Pixel 2 review, KRACK, and Microsoft's Surface Book sequel

The reviews are in and everybody just loves the quality OLED component Google picked for the Pixel 2 XL. Really just can't stop talking about it. And talking? That's what the Vergecast is for. On this episode Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss the reviews of Google's new phones, and The Verge's security expert Russell Brandom drops by to explain KRACK and four-way handshakes. It's all the grit and off-axis color shifting of a Pentile display, in podcast form. 03:08 Dieter: Pixel 2 review 10:27 Smartphone screens, display 17:58 Features, camera, speaker 26:12 Russell: Wi-Fi, WPA 2 protocol 39:40 Paul’s Segment 46:45 Dieter: Surface Book 2 52:14 Microsoft fall creator update 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?

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• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge dot moby, a WAP site optimized for the Nokia 3310.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Oh man, I miss WAP.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, WAP was great. Hey, we have a, there's another ship in the armada.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  It happened.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  A new boat.

• 0:50Nilay Patel?

  We're not longer alone on the ocean of audio. Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carmen launched Why'd You Push That Button? It's a great podcast.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It's really good.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  First episode, second day was in the top five technology iTunes podcasts on its first day. Got all the way up to number four.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  Pretty amazing. So go listen to that. It's on iTunes, on Stitcher, it's on Spotify, wherever you listen to stuff.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Can I just say, they deserve it. It is, it was a really good show and I'm really excited for, like, literally every single topic that is upcoming is, everything is like, I need to know. I need to understand this.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the next one, you're prominently featured in the intro to the next one, which is about read receipts and why you turn them on, why you turn them off and how they work. So that's coming. That's Tuesday.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Spoilers.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  It's not spoilers. Those are just the questions. I haven't spoiled anything. That's like being like, there's a, there's a movie about a man who's a spider.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  On the last episode Caitlin, or no, Ashley quoted me saying that I accidentally super like people and Caitlin was like, yeah, sure.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people said that. Hey, go listen to that. It's everywhere. It's great. Two, two podcasts in the armada. We remain the flagship.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Boat number one.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Boat, first boat. Rambo, first boat. We're also part of the Vox Media Network of podcasts. I contend that we are the flagship of that network as well.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Other folks.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Come at us Ezra.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Ezra, do not agree, although potentially also not paying attention. Uh, but yeah, that's that. Anyway, Dieter's here. Hey, Dieter. Hello. Uh, how's it going? It's going really well. You're not here this week, back in San Francisco. Sorry. Paul is here. Hello. And I remain as ever, your captain.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  I almost got through it. Anyway, I'm Neil. I'm also here. So Dieter, I feel like we could do the entire show on just one topic.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Just about P O LED screens?

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Just about OLED screens. I have a lot of thoughts. But so to set the stage, it's Pixel 2 review week. Dieter was here. He was on Circuit Breaker Live with me and Paul. So if you want to watch us yell about OLED screens, go on the website, you can watch that video.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  But let's talk about it now. We looked at it. You reviewed it. Before we go into screens, what do you think of the phone? Does that make any sense?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, no, the, this is an incredible, amazing phone. It has an incredible, amazing camera. The one bad photo I accidentally called good on Twitter, notwithstanding, and get into that if you want.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I still think it's a good photo.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  I mentioned.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Don't beat yourself up. I like it.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Anyway, the camera's just stupid good. It's fast. It feels really good to hold, even though it feels kind of plasticky because they coated it in plastic. It does all of the things you want a phone to do, and it does some things surprisingly well. I actually am using the squeeze for assistant, which I never expected is a phrase that would come out of my mouth.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Are you intentionally squeezing?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  I am intentionally squeezing. It's funny. So you don't know, you can squeeze a phone and it launches a Google Assistant. Fine. But you can adjust to the, you know, how hard you have to squeeze it. And I am just constantly changing it. It's like too high, it's too low. I can't find the perfect middle ground because if you have it too low, you pick the thing up and it launches and yeah, it's no good. You have it too high, you have to just grip it really hard. Anyway, so I have not a ton of complaints. I wish it had wireless charging, but not so much that I'm really angry about it. It fast charges very well. And Google does include a proper fast charger in the box. The lack of a 3.5 millimeter headset jack is another thing I imagine we could spend the entire podcast talking about. But it's very good at Bluetooth, unlike the last Pixel.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  So whatever. So I basically ended the review by saying, if it weren't for those two small things, plus the screen, I would be giving this thing the highest rating I've ever given a phone in my entire life.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  And let's, let's talk about that math. So the math was, we gave the iPhone 8 an 8, which I felt was

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  appropriate.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  They walked right into that one.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  Just walked into that one.

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  And we gave it an eight. We've traditionally given iPhones nines. I think that's not a secret. We talked about it and we're like, this design is somewhat old and the headphone jack is somewhat annoying. There's a newer, more interesting iPhone coming out. We're gonna shave off a point. That made sense.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  I also think that price factored into that iPhone score. Like, it's a pretty expensive phone and there are lots of, you know, presumably good reasons why. But, and it does have an insanely good processor and slightly updated cameras over the seven. But when you look at the value proposition of the iPhone eight versus the iPhone seven, I don't know that it fully justifies its price.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  And this is borne out because there are studies coming out this week saying people are buying more sevens than eights. So eight sales are slow. The seven is out selling the eight.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  That's wild.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  And presumably all the people who would be buying an eight and pushing that number higher are waiting for the 10. The deafening silence around the iPhone 10 is real. I'll just tell you that right now.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So just to be clear, I feel like this is where you're going, but I don't totally understand our review system. Because I don't review things very often because I'm super biased. But you can't just drop a phone into this pure mathematical scientific function of the Verge review process and get out a number. It's very contextual.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  It's very contextual.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  It's contextual. It's based on the opinion of the person. It's incredibly contextual to its time. And I guess it's place. I don't know. And also like its cost. It is, in the same way that like we struggle to, we pay a lot of attention to, you know, our like last few lines of the review and like how we're gonna like end it. We pay a lot of attention to the score, not as a like scientific metric, like DXO marks camera scores, which themselves are not so scientific.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  You might argue. But as like another editorial statement about the thing.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's an all lengthy aside. So then we were with the Pixel 2. Dieter, it sounds to me like you're saying you would have given it a 9.5 and you just took off a whole point for the screen.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  And the headphone jack.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it would have been a 9 or a 9.5. A 9.5, I would have had lots of feelings about a score that high, and I'm not quite sure I would do it, especially with like the headphone jack. But it like, that would have been the debate. Is this a 9 or a 9.5? Instead, it was, is this a 8 or an 8.5, or do we, you know, even go lower, depending on how angry we are at the screen? And the screen in particular, we should be really clear, we're talking mostly about the screen on the Pixel XL, which is a screen that's manufactured by LG. The screen on the smaller Pixel 2 is manufactured by Samsung, and the whole thing is manufactured, built by HTC. It is also not a vibrant, super bright screen like you might be used to on Android phones,

• 8:02Speaker 02

  but because it's tuned to sRGB, but it doesn't have a lot of the technical deficiencies that you see on the LG screen on the Pixel 2 XL.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Which, again, before we do this whole thing, I just want to point out that I bought one of these phones, it's coming whenever it shows up, if Google manages to actually ship these things. And I'm very happy with the purchase. When I look at this phone day to day, I'm very happy with it. When I look at photos that I take on this phone, I'm very happy with it. They just happen to look different when I look at them on another screen.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I think that's where the, you're saying the scores are an editorial judgment, because I think if Vlad, who also has a Pixel 2 XL review unit, he basically thinks the screen is a disaster. He actually published that headline, I believe, on our website. I think the screen looks very bad. I also bought this phone.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Can you guys clarify, I mean, I looked at it and like, off, the thing that bugged me was the off-axis. And I'm definitely like subdued colors.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let me.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  There are three issues with the screen.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Number one, the classic, when you look at it at different angles, the color temperature changes wildly. That's a thing that happened to OLED screens for a very long time, that basically Samsung had resolved in more recent phones. So that's issue one. Issue two is the color tuning, which Google insists they've done to sRGB to make more naturalistic. But when I look at the color tuning, it it looks like very blue, reds look very brown. It just looks very like desaturated and kind of washed out. The third issue, which may or may not be related to the second issue, is the thing that folks like Arstica have been talking about, and I believe Android Central a little bit, which is there's this weird sense of like grit in between the pixels and the surface

• 9:51Speaker 02

  of the screen, where if you turn the brightness way down and you scroll, you can kind of see that there's like, I don't know, it's like muddy, there's like dirt or dust or like, just like a screen or something in between you and like what you're scrolling. And trying to put all those together and describe them in like accurate language is relatively difficult. It makes me say like all the time, more than usual, a lot. Like, here I am saying like. But it adds up to a thing that is just a little bit, it doesn't look perfect the way that you expect an $850 smartphone screen.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  So I would go even farther. It's not that the bar is perfect. The bar is nice to look at. And those are different. Those are, that's a wildly subjective thing. So there's a gap between a perfectly color accurate display and what you like to look at. It's just true. And that's why TVs come out of the box looking crazy. They're wildly inaccurate. The, I have said this a lot, I'm getting a lot of heat for it. I think the best display on the market is the iPhone LCD. Right? Apple calibrates each one individually in the factory. They're not dead accurate. They're really accurate, but they're tuned to be pleasant. Right? So there's a gap between absolute color accuracy and sort of what

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  your eyes want to see. And Apple's just hit that sweet spot, I think. Other people like to look at Samsung OLEDs.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  Which, I think, Dieter, you've called them phantasmagoric, which are ultra saturated and vibrant and crazy.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  You can switch the color gamut setting to Samsung's to be a little, little bit saner, but that's not the default out of the box.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  But even I have, um, I have the Pixel 1 right here. This is a tale of woe as to why my SIM card is in this phone right now, but, um, even this to me looks crazy. So there's, there's just that color tuning. Google just botched that. And that's like somewhere in the code, they went, they aimed for like complete pure technical accuracy.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  If it's just code, they can fix that.

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  Presumably, we don't know, but like-

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And they've, they've implied in a statement that they would consider doing that. And there's a question of, did they botch it or did they just make the wrong philosophical choice? And, you know, I mean, like, it wasn't just like a screw up. They chose to, to make this color because they're trying to do like the morally right thing from a color temperature perspective.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Well philosophically, you can make the wrong choice and that's a botch.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yes, fair, but it's not necessarily a technical botch in that regard.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Anyway, so there's that, that's a whole thing. Then there's the muddy, grainy pixel thing. And I'm, I will just, this is like a throwback.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  If you say the word's Pentile, I'm quitting the podcast.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm gonna say.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Goddamn it.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not a striped pixel arrangement, so the early OLED screens that were Pentile, that's Samsung's trademark, had this problem all the time. And so all that's happening is LG is making all of Samsung's mistakes five years after Samsung fixed it. But it's not, you can't just blame LG because Google bought the displays and shipped the phone. So they made the choice to use an obviously substandard part. Like, if they put a crappier processor in there, is that Qualcomm's fault? Like, I, I just don't understand what drove them to use this, this panel. Because the panel, the hardware of the panel and the blue tint off axis, you, you can't fix those problems.

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  You might be able to fix the muddy colors, but you can't fix the literal RGB dot arrangement on the thing that causes it to look grainy. And you can't fix that the polarizer on top causes the off axis shift. If you know those are going to be problems, what are you doing? Dieter, what are they doing?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. Sorry. I clicked the link and then there was sound and my whole, my whole computer decided to be angry at me. But I was listening to everything you said.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  I promise.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  No, what are they like, they, the, one of the issues here is this idea that these are Google made phones and everybody knows that LG manufactured this phone. So what things are made by Google, what things are made by LG, what things are made in what factory and who actually did the real design, whatever. So one of the things is we know that this thing very closely resembles the LG V30, which has other problems.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Other screen problems. And so do we blame Google for just picking LG? Do we blame like the market dynamics because they tried to have Huawei make one and Huawei couldn't pull it off? Do we blame them for wanting to go with HTC but HTC can't figure out how to make a bezel-less phone? Look at the U11 and it's big giant bezels and they're like, well, we gotta go bezel-less. So what's, who out there can build that for us?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's hard. I don't know quite where to land on it.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  I would say I would at least expect the phones to be the same. Like I understand why, I feel like if Google is gonna build itself as a hardware creator, like, like one of my favorite things about these phones is that they have the same camera in both phones.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Because it makes me not feel like a second-class citizen for liking small phones. But you would expect that they could at least, I don't know. I would definitely blame Google. Not that, not that maybe they couldn't have delivered a phone this year and they have to deliver a phone this year. So there's nothing they could have done, but it just means they need to get better at this.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  Way better. So they just hired, you know, a thousand engineers for a billion dollars.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Hmm. Two thousand.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  Two thousand engineers for a billion dollars. They're all from HTC.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Right. Do they know how to make OLED displays?

• 15:34Nilay Patel?

  Someone. And so that, so that's, so here's the tale of woe. My iPhone 6S broke. My vengeful iPhone 6S, I'm just gonna hold on to this because it has a headphone jack, broke.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  In what way?

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  The camera decided, well, first the battery died and I put a weird shitty aftermarket battery into it and that got very hot.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Then the camera decided that it no longer wanted to live in its housing and it would just rattle whenever you turn it on because the autofocus decided that it would just rattle.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Oh, you showed me some of this.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  It was crazy. So I put my SIM into the We needed the iPhone 8 for review, so it's like out in the world, photos are always getting taken of it. Uh, so I put it in a 7 review unit. And then I'm just gonna admit this on the show. It's a Apple. I dropped it on the concrete stairs here in the office and it shattered. And I was fine. And then I dropped it again and it's not ringing. So that is a problem. Wait, you dropped it and the screen shattered, but then you dropped it again and it broke. And now the screen doesn't light up anymore. It's still buzzing away. It's still getting my iMessages. I've seen some pretty busted screens. I've seen screens with the glass now.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  That's where your iMessages are going?

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  You left iMessage on?

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this is only all happened today. This is very fresh.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  So what happened to my iMessage? So like, I'm leaving the house and I'm like, I don't have a phone. So I grabbed my Pixel 1. And I just throw my SIM card in there. And just like leave and like I've been working all day, haven't had time to think about iMessage. And now I'm like, well, I've got this Pixel 1. It's got a great camera, a screen I can tolerate looking at, and a headphone jack. But why did I order this Pixel 2? Now I don't know what to do.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  So you're thinking just staying Pixel 1? Live on the Pixel 1. The iPhone 7 equivalent. I had it. It was fine. Alright, I just iMessage you. It says it's delivered. It's gonna come to my laptop. It says it's delivered already. I've been texting from the laptop all day on iMessage. So the only person who's actually gotten a text through to me today is Josh Tepolsky. Cause he switched to a Pixel.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, welcome to no iMessage hell.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so who knows, man?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what, like.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  I don't know. Google will ship a thing to like, adjust the screen.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  I am okay not having the perfect screen because there's so many other things here that make me happy.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm really. What are the other things? I really want that camera. The camera.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  It's the camera. The camera is great. The speakers are also very, very good. Um, it, it, when I say, okay, Google, it actually hears me whether it's on or off from across the room. They're just activated it, sorry. Um, in a way that no other Android phone ever has.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Battery life is very good for me. Uh, it's fast.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I prefer the way Android does notifications. I prefer the way Android does multitasking.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  There's no crazy, bad Samsung stuff on here. It's just like, you run down the list of all the things that you want from a phone, and not only does this like, hit a bunch of checkboxes, it like, pounds a nail into them.

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  That's a bad metaphor.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  But that's just good, but do you like looking at it?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  There's no hanging chats. Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Twist a knife into the heart of the American electorate there, Paul. Will people in Florida like this phone? Or they'll just be hopelessly confused. I mean, I'm the guy who sets his screen brightness down one notch lower than looks great in order to get that little bit of extra battery life.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  So, whatever.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean-

• 19:22Speaker 02

  It's not the most important thing to me.

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  I think it's gonna be really-

• 19:25Speaker 02

  And I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be like an apologist for the screen. To be very clear, everything everybody has said about the quality of the screen and how disappointing it is, is right.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  But I'm not having a giant existential crisis about it.

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I'm gonna get it, we'll see. I just have a feeling that what's gonna happen is I'm gonna look at it and be sad and then leave the SIM in the Pixel 1 until the iPhone X comes out, whenever that is. And then the iPhone X is gonna have an OLED screen, and I'm just hoping that Apple has solved these problems.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  Because in my mind, no one has ever made an OLED screen that looks as good as the iPhone LCD. Or LG's previous LCDs looked really good, too. LCDs look really good. OLEDs look insane to me. That's just my personal-

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Except on TVs.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but everything they're doing, I mean, this is like an interesting thing to get into somehow. LG's OLED TVs are great. Samsung makes LCD TVs. Samsung's OLED phones are great-ish. LG has been LCD displays. LG makes the LCD in the iPhone. So it's just like, these two companies went wildly different directions.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  I do think there's, I would like to see a trend towards screens that look more like paper, and you don't want your TV to look like paper.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  You want your TV to be ultra-real.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  Awesome, but the pixel density of a 4K TV is way lower than a phone.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  It's not just about pixel density, like, it's something like, like the Kindle.

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Like, if you think of what you're using a phone for a lot, you're reading text. You don't read text on your TV.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  What's this true tone on, on the iPhone?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but there's true tone, but like, I just, I would like a screen to eventually look less backlight.

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  I want pix- pixel chi.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  You want that phone that has the e-reader on the back of it?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's also on the front, and there's only one screen.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  You want, you want a Kindle.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I want a Kindle phone.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, Jeff.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Jeff?

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  The fire, the fire phone failed.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't hold that against you at all.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Kindle phone.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  You just stick to your core competencies. You're trying to, a lot of weird 3Ds. Why, why did you do all the 3D things?

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Andrew, our producer, bought an HTC Evo 3D. You remember that thing with the two cameras and the 3D screen? It just caused a sensation in the office.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Really exciting.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  Everybody wanted to look at that phone, and then everyone got tired of it and put it down.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, I, well, Dieter, what's your last word here? Basically, look at it and see if you like it?

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, go to a store and look at it, but apparently don't go to Google's pop-up stores because it's run by some rando third-party company, and they're like, sneakily charging an extra 30 bucks for the phone.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  That's perfect. Yeah, you can't look at the phone because you'll either be scammed, or Google just won't ship one to you. That's great. How are they doing on shipping, by the way?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know. Uh, mine doesn't, isn't due to come for another week.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  But presumably, they're getting the first batch out.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  Mine, oh, I was supposed to do a dramatic reenactment. Because I, I found a window over the weekend, and I ordered one, and it's supposed to come on Tuesday, but...

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Why would you dramatically reenact that?

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  Because I tweeted, I got one, and someone's like, "You're supposed to order on the verge, Cass, you've broken tradition."

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, that is true, and I'm offended.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  Let's do, let's quickly...

• 23:04Speaker 02

  I think that's a curse.

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  For the fans.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  I think you cursed your pixel by doing that.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Why didn't you just buy me a phone, Neil, real quick?

• 23:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, no, it's a dramatic reenactment. So, just pretend...

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Nobody asked, but I'm staying with the iPhone 7.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  Out selling the eight.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm at store.google.com.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Fine time.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Neil is making like pretend keyboard motions with his hands right now.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Well, the way, the way you know that Neil is actually buying a phone is if we ask him a question, he's like, wait, what?

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  And unlocked, black and white is out of stock, of course. 128.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Although I will say, I would really like to go over to like Project.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Whoa, this is way in stock.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Project Fi or something?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Wait, which color?

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all black, 128 XL 2 ships October 22nd.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Good for him. So I bought it.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  The black one, the black one in stock.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  Definitely bought this phone.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Not so much.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna switch this thing.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  I'm having the worst T-Mobile service.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and the, the, the kind of blue is just gone. It's not even in the store anymore.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Just memory wiped it.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Too cool to sell.

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  That might be surprising. Okay, I'm gonna read an ad and then, this is exciting, our friend Russell Brandom is gonna join us and tell us how wifi is completely insecure now.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Crack.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Crack.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

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• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. Russell.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  Let's go on.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Good, good, living life.

• 25:28Nilay Patel?

  Great. So, there was a huge-

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Actually, can I just, just point out, if you guys don't know Russell Brandom, he's, he's one of our security reporters. He's incredible. And the thing I love about Russell is, as chill as he was just then, is how chill he is when something as insane as all Wi-Fi being critically broken. And he's just like, "Oh, my God, Russell, no Wi-Fi is secure anywhere, ever." And he's like, "Yeah."

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so Russell, let's just start at the start. No Wi-Fi is secure anywhere, ever. Is that, that's the case?

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Um. Yeah, kind of.

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, walk, walk us through the exploit known as "crack."

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, so, so essentially, there's this protocol called WPA2, which you may have seen if you were setting up a router recently, as I think a lot of our audience probably was. And so, it's just, it's, it's basically what you, it's how you encrypt Wi-Fi at this point in, in this modern age. And it's been the same protocol for 13 years, and, and no one's had a problem with it. But this guy, this researcher in Europe, discovered that, uh, the details of, of it are actually kind of cool. You can go, if you're at all technically minded, the paper is public. Basically, you can get, because packets drop wirelessly a lot, especially when you're setting up Wi-Fi,

• 26:56Speaker 03

  it will just keep resending one part of the authentication process, and you can just have it sent to you three times, and then that's enough to give you an edge to sort of decrypt what the password is. So, the question of like, how much you can get from this varies from thing to thing. It's sort of worse on Android than it is on Microsoft or, or-

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  Wait, is it worse on the router side or the device side?

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Um, well, it's worse. Ultimately, what you're trying to do is compromise a device, right? Like, it's that's that's the most common attack is that you're masquerading as the router and then you're doing the Internet through the router. The router itself, it's kind of a more complicated thing. It is vulnerable. You do want to patch your router, but that's not really the biggest number one concern because the most common attack is I'm going to use this to pretend to be the router and pretend to be the Internet and sort of slip malware into your webpage, right?

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Got it. Okay. So why is Android more vulnerable than these other platforms?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Because everyone implements the protocol a little differently. It's specifically Marshmallow, which is a few versions old, but is also the most common Android version just by usage.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  So it's, yeah, it has to do with what do you do when you reset the key? The whole thing is a K R in Krack stands for key reset. And so what does it do when it resets the keys? And Android has this one condition that you can trigger if you're clever enough that uses this predictable all zero key. Or one part of the key is all zero. It's not just the password is six zeros, but like this one element of it is all zeros, which lets you effectively steal the key in a way where like in the other ones, you're leveraging knowing something about the key to do some more complicated attack. Whereas it's it's really bad specifically in Marshmallow. So, yeah, I mean, I think the tricky thing

• 28:58Speaker 03

  is companies have known about this for a little while, like the guy did the right thing and told people, you know, in July and August, hey, this is coming. But the patches are not really ready yet because everyone has been taking this profile, I think, for granted for like years and years. So like you need to re and also in some ways, it has to do with this very deep aspect of the protocol. So every implementation of it is kind of broken in a different way. And you have to come up with some completely new way to implement the protocol. So it's it's really hard. And they still, you know, we did the rounds and asked everyone and everyone said, well, you know, in a couple weeks like that, that's about when it'll happen.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Wow. So I noticed router manufacturers all did it first, like Eero put out a press release. They're like, we're done. It's happening. It's rolling out. That's not it. You're saying that's not enough to actually protect you?

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, because then the thing is if someone's pretending to be Eero, but they're pretending to be Eero with an old version of the thing, then your phone doesn't really know the difference. Your phone has to not accept it if it's the other thing. And so that protects the router, but it doesn't protect your phone.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  Right, so this, so what you're describing is a man in the middle attack, right? So someone gets near you and they figure out what network you're connected to. Then they do something to collect packets from your phone. They crack the key and then they impersonate that network. And then they just start putting stuff on your phone.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would even say that right now, security researchers at all of these companies are looking at the man in the middle. And they're asking him to change his ways.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, Russell, you're done. It was great talking to you, buddy.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, the cackling here is out of control.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  So I remember, I remember there was a time, there was a time when you could, I think it was a great joke. There was a time when you could, when WPA was fine. And then, and then it was like, that's not safe anymore. You gotta use WPA2. But why isn't there like, are people talking about a new protocol? Because you sound like, it sounds like if everybody's implementing this fix, it was a fundamental flaw in the protocol to begin with. And so if those fixes are different, will that like mess up compatibility?

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Um, well, I mean, you're, you're making the fix for this device, right? So, so, you know, the protocol is everyone kind of meets in the middle. And that that middle point can still be fine, but they have to sort of add some extra structure on each side to make sure that the attack doesn't work.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  They are, I mean, they're always working on the next version. And, and there is, you know, WPA3 is a real thing that will happen. But the word so far has been, one, that we don't need to wait to WPA3 to, to have a version that's not vulnerable to this. Like ultimately that will be the best fix, but we can, for however long that takes, we can have secure versions that are just like slightly more complicated and like weirder to deal with. And then the other thing is people said, oh, well, why don't I go back to the other one? W E P is the one that like you can probably set your router to, but also has some problems. And the researcher actually said it on the page. They were like, do not take away from this that you should switch your router to W E P. Like it's, that's not a good idea. Please don't.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Well, so the other thing I should say is the good news is that because this is a Wi-Fi bug, it's not like catastrophic. Like I think if there's an internet based bug, a lot of times it just spreads really, really far, really fast, and it becomes this scary, fast moving thing. Whereas Wi-Fi bugs, you really have to be like, sitting outside someone's house in your hacker ski mask.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  So like, that's not a comforting thought, but also it's unlikely that we'll get there, right?

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, Paul, just don't mind me when I'm saying.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  There's no indication, right, that anybody's actually used this, like,

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And also I think, so, so the, the, the phase of life for these things is they, we have the vulnerability. There isn't an exploit program that takes advantage of this vulnerability that's like easily available. I mean, maybe there is somewhere, but it's not public. We couldn't, you couldn't go out and find it. So that's good. And, and hopefully it will take as long for them to make, to code up the exploit as it does to deploy the patch. So, you know, it's not a great situation. But I feel like it's probably not the worst thing, unless like literally someone was waiting to be like, I'm really gonna hack, you know, I'm really gonna hack Dieter. I'm just gonna wait for this bug and then I'm gonna go outside his house in a ski mask.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Like, that's the scenario, which again,

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, I would suggest, for example,

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  the president of our country is tweeting from an Android phone.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm just, it's like, that's there, right? It's, it's reality.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  What, what if, what if someone's phone is patched, or laptop is patched, but their router, like, I can, a lot of people do not update their router software. If they have a relatively old router, it might not update automatically. In fact, I know a lot of routers are kind of a pain in the ass

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  to update the firmware. Is, are you still vulnerable if the router is vulnerable, but your device has been patched?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  So, this is what happens with all these vulnerabilities. We saw this with stage fright in Android, where you like fix the obvious attack, and then people kind of get clever, and they're like, well, what if I did this other thing? And what if I like, took, you know, came at it this other way? And, uh, yeah, I mean, that's what's gonna happen. Like, that's, uh, you know, the, the question is, okay, if your router's not patched, then can someone use this to somehow put malware on your router? And then they'll use that malware to put malware on your phone? Which is a little bit more complicated, but is totally a good, a good thing to protect against, and, and a reason to update your router.

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait for Verizon to try to instruct its entire customer base on how to upgrade the Action Tech M7012, or whatever it is, like.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's actually my question. Is this thing scary enough to sort of kick everybody in the ass and make Android security updates, router security updates, internet of things, you know, security updates?

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Is it enough to make people actually care and actually start to secure these things? And actually get updates pushed through the way that they ought to be? Or are we gonna be like, ah, it's a thing, it's bad? And then a month from now, it's back to business as usual? And there's just a whole, there's just millions upon millions of different kinds of devices that just have this security hole, and we're gonna forget about it? Like, is the scale of people freaking out about this high enough to actually affect actual, genuine change in the ecosystem of things that are supposed to be getting security updates and just aren't?

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I would say it's even the door number three, which is there will not even take a month for it to be back to business. It's bad. I mean, I think the thing, the thing is, so my glass and I tweeted this was that it's, it's sort of hard to exploit, but also hard to patch, which is kind of a recipe for this just going on and on forever. And like years from now, there will still be devices that are vulnerable to it. And it'll be one of the things where like, if you hire someone to, to do a security check on you, it'll be one of the first things they'll check and people will probably be finding vulnerable devices to this for years to come.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Great. Cool.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  All gonna die.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you're interested in hacking, Russell and I are on a show together, Mr. Robot Digital After Show. So you gotta watch Mr. Robot, which is about hacking and capitalism and hacking capitalism.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  All right.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  And then we are on right after it live on the Verge's YouTube page. We chat. Megan Frogness on that show with us. You got all kinds of guests. Sam Esma is going to be on this season.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Weirdly, your show is just about capitalism.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's all I care about.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Straight spin.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  It's really weird.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  You don't even really have to watch, you don't even really have to watch Mr. Robot. You can just go straight to the after show.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  It is a good time. We run a lot of clips. You can catch right up. Anyway, thank you so much, Russell. Thanks for being here. Please, if you can come to my house and patch all my devices for me, that would be great.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Would you say this conversation was kind of like a four-way handshake?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  It was very much like, I didn't really, there's, there's only two people in the four-way handshakes. They just shake hands four times. Seems like a bad name.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Are they shaking hands with both hands at once?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  They're like passing stuff back and forth. So each handshake is different, but it's like, that seems like a two-way handshake to me.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just four single handshakes.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they happen really fast, like at the speed of light.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  Got it. All right. Thank you so much, Russell.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I gotta read one more ad here. You ready?

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast brought to you by Squarespace. Yes.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

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• 39:07Nilay Patel?

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• 39:23Nilay Patel?

  A dream is just a great idea that doesn't have a website yet. They should stick with that one. Yeah. And even if they change it, we're gonna stick with that.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  That's where I'm at. Okay, Paul. Oh, gosh. Did you forget? Yeah, I forgot.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  Every week, no one ever forgets. Paul does a segment called... Waiting for Safari to load. That's a good segment.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  Called... Hmm. Called... I don't know, dude. Can I name it for you? Sure. $80 dancing hot dog costume. Oh, gosh.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Snap, a camera company. That's such a whole segment. I think that's pretty good. I'm sorry, I forgot. All right, so every week, Paul does a segment. Yeah. No one ever forgets, and it's called...

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  Snap, a camera company.

• 40:29Nilay Patel?

  What, what, what, what happens in your segment, Paul? You look so sad.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  I can't believe I forgot this ever.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Um.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  I don't know. Nothing looks really standing out to me. It's a problem. I think this camera. Oh, I know what I want to talk about.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Sony, the Sony 360 camera.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  All right.

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  Or the Samsung 360 camera. We're gonna do it one more time.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  All right.

• 40:53Nilay Patel?

  Third time. Every week on The Vergecast, no one ever forgets. It always happens. It always goes off without a hitch. Paul does a segment that is called.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Smells like a competitive foothold in the machine learning's, um. Segment of the economy.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  Spirit. So close. Go ahead.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Intel is releasing its first of the Intel Nirvana, but they spelled it weird, neural network processor family, or N N P for short. I'm really excited about this. They, they are making processors there. They bought this company that, that, that was doing this, but they're, they're making processors that are specifically designed for training neural networks. But it's just, it's really interesting because it's just a really weird processor. Like they, they, the, they laid it out way differently. Like if you take a typical processor,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  you've got the cores in the middle and then you've got a large cache that they all access. And this processor is more about like putting the cache next to each of the cores. I don't know. There's just some really interesting stuff. I'm still like reading up on it and learning about it, but I'm really excited about like very different kinds of processors. And this is definitely, and so this is very focused on machine learning, but I'm, I'm kind of curious if there are other applications that could benefit from this weird sort of chip. Also really excited about FlexPoint, which is their type of floating point number.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  So you know how numbers are laid out of memory? Like, like a, like a, like an eight bit number.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Like goes up to 255, like powers of two. Of floating point numbers for machine learning, you typically have to have like a 32 bit number to have like a large enough number. They're doing it with FlexPoint, you can use a 16 bit number and then share the exponent, which is only five bits across a bunch of numbers all at once.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  What does that let you do? Other than name it FlexPoint?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Um, it makes it faster.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I mean, you're using, you're using less memory.

• 43:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  To, um, to represent all the numbers that you need. And therefore it's faster.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  I like it. It smells like a competitive foothold in the machine learning.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Market. Spirits. And the market spirit.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  The market spirit. The spirit of the market. That's the name of your boat.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:50Nilay Patel?

  You know, we should talk about the Pixel chip. There's a secret chip.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. What it's, what's it called? The something, something core? Visual core?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Visual core? I had that tab open somewhere.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  What's weird is like, they knew they had this. They told me they had this before when I did the big Google feature. Um, and they're like, but you can't talk about it. I was like, why not? You should be telling everybody. They're like, no, we're going to announce it later. It's like, but, but what if you announced it right away when you announced the phone? No, we're gonna wait. So it's like this big surprise. Like, yeah, Jay, look at that. We've got another chip in there.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  But it's not on.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  The Pixel visual core, it's not on. What's the opposite of vestigial? It's like prestigial?

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Prestigial.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  This is like an appendix?

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  Pre-used. No, that's not right.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. They're going to use it to speed up HDR. There is, when you do pixel or portrait mode on the Pixel, or you do any like particularly compute intensive things, there is still a little bit waiting to load. So it'll probably get rid of that. Uh, but they're also opening it up to every other third party camera app that wants to use it. So other camera apps, other things will be able to use this thing. I'm betting. My hunch, this is just, I'm just speculating wildly here. But the other thing that they announced for the Pixel that they're not shipping is those AR stickers, those like Stranger Things AR stickers and other AR stickers. I'm wondering if this is also like an AR core thing, that it's a visual core, does like visual processing,

• 45:23Speaker 02

  but they also, it makes AR stuff work a little bit better. And that is why they didn't launch those stickers right away, is those stickers depend on this chip to work.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  So what's the holdup?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  It's a wild guess. You know, stuff, reasons.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  It's pretty wild that you had a chip ready before you had the software ready.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Like, chips are pretty hard to make. I don't know a lot about chips.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  But they sound pretty hard to make.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  There's caches.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  I do think of this as a large, like, you know, Apple's got its bionic thing, Apple, uh, Google has like the, the tensor processing units. Like, there's a lot going on right now. Like, Google let off its Pixel presentation like Moore's Law is dead, so we put a really old processor in our phone. But, you know, most of the improvements that you get these days in performance are from really specialized hardware and not from the basic CPU.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  All right, Dieter, we have a few minutes left. Okay. Let's talk about Microsoft. You also visited Panos this week. You had a busy week.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  A real busy week. Uh, we flew up to Redmond and hung out with Panos and Ralph and the folks at the design lab. Uh, we're gonna be doing a follow-up story about their, uh, their hardware lab. So stay tuned for that. Uh, but what happened was they, they announced two new Surface Books, uh, new 13.5 inch and a new, a brand new, all new, never before seen 15 inch. They look basically the same as the current, uh, Surface Books. Uh, they still have the hinge, the hinge is a little bit sturdier now, so it can hold the bigger screen. They did the thing that is apparently just commonplace now, where they got rid of the fans in the, uh, i5 version of it, in the tablet, so there's no fans in the, in the top of it anymore.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Um, and they also put, uh, big, serious, very serious Nvidia graphics cards in there. So there's a 1050 in the 13 and a 1060 in the 15. Yeah, so like, I didn't like hit it hard enough, I think, in my write-up, but it's a big deal that these laptops have those graphics cards.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Uh, two.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  And they also. Go ahead.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  I have two questions for you.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Are the graphics cards in the keyboard and you only have it when you plug it in?

• 47:40Speaker 02

  That's correct. Yeah. There's no way you could fit that in that little thin tablet.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Okay. So when you're tabling along, you don't have a GPU and then you plug it in?

• 47:47Speaker 02

  The standard Intel Adreno, whatever, you know, integrated GPU. That's what runs on the tablet.

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of amazing. I just want to like, point that out. We have covered for almost a full decade now, the dream of the on-demand discrete GPU. And there's been external boxes and like weird Thunderbolt things and all kinds of crazy shit's been out there. And now it's all just in a two-in-one and it actually works. Although I will say with the Surface Book, all of the processors actually working the way that you expect them to is an asterisk.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  My other-

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  But it probably actually works.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  My other question is the original-

• 48:25Speaker 02

  They're eighth generation Kaby Lakes too. So they're quite, eighth generation Intels are the same as seven, but they can make them quad cores now.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  So there's more probably.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  I kind of want, I've been looking for like thin, you know, there's a few of these thinner laptops with 1050s and 1060s coming out, but this might be my-

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  This is your one.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  My idea. I don't know. So the other question, does it shock you when you try to disconnect? The first Surface Book would shock me.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  The first Surface Book is gonna go down in history as a misfire of a product. Right? And like-

• 48:56Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's just, it had the, it had the Intel chip problems. It was hurting people with electricity. Right? It's just like, they didn't execute it perfectly right and it was, it was just broken in fundamental ways. But you, if this one is everything they think it is, or say it is, it's kind of an amazing, like just the, the fact that you can dock into a 1050 or 1060. Like, literally, that has been a thing. Remember Sony made those ViOS back in the day? And they had like the ViO GPU station? And it was like a huge box? And you could just like plug a thunderbolt, like an optical thunderbolt cable into it?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  I don't remember that at all, but I do, I mean, there are a lot of external GPUs now on the market. I don't remember Sony doing it.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  Sony had, and it was like, literally, the, the, the, the cell of the product was like, this laptop is very fast. But once you get home, you can plug it into something that is fast.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  It's very good.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Well, because theoretically, they could sell you a new base, right?

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  It's like, this one has

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  A new GPU.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Like, the 1170 in it, or the 1160.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the ViO-Z, it, the dock, uh, it was Light Peak. Remember Light Peak? This is the ancient tech history.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  ViO-Z.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  The ViO-Z, uh, and the, the dock was called the Power Media Dock.

• 50:21Nilay Patel?

  The ViO-Z was like a beautiful, thin laptop. It was just not very fast. And you plug it in with this optical version of thunderbolt.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Oh, this is like 2011?

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was ancient, ancient. That's what I'm saying.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  I don't remember this at all.

• 50:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so Dieter, you wrote a piece, and I, I want to get into this piece of it as deep as we can in the time we have left. I feel like Apple's MacBook situation right now is not great. So, Casey Johnson, who is an excellent writer who generates for Wirecutter, wrote a piece for The Outline, being like, "These keyboards are a disaster." Marco Arment followed up and was like, "Keyboards are a disaster." John Gruber was like, "These keyboards are a disaster." The port situation.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Marco Arment also said USB-C is a disaster.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Yep. And USB-C is kind of a disaster.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Everything he wrote was right, and I definitely kept myself from, uh, pointing out that I've been screaming about this for three years now.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  Right, so like, it's, it's hit ahead, because you've been screaming about it.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  But you still soldier on in the dongle life.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  I do.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Our, we said this on Circuit Breaker Live, our IT department won't even stock the Touch Bar MacBook Pros. Because they think the battery life is insufficient for the people who work here. That's not The Verge. There's like a different set of people in our company. And we wanted one for the show, and they're like, "Yeah, we don't have those. We don't stock them because the battery life isn't good." So the ports are an issue. A lot of people are buying 2015 MacBook Pros. Mike Isaac, the great tech reporter for the New York Times tweeted the other night, "My MacBook Air is dying, but I don't want a new one. What do I do?" 500 people replied to him that was like, "This is garbage." So whatever is happening, maybe the products are great. And that no one is brave enough, courageous enough to see where Apple's going.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  But there's definitely an opening in the market where people are not happy with the MacBook Pro. And Microsoft is trying to get that.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Can I say something about? Can I say something about this just very briefly?

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  I'm gonna piss off a bunch of people. I had a bunch of Apple people also mad at me about saying the Pixel camera is better than the iPhone 8. When it comes to defending the MacBook and a little bit defending the iPhone, I'm getting a distinct like Windows Phone fan vibe from Apple fans. Like, there's a defensiveness that isn't necessary. Like, you don't need to get this defensive about Apple stuff. Apple stuff is pretty good. But there's a general sense out there that they've been missing the mark. And nobody really knows quite how to say it in a way that feels totally accurate and not just ranty.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  But there's a bunch of missed marks.

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  In general.

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I've been thinking about. We should talk about the Surface Book. First, finish that and I'll say the thing I've been workshopping about the Apple missing the mark. Because I've been turning it over my head. But Panos just basically told you straight up, "We're going for the Mac." Like, that is the market we want to get because we see the opportunity.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  We have seven hours more battery life than the MacBook Pro. We are this much more powerful than the MacBook Pro. Usually when you talk to people at a company, they'll say, "Then the competitor." Or, "We think it's very good on its own merits." And we don't talk about the competition by name, right?

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Microsoft is not doing that. They are just straight up saying, this is better than a MacBook Pro.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they know, like, they seem to know it, right? They're confident about it. The only thing that is holding them back is that they run Windows and a lot of people really like macOS. But then Dan Seaver was pointing out, like, they're, they're making Windows 10 act pretty Mac-like with like a bunch of swipes and swoops.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  I like that they're doing the swipe stuff. I gotta say, the, the fall creator update is kinda hitting me the wrong way.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like-

• 54:13Speaker 02

  You don't like the Fluent?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Well, the, the things I've seen of the Fluent design, I'm not super excited about. Uh, this like Cortana, like, collects all your favorite things for some reason?

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh my.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  There's a new Cortana feature where, where she pops up like Clippy-

• 54:31Nilay Patel?

  Don't gender the robots.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. Well, it's a girl in the Halo.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  Don't, don't, don't gender the robots.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Okay. There's a, a, a, a new Cortana feature where it pops up like Clippy when you're on a website. It's like, "Hey, I see you're trying to buy the newest book by Bill Gates. Would you like me to add this to a list of books that you wanna buy?" or something. Which is weird, but then the, the UI for it is like, it's kinda, I don't know. I, I see what they're trying to do. I just don't think they're doing a very good job of it. But basically-

• 55:04Speaker 02

  I will give Microsoft credit, though. They do a better job in Cortana of giving you lots of like checkboxes and settings to turn off what Cortana does or does not know about you in a way that neither Siri nor Google do well.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. And I don't, I don't feel creeped out by it. I just like, I have Cortana turned off on my Windows desktop. I just, I, I, I don't want Microsoft to say, "Look at all the new features that we added to the computer." It's like, I know how to get my computer to do things.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  I, I get apps and they do the things that I want them to do. And those apps are mostly games. And, you know, software to make games and, you know, coding software, some of which is made by Microsoft and they do a good job at that. But- Showing me how many new things they're piling into the operating system just doesn't excite me. It's like, wait.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  I feel like your operating system is good right now because it is relatively minimal. And don't, don't go crazy.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  They're trying to give you little gifts.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  I just, they don't feel like gifts to me. It's like when someone gives you, yeah, they actually, no, they're exactly like gifts. It's when somebody gives you a gift, but you didn't actually want it, but you can't throw it away.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Was this you, Dieter? Someone mailed me an IR repeater today, or ages ago, and I was sitting in the thing, in a gift bag, and the card just says, "This is the only way." I don't want that gift.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Why would, why would anybody do that to you?

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  It was Dieter. It was 100% Dieter.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  That's just so mean. It's almost like someone knew that you had feelings about not getting enough lights on your AV system, and they wanted to suggest a solution to

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  You definitely, Dieter.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  I want, it's almost like the joke would have come off a million times better if you hadn't let it sit in the goddamn mailroom for a month.

• 56:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  It arrived the day the review came out, and it would have been perfect.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  It just sat there.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know what it was. I thought it was, it was in a weird little bag.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Hey, did you get any packages? Because then you would have known it came from me.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I'm sorry, Dieter. Well, thank you for sending me an IR blaster. You're my best friend.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  All right. Can I offer you my workshopped Apple line?

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  Because we've been doing the show, Circuit Breaker Live, and we have all these old Macs on the show. We've got, we've literally, our producer disassembled an iMac G4 with the arm and mounted a Surface tablet in the display, because we need HDMI out, so I can like, look at tweets, the whole thing.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Lot of metaphors in that, by the way, but...

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, you just can't do it with an iPad. You just can't get 16 by 9 HDMI out, which is what we need for the show. So we mounted a thing. Anyway, and then we have an old iBook. We've got a bunch of old Apple stuff, a bunch of old, it's just the set. It's the decoration for the set. And I'm looking at that stuff, and all of it is so whimsical, and like, inviting, and it's funny, something like that. That tangerine iBook is just like a funny thing.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  With a handle.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you just want to, you want to look at it. You want to hold it, you want to think of, like, it's just, there's something about them that is so much more human. than what Apple is doing now, where Apple is consistently demanding that people adapt to the products, instead of the products inviting you to use them. And it's just, the more it just keeps going, I think that's the thing that people are reacting to. When, when you say, Dieter, they're missing the mark. The, Apple is saying, okay, we've removed all the ports. Now the market will create USB-C peripherals. Right? Like, that is, they're demanding that you adapt to them. Quite literally in the case of many of these.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  That was something they were doing in the, the Bondi Blue era.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they got rid of a bunch of proprietary Apple connectors for a universal standard.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? That was like a different kind of move. They've certainly done it before, don't get me wrong, but the, just as we've been spending a couple hours a week on the set that is dressed with old Apple products, it just has struck me over and over again, these products used to make tons of affordances to people. They were very, the products were, the people who made the products were deeply aware that human beings are like, not great at technology, and they made them inviting in different ways. And now, you know, the phone is getting, it's just becoming a more and more faceless piece of glass. Right? And it's like, something, there's something in there.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Aren't an emoji inviting? Aren't an emoji inviting?

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's, it's less the software than the hardware. I think iOS 11 compared to like iOS 7 is a much more inviting thing. Like, iOS 7 compared to iOS 11 was like, I don't know, man. It was like being on cocaine in the 80s or something. It was just not a very, it's a very sterile place.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  I'm an iPhone, iOS 7 fan for life.

• 59:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  It was great.

• 59:53Nilay Patel?

  It was insane. But, anyway, that's just my theory. It's just something I'm, it's, I'm noodling. So, it's, it's not like a complete thought.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Here's something I've been noodling.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  So, actually, I gotta, I gotta do one thing, Paul, and then I'll let you finish out. If you haven't read the Surface Book post, it's a standard, you know, gadget announced post, but make sure you go read the back half, because Microsoft did something kind of crazy with. They blew up the lab tour. This was probably staged, but maybe not. And they showed me different cuts of the launch video for the Surface Book 2, all set to different music that evoked different emotional reactions. And it's fascinating that Microsoft makes those videos in-house instead of farming it out to an external marketing team. And the different emotions that they were trying to nail there and like do it in a context of,

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  let's make this thing compelling to regular people, but let's also, I think they didn't say this, but like, there's like a sense of like, what can we do to like have this appeal to Mac users who are disenamored with the MacBook Pro? That I feel like that was there. The final video they went with was a cover of, what was it a cover of? No, I'm already blanking. They did a great job.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Anyway, go read the back half. If you like, oh, I know what a Surface Book 2 is. I don't need to look at it. You should still go look at it.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  I really enjoyed your piece. I also forget what the song was called.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  They also brought back the Intel MUS Explorer 2. Just putting that out there. Mice are back.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Oh, mixed reality.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  What the hell is that?

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  I feel like that really crept up on me.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  We gotta wrap up the show.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  We're just having, I just wanted to say the words mixed reality because I feel like I haven't said this on the show and that's, Microsoft's really into that right now.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  They love it.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  You can go to their website. They've got all these, all these different headsets you can buy. And like they have certifications for the different computers they sell, whether they're like mixed reality compatible or mixed reality ultra.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Fly me to the moon, by the way, is what Microsoft's used.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yes, I can.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Which is an interesting choice. All right. We gotta, we gotta wrap up the show. And all this other stuff I want to talk about, like the Snap's $80 dancing hot dog costume. The camera company.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  The camera company.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  All right, but whatever. So it goes, that was our show this week. A lot of stuff. I want to know what you think about the Pixel 2 screen situation. You can tweet at us.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  At Backline.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  At Backline. You can just tell them about his photos. He loves it. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at FuturePaul. I also want to know what you feel about this Apple, this Apple thesis that I've advanced because I, you know, I'm just putting it out there in the world. It's not my, it's not my complete thought yet. I'm just tossing it around.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  So tweet at us.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  You can also go-

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Can I say something super thirsty?

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna back off on Twitter for a while. I'm gonna start posting on my Facebook page, so search for my name there. I'm gonna start posting videos on my Facebook page.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Just chats.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Keep an eye out for Dieter Bone on Facebook. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put up some thoughts, some feelings on video.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be wild.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Can you, can I get a Theseus ship deep dive?

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you sure can.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Ship of Theseus.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  You can also go to store at theverge.com or a number of shirts. The promo code there remains promo code.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Still goes down.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  Thirty percent off, I think. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff to listen to, starting with Why'd You Push That Button? with Caitlin Ashley, which is great. Go listen to that, give it five stars, rate it, review it. Episodes come out on Tuesday. Lauren Good, who's on the show a bunch. Too Embarrassed to Ask. Kara Swisher, that show is wonderful. Listen to that. Kara herself does Recode Decode and Peter Kafka does Recode Media, all which are excellent podcasts in the Armada of the Vox Podcast Network, of which The Verge is the flagship. Verge Cast is the flagship.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Boat number one.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Boat numero uno. That is it for this week. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.