seems like it's also interesting the way that they're potentially positioning their arm surface devices for consumers
00:58:50 and the Intel ones for for businesses that kind of
00:58:53 Suggests for the first time that they are they are thinking about like you were talking about previously that the legacy of these
00:58:59 Supporting these applications and stuff
00:59:02 they're starting to think of that as a consumer versus business thing because obviously predominantly businesses need that legacy support and it's great right you
00:59:09 can still run like a
00:59:11 MS-DOS application or a game from like the 90s like on your PC. It just opens it works great like
00:59:17 Of any company that builds software Microsoft has always done a very good job of supporting that and that's probably one of their
00:59:24 Greatest traits of even on the export side as well
00:59:27 But yeah, like it does seem like they are starting to think how do we split that up?
00:59:32 And the last time we did that was obviously Windows 8 so which went super well
00:59:36 Too drastic, but
00:59:41 Are they gonna redesign Windows for an era of AI like at the moment?
00:59:46 They've just shoved a copilot chatbot into Windows 11, which doesn't not much ambition there, right?
00:59:51 Like that's that's not as ambitious as I'd expect them to be maybe AI Explorer is kind of a more the hint to okay
00:59:57 How I could really change how you actually use your PC
01:00:00 Because you literally been able to type into a prompt and bringing up your search history or whatever
01:00:06 You've used on your PC is kind of wild if that works in reality and that could yeah
01:00:11 Like where they change the design of Windows and apps in the future would shift pretty big if they can leverage it
01:00:19 Well, at least for me and in an ideal world
01:00:22 I just want to talk to my AI chatbot like I don't want to type to it, right?
01:00:26 and it's
01:00:28 an accessibility thing for me because
01:00:31 Like talking requires so much less brainpower than like writing does so if I want to go look up, you know
01:00:39 My search history. I don't want to type that in
01:00:42 I know where to go find it and I just want to you know, like oh
01:00:46 Here's the little thing in my browser for history that I can see I can just click on it
01:00:51 and then I can like go through it all now if you have like a
01:00:55 Long search history and you have like no
01:00:58 Idea when you found that thing or what even what that thing was
01:01:02 Yeah, I can definitely see that being useful if you remember what you're trying to find
01:01:07 Yeah, it's um, it seems very similar to
01:01:14 Going into a search engine and furiously typing like trying to find the article that you found
01:01:21 Now for me, I don't save any of my search history
01:01:24 Like if I need to go find something I bookmark it and I have a little folder for it
01:01:29 so I know like I'm gonna go back and
01:01:31 find that so
01:01:33 philosophically, it feels like there's this
01:01:37 organizational method that I use and then
01:01:41 there's tools for people who maybe don't organize the same way like I do and that's kind of like where
01:01:49 AI is heading
01:01:50 As someone whose entire organizational strategy is just to open several thousand tabs and then close them when my computer collapses
01:01:56 Your way sounds better. All right before I let you go here. Let's let's just wildly prognosticate for a couple of minutes
01:02:02 So let's assume these Qualcomm chips come out and they are everything they are promised to be the efficiency is unbelievable
01:02:09 The performance is out of control. They are like they finally did the thing
01:02:13 Are we gonna get like a whole new generation of new kinds of PCs as a result?
01:02:20 Like if this is what we think does it stand to sort of change?
01:02:23 What our computers are or is this just like bringing windows kind of up to par?
01:02:30 With some of the best of what you can get from Apple right now
01:02:35 No, I like I don't think so. The hardware will still be pretty much the same
01:02:39 We've already seen the the limits of what they can do with the chassis
01:02:43 Anyway, like the surface Pro X is pretty much as thin as you're gonna get
01:02:47 This sort of hardware at this sort of stage until it really gets shrunk down even further
01:02:52 But so I don't think it's gonna change much on the hardware side. Yeah, you might get some thinner and lighter
01:02:57 Designs and all that sort of stuff. It will change the battery life like that sort of situation
01:03:02 I think would be greatly improved
01:03:04 But I think it's really gonna be on the software side of things how Windows leverages that MPU
01:03:10 like we've been talking about that that software side is really gonna be what differentiates these devices versus the
01:03:15 Laptops that you've got to put today. Yeah
01:03:18 My great hope is that you're totally wrong and that actually we're gonna go back to that phase
01:03:23 We were in 10 years ago where everybody was just like what if a laptop was different?
01:03:26 Yeah, maybe but I kind of think that went so badly for everybody that there's going to be real reluctance to do that again
01:03:32 Because like I think who was it a sir that was just like what if we put the trackpad above the keyboard and everybody's like
01:03:38 That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my whole life
01:03:40 and I think it the road to like
01:03:43 Wildly try to change what a PC looks and feels like is probably much longer than it once was even if we can do it
01:03:49 Yeah, that was like the Windows 8 era where there was a lot right experimentation in hardware. Should we say?
01:03:54 Yeah, which I think no one is eager to repeat. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think it's gonna be it's gonna be pretty timid
01:04:00 But I do hope we see thinner and lighter like the surface Pro X that sort of device is
01:04:05 Really nice if you can get more of that, that'd be nice Joanna. What about you any are you are you expecting wild experimentation?
01:04:12 Absolutely not
01:04:14 But if we can make chips just as powerful, but that also run cooler
01:04:21 We can make even thinner and lighter laptops the issue that we're running into now is like thermals, right?
01:04:27 And what happens when the processor gets too hard hot are
01:04:33 The the other components get too hot like that just means it's drawing in a lot of power. And what is it doing?
01:04:39 It's using more energy. It's depleting the battery life, right?
01:04:43 So a lot there are companies who have figured out like a nice balance with that like I find Lenovo
01:04:50 does a really good job at balancing power and
01:04:56 Their battery life so until we can like make chips that run cooler
01:05:01 I think that we won't like one see as many use cases on
01:05:06 the software side of things and then we also like
01:05:11 Will be limited to what sort of like new laptop and form factors can come out
01:05:16 Like I would love to see one of these
01:05:19 Qual Qualcomm chips in a dual OLED display
01:05:24 Like the Zen book or the Lenovo yoga book. I think that if
01:05:30 It goes like the best way possible
01:05:33 The Qualcomm chips will open the door for new for other laptop form factors that companies are already starting to
01:05:42 ideate and
01:05:43 experiment with and I find that side of
01:05:48 The industry far more exciting because at least for me having a dual screen laptop
01:05:53 it opened up a lot more possibilities to like my workflow and
01:05:56 everything else whereas
01:05:59 Awesome. There's an AI chip in this thing, but there's no I don't really use it for what they're saying
01:06:05 It's designed for so for me
01:06:07 It's not that to use lack of a better word like that that impressive because I'm like, well, it's fast. That's great
01:06:15 It's not for me though. So yeah, that's fair. I'm just saying if if the flippy laptop comes back
01:06:21 I will be happy with Qualcomm forever. That's all I yeah
01:06:23 Just give me a laptop that flips all the way around for no particular reason. I'm a happy guy. All right, Tom Joanna
01:06:29 Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you
01:06:31 We got to take one more break and then we'll be back to do a question from the first cast
01:06:45 Alright we're back let's get to the hotline as always the number is 866 verge 1 1 the email is verge cast at the verge
01:06:52 Calm, we love hearing all of your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week this week
01:06:58 We have a question from Tony
01:07:00 Hi bridge casters. This is Tony. I'm in the market for a new ear. I have books on Kindle
01:07:05 Epub formats and PDFs
01:07:07 I've been thinking about getting a books palma
01:07:10 But the price and it being kind of stuck on Android 11 maybe be obsolete too quickly is holding me back
01:07:16 So I just go the normie route and buy a Kindle also
01:07:20 How's the new Kobo color and why do I feel more complete when I buy a new gizmo and gadget any help?
01:07:26 You could give me it would be great. See ya all of the existential questions of the vert cast rolled into one
01:07:31 There is only one person on earth who is the most qualified to answer this Alex Kranz. Hello. Hey, yeah
01:07:38 I know why I feel better after I buy a gizmo. It's just like retail therapy. It's just
01:07:44 It's magic. It's there's just something where you're like
01:07:48 I have now acquired this and I'm gonna I'm gonna use it well, and it's gonna make me better
01:07:53 Especially with reading gadgets. There is something to like, ah, I've really fallen off on, you know deep
01:07:59 Classic fiction and this is the thing that's gonna get me back into it and it never is
01:08:04 But so I want to I want to answer this question kind of in reverse
01:08:07 Okay, tell me about the Kobo. You've now had it for a few days early thoughts. I like it
01:08:12 It's so I've got both the Libra and the Clara and I've been using the Libra more
01:08:17 I'm in fact right after I finished recording this
01:08:20 Running over to the library to update my library card so that I can get some books on it because it's got overdrive built-in
01:08:26 Which is really exciting, but it's also a Kobo e-reader. So it's like built for Kobo's bookstore and stuff
01:08:33 So it's a little more difficult to use like you you know
01:08:36 It's a little more difficult to get all your books on it
01:08:39 If you're not already in the Kobo ecosystem, right, but it's still really good and it's super light
01:08:44 And it's just like it moves fast. It just like I'm like, I make that noise every time I like turn it on just like
01:08:51 Oh, it's just it's just go it. I really just the one screenshot
01:08:54 I keep seeing of the home screen of the color where you can actually see the color on all the book covers
01:09:00 I'm just like, ah, I want that. It's wonderful. But also it is in no way. Perfect. Yeah, I believe it
01:09:05 Kaleido three the the technology they're using is really good and it is
01:09:10 So much better than previous iterations of color ink
01:09:14 But it's still like the colors aren't as vibrant as you're used to on other displays or even just like print magazines
01:09:23 Yeah, it's fair. And I think to some extent that's fine
01:09:27 Yeah, I think I don't know I've now used these devices long enough that I think anybody who is like mad about the pixel density
01:09:33 Of e-ink is kind of working up the wrong tree. That's just not the point
01:09:37 I think it's good enough in most cases
01:09:38 But then it's weird because color does introduce a thing where like when it's just sort of black on
01:09:43 Gray, you don't notice it quite the same way, but I can imagine when you have theoretically lots of colors
01:09:49 You're gonna notice the things that don't look good more
01:09:52 Yeah, and I you'd really notice that on like the Android e-ink tablets that do color like it is really really noticeable
01:09:59 It's it's a lot easier on this one
01:10:01 And and I think for most people if you're ready to dip your toes into color e-ink
01:10:06 I need more time with it
01:10:08 But I suspect Kobo is the way I'm gonna push people for a little while because it's just like it's a nice ass
01:10:13 So far I'm enjoying it, but yeah, it's not quite
01:10:20 iPad worthy, so if you're still like I want it to be an iPad. I'm sorry
01:10:24 Yeah
01:10:24 I do think I've like the first question I ask people now who ask what e-reader to buy is
01:10:30 Are you sure the correct answer isn't an iPad mini because I think for a lot of people that correct answer is an iPad mini
01:10:35 It's also like three times the price in a very different battery life story and all of that
01:10:39 So let's just leave that one aside for now like Tony ask yourself
01:10:42 The question is the right thing an iPad mini and if it's not let's keep going
01:10:46 So the question of which e-reader to buy is I feel like you and I talk about this every time we talk about this
01:10:52 It's like weirdly a lifestyle decision because you're like, okay if I buy a Kindle
01:10:55 I am in on Amazon because Amazon stuff has gotten a little more open over time and you can upload
01:11:00 PDFs and you can upload a pub stuff and it's a little better
01:11:04 But only a little and it's kind of a pain in the ass and if you want to just like buy or download a book
01:11:09 You are gonna do it through Amazon and Kobo
01:11:11 Which I think used to be a little more open and I was excited about things like the pocket integration has lost a little bit
01:11:17 Of that so they're coming towards this middle of like you're kind of just picking your poison either way, right?
01:11:23 Yeah
01:11:24 It's kind of like I think a lot about the Apple antitrust thing here because it's the same thing where you're like
01:11:30 Oh, no
01:11:30 I have to make this decision of like ecosystem pretty early on because moving to a new ecosystem is hard and it's
01:11:39 Certainly easier with an e-reader, but you still have to go download Calibre
01:11:43 You still have to go
01:11:44 Look up a bunch of tutorials and load it all up and and pull all your books over and then transfer them over
01:11:50 You've just lost 99 and a half percent of people right like just right there
01:11:54 Yeah, most people don't want to do that. So you really do have to say, okay, do I want to go Kobo?
01:11:58 Do I want to go Amazon and I think Kobo is doing more interesting stuff in the space right now, right?
01:12:03 If you're looking for just a straight e-reader not thinking about it
01:12:07 but but that's not what Tony's thinking about like the books Palmo, which is uh, right just
01:12:11 No color black and white. I think it's like six inch phone. Yeah, it's an it's an eink phone
01:12:18 Basically is like it's a little it's a little tiny tablet that does eink stuff and actually I have one on its way to me
01:12:24 Right now and I'm so excited about it because I don't know if you notice this but it's like a little
01:12:28 thing that just is percolating around the internet as like the Internet's favorite gadget like Craig Maude who is a
01:12:34 Newsletter writer and author who I love is like obsessed with his bunch of people are getting it and being like this is the exact
01:12:39 Thing that I need I'm very enthusiastic about it as a little tiny pocketable reading device
01:12:44 But it does make me nervous and part of the reason I wanted to do this with you is to sort of check in on
01:12:49 Where we're at with books because we've been I think enthusiastic about their potential for a while now
01:12:54 But it doesn't feel like we've gotten kind of the breakthrough device yet
01:12:58 I think the Palma feels closest right and and Tony's concern was that they it's on Android 11
01:13:05 It might not get upgraded books has actually been really good in the last couple of years about upgrading pretty
01:13:10 Consistently, is it always gonna be to the newest latest flavor of Android? No, but also for what you're using these devices for
01:13:16 It's like if what you need is the latest download of the Netflix app like you're buying the wrong device
01:13:22 Don't don't buy this. Yeah, right
01:13:24 Yeah, I think like if you're looking at the Palma and your only concern is that it's on Android 11
01:13:30 Just go get the Palma. You're gonna have a great time. It's gonna get updated at some point like you'll be fine
01:13:36 Yeah, I think that's right
01:13:38 And I mean, I'm just thinking about this as you're talking that like this is one case where Android being so fragmented actually helps you
01:13:44 Because like on on iOS I would be much more worried about sending you to a device
01:13:48 That's a few years old because you're gonna start to get
01:13:51 Outdated software that won't support old versions of the software on Android a lot of these developers don't have a choice
01:13:56 But to support wide swaths of Android
01:13:59 so the odds of you being able to use even Android 11 with like the Kindle app and the
01:14:05 Barnes & Noble app and your favorite reading app probably pretty high for a while. Yeah. Yeah, you're you're gonna be using it for a while
01:14:12 Yeah, I bought a books e-reader back in like 2019. It's still getting system updates
01:14:18 It's still getting software updates like it's still cruising. I can still use all the main e-reading software on it
01:14:24 So if that's kind of what you're looking at Tony just go get it and books
01:14:28 We should say is more like it's it's basically an eink tablet that runs Android, right? Is that a reasonable explanation?
01:14:35 Yeah, it is an it's it's an eink tablet. It's an Android eink tablet
01:14:38 They do their own kind of custom launcher and stuff and you could theoretically go do it your own launcher
01:14:44 But stick with theirs because it's built for eink and that's that's the really big friction
01:14:49 You notice with those Android eink tablets is they're using apps that weren't built for eink and it just you just run into little hiccups
01:14:56 And quirks, but the flip side is you get all the apps, right? Like yeah, that's and I can't think of any other
01:15:01 Meaningful e-reader out there if there is one people tell us vergecasttheverge.com
01:15:08 Send us links to all of the cool cross-platform e-readers that exist
01:15:11 I don't think we're gonna get very many emails, but that's the pitch right with the books
01:15:15 Is there just like you can have all the apps?
01:15:17 Yeah, exactly
01:15:18 That's the pitch because there's there's a couple other folks out there who who are primarily there
01:15:23 they're Chinese based companies who are doing this as well and
01:15:25 Everybody's kind of settled on. Okay, I guess we'll go with Android and and do like a weird
01:15:30 Custom build of Android but then they run into the problem of doing weird custom builds of Android is hard and it's hard to maintain
01:15:36 And everything which is why books is kind of ahead because they're a bigger company and they can just maintain it better
01:15:42 But yeah, and then all the other kind of small e-reader companies you have to sideload and you're just stuck sideloading everything which is fine
01:15:49 That's what I did to skip to start reading on the Kobo this weekend because I need to buy more Kobo books
01:15:54 That's not everybody's bag. Yeah
01:15:57 I mean again
01:15:58 I think the good news is that with a little bit of work if what you have is a library of PDFs and stuff
01:16:05 You can get those on to most e-readers now like it is it's not easy
01:16:09 But it is doable if you've got Calibre you can use any e-reader you want with a little work, right?
01:16:15 Right as speaking of books has the has books
01:16:18 I feel like they put out a new thing like every two weeks have they shipped anything cool and new recently
01:16:24 Nothing super cool. They've been a little quiet
01:16:27 we've seen a lot of they've just been putting out like color versions of a lot of their their products at the moment and a
01:16:32 Lot of just movement around the books Palma
01:16:35 I see like I'm seeing that thing everywhere and I really want to get it
01:16:38 But at the same time I know exactly what it is and I was like I have enough books devices in my house
01:16:44 I was like do I need another one? That's just a little smaller. I've used smaller
01:16:48 E-readers like that. I just it's not my cup of tea personally
01:16:51 I I was always the like pocket-sized six-inch Kindle person and I recently got a Kindle scribe
01:16:57 Which is the one with the the Silas for taking notes. I love that thing
01:17:01 It's still very light so I can like hold it in one hand in bed without dropping it on my face
01:17:06 But having having just a little more space, especially for things like PDFs, which don't often render super well on those smaller screens
01:17:14 Way better huge fan. It's nice
01:17:17 Well, that's why I like the Libra is because it's got that side that you can just hold
01:17:21 It's basically got a handle built in and and I am all about that
01:17:24 Like I saw that with the original Oasis and was like, oh I've now had my platonic ideal
01:17:29 form-factor for an e-reader and I never want to escape that if it doesn't have a
01:17:34 Like just a little handle on the side for me to hold a larger bezel on one side then I don't want it
01:17:39 Yeah, give me buttons or give me death. This is what I always say. I could not agree more
01:17:43 So I think I don't know my instinct is to tell Tony like
01:17:47 Probably just buy a Kindle like I sort of hate that as the answer. No, it's get the books Palma
01:17:53 It's get the books. No, you're right. It is get the books Palma buy it on Amazon
01:17:57 They have a great return policy. If you don't like it, send it back. That's yeah, you're totally right by the Palma
01:18:01 You're gonna have fun. You'll you'll enjoy it for a little while and if it doesn't work out for you
01:18:07 You can return it or you can stick it in a drawer and three weeks later. You'll still be able to use it
01:18:11 Yeah, and people love this thing like they love it
01:18:14 and
01:18:15 it's been a while since I've seen just sort of a
01:18:17 Little niche gadget like these sort of old heads of like bloggers all over the internet are obsessed with this thing
01:18:23 So I I suspect you'll like it. I know it makes me so happy. All right
01:18:27 Well Tony hit us back. Let us know how you like the Palma Alex. Thank you as always
01:18:31 You're welcome
01:18:33 Alright, that's it for the verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who was on the show and thank you for listening again
01:18:38 One more plug read Josh's story on the verge comm it's
01:18:41 Fantastic and deep and wonky and is excellent very much worth your time. There's lots more on everything
01:18:47 We talked about at the verge comm we'll put some links in the show notes
01:18:50 But as always read the verge comm the news is crazy and is only going to keep being crazier for really the next several months
01:18:56 So check it all out as always if you have thoughts
01:18:59 Questions feelings or want to talk about the location of undersea cables near you
01:19:03 You can always email us at verge cast at the verge comm call the hotline 866 verge 1-1
01:19:09 We love hearing from you
01:19:10 Send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show
01:19:13 This show is produced by Andrew Marino Liam James and will pour the verge cast is a verge production and part of the Vox Media
01:19:19 Podcast Network
01:19:20 Nilay Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about more AI news some new gadgets come in this week and lots more
01:19:26 We'll see you then rock and roll
01:19:28 You
01:19:31 You
01:19:33 (upbeat music)
01:19:36 [BLANK_AUDIO]