The James Bond Cinematic Universe
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- Welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of modular devices. I'm your friend David Pearce, and I have like 1,740 miles to walk. So I downloaded this app called Fantasy Hike, which VSong recommended on the podcast a few weeks ago.

It's basically an app that takes all of your motion activity, the steps you take and stuff like that, and converts it to like this long Lord of the Rings-y journey to take a ring back to, they don't call it Mordor for copyright reasons, but that's the idea. The journey is 1,780 miles, and it turns out I am surprisingly easily gamified by systems like this.

So I have found this very compelling and I'm now walking way more than I ever have before just so that I can get the little like way to go notifications and see my progress and get somewhere. So at some point, I think I'm going to end up walking almost 1800 miles all because of this silly fake Lord of the Rings app. It's great stuff. Anyway.

This is a super fun episode we have coming up. We're going to do two things. First, Sean Hollister and I are going to talk to Nirav Patel, the CEO of Framework, about the new desktop and laptop the company last week launched, plus all of the stuff that Framework might do in the future. They have some pretty interesting ideas, and we have a lot of questions about those ideas. Then, John Gruber from Daring Fireball is going to come on and talk about the thing he knows best,

James Bond. Super fun episode. We also have a really fun hotline question about glasses on your face for computers. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm going to go get a couple more miles in. I'm on my way to Mount Fire, I think it's called, which is not Mordor because of Lord of the Rings. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. I don't know if you know the company Framework, but for the last several years, I have thought they are one of the most interesting companies in tech. Basically, Framework's big idea is that all computers, all gadgets, all electronics really should be upgradable and repairable. That when your AirPods stop working because the battery stops working, they shouldn't die and go into a landfill. You should be able to just stick in a new battery and keep moving on with your life.

Framework's products until now have all been laptops. There was a 13-inch laptop and a 16-inch laptop, both of them super repairable. Like you can unscrew something, pull out a module, stick in a new one, screw it back in, and you've just upgraded your computer. It's a big, powerful idea. And Framework has actually done a better job of pulling it off later.

really than any other company I've certainly ever seen. And so last week, when Framework announced a new laptop, the Framework Laptop 12, and its first desktop ever, the Framework Desktop, it felt like a big moment, right? Like this is the time when a company like Framework is really starting to make the case that it matters, that it can keep doing this thing and that it can take its big idea and extend it out into other products.

So I called up both Sean Hollister on our team and Nirav Patel, the CEO of Framework, just to dig into all of this. What's going on at Framework, how it's been able to pull off this miraculous thing that no one else has in actually sticking to the plan of having upgradable gadgets, although it hasn't been perfect and we're gonna talk about that, but also what you can do with this idea about how gadgets should work and how far it really goes. So lots to talk about, let's just get into it.

I kind of just want to start with Framework as a company. Because again, it's been a while since you and I have talked. It's been a while since we've talked about Framework stuff on the Verge cast. Catch us up on Framework, the company, a little bit. You're kind of a hardware startup, but you're not...

as startup-y a startup as you were? Like, where do you feel like you are at the moment? I think we're not as startup-y a startup. I'm going to take that as a compliment, meaning I think we're executing relatively smoothly and without a lot of... I think it is a compliment, yeah. Yeah, without a lot of drama, I think is the key, which makes it feel maybe less like a startup than many other startups do. Yeah.

But yeah, we're five years in, we're 60 people. And whenever I say both those numbers, people's eyes go wide a bit like, wait a second, really? You can do that with 60 people? But really, it's just a testament to the team that we've been able to put together. We've got just an awesome set of individuals. And we're also just carrying in

a ton of collective experience, both from like bigger, mature consumer electronics companies of like how to do hardware smoothly, but then also the startups that were very startup-y, where we got to learn from the mistakes very quickly and not at least make those same mistakes again. I also feel like from the beginning, you've been...

kind of resolutely less chaotic than a lot of hardware startups. Like Sean and I spent a lot of time with people who have huge ideas about revolutionizing everything and quickly discovered that, you know, making one of something is very different from making thousands or millions of those things. And I feel like you were pretty clear-eyed about that stuff from pretty early on. And I think it's still, like even just hearing you talk at the event this week about the way that you're thinking about products, like there's still a sort of

cautious approach to all of this that it's like we're going to be slow and careful and not try to move fast and break things you even published in a manifesto i want to say you you earliest manifesto it seems like you you had this this this notion that you needed to be very selective yeah it's a it's a move slow and fix things approach to to startups i think

Which is, I mean, it's fundamentally, we're about longevity. So if we're not building the company around longevity, the team around longevity, the infrastructure, how can we build the products themselves to be long-lived? Like, how can we reasonably go out there and say we're building a laptop that's going to last longer if we're operating as a company in a chaotic matter? So that's like really what drives very deliberately us making decisions that optimize for what's going to

guarantee that 10 years from now, we're still able to deliver on the same set of promises, not what's going to mean that we can capture the most hype or the most interest in the next week.

So with that way of thinking about it, why the two things you launched this week? As you've had two laptops, those two make sense together, I would say. These two things feel slightly further afield than the stuff that you've done before. And I think in particular, I'm curious, why do a desktop at all? But why these two as the next two? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think if you look at the Framework Laptop 12, that's like...

pretty core and pretty in line with the path that we've been on since day one as a company. I mean, in some ways, like I actually have even said in the past that like,

if we had the technical capability to have done framework laptop 16 before framework laptop 13, we might have done that in the sense that like, as we think about who the customer base, who the end user is for those products, it is actually like the more enthusiastic earlier adopter persona that's gravitating to the 16 than the 13. And so like, as we look at the 12, like as we think about

our mission and our product philosophy, it's almost like the ultimate expression of that. Like we took the category that is the most disposable and we want to make it the least disposable. But from a brand perspective and from being able to build up the infrastructure and the trust to be able to go after a less extreme enthusiast user, which is really what the target user is for Framework Laptop 12, like that less

core enthusiast more, I want a computer that works and that's going to last me a while. That's where the sequencing comes in of starting with the 13, which we knew we could achieve. We knew we could make like a dent in the market with that thing with a very small team very quickly. Then building the vastly more technically complex Framework Laptop 16 and then taking all that brand and infrastructure and team investment and building the product that

in many ways, like technically is actually a bit simpler by what we're doing with Framework Laptop 12. But from a brand and a go-to-market perspective is a lot higher of a reach than the 13 and 16 were. But you're not just keeping it simple, right? I mean, I see a lot of budget laptops out there that don't necessarily have

and touch screen and stylus and back flipping and core i3 and i5 chips, you're adding those things into the mix too, which I'm guessing impact the price a little bit, right? So it's not going to necessarily replace the most budget laptops out there for people. Why were those things important to get in there? Yeah, I guess like when I say simple, I think one key thing to call out on that is I mean from an invention risk standpoint. Like as we look at 16, like we invented a lot to make 16 work.

for 12, it was actually in many ways, we took like little pieces of things that we invented from 13 and 16, and then brought them into 12. But like, as we went through the development process, I shared like little bits and pieces of this, but actually don't think I've shared much publicly yet, that as we started the development process for Framework Laptop 12, like about two years ago, we actually had some like extreme and novel designs and architectures that we were bouncing around, like things like

by taking apart modules between like clamshell and tablet and like detachable modes and things like that.

that ended up being like very inventive, ended up being very complex. And it was like, we took a step back and we looked at, we thought like, yes, we can technically do this, but is this actually the right thing for the type of audience we're going after? Like, this is not the Framework Laptop 16 audience. Like we want this thing to be simple to understand and simple to use. And in doing so, actually, we can then actually make it more robust and solve for, you know, some things like making it just generally more accessible as a product. Yeah.

And so like all this really kind of taking a step back to what makes framework a bit less startup-y than many startups is that

We make those trends. We choose those things very clearly, like with eyes wide open, who is this product actually for and what is actually sensible for the end user as opposed to what can we technically do as a company that builds innovative and interesting products. So let's talk through that with the 12 a little more, actually, because I think, you know, you talk about the branding and marketing of it. And to me, it sort of seems like the average sort of mid-range mainstream consumer laptop

like sucks. And I, it has become a real problem, right? That you have, if you want a pretty good windows computer that has gotten more and more expensive over time. And so to some extent, it seems like you're actually perfectly positioned to come in and be like, no, actually what we've done is we've built a good windows laptop. And that to some extent that should kind of

sell itself in a certain way. And like that, that makes the case for itself. So I'm curious why you feel like it's been, what is harder about that market than going into like the framework 13, which is like a market full of very good computers and trying to make your case.

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, in fact, like, if you look at a lot of what we do, there's a certain obviousness about like, hey, why don't you just make a computer that's like kind of a mid-range computer that isn't terrible? And you could like look at every mature consumer electronics brand, every mature pre-C brand and ask the same question. And the answers would be very unsatisfying answers you're going to get back.

And as we've observed the market very closely, like the PC industry very closely, at least the thing that I observed, I'm not going to speak for the entire team necessarily on this specifically, is that the way that PC companies operate typically is that as you look across the entire organization for...

The A team, the best possible designers, engineers, supply chain people, go-to-market people, they're all assigned to the premium top-tier commercial notebook. So like the best and the best suppliers are your top tier suppliers, the best teams of the suppliers, all that goes into premium commercial.

And then you take like the next best people and they get assigned to the premium consumer. So the highest end consumer and the next team gets assigned to like mid-tier commercial and then like, or like, you know, sub-premium commercial, sub-premium consumer. And then by the time you get down to like

those like core mainstream mid-tier consumer laptops, especially it's like some guy in a basement somewhere writing a spreadsheet and throwing it over to a supplier and hoping to get a computer back in a few months. And obviously that's like, you know, an extreme exaggeration, but like, that's what I mean by the opportunity. Like I think I'd,

said during our announcement, like the opportunity that we spotted on Framework Laptop 12, like the people who need long-lasting computers the most are getting like the most thoughtless computers. And that's like the industry dynamic that results in them being the thoughtless computers because obviously they're lower margin products. So like they're going to, obviously these companies are going to focus on premium commercial where the highest margins are and put the least thought and care into, you know,

their lowest cost products. For us, it's that we're a small company. We've only got four product lines. We're going to put thought and care into every one of them. There's so much margin in the premium commercial, maybe. But where is the volume in the market? And is this an opportunity for you to get some volume? Do you anticipate you're going to sell a lot of these? Do you have the capacity to make a lot of these? Is that the thought that there will be a lot of these

12s in the market? Yeah, definitely. This is... Yeah, it's a great question. It's very much... It's a volume play, but when we say it's a volume play, it's really a mission play. That, like, if we're going to fix consumer electronics, let's go to the places where we can really fix consumer electronics. And we...

can live with good problems to have, like having more demand than we have capacity. Like we can go figure out with our suppliers how to scale capacity. And that's where it goes back to like, we built a team that knows how to do this. So yeah, we're very much going for scale with Framework Laptop 12, maybe even in a way beyond what we're doing with our other products.

Interesting. So and then make the same case for the desktop, which I feel like is a very different group of people. I would say it's been very funny to watch the reaction, like even on just like the framework subreddit to the 12 and the desktop. The 12, everybody's like, oh, yeah, cool. Makes sense. Fine. Whatever. Good idea. And then the desktop, they're like, I have thoughts about the soldering. Sure. Yeah.

We also had many thoughts around this. I believe that. And we're going to get into those thoughts. But I am curious, like with that, that framework reference for the 12 makes sense. What was the thinking for the desktop? Yeah, this is an interesting one of the realizations we had from basically a brand perspective around like, what is framework? What are we trying to do with framework? How do we bring framework to more people? Was this idea that do we need to take what we're doing and kind of

make it more accessible by diluting it, like making it look less DIY, making it look less repairability, upgradability, more about like, is it just like, oh, these are environmentally friendly products. That's like kind of a mainstream statement. It's not like getting people into the technical details. And the conclusion we came to is actually that's not the right approach to get people into this world, into this world of like owning your products, using your products for longer. The thing that we should do instead, we could do instead is make

make repair cool, make upgradability cool, make modularization and customization and personalization cool, which like in many ways, like as you look at like what you're actually doing with these, they are interesting, like engaging things to do. And especially as we look at younger audiences, people are like eager to jump into these spaces. And so the thing we need to do is not dumb it down and make it

make it look and feel like it's simpler and hide away the complexity. The thing we want to do is make it fun and interesting, but also make it accessible, make it accessible in a way that maybe traditionally some of these categories or some of these behaviors haven't been accessible. And so the framework desktop, like a big part of that, of course, did just come straight from, wow, Ryzen AI Max is super impressive. How can we use this thing? And a big part of it came from

We like PCs. PCs are awesome. Desktop PCs are awesome. DIYing gaming rigs is awesome. Like all this is great. It's like a bunch of folks, including myself and the team, have been doing it for many years. It's not the most accessible space. I mean, I'm not saying it's like, you know, totally esoteric knowledge you can't get into. Obviously, there are millions of us doing it.

But we saw an opportunity for us as Framework to take that culture and take that ethos and open the door a bit wider by building a computer that was just simpler to bring into your life. There's less mental overhead required and just simply less physical space required to have it into your life. But we did as much as we can to still bring in as many aspects of that same ethos and culture around DIY and PC building into it.

How is this one simpler to bring into your life than any pre-built desktop that comes with modular components in it? There are many of them on the market. I wouldn't necessarily recommend any particular company, but many exist. Yeah, sure. I mean, one thing that we like to do is...

go to the websites of our competitors and attempt to find computers and attempt to see how are people describing their computers? What's the purchasing experience look like? And it is shockingly bad with the exception, I'll say of actually Apple and maybe Microsoft. And obviously neither of those are in the gaming PC world. Um,

But as you look at the website, or actually I'll say there are a few others, like NZXT is doing great work too. But for the most part, as you go to like PC brand websites, especially from the big mature incumbent companies, it's a nightmare even figuring out what they're trying to sell, what the product lines are available, what's new, what's old, what you should buy at any point in time. And so part of this is even the like figuring out what computer to get. And actually, I think Frank did a great job. Frank Azor, when he was up on stage earlier this week, kind of talking through, you don't really have to think about it.

If you want to take any game that's out there, run it at 1440p, run it at reasonable settings or the default settings out of the box, it's just going to run. You don't have to think about like, do I have to pick out a specific configuration to make it work? And then for us, from just like a browsing and like learning about the product and purchasing experience aspect of it, like our marketplace team has done great work to actually just make it straightforward. It's not like, what if the...

you know, hundred different weird pages of computers is the one that I'm supposed to be getting and these confusing specs that are there. So like we try to make it simple and

make it transparent. Like we lay out the very detailed specs all the way out to sharing like mechanical CAD of the components if you want to get all the way into like the deepest complexity, but you don't have to. You can start from the simple page of here's the computer, here's the few most recent games you've probably heard of, here's how fast they'll run. Great.

That sounds good. I want to play those games. I'll get this computer. It's pretty straightforward. I know, David, there's more questions about the desktop than I do, too. But the customizability, the one thing, when you said you're bringing the learnings from the 16 and the 13 into this desktop and this laptop, right?

I thought maybe that meant we would see more of the input modules and the expansion bay, the two new input mechanisms, the two new modules types that you introduced on the Framework 16. And why don't we have some LED panels or customization or secondary screen kind of electronic stuff going on in the front of the desktop, replaceable keyboards maybe on the 12. Tell us about that.

What about those made them not a good fit for this? And if we're going to see any more of those in the future? Yeah, this is interesting. Like, you know, you can see on the desktop, for example, actually, I'll say specifically on my comment on bringing learnings from 1316, that was repairability learnings for 12. There was maybe less direct knowledge transfer into the desktop just because the category is so different architecturally. But we did bring in the expansion card system. And it's really as we look at any product we build, especially looking at framework laptop 12, looking at the desktop, it's

We think both through what makes sense in our ecosystem to try to drive ecosystem expansion or commonality between products or being able to share modules or share supply chain infrastructure. But then also, if we were building this product from a totally blank slate, what does the product experience actually need to be? And we end up like,

Making sure that the end result actually like logically makes sense in a way that like we don't want to force something that isn't going to be natural just to get cross compatibility or like cross module sharing between products. But we also want to leverage ecosystems where we built them out. And so basically, as we look at the expansion card system, for example, in a world where we built the framework desktop first, we didn't have laptops first.

it's very unlikely that we would have invented an expansion card system just to make the front IO of the desktop modularized. Like that's probably not something that would make sense.

But we built the expansion card system. We already have that available. We have like a dozen different expansion cards out there, including things like additional storage, additional Ethernet cards, things like that. So since we had that in our library, we have all that available. It made total sense to plug that right into the front and bring some of that customization that's helpful in laptops to a place where it's also helpful in a desktop.

You've told me before in a prior interview that you actually plan your funding around this. That's right.

That allows there to be a repairable and modular 12-inch laptop instead of a 13 or 16. It allows there to be a modular repairable desktop all of a sudden. But does it mean that each of those new product lines is going to be upgradable? We don't know that. I don't think you've said that. And I would love for you to say it here on this podcast. With the 13, a 2021 machine.

with an old Intel chip can now be upgraded to a 2025 standards with a modern AMD chip. I don't know about any company that's ever done that before. It's amazing that you've done that. I don't know if you've said out loud that when you do this for other categories that you are going to do that, that you are going to make them so that you can put new boards in them in the future and upgrade them.

Is that the idea? Yeah, I don't know if I ever haven't said that. I'm not to double negative it. But yeah, I can definitely say that. I can commit to we start product lines where we have conviction that we'll be able to deliver on the upgradability of it, not just on the longevity of it. And the challenge here, of course, is that the definition of upgradability is really broad. And in many cases, because we can't

be in full control of the entire world's, PC world's supply chains and roadmaps. We don't want to over-specify what upgradability means because that is something that's outside of our control. I think you'd be shocked at how often and how rapidly roadmaps at very large silicon companies change. And so we don't want to

even see something that like we see on a roadmap and we see based on our knowledge of that item, like, oh yes, that could make a good upgrade for this because we don't know if a year from now that item will still exist. So when we state what that upgrade is, it's that that thing is something we'll be able to ship. Like we're deep enough in development. It's close enough to hitting, well, for in our case, not a shelf, but hitting our website.

that no matter what those Silicon vendors decide on the roadmap, that thing's not going to disappear and we'll be able to get it out into the world. Going back to the fundraising question, this idea that we do fundraising to unlock new categories, like very tactically what that means is that when we raise funding like we did early last year,

We actually go and hire and build additional teams within framework. And we go out into our supply base and we make sure that they're hiring and building additional teams that are dedicated to working with us. So every time we add another category to our roadmap, another long-lived category to our roadmap, that's us building a team inside of framework that owns that product category. Is that in a certain way, like a really inefficient way to do business?

One of the reasons, one of the things that makes it really efficient is that the same dynamic exists across other companies, other consumer electronics companies, but in a way that

that product is reset either every year or every two years from scratch. I mean, a whole new set of tooling, new mechanical design, new electrical design, new set of modules. That's like incredibly wasteful and inefficient. And obviously it results in short-lived products too, because how can you have parts longevity or upgradability if you're resetting it every two years? So for us, when we invest in that category, that first year,

We're paying a lot more, like the team at our supplier is a lot bigger. We're paying for a lot more tooling. We're paying for new modules that we're tooling up and creating. And then each time we refresh that product, it's more efficient for us, for our team internally. The teams that the suppliers are working with are a bit smaller and more efficient. And we're not doing a whole new set of tooling each time. So basically, it costs us, let's say, something on the order of

five times more to do the first iteration of a new product category than it does for each subsequent refresh. That's just like a rough approximation. That's interesting. That also feels like it in part answers the question of the caution in launching new things because that means if you get it wrong the first time,

You're just hoes. Yeah. Yeah, there's no way that we can recoup that. Right, you spent a lot of money and it's just gone because you're going to have to start over somewhere else. That's exactly right. So let's talk about where you go from here because I think...

I think you told Sean at one point that you weren't just a laptop company. We're not. We've got a desktop now. I know. Does that count? Like, have you satisfied the brief now? No, not really. Is that what you meant? Or are you going beyond PCs eventually? No, no, yeah. What I meant is we're going beyond PCs. And part of this, it goes back to the efficiency thing. It goes in some ways even back to the fundraising thing of like part of what made the framework desktop really obvious for us was that we could identify that, you know,

mission and product philosophy and market opportunity for us. But we could also identify that, oh, we can leverage essentially all of our existing supply base and partnerships, including the really strong partnership we have with AMD, to do this really quickly and do this really efficiently. Whereas if we think about like a total leap into an entire different space, that's us building an entire new supply base, which then demands a

a lot of confidence and a lot of investment to basically make that confidence make sense. As you think through something like a phone, which I know everyone has asked you about, a phone strikes me as a particularly interesting one because as you talk about, you know, repairability and e-waste and upgradability, there's no place to be more effective than with a smartphone, I think right now. Um,

But that's also like an incredibly mature, incredibly hard market to break. So like, I'm not asking you to say if you're building a phone because I know that you are. But like, how do you think through a market like that one and whether it makes sense for framework to be part of it? Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. I mean, one of the things for really any category that we pick goes back to this idea that that first iteration is such a massive investment in

that we have to be fairly sure that we're going to be able to succeed and win in that category. And one of the things about phones specifically is that that initial investment is orders of magnitude larger than it is for any category that we've been in to date. And so for us to build a phone, we have to be in a financial position or a fundraising position where we're

If we're not able to win, obviously we want to win. We want to be able to make sure that we're able to win in that category. But if winning takes longer than we anticipated or takes more iterations than we anticipated, we don't want to put the entire company at risk around that. And so like, you know, obviously phones are hard from...

design and engineering perspective, especially as we think about modularization, repairability, and upgradability, but they're also extremely difficult from a go-to-market standpoint. And so as we look at both ends of that, we want to make sure that we as a company are in a position where no matter what happens on phone, we're going to continue to be able to drive and succeed on our mission across framework. That's when we're doing a phone.

if Framework were to theoretically do a phone, what we get in the comments, which it is, according to David Pierce, you've heard it here on The Verge, David Pierce, who is not part of Framework, believes Framework is still a good phone. If Framework were to do a phone, we get this comment all the time on any story where we compliment the

the battery of a phone or we hate on the battery of a phone. People say, I miss those days when you could open a compartment on the back of your phone and remove the battery and put a different battery in there. Should Framework ever do a phone? Is that something that you think would be a feature of a phone? We do have some very interesting ideas. We have ideas around a lot of different categories. We do have some ideas specifically around batteries and phones that I'm not going to

to pre-commit anything around given the unknown time in the future at which point there may or may not be a framework phone. Fair enough. So, and let's go to like a talk through like a very different category because I think about like

I don't know, headsets is probably a good one right now where I think we're at a point now where there's a lot of energy behind it. There are a lot of people who think this is going to be the next big thing, but nobody has yet agreed on anything, what they're supposed to do, what they're going to look like, how they're going to work, like everything.

We don't know any of that yet. And so I think based on what you've said, that strikes me as this is a moment that is just objectively too early for you to want to be in it. Because if that's right, you just can't, you literally and figuratively can't afford to be wrong four times until we all figure this out. Is that, am I thinking about that the right way? That's right. Yeah. So like, as we look at like VR AR headsets against something like laptops, the reason we did laptops to start our first product was a laptop is that we saw that

for 10 years running, the use cases and the core user experience of laptops had stabilized in a way that we could take what we had there, look at things like silicon roadmaps and module roadmaps from different technology providers, and have fairly high confidence we could build a long-lived upgradable product within a form factor that we hold constant. As we look at

AR, VR, not only are the form factors like wildly in flux, like the core use case and value proposition is still wide open. And those things, of course, go very, very tightly together, especially in something that has such ergonomic constraints like a headset.

And so for us to look at a VR headset and say, you know, with reasonable confidence that not even 10 years and five years from now, that thing's still going to make sense. We just can't do that. So it wouldn't make sense for us as a company with our product philosophy to go and build a VR headset or an AR headset until that industry matures and stabilizes.

And the interesting thing is like the way our business model works, we want that to happen. And that like as these product categories mature, replacement cycles inherently lengthen, which we're even seeing in smartphones already over the last five years.

And the companies that are in the space invest less in innovation necessarily in a form factor perspective, a use case perspective, because there's no juice left to squeeze out of that lemon. And

Instead, you end up with this world like we're seeing maybe with iPhones today and the reviews that folks like you at The Verge are doing on iPhones reviews of like, oh, actually, you can skip this year, wait for next year because there isn't a lot worth picking up this year. That's like our signal for like, oh, okay, we see those reviews. That means it's time for us to enter that product category. Yeah.

So, all right, we need to let you go here in a minute. But before we do, I believe Sean has a lightning round of things he wants to throw at you. I do. I'm sure I can anticipate a few of them. It won't have the question that I asked you the other day, though. Oh, okay. So I've already asked it. 240-watt charger.

We're starting to see some out in the market, which is great. It actually took much, much longer than we thought it would. We expect, actually, we were surprised that we ended up being the first 180 watt out there. We expected 240s to be out before we even shipped our first 180. So it's great to see that the market is finally like moving and catching up. And that's nice. It's nice for everyone. And obviously, you know, any of our laptops, you don't have to purchase with a power adapter. You can purchase it without and then pick up any one that you'd like.

Cam memory. We know it's not going to be in the desktop because it reduced the bandwidth significantly to have it not be soldered on the board for that Strix Halo chip. But in general, we're going to get some of that flat memory in the future, maybe. Yeah, one of the things to understand about this, I think maybe is lost and that we maybe haven't communicated as clearly as we needed to around the framework desktop, but also really around any product at all, is that

For technologies like that, that go deep into signal integrity, that go deep into IO, that go deep into like even how the processor is packaged and the ball out works of signals. These are things that the silicon vendor has to have planned out and designed for from the start. Like us as the end device maker, we can't like hack around it and like

create a thing that wasn't designed for from the silicon to begin with like so for let's say cam on something like ryzen ai max that's something that amd would have needed to have designed for all the way from you know maybe i don't even know how many years ago they started that

the development of the architecture and design of that thing as a design goal from the beginning, which actually, based on our understanding of it, may not have even been possible given how wide the memory bus is on that thing, even if they had thought that that was the goal from the beginning. But there are technologies like this that just can't work. So for us, it's not, can we add CAM to something that wasn't designed for CAM? It's, when is there a platform that was designed from the beginning for CAM that we're then going to intercept for one of our products?

Gaming handheld. I would put this in the category of similarly but differently maturing-ish category with good products that we also can identify a clear path to making business sense. And part of the challenge there is just Valve is so dominant with Steam Deck. We can't afford to play the kinds of games that maybe a Lenovo or an Asus can play.

is likely not making money for an extended period of time entering a new category. For us, like we have to be able to recoup our investment relatively quickly within the first or second generation of entering a category. And so that's something where similarly, like even though like we know we could build a great gaming handheld, we see the demand from customers for to have an upgradable, repairable gaming handheld. It's hard for us to see a path, at least right now, where

We can compete with Valve in that space and not get destroyed financially. Framework Battery Bank

Framework Battery Bank, meaning for Framework Laptop 16 or for just generally as a product? Yeah, this is the one that would take one of your existing laptop batteries, would stick it in a case. I think you showed off like a prototype of a prototype or something. Yeah, we showed a proof of concept actually two years ago at the Framework Next Level event. And there are actually a number of proof of concepts that we showed that including an eGPU concept. And part of this was...

showing and flagging to electronics makers, like peripheral makers especially, that these things were technically possible with the goal of then starting to seed some third-party development. We haven't seen a lot. Actually, we haven't seen those specific things pan out. Instead, actually, we ended up seeing as a third-party RISC-V mainboard. We actually didn't anticipate that at all. So instead, we instead ended up getting that. But basically, whenever we do these types of proofs of concept

It's oftentimes to show technical feasibility to enable third parties to go and run with it or even enable the community go and run with it. And so for Battery Pack, that is the one that we would love to see a third party or even a community member start to design on their own. And it's also something that like for us in Framework, as we have a larger team over time, as we have more resources over time, is the sort of thing that potentially we would also go and start to address.

But the reason we showed it so early was more the technical proof of feasibility. E-paper screens. Yeah, this is also interesting. It kind of goes back to this idea of us being able to invest and be in control of our own destiny. Display development, aside from, you know, is the second most expensive part of consumer electronics beyond silicon investment, doing custom silicon. And so for us, it's being very selective about where we do...

semi-customization or custom development of displays because of the upfront cost required there. And so to do something like an E-Ink display in the proper form factor for any of our laptops would be an enormous sum of money we'd have to pay. So if a display vendor creates something that

happens to be close and we can semi-customize it, that becomes more feasible. The investment to do a fully custom display is just, at least for us today, still pretty far out of reach. The framework Kindle is a thing I want to exist. I just want you to know that. Okay, there we go. That's another. We can put that on the quadrant somewhere. And lastly, NVIDIA. Sure, it's a company. It sure is. It sure is. That's a Verge cast.

All right, Nirav, we've kept you long enough. Thank you for doing this with us. Thanks, David. Thanks, Sean. Always good to chat. Thanks so much. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about James Bond. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Trade Coffee.

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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Welcome back. A couple of weeks ago, the big news in the entertainment world was that Amazon had struck a deal to give it full creative control over James Bond.

Basically, for decades, the way that James Bond has worked, that whole franchise has been controlled by one family, the Broccoli's. You may have heard of these people before. Barbara Broccoli, for many, many years, has been the person overseeing the James Bond franchise. Other people distribute the movies. Other people do a lot of the work to make the movies, obviously. But no one does anything with James Bond without the Broccoli's say so. And they've been, to their credit, very precious about that.

But then Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion a couple of years ago, and a big part of what MGM had to offer was James Bond. Since then, there has been no James Bond. So Amazon, by all accounts, made a deal to have the Rockleys relinquish creative control so that what happens to James Bond now is fully up to Amazon. And that made a lot of people, including really anyone who likes and cares about James Bond stuff and wants James Bond stuff to be good,

feel a lot of feelings. I would not say the overall reaction to this was like great enthusiasm for the future of James Bond. It was people worrying about what will happen when Amazon does what Disney did to Marvel or to Star Wars and just floods the zone with stuff because that's what the business demands until it kind of ruins the vibe.

I've been trying to figure out how to sort through all of this myself and figured that the best person to talk to about this is the person I know who knows the most about James Bond. And that is John Gruber from Daring Fireball. So he is going to come on and he's going to explain how he feels, why James Bond is special and where it goes from here under the control of Amazon. Let's get into it. John Gruber, welcome to the Verge cast.

Nice to be here, David. Okay, so the news, I think, at this point is a couple of weeks old. But basically, where we are, and you, I think, have more context on this than I do. But basically, the way I understand it is that after a bunch of interpersonal shenanigans, Amazon wrote a very large check, the number of which at least I do not know yet, to the Broccoli's and now have creative control over the James Bond franchise for the first time.

Is that a reasonable summary of where we are? I think so, yes. I guess the part that I'm still confused on and maybe everybody is other than the Broccoli's and Amazon's top executives is exactly where they were before last week's news that, okay, we're going to write a check and just take control. It was like,

you know, like what amount of control did MGM have that gave Amazon power to, you know, that, that, that left them at a logger jam. You know, it seemed like basically MGM, uh,

has the rights to some aspect of the franchise. You know what I mean? Like, the Broccoli's couldn't make movies without MGM, but MGM couldn't make the movies without the Broccoli's having complete control over the creative element. Something like that. Yeah, it's a very odd setup. And I think, I was going back and reading some of the coverage of the MGM acquisition in the first place. So Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion. That deal closed, I think, early 2022. Yeah.

And even back then, the read was that like the crown jewel of the empire here is James Bond, right? Like there's a lot of content. Amazon wants a lot of stuff. They want the studio. They want the library. But like the thing that you're buying, the IP at the top of all of this is James Bond. And since then, precisely nothing has happened, which is so strange. Right.

And and I think just speaks to the weirdness of all of this. Yeah. Other than stories coming out that nothing was happening. Right. And that it was sort of conspicuous that nothing was happening. It wasn't just secrecy behind the scenes. It was, hey, something's broken behind the scenes, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So what what was your feeling when this news dropped? Like, how do you what's your immediate reaction to the change that came out a couple of weeks ago?

I get my heart sunk, I guess, because I think I don't think it's impossible that that that in hindsight, we can look back and say, you know what, this wasn't so bad or something good came out of it. And I'll I'll put a pin in that and we can come back to what I think might be the best case scenario. But I think the most likely scenario is.

is that this is just not going to be good. And I'll compare it directly to Disney buying Lucasfilm from George Lucas. Another franchise you care very much about, if I'm not mistaken. I do care. Well, certainly Star Wars. Yes, definitely. Very, very meaningful and important to me. And

And similarly, Lucasfilm, there was a lot more than just Star Wars. There was the Indiana Jones franchise. There's the whole Industrial Light and Magic. Everything else Lucasfilm does. ILM in particular is just a – Verge listeners don't need to be told what they do or their role in the industry anymore.

But overall, I just feel like what we've seen Disney do with the Star Wars franchise is what we'll see Amazon do with the James Bond franchise, which is diluted, you know, with spinoffs and shows and cartoons. And, you know, for some fans, you know, there are, I'm sure you can dig up some fans who think Disney's done nothing but a bang up job with Star Wars or more positive than negative, but

But it's definitely a change. It's a definite, you know, and this whole idea of calling it content, you know, or whatever else you want to call it, which is what the major big tech streamer corporations who are making these deals and writing these checks, the way they tend to look at it, as opposed to an artistic endeavor. And I will compare...

One difference with James Bond and Star Wars is that when Disney bought Star Wars, there had only been six movies made. And yes, there were like comic books and there was somewhat of an expanded empire, but nothing like what we've seen since. And the James Bond franchise is different because it goes back so much further to the 60s. And, you know, at this point, there've been, I guess, 25 movies. You'd think I'd know that before I came in the show. But...

it's just a longer stretch of time. And there was a similarity where the franchises were defined by theatrical major motion pictures that were events, right? Like, holy crap, George Lucas is finally going to make those prequels that he was, you know, rumored to be working on even when he was working on the original trilogy back in the 70s and 80s.

Wow. Or wow, they've announced a new James Bond. It's a guy named Daniel Craig and he's got blonde hair, not dark hair. And people are upset about that. And it's a new, you know, or here, Daniel Craig's coming back for a fifth movie and it's definitely going to be the last one. You know, it's an event. Right.

you know, oh, here's a series about young Moneypenny. Here's a 10-episode series about Felix Leiter in the CIA. Here's the young James Bond cartoon, which I know sort of exists, you know, but there's going to be more of it. This is the thing I'm sort of torn on. And I think one of the challenge I have in thinking through all of this is, on the one hand, it's not like every James Bond movie ever has been

perfect and fabulous and this is like a beautiful pristine thing that cannot be touched right like

There have been bad Bond movies. I love them all, if I'm honest, but some of them are very bad. And even there have been sort of spin-off things over the years, like GoldenEye on the N64, obviously a classic, iconic video game. But there have been other James Bond video games that I don't remember the name of because they're not any good. And so they've experimented with this over time. And I think there is definitely an extent to which...

I think the broccoli is in this sort of unusual setup where basically a couple of people had creative control over whether things happened or didn't has probably avoided bad things, but it hasn't avoided all of the bad things. Right. And so maybe it's like the part of me that is optimistic is like, okay, maybe nobody's perfect. And, um,

And maybe maybe there will be good stuff and maybe I can just watch the good stuff and ignore the bad stuff. But that's also the Star Wars play. And I have basically been run out of the Star Wars franchise by the way it has run over the last decade. So I don't know. I'm torn between these two feelings.

Yeah. And I, you know, I say that as a real big fan of, I mean, that's why I'm here. And a long time ago in the first run of my podcast, the talk show, when I was co-hosting it with Dan Benjamin, this is like, oh man, like 2008, 2009 early. I mean, literally like early days of podcasting. We had the idea to at the tail, you know, the topic was typically Apple and the usual stuff I talk about on the talk show. And, um,

We had the idea for, I forget how many movies had been out at that point, but let's say it was like 19 Bond movies had been made to date. Let's take the next 19 episodes and in chronological order, we'll talk about each one at the end of the show, like the last 20 minutes of each show. We'll talk about each of the Bond movies in order and we'll, you know, we'll watch them.

in order again. And you listeners following along, you'll know, because we're going in chronological order, your homework, if you don't want this spoiled, we'll be to do it. And it was a lot of fun. But rewatching them all in order, you know, and we talked about it week to week, you know, they're uneven, right? There's some of them are not great. Some of them don't hold up. And it's kind of interesting watching them,

Again, but I don't think it's for lack of effort, right? It's the, and I think that's the difference, is that when, like with Disney's current stewardship of Star Wars, or the Avengers too, the Marvel Universe, right? With the amount that they're putting out, there's no intention to try to make everything great, right? That's, it's like, that's the difference, is that when you know you're putting out

all of these hours of content and they call it content each year, you know that the overall quality is trying to be like

I don't know, good at best. It's not trying to make everything great. And, you know, and we can talk about that a lot of people, especially people of our generation, have very, a lot of people have very negative feelings about George Lucas's own second trilogy in the Star Wars movie. I personally, I don't love it like I do the first ones, but I actually don't hate it like most people of my generation do. I actually like the movies overall, and I

I like their weirdness and I like that they're not just trying to redo what the first trilogy felt like. And I really noticed with my son's generation, my son's 21 now, but he was a little kid when those movies were like new. His generation didn't really see a difference between the old trilogy and the new trilogy. They just loved Star Wars, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So much of that stuff is tied to sort of time and moments in your life in a way that's always really hard to

peel apart that like, whichever part of it you saw when you were 12 is probably your favorite. Yeah, definitely. It's just a hard thing to undo. Well, and that, you know, and that just came up recently with SNL's 50, right? 50th anniversary where so many people and there's so many cool documentaries that came out about that. But over and over again, and I think it's, this is one of those things that we can debate what the best eras of SNL were.

But one thing that's almost undebatable is that most people feel that the quote unquote best years and the best cast were the ones when they were like a teenager and they first started getting late night.

sarcasm and humor. And so no matter how old you are, you kind of have this sweet spot in your head. And I think the James Bond movies are like that, right? Everybody has a sweet spot for the sweet place in their heart for the James Bond of their youth of the new movie, you know, whatever were the new Bond movies when they were young and they first fell in love with the franchise. Um,

You know, and then you get older and you get more of an appreciation for going back in time and sort of putting things in perspective. But that's, to me, the difference is that the Broccoli's for 20-some movies were always trying to make each one a great Bond movie. And they fell short sometimes. I think you make 25 movies, you know, and you try to take risks and you're trying not to repeat yourself and you're trying to keep Bond. And I think they did this remarkably so. Like, keep Bond

Bond current through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. I mean, it's a long time to keep a character current through dramatic changes in culture, history, world geopolitics, things that affect a spy movie. You know, some were great, some not so great, but they were always trying. Yeah. To that end, actually, why do you think this character in this franchise has been this enduring? Because it's

It's kind of unparalleled in that sense that like James Bond is, I think, very different as a character from first movie to, you know, No Time to Die. But it's also pretty recognizably the same the whole way through. And for that to happen and still be even have the possibility of being any good.

is pretty unusual with any kind of franchise like that. Just the fact that it hasn't run out of steam yet...

is kind of wild. What is your sense of why that is? How much time do we have? Right. I mean, that's sort of what makes me obsessed with the franchise is trying to answer that question and sort of the impossibility of really buttonholing it very neatly into a very succinct. Ah, yes, that's exactly how they've done it. Argument like you're not going to get there. And that's what makes it endlessly fascinating and fun to discuss.

If I had to try to encapsulate it, though, I think the things that they did that really made this built to last. And it sounds...

but I mean this in an endearing way that they, they established a brand for James Bond, right? And right out of the gate, they had this, the theme song in the first one, Dr. No, the theme song was cool when it was new in 1962. And it's sort of timeless now, right? Star Wars got that right too, right? With the great John Williams score, right? Like,

And the logo for Star Wars, the logo for James Bond with the 00 and the seven that shaped like a Luger or something, which isn't even a gun James Bond used. Right. And he, you know, and that ties into other aspects of the brand, like the fact that James Bond is persnickety and very picky about certain things. He wants to use a certain gun. Like that's his favorite gun. You know, the Walter PPK for most of the run. And, and,

He wants his martini famously prepared just right, you know, and that sort of pickiness of the character becomes part of the brand and, and,

I think that they managed it over the years to sort of keep that fundamental brand timeless, and then they could decorate around it with each decade and with each actor as they move it forward. But that that core brand resonates with people. I totally agree with that. And I think part of the reason I'm thinking about this is because I have to assume that

If you're Amazon, that is the big question to try and figure out, right? Is like, what about this can we not change? Because I think what I assume to be true...

And I'm curious if you feel differently, but what I assume is true is that every imaginable branch of the James Bond cinematic universe is about to come true. We're going to get more Bond movies. We're going to get a Q spinoff that's going to be like a tech show. We're going to get a Moneypenny thing. They're going to do a whole thing about minor characters. We're going to spin this thing in every single direction. And I feel like if I'm the person in charge of James Bond at Amazon, the question now is...

what do you have to have inside of one of these to make it work, to make it James Bond? And in a weird way, the answer to that question seems to both be like scarcity. You actually can't do too much. That's like a part of the whole James Bond thing that I think if we had done 50 movies by now instead of 25, it might actually be really different. Right.

But that also even that thing you're describing is hard to... You can't just have him say shaken, not stirred once an episode and get away with it being a Bond show. You know what I mean? I feel like that's a hard thing to define with Bond in a way that even Star Wars, you just start with like galaxy far, far away, permission to kind of do whatever we want. And I think that was the wrong approach, but you can at least see how you start from that. James Bond is harder to define that way. Yeah. And it's...

Because there is no one central character of Star Wars, right? That's different, right? It's not the Luke Skywalker cinematic universe. I think they decided it was the Force, right? They were like, that is the unifying theme, and it just didn't work. Yeah, and...

Like, what is the greater James Bond cinematic universe? It's just the world, right? It's the modern world, right? And that's where it just seems more worrisome to me, even than Star Wars, right? Like, where, like, the, to me, clearly better parts of the Disney-era Star Wars and or, which itself is sort of a spinoff from my favorite movie they've made since then, the Rogue One. Yeah.

You know, which isn't about the main characters, you know, it parlays into the story of them and it takes place in their era. But it's like, ah, but here's the thing that's happening over on the side. But what what's happening in the James Bond universe when we're not paying attention to that him himself, Agent 007 for MI6, it's just the world. Right. So that's so true. Yeah.

Yeah. They're going to end up having to make a movie about the financial crisis that is like just James Bond appears one time. And like, I guess this is a James Bond movie. And so what are the odds when they do a Felix Leiter spinoff about the American CIA agents in the world fighting, you know, the same agents of evil of Spectre or whatever they do when they reboot it? Yeah.

How is that going to be any different than just any random CIA show that Amazon puts on Prime? And this is the other part, to go back to your question from 10 minutes ago about why my heart sunk. The other thing that really, really has me bummed about this is I think of the major streamers, Amazon Prime's original content is the worst. I was going to ask you about this. If you were more upset that it was Amazon in particular than anybody else, why...

I like Mr. and Mrs. Smith is my only quibble with that statement. But otherwise, I think I largely agree with you. I haven't watched the Mr. and Mrs. Smith yet episode.

you know, and, and the one show that I, when I mentioned this on daring, I know, so I'll add that to my list. And I, you know, I like, I like spy stuff. I like spy shows. I just, it's spy shows, heist shows, spy movies that are, you know, more heisty is sort of the sweet spot. You know, I, I like that sort of plot. Uh, you know, it's a very middle-aged white guy thing to like, but that's what I like. Um,

But I don't know. When I mentioned that I just don't think Prime's original content is good, people pointed to a show called Patriot that was on as like a sort of somewhat comedy. And I'd never even heard of it. It was on like 2015. It was on for two seasons and then they canceled it. Yeah.

It sounds like Amazon. Yeah. And I did my favorite show on Amazon, but I can't recommend it. It was a show called The Peripheral from a few years ago, based on a William Gibson novel. And it was really well done, but they canceled it after one season. And it's one of those shows where that's why I can't recommend it. It was a very good season, but it clearly stopped at a point that they were really...

it wasn't a satisfying conclusion. It was meant to keep going for at least another season or two and it didn't. So it's like, so it's the best show that they made good production values, good cast. I thought it was pretty smart because I, you know, I hadn't read Gibson's original book, but it seemed smart enough that they surely seemed to use the source material well to make an intelligent show. So,

So much else that I've seen on Prime is just sort of like, it looks bad and it's sort of dumb. Yeah. Well, and I think I'm now thinking about how many of these sort of generic things

kind of anonymous seeming spy shows there are out there uh and a lot of them were big hits like the the night agent on netflix is the most forgettable show of all time but is a giant hit yeah uh and then there's the recruit which i thought was the night agent but it's actually a different thing and uh and there's just a million of these right and i think like i i probably watch more of them than most but i just keep thinking like you take all of that stuff and you rename it james bond

And maybe that's where we're headed is we're just going to have a million generic things with this name that isn't generic. And that's how Amazon feels like it can win, which is a real bummer of a way to go. And you've got to go back to the word branding. You've got this brand that, you know, like a way to style the logos of whatever you call the show, you know, a way to style that. I don't know what it would be. I'm not...

logo designer, but a way to style young money penny in a way that looks James Bond branded, you know, musical scores, you know, and Disney does. If you like the proliferation of cinematic universe content, I mean, Disney does a good job with stuff like the music for its various Star Wars shows, you know, and it, you know, you can tell from,

If you didn't know what was playing, you could just listen and say, oh, this seems like it must be a Star Wars show, right? And I guess they'll do that with the Bond, Greater Bond. And they haven't said they're going to do a Greater Bond cinematic universe. Like I said before, maybe they'll do the right thing and sort of keep it rare or special, but I doubt it. What is the right thing in your mind? What feels like the best case plausible scenario here? I would say...

I would like to see them acknowledge. Because I think, and again, it sounds so simple, but obviously all of these companies with all this money, they get caught up in it. Like, who thinks it sounds like a good idea to run a creative artistic franchise by committee? Who thinks...

a committee of executives in the streaming company should be the ones making the artistic decisions of casting and writing and plotting and pacing and stuff like that. Nobody. You want filmmakers and creative people making those decisions. They could nip this in the bud and acknowledge all of our fears by writing a big check and the name that comes to mind is Christopher Nolan.

Who famously at one point wanted to do a Bond movie. Right. And the problem that they ran into was that the Barber Broccoli ultimately always had final cut of the Bond movies. And Nolan, you know, it was sort of irresistible force meets an immovable object, right? That Nolan doesn't do anything anymore unless he gets contractual, you know, not just a handshake, but in the contract final cut. Right.

um but if they just said you know call him up and say you know let's make a deal for a three let's do three movies you're in control you cast it you're in charge of the writing we'll give you the money we trust you to do a great job just do three great new you know reboot the franchise with a new new actor

you're in control, Christopher Nolan. That would be perfect for me. Or, you know, there are other people other than Christopher Nolan who could get that role, but it has to be a filmmaker slash creative person. Someone who, like, if Christopher Nolan passes or they choose somebody else, but they're

Christopher Nolan hears who's in charge, he'd be like, oh, well, I kind of wish it was me, but that sounds good to me that they're in charge. Right. Real like Dark Knight trilogy, but with James Bond kind of situation. And that went, I would say, very well for everyone involved. But it does seem like that dynamic is

just doesn't seem to exist anywhere anymore. I think there was a while where there were folks out there writing big checks and giving creative control. Like, that was the House of Cards story at the very beginning a million years ago. I think Apple was doing that for a while at the beginning, but we've seen this real...

retrenchment back from we're going to write big checks to great people to make great things and that's going to make it all work because the theater business has died because the streaming business has gotten more complicated because it's ads like the thing that worries me the most is it feels like every business incentive is going to be we want to make infinity

10 episode long miniseries about James Bond and not a great movie every three years. And that's just the business now for these companies. Right. And and I'm sure, you know, I'm sure inside Amazon in particular that having numbers and spreadsheets and, you know, two page memos or whatever their famous memo length is to back it up with facts actually works is.

or at least works politically inside the company. I don't know that it works to produce. It works when you're selling cloud computing. Right. And I think it's about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking, right? They're not people who are invested in

like the Broccoli's were in thinking, hey, we're spending all this money. We have a $400 million budget to make a fifth movie with Daniel Craig as James Bond, whatever the budget is. And they're, of course, interested in the box office of that movie when it drops and when it comes out and what the critical response will be. And the fact that it's concluding

a run in the role for Craig, that they want it to feel like a capstone to a great reboot of the franchise. But they're also thinking about the fact that Bond movies get watched 10, 20, 30 years from now, right? Like, after Barbara Broccoli's gone, you know, like, just the way that her dad is dead. But the movies he made still stand up and are beloved. And to have somebody who has both those goals in mind,

You know, I'm sure there is a short-term financial logic to it, you know? And I'm sure there was with Disney, with Star Wars, right? That they're selling more toys continuously by keeping it in the air. There's always new Star Wars stuff. There's always new Marvel cinematic stuff. Like, and it... In some ways...

You know, there is an upside to it. It's not all downside, but it's just different. And it's so much more like everything else as opposed to being something special. Right. That Star Wars is no longer special. James Bond movies are still special. They really are. Yeah, it's true. And I think it's been it's an interesting moment in the Bond franchise because I think part of the reason this happened is because by all accounts and reporting, you

the franchise was in total disarray. They don't have a next Bond. There's apparently not a script for a movie. Nobody had agreed on anything. The last one came out in, what, 2021? Like three and a half years ago? Yeah, and I remember the timing because it was sort of like one of the big blockbusters to sort of reopen theaters after COVID. That's right. I remember that. That was the post-COVID movie. Yeah.

Tenet was the mid-COVID movie and No Time to Die was the post-COVID movie. Right. Quote unquote post-COVID. And yeah, I think the part that gives me hope, I guess, is that maybe now we can be out of impasse, right? I would rather have something than nothing, I guess. If those are the two choices you're going to give me, I would rather have meh James Bond than nothing, I suppose. But then I wonder if that's the thinking that leads us down this path.

I guess the way I would put it, and I often come back to this in my writing, that it really matters what it doesn't just matter what your top priorities are as an unordered list. It matters what order they're in. And if you want to, there's a Walt Disney quote that they put up at Disney World when you're walking around and they always cover, you know, if there's a ride that's under construction. Yeah.

And they cover it up so you don't see the construction. And they put inspirational quotes from Walt Disney. And my favorite one is, uh, I guess I'm paraphrasing here, but I think I can get it really close. We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies. And yes, you want to make, you want your movies to be profitable and you want your IP to be profitable. Um,

and you want the investment you've made in it to pay off over time. But the most important thing is to keep the art as high as possible and make it popular enough to make money, not to maximize your money and secondarily make the content as good as we possibly can, because of course that'll keep it going. But if the most important thing is how do we make the most money from this in the next few years, it's going to hurt the artistic quality of the output. It's inevitable.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and that is the way that most people seem to be thinking in this particular moment.

Publicly held corporations are under a legal obligation to quote, maximize profits for shareholders, right? And that, oh, well, if they make this decision, it's sort of bad for the product, but clearly you can see how it's going to make the money.

That people who want to excuse them say, well, they had to because they're under a legal obligation to maximize profit for the shareholders. That's not true. Well, and Amazon famously for like 15 years, Jeff Bezos was like, I am going to actively make less money than possible in order to continue to make this company a success and more valuable. Right.

Amazon is definitely not that company anymore, but it is certainly true that that is a thing you can do if you choose to. You can do the right thing if you want to. You know, and Tim Cook has talked about that at Apple. There was a thing like 10 years ago or in the early years of his CEO ship after Steve Jobs had passed that

where somebody had asked somebody at their shareholders meeting had questioned the amount of money the company was spending on accessibility. And he was like, I don't care about the bloody ROI. And you can just say, like why Tim Cook used the word bloody is because I think our actual American curse word was on the tip of his tongue. And he caught himself and somehow shifted to the very unusual for an Alabama bloody. I don't think he's running around saying that in his day to day. Yeah.

But by all accounts of that shareholders meeting was very angry in that not every decision they make is going to be about the return on investment, that there's a long-term view that will ultimately, and that long-term view will maximize long-term profits, right? And I think people looking back at 15 years of Tim Cook,

would say, yeah, maybe the guy knows what he's doing in terms of profits at Apple. And I think the long-term value of owning the James Bond franchise isn't about what they're going to do in the next three years. It's about what they do for the next 30 years and about how what they do in the next three years, how it holds up.

Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, Andy Jassy, if you're listening, get at us. We have thoughts for you. Or at least give Christopher Nolan a call, right? Yeah, right. That solves a lot of problems. I'm good with that. John, thank you for doing this. Let's do this again sometime. Yes, very fun.

Hopefully under better circumstances. I would love to come back on if they make a great movie and be like, yes, we were wrong. We had no reason to fear. Thank you. I would love to be wrong. That will be a great day on the Verge cast. I very much look forward to it. I think it's more likely I come on and we talk about how terrible the young Moneypenny. The 16 part miniseries. All right. Well, until then, thank you, John. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Verge cast hotline. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, you can email VergeCast at theverge.com. You can call 866-VERGE-11. You can, like, I don't know, BlueSky. We're not that hard to get a hold of. If you have questions, we want to hear all of your questions. Thank you, as always, to everybody who reaches out. This week, we have a question about face computers. Hey, it's Mark. I got...

I don't know. I'm using the laptop on a computer table on a desk, and I am just unhappy. The laptop screen is so low. I feel like I'm just cranking my neck down, and I'm sick of it. And while external monitors exist, and they're great for desks, I want to be able to move around, travel, go different places, be in the living room, wherever I need to be, office. I don't care what I look like. Can you help me find something I could put on my face? Some type of glasses.

that I can connect my MacBook Pro to and use as a monitor. And obviously the Apple Vision Pro exists, but it seems that the value is not there. The value is not there. I'm not paying that much for all those features that I don't need when all I need is a really good screen that plugs in to my face. So please help me, please.

All right. V song is here. Hi, V. Hi. I have never wanted to help anyone as much as I want to help Mark. Oh, my God. Mark. I feel for you so much. Mark's going through it. So what do you think? Where does your head immediately? I have an immediate reaction to this. Where do you go? I have one answer for Mark and it is the X real one glasses. This is where I went to. OK, good. This is this is the answer for you, Mark. This is actually, I think, the only answer for you, Mark, to

Because so what the X-Real one look like, they just look like a normal pair of glasses from afar, sunglasses. And then it has USB-C. You plug it into anything that can output video by USB-C. So it can be your phone. It can be your laptop.

And then bada bing, bada boom, you've got an extra screen in front of you. And people will just think you're a jabroni indoors wearing sunglasses. But in front of you, you get to see an ultra wide screen if you so choose to enable the ultra wide. Or you get to see a very large screen in front of you that...

It's actually surprisingly really good quality. So, yeah, I've been testing the X-Real 1, which is their newest series of glasses. They also unveiled the X-Real 1 Pro. What makes it pro? Off the top of my head, you get

You know when someone smacks pro at the end of something and you get just a little bit extra? It's that. I'm using the regular X-Real ones, and I think they're great as is. I think they're about $500. So, you know, a seventh of the price of a Vision Pro. Yeah. And it basically is going to extend your screen for you. It's not going to hide your screen. Your laptop screen is still going to be on, but you can just...

look up and not have to crane your neck down. You can look up and type. So yeah, just crank your font up. My eyes are like really bad. So whenever I'm typing in it, like I was slacking a message to you, David, earlier in the X-Real ones. And I was like, oh, Jesus, I can't read. Because my eyes are notoriously bad. So I had to just like be a really old lady and crank up the font to like

I was like, oh, now I can read this comfortably. And you can adjust the distance of the virtual monitor so you can put it further back if you have better vision or put it real up close like me because I'm blind. So, yeah, extra one. Okay, so I think you're right.

But I just want to talk this out a little bit. I went to exactly the same place that you did, which I think suggests that this is probably the right answer. I think we can dispense with the Vision Pro immediately because it's $3,500 and it's really heavy. And it's just like for this thing that you want,

It is wildly overkill and also like not ideal because it's really heavy on your face and it's $3,500. And just not portable because Mark says he wants it to be portable. So I'm assuming that he occasionally wants to go to a coffee shop. And if you want to go to a coffee shop, please don't bring your vision pro. I just, yeah, it's the travel case is not that portable. Is it possible, though, that a meta quest could be the answer?

It's possible. I have tried doing work in a meta quest before and come across similar issues. Not in the sense that it's more comfortable, but I just find it just disorienting because, I don't know, you don't really have peripheral vision in a quest. So if you are out in public, you can't.

Mark says he doesn't care what he looks like, and I love that for Mark. But I think you will care even less if people aren't staring at you, because I feel the stares when people stare at me. Yeah. I just feel like you'll be more comfortable and honestly a little safer because you never know who's a whack job out there just taking pictures of you. Like, that's not fun. Or stealing your laptop while you're not looking at it. Or stealing your laptop while you're not looking at it because you're in a headset. I just... I don't think really...

We're at a place where the headsets make sense for productivity, no matter what the big tech people say. Like gaming, sure. Like I think the MetaQuest is great in terms of like how lightweight it is. It's much more comfortable than the Vision Pro. I find it looks really grainy in there anyway, though. So that's not my favorite thing. So I think in terms of screen resolution, listen, I watched Stray Kids videos in the X-Reel to test and I was like, oh, wow.

My boys, my sons, my K-pop sons, they're in such high resolution. I love this. Okay. Yeah. So and then the other thing I'm trying to figure out is there are basically two ways to do a screen in front of your face, right? One is the like,

standard X-Real thing where it's just a display in front of your eyes and when your eyes move, the display moves with your eyes, right? Like that's very straightforwardly, this is the thing that X-Real and a couple of others have been doing for a while. The other one, and I think this is the difference when you get into like the pro universe is you get the sort of three degrees of freedom where I can like leave the screen over there or kind of have it exist in like anchored in physical space around me even though it's a virtual screen.

And I'm trying to think if I'm just a person trying to use my computer, which of those is better? Because on the one hand, like my screen exists in a space. And if I move my head, my screen stays over here. So that sort of tracks with real world. But also if I'm wearing these glasses so that I can look at my screen, actually being able to turn my head and still be looking at my screen might be a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, that is a good thing. I do appreciate that about the X-ray. There's a button you can press that will just turn them into normal glasses in case you have to see what actually is going on around you. So that's not so bad.

My thing is, is if you're actually working, typing in the headsets is a bitch. There's no way around it unless you have your peripherals with you. And I mean, if you're connecting to a laptop, you can just use the laptop's keyboard. That's totally fine. But it's just not a comfortable experience is what I would say. So if you're doing long-term work, I find a pair of glasses interesting.

easier to wear for a longer period of time if you're trying to do deep work. The one thing I do find that the Pro headsets have an advantage over is you could make that screen so big. If you ever really want to feel existential dread in a draft, just make it...

Make the screen the size of your wall. Stare at it and just go like, why won't the words come? Have you ever done that? That is sadistic. I'm going to look at every word that I have written for this story six feet across. That sounds awful. I have done that. It is awful. I will tell you, I've done that. I've just like full screened a full screened CMS article.

stared at it and just gone like, wow, I've made a life choice. And wow, I really don't like the structure of this graph. What if we just delete it? So I have done that, not frequently, mostly when I was testing just to like torture myself, because why not? Why not?

I will say that if you're doing a lot of writing, though, you really got to crank up the font in the X-Reels. And it's not my favorite to write in. It is a lot better if you're doing just casual media viewing. But you can do it. And as long as you're not looking at 40,000 Excel cells, I think you should be fine. Like if you're just making a deck.

Blow the deck up. You'll be fine. It's great. If you're doing like a draft where there's hundreds of tiny little words, just crank it up to 180. And then you can read comfortably instead of squinting in your glasses and going like, yeah, that's that's the only thing I'll say. You do make an interesting point about the resolution, though, because there is there is a certain kind of like number crunching, spreadsheeting work that I would love.

say no one should do in a headset of any resolution because it'll it'll it'll just destroy your eyes and brain trying to make sense of all of it also your soul also also your soul yeah nothing like if you want to see the excel numbers bigger you're in real trouble but i think yeah yeah there's like part of me here's mark and it's like mark what you need is not glasses what you need is one of those cool foldy stands that just moves your laptop up higher also gonna suggest that i was like mark

Mark, what if we, what if we, I think Welch took a picture of the guy one time in a coffee shop who just had like seven books stacked on top of each other and the laptop on top of it and was just happy as a clam working. I will say you probably have seven books in your bookcase, Mark, if you want to try that. And before you shell out $500 for a pair of smart glasses-based computers, Mark.

But if you are going to go the face computer route, I really do think the X-Ray 1 is probably your only option. There might be other competitors that I just haven't tried yet. But as far as one that I have...

gotten my hands on, put on my face and feel comfortable recommending, I would say the X-Real. They have multiple options in multiple price ranges, but the ones that I have used and can say has a pretty good screen resolution is the X-Real one. Yeah. And I think in a case like this, if you're serious, like I was just looking at X-Real's website because I've tried a few of these and it's like you can get the thing that you're describing, which is screen in front of your face for less than the price of the one.

But I also think if you're going to use this thing as hard as it sounds like our buddy Mark is going to use it, you should pay for the extra resolution. Like it's your your eyes will thank you if you just spend a little bit more to get the one that looks the best you possibly can. That and especially if you like want to watch a video privately on the way back. True. Commuting like that's.

I'm telling you, the Stray Kids, the makeup resolution was really great. And I was just like, they're so beautiful. I love this. I love watching my effeminate sons from a different country dance complicated choreography in Technicolor. It's great. And they're doing it just for you because that's the glasses. They're doing it just for me because they're on the glasses. No one can see me watch a million TikToks.

of the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively case. It's just for me. And now for all of us. That's on top of that. And now for all of us. But it's just we won't tell anybody. Don't worry. I've watched way too many TikToks about that case. So I'm glad that it's private. It's for the best. It's for the best. V, thank you. Mark, I hope that helps.

All right, that's it for the Verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. Lots of great Sean coverage of all of the framework stuff. I'll link to John's stuff on James Bond and Amazon and all that stuff. We'll put some stuff on the extra glasses in the show notes, all of that in the show notes. Keep an eye on everything, but also keep it locked on the Verge. As far as I can tell, this surprisingly early gadget season is not going to stop anytime soon. So keep an eye out.

Anyway, as always, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, James Bond pitches you want to get out to somebody, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We honestly love hearing from you. It remains my very favorite thing about doing this show is hearing from all of you.

The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore. Nilay and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, all of the politics, all of the gadgets, all of the everything that just keeps happening. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. ♪