Magic Leap, Galaxy Note 9, and Android Pie

If you’ve been reading The Verge this week, then you know Samsung announced a few products. We got our hands on the Galaxy Note 9, the Galaxy Watch, and we even got to look at that Home speaker as well. That news is covered in a big chunk of The Vergecast this week, but there was also so much other stuff that happened. Adi Robertson was able to travel down to Plantation, Florida, to check out Magic Leap’s creator edition headset. She sits down with Nilay, Paul, and Dieter to discuss her experience with the device and how it compares to the years of hype surrounding it. And, of course, since another week went by on this planet, there is another week of Elon Musk news. Science editor Liz Lopatto graciously fills us in on the show. Like I said, there’s a whole lot more — like Paul’s weekly segment SHAASUIVG — so if you listen to it all, you’ll get it all really. 03:32 - Samsung announces Galaxy Note 9 with bigger screen, huge battery, and more powerful S Pen 16:20 - Fortnite for Android is launching today exclusively on recent Samsung Galaxy devices 23:47 - Samsung unveils its latest smartwatch — the Galaxy Watch 24:27 - Samsung announces Galaxy Home speaker 25:49 - Samsung is partnering with Spotify across its devices 29:20 - The 5 most important Android Pie updates 32:57 - I tried Magic Leap and saw a flawed glimpse of mixed reality’s amazing potential 54:25 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 58:33 - Microsoft Surface Go review: a little goes a long way 1:03:03 - The new Anki Vector robot is smart enough to just hang out 1:08:35 - The FCC lied to Congress about an alleged cyberattack and didn’t come clean until now 1:12:00 - Justice Department appeal says AT&T-Time Warner merger decision is ‘contrary to fundamental economic logic’ 1:14:48 - Paul’s weekly segment “SHAASUIVG” 1:17:24 - Google Pixel 3 XL leak appears to show production hardware and wired USB-C Pixel Buds 1:18:09 - The Palm smartphone reboot is shaping up to be disappointing 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hiring used to be hard. Multiple job sites, stacks of resumes, but today hiring can be easy. You only have to go to one place to get it done. ZipRecruiter. And right now, Vergecast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address. It's ziprecruiter.com/vergecast. This episode of Vergecast is also brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Amplify your ideas and take advantage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics on a trusted cloud that's designed to help you achieve more. Start your free trial today at azure.com/trial.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge. I'm gonna get this pro-style intro. I'm gonna get it down. You're always professional to me. I'm your friend, Eli. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:49Nilay Patel?

  Would you like to address the audience?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Hello, audience. I am, um, I'm your nemesis.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh. Wow. Dieter's in a mood today. And we have a special guest, Addie Robertson is here. Hi, Addie. How are you? Hi, good. Uh, Addie spent, I would say, like, five years in Florida with Magic Leap. We're gonna talk all about that. Yeah. But, uh, and we're gonna talk about the Note 9, which came out today, just before we started recording. But before we begin, I have two quick plugs for Verge stuff. One, our series Home of the Future is out this week, hosted by Grant Imhara of Mythbusters fame. We built a house in Texas. And then we made Grant go there and tell you what's in the house. It's a lot more exciting than that. But it's a full-on Home of the Future. It's like a sustainable house. There's cool solar panels on it.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  There's all kinds of smart tech. There's like laser keyboards happening. Are there USB-C plugs in the outlets? No, there are not. There are no, I believe there are no USB outlets. Oh, okay. But there's like Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi's good.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  But like, the house is super cool. It keeps track of its own energy consumption. I mean, there's smart tech everywhere. So that is on YouTube right now, the first episode of Home in the Future. Big props to our video team, particularly Tom Connors, who really shepherded this project. Building a house is like, not easy. And then, making a video while other people are building a house is harder. So, props to Tom, because he's got it all together. But, check it out, it's on the YouTube channel right now. And then, I want to call out Casey Newton's newsletter, The Interface. The other big story that isn't the Note 9 and Magic Leap and all the stuff we're talking on The Vergecast right now, is what is happening with platforms and free speech and Alex Jones and all that stuff.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Casey is doing an amazing job of covering that on The Interface, which is his newsletter. It's published on the site mostly every day now. And you can check it out at theverge.com/theinterface. So, go look at that. If you are interested in that stuff, there's no, there's no better synthesizing it for everybody than Casey. I just want to point out at the top, because we're not going to talk about that stuff. I mean, I'm going to jab at the FCC a little bit later on, like, we're going to do some policy stuff, but that's like, that's just me.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  We've got some gadgets on our plate.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  There's like, a lot of gadgets today, and I think the world, the, if, you know, there's politics everywhere. We're going to do gadgets, but I just want to point out, The Verge is covering the stuff very deeply. A bunch of reporters, and Casey's leading the charge. So if you're interested in that stuff, make sure you go check out The Interface. All right. Gadgets. That's what we're here for. Note 9 today, let's start there.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  I actually just played with it. We like, have one. It's gigantic.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It's always been gigantic.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, the screen's even bigger now. It's 6.4 inches. It looks amazing. We have the one with the yellow pen.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  She's adorable.

• 3:50Nilay Patel?

  I have never wanted a phone more for an irrational reason than just this yellow pen.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  It's a Bluetooth pen.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  It's a Bluetooth, it's a bright yellow Bluetooth pen.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Spin. It's a spin.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  It's a spin.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Sorry, yes.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Actually, now, because it is Swedish, I believe it is technically a spin. It's blue and yellow.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  This thing is just a spec monster. It has, there's a 512 gig option, there's a 4000 milliampere battery.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  There's two SKUs. There's a $1,000 SKU with 128 gigabytes SSD, 6 gigs RAM. But there's also the $1,200 SKU.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  512 storage.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Eight gigabytes of RAM.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  You can stick a card in there and get to a.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  And there's a big battery, so you could use it for like several hours, probably.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  The thing is, it's just ridiculous. And Dieter, I saw you tweet earlier. You can't tell why people are so excited about it because it is a very iterative update to the Note 8. But people are psyched.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  People are super psyched. It's not that I can't tell. It's I was just like, I'm genuinely curious what it is. And looking at the responses, it seems like every phone has like some set of compromises to it, right? You get a Pixel 2 XL, you've got a meh screen and bezels and, you know, whatever. You get a S9 is boring. The, it seems like right now, in this moment, the, other than maybe the processor, the Note 9 is purports to be a phone that has very few compromises if you are a spec maniac. You know, it's still got Samsung software, which is a thing. There's no notch. It has crazy storage. It has a crazy battery. It has a ton of RAM.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  It can do all the things. And so the.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, do you know what else it has?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Dex.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a water cooled.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. How does that work?

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  It's not the first water cooled phone. It's just, you know, it's got some liquid in there.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  There, Stefan conferred with Samsung that there is literally water inside of this phone.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  What is, like, what loop does it go in? Like, does the water just get hot?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Okay, here's how it works. The computer's hot.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  The water goes whooshing by. And it takes the heat somewhere else.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  But usually then it like radiates that heat out somewhere.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, to where the CPU is.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  It's just circling the headphone jack.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Comes back around. I mean, every, every water cooled computer is, it's a loop.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  But like usually the.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  You don't plug a hose into a water cooled. Oh, but you should.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  Garden hose port.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Whatever port you want.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Where does all this water go?

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  No, but usually the whole point of the loop is that you carry the heat away and it radiates out somewhere.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Theoretically, there's a part of the phone that is less hot. And that's where the water goes.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  And because the phone is so big.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  It's not always entirely in your hand.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Places to journey.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I just think it's kind of exciting that that people are getting excited about specs on a phone. Right? The note is always meant to be that. And even though, even though you could argue that the specs are in some ways, not the best, or not like what you might hope for, like, what thing exists for an Android phone right now, spec wise, that you would want, that's not here?

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  More water cooling.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  It doesn't have like several cameras on the back.

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's two and a multiple aperture. I mean,

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:12Nilay Patel?

  It's like a lot.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, you're right.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  It's really hard.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Specs. I like, I'm most excited about the Bluetooth pin. Because Samsung has made a button that is remappable.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  So the, it's a Bluetooth LE pin that's charged by the phone. And you can use it wirelessly as like a shutter. Or I think by default, it launches the camera. You could also use it to like slide or progress a slideshow, a presentation.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  But you could remap it to do whatever, which is very exciting to me.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  It sounds like the spend team should talk to the Bixby team and educate them on how buttons work.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, it doesn't have a Bixby button, does it?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I'm almost positive it has a big, yeah.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  Maybe in my short time playing with it, I did not enable Bixby. I played with her five minutes before I came on the show.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Do you, I, to be honest, I'm out of my depth here, but you guys know anything about Bixby 2.0?

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I do know that they tried to demo it and it didn't go so well. And then the presenters had to say, you can clap now, which is not a great moment.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  But they're trying to do some of this more conversational stuff. They're trying to make it more powerful. Order food for you, things like that.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, restaurant reservations order. I mean, they're basically doing.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Wasting their money?

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they put out, we gotta get to the Bixby speaker, the Galaxy.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Oh, shoot. Yeah. More gadgets.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  Gadget show.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  So I think they're leveling up Bixby so they can compete.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  But, I mean. It's still just a dog with shoes. It's like the butler got some more capabilities and he's still just like standing in the way of your friend, the Google assistant.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  So it has, but I mean, it obviously has Google Assistant. There is Dex. So like the skin is toned down. Samsung is like continuing to turn down their skin. And it seems like all the, all the insanity is like pushing into Dex. It's like a totally different Android environment.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  What's exciting about Dex is, well, I mean, one, we have to see how well it works. Uh, but you don't need a dock for it anymore. You just plug in a dongle. Um, and do an HDMI thing and you're done. And that's kind of cool.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Well, cause the whole reason for the Dex dock before was partly cooling and now it's water cooled.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you are always on about the future of computers. I, I feel like this is one of those phones. Where the promise is you just don't own another computer. You spend $1,200 on this phone. You buy the micro SD card. You have a terabyte of storage, eight gigs of RAM. That is legitimately more numbers than like the baby MacBook. Do you think you could, do you think, is that the play or is it just a spec monster?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's mostly a spec monster. I don't know. We're, we're going to be putting up an article later. Uh, that's like the history of people trying to turn phones into computers, starting with the Palm Folio on through the Atrix and then Windows Phone and now this. I think it's an exciting idea, but I'm glad that it requires fewer accessories, but I mean, who really uses it? I don't know.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I think people are gonna buy this thing for a phone.

• 10:26Nilay Patel?

  On the regular, tweet, tweet it up.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Please tell us if you use Dex.

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to know.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And also if you have a choice between this and, because you can use Dex. At a desktop with a screen and a keyboard and stuff and use your phone as a mouse. But like, you don't, you don't get the laptop coffee shop experience.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  So would it be better to get like the, the new Galaxy tablet was the S4?

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  S4. That thing is, Stefan reviewed that thing this week. It is crazy.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  It's just a, and you switch over to Dex and it's even crazier because it's trying to like window Android and.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Right. Well, but Dex is windowing Android.

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but when you, it's, I think it's philosophically, it's different than, you know, you plug in a phone and it turns into this other thing. You know, like, okay, I'm definitely doing something that seems different. Right? And like, maybe Netflix isn't gonna work as well in this mode. When you have the tablet and it's the same screen, you just push a button and it becomes a radically different thing, all on that same screen, and then Netflix won't go full screen.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Cause there wasn't a physical mode shift, but there's a software mode shift.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  Right, there's like a context shift to like, okay, I'm gonna try to do a thing that phones can't do.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Now, I need spreadsheets.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, whereas with like, the tablet, you like, push the button, you're like, wow, this is a crappier laptop than I expected. If you were the person who drags a, a external display into the coffee shop to plug in your, your Note 9, I wanna hear from you. So Dieter, one of your big questions last week was like, basically, why are, why are they making this when there's the S9? Did they answer that question for you? The S9 Plus. Do they answer that question for you?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's the stylus and, and DEX without a dock, right? That's the whole answer. Uh, and the rest of it, I kind of don't care about, but it's also like, it's the RAM, it's the storage, it's the huge battery. I was hoping they'd answer it with like, new innovation, and they answered it with brute force and specs and Samsung stuff. And it turns out, people are excited about brute for, brute force specs and Samsung stuff, which I wasn't expecting. So, I just, I do not know who on earth should spend $1,250 on this thing. Like, you gotta really, really stand for Android, for Samsung, to spend $1,250 bucks on this.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I definitely just held it in my hand and thought to myself, I want this phone. Run away before I bought it by accident. And no notch.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  No notch.

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so Addie, you're like an Android person. Are you, you in on this thing?

• 12:59Speaker 03

  This just feels like such a non-starter because I, how can I use the screen? I can't fit it in my pocket, I can't use it with one hand, I can't use it on the subway. I have to like, if I wanna sit down in a coffee shop and like, I'm going to go and fold out my phone now. Okay, maybe. I, it just like, it's cool on paper, but I just can't even think about owning it.

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, cause it's too, it's just too big.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  It doesn't do the thing I need a mobile device to do, which is be mobile.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  What is your? Preferred phone size is like a just a regular S9?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Um, I'm using a Pixel, original Pixel, and I forget what screen size it is like.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  But not XL.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Four points, no, not an XL. XL was a little too big.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I've got a fellow traveler over here. Small phones.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Small phones and but like thicker phones.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the original Pixel is gonna, it's like a, it should be loved more in history than it will be.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Like the Model T?

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like it's, it's a great, like.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Like the Nexus, the Nexus 5.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Nah.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  The Nexus, like.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  The Nexus 5.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  I wanna love the Nexus. I have one. I like, it's one of the few phones I didn't throw away because of the color.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  And then it was not a great phone.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I don't know what you're talking about. The Nexus 5 was dope.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  It was beautiful.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  It was like four, three, 400 bucks. The screen was like super wide.

• 14:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  It was great.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let's, let's turn this Note 9 discussion into a referendum. The Nexus 5.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Here's what, here's my like major question with the Note 9. How long are you meant to have it? Right? And so Samsung, they did a video, which we actually declined to participate in, where they did all of the people like around the original Note saying it's like, they had, they just did a montage of tech journalists being like, it's too big, nobody wants a pen. And then they were like, the Note 9, you were so wrong.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  It's true, they asked it. And I was like, no, you can't, you can't have that from us. But it seems like they're targeting Note 5 owners. It seems like they're targeting Note 3 owners.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Are you saying a Note is an every two-year purchase?

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  No, it might be like every four. Right? It's a computer. It might be on that cycle. And it's, that's just very different from the regular phone cycle, especially when you're this specked up. Or are you just gonna load it with like pirated movies and run Fortnite on it and two years you're gonna be, right?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I have a Samsung, every time I think I want a new Samsung phone, I look at the S6 on my desk. I was like, wow, that aged so quick.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Because I remember like a year in, I was like, this is the oldest phone in the world. Because the S6 was the first one for the Gear VR, right?

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I thought it was earlier, but I'm not sure.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Whichever one was the first one, I was like, I'm gonna be super into VR. So I bought a phone specifically for VR, and it felt so old so fast. In some sense, it's kind of nice that Samsung has slowed down on its redesign, because it makes you feel less bad about having a phone that's a year.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  The S6 was also the one that had the extreme curve. Do you have a curve on?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  No, I'm pre-curved. I got a fully flat screen.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Can't get that anymore.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Classic, classic design, tried and true.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  So Fortnite is exclusive to Samsung phones for like a hot minute, and then it's gonna be available on other Android phones. And there's the whole very, very interesting thing they're doing, where they're refusing to launch it on the Play Store.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  But that aside, my hot take is that Fortnite working well on Android phones is strategically important to Samsung, and it's the most important thing that could happen to Samsung's bottom line in the past year.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Because it's a spec mover?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Because if you're gonna play Fortnite on Android, you need a flagship phone. And you know who makes the flagship phones that people buy? Samsung.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And the S9 did not do so hot.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Can you play Fortnite on decks?

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  With a keyboard and mouse?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  With a keyboard and mouse, and just wreck people.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  That could give you a huge advantage, because apparently when you play Fortnite, if you're playing on mobile, you play against other mobile players. Playing on console, you play against the console players. If you've got a keyboard or mouse, you play against other keyboard or mouse players. Make sure nobody gets destroyed.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Or at least they try to keep it like that.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  But if you manage to hook up a keyboard and mouse, I asked if the stylus was a competitive advantage in Fortnite, and everyone told me to shut up, because you don't steer with the stylus, you have to screen to fire. So the stylus doesn't actually give you a competitive advantage. But that would be dope if it did.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  I guess that's interesting also, because that's been the play for all of the people making those quote "gaming phones", is that they're like, you can do all these things, and all you have to do is put up with a phone with no battery that's hideous.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  This seems not good for them.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Are we talking about the ones with the analog sticks on both sides?

• 17:56Speaker 03

  No, not even those, like the...

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  The Rock phone?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  The Asus, yeah, the Rock.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Asus, I think Razer has a thing.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  But those all have faster, uh, refresh rates, right? Isn't that their whole gimmick?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  I feel like after a point, there's, like, the trade-offs become less and less worth it.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I don't know what to... I mean, I know that, um, when I use, like, my iPad Pro with a faster display, refresh rate, I'm like, "Yeah, kill that battery."

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think a mobile GPU is gonna render Fortnite at 144 Hz, personally.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  And maybe I'm underestimating...

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  I doubt it. Well, so the Fortnite thing is really interesting, right? Because it doesn't even... it's not even exclusive for very long, right? And it doesn't track with Epic's business model for Fortnite, which is to give it away free to everyone and then, you know, charge you for stuff.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, a subscription.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like...

• 18:49Speaker 02

  To get XP faster?

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  So like Samsung got this exclusive.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  Will it drive any sales of the Note 9 before it goes away? And then Epic does what Epic needs to do with Fortnite, which is put it everywhere.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Fortnite is a sensation. I don't quite understand it. I felt like there were plenty of video games that were very similar before.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden Fortnite shows up. It's a real interesting case of, like, just growing the pie. Like, if I go around Twitch, everything I used to watch on Twitch has the exact same number of viewers, but also there are Fortnite streamers with 100,000 viewers. It's like a really weird scenario, so I have no way of predicting this, but I could imagine it'd be a huge driver. You've got a new phone coming out, you've got holidays coming up, Samsung has now positioned itself as the Fortnite phone on Android. That could be, that could be big.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  Sadie, do you know how long this exclusive is?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Now I have to actually check our site, uh, but it seems like it was, like, it was days long.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we have a quote. It says, "The exclusivity period will last for the next few days," according to Samsung.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  I think we were joking that you won't even be able to buy one and get it shipped before the exclusivity ends.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Uh, but, but, how many of those phones are water-cooled?

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  So I actually want to talk about this, the Fortnite side loading situation for a sec. If anyone can pull this off, it's epic, right?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  To say, get out of the store, turn off the side load restriction, download this thing.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Then turn back on the side load.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  Very confusing. How confused do you think people are going to be?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Uh, not at all.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  No?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Not, not in the slightest. Do you remember the kind of shit that you went through when you were trying to get video games to run when you were a kid? Like, if we could figure out auto exec dot bat and config dot sys and high mem settings.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  They'll be just fine side loading. That'll be not a problem. They're gonna, they're gonna get people to do this. We'll see how many people follow their little, apparently it sends a clever little prompt after you have done it to remind you to turn back on, don't allow untrusted sources, which is nice of them. But yeah, I, I think that the only limiting factor on them getting installs is like the specs that are required to run this thing. I don't think it's going to stop anybody who wants to play Fortnite from installing it. And it's going to train a generation of children on how to get apps outside of the Google Play Store. If I'm Google, I am freaked out by this.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, between that and the EU, it's like, whoo. Like all of a sudden their entire, like, you know, walled garden. They're like, the government's like, no, actually you can't have this at all. And then.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  I mean, the next, the, the next domino here is, do they get forced to start putting like core Android updates directly sent to you, not through the Google Play Store? Because half the stuff you want updated for you comes through the Google Play Store now. Um, that's the next big like thing. If they, if they have to do something there, they're in deep trouble.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  The real irony of this is this is all their fault for being open-ish.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  It's like, hey, we see that you're more open and accepting of different modes of software use than Apple is.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  You, you suck.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  But I'm stoked that people are gonna be sideloading the hell out of apps now.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's interesting because like, there's no way to do this on the iPhone, right? So Epic just had to take the deal. But here, they just like walked through the other way. I can't imagine that Google is happy about this at all, right? Even like, even on the revenue, like the revenue side is like, whatever. But like, if I'm Google, I would give Epic the special deal.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  Right? And be like, yeah, no one else can have it because you're not Fortnite. And then just be done with it instead of end up here. And that is a weird, a weird stance for them to take.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  I mean, and the Fortnite business model isn't ads, it's

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  digital goods.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. So Google can just be like, we want Fortnite on Android. We don't need to take this cut. They don't need to take the cut.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  They don't need it.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  They couldn't do that.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  They couldn't make a one-off deal for Fortnite. Everybody would hate them forever.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  Except all the people who love Fortnite. I mean, it's like, if you're gonna make the one-off deal, you make it against Fortnite.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  I don't think Apple or Google's best long-term, like if you look at their balance sheets, they are not making the bulk of their money on App Store revenue.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  And you are basically

• 23:10Speaker 01

  They're making enough that they don't want to turn it off, especially Apple.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Apparently, but you're basically taxing the small businesses that make you have a vibrant ecosystem. While for you, it's like a marginal portion of your revenue.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they would, I mean, the argument is they are providing some valuable services. They're giving you distribution, they're providing an update mechanism.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Censoring.

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  Data transfer, I don't know, some stuff.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Restricting.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Trampling. I just want to be able to buy my Amazon Audible books on my iPhone.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  I see where you're going.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  That's not Google's fault.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's go back to Samsung, please.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  But maybe Fortnite can help you.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, they also put out a watch. I don't know what to say about this watch. There it is.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  It has a, it has panel level technology in the processor, which allows it to have four days of battery life. I, I, I admit that I'm not a processor super smart person, but what? What? What? Huh? What the huh? What is that?

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  It just ramps down unless you have a digital key, in which case

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  I think what's funny, this is, the Galaxy Brain meme has like recontextualized Samsung's branding for me. So it's like the Galaxy Watch.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  It's like every, that's all I can say. It's like, all I can see about it. Alright, then there's Bixby 2.0.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  And this speaker.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  I like it. It's exactly as creepy as a smart speaker should be.

• 24:33Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, it's, I don't know, it's, it looks like a Weber grill on a tripod.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  It's a cauldron.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  No, it looks like the, it looks like the eggs for the face, the face eaters.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  No, it's the turrets that kill you in Portal.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  So it's a lot of things. A cauldron is good. I've seen a lot of cauldron memes today.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why it's on, the only joke I had was like, well, I bet it won't stain wood countertops.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Because it's on this tripod.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  It has three little legs. If you haven't seen it, it looks like a Google Home that's bigger.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Painted black with three legs.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  Now, because the Google Home has like that angular top.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  This, it's, it's like a teardrop shape on, on three little silver tripod legs. It is enormous. Uh, I just don't understand this product. You know, like, the Note 9 is like a huge phone, but you're like, Samsung got good at design. Like curved edges, sharp lines, sleek yellow pet, and then like, oh, and then they made this as well. No pricing, no availability, except we'll talk more about it in November. It presumably just runs Bixby. They didn't say anything about Google Assistant. I rate this product one, one to 10 on the scale of how doomed it is.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I give it three Spotify's.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they did announce, they did announce a partnership with Spotify.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that helps them a lot. If they're the best Spotify speaker, I don't know.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  What does being the best Spotify speaker mean?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Not being a Bluetooth speaker.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  How is it a better Spotify speaker than a Sonos?

• 26:02Speaker 03

  It seems like it's the other way around, that it's like Spotify gets to be on a thing. I don't know that I saw great benefits if I use Spotify.

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, you might remember Samsung's extremely successful music service, Milk Music.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  Samsung doesn't have that service. They signed a deal with Spotify, so it's Spotify by default everywhere. I get it, that makes sense. But like, how is it, once you like, say, play a song, it's like, any smart speaker will play the song. There's not like a differentiated Spotify experience where it like-

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, on Apple's speaker.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  It doesn't work.

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  I just don't understand this thing at all. I'm extremely excited that it exists because it is crazy.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  I think that's the, all, a lot of Samsung things, I think that's why the Note is interesting. Like, nobody required Samsung to make the Note the way the Note was. And it always has been a little push of the envelope. A lot of their products, though, are like, ah, well, you've got a green phone icon. I guess we should do a green phone icon. They have a lot of Me Too products.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  I just want to be in the design meeting for this thing where the first person was like, I've got an idea for how this should look. And then like, put out their tripod cauldron. Like, were they all in a room and everyone's like, alright, show your work. And then like, taped them all to the screen.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Google doesn't make televisions. Apple does not make televisions. Samsung had the chance to be the, hey, we solved-

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  TV audio.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Like, to combine the world of Spotify, voice assistants, and you have a shitty, built-in TV speakers.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I just want to be-

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  They could have done that. I just want to be clear. What they did instead was like, they built a facehugger on legs.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  It's very, it's just deeply confusing product.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I can't wait for them to like, trot out the audio engineer who talks about why the tripod is necessary because it like, creates a space under the speaker for sound to reverb off of to make a better sound. That, that has to be what they claim about it, right?

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  They didn't do that today.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Also easier for a cat to tip over.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  See, that's what I think about.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a tripod. It's a very sturdy-

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Those portal robots are, it's all about tipping them over.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you know, we're gonna get the briefing like that, that where they're like, "We've engineered this to be as sonically perfect as possible. They're gonna play Hotel California for us, and we're all gonna have to listen there and, you know, not make the face." And you'll say, "I've never heard music before."

• 28:36Speaker 01

  If I'm Samsung, I don't play Hotel California. I'd market this thing as the best and only speaker you should ever get for listening to K-pop.

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  They should just pick, they should just pick a random music genre and just go all in. This is the thrash metal speaker.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I would buy this immediately if, when you said a word to it, like the bottom opened and a dog with shoes like tumbled out.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  People have been sending me photo shops of this thing with shoes and little doggies on it. You put shoes on the tripod, it's perfect.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we gotta put those in the Vergecast post this week. Alright. No, literally no information other than that. They, that's it. That's all we got. Go on the website and look at it. Make us Photoshop. We'll put it in the post. Lastly, Android P came out this week. No fanfare around this name, uh, at all. And they just picked Pi.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Well, no, so here's, if, if there's like one thing to latch on to, is something to talk about, it's that it's Android 9 Pi.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  That's what it's called officially. Not just Android Pi, not, not Oreo, how they did before, Android 8 Oreo. It's Android 9 Pi.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  They want you to know that it's the ninth version.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Addy, you told me you didn't put it on your Pixel. Did you put it on your phone yet, Dieter?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Uh, I have it on two phones. I have it on my Pixel 2 XL and I have it on my Essential phone because they had a day and date update with the new version.

• 29:59Nilay Patel?

  They're still just trucking along there, Essential.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  No, the, I mean, it's, we'll see who else follows suit. They're saying that the other beta people are gonna have it in the fall, or no later, so that we'll get, you know, there's six phones with it. Um, I mean, the big question is always, and will always be, when, when will Samsung do it?

• 30:17Nilay Patel?

  Is the Note 9 on trouble?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  It has to be.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Oreo phones have to be troubleized if you launch with Oreo.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so presumably they can do it relatively quickly.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's like, you can do treble, or you could screw up treble. Like, just because treble's there doesn't mean they've stopped Samsung from being Samsung.

• 30:35Nilay Patel?

  And if you don't know, treble is Google's new update mechanism. It separates the theming and the stuff from the other part.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  The Android fabrication.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  The good part.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  The final solution to Android fabrication.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  Until the EU showed up.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Wait, but.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  I'm gonna try and write a review of it for next week. I mean, I've been using the beta, obviously. My big question was the gestures and like, they fixed the animation, but I still don't love the behavior.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Well, I was surprised to learn that's off by default, the gesture thing. Like, by default, you have the buttons.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  An Android engineer at Google told Android Central that it's gonna be on by default on the next phone.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so they're not like, having second thoughts. They just know that they need to warm people up to it.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  It's probably both.

• 31:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, you have it next week, a little review. I mean, we've, it's like been out, we've seen the features, they announced it.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  And like to the slices and time, time spent in beta and slices are not available yet. Slices are the thing where if you like, type a thing into Google search, it'll like, surface the app action directly. So that's not quite ready.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  And I'm assuming they need app support for that as well.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

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• 32:24Nilay Patel?

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• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, Addie, you went to Florida.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  I went to Florida.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  The mysterious Magic Leap facility.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Yes, which used to be a Motorola factory.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you actually put the thing on.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Put several versions of them on.

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  And you look through it.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Several times.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  Did it reboot the GPU of your brain?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  I can't tell because I saw a slideshow and there were diagrams about how this was adding light to my eyes, but it also kind of, they were just describing how eyes worked, I think. So it's very hard.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  So you wrote your first impression. We don't have one. It's not a review, but it's been, I don't know, four or five years of endless hype that they're kind of walking away from now. And what'd you think?

• 33:39Speaker 03

  I mean, again, I probably used it for like an hour, maybe. It feels like HoloLens with a bigger field of view and with some genuinely very good ergonomics, which is a big deal. I don't want to underplay that because so many companies have screwed that up with like VR and AR headsets. It's really like, whoever designed that, good on them.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  What's good about it?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  That it's, first of all, I think separating out the, like, most of the components onto a sort of pocket computer is actually a good idea for now, just because it is working within the limitations that you've got.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Like, it's hard to fit all that stuff on your head. So I think that's good. It has a pretty solid, like, you stretch out the back and you rest it over your head and it fits on and it, like, if you lean way far over, maybe it feels like it's going to fall off, but like, it rests well. They have a bunch of little adjustable nose and forehead pieces that actually, like... Worked pretty well. I tried one that one headset and it fit badly. It felt like it was too far away, weird angle, and they just swapped out a few pieces and then it was perfect. So it's promising.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  I feel like that's like when you get a new set of earbuds and you're like, figure it out and you're like, what do I do with all these old ones?

• 34:44Speaker 03

  I don't know what.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  When you say it's got a wider field of view than a hololens, like how much wider? Cause that was, that was like when they, especially with the hype, it's like, all right, you're going to do all this cool stuff and it's going to feel totally immersive and the stuff's going to look totally real. How, how did the stuff that, you know, how did the holograms or whatever we're calling these things actually look? And how wide was the field of view?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  So the numbers are that hololens is, I think somewhere around 35 degrees diagonal. Magic Leap is 50 degrees diagonal, which is.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  That's pretty significant.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  I think somebody calculated it to a 45% increase in rectangly area. The problem is that that's still like 45% more of something really tiny. So their site has a whole bunch of estimates, like you can see a house cat at 12 paces or something, but.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 35:33Speaker 03

  They have a, cause they're trying to cast it as there are, it's volumetric space. It's not like a square. It's that actually things exist in this viewing frustrum. And so you can see this thing at this far away and like something larger if you look like you're further away and it's great. In reality, it's like, there are things that work. There are, if you had something like Microsoft's like Minecraft thing, you're going to be able to see more of it. Like you can walk a little bit away. You could see it all over the coffee table, but still if you lean close, like it's going to disappear. You can't like, if you're looking at a screen that's pinned to your wall and you turn your head a little bit, then half that screen is going to go. And.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  And that's a pretty clear edge. So I remember with hololens, it looked like, I would say I was like holding a postcard out almost arms length and just getting this like very discreet slice of what I was trying to look at.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  I think that it's inherently not necessarily slicey. And I know that they have done some projects where it'll like fade out. So it'll look more natural. I think a lot of that's controlled by software. It does kind of inherently make the world darker, which is a little bit annoying. It's like wearing mild sunglasses.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Okay, just the regular view minus any...

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's got darkened lenses, which a lot of things do.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  Is that just to manage the relative brightness of things?

• 36:58Speaker 03

  I would guess so, but I don't know totally. The problem is, I just don't know how much it can scale up. Like, when I went there, they had this table, and there was a tablecloth over it. And Roni Abovitz, the CEO, was like, "You know what's under there? Magic Leap's 2 and 3." So they're talking constantly about how they're iterating and how fast they're going, but I don't know how much the field of view is going to improve, because it's just not enough to actually use as a computing device.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  So I think this, your piece, and the question that came to my mind, which is the only question I have, which is, what is Magic Leap? Is it a hardware platform? Or is it a software platform? And I mean that very specifically. Like, Magic Leap's 2 and 3. They needed to put this one out so people could build the software. And then, you know, Magic Leap 2 comes out, and it's the more consumer version, and all the software's at the ready. Or is it the thing, the hack the GPU of the brain thing, where they're developing this crazy photonic system that, like, does something to your eyes? Because that's not what this is, right? And so I just can't tell where the bet is exactly.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  So the photonics chip is what is in these things. They call it a photonics chip because it's a lens. It's a waveguide, but it's made with processes that are similar to making a CPU, because it's very precise, and therefore they call it a chip. So the thing that you have been hearing about since, like, 2016 or something, it's roughly that thing. The problem is that it's really hard to describe what technology is Magic Leap is actually using, because everything simultaneously is a specific technology, and also like, a really weird, "We're going to project light in your eyes." Like, yes, that's how eyes work.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Well, no, but before, it was not, it was much more about directly interfacing with your retina. I mean, like, it is the that's

• 38:45Speaker 03

  What does that mean?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  That hacking the GPU of the brain, man. It was, it was about not, like, the first Avigot didn't have like that thing, right? They were like actually shining against your retina. And they're beaming light rays against your retina.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Yes, no, there's retina. This is not the technology, I think, that people were speculating they were going to be using when they first got all of this funding in 2014.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  It's using technology that, as far as I am aware, is fairly similar to HoloLens, but more so.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  And you, you So more HoloLens. I was really sad. You, you said you couldn't quite tell if the refocusing, because ostensibly, you can like actually refocus using your regular eye features on, on things at different depths, but you said it was kind of too fuzzy to tell if it was working?

• 39:38Speaker 03

  So, yeah, they have something called multiple focal planes, and the idea is supposed to be that you're supposed to be able to focus on things of different depths. There just wasn't a demo where it felt like there were things at multiple focal distances that I could look at in a way that like felt like I was looking and shifting my eyes. Actually, in the hotel before we got there, I just sat there with Tom and Becca and James, and I just like had them hold things up, and I practiced shifting my eyes, so I would know what it felt like. I just, I couldn't tell enough where I'm like, this thing is categorically different. It must be the focal planes.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  So you, you didn't have like, I feel like the canonical story is like the, the original demo, they like put like a teacup in front of people, and like, which one's the real teacup? You didn't have some sort of like, I should definitely give them $2 billion sort of experience?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I've heard, I've, I've heard the version that when you go there to interview or something, or you go to try it, then they put you in a room, and they ask you to pick out the things that are fake. I do not know how someone could lose that test.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no. It's a lot, right? I wanted it to be magic. A leap. A leap at least. A leap of magic. And then you point out in your piece, they have this huge set of developers, more than some game studios, and the games aren't even there.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Like, they, yeah, literally not there. They have a ton of creative people working for them, like Neil Stephenson, obviously, the author is, was one of their very early hires. He's supposedly been working on something for just years and years. The day after I left, they announced they were gonna have Grant Morrison, the comics author, writing for them. They have, yeah, they have a studio that's supposedly 55 people from the New Zealand FX studio, Weta Workshop, building a game.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  You played that game a little bit, right?

• 41:29Speaker 03

  I played a thing that is supposed to be that game, yeah.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  Dr. Grodport's Invaders.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  Amazing name. It's 55 people. Who is this doctor, by the way?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Uh, he's actually, it's one of their franchises for making their props or something. It's like a sort of steampunk universe thing. It's kinda neat.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  But the idea is that if you've seen the Microsoft demo where the stuff would break through your walls and you had to shoot it, and there was the little holographic creature telling you to do stuff. This was like that, except steampunk. And the thing that this didn't do that was actually really neat was that it looked like this portal opened up in your wall to this other, like, little steampunk world, and you had to shoot through it. I just genuinely don't know how you get a full game out of it.

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  So I was reading Wired piece, Jesse Hempel did another, I guess she got access before, and like, she wrote the, like, story of...

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think she wrote a piece after Kevin Kelly wrote his big Wired piece.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, there's just two quotes that I want to point out from Avivitz. He says in this piece, "The marketing team, the early marketing team, was in line with the company's culture. In retrospect, he likened it to a type of organ rejection, describing the ethos of the time as tribal. It was like, which culture is going to win the splashy big company? Everyone else was just like, that doesn't feel right. To cut to the chase, we were not connecting with our early marketers." And then, the ex-marketer gave a quote, "As the months and years were on, it became clear to me that what he was directing us to say publicly was not going to converge with the realities of the product when it launched." That is a damning set of statements, right? Like, they straight up lied about what they were gonna launch at the beginning,

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  and we all just sort of saw it. And now they're trying to like back it down to like, this is Gen 1, it costs $2,300. This robot's gonna throw a thing at you and you can like wave your hand through some grass. And Gen 2 is like gonna be better? Or are they backing it down to this thing is still a revolution?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  It's a little bit weird. Like, the analogy they used with me was that it was like the original Macintosh. And so I think the thing they're going for is that it's, it will be, have clear shortcomings that you'll be able to point to, but they're the kind of shortcomings that if you like, make a big deal out of them now, you'll feel very silly when this thing is huge in 10 years, like the people who thought that the iPhone with 2G was never gonna catch on. Like, I'm reading between the lines a little bit, but that kind of feels like the thing they're positioning it as. Like, it has shortcomings, but it's still fundamentally amazing.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, when the...

• 44:03Speaker 03

  And they like, and they were like, he told me, he's like, it's a magical mystery tour thing, that's what we were going for, uh, originally. And we think people took it too seriously.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, the press that they did was so insane.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Well, how are they reinventing computing?

• 44:19Speaker 03

  The way that anybody who's doing mixed reality sort of is inventing computing. They do actually, if you talk to him, it's like really cool. He has these weird ideas for like the life stream, which people have written about, where the idea is that all your data is actually a thing that you own, and they treat it like you had generated a book or something and you could sell it. Um, and it's gonna be like a gesture, the universal no-recording gesture, that they're gonna slowly like inculcate people with etiquette for augmented reality. Like, they come off as way less techno-inevitable than a lot of really big companies.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's interesting. It's cool, it's, it's, from a lot of the stuff, and you have this stuff in your piece, it sounds like they are thinking through the implications of what it would be like if everybody was wearing this all the time.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  But why would everybody be wearing this all the time? What are they, what are you gonna do other than fight robots?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the problem. So, because augmented reality, the thing is that they're kind of making a thing that tons of people have been imagining in science fiction, and that tons of people are also currently trying to make, and have been trying to make for some 10 years. So their ideas so far are a lot like, it seems like, the ideas that a lot of people have, except that they're more, they've traditionally been more sort of entertainment focused. Like, they have a deal with ILMX Lab. They are, they've said they are working with, like, location-based entertainment places, so you could put these things on, and it's like this extra dimension to a theme park. I mean, I can think of a lot of things I could do with it. The really obvious thing everybody seems to say is just, "I want to replace my computer monitor with a thing that I can put in midair and take anywhere."

• 45:53Speaker 02

  But it's too fuzzy for, like, reading a lot of text, right?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  I mean, you can read text, but it's, yeah, it's a little bit fuzzy. I don't, I also just don't want a screen where, like, if I were looking, the direction I'm looking now, I'm like a slight angle from my computer, it would just disappear. It sounds deeply silly to say, but I kept forgetting where I had put stuff.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Because it was, like, disappearing?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Because you have to look fairly closely to, like, you have to look through sort of a periscope to find anything.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Well, it's hacking the GPU of your brain, it's getting rid of your object permanence.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's actually a blog called GPU of the Brain Now, which is amazing, just in general. Like, I'm glad it's a meme. So, okay, $2,300.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yes, with an additional optional $500 developer package that gives you, like, replacement services and stuff.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  Who buys this thing?

• 46:48Speaker 03

  They're calling it the Creator Edition, and the idea is basically, it's people who want to build apps for this, who want to build games for this, and who want to be comics, artists, and magically for something.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  And are they promising that this stuff is portable? Like, is it on their platform and their platform only? Are they saying it'll go to AR kit on the iPhone and HoloLens? Like, how does this, are you, are you buying into their platform? Or are you buying into the future of AR broadly?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  They were saying kind of both. I talked to developers who they're building sort of internal stuff and there's a lot of stuff that they want to work just on all platforms and they don't sound like they have a bunch of exclusivity deals with anybody who builds stuff.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  I think the thing they obviously don't want to say is like if you can build for our tech, our tech's the same as everybody else's tech.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  So I think there's probably an argument that they're like, no, look, it'll obviously better on us. We have this special controller that like Poland doesn't have. You obviously can't do the same stuff with looking through a phone. So like you might not want to do this, but like they have a vibe in their office. They talk about like cross-platform stuff.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  They definitely don't seem like they're trying to create a lockdown ecosystem.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  Can you, can they do like a blacked-out virtual reality mode in the thing? Or you always just see the, it's always mixed reality?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  I mean, they can't do it. I think they're at something like 85% darkness or 85% occlusion?

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I was just like, after all of that, it seems like this is a very grounded in the practical reality of what they could build right now product. And I still, I don't know what the sell is for that when it's really easy to have a nice AR experience looking through an iPhone.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm not a big fan of phone-based AR, so I think part of the appeal is also just genuinely having a hands-free computer that you can take anywhere.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Like not having to hold up a fairly heavy device when you're holding your arm up.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Staring at things, like being able to control something without like blocking the thing you're looking at. I think that phone-based AR genuinely is just a stopgap and there's a lot I don't like about it. I think the problem is that every company is also making AR glasses. Like how do you build a future when the thing you're trying to build is something science fiction writers have been like coming up with every possibility for obsessively over the last like

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  several decades.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, so Apple puts out the glasses, they're gonna run iOS, they've got the huge library of software magically passed to compete with that presumably, right?

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the way that I had thought they were gonna do this originally was that they were gonna use their huge entertainment thing and they were gonna be like the Nintendo Switch sort of, that they were going to come up with the best experiences. They have, that's where you get Star Wars and maybe there's some version of it you can get on other platforms that they will. Sell, but that actually like that's why you want a Magic Leap because it has the best experiences and it's like comfortable and fun.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and yet.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  I.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  Dr. Gordboards Invaders.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just haven't seen anything they're doing.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  So what do you, what's next for them, do you think?

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Well, the Magic Leap's two and three, apparently.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  But like, you mean, they're gonna go on sale, are they gonna go like road shows, are gonna be AT&T stores, right? Like, are they gonna make the big push or are they gonna keep it kinda quiet?

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna, like you said, they're gonna be in some AT&T stores sometime this year. They're gonna go on a big, I think, university tour. He really wants, like, Babavitz really wants this to go to like schools and wants college students and kids and stuff to try it. And I think, I think they are leaving it open to like pop-up stores and things like that. But largely, yeah, they try to sell this thing, probably, they, I mean, I'd assume showcase any really good stuff devs make, which would be cool, and then they're also supposedly already working on their, their next generations.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  And AT&T, they signed a deal with them to distribute something with mobile data, which this doesn't have, so that's hypothetically coming.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  I feel like this AT&T made that deal just to get people into an AT&T store. Because there's no reason that you go to an AT&T store otherwise, unless you just need a new phone and then you're trying to get out of there as fast as possible. And now they're like, I'm gonna go to the AT&T store, oh my god, I accidentally bought a Note 9, five family lines, like, four cases. Pure margin. I just left $400 on the floor and walked out.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  We've all been upsold.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  I mean, they also invested in them. I'm not super clear on to what extent the investment is influenced.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Part of that, right now, they don't recommend using this outside for whatever reason. But like, obviously, the biggest AR success of all time is Pokemon Go, which is walking around outdoors.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so sort of the problem technically is that outdoors is super unpredictable, right? The idea is that you constantly have these things moving, there's not a pre-arranged space that you can map unless they go through some truly giant mapping effort. And inside, the way that you use this thing is if you want it to, if you want a ball to bounce off a table, then you like run a mesh of the room. It can't detect when people are walking in front of you, like, it just doesn't have the kind of responsiveness, nor do other AR headsets that that would require, and Pokemon Go, like. Nobody who played that game for more than like two days used the AR component.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's true. It's true. When can I get one?

• 52:11Speaker 03

  Um, in specific cities, which you can check on their website, you can get one now and they will literally come to your house and like fit it for you.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  Uh, otherwise you can sign up and it's sometime soon. Um, and you have to sign up through the develop, you have to like sign up on their development portal, but that's easy. I did it and I've never developed a magically BAP.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Did you buy one?

• 52:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  Just asking. When are we getting one? Do you tell us?

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Uh, no, I, I know someone in the office I think has ordered one.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Um, I have not ordered one because I don't want to spend $2,300 on a thing that I can't do anything with right now.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Makes sense. All right. Well, you made a comparison on Twitter to General Magic. There's like the new documentary about General Magic out where it's like all of the smartest people doing, having all the best ideas, just way too early and then it flamed out. Are you, do you still feel that way?

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, and the corollary of that would be that everybody from magically goes on to found every company in Silicon Valley 10 years from now. But yeah, they feel like they're trying to do a thing and they do have good ideas, but they haven't really backed them up with the hard work of making a like software platform and that they, it is not clear that they can actually realize the thing they're promising with current field of view standards.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I feel like the thing that they magically right now is an AR software platform and the hardware hasn't caught up to it. And like, if you get the people going, like spin that flywheel, then you put out the big piece of consumer hardware and everything's all ready for you. And they just haven't made it explicit that that's what they're doing. They're still pretending that this one's amazing.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, I really do hope that they find a bunch of cool apps and that they showcase them and they support them because that's been a really key part of something like Oculus's strategy. And that's how they have managed to survive, I feel like.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Besides being a part of Facebook. So I really hope that they.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Actually are paying attention to software.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're going to do This Week in Elon with Liz. And then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about Service Go. Dieter played some robots. The FCC did some stuff. This is going to be great. Check this out. This Week in Elon with Liz Lapata.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to This Week in Elon. It has been an unusually eventful week even for Elon. And this is Elizabeth Lapata, the science editor at The Verge. I'm going to walk you through it. So Tuesday, there was this tweet, which, you know, isn't unusual for Elon. But what was unusual is that Elon tweeted about taking Tesla private. Now Tesla is a publicly traded company and has been since 2010, but Elon Musk has never been happy about it. In fact, if you've read his biography by Ashley Vance, you know that Vance says that going public was something of a Faustian bargain. Because even though an IPO can raise an awful lot of money, it comes at a cost. When you're a public company, obviously, there are lots and lots of people who are paying attention to what you're doing.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  It's not just your shareholders. It's also short investors who are betting against the company. Regulators and reporters like me. So Elon Musk has been pretty consistent about not liking having a publicly traded company in 2013. He sent an email to SpaceX employees explaining why he didn't think SpaceX should go public. He wrote, quote, "Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience think that going public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if there are big changes in technology involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and reasons that have nothing to do with the economy." So let's zoom back to Tuesday. What happened was a little weird on a couple of levels. So here's his tweet.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  "I'm considering taking Tesla private at 420. Funding secured." And then nothing for an hour. So there was some speculation about whether this was like a weed joke that like went wrong, or like whether this was a real, a real thing. But then he, Tesla released an email he sent to the entire company confirming that this was a real thing, that he is going to try to take Tesla private. Now, there are a bunch of things that are currently happening in the Wall Street press that I'm going to try to quickly summarize. First of all, the tweet could attract regulatory attention. And in fact, it looks like the SEC is considering an investigation. But especially if Tesla doesn't move ahead with a deal or the funding isn't there, then regulators might suggest that Musk made a false statement that caused the price of his company to skyrocket. That's market manipulation and gets you in very big trouble.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  But there's also some concern about the announcement being on Twitter itself, which is sort of an unusual move. It's not unusual for companies to disseminate stuff on social media, but the SEC requires a simultaneous press release, and the email did not go up for an hour. So let's just leave the SEC aside for a moment and talk a little bit about the practical concerns. So no one knows where Musk is getting the money, or at least I don't, and most of the smart financial reporters I've been following don't either. So SoftBank did meet with Elon Musk in 2017 to talk about taking Tesla private, but it didn't work out. So it's not super clear where the money is coming from, and he needs about $60 billion to do this deal, because he only owns about a fifth of shares. So that's a lot of money, and there aren't

• 57:24Speaker 04

  a lot of people with that money. So right now, a lot of reporters are focusing on figuring out where the money could possibly be coming from. The obvious people are banks, private equity firms, mega tech companies, and SoftBank. It turns out reporters are just coming up empty. So there's a big question about where that money is coming from, because it is a lot of money. But it's, you know, one of many, many questions that are sort of raised by this move, because, you know, the other thing that Musk said is that he wants everybody who's invested in Tesla to go private with him, which is not usually what going private means. Usually, you just buy everybody out. So whether or not that's even possible is something of an open question, but I think it's pretty interesting. What he's saying,

• 58:04Speaker 04

  essentially, is that his shareholders aren't the problem, it's all the rest of us. So that has been This Week in Elon, and I suppose he will tweet again very soon.

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  He will. He will tweet again. Busy, busy man. Actually, right, it's funny, Liz taped that earlier today, and as we've been taping The Vergecast, Tesla's board put out a statement, said they're evaluating his offer, and there's Saudi money, the Saudi Wealth Fund is like, part of the thing. So who knows? That's the update. He keeps going. The Week in Elon does not end Thursday at 1 PM when Liz tapes This Week in Elon.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter. Yeah. We've been talking about this for about three weeks, so let's do this fast. You reviewed it? Yes. Tom Warren was like, "I love Microsoft," and then also reviewed it.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  It's good. It's like, get the expensive one. Don't get the cheap one. It's stupid, slow. Windows Central did some benchmarks on the eMMC storage and it's like a quarter as fast as the SSD on the more expensive one. You know, like, we answered a bunch of questions. It's how we did the review. I managed to play some games on it. I managed to not play some other games on it. And everyone's really freaked out about, you know, spending 650, 680. Maybe you can get it for 600 on Amazon if you're look, if you look carefully. Uh, is that too much for this thing? And I just stopped worrying about that. Like, we don't freak out about how much an iPad Pro costs. It's like, well, it's expensive. It's 800 bucks with a keyboard. But if you want that thing, then you spend 800 bucks and you get that thing.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  And you could maybe use it as your, you know, main computer on the side or some-

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  Main computer on the side.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, your main side computer.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I got it.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Your main second computer, you know, whatever. Um, and I just, I feel the same way with the Surface Go. Like, don't overthink it.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Wait, actually, hold on, hold on. What's your second, second computer?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  It's a Chromebook.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I knew there was an answer. That's true. I would like a Chromebook as my second, second computer. What's your, what do you think your first computer is?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  It's still the Mac.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I was gonna say it's my-

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Although, yeah, oh, okay, that's fair.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  So this isn't, you don't think of this as an entry level Surface?

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  No, I do not. And I know they're trying to make it that by selling it for $400. But if anybody buys a $400 one, I'm very sorry. I'm very sorry for what's going to happen to you.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  But it's not, also not a really an iPad competitor.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  But no, it's 680. I mean, there are so many bad $700 Windows laptops out there. And like, their only benefit is like a mediocre 15 inch screen. It's 680, you might as well just get this instead of a $700 Windows laptop, right? I mean, like, I could, I could see making that case pretty clearly.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Right, except that everybody who buys crappy $700, $700 Windows laptops is doing it because they want a 15 inch screen. So the, the market for this is people who want an ultra portable, who want a tiny little computer. So like, one of the things I hate doing in a review is like, if this, you're this kind of person, and you're this kind of person, and if your computer needs are this, then maybe you should check this thing out. Like, I hate doing that. Um, so like, I don't want to totally like, try and predict what the, you know, target market of who's gonna buy this is. But I, I do think that if we give- Other computers, the benefit of the doubt to just be what they are and sell for their price, that's fair for, you know, what it costs to make them. Uh, I don't see any reason

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  why not to do it with this thing and, and not like stress about, you know, the price point too much.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  I will say that is a slightly different angle than Tom, who is like, "The dream is alive! It has been achieved!" Uh, he's like very enthusiastic about this thing.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. The thing, the thing will surprise you. Like that, that's, that was like my first angle. Like, you use this, you're like, "Holy shit, this is good!" And you're like, "You're not confused, but you're a little bit confused." Cause all the other little surfaces have been bad. Really bad. Every single little tiny, like, "Let's make a tiny Windows PC and see what happens and make it kinda cheap," has been awful.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Going back to Netbooks. So the fact that they, they did the thing they tried to do originally with the Surface RT, and that they've made a good little Windows computer, is worthy of, I don't know, applause, admiration. Good job, Microsoft.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Maybe I'll get one.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Primary side.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  What would you rather have, a Note 9 or a Surface Go?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Or two Note 9s, or two Surface Gos, or one Note 9?

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  A Note 9 and a, a little monitor with HDMI plug.

• 1:02:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  For, from, for decks.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Straight decks. Oh, you can slide in the back like those, um, those Asus tablets. Were those Asus or Acer? They were Asus, right? The Zenfone?

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  Those were Asus, yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you could, it had the tablet with like the slot for the phone in the back?

• 1:02:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Nilay Patel?

  The dream is never that. Alright, uh, and then Dieter, you also played with these new little Anki Vector Robots, which are, I, I think they are less cute than you think. I, I think they could have been much cuter.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Uh, they could have been much cuter. The main job I had was not to, um, you know, it's not a review, but not to like judge this thing based on what I thought they could have done and, uh, what I think they thought, you know. It, it looks exactly like the last robot. It looks exactly like the Cosmo. It's just like slightly updated.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  My question on Anki is like, we, they have done something unique, which is they are basically a toy company, but we talk about them like they're much more than a toy company, right?

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  Why is that?

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Well... This thing is supposed to not be a toy. They have they have much higher ambitions like they were very unafraid to be like, this is the first step. Like they showed me a slide. It's like, there was the overdrive and then there was the super overdrive or whatever. And then there was the Cosmo and then there's this and then there'll be another one next year that'll be even better. There'll be one after that. They keep talking about they believe in a bottom up approach to robotics. So they made this thing the way they did. They didn't give it a hand. They didn't make it bigger. They didn't do whatever they did with it. Because they wanted your expectations of what it could do to match, to match what it actually can do. So when you look at this thing, you're like, what could this little thing with this dopey little forklift arm do? I bet it could do this stuff and that's the stuff it can do. If you, you know, they,

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  they dunked on Gibo, which was super fun, right? Like Gibo promised way more than it could deliver. And you expected way more than

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Gibo's a little like Butler robot that like runs around your house.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Canceled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this could do more than that Gibo thing could. Uh, but it's only 250 bucks. Um, and you know, you'll we'll see like you should not buy this. Don't buy it. I'm telling you now. I don't know. I'm telling you, don't buy it because if you buy it expecting to get something out of it, to expect utility, you're going to be disappointed.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  If you buy it because you think it's kind of cool to have a little robot in your house that charges itself and says hi to you when you come home and gets excited when it sees you and watches TV with you and uh, gets really mad when the alarm goes off and like shakes and gets pissed off that its face has turned into a clock. Then get this. If you want to like, see what it's like to have that thing in your house, go get it. It's like a hamster.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Why do they call it a home robot? They could call it a desk robot.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Or an ibo.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Call it an ibo and that would make me very happy.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Call it a robot pet. It's a robot pet.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  It's like, when I said, "Is it a pet?" They're like, "No, it's a home robot." "Okay, is it a toy?" "No, it's a home robot." "So, it's like a digital assistant?" "No, it's a home robot." "What is, what is a home robot?" "Well, it's Vector. Vector is a home robot."

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  Also, very interestingly, we say, "Don't gender the robots" on the show all the time. They gendered the robot.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  They super gendered the robot. Uh, but, yeah, well, they, they believe in character. So, one of the things the robot's gonna be able to do, um, come later this year, I think, is you'll be able to leave messages for somebody. And they're also gonna let it, like, bring you notifications. And so, think about, if you've got an Alexa speaker, or Google Home, or whatever, and it just is like, "Hey, Paul, hey, I got, I got some information for you." You're like, "No, you do not get to talk to me out of nowhere." But because this thing has a personality, they feel that it gives them permission to, like, have it proactively do stuff. Uh, and like, proactively try and get your attention.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Which, maybe, maybe that's true. We'll have to, to see, once they start releasing those features. They, I don't know, they, they, they like, overthink a whole lot of this character stuff. Like, I got in a really long conversation behind one of the character designers, who's like, "It's like a, it's like an exotic pet." And when, we don't think about, like, you and the information. There's this third entity, and that's the character of the robot. And so, when information comes in, the robot has an opinion on it. And so, you're talking to the robot who's delivering the information. You're not just getting the information. Like, we're having this whole thing.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Wait, will the, will the robot stop doing stuff if you get it mad? That's what Magic Leap wants to do, too.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, uh, it, they specifically said it'll get moody. Like, if it can't get to its home, yes, if it can't get to its home base, or like, it's trying to pick up its cube and can't figure it out, it'll like, start grumbling. And be like, "Brrrr."

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Isn't the Magic Leap thing that they're gonna make an AI assistant that like, abandons you if you're mean or something?

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna have like a sort of little demon that does whatever, does low-level things, and then you'll have this collaborative like, AI that has a personality, and if you're rude to them, the name is Mika, then she, which they're calling a she for now, even though they accept that gendering robots is, and AI is problematic, will like, walk out, and you'll maybe be locked out of stuff for a little while.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh my.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  So the best minds of our generation are trying to create AIs that will abandon us.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  What you want is moody AIs that have, that impose consequences when they're unhappy with you.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  I think there is something just completely innate in humans. We wanna make humans. And getting mad at people and storming out, slamming doors, it's very human.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  Starting a global thermonuclear war. That's where this ends.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Hashtag just humans.

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  Vector's like, "I'm a he," and like, hits the button, like, "Man, he is over."

• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  It's like, the end of it. "I'm a boy." Two little net neutrality things. One, it takes a lot to put the word "lied" in a headline, and we were very confident in this headline. "The FCC lied to Congress about an alleged cyber attack and didn't come clean about it until now." So, when the net neutrality's dead, I know it's over, it's fine. Just, but go with me on this. When John Oliver went up against Ajit Pai last year, the FCC said their comment system was taken down by a quote-unquote "non-traditional" DDoS attack. And then Congress started asking about it. The FCC's own inspector general investigated

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  and found that no such cyber attack had taken place. So Pai got up in front of Congress and said there was a DDoS attack, and that's why many of the comments were not there or taken out. Never happened, which is a lot.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  His argument that it was a non-traditional DDoS attack and it was non-traditional in the sense that John Oliver asked everybody to do it, and that counts?

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that counts.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Their system did crash, right? They didn't like shut it off on purpose?

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  No, the quote is, "Some external folks attempted to send a high-traffic attempt to tie up the server. The suggestion was rather than being shut down by a surge of valid complaints, the site was flooded by fabricated traffic." The assertion came from the CIO. And then everyone disputed this, and now we're finding out that never happened, even though Pi went in front of Congress and said it did. That's a lot. Like, there was, I think, a lot of fear that he was ignoring comments. We talked about it a lot on this show, that he was ignoring comments, he was saying, "I only want quality comments. There's a surge of fake traffic." He was doing everything in his power to make it seem like the grassroots, popular opinion

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  was invalid, and now we're finding out that they outride, they just, they said a thing that wasn't true, which I think is just a lot for them.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  It also just seems like such an unforced error. Like, this seems like such an elaborate subterfuge to go to, to say that John Oliver isn't as popular as you think he is.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  I think what they wanted to do was discount how unpopular the move was, and I think, to his credit, like, that's what you would do under a normal administration. Where like, you don't just do unpopular things whenever you want. So like, I think there was like some element of, we know we're gonna do this thing, we're gonna get this blowback, and we can discount, we can say there was a DDoS attack and all this traffic was fake.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, I get why they'd do it in the first place, but this just seems like they have doubled and tripled down to a point way after I would have maybe let this quietly die.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Pi had passed the buck to a CIA.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  It's like anyhow, so that's that. I just want to keep that in mind because the things are still spinning out of control in terms of consolidation. And I think Pi is just under the gun. He just blocked the Sinclair Tribune merger and now it's to read like, there's a lot of FCC stuff going on. And I think as with many things in this administration, the actions are taken. There's a lot of, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors and then some element of the truth comes out and it's like, oh yeah, you just lied. Like that's actually, you just lied. The reason I wanted to bring that up is not just to dunk on Pi, although if you would like to come on the show, we can get that done.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  It is because the government is now appealing the AT&T Time Warner merger and they filed their first set of briefs. They said it doesn't make any rational economic sense. AT&T, amazing quote from AT&T. "An appeal is not a do-over," which it is. So I don't know what exactly they think that that statement means. But they, it's at the same time, the FCC and the DOJ, this is very procedural, but just follow me on it. So the DOJ is appealing the AT&T Time Warner merger decision that they lost. At the same time, they are partnering with the FCC to vacate the previous decision upholding that neutrality in 2016.

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  Which they don't need to do because they already passed the rules vacating decision. So like, it's a procedural move that they're doing. So they can clean the slate and potentially pass and let Congress pass new legislation is what they say. The reason I think it is insane is that the best argument against the AT&T Time Warner merger is the net neutrality argument. And they can't make it because they keep saying that neutrality is dumb. So they're going back at it again and they don't have this argument that letting AT&T prioritize HBO content will be unfair to Netflix. Like they just don't have it. You said the government doesn't have that. The government is cutting off its own best argument. The government is arguing.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Against net neutrality. So if they had this net neutrality argument in their pocket, they could say, we don't, you know, we don't usually care about vertical monopoly in this way or vertical consolidation this way, but in this case. Letting AT&T prioritize its own services will necessarily affect the market for the... They don't, they just don't have that argument. So this thing is still just like rolling and, you know, I think they just want to get back at CNN because the Trump administration wants to get back at CNN, even though they claim that's not what they're doing, but they don't, they don't have their own best argument. I just think that is deeply, deeply hilarious. You got a big sigh. They have it, they just, they just can't say it. Okay, well, that's the opposite of having it.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know, I know what I should say, but I'm actively choosing to say the other thing at every opportunity. What were you gonna say, Paul?

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  I just, I just hate antitrust. That's my thing.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  A really smart econ professor called Howssinger, I follow on Twitter, had a whole thread today, which I, I, I retweeted, you should go read it, it's very smart. His line was, "Antitrust is the thing that separates capitalism from socialism." I'm not gonna go into it, but it's good, it's good.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  My thing is Tom Sowell, so that's, not gonna go into it.

• 1:14:43Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul, shake hands?

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Done and done. All right, Paul, buddy, every week, you do a segment. This week it's sponsored again.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  The peep, the sock folks have come back.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  You know about all of the socks. Yeah, this week's, uh, segment of Shasui Vidge.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  But you gotta read the ad.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This week, Shasui Vidge is brought to you by Darn Tough Vermont Socks. The flagship merino experience for your feet. Made in the USA and unconditionally guaranteed for life. Visit darnough.com/verge for 20% off your first order. That's darnough.com/verge. Thank you, Darn Tough Vermont Socks, for sponsoring Shasui Vidge.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Thanks to Vermont.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically the great state of Vermont and all your merinos. Okay, Shasui Vich is, it's basically like a Kimming joke. If you're aware of Kimming, where if you put an R and N close together, they look like an M.

• 1:16:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  And but it's a joke on the word kerning, which is about the spacing of letters. There's this brand called Shasui Vich. S A double A S U I V G. That through some miracle, when properly curved, looks exactly like Samsung.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  They are selling a 55 inch 4K TV for, I believe, something like, yeah, $57.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  Go to Walmart, buy a $4,000 Samsung S AMOLED.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Or you could get a Shasui Vich for way cheaper.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's beautiful. This is like my favorite post on the site today.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm happy it happened on Samsung.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Thank you, Vlad, for for putting this up.

• 1:16:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's do like four phone leaks. There's iPhone 10 plus in the iOS 12 beta. Is anyone surprised by this?

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Small phones.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Nah, zero surprise.

• 1:17:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if I'm gonna go back. I feel like I'm very happy with where I'm at right now. I used to be a plus phone all the way.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  iPhone 10 works?

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm not dying for a bigger screen. Oh, I felt that way when I had like the 3.5 inch phone and then I bought the plus and I was like, oh, yeah. That's, that's what I wanted. And I just held the Note 9. I was like, I want this. So I don't know. More Google Pixel XL leaks.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  This thing is just getting uglier and uglier, man.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've been, I've been saying pixels always look worse in the leaks than they do in real life. But man, I don't know how you make this thing look good.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  It's got a lot of, lot of notch.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  I'm going with the smaller one. I don't know, man, like the notch is good if you get bigger screen and this gives you more screen. But it's, it's so big. I don't, I don't want to have to reach up that high.

• 1:17:53Nilay Patel?

  It is easily one of the worst notches I've ever seen.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:17:57Nilay Patel?

  And then it also has a chin.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, all Android phones with notches have chins.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  But that's.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that it's, yes. You are correct.

• 1:18:09Nilay Patel?

  All right. And then Dieter, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna throw this one out there and then you're gonna start talking. The Palm smartphone reboot is shaping up to be disappointing.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  Don't you mean plan?

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the logo is awful. It's, it's like, you can't tell if it's Pam, Palm or Plam. I'm only referring to this thing as Plam. It is now cannot canon. It is verge law.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  You cannot refer to this thing as a Palm phone. It's a Plam phone.

• 1:18:40Nilay Patel?

  It will say it's one of the dumbest logos.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  That's number one. I'm just getting started. It has what, like a 3.3, 3.5 inch screen?

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's small phones.

• 1:18:51Nilay Patel?

  3.3.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  So like it's maybe it's trying to get in on like the light phone action and like blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like channeling the Veer. That, go, yes, make that phone. Sure. Fine. Good. Don't put Android 8.1 on and under spec it so it can't pull anything off. But here's the deepest cut. Here's the, here's the thing. More than anything else, like it's low end, blah, blah, blah, all this, all these problems. That's all fine. I just want you to look at the, the layout of apps on this launcher.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Screen image placeholder.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know what I, that's what it says under the slide.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  I believe that that is what they're going to do. And here's why. Because these icons are laid out in a honeycomb. And if you know your smartphone history, you know, the very last version of Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile 6.5, thought they could save the platform by creating a honeycomb launcher.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  This is true.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Everything is awful about this thing. I'm gonna buy like four of them.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  If you haven't seen the Plam phone, by the way, it has a, a scattering of. App icons, kind of like the original Apple Watch.

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  It looks like a knockoff iPhone made by the lowest rent Chinese OEM you could possibly imagine.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  My dude, it's codenamed the Pepito. We have not mentioned this yet.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Pepito. That is the only good thing about this phone. That is a great name for a phone. That is why I'm buying it. It's called the Pepito.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  Isn't this the same company that's making the?

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Blackberries.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  The BlackBerry phones, right?

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was Alcatel via TCL or TCL via Alcatel. Back in 2015, when they bought it, they said that they were going to ask the community what to do. And they were gonna like, like run a poll, I guess. It was very unclear.

• 1:20:47Nilay Patel?

  Wait, and so the poll was make of year?

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  I guess. I don't know.

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  I love the Veer, don't get me wrong.

• 1:20:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, Dieter.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  I'm not done. One more thing. One, just, just, just. It's launching on Verizon.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Nilay Patel?

  It's all coming back.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Carrier that destroyed Palm. The carrier that wrecked this company. I mean, they, they went with Sprint and that's their fault, but Verizon rejected them the first place. They had like, like, but no, but they tried to go to Verizon, Verizon rejected them. Fine. And then they had the thing and like, they, I'm pretty sure they had to landfill a bunch of phones. Verizon made a garbage ad campaign for them. Not that Palm's first campaign was anything but garbage either. But the thing that put the last nail in Palm's coffin was Verizon's rejection of their phones. And now Verizon's the one that gets this little Pepito.

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Plan.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  My question.

• 1:21:42Nilay Patel?

  I think that's, okay, go ahead.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  What if the Plan ran LG's WebOS?

• 1:21:48Nilay Patel?

  That would be amazing. It's a full TV operating system.

• 1:21:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, I can't wait to make Dieter review the Plan phone.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  Just you and your Pepito, man. Dear, dear, just, just smoking.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  He's so mad.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. It's been a long one. Thank you, Addy, for being here. I've got two ads to read and then a bunch of stuff to hype.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  You know the skip part. You know where it is. I mean, we want to keep the stats good, so just keep it running till the end. All right, this episode of Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. In the business of tech, it is practically scripture that you have to be comfortable with, big, bold, exciting risks. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to minimize the downside of taking those risks. If you're hiring, you can massively reduce uncertainty with ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology scans thousands of resumes across its network to actively find people with the right experience. It invites them to apply for your job. As applications roll in, it analyzes each one and spotlights the top candidates to save you time and make sure you never miss a great match. It is so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day. So if you're hiring- The first day. The first day. If you're hiring, time to get smart, Paul.

• 1:23:04Nilay Patel?

  Go to ziprecruiter.com/verge right now. Try ZipRecruiter for free, the lowest risk price there is. That's true. I guess I could pay you. But free is the lowest risk price there is. That is ziprecruiter.com/verge. Start putting technology to work for you. Once again, ziprecruiter.com/verge. Lastly, I just want to, once again, tell you to go watch Home of the Future on the Youtubes. It's real good. Brandon Mihara from Mythbusters. And I know we didn't talk about the big stuff happening in the world. Platforms, deplatforms, speech, Alex Jones. The info whores. Yeah. But Casey is doing just an excellent job covering that stuff on the interface. So subscribe to that newsletter, check out Casey's work on the site. We have a bunch of other reporters doing it too, but Casey's really tipping the spear there.

• 1:23:50Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of which, Converge's Casey Newton, almost done. So go listen to that. It's an excellent show, one of my very favorites. It's just, he's so good at it. So check that out in Apple Podcasts. Why'd You Push That Button, Season 3, production ramping up. Oh, boy. Ashley and Caitlin and Andrew are producers, and their producer has been working on it. I'm very excited that's going to be coming out in a little bit. We gotta do some work. But Converge is wrapping up. Go listen to Converge. Binge watch, binge listen to Why'd You Push That Button, Season 1 and 2. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm Reckless, Paul's future Paul, Dieter's Backlon, Addy is-

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  The dextrarchy.

• 1:24:26Nilay Patel?

  The dextrarchy. Are we adding your Magic Leap photo to like the quad tick of VR photos? Or are you keeping that restricted to VR glasses?

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Um, the quad tick is only the big four from 2016.

• 1:24:38Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  But I have a whole other sort of running tally of them. So this goes with that, um, with a few other headsets I've done this year. It's one of the better ones, though.

• 1:24:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I feel like your job is to just wear extremely weird headsets.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, it's like the only pictures of me on the internet are me without eyes.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  And with that, that is the Vergecast. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Recode Media with Peter Kafka, all of its own podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Plam.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Russ Fruschek, the host of the History of Fun podcast. Each week we explore the hidden backstories behind the things you love to do. For example, did you know the Neopets were led by high ranking members of the Church of Scientology? Also, this kind of blew my mind, the original Mr. Potato Head was, wait for it, a real potato. If any of that sounds interesting to you, new episodes of the History of Fun are added every Monday. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.