Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Google I/O 2022 📲 Stablecoins struggling to survive the crypto crash, and Apple discontinues the iPod

Nilay Patel and David Pierce interview Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai after Google announcing a bunch of products at their I/O conference. 34:25 - Dan Seifert joins the show to discuss the hardware previewed at Google I/O 2022. 55:38 - Liz Lopatto explains "the crypto crash" in this week's Crypto Corner. 1:07:19 - Alex Cranz hops in to run through this week's gadget rumors, reviews, and announcements. Further reading: Google is making an Android-based Pixel tablet and plans to start selling it in 2023 Google finally announces the Pixel Watch The Pixel 6A includes Google’s Tensor chipset and costs $449 Here’s an early look at the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro coming this fall Google’s vision for Android 13 is to offer a little more of everything Google’s new Pixel Buds Pro come with noise cancellation and long battery life Google thinks the time is right to bring back Wallet Google Chrome is getting built-in virtual credit cards Apple will drop iPhone Lightning port in favor of USB-C in 2023, claims analyst Apple discontinues the iPod after 20 years Sony WH-1000XM5 review: new design, new sound, new price - The Verge Mark Zuckerberg’s Project Cambria demo shows off its full-color passthrough - The Verge Samsung’s next flagship foldable allegedly leaks Samsung and LG preview the future of weird phone displays DJI officially announces Mini 3 Pro Aura Strap 2 review: context — you love to see it Ford F-150 Lightning first drive: quiet storm Dish’s upcoming wireless plan might let you buy an iPhone with crypto Josh Hawley wants to punish Disney by taking copyright law back to 1909 and that sucks UiPath CEO Daniel Dines thinks automation can fight the great resignation Ploopy and the promise of an open-source trackball Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This week on The Vergecast, Google CEO Sundar Pichai joins us to take us through Google I/O. Afterwards, we'll talk about all their hardware announcements and the gadget news from this week. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, flagship podcast, tablets that come out a year from now. I'm your friend, Neil. We've got a huge show today. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is on The Vergecast today. David and I talked to him about everything announced at Google I/O and kind of the future of Google. It's a really good conversation. Then Dan Seifert joins the show. We talk about all the rest of I/O. And Alex Krantz comes on at the end, little gadget lightning round. It's a really fun one. Let's start. Here's David and I talking to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  Sunil Pichai, you are the CEO of Google, you are the CEO and Chairman of Alphabet. Welcome to the Vergecast.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Good to see you, Neil and David.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's great to see you again. It's been a while since we've talked. Also, I appreciate that you're on the Vergecast. Real ones are on the Vergecast to talk product. That's like, that's, this is where it gets serious about products.

• 2:36David Pierce?

  True that.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  So it's Google I/O. We obviously came off the keynote. The keynote was two hours long. Lots of products, lots of really hardcore AI tech, Lambda, big language models. Here's my question for you, just kind of a big picture, and then I want to dive into some of the products themselves. Google does a lot of things. It has a lot of research projects, a lot of far out ideas, a lot of things on the ground, like maps and recommendations and obviously search. You run YouTube, then you've got Android. Like, it's a lot of things. Kind of the theme of I/O this year was you're bringing it all together and it's going to become a very focused set of products and experiences for people across the whole ecosystem. So just from the baseline, how real is that?

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  How much are you actually bringing Google into focus versus you're just lining up the pieces and making sure they make sense together?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I do think a few things which I've tried to do at the company. One is underlying more foundational layer that focus on AI. So when you say research, you know, it is a real deep focus on AI. In some ways, the big bet is AI is transformational across, you know, all the products and services we do. So for sure, that's been a big focus bet. And above it, a focus on knowledge and computing, right? And both we see as core aspects of our mission. And so to me, you know, it is the same AI which, which makes that change in search, you know, because we are able to do things in a more multimodal way. And it's that same multimodal model which in YouTube can create auto chapters and so on.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  So it's an underlying theme, so with which we are doing it across our key products and services. But there is a set of products which are users use multiple times per day. These are big, active user bases. And so, you know, there's a lot of focus on be it search or Gmail or Maps or YouTube, making sure those products are evolving in a way that makes sense. And so I think both are important.

• 4:35David Pierce?

  So on the AI front, though, there's a piece of that that's really interesting to me because one of the things I noticed in the keynote was that things like Lambda and Translate and Palm kept coming up kind of in different contexts. And I think one of the things that's been tricky for us to figure out is like, when you say we're focused on AI, that can mean lots of things, right? AI is this huge sprawling thing that can mean a lot of things. Within that space, it feels like maybe Google is picking its spots a little more. Instead of kind of trying to do lots of things, you have sort of a few big bets even just within AI. Is that fair?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. You know, you can think about it this way, right? There's, we are all making progress in state of the art ML and AI. Then there's things in terms of what we are deploying in production, which is the latest version of either speech models, vision models, et cetera, or multimodal models, right? And then there is the future of AI, which, which is not in production yet. And that is large language models. I think we are talking about that. And that's where Lambda and Palm and everything comes in. And some of that will keep flowing back into cutting edge production. And, and, you know, and that's what keeps the innovation going. And we are talking about both of them.

• 5:45David Pierce?

  And I think part of that, it seems like my sense would be then that your job as, as CEO is in part to sort of make sure all of those things are moving at the correct speed. Because I just, the idea of sort of living deep in the future, and two years from now, and also right now, is just, it seems impossible.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  You know, I think something which is probably, you know, there are two sides to the coin, right? So for example, when we built something like Chrome, you know, we unveiled the end to end product one day. Well, the comic book leaked two days ago, but at least, you know, it's a product in which you come out and, you know, unveil it. When it comes to things like AI, both, a lot of it, we publish research. So, you know, you're not quite can do that. And B, because in a technology like that transparency is important too, I think. And, and so we are talking about it ahead of time, which is what gives a sense of, well, is this too futuristic? What of this will apply to the products? And I think it's a fair question. But I'm trying to explain why we are doing it the way we are doing it. And so that's what I think makes it a bit different.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  I think that kind of the classic story of I O has been a demo of a really impressive AI tool. I can't help but think of the one that took the fence out of the picture in the image editor. And it turns out like that's actually a really hard problem. It's going to take a long time to actually ship that to consumers. But at the same time, you're demoing things in actual products like translation that are real for people or could be real today. And it's just really hard to calibrate. What are we looking at that's real right now? Or that is a vision of way I could accomplish versus Google is one of the few companies that still demos really impressive software every time you have an event. Most other companies are like, I don't know, we we're going to stream some baseball games to you. You know, like, there's a really

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  like, very hardcore engineering component to what you showed at I O. But it's just hard to know which of it is going to come into focus and turn into a product. And which of it is, Google has an intense set of capabilities. And part of Google's culture is chasing them down wherever they might leave.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  You know, if you if you go back, let me give a couple of examples, like, you know, we showed Google Lens many years at I O, right? You know, the promise of what Google Lens is. It's a real product, right? And like, you know, people query it, you can access it. And we are taking, as Lens matures, we are bringing those capabilities into search. And that's what, you know, helps you from a multi-search standpoint. Even the fence, you can you can see magic eraser in Pixel, and I would argue gets at some of that promise in the context of a product. You know, so the goal of everything we are showing is to actually build it into a product. That's how that's what we are trying to do. So I have no interest in being a R and D lab. You know, we actually genuinely believe in doing cutting edge R and D, right? We are one of the world's

• 8:29Speaker 03

  largest R and D investors, you know, probably over $100 billion in the past five years. And so we are definitely doing tip of the tree R and D. But the goal is all with a clear lens of our mission, how we will apply it, and working it backwards. And then I think both are true. So, you know, there may be times, you know, there's a probabilistic outcome. And so that there may be one or two elements in it which we fail. And so there is that risk of Talking ahead and and I think the failures are also obvious to the external world. But I do think if you have looked at the capabilities we are bringing in pixel, et cetera. That is, we are translating it into products and features. Everything to do with translation, though, you know, I would argue, we've been steadily making progress.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  You know, be it monolingual translation or what we showed in the context of translation and transcription in the context of the prototypes, AR glass prototypes. Those are real products we are working on, right?

• 9:25Nilay Patel?

  Right, so we're to skip ahead. You brought it up. The glasses are real? It's a real pair of glasses?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the prototypes are real. I mean, they are real use cases and, you know, people testing it out are real. Absolutely. We are still obviously working through what the right product in terms of AR is. With AR, we were trying to communicate two things. One is a lot of the innovation for what we are building in AR. We're building it in the context of a smartphone today. And so lens, multi-search, scene exploration, live immersive view and maps. These are all AR experiences. We are doing it in a smartphone today, but the magic isn't fully obvious till you can live in that future. And so we are exploring that future also in terms of hardware form factors. But that's going to take time to do and we have a few more decisions ahead of us there.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  So I looked at the glasses. So if people haven't seen the video, you should watch it. It's cool. It's a pair of glasses that listens and it shows you real time translations. Someone's speaking a different language and you get real time translation on the screen of the glasses. I look at that and I say, oh, that's really smart. Right now, all the AR experiences you're describing, they happen on a phone because a phone has a fancy camera built into it. It has a 5G network connection for whatever that's worth. It has a fast processor. It has a big battery. Putting that stuff in glasses is very difficult. And I look at the translation glasses you demoed and I say, oh, this is actually, you're cutting the problem way down. Now, all we're doing is listening to someone translating it and then showing some text on a screen, which in the grand scheme of computer problems is still hard, but in the scheme of AR is like

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  a very narrow solution. Is that how you're thinking about it? That you're going to cut it all the way down to that and you're not going to do real time graphic overlays and stuff that seems really far out right now?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  I think it's part of how we are thinking about it because, you know, I don't think we want to overshoot it. The more you overshoot, the longer it is away, right? And so we are trying to find that sweet spot of what is it that you can do something which people can wear? Maybe doesn't have, you know, it's comfortable, you can wear. And also doesn't have the other broader issues around, well, if you have a camera, you have to solve a set of different issues. It's a harder system integration problem, as you're pointing out and so on. So we're thinking through. I think anytime in a constraint, I've always felt constraints help, right? You know, having constraints helps you actually deliver a product. And so I'm a fan of that. And so I think that's part of what's informing our thinking there.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  One of the other challenges they are, and you're kind of hinting at it. Yep, there's the big, you have to develop the hardware. That seems very challenging. There's also the idea that you're going to augment reality, which just on its face seems like the world's biggest content moderation challenge. You run YouTube, YouTube is a content moderation challenge. Have you put time into thinking about, okay, we're going into an AR future. Someone's looking at the Capitol Building. Google's going to put some information over the Capitol Building to say what happened there. And people are going to be upset regardless of what we put on that screen. Have you gotten all the way that down that road in your thinking yet? Or are you still focused on, we have to make a computer you put on your face?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  No, I think, look, I think we are in early stages. You know, you can imagine use cases where there are products like maps or, you know, you want to listen to music when you run. Or, you know, the translation use cases. I think anytime you show information with that, you have to think through all that. And I agree with you, but I don't think we're quite there yet, if I were to be frank, thinking, thinking all that through.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  Just on a timeline, do you think this is a five-year problem? Is it a 25-year problem? Is it 18 months?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Well, we have that problem today, right? I think information is working at scale on the Internet. And, you know, I think we've already crossed the inflection point. So I would argue, you know, solving content moderation, you know, it's a hard enough problem today. And if I think through the future, I don't know, maybe areas where I worry about more are, you know, synthetic content and how do we deal with that? And, you know, so maybe areas like that, which is not necessarily AR as a dimension, but I think there are other dimensions, uh, you know, which, which, which I think we are probably thinking about a bit more.

• 13:31David Pierce?

  Fair enough. And I think this comes back to the, the kind of how you think about the company as a whole question too, because I think we've seen a few companies most aggressively, I think Meta, make a lot of noise about AR being like a bet the company thing, right? That this thing that is coming next is going to require everything that we have and we have to put everything we have behind it and it's going to require changing how we work. My sense is you're not shifting Google quite that aggressively, but.

• 13:54Nilay Patel?

  Sundar was like, the real world's pretty good.

• 13:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Which is about a heart of a shot as I've ever heard you take, man.

• 14:00David Pierce?

  That is true.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Look, I mean, I mean, we are definitely focused more and more on the AR side in the context of the real world is important. It's not a, it's how we see it and we're building it. I think look, VR is, uh, has an important use case too, and there'll be mixed reality. But those things all have different timelines and access and so on.

• 14:23David Pierce?

  Well, I was curious, as you think about, and I mean it with AR, because eventually if AR is going to be as big as a lot of people think it is, it's going to require basically every team at Google to build new things for it. Where are you in sort of how you're thinking about how much energy you want to put within the company onto that kind of stuff?

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Look, I mean, we work through, remember, uh, you know, Google was, uh, came from the desktop era, right? And, you know, we have driven the shift to mobile. AI is a big shift we are driving. Uh, and so to me, I think it cuts across. And so we think about it. So I don't view it as betting the company. I mean, it is a natural evolution of the company. And I think if you're thinking deeply and building for the future, it is a big part of getting it right. So for me, it's important, search works in AR context, you know, and Maps is thinking it through and YouTube is thinking it through, right? And, and Google Photos is thinking it through. And so I think if you get it right that way, you know, you're, you're, you're bringing the company along through these big transitions. And so maybe, you know, maybe it's a, it's a way about how we think about it.

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's come back out of the clouds for a minute. That's a, I mean, it's interesting, and I think the glasses are fascinating in the sense that by reducing the problem you're trying to solve, you actually can make a more useful product as opposed to trying to boil the ocean there. But they're still pretty far out. You've got another problem right in front of you, which is trying to sell Pixel phones and create a Pixel ecosystem. Even at that, for a while, we saw Pixel 7, Pixel 6A, Pixel Buds Pro, you hinted at a tablet. There's a lot of energy in that space. And one of the things that Rick told David on another piece of the Vergecast is that the Android team and the Pixel team are much closer together now. They're operating in

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  harmony. Historically, that arrangement has made your OEMs very mad. I believe at one point, Google was forced to sell Motorola because things were too close. But now you're doing it again. Tell me about that. Is that Pixel, Samsung, and Lenovo, and whoever else don't see Pixel as a threat, so you can bring them close together? Is it you're going to spin some innovations from Pixel out into Android proper? How are you thinking about managing that dynamic?

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Let me step out and first answer about a focus there. You know, to me, no different over the past five years, if you've taken an area like YouTube, or, you know, we've put a lot of focus into it. Cloud is the same thing, both as big areas and as important businesses to be built. To me, hardware and computing is equally important. I do think the ecosystem all of us see value in, you know, working together to make sure we make progress, particularly beyond phones, right? So WearOS has been a great example. I think we've done both, you know, because when you're, when you're, when you're building these new categories, it's hardware, it's software, it's app developers, you all understand this well. So there is value in what we did with Samsung on WearOS aligning. And as developers,

• 17:15Speaker 03

  the fact that Pixel Watch is coming, and WearOS has a lot more traction, all of that matters because developers address it too. So a rising tide lifts all boats, kind of a scenario, I think, I think is genuinely what plays out. So, you know, we work super hard with Samsung on foldables and phones and, you know, and also, I think there's some added value in our approach in the sense that sometimes we have a strong view on what to do on top of Android, right? Our OEMs may have a different viewpoint. I think one of the benefits of Android is it allows both viewpoints to be expressed, and we can do it in the context of Pixel and the ecosystem we see. And Samsung can, you know, have a vision on top of Galaxy and their hardware ecosystem

• 17:58Speaker 03

  too. So I think there's some value in that too. So, you know, I don't see necessarily this being that complicated. I think the industry has evolved to this level. You can you can look at somebody like Microsoft with Surface and Windows and you can ask, you know, the same question. But I think, you know, I think it's natural. We work with Samsung, by the way, you know, our Pixel division is a major customer of Samsung's competence. So we don't sit and ask, hey, Samsung is supplying its own phones and us and like, how do you do this? And the industry has worked that way for a while. So, you know, I see it as a natural evolution.

• 18:38David Pierce?

  On the ecosystem side of things, what changed your thinking about that? I think one of the things that Neil and I both noticed from I O was it was, there was a lot of kind of resurrecting of old products and old ideas, like tablets was a thing that it doesn't seem like Google has cared about in a while. And same with watches and while it is back after not being back. And it's definitely, the ecosystem thinking seems to have gotten much bigger. What sort of sparked that internally?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Look, I think there are two aspects to it. One is what you said, you know, that the ecosystem is important and, you know, thinking it through. And, you know, Android is open source, which means there are many different OEMs making things. So the Android team is thinking hard about better together and how do these things work together better? And the additional category is becoming more important. That's that's one part of it. The second part of it is why not sooner is, you know, hardware is such an economies of scale business, right? There's so many things to do to get it right. You know, we have been building the capabilities, right? So for example, we knew Tensor has been five years in the making, right? You're seeing it now, but we knew we needed that to work

• 19:44Speaker 03

  well to be able to do a tablet so that it shares the same silicon platform with phones. And so you had to crawl, walk and start to run on phones before you can actually do do the other things. So there is a difference between intellectually understanding it a few years earlier versus the actual practical ability to get scale and to be able to do it all in the additional things. And so I think I think that's the practical side of it.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  But let me ask you about phones in particular, and then maybe extended to tablets. You made the comparison to Microsoft. Microsoft did Surface because the Windows ecosystem was not producing thousand dollar laptops. Panos has been on the show, he said that very to us very directly, very loudly. And so they're like, we need to, we need to reinvigorate this segment of the market. We need to compete with Apple because Apple's winning at this segment of the market. In phones right now, right, if Pixel's a huge success, you're not necessarily getting Apple switchers, right? You're getting Samsung switchers or you're just moving people around the Android ecosystem. If you launch a tablet, I don't know if you're thinking you're going to get iPad switchers. You might just get like Chrome OS switchers or other Android tablet switchers.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, how do you think about managing that competition? And then I guess the real question is, how do you think about opening the gate to get people to switch from the Apple products where however many conversations you want to have about lock-in, and I promise you, we will soon ask about RCS, but they seem to be pretty happy over there and not enticed to switch to your platforms.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  No, look, I, I definitely think us doing tablets and us working better with Samsung on tablets will end up in together, each of us both individually better off and overall, you know, Android as an ecosystem will do better than tablets. That's how the math works out, at least empirically for a while. On the phone side too, you know, I do think on high ends, you know, we need to be competitive. Similarly, you know, you're talking about switching, but we could also lose users from the Android ecosystem because we don't have a good tablet offering as well. I mean, you've made this point before on, on Vergecast, but you know, about Nexus 7 and the impact it had. We are doing it because we think we will give a clearer view on how you can do these

• 21:57Speaker 03

  things and how they can work together. And, and I think it will impact the whole ecosystem to do better. So I see all of that playing out. I see it so far from being a zero sum game. And to my earlier point, we end up being a very successful other self competent to us, we buy displays, we buy memory, we buy, I mean, it's, it's so, I think it's a bit more complex than that. Yeah.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  All right. So now I definitely have to ask the RCS question. Shout out to our friend Dieter Bohn, who ruthlessly took from us, Sinner. But, right, the, the noise that Google has started to make about RCS has gotten louder over the past five years. I would, I would just say it started with, here's the new standard, we hope the carriers adopt it. We're running our own RCS servers to, two days ago onstage, everyone should adopt RCS, pointed look in the direction of Cupertino, right? Like, you're starting to advocate now for it as, as a company very loudly. There are good reasons for that. There's security, there's encryption, there's all that stuff. There's also just interoperability and ease of switching in the sense that iMessage is pure lock-in for

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Apple. How are you balancing all of that stuff? Is it, you're more focused on this is the next generation of standards, we got to get there, or is there an element of competitiveness to it?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, a few things, you know, I mean, for, for all the, you've had a long focus on our messaging efforts. And I would say RCS is a tribute to, I still recall being in Mobile World Congress, maybe now, I may get the timing wrong, six to seven years ago, and seeing the moment where the carriers suddenly looked at us and said, we need you to do this. And historically, it had been difficult. The carriers viewed us, we don't want anyone else to come into messaging. And so it was a big shift. And so I actually view it as a great example of, against extraordinary odds, being so focused on an area over six to seven years, and, and being where we are at, where I think, at least on the Android

• 23:52Speaker 03

  ecosystem side, RCS is on a clear path to both being a standard, supporting end-to-end encryption and so on. So, you know, I'm super excited about the progress there. I think, look, interoperability is great here. You know, we all take it for granted in areas like email today. You know, I, it would be great for it to work. I think we couldn't even make the case till we had a viable alternative. So we've crossed that part. And so, you know, I think I realize teams being excited and making calls and stuff. But to me, what's in our control is to build a compelling standard. And over time, make the compelling case. It's the benefit of everyone involved, including iOS users, to have that end-to-end encryption

• 24:37Speaker 03

  working and have that interoperability. And the rest is outside of our hands. And as you said, you know, time will tell. But you know, I'm at least glad we reached the stage where we are and making progress and taking data. Well, first of all, you guys focus a lot on products, which is great and I think unique. But the more you focus on product, you're almost like product manager type of people. And Google is always hiring product managers. So I think it comes.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you need someone who thinks about the people. I guess that's like another, I think, just big thing question that I want to ask about a more distributed future. But just on a big perspective, right now, when you think about the big companies, they have signature products. Google has a lot of signature products. As you're thinking about the future of the company and how all those products might work together and how you might layer the technologies underneath them together, are you thinking about changing how Google operates or how it's organized? Like historically, Google has just been a, has been doing a lot of things all at once. I think messaging is actually the ultimate example of this, where lots of teams at Google

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  have built messaging products, but the strategy for messaging has only recently begun to perhaps coalesce. Are you thinking about that more broadly across the company?

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Look, yes, I mean, you know, things which have really, you know, one of the things which becoming CEO was one, I wanted the company to go back and think a lot about its core mission, because I felt it was important to ground ourselves there. And really focused on knowledge and the core of knowledge for us is on search and YouTube, which are core consumer services. And then computing, right? It's Android and as part of that, there was a big bet on hardware too. And then making sure we are a world-class enterprise. Enterprise platform as well with cloud and workspace. So we've done a lot of work to focus the company along those dimensions, right?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  And so, you know, you see those are our five big product areas, how we have structured and how we run them. And with a common view of all the cross cutting R and D and technology, particularly AI, which which really, you know, drives innovation forward there. So that's definitely, you know, that's the big picture, how how I think about it. And, you know, we'll continue to be very focused and that's why I gave the examples of. And I think it takes a lot in tech, you know, tech is very competitive. You look at something like TikTok, emerge, you know, things happen in a very fast cycles. And so to stay on top of on any significant tech product, you know, needs a lot of focus and continued innovation. And so I've always viewed as a company, we need to be very, very focused on it.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And definitely we have brought focus, some of us what looks outside as well. You're focused on these products and you're improving them. Wow, yes, I mean, because these are, you know, billion user products doing important things. And I think people rely on them. And to me, there is nothing more important than making it, you know, better constantly and continually evolving it. As a web service, sometimes it's hard because, you know, if you're doing hardware or something, you get these once in a year moments to go talk about it. Something like search where you're shipping stuff every two weeks and you're continuously releasing them. Uh, you know, it is even more important, I think, to be very focused in making sure you're actually moving the needle. So I think it's definitely a big part of what I think about.

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the blockchain decentralized computing. I talked to blockchain companies and CEOs. And whenever they're like web two, the examples they give me are always Google. It's always Google search, it's always, it's always YouTube, right? These are the web two platforms that the blockchain companies are going to disrupt. Are you making big bets? I mean, you and I, we're talking right now in the middle of like a literal cryptocurrency crash. So I'm assuming. You're not making huge bets today, but are you thinking about that next future for Google?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Look, I web two was a big part of why I joined Google and, you know, seeing the transition from the web moving from content to apps and the excitement around XML, HTTP and Ajax and realizing that, you know, Maps and Gmail all represent a fundamental shift in how the web works. So I think it's exciting to me anytime the web evolves, but the web is a big thing and like there are, you know, no one person can evolve it, right? It's like, that's, that's the beauty of the web. And so, so I always look at any innovation in a excited, try to understand what are the good things coming out of it. And, and so it is still early days though. So that's how I would probably be, probably say, but you know,

• 29:20Speaker 03

  I'm always trying to think ahead about what are the key trends, be it on computing, be it on how the web itself is evolving and trying to see, you know, where Google can contribute, where Google can also lead. And it's, it's a big part of how, how we should think about, not to mention AI being the most important of it all.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  Do you think of, let's call it web three, the blockchain web three stuff, right? The innovation there is not, there's a lot of cryptographic innovation, sure, but the innovation there is not necessarily technological capability. It's, I don't have to trust your database. Google is effectively like the world's most powerful database company. There's a very important database at the heart of Google that you can query and get results from. Do you ever think, oh, this will displace the search index or this will displace the YouTube database?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Look, a decentralized model, I mean, don't forget, I think Skype worked at some point on a P2P based model, right? I think distributed databases are a hard, interesting computer science challenge too. So I think we, we get equally excited about that and, you know, and so on. I think it's important to think through user problems, what you're trying to solve and the underlying technology. And so all of that is important, you know, end to end. But as always, anything evolves, you know, the big part I, to make sure you're leading in all these services, will you get disrupted? Yeah. By definition, if you're not trying hard enough, yes, the answer is absolutely 100% yes.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  I'm like, we show up to work on Mondays and yes, I worry about all of this all the time. And, you know, so maybe I'll leave it at that.

• 30:57David Pierce?

  So my, my last question is, tell me what your killer app is for smartwatches. We spend a lot of time debating what smartwatches are for. And having now spent a lot of time building one, I'm curious kind of what you see as like, the, the sort of reason for smartwatches at the moment for Google.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  I'll probably leave it with, I want to make sure the team has something to say in September when they talk about Pixel Watches. And I, I think they've teased it enough that, look, I'm excited because I think for me, it's the thing I'm excited about is it's an end to end hardware portfolio. And you will see a lot of the Pixel brand identity. And, you know, if you're a Pixel user, a lot of the design language and, and some of the customize of how easy it is to change bands and the expressiveness is, is great. In terms of killer apps, look, can we, you look at something like GPS being on phones and, and what happens later, or, or the fact that XML HTTP created a whole set of apps

• 31:55Speaker 03

  as I talked about earlier. I'm always humbled by when you create underlying capabilities, the creativity of developers outside, you know, it's not that Google will develop the killer app, you know, I think down the line, someone will do something really cool with it. But I would argue, one of the exciting aspects of the Pixel Watches, of course, Fitbit coming on it, right? You know, Fitbit coming as a service on it is a killer app we are putting on that watch. And, you know, so that is something I'm super excited by.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, Sundar, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been, it's always great to talk to you. And I always appreciate that you want to come on the Hardcore Nerd Show. So that's very good. It's good to talk to you.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Greatly enjoyed it. And thanks for all the focus on I O. Appreciate it.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to take a break. We'll be right back with Dan Seifert to wrap up the rest of Google I O.

• 33:12Speaker 05

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• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Dan Seifert, welcome. Hello. So obviously David and I just talked to Sundar. He's great. By the way, I keep saying this, it takes, it takes real guts for a product CEO to come on the Vergecast. Oh, yeah. Decoder is like, you know, that's where you do your think influencing. On the Vergecast, we're like, let's skip out to breast tax. So that was great. We, you know, big picture conversation, but there's some stuff at I O that we should talk about with Dan. Actual products. What's, Dan, you have some real feelings about this tablet. I was gonna say, we gotta start with the tablet. Yeah. This tablet, I don't know why they announced it. I haven't been able to figure out why they announced this. So they pre-announced a tablet that's coming out in 2023. What we know about it is that it will have a tensor chip. Mm hmm. And that's what we know about it. Well, we know it will have a bigger screen than a phone.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  It will be rectangular. It apparently has big white bezels. Yep. They announced bezels, the camera is in the, on the middle of screen and landscape. They did that, right? Yeah. So big improvement over your iPads. Yep. Credit where credit's due. The back looks like plastic. There's a camera on the back as well. It does. They showed us some, they did show us some Android tablet software stuff. And yeah, and it runs Android. But they showed us, you know, here's some apps running side by side. I will say, if you just go watch the event again, watch the tablet UI presentation, just like re-watch it closely and it is almost as though they're inventing computers. Oh, yeah. The, the number of things that they have not even like heard of before, that it's like, what if you had an app and then you want another app?

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  But at the same time. At one point they're like, I love using two apps at once. And it's like, yeah, it's pretty good. It's a great, actually, I've been doing it for years. Welcome to the party. Which is funny, because you can already do that on many Android tablets.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and Android phones. You can just split screen them very easily.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Dan, we've been sarcastic enough. What do you think they're trying to do with this tablet?

• 35:37Speaker 06

  It's really hard to say. You know, David talked to Rick Osterloh. I had a chance to talk to Rick Osterloh briefly. And every time he mentioned this tablet, he positioned it as a, quote, "perfect companion to the Pixel phone." He called it the Pixel tablet onstage. He said it's a premium, large-screen device. They are like filling this gap in their lineup so that they have a full ecosystem, ranging all the way from the watch that we'll, I'm sure we'll talk about, through to phones, to tablets, out to laptops with Chromebooks. They've got like the full device portfolio in this thing, by the time this thing launches. And so like, that all makes sense. Like, they could just say, "We're gonna launch a tablet next year," and like, tell that same story. But for some reason, they decided, "We're gonna also show this hype reel of this tablet,"

• 36:20Speaker 06

  which looks like it was designed in 2014 and is like the combination of a 2014-era Samsung tablet and like, an Amazon Fire HD. Like, if you just mash those together, that's what you got, the concept of this tablet. And it's really weird to like, use that kind of product look to build hype for a product that's not coming for seven months, a year, whatever. Not this calendar year. So like, I really don't understand this announcement at all.

• 36:48David Pierce?

  Well, I think there's sort of two separate things there, right? There's like, if the tablet had been beautiful and cool and exciting, and even just like what it was, but with no bezels, that would have been something. And at least, I think strategically, strategically, it makes sense, right? Because like, the thing Google desperately needs is for people to build tablet apps. Because the reason Android tablets suck is because Android tablet apps suck.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  No, I disagree.

• 37:11David Pierce?

  Really?

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I have a, I have a much wilder conspiracy theory about this whole thing.

• 37:16David Pierce?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  They're doing this. This is all just a front run, because they said this thing, which makes no sense. They're like, "There's so much developer interest in Android tablets."

• 37:26David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, I don't believe that for a second.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  So they said this onstage, and that's, that's when I started doing my own research.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Developing this conspiracy.

• 37:37David Pierce?

  Doing Google searches.

• 37:40David Pierce?

  So sorry.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  No. Okay. The future, the only way they're going to get people to switch off the iPhone is that they beat Apple to foldables and they create the moment, the hardware form factor moment that rules, right? So yep, you've got your Galaxy folds and whatnots, but like those are still early. You gotta make the mainstream folding phone. And if you unfold the phone and then it's a garbage tablet, you're you're hooped. So the developer interest is not in tablet apps. It's not in this thing. It's in what can I do when the phone unfolds? And so they're building a tablet ecosystem because they know that their their big upcoming shot to recapture market share from Apple is beating Apple to folding.

• 38:27David Pierce?

  So, okay, I hate to burst your bubble on this. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's just true. Like Google, no, like Google told me this. And because we were talking about it, and like you look at the multitasking and it's and it's like, that's a that's a foldable phone. And so it's like, if you just take the tablet with the two apps and folded in half, like, oh, my God, what is that? And that is like, Google considers foldable phones and tablets to be functionally identical software systems. And whether or not that turns out to be a good idea, I think really remains to be seen because I'm not sure that what works well on one unfolded screen is the same as two folding screens. But we will see. But I think you're absolutely right that like, the bigger possible win here for Google solving larger screen Android is on foldable phones than it is on tablets.

• 39:11David Pierce?

  And I think like this idea that Google suddenly discovered the iPad is popular, I think is like, kind of bonkers. And

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like a little bit of a head fake.

• 39:19Speaker 06

  So why not tease a Pixel foldable, which has been like rumored forever. And like, this is not this, the product that they showed off is not coming out till next year. It's got a while to go.

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  Because they got to sell the Pixel 7.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  I mean, this is, this is the company that is like, we're launching a phone in two months, but also we're launching a phone in October. Like, I mean, this is the company that has no concerns about cannibalizing hardware.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, because they don't sell any phones. They're like, they were like, the Pixel 6 sold as much as the Pixel 4 and the Pixel 5 combined, which is one of the harshest cell phones that you can issue. Right. But it's also still not a lot. So then you can announce a Pixel 7 or a Pixel 6A. You're not like, I'm worried about tanking my successful Pixel 6 line. If you announce a Pixel 7 and then announce a Pixel foldable, like now you're not even gonna even, now you have no hope of selling as many Pixel 7s as Pixels 4, 5, and 6 is combined. It's never gonna happen for you.

• 40:13Speaker 06

  Maybe.

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  So and you gotta slow roll it in this way. I think the Pixel tablet, whatever this thing is, is all just a gigantic head fake to get people to think that they care about tablets.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  There's another theory going around because there's been this rumored product for a while now.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna ask you about this. This is good.

• 40:30Speaker 06

  That Google is working on this like Nest Hub device that has a detachable screen and becomes a tablet. And the the theory going around is what the tablet that they showed during the event is the tablet that connects to the Nest Hub and becomes a smart display when it's at home. And there's some like, some credibility to that in that the tablet looks like the front of a Nest Hub. Like if I look at my Nest Hub Max over here, uh, yeah, that's exactly what the tablet looks like that they showed off. So like, sure, a lot of design similarities there. The hesitation I have with that theory is that Pixel teams and Nest teams are like wholly separate and they have separate branding and everything. And they did not call this a Nest device. They called it a Pixel tablet. And then, of course, they also didn't show

• 41:14Speaker 06

  any of that, like functionality or keys, any of kinds of that where it would dock into a a smart display screen or whatever. So I mean, far be it from Google to do something like that. Like, like they are the, like, they've done much weirder things and they could possibly turn that into a smart home device or whatever. And and then it becomes, it's like, well, its primary purpose is a smart display, but then you can use it as a tablet when you want sometimes, which is like, again, a weird way to frame something as the perfect companion to your Pixel phone.

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  Also, Lenovo built this product like six times in a row. Amazon built a product just like this, right? Like,

• 41:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  It's not a category, whatever. We'll see. We've got until 2023 to argue about. These vessels.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  I don't know why they're white. Like the, the whole problem is they made them white. Like, like it's like, you can have big vessels. Okay. There's a place for bezels. You gotta put your thumbs and you're holding the tablet or whatever. You can make that argument. Don't make them white. Like it's a, it's a like content consumption device.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. But that's, that's my conspiracy theory, which David tells me is true.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  Oh, I, I definitely think you're right. What if, what if it's a smart display that you take off? And then when you leave to go outside, you fold it closed. What if it's, what if it's a foldable and we didn't even know? There's your conspiracy theory.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  There you go. Uh, we should actually quickly talk about the Nest Hub just for one second before we talk about the Pixel Watch. They announced a bunch of features to invoke the assistant only for the Nest Hub Max that require you to look at it because it has a camera. And that was the one part of this whole presentation where I was like, oh, that's too far. Really? I don't want it. I don't want it always on camera in my, I have the little Nest because it doesn't have a camera.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I mean, then you guys, I guess just wouldn't use this feature, but if you have a Nest Hub Max and you don't have the camera disabled, then it recognize uses you already. Like that was a launch feature. Like it says, hi Dan, when I walk up to it or whatever, and shows my little avatar. And then in theory, if it, if Google ever got its calendar system straight, where it could see my work calendar, it would show my work calendar events. As opposed to like, if my kids look at it, they would not see my calendar events. Um, so it's already doing that. This is just kind of like the next step of like, oh, you're looking at it. We know you're looking at it. We know you're in range of it. If you just say like, start a timer, uh, we don't need you to say, hey G to wake up.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know. It was just the idea of the camera always looking to see if you're making eye contact with it. Just like, no, thank you.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't need to make eye contact with the computer.

• 43:33David Pierce?

  Well, and I think part of this, what's interesting about that to me is like, it's a constant reminder that it is doing that, right? Like, yeah, the, the thing where you walk up to it and it knows you is at least you, you can sort of feel in your brain, like you're doing something to enable it, even though you're not, it's just watching all the time. Uh, but this is like, they're just directly telling you via the feature, like it's watching you a hundred percent of the time. And anytime you look at it, it knows, like, don't, don't forget, like, that's a, that's a bold thing.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  They said all of the right things, but it all happening locally and no device, no data leaving the device and data minimization. It just, you know, you can't take a picture of me if there's not a camera on the thing. It's true. I'm going to stick with the little ones until, until they force me either way. And then I'm going to put tape, I'm going to buy white tape. All right. There's cameras all over my house. I don't even know what I'm talking about. There's five cameras on my cell phone that I carry in my pocket. Uh, we start to fix a watch, Dan. It seems like they're trying again in a serious way. They've got this platform they did with Samsung. What do you think?

• 44:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Pixel Watch is interesting. I mean, we've this thing's been rumored and leaked for over a year now, and it's still not coming out to the fall. This is like one of the announcements along with the Pixel 7, that it's going to be released in the fall, but here's a teaser look. There's a couple of interesting things with it. I think the big move for it is that this is finally the first product of the Fitbit integration with Google that we're really seeing in a real tangible way. Google closed, uh, David, was it 2021? Excuse me.

• 44:58David Pierce?

  It closed, yeah, January 2021, and they announced the acquisition in like mid 2019.

• 45:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, like a light, literal lifetime ago, they announced that acquisition. And now we're finally getting a product that is using that. So they are going to have like a big fitness integration play, which as we know, is what makes the Apple Watch popular. So that's like a smart move. The watch itself looks pretty nice, I guess. It's interesting that they only seem to show one size of it as opposed to multiple sizes. It's got proprietary bands, which is hmm, maybe. And it's round and it's got a little, uh, little control dial on the side, whatever you call one of those.

• 45:36Nilay Patel?

  The digital crown. Johnny, I've told this.

• 45:38David Pierce?

  Revolutionary input device.

• 45:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 45:40David Pierce?

  On par with multi-touch.

• 45:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. And like, you know, it's going to be running Wear OS 3, which is currently only available on Samsung Watches. They also announced on stage that a bunch of watches from the usual Android watchmakers from Fossil and all the brands associated with that, uh, are going to be releasing Wear OS 3 watches. But so far, we've only had it on a Samsung watch and it's been very much a Samsung-driven experience. So when the Pixel Watch comes out, uh, ideally, we would be getting what is a Google-driven experience for an Android smartwatch.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  Is there any news on the processor battery life front?

• 46:13Speaker 06

  No.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like the, the thing that has held this entire category back.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. So like for many years, Android Wear watches have been relying on, many of the Android Wear watches have been relying on Qualcomm processors, which Qualcomm has not really put a lot of development into its processors for wearables. And they've been slower and way behind what Apple's doing. The only reason that the Samsung watch runs Wear OS 3 is because it's using a Samsung processor inside of it. The Qualcomm processors that are available thus far apparently can't run all the features of Wear OS 3. So it'll be interesting to see what processor they do put in this Pixel watch. They did not speak to that at all. They didn't speak to anything in terms of like battery life or features like always on display. You, it would assume that it would have like the Google Assistant and you could talk to it like you

• 46:57Speaker 06

  can talk to Siri on the Apple Watch. They did say that you can control Google Home stuff through it. So you can control smart home stuff. It's like all the typical smart watch stuff we've seen for like years now. Like they're just like putting it all together in one product that'll hopefully work well and not die at like 5pm, which is like a thing that they haven't been able to do in the past. So there's a lot of unknowns here. We don't know exactly what it's going to cost. I think it's going to be more on the premium side. I would be surprised if this thing's under $300. They're using stainless steel with it, which is generally going to push the price up. And if they put a tensor chip in there, we have no idea.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think the main thing for me is, you know, they went with a circular display, which they've been doing across Wear for a while. It does not seem like they have really rethought the UI. Like there's still a lot of scrolling of rectangular objects in their demos. And it's like, you guys, all right, like we've just been at smart watches for a while.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's like, this isn't a first generation product kind of problem. But like, here we are. And it's still like, well, I guess the edges of that list item will be cut off as I scroll.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  That reminds me of like what Pebble did with their circular smart watch many years ago. They would just scroll the whole page. So it perfectly fit each circle. So you couldn't scroll line by line. They would just do an entire page and each page was rendered to fit the circle.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any great solution except for square watches. And then you're stuck with a direct Apple comparison. So I kind of get it, but. We'll see. I think the Fitbit stuff is really interesting that we've been waiting, but I think the main things are like battery life. And then obviously they can only, I mean, this is like the Pixel Buds Pro 2, right? Like they're starting to make hardware devices that only really work well with their hardware.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  And that's.

• 48:39Speaker 06

  Or at least, at least Android hardware, right? Like,

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 06

  You know, I'm sure that the Pixel Watch will work with other Android phones not made by Google and the Pixel Buds Pro, which they also announced will probably work with non-Google phones. Maybe there might be a feature or two that you get with a Pixel that you don't get on a Samsung phone, but like, they really are not designed to work with iPhones at all. So like, you probably won't be able to pair the watch with an iPhone. You might be able to pair the Pixel Buds with an iPhone, but then have no access to any feature controller or anything like that. They will just be like very basic Bluetooth headphones.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Just wait until the Europeans hear about this.

• 49:14David Pierce?

  Well, and on that same level, what do we know about how Fitbit gets integrated into things? Because one thing that is true is there are a lot of people out there in the world who love Fitbits and have used them for a long time, who might theoretically want a device like this. But what I can't get a sense of is like, is Fitbit going to be a separate service like Google Fit that others can use? Is it going to be part of Android? Is it just going to be for the Pixel Watch? Like, did they spend all this money on this company just for the Pixel Watch? Do we have any idea how this is going to shake out?

• 49:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's hard to say. I know that James Park, who is Fitbits CEO, or he was the CEO before the acquisition. I don't know what his current title is now, but he's basically the leader of Fitbit. He did say that when the Pixel Watch launches, Google Fit is still going to exist for whatever reason. So they're going to, they're going to run concurrently. Fitbit is going to be making other hardware. They've got trackers. They've got their other smartwatch lines. But apparently it was his team that drove the development of the Pixel Watch. So there's a lot of Fitbit expertise built into this, maybe in the way that the watch wears, the way it fits you, the way it kind of works as a functional watch. It seemed like they leveraged a lot of that Fitbit experience. But as far as like what the platforms do, it's still like up in the air. You know, how that's going to shake

• 50:26Speaker 06

  out and, and are you going to have two fitness apps on your watch? Like, if you have a Samsung watch, you do. You've got Google Fit and you've got Samsung Health and you could install any others, but you know.

• 50:37David Pierce?

  And I'm sure there's a team at Google working on like Android Fitness Pro and that'll come too. And it'll, it'll all just be really delightful.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  Sundar told us they're focusing, Manny.

• 50:46Speaker 06

  Ecosystems all the way down.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. Last thing real quick. I feel like we can actually get through it real quick. They teased the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. They also announced the Pixel 6A, but fine. Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  It's 450 bucks. It has a millimeter wave, which at 450 bucks, I think might be one of the only phones.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Well.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no. Did they? Did they tell us something wrong?

• 51:07Speaker 06

  A little bit, yes. Shocker that Google had their specs wrong on their wireless radios. The unlocked $450 version does not have millimeter wave. The version that Verizon is selling is $500 and it does have millimeter wave. So you get to pay a 10%, 10%, yeah, 10% tax to get millimeter wave on Verizon.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Just what everybody wants. Who hasn't wanted to stand at a one street corner and download in pirate movies at blazing fast speeds on their 450 dollar phone?

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. The other interesting thing about the Pixel 6A real quick is that it is aggressively priced and it, but it runs the same tensor processor as the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, but it does not have the same camera system as the 6 and 6 Pro. Instead, it appears to have the same camera system as the 5 and 5A from before it. And this is the first time that the A line, Allison Johnson on our team pointed this out that like, this is the first time that the A line has a different camera system than the flagship pixels. So Google traded a better processor for an inferior camera and it made that trade this year, which is, which is interesting. That's obviously what Apple does with the SE line on its budget phones. It's got the latest A15 processor, but it's got an inferior camera compared to the rest of the iPhone.

• 52:22Speaker 06

  So it's interesting that, that Google made that transition this year.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think they're all focused on tensor, right? They, they said nothing about these cameras at all.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, other than they're 12 megapixels.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, correct. And then they teased the 7 and 7 Pro, which are still ugly. I don't know.

• 52:41Speaker 06

  They they carry on that that design language, right? And either you like it or you don't. And and I the one thing that they're changing with the seven pro is interesting is on the six and six pro, the the camera bar, or as Dieter used to call it, the shelf was glass. If you didn't use a case and you put your phone down, you're putting the glass like camera lens right down.

• 53:01David Pierce?

  It would break the third time you did it.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, very frequently broke. So they are shifting that to like an aluminum band that has cutouts for the camera in it. So that's going to be a little bit different of a look. Maybe it'll be more durable or what have you. The other thing we know about the Pixel seven and seven pro is that they will have a second generation tensor chip in them.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just they're not beautiful. Maybe it won't go all the way to the U word.

• 53:22Speaker 06

  I mean, I've seen I've seen worse design.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you've seen that pixel tab.

• 53:28David Pierce?

  What if you could dock your phone to your Nest Smart Hub?

• 53:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Didn't Asus do that like 10 years ago? You dock the phone to the tablet.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  We're fully at the period now where like early 2010s product innovation, like enough people have forgotten it.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  We're like, we're just gonna do it again.

• 53:47Speaker 06

  It's like Atrix time to shine, baby.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  Baby.

• 53:50Speaker 06

  Doc, here we go.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  Turn this phone into a shit Windows computer. Let's do it.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  You guys heard of Linux on the desktop? This is the year. All right, there's other stuff. They brought that wallet. I mean, it's all on the site.

• 54:03Speaker 06

  Just bringing back the hits.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  It is very much Google is in a and again, you you just heard us talking soon. There are more focused. They're actually trying to deliver on this stuff. It's interesting. I would not say there's they announced anything that was wildly new at this year's I O.

• 54:18Speaker 06

  No, I mean, I think we'll see. I think the the fall hardware launch will be interesting because one will will obviously learn more about the Pixel sevens and the Pixel Watch. But I have a feeling, just a hunch, that if they're willing to tease the tablet I O, maybe they will tease a photable in the fall if they're not ready to launch yet. Because that thing's been rumored forever.

• 54:37David Pierce?

  That's a good theory.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, I've been doing my own research.

• 54:40Speaker 06

  Yes, you've been Googling.

• 54:41David Pierce?

  Dan, thank you. We will see you again here soon. We're going to take a break. But before we do that, the crypto world is insane right now. And we could spend like nine hours talking about it. But instead, we just grabbed Liz Zapato and decided to spend like 10 minutes trying to figure out what's going on in crypto. So here's that.

• 54:59David Pierce?

  Liz Lopatto.

• 54:59Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 55:00David Pierce?

  Welcome to what we're calling Crypto Corner, the new, possibly only ever happening once, segment on the first cast.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  Well, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Here we are. It's time to talk about money.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  OK, so there's a million things we could talk about, but I think the like, general story here is crypto is falling apart. And as far as I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of this comes back to Luna and Terra as like, the, the sort of middle of all of the chaos. If you had to pick one, it seems like it's that. Is that fair?

• 55:32Speaker 07

  Kind of. OK, so I'm gonna like zoom way back and then we're gonna zoom forward to Luna and Terra. So one of the things about an asset like a cryptocurrency is that it's super risky. And for the last several years, we've been living with very, very low interest rates, like near zero. The reason why we've had near zero interest rate policy is to stimulate the economy during the pandemic. And so in this environment, it doesn't necessarily make sense to put your money in safe investments because you're not gonna earn enough interest to keep up with inflation. So a bunch of weird shit happened. We've got SPACs, we've got meme stocks, we got MFTs. And like, a lot of the like, sort of weirdness is because there was so much money like sloshing around and looking for places to have returns

• 56:16Speaker 07

  that inevitably it spilled into some of these other areas. But also, like, I think some people got bored during the pandemic and risk can be really fun. Like, that's the point of the gambling industry. So a lot of people got involved with like, trading. Anyway, around November, the Fed indicated that it was going to raise interest rates. And that, by the way, was the peak of the crypto market, was November. And then last week, the Fed increased the interest rates by half a percentage point, which is like, the biggest increase in 20 years. And so we all saw like, the stocks fall, right? Crypto's been falling farther because it's much more volatile and anybody who's looking to de-risk is probably going to start with crypto.

• 56:57Speaker 07

  And so to get to your question about Luna and Terra, I think maybe it's helpful to understand in the crypto ecosystem what a stablecoin is.

• 57:06David Pierce?

  Because stablecoins are supposed to be like immune to all of this. Isn't that like, they're literally called stablecoins, right? Like, all this chaos should not be affecting stablecoins.

• 57:16Speaker 07

  Well, that's fun, because some economic research from Bruce Misraak, he's an economist, and he looked at stablecoins, and they're not that stable, actually. Like, 80% of them go to zero. But the idea behind a stablecoin is essentially that it's pegged to something like, let's say, a dollar, just for simplicity's sake. So you have something like Tether, which is supposed to represent a dollar in the crypto ecosystem and is theoretically backed by reserves. I say theoretically because there are a lot of questions about Tether's reserves, and we'll get there in a second. But the idea is that if you want to exit, let's say, your Bitcoin position, and you

• 57:56Speaker 07

  want to move into, let's say, Ethereum, one way to do that is to cash out through Tether or another stablecoin that's about equivalent to a dollar and then move into the Ethereum ecosystem. As for why you might want to do that, well, it's really difficult to go between crypto and fiat, or what you and I understand to be money, like, dollar.

• 58:17David Pierce?

  Real, human, people money, yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 07

  I mean, as real as money ever is. And so that's partly because of like, things like, you know, anti-money laundering regulations, stuff like that. It sometimes takes a couple of days for your crypto investment to show up in your, like, dollar bank account. So if you want to do trading more quickly than that, you move into a dollar equivalent, which is a stablecoin. Those are also used to do things like create loans in the DeFi space, a bunch of other stuff in the ecosystem. With something like Tether, it's backed by reserves. Now, like, there are questions about Tether's reserves, which I got into at length last year. But the thing about Terra and Luna, about that ecosystem, is that it is an algorithmic stablecoin, which is, if possible, worse than a regular one.

• 59:03Speaker 07

  The thing about algorithmic stablecoins is that, I'm trying to think of a real gentle way to put this, and I'm not coming up with one.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  I think it's increasingly not in need of a gentle explanation, based on what's happened.

• 59:17Speaker 07

  Basically, the way that this works is you have two coins, right? One of them is called Terra, and Terra is supposed to be worth $1. And the other is called Luna, and that value floats. So it's worth whatever somebody wants to pay for it, the same as like, I don't know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. Now, the two can be converted into each other. So let's say Luna's worth 30, which it was recently and certainly is not right now. But like, let's say it's worth 30. You can destroy Luna and get 30 Terra because Terra is worth a dollar each, right? And so if Terra is worth less than a dollar, and you can think to yourself, oh, great idea. I'm gonna destroy, I don't know, like 45 Terra to create one Luna at a discount,

• 1:00:02Speaker 07

  which, you know, decreases the supply of Terra, making it more valuable, pulling it back up to a dollar. And if you're thinking, wait a minute, but like, what makes this valuable? The answer is belief in community. And so, you know, if you believe in this stuff, if you're in Luna, this can be useful because you're like, oh, a number go up, this is great. And you feel like sort of backed by arbitrage. But the moment that confidence is lost, then you find yourself in a really interesting position because you can essentially buy dollars at a discounted price. So if, you know, you dump everything, then they both fail. And we've hit this point of failure.

• 1:00:46Speaker 07

  And to be clear, the people behind this project are trying to like fix things.

• 1:00:50David Pierce?

  Well, and that's the last piece of this we're gonna get into before I let you go because it's, it gets even crazier. But yeah, like, I keep looking and I feel like every time I refresh the page, the value of Luna goes down further and further.

• 1:00:59Speaker 07

  So right now, it's worth 2 cents.

• 1:01:03David Pierce?

  Yikes.

• 1:01:03Speaker 07

  Which, just to be clear, like, as of like April 4th, it was worth $116. So some people just really got like wrecked in a really, really painful way that I am genuinely sorry for. Because like, the thing about money and the thing about investments is that they play on human emotions. And like, the biggest thing in the crypto space is like, hope and greed versus fear, uncertainty and doubt, or what people like to call FUD. And so like, if you look at Terra's price right now, You know, for the the U S T, the thing that's supposed to be worth a dollar, it's worth 38 cents at the time of this recording.

• 1:01:42David Pierce?

  Which is definitively not a dollar.

• 1:01:45Speaker 07

  Correct. And so like, I love the arbitrage idea of buying a dollar for 38 cents, because that's a lot of profit for me, assuming I can exit the trade, which I may not be able to do at this point. So that's kind of what's going on. You're in a death spiral. Now, what has happened is that the people behind this ecosystem have halted the blockchain. They say to prevent governance attacks, but I think like, that's like, the only way that you can make the death cycle stop and like, reset it, if that's even possible, which I don't think it is.

• 1:02:18David Pierce?

  Just by literally not letting people continue to sell.

• 1:02:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. And like, to be clear, like, this is not that unusual in the regular financial system, right? Like, sure, the markets of the regular financial system close at like, four. And there's some aftermarket trading, whatever, but like, you can, like, you're not going to get wrecked while you're asleep. The problem with cryptocurrency ecosystem is that markets are always open. And so there's no time to like, pause and like, reevaluate your position and like, re-strategize. And like, get out of your feelings, because like, one of the biggest things that like, happens during periods like this is panic selling, where people sell stuff that actually might be good, but they're so freaked out about all their losses that they don't like, think it all the way through and sell.

• 1:03:01Speaker 07

  And so like, you know, if you're opportunistic, like, when you see a bear market like this, you start thinking, okay, when do I want to buy in? Because like, there are plenty of people who are in this space who think that, you know, cryptocurrency is going to come back, because so far it has. And like, I've seen a lot of people sort of reassuring each other and themselves, like, I remember when Bitcoin like plunged in, you know, 2018, and like, I remember all of these crypto winters, whatever. I guess one of the things that I find myself really interested in is like, are we going to see this chaos going into the regular markets? Because, you know, there are cryptocurrencies that are on the stock exchange right now, like Coinbase, like, that's, that's a publicly traded company. Like, things going wrong for crypto means things going wrong for Coinbase and the Coinbase.

• 1:03:46Speaker 07

  Shareholders and of course Coinbase has been plunging also as all of this is happening. And so like, I can't tell you for sure that this is going to stay contained to crypto. I hope it is, but there's the possibility that there are linkages between these two systems. So between like TradFi and crypto, but also because like a lot of the people who are in crypto are retail investors. And so it may just be that we're going to see a lot of retail capitulation. And so if they decide that like all risk assets are a problem, then there's spillover. So it's, I don't know what happens. I am absolutely riveted. And you know, I know that some of our listeners are into crypto, into the crypto ecosystem.

• 1:04:28Speaker 07

  If you're in crypto and you want to talk about this and like, let me know what's going on from your position, like email me. I'm [email protected]. I am genuinely curious about what's happening to retail investors right now. And like, if this is you, like, what are you thinking? How's it going? Like, please drop me a line. I think there's carnage in the markets and I think there's more carnage coming.

• 1:04:49David Pierce?

  Fair enough. All right. Well, we're going to come back to all of that on the next episode of Crypto Corner, which is probably a segment they'll never let us do again, but I hope we do. Thank you, Liz. Appreciate it. And we are for real going to take a break this time. We'll be right back.

• 1:05:06Speaker 08

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• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  We are back. Apologies to the crypto verse. I hope things work out for you. Alex Krantz is here. Hey, Alex.

• 1:06:34Alex Cranz?

  Hey, I'm very excited to not talk about crypto.

• 1:06:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, that makes just one. No, Liz is great. Liz is refocused. She's on the crypto beat now. So now, whenever we need anything, Liz is there. It's great.

• 1:06:46Alex Cranz?

  She's there.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  And what a time to be on the crypto beat. That said, we're not talking about that with Alex. Alex, we're talking about the lightning port. Classic Vergecast.

• 1:06:54Alex Cranz?

  Yes, I love that there's like currently a threat to the lightning port.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  A looming threat.

• 1:07:00Alex Cranz?

  A looming threat. It's been looming for like a decade now, but no, it's really, really looming. There's, we're getting more and more reports that they're going to finally get rid of the lightning port on the iPhone and the AirPods and replace it with USB C.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  If you drop it off the iPhone, you gotta, you're hooped. You gotta take it off everything.

• 1:07:20Alex Cranz?

  You gotta take it off everything. Yeah.

• 1:07:21Nilay Patel?

  That's the end of it. This actually, there's like some really inside tech journalism baseball here. So there's a very famous analyst, Ming Shi Quo, who issues reports, great track record on Apple rumors, surveys the supply chains, component suppliers. He is a controversial figure. Apple hates him.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  Accusations that he's bribing, like all the stuff.

• 1:07:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  But he is an analyst. He is deeply sourced in the supply chains and component world. Gets a lot of Apple stuff right. Sometimes you get some stuff wrong.

• 1:07:55Alex Cranz?

  Sometimes.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm only saying this to set up the fact that now they have a Twitter.

• 1:07:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  Which is just not what you would like. Your stuff used to come out, the Mac sites would get it for sure.

• 1:08:04David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:08:04Alex Cranz?

  The rest of us wouldn't.

• 1:08:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, but all like percolate out from his analysts or from the analyst reports that it was like, you never quite knew where it was coming from. Somebody got an email that they sent to somebody else and then it eventually ended up on the internet.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  But now he's like, whatever. I've got a Twitter. Look, Twitter's got six months left and I'm going hard for the last six months. So he's tweeting directly now. He says, my latest survey indicates the second half of 23, new iPhones will abandon Lightning and switch to USBC and then the suppliers, the USBC ecosystem will become, they're gonna do great. So what he's basically saying is I've talked to all the suppliers and they're expecting USBC sales to go through the roof because Apple's hinting at this. Is this true or not? We don't know. Good track record. But you put this next to when they announced Lightning. They said it was, Phil Schaller said it's a connector for the next decade and they've hit the mark.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. Is this year the decade?

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, they're done with that.

• 1:08:57David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  September 2012, Phil Schaller called Lightning a modern connector for the next decade.

• 1:09:03Alex Cranz?

  So technically, they, they kept their promise.

• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  They made it a decade. That's true. All the rumors were that they were going to go portless and just do wireless charging. And then I think they released MagSafe and wireless charging. And then every Apple executive experienced what wireless charging is like. And they're like, cables are still pretty good at this.

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22David Pierce?

  And they can sell cables for so much money. You can buy a 10 foot Apple cable for $40,000 and the margin's pretty good.

• 1:09:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, every day Tim Cook gets a, an email that's like, this is how many $150 Thunderbolt cables we sold. And he's like, well, that's the future of the business. We'll see. They have been very committed to Lightning. They have not wanted to let it go. But it's it's time. Doesn't it feel like it's time?

• 1:09:46Alex Cranz?

  Have they been committed? Because they've already pretty much taken out of most of the iPads at this point.

• 1:09:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's still only in the cheapest couple, and that's about it.

• 1:09:54Alex Cranz?

  And it just feels like a legacy thing, much like most of those really cheap iPads, like most of the components of them are legacy components. So I could see we're doing a brand new iPhone. We're doing a brand new AirPods. USB C. And then we all cry. And there's like at least one analyst who I think said they were going to shave their eyebrows if it actually happens. That guy will have no eyebrows.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  See, Twitter's getting weird in these last six months of Twitter. It's just getting weird up there.

• 1:10:19Alex Cranz?

  Just getting super weird.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  So see, that's the big rumor. It's funny because that came right on top of the news that Apple was going to discontinue the iPod. But well, the iPod Touch, which was like ancient at this point.

• 1:10:33Alex Cranz?

  It's an iPhone 7.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it had the iPhone 7 chip in it. But you know, we just had Tony Fadell on Decoder. He was on his big tours and tweeting all these pictures of iPods. He got in a little, I would say like a respectful bro argument with Phil Schiller on Twitter. Who had the idea for the wheel and where the idea for the wheel came. And it ended with him being like, loved working with you, man. But like in the middle of it, you're like, this could go another way. But it's just like, you know, a moment, the iPod had a moment in the past couple of weeks because of the Fadell book.

• 1:11:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say, I was thinking about how much stuff I used to have in my pockets all the time. So it was an iPod, but I always had a classic. I always had the big dog. I had a Canon Powershot Elf. That was very important to me. And God, thank God, those pictures didn't survive. And I had a Sony, like a Sony candy bar phone. Always those three things. And I had to charge them all every night.

• 1:11:22Alex Cranz?

  And you had to wear cargo pants.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  No, I didn't have cargo pants. I'm like a jacket oriented person.

• 1:11:28Alex Cranz?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  What were you? Did you have, were you permanent iPod person?

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. I had a gold iPod mini that went absolutely everywhere with me for a very long time. It was.

• 1:11:38Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible.

• 1:11:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. Oh, I loved it. It got, it was one of those things like that. It got stolen out of my car. And I still remember like where I was, what the weather was like, where my car was parked. Like, I remember it was, it was one of those moments in my life that like is so scarred into me because that's when someone stole my iPod and I couldn't afford to buy anyone. But I still had the white headphones, so I plugged those into my crappy other MP3 player and kept using it. And it was kind of like I had an iPod.

• 1:12:04Alex Cranz?

  My original iPod was also disappeared. I have no idea who took it. I suspect my brother. I've never found it. It never reappeared.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, if he's listening now.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  I've since, I've moved many times. So if it was in any of those places, I would have found it when I moved. Right. But it wasn't there. So who knows? And then I got an iPod Shuffle. It was not the same.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Did you have the one without any buttons?

• 1:12:27Alex Cranz?

  Yes, I had that one. And I had like the USB stick looking one.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Alex Cranz?

  That was my favorite because I felt I would feel like a spy. I'd go to like the college computer lab and I'd be like, I'm in guys. It felt very, very cool.

• 1:12:41David Pierce?

  Just load up Kazaa.

• 1:12:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  The iPod is one of the last products that constantly changed its design every year. Like every year it looked different and it was very exciting. And now it's like, well, we're under the 35th year of this iPhone design. We've figured out laptops and that's what you're going to get forever. Just go, I would encourage everyone to go back in time and look at like, what digital cameras looked like. They were all over the place.

• 1:13:07David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  And you could, like, everything is converged into a candy bar, which is fine. They're very powerful and they're great. And we love them, obviously, but be nice. Be nice if we.

• 1:13:17Alex Cranz?

  Click wheel.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  Diverge to things. Did you just say click wheel, people?

• 1:13:21David Pierce?

  There really was something magical about it, by the way. Like the coolest thing about the iPod thing this week was like, everybody has an iPod story and everybody like has feelings about iPods. They had just, they were this like, cultural phenomenon for so many people for so long that I don't feel like there's that many things like that. Like, you're not going to hear people telling you like their stories about their Quest 2 in 10 years. Like that's, it's just not the same thing anymore.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. One of the, actually, the things I thought about the iPod a lot this week was so much iPod usage was communal. Like you think about it as like a headphones device. Like you're alone, you're like having your moment. But you were not worried about people seeing your photos.

• 1:14:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Nilay Patel?

  iPods weren't locked, right? Like they had the switch on the top to prevent like butt plays. But like you just like you would just like hand your iPod to other people or you're like plug it into their dock or like whatever. And like that was the ad campaign. It's like, what it was just such a shared device and very few of our devices are designed to be shared in that way anymore because they contain the past, present and future of our personalities. And now you're like, no, you don't even look at my phone. How dare you?

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  But also that feeling when you hand somebody your iPod and they start scrolling through your artists and judging your music taste was like, that was, that was a real moment. It was, it was like maybe not as high stakes as you can now scroll through all my photos, but it felt as someone with like deeply, deeply terrible music taste. It was, it was, it was a tough moment. It's a lot of people who are like, wow, you have a lot of Britney Spears on your iPad.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of jangly jam bands on your iPad.

• 1:14:58David Pierce?

  Oh, so many, so many.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  Just like the entire jam bands discography.

• 1:15:07Alex Cranz?

  That was the best part of it, though. I loved having like terrible music on it and like wording it. So that was the first thing you would see on my iPod. So you'd be like, what? This is what we're gonna have to listen like anime music from the 1980s? This is what you're gonna make us listen to, Alex? I'm like, yeah, it's exactly what you're gonna have to listen to. It was incredible.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  Were you a, were you a perfectly organized iTunes person?

• 1:15:30Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent. Like, that was a dopamine hit.

• 1:15:34David Pierce?

  Same.

• 1:15:34Alex Cranz?

  To like, I'd get in there, I'd, I'd mess with the genre. I'd be like, is that really, is it really country western? Is it Texas country? I don't know. But I had to have it just right.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  When you got the weird MP3s and they had the deeply weird genre, you're like, do I have to be really into this now?

• 1:15:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Nilay Patel?

  Because this is who I've become. Look, we're missing a lot with having streaming services categorize all culture. I'm just saying, there was a moment with iPods and it was real. Speaking of music, Welch reviewed, I'm never gonna get this right, the Sony WH 1000X M5s.

• 1:16:09Alex Cranz?

  You did it.

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  I did it, cuz I read it. I'm gonna buy these headphones so fast.

• 1:16:14David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:16:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  Even though I think that they're not gonna be my favorite.

• 1:16:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm a little bummed. I kind of expected them to be, Sony's just done such a good job of just making it substantially better every time. That this was kind of the one where it was like, okay, certain things are better. It seems like it sounds better. The noise cancellation is better. But it's more expensive for what I think is like a nicer looking, but less sort of impressive design. And I will say this-

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't fold up.

• 1:16:41David Pierce?

  That's the thing. That's the thing that kills me. The fact that it just lays flat in the case and doesn't curl in on itself to fit into us drives me absolutely insane.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  I just went to San Francisco and I carried my M2s, which are dying.

• 1:16:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  And like decrepit, but like they fold up small into the case.

• 1:17:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  And now these don't.

• 1:17:01Alex Cranz?

  You know what this is? This is inflation.

• 1:17:04Nilay Patel?

  This is inflation.

• 1:17:05Alex Cranz?

  This isn't, they're, they're increasing the price and, and giving us less like space in our bags.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  So Welch points out that they're gonna keep selling the M4s. I hope the price will go down. And I think I'm gonna end up buying M4s instead of M5s cuz they fold up. This is my plan.

• 1:17:19David Pierce?

  There was an interesting argument on our YouTube channel too about comfort over versus design. Like that was just sort of the question that, that we posed as we uploaded the video. And at least when I checked, it was like overwhelmingly comfort. People are just like, just give me a thing that is easy to wear. And for me, I would add to your point, like easy to carry. And it's like, will I deal with slightly worse sound in order to get that? Yes. Like the only thing for me that I like won't trade is battery life. But beyond that, like give me comfort over just about everything else.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  So depressing. No, it's just like, no matter what, if you're like, will you pick this or sound quality? People are like, whatever the other one is.

• 1:17:53Alex Cranz?

  Whatever.

• 1:17:53Nilay Patel?

  Convenience, comfort, like, just like whatever it is. Speed, like, sound quality? No, that's, it's always the lowest thing on the list.

• 1:18:03Alex Cranz?

  Grado would be like a Fortune 500 company right now, if people actually cared.

• 1:18:08David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 1:18:09Nilay Patel?

  I tweeted, by the way, Wondery announced a podcast in Atmos, which we are gonna have to do. And I think-

• 1:18:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  Our engineer Andrew is very hyped for us to do. So we'll be sneaking all around you soon. But I was like, I think spatial audio is a, like for not movies is like a Wondery laundering scheme. And now the spatial audio people are out in force.

• 1:18:28David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30David Pierce?

  Are there, are there, there are like Atmos bros out there?

• 1:18:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what it, I don't know how to describe it. They're not passionate about it and they back down immediately. So they're not like Elon fans, right? They're like, I think it sounds good. You're like, I don't, you're like, to each his own. And it's like, well, that was the most pleasant online interaction.

• 1:18:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's nice.

• 1:18:48Alex Cranz?

  It's because they like, they wandered over from the AVS forum. And they were like, oh, you're talking, you're talking trash about the system I spent thousands of dollars on. How dare you?

• 1:18:58Nilay Patel?

  Do it for movies. I think it's great for movies, but I just think when we release this podcast in Atmos, which we inevitably do, I think we will quickly discover that the value of it is very low. The reason I bring this up in the context of these headphones, Sony says they're going to issue an update to make them run spatial audio on Android.

• 1:19:19David Pierce?

  Classic disclaimer about trusting software update promises.

• 1:19:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, right, who knows? But it won't run on iOS and then on Android, you can have lossless audio or you can have pairing with multiple devices. And those are your two choices because Bluetooth is stuck. And then on Apple, you can only get AAC.

• 1:19:36Alex Cranz?

  I'm just gonna start the clock.

• 1:19:37David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:19:38Nilay Patel?

  I'm to the next version of AirPods with these USB C connectors are going to get the win of the USB C connector. And then I feel like it only works on iOS devices. Like we've completely made a proprietary Bluetooth protocol. I'm telling you, it's coming. By the way, the six A, the Pixel six A, no headphone jack. The nightmares here, people.

• 1:19:54David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:19:54Alex Cranz?

  We're in it.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  Every day. I definitely sat next to somebody on the plane back from San Francisco, who looked at the movies on the Delta seat back and held up their AirPods and then looked at the AirPods and looked at the movies.

• 1:20:05David Pierce?

  That's devastating.

• 1:20:09Nilay Patel?

  It's like, there's a number of adapters and dongles that you can, but.

• 1:20:12David Pierce?

  But then on the flip side, did you notice when we got on with Sundar at the beginning of the show? He asked us if it was okay that he couldn't find a pair of 3.5 millimeter headphones to plug into his computer. And it's like, this is the world we live in. Like the CEO of Google cannot track down a pair of headphones that plug into a headphone jack.

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  We had somebody on the cutter. I don't remember who it was. It was, it was another CEO of an accessory company. And they were like, I need a microphone. I was like, but you make them.

• 1:20:39Alex Cranz?

  That's your job.

• 1:20:40Nilay Patel?

  Go outside.

• 1:20:43Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 1:20:43Alex Cranz?

  Shout.

• 1:20:44Nilay Patel?

  Mark Zuckerberg trying to cause a little hype situation today. Did an Instagram reel. That's what he's got it. He doesn't have a choice.

• 1:20:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Nilay Patel?

  He can't tweet anything.

• 1:20:54David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:20:54Nilay Patel?

  But he tweeted a link to Instagram video

• 1:20:58Nilay Patel?

  of him in the Project Cambria headset, which is the new high end headset that's coming. Out teeth have leaked the entire roadmap. It's a high end mixed reality headset. So there are cameras on the outside, streams of video to you in low latency to your eyes. And then it does AR stuff over that video. Cause no one can figure out actually AR. So now we're just doing video, like mixed reality like that. This is all great. It's, he says it's going to come to Quest soon, like some sort of preview mode. The funniest thing about this is they blurred out selectively the headset on his face.

• 1:21:32Alex Cranz?

  Can't see it.

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  Frame by frame. So it's just him with like a blurry line over his eyes.

• 1:21:37Alex Cranz?

  The funniest thing for me was a lot of hype in this entire video. And they're like, we're finally doing it. We're giving you pass through in color. And I'm like, I want you to know

• 1:21:49Alex Cranz?

  color, color video has been a thing, Meta. This is not new.

• 1:21:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm assuming maybe in the lab, like they started, but they did announce color very proudly.

• 1:22:01Alex Cranz?

  So proud.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  Pass through. I just wonder like, what if you just showed us the device like leaking a headset at this point, it's going to look like a VR headset.

• 1:22:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10David Pierce?

  It's also like not that well blurred. It's pretty clearly just a VR headset. Like it's also, I'm looking at this right now and the, the cover image on the Instagram that he shared is him standing up, sort of holding one hand out in front of you, smiling with, with the headset on him blurred. And it's like, my dude, like this is going to go right there with the sunscreen photo. You with the flag, like this is just a measurable moment.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  In the render, if you watch the video, at one point it zooms out of the headset. It just shows you that. Very good. All this is very hypey, very cool. This is Apple's building a version like this. That's what Alex tells us. Meta is building this. It's going to come out later this year. But their demo is like, he's like petting an alien. And then it's like, what if you could work in your office? And he's just sitting at his desk, but the video is being passed through. But then he's got virtual screens too.

• 1:23:02Alex Cranz?

  Wait, wait, what if you could work in your office and just pet an alien?

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  Not, not mad. I'm gonna read you the thing. It says, imagine being able to pull up your perfect workstation, which is with as many screens as you want, anywhere you go. Which is, I mean, I do imagine that from time to time.

• 1:23:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I do as well.

• 1:23:19Nilay Patel?

  But this is, this is the next step of VR AR. Cause no one can build the glasses.

• 1:23:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like even Google is like, we're not going to build the glasses. What we can build is a little display that shows you text of people talking to you. So Apple and Facebook are chasing this like high end mixed reality. We'll see. It was, I don't know. They did it.

• 1:23:38Alex Cranz?

  Do you think, cause I figure both Google and Meta are showing this stuff off because they know WWDC is coming and presumably we're gonna see a lot more of the Apple headset. So my question is, do you think Meta hyped the color? Because the Apple headset will be in black and white?

• 1:23:59Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. That's how, that would be great if Apple released a fully black and white, like a perfect AR experience in black and white. Like the glass is the whole thing, but it's just in black and white. Like that's up there with like the watch that has a display that isn't on all the time. All right. Like it doesn't have a floppy drive. Like that's like a perfect Apple move.

• 1:24:16Alex Cranz?

  Just very European aesthetic. Anytime you put it on, you're in a very fancy movie. It's great.

• 1:24:25Nilay Patel?

  That'd be amazing. Samsung leak of the Galaxy Z Fold 4, which actually looks beautiful.

• 1:24:31Alex Cranz?

  It does.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  They like really refined this design.

• 1:24:34Alex Cranz?

  The bump though, the camera bumps.

• 1:24:37Nilay Patel?

  I love the camera bumps. There's, there are three individual camera bumps.

• 1:24:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Nilay Patel?

  Perfect circles.

• 1:24:43Alex Cranz?

  Perfect circles. I just, I can already feel my thumb running over them and like having feelings. And I don't know if they'll be good or bad feelings.

• 1:24:51Nilay Patel?

  Like the thumb having feelings.

• 1:24:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, me having feelings as I like the texture. There's just something about it that like, I was like, ooh. I don't know, just they're too thick.

• 1:25:02Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing that they're on the fourth generation of this device. And like they're refining the design.

• 1:25:07David Pierce?

  It really, and it's like to your point, it's getting kind of good. I mean, obviously like a lot to see between here's a video from Samsung and an actual thing that does or does not break when you try to touch it. But I mean, these things are getting better fast. Like I still think of foldable phones in my head as kind of a like silly prototype that are a long way away from being really competitive things. And I can still count on one hand that I'm a foldable phones I've seen like in the wild. But, but there's like, this is the Z Fold 4 was one of those things that was like, okay, there's, there's something here, like this is kind of looking like a phone.

• 1:25:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then if Google figures out its tablet situation, then you unfold it and it becomes a useful tablet as opposed to just a giant phone.

• 1:25:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:25:52Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:25:52Nilay Patel?

  Which is what we're going on now. And then lastly, speaking of foldable displays, it was the display week conference this week. Obviously the talk of the town.

• 1:25:59Alex Cranz?

  My favorite, honestly, one of my favorite conferences.

• 1:26:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Display week and Siggraph are my two conferences, my two favorite conferences because the weirdest stuff comes out. LG and Samsung, you get the feeling like they're display teams, like they're geared up for display week. They're like, this is it, y'all. So just lots of stuff. LG had an eight inch foldable touchscreen which can fold in both directions, which is wild. You can fold it all the way back on over itself. Lots of rolling displays and like extendables, which is really cool. So you just like pull the display out and it gets longer.

• 1:26:32David Pierce?

  And we should just say, if you're wondering, why are these things useful in my life and do I need them? You're asking the wrong question. That doesn't matter.

• 1:26:39Nilay Patel?

  You're listening to the wrong show.

• 1:26:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's if you're saying, why do I want to pull up my phone two inches to see notifications on it? I don't have an answer for you. I also don't care. It looks very cool and it makes me happy.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying Samsung put out a video and at one point it just put the words wide slideable on screen and then showed it and then showed it being like pulled out. And I was like, this rules. Like I've been, I've been walking around being like, where are my wide slideables? And like, no one's been answering until today.

• 1:27:09Alex Cranz?

  Why are they though, going after it in the mobile space and not in the TV space? We're like, the only rollable TV we have is $10,000. And I personally would like a rollable TV, so I don't have a giant black square behind me in every Zoom call.

• 1:27:27Nilay Patel?

  And Samsung is selling more framed TVs than you can shake a stick at. That thing is so popular. They're like, yeah, people, what people want is a subscription to fine art, not to make your TV go away. Even though it's not their best TV. I'm just saying wide slides right up, rise up, you know, like, that's the future is wide.

• 1:27:46David Pierce?

  Wide sliding sounds like a catchphrase from like a Disney cartoon. I really love it.

• 1:27:50Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the wide slide.

• 1:27:51Alex Cranz?

  Starring Goofy.

• 1:27:53Nilay Patel?

  It's such a cool, you gotta see it. It's like, so, let me try to describe their demo to you. So David's right, the vertical slideable is someone's watching like a surfing video and they pull the screen up. And they, and like notifications and menu stuff there. The wide slideable demo, this is real. I swear to God, this is real. It's like, oh, it's kids trick or treating. It's a video of a kid, so they're all dressed in like, like costumes and they pull it out and they reveal a ghost.

• 1:28:26Nilay Patel?

  That's not how movies work. No, it's like a scream costume guy, not a ghost. But it's like, they pull it out and there's like a guy being like, woo. It's just such a good demo.

• 1:28:38Alex Cranz?

  It looks so good that you're like, this isn't real. This looks fake.

• 1:28:43Nilay Patel?

  I can't stop watching. It's like they had to film it and make it and then put the words wide slideable on it. And there was meetings for days about this and they're like, whose kids are gonna be in the ghost video?

• 1:28:57Alex Cranz?

  They paid some kids to be in that video.

• 1:28:59Nilay Patel?

  I just love the idea that if you didn't have the ability to stretch your screen out, like if they didn't do all of that engineering, you would never know there was a ghost.

• 1:29:07David Pierce?

  Think about all the stuff that's happening on your phone that you've just never even seen. In every movie you've ever watched, there's something off to the side that you just didn't even.

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  You could just wide slide your stuff right out.

• 1:29:18Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. I hope these are all real and we should all have them. Uh, other stuff we should talk about really quick. The F-150 Lightning is shipping. Andy Hawkins got to drive one. Lots of people got to drive one. By all accounts, this product is going to be a hit.

• 1:29:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Nilay Patel?

  People seem to love it. They just can't make any of them. Like, that's the problem.

• 1:29:35Alex Cranz?

  Also, the, the tow capacity on them. Like, I love that he was talking about how it, it actually shows you how much your battery life is going to go down when you start towing something. But also your battery life goes way down when you start towing something. No long distance trips factor in.

• 1:29:53Nilay Patel?

  This is the real Texas coming out. And Alex, she's like, I'm very worried about towing.

• 1:29:57Alex Cranz?

  It's, I, I, yeah, I had to tow one time and ended up calling a friend crying because I was so upset. I was just towing like a U-Haul trailer and she's like, that's, you just learn how to do it. You get used to it.

• 1:30:11Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Uh, you do over time. I've only towed twice, I think.

• 1:30:14Alex Cranz?

  Scary.

• 1:30:15Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't, it wasn't a big deal. Yeah, it wasn't, it was, I was towing a very small thing. All right. Here's what we got. Everyone's got to get a truck and we're all going to practice towing together. But no, seriously, like, it, the product seems great. They just got to make a lot of them. So that's great. Check out that coverage on the site. Dish, the Project Gen of Five Sis, keeps stumbling into some sort of disaster-like reality. I would say that Dish Network keeps talking about crypto in relation to its wireless network in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. So they had an investor, an analyst event in Vegas. And I'm just going to read this to you. This is on the slide. Imagine if there is a wireless carrier that embraced digital acceleration,

• 1:31:00Nilay Patel?

  the web 3.0 trends to reshape the entire wireless experience. Or, or, or imagine if you could turn your unused data into a real digital currency.

• 1:31:13Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 1:31:14Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:31:16David Pierce?

  What do any of those words mean?

• 1:31:18Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. But let me continue. Imagine if you could leverage decentralized financing to get the latest iconic devices. Imagine if there's a wireless carrier that actually paid you back. So I'm just gonna tell you, if you have a Bitcoin, do not buy an iPhone with it.

• 1:31:37David Pierce?

  I don't know, at this point, the, the, the price of those two things is getting ever closer together.

• 1:31:41Nilay Patel?

  It's true. It just seems like a not the right use for it. They've got to launch this thing by June. They've got all these targets to hit. It seems like we're gonna be in the market for a lot of actual marketing. I would remind you that right now, this network exists only in Las Vegas. The only phone that it can work with is the Motorola Edge Plus. It is not on track. I, I hear the ORAN fanboys. They're furious when I talk about this. Open radio access networks are great. I'm excited for the next generation of technology to, you know, enable competition for infrastructure.

• 1:32:12Alex Cranz?

  Genesexis.

• 1:32:13Nilay Patel?

  Genesexis. I'm with you, man. But I think we're in for a lot of weird crypto, bro. Like, they're supposed to cover 20% of the population of the United States in just like a few weeks. And what they've got is a slide about paying for iPhones with digital currency.

• 1:32:28David Pierce?

  All I see here is Dish, like desperately begging to be a meme stock. They're like, please, we love NFTs so much. Give us your money. Just meme us so hard.

• 1:32:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, by the way, if you, in a tester on the network, you get NFTs.

• 1:32:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44David Pierce?

  Of course you do.

• 1:32:45Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's all, it's all very confusing.

• 1:32:48David Pierce?

  You don't get cell service, but you do get an NFT.

• 1:32:53Alex Cranz?

  We've just inflicted violence on Allison Johnson, our, our phone and, and network reporter this week. Every day, just being like, hey, Dish said something else about their new network that's coming. You just hear her groaning across the country.

• 1:33:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, they just need to put up a network. It's not that they bet on the wrong, well, it's not not that they bet on the wrong technology. It's that they promised they would build this network faster and cheaper by using ORAN and like having all these other vendors involved that aren't the traditional vendors. And like in a normal context, that would be like the great disruptive thing to do.

• 1:33:29Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:33:30Nilay Patel?

  You know, and it would like fail and whatever, but they're only do they're doing it like the point of a gun. Because they they only took over these assets because T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint. And like, it's just like, this is not actually how innovation or good businesses work. Like, the government was like, what if you married you? And then we'll take your house and we'll give it to that guy. And then that guy will build another house. It's like, what are you doing? It's not great, but who has not wanted to turn their anytime minutes?

• 1:34:03Nilay Patel?

  To rollover data.

• 1:34:06Alex Cranz?

  Do people still have rollover data?

• 1:34:09Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I don't know what that means. I keep reading it and I'm just like, imagine if there's a wireless carrier that embraced digital acceleration, comma, the web 3.0 trends to reshape the entire wireless experience. What does that mean? Do you know what the wireless experience is? You you take your phone out of your pocket and it connects to the internet. What web 3.0 trends are gonna hit the middle of that? Okay, fine. Or imagine if you could turn your unused data into real digital currency, not that fake shit. What does that mean? You know, you've been trying to buy stuff with your data. Can't do that anymore. I got real money. It just implies that you will have unused data, first of all, right?

• 1:34:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Nilay Patel?

  Your unused data. So I don't know if Dish is aware of this, the hottest trend in wireless is unlimited data. So this is Dish saying, we made a network. It's so bad. Please don't use it. We will give you money.

• 1:35:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man.

• 1:35:01Alex Cranz?

  I'm a little worried, though, because this is coming from like the subsidiary, right? It's gonna be Boost Mobile's network. It's gonna run.

• 1:35:08Nilay Patel?

  Super unclear.

• 1:35:10Alex Cranz?

  They they keep like dancing around it, but they had Boost Mobile's CEO out there talking about this thing. So it's a little feels a little.

• 1:35:17Nilay Patel?

  Boost coins.

• 1:35:19Alex Cranz?

  Is it predatory? It feels a little predatory.

• 1:35:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I don't know. All I know is that you're gonna there's the concept of unused data in 2022 for wireless plans is a new. It's look, the theme of the show is everything old is new again.

• 1:35:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, true.

• 1:35:36Nilay Patel?

  Google's like wallets back. Boost Mobile's like, limited data plans are back.

• 1:35:41Alex Cranz?

  Rollover data.

• 1:35:43Nilay Patel?

  For minutes are back, y'all. Uh, what a time to be alive. I can't wait to cover this more. If, by the way, if you're a Dish Network executive and you want to come on one of our shows, the door is open to you. Yes, please. Get out your Motorola Edge.

• 1:35:59Alex Cranz?

  You have to be in Las Vegas.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  I'll come to Vegas for you. All right. We've gone over. We gotta wrap this thing up. Thank you to Sundar Pichai for joining the Vergecast. Real ones come on the Vergecast. Decoder is the safe space for executives. You want to come into this chaos, you gotta... Congratulations to Sundar for coming on this show. That's the one he wanted to be on this show. So you have Decoder, the CEO of UiPath, which is a software automation company. One of my favorite nerdy things to talk about. CEO of UiPath, Daniel Dines, was on Decoder. We talked a lot about whether big companies hire UiPath to automate their software. And so there's a feedback loop happening where the people who make software are making it for robots and not people, which is just wild to think about. It's very good. Alex's creators mini-series on Vergecast continues. We just had Ploopy touch our hearts.

• 1:36:46Nilay Patel?

  Next week, it's what? It's successful game controllers.

• 1:36:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's controllers. We talked to Ben Heck, who like has been doing this for over 20 years.

• 1:36:55Nilay Patel?

  I've known Ben for over 10 years. He's a fascinating character.

• 1:36:59Alex Cranz?

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the site looks great this week. There's all kinds of stuff. We have coverage of Josh Hawley trying to punish Disney. Addie's got some stuff on the Texas social media bill. We've got the Aura Strap 2 review. There's DJI Mini 3 Pro, which I'm buying for no reason. That's on the site. Just go read the Verge.com. That's why it exists. It's a great, it's true. Uh, site looks great this week. That's it. Thanks, Dan, Alex. Thank you. Thank you to Sundar one more time. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. And if you liked the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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• 1:38:40Speaker 11

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