Microsoft Surface Duo 2 updated review, Solana's Saga phone, and the M2 MacBook Pro review

Nilay Patel and Alex Cranz chat with Verge senior reviewer Monica Chin about her review of Apple's Macbook Pro 13" with the M2 chip. Alex, David Pierce, and Dan Seifert continue the show, focusing on this week's tech stories from The Verge: Nothing's Phone 1, Solana's Saga phone, and a second look at Microsoft's Surface Duo 2. Further reading: Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2022) review: new chip, old threads There has to be a better way to binge Netflix cuts around 300 jobs after losing subscribers Microsoft’s weird Surface Duo 2 has surprisingly become my favorite device of the year Here’s what the Nothing Phone 1’s rear lights can actually do Nothing’s Phone 1 isn’t coming to the US Nothing Phone will be invite only like original OnePlus phones Solana is making a crypto phone with help from former Essential engineers Juul’s e-cigarettes can’t be sold in the US, FDA says Twitter confirms it’s working on a built-in Notes feature Amazon shows off Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives Email us at [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. 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.

• 0:00Alex Cranz?

  Today on The Vergecast, we're going to talk to Monica about the Apple MacBook Pro 13 with the M2 chip and whether or not you should buy it. We're going to talk about Netflix and how the apps could be better. And we're going to talk to Dan Seifert all about the Microsoft Surface Duo 2, which he's grown to love six months after launch, right after this.

• 0:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:06Speaker 01

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

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of twice a week podcasting.

• 2:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  It works, right? That's a sentence that works.

• 2:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend Eli. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who is very excited to listen to that second podcast every week on Wednesdays.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  Every week on Wednesdays. Monica Chin is here.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I'm your friend who has too many laptops on her desk currently, like way too many.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  It is astounding. Every time I pass by your desk in the office, I'm like, that is a, it's a lot of laptops.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  There are even more in the closet.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  So this episode of The Vergecast is going to be different in two ways. Some of the changes are permanent. For example, we have rocking new theme music from our friend Breakmaster Cylinder. It's great. It's an update of our theme. We had that theme for 10 years. It's time, it's time to move on. So Breakmaster Cylinder came in, did an amazing job with our engineer, Andrew Marino, on making something great. I love that theme. There's a slightly different version of theme that will come out with the new Wednesday episodes. We got two variations. That's really fun. We've got new art. I'm loving all the people on Twitter who are finding all the Easter eggs in the art.

• 3:05Alex Cranz?

  It's so good.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  There's some like long range Easter eggs in the art.

• 3:08Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot. I've been, I've been really, it took me way too long to get Vaporware car. I was like, why is this car invisible? I don't get it.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. People trying to guess what kind of car it is is very funny. And I'm like, no, it's just, it's literally the most generic model of a crossover that you can find. And because every car looks like that, you can kind of assume it's like every car. It's pretty good. The computer ship.

• 3:29Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  So the name of the ship in the art, the class of ship, the flagship.

• 3:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  The class of ship is computer ship. And then the name of that ship is the USB C. It's very good. And then there's a USB C monster. It's very good. All that's great. That's all the stuff there. I'm saying there's long range Easter eggs. Like, we've been seeding the ground for some of the changes to come for a while now. And so there's some in here. I'm excited about all of it. So we got a new podcast art. We got a new logo, got new music. Those are the changes, like the permanent changes where over 10 years, over 500 episodes, new look, new sounds. David's hosting that second episode on Wednesday. That's going to be really fun. Those are the real changes. And then this episode, the Friday episode, is going to be the same chaos as ever.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  And then the temporary change for this particular Friday episode, I have to go to Toronto today. So I grabbed Monica and Alex, I really want to talk about the MacBook Pro review. David was busy, so he's not here. But then, when this is over, Alex and David are going to take over the rest of the show. So it's going to be a little weird episode because there's all the change, but I promise you, the permanent changes are cool. And then today's weirdness is just because I gotta catch a flight.

• 4:37Alex Cranz?

  But it's also cool. It's gonna be so cool, guys. Stay tuned.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't love air travel?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Flying is so easy and convenient right now, so.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  It's right in flying to Canada for the collision conference. I gotta download this like weird Canadian surveillance app called Arrive Can. It's great. I love it.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  That's an amazing name.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, those are all the changes. I'm really excited about the new art and new music. I'm glad people like it. Very fun to see the discussion about the artwork on the tweets. Okay, there's two other things we have to talk about before we dive into the MacBook Pro. One, our Netflix show, The Future Of, is out. It's streaming now. People are watching it. Mind-blowing experience to work on something for three years and then just like have people watch it.

• 5:16Alex Cranz?

  It's just out there. Like, everybody can have opinions about the things you had opinions on first.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  But like, you like marinate in those opinions. Like, this show, we like record the show and then we put it out. And then we make another one the next week. This is like, we spent three years arguing about everything. And then it's a long time to make the next one. So I'm really excited about it. I hope you like it. I hope you're watching it. It's on Netflix now. The first six episodes are out now. The next six episodes are coming out next week on the 28th. Please watch it. If you know how to do some like K-pop fan army stuff and you want to like VPN to 50 Netflix accounts around the world and stream it all at once. I'm not saying you should do it. I'm saying that would be an interesting technical challenge for a group of motivated teenagers. Just an idea.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  I'll get on it.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  You ever see those farms? Those like farms in Asia with like the hot dogs moving hundreds of Android phones at once? You didn't talk.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  They're not hot dogs.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Are you saying that if we open that door behind you, that's what we're going to find in your house, New Life?

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  Hundreds of hot dogs operating Android phones. No, like, you know, they do testing. The way that you like do testing on apps to find bugs is you hire these companies that operate automated phone testing systems and like, they need things that can touch the phones.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  So they're not hot dogs, but one of the first stories about touchscreen culture that I ever wrote it in Gadget was iPhone users in South Korea discovered that a certain type of like meat on a stick worked as a stylus on their iPhones because it was capacitive.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Just greasy.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  So they were just using these like meat styluses. And so now whenever I see one of those rays, I'm like, oh, it's just like hundreds of hot dogs.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Maybe it's a kebab. You don't know.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  You never know. Okay. It's gone in a strange direction. Let's bring it back home. Watch the Netflix show, listen to the new Wednesday episode of The Vergecast. Lots of exciting things happening in Verge world. One of those exciting things, which is like, I would say, Monica, half exciting, like exciting with a limit, is our review of the MacBook Pro 13.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  So I actually loved the way Apple Insider described it in their review roundup. They said, "The MacBook Pro reviews are out with what seems to be a collective yawn."

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's right. So we were just at W W C. Apple announced the new M2 chip. That chip is going into two laptops, the MacBook Air, which is full redesign, MagSafe, the new webcam, the whole thing. And then this computer.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:43Nilay Patel?

  The MacBook Pro, which is.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Is also there.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  High, which I was thinking about this. So Apple announced it and they put up this slide. They're like, did you know the 13 inch MacBook Pro is the second best selling laptop in the world? The MacBook Air is the first, the 13 inch Pro is the second best selling. And at the time, it's like, fine, you know, you've got to justify releasing this computer and the same old chassis. You're saying people like it already. And then it occurred to me, like, they showed us no numbers. Like, they just said that it was true. I don't know a lot of people. I mean, like, I feel like laptop owners are quite loud in talking to us about the laptops they like. I would not say I get a lot of emails about the 13 inch MacBook Pro. Monica, you're our laptop reviewer.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  I certainly don't, but I do say in my personal life, I do know more people who own the MacBook Pro than I do who own a MacBook Air.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  My guess would be that the MacBook Pro is just owned by more of the people who aren't emailing us all the time, like normal people who like don't care as much about laptops.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  I just think those are Air owners. I think like there's the default. Anyway, so Apple's contention is that the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar, the only the two ports, is the second best selling laptop in the world. So obviously updating it with the M2 chip is a big deal. Monica, what'd you find?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  I mean, it's better. Like it's a little bit faster. Like if you are upgrading from an Intel machine, which you likely are, like I can't imagine that people who bought the M1 last year are like already getting tired of it. It is going to be like a big change. It's going to be a noticeable change. It's like if you need to buy one now, it's like fine to buy now. Like you can go ahead and buy it. In terms of like separately talking about how big of a leap forward it is from the M1, it's like, you know, not necessarily something you would notice in your day to day life. If you're like using the M1 next to the M2, which I did like for quite a few days. And it like, there are like differences of a couple of seconds when you're doing certain things here and there, but it's not

• 9:41Speaker 03

  anything like jumping up to the M1 Pro, which is where you will really notice like, I think a huge change in a lot of the stuff that you're doing. And that was reflected in our benchmarks as well. It's, you know, the M2 is a step up from the M1. It is still much closer to the M1 than it is to the M1 Pro in terms of like how powerful it is, how fast it can go. And that's not unexpected. Like that's like exactly what everyone thought it was going to be. But that is just to emphasize that you can get a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro for $300 more. And that $300 is buying you like a lot of power to the point where like, if you are really looking for a powerful laptop, like I will just tell you not to buy this. Like it is worth it for you to pay 300 extra dollars. You will get a lot more multi-core performance. The other thing I do think is worth noting though

• 10:25Speaker 03

  is that the M2 does beat the M1 Pro and the M1 Max as we, which. Makes sense because that's just the M1 Pro with more cores. In single core performance, like on single core Citi Bench and single core Geek Bench, the M2 is doing better, which I think is a good sign for just like the M2 Ultra and Max and all those little fun chips we expect are coming. I think that is a good sign that those will be single core improvements. It won't just be like the M1 Pro with even more cores or two M1 Maxes making M1 Max exception. Like it will be, I think there will be single core innovations there as well.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  So Alex, on the sort of like the nerdy chip side, right? The M1 is kind of like an A14 but more.

• 11:09Alex Cranz?

  Souped up.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  And then the M2 is the A15 but more?

• 11:13Alex Cranz?

  Right, so it's a little bit more souped up. So this is kind of like, I ultimately always think in the Intel AMD kind of way of things. So I'm like, this is like a TikTok situation where this is like a little refinement of processes across the board. And so the tick was the M1, huge change, big massive performance leaps from Intel. This is the talk. So these are like minor changes. This is like refining processes, cleaning things up. So like slightly different processes, they're both 5 nanometers, but it's like a more refined 5 nanometer.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  It has more transistors, has more memory bandwidth. It has a couple new updated engines. There's an updated media engine was like the big one that they've been harping on. It has more GPU cores than the M1's, than the M1 did. Compared to the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, it has more like efficiency cores, whereas the M1 Pro and the M1 Max have more like power cores.

• 12:04Alex Cranz?

  And you, you saw that. Like I thought what was really interesting about your review is that you were like, yeah, the performance is a little bit better. The GPU performance is a lot better, but the battery life.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:14Alex Cranz?

  That sounded like a real big win. And I think honestly, that for me was the most interesting part is that like, yeah, we know the M1 is good. We know the M1 is fast. A slightly refined version of it is going to be. Slightly faster. Great. But there was a lot of changes there for the efficiency cores. And I was really, really curious how much of that bared out in your actual testing for battery life.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I was, I was not able to run this down during my testing period, which has actually never happened to me before. Like even when I was testing the M1 Mac, like the M1 Pro 14, which got, gave me like 16 hours. Like I did that same thing with this computer and there was still like 20% left. Like I would like use it all day. I'd like leave it running like something overnight. I'd wake up and there'd still be like so much left that I'd like, I'd have to shut it and like stop my timer and like bring it to the office. Cause it was just like, I was never able to consistently use it for all the battery life that it has. I, I do plan on doing that. I need to find a time to do that, but I haven't been able to yet, which is a really unprecedented in my career. It's a very long lifespan.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because when we were doing the M1 reviews, we were running right up against the limits, right?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  The MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and the M1 Max were like, it just keeps going. And we, but we, we got there and then this one is like, and a little bit more.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like I would use it for like, you know, eight hours and I was, I mean, I was getting really frustrated at points where I was just like, I'm just going to kill this. Like I would throw, I like played Tomb Raider on for a while, like had like premiere running over audition. Like I was like really trying to like get it down and it would still, at the end of the day, like have like 50 to 60% remaining. So I, my best guess as of now is that with my workload, it will get like 17 and a half to like 18 hours. I will update the review.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  This to me is baffling because Apple's battery life estimate is for video playback, which we know is all the radios are off, brightness down. You're using the Apple TV app and they quote 20 hours. And you're like, well, just in using it, I'm getting 18 hours. It's like, why wouldn't they just say the real figure?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  I would say part of it is that, I mean, everyone's workload is different and the fact that I'm getting, you know, a certain amount of time doesn't mean that you're going to get a certain amount of time. It, it is sort of useful for giving you an idea of like how much you might expect knowing if you're doing stuff similar to what I'm doing. And it's a useful comparison. Because I know and can confirm that I was doing the same workload on the 14 inch M1 Pro. But I do understand that Apple sort of saying like, our engineer Steve got 17 hours out of this like isn't like as useful as having, having a playback test.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Poor Steve.

• 14:50Alex Cranz?

  Poor Steve, just sitting there watching the same video in Apple TV at 50% brightness.

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  Meat stylus.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  That's what they're doing in Severance.

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's just battery life testing. So it sounds like the M2, right? Based on the A15, faster efficiency cores, more efficient efficiency cores, meaningful bump in single threaded performance, but then the M1 Pro and the M1 Max have more performance cores.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  And so when you do multi-core workloads, those cores all kick in, you get way more performance out of those chips.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, just like way like it's double, it's close to doubling it on a lot of stuff.

• 15:30Alex Cranz?

  I do want to say last week I ran into Monica at the office and I was looking at the computer and we were trying to come up with ways to tax the memory bandwidth on it. Because that seems to be one of, were one of the really big like performance increases is, right? Like the memory bandwidth is really improved. And so my very dumb, it's five o'clock in the afternoon idea was to see how many tabs we could open. And like, we went and found like a site, we won't name the site, that's rude, but we went and found a site that we knew would normally tax our browsers and we opened it in Chrome, which we know is really memory heavy. And how, how many, we got to, we got like 200.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  It was over 150. That was on the M1, which any of our storage would be, storage should be part of that too, but yeah. Cause we sort of had the idea of like, oh, let's like see side by side, like which one can open more tabs. And it became very clear, very quickly that that would take like hours because the M1 was just like, still doing totally fine with like 150 tabs open.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Did anything slow this computer down?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  No, not when I was using it, not even when it was on battery. It certainly wasn't like as fast at doing CPU-heavy stuff in like Premiere and Audition as like the M1 Pro computer would be, but there was never a point where I was using it and getting like the spinning wheel. That doesn't mean you couldn't get that if you were like doing even heavier stuff than I was on here, but one of the things I wanted to emphasize in this process is that if you are doing like lots of professional work, like you should just stop reading the review and go buy the 14 because this is really like not a good value purchase for you. So I think what sort of does matter more than doing that like really heavy professional work is how good it is at the stuff that the M1 Pro is overkill for, which is mostly

• 17:11Speaker 03

  the stuff I was trying to do, and none of that slowed it down.

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  But then we have no idea how good the MacBook Air will be at that stuff.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Right, and that's sort of my hesitation with the battery life too. You know, the battery life is really great. The MacBook Air has the same processor, could have the same battery life as well, because we don't know the size of the battery in the MacBook Air.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  It's a slightly lower quote, we know that much.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  It is a slightly lower quote, yeah.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  But again, the quote is for video playback, which is all the radios off, low screen brightness, playing video on a loop in the Apple TV app. So if you need to do that for 20 hours, the MacBook Pro is the way to go.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Right, for all you loopers out there.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, loopers, that's what they call them.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  You go, it's a great subreddit community, people who just loop video all day, talking about their tips, their stamina tips, bathroom strategies.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  That's who we're gonna talk to, that's gonna, they're gonna feature them in the Air video. That's like we did with the MacBook Studio at Alex Castro, like the Air video's gonna be loopers.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Looper Forum Wars are just crazy when the two factions, oof, you don't wanna get in the middle of that. But so the MacBook, the MacBook Air is quoted at 18 hours of video looping time. So like presumably that just means it's less, but if it's less against the benchmark of I couldn't kill the battery, maybe it doesn't matter at all.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  I wanna see how much less it is, like if I'm getting, if I'm only getting 10 hours out of the MacBook Air and I'm getting 17 out of the MacBook Pro, that to me would be tempting to buy the MacBook Pro, because I'd be, you know, I'd be giving up MagSafe for seven hours of battery. For me, that would be a worthy trade, even if it might not be for everyone, but you know, the more battery that the MacBook Air has, the sort of more considerable the other trade-offs become, I think.

• 18:47Alex Cranz?

  How many hours battery did you get on the M1 MacBook Pro?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  10-ish, 10, 11.

• 18:53Alex Cranz?

  10-ish?

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:54Alex Cranz?

  So this is almost like double that.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:56Alex Cranz?

  So if we got, we saw like similar on the MacBook Air and the MacBook Air, I struggled to get mine to die. Like I can go a day or two at the office and everybody's like, did you bring a charger? And I'm like, no, never.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Alex Cranz?

  I live and die by the battery.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  I've not actually used the M1 Air recently, but the M1 Pro is I using as my primary driver right now in that it's like 10 to 12 hours generally.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have a 16 inch M1 Pro and it just doesn't die. Like I, I think I said this like last week or the week before, like I went and live logged the entire Apple event. And then did some photo stuff and wrote up like I did that day on the road and I got home and I was at like 50% battery.

• 19:33Alex Cranz?

  And you weren't even a hundred percent charged.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what's it? I was at 90. It was great. So what's, you, you, we keep talking about the Air, you keep talking about the 14 inch Pro. Let's put those things in the perspective of the price. So the M2 Air, which is coming out next month, starts at 1199.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  So the M2 Air, from my playing around on the website, it seems like it is largely going to be comparable, if not the same price for the same specs as you can get from the MacBook Pro. So the decision between the two of them is going to be less about money and more about the other benefits MacBook Air has, like the new design and MagSafe and the upgraded webcam and the lack of touch bar for people for whom that's a big draw.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just trying to like, understand this. So the MacBook Air with the M2 chip has MagSafe, it has a 1080p webcam, has the new design, it comes in fun colors. It starts at 1299. Okay. I think you should get more than 8 gigs of RAM. So like, maybe you should pay a little bit more money, but like, whatever. It starts at 1299. The 13 inch Pro that you reviewed.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  And then you reviewed the step up model of the 13 inch MacBook Pro with the M2, but the base model is 1299. So for a hundred dollars more, you get the old design, you get the 720p webcam. You don't get MagSafe, which effectively means you lose a port because you need to use one of those ports to charge. And then importantly, you get a smaller screen because the 13 inch Pro is 13.3 inches and the 13 inch Air now with the M2 is 13.6 inches.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  So this is like the worst hundred dollars you can spend unless there's something you need the touch bar for or some. Extremely esoteric reason that you need to run the fan all the time.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's really not looking like a good deal, but I sort of like I want to wait and see how big of a deal the fan is. Like, I think we can say Aaron, like, suspect that the fan is is not going to lead to huge performance gains and suspect that the battery life on the air won't be too much less, but I don't want to like bang that gavel down quite yet until I've tried that stuff out, I think.

• 21:37Alex Cranz?

  I think there's, there's two reasons to get the Pro. I would never do it, but here are the two reasons. One, two sweet, sweet more hours of battery life as promised by the loopers.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  The loopers are freaking out right now, man.

• 21:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I know. They're like, oh, my God, they're finally talking about us. But but like, it's also an, it's an established design. We know it works every, we know all the components work. We know there are no bugs. We know that, like, this has been tested for for years and years and years, and everything about this is going to work. And the MacBook Air is a totally new design. And historically, when Apple launches a totally new design, like, sometimes it goes really great. So far, I've got a Mac Studio. It's going great.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  And they just did a totally new design in 2021.

• 22:19Alex Cranz?

  But like, but this is a pretty radical, radical new design for the MacBook Air. And there could definitely be some things that pop up that, like, might make somebody who just wants, like, that super consistency will be like, you know what? I'm just going to go ahead and get this other one. It's got all these crappy things on it, but I know it's going to be consistent.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  But I live in fear.

• 22:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I live in absolute fear.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I like to live my life on roller coasters.

• 22:43Alex Cranz?

  I mean, there's like video editors out there.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Alex Cranz?

  Who don't upgrade for decades because they're like, well, I, you know, my, my software works just perfectly right now.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  Dude, if I could still be running Snow Leopard, I would. So I I feel those people. But I'm just saying, if for $100, you get the substantially worse computer on a number of like, like, experiential metrics, like, the webcam is worse. You can have access to fewer ports. If, like me, you are left-handed, you will be touching that stupid touch bar and just muting your computer all the day long, right? Like.

• 23:18Alex Cranz?

  Forever.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  Whatever's going on there. If you pay $400 more, you get into M1 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro territory. And that's like a substantial improvement. Across all the met, you get an SD card reader, right?

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  You should definitely just pay the $400 more.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  So I think that the audience for this like is theoretically me. Like I am legitimately someone who just does not need anything close to the power that the M1 Pro has. Like, like I could frankly do my work on like a $700 computer if $700 computers didn't have like terrible battery life and lots of other bad things about them. Like, like I just do not want to pay for the 14 incher and I do not need the power the 14 incher has. Like, that's just overkill for me. And I do want a fan because the current air, like just from the reviews that I've read, I do think that some of the stuff that I occasionally have to do, like in Photoshop and in Audition, would like lead to some throttling on the current air.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  So if I were like a 2020 shopper, the MacBook Pro with M1 would be like the buy for me. I personally do care about battery life a lot more than I care about like MagSafe and care about design. So I do think that there is a world in which the M2 MacBook Pro is a better purchase than the MacBook Air for like me and my demographic. But that again, that's where I've been sort of so heavily caveatting like I need to see exactly what the performance difference is between the Air and the Pro and exactly what the battery life difference is for me, because those are really like more so deciding factors than a lot of the sort of extra stuff that the Air has. That is the best case I can make for it.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  So the M2 Air is coming out next month. That's what it says on Apple's website. We'll see how this chip shortage goes. Apple's running the supply constraints like everybody. This thing is out now. I think the right answer is unless you need this computer right now, and there are lots of people who need a computer right now, like go, fine, you'll be happy. But if you can wait the additional month to see whether the worst $100 upgrade I've like I've seen Apple provide to people in a long time is worth it. Like I would just hold on.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  Because I, my instinct, I hear you that like there's this middle ground and whatever, but my instinct is. The mini LED display in the MacBook Pros is really good. The ports are useful, like the M1 Pro is faster. Like you get more for that money. So if you can live with the Air, like you get the new computer. And if you need more, you should get substantially more. And this thing is just in a weird tweener spot where that, I mean, this is why they're saying, look, this is the second best selling computer, the second best selling laptop in the market. A statement, by the way, I'm looking at press release, no footnote, no sourcing. I don't know if that's from IDG, like, I don't know where that came from. They're just like,

• 26:14Speaker 03

  They can just say it.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they just said it and there's nothing underneath it.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  It could be in like 2015 that it was the best.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, who knows? But you understand why they're saying that they're saying, look, this computer is popular despite what you may think.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  My instinct here is if you can wait a month, you should absolutely wait a month to see how the Air performs. So you can decide whether you need the little bit of extra sustained power that the fan would give you, you need the little bit of extra battery life that you might get, we don't know yet, or you need the big jump to the M1 Pro machines. And then you're going to be in a horrible conundrum of like, do I wait for the M2 Pro machines? And who knows?

• 26:53Speaker 03

  I basically agree with you. I think it's, it is in like a weird middle spot. And the way that things are looking right now, it is somewhat unclear, like who this is the best computer for, especially given the identical pricing, basically to the MacBook Air.

• 27:09Alex Cranz?

  I think the Pro name kind of trips it up because you see the Pro like that made a lot of sense. And just because they're using the same chassis, they decided to call it a Pro. And really this is more of just like base model MacBook. Right? Like the Air is generally for those of us who aren't doing a lot of professional stuff. We don't need a fan to just get a slightly bit more performance. We want, if you're going to go like super performance, you want to get like more cores. So this is like, it's just a weirdly named product sitting in this weird space. And they should maybe like reposition it.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  The Pro naming is just very confusing to me in general. The fact that they have an M1 Pro processor that is in a MacBook and they also have a MacBook Pro with M2 that is not of the M1 Pro and it trips me up all the time and they should change it and I hate it.

• 27:58Alex Cranz?

  Oh, and they did tell us what the battery size is. It's actually slightly for the MacBook Air, the M2. It's slightly bigger than the M1 MacBook Air. The M1 MacBook Air was 49.9 watt hours. The M2 is 52.6 watt hours. And then this 13 inch MacBook Pro is 58.2 watt hours.

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  Ever so slightly bigger.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, ever so slightly bigger.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  The answer is we have to wait for that air. And I will say that our friend Joanna Stern, like, straight up said, I didn't review this computer because it's pointless to review it without the MacBook Air. She also, I will say, gave Monica a great compliment, said Monica's the best laptop reviewer.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Thank you, Joanna.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  Since Joanna reviewed laptops, which is an amazing.

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  I thought it was a very nice compliment from Monica. Okay, we've got to wait for the air. That seems to be the consensus, unless you need to run out and get this computer right now.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  If you are someone who needs to run out and get this computer right now, I do want to like not undersell that the M2 like is a very good chip. Like it is a better chip than the M1. Like this is still, as of now, one of the fastest laptops you can buy. And that like, it is like, yes, it's like boring, it's confusing. It is like very, very fast and like a big achievement and it's like, fine to buy.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  It's true that it's very fast, but you know, I just think this pricing is so odd that it feels like Apple is counting on people to be like, for a hundred dollars more, I get a Pro and just like paying it. And I think the answer is we absolutely have to wait for the air to know how these things all slot together. So we'll wait a month for the air. All right, I am running late to catch this plane. Alex has got the rest of the show in excellent hands.

• 29:35Alex Cranz?

  We got this, everybody. Do a shot, we're going to get through this together. It's going to be great.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  Monica, thank you so much.

• 29:40Alex Cranz?

  You do.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  We're going to take a break and then, you know, Alex, godspeed.

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• 31:04Alex Cranz?

  And we're back. Neelai is gone. I don't know where he is. Wish him luck. But David Pierce is here.

• 31:10David Pierce?

  Hello. It's good to be here. I'm like, I'm like 60% here, if we're being honest. I don't know if you guys talked about this while I was not here, but I have COVID. It's very exciting. I don't recommend it at all, but I have watched a lot of Stranger Things. No one told me all the episodes of Stranger Things are six and a half hours long, but we can come back to that later. So in several days of being sick, I've watched like half of the Stranger Things season, but I'm very happy to be here.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  Dan Seifert is here.

• 31:35David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 31:36Alex Cranz?

  We're very, very excited. We're gonna, we're gonna, we got a bunch of other things coming for this episode of The Vergecast. This is a very special, very weird episode. First up, we're gonna talk about Netflix and binging because David's watched all of Stranger Things, but also because Netflix just laid off another 300 people. And they're, they're pegging it kind of to, they had the quarter one results, they did not go well, they were losing subscribers, they're kind of starting to tighten up the financials and have laid off another 300 people. And I think the question is like, well, how do you rebuild? Like, how do you make Netflix competitive? And everybody seems to be focused on content. Netflix is focused on content, and I don't think that's correct.

• 32:19David Pierce?

  Well, so wait, hold on. Before, before you get too deep into that, I think part of what's so interesting about this to me is that like, that premise that Netflix is somehow like falling apart and needs a new strategy to rebuild is just not true. Like Netflix, this has been the weirdest part of all of this to me, is Netflix seems to be undergoing this like massive panic attack because everybody went outside again. And like- That's fine, right? Like Netflix was like so many of these other companies that like probably grew too fast over the course of the pandemic. It was unsustainable. Netflix probably should have spent time talking about how that was unsustainable rather than being like video games. But instead, like Netflix is fine, right? There was this, there was a report a few days ago, I believe from Bloomberg, that Netflix has like, half the

• 33:02David Pierce?

  shows people actually watch on streaming. Like Netflix is by all real accounts killing it and yet is undergoing this like crazy existential crisis as a company, which I find just deeply weird.

• 33:13Alex Cranz?

  I feel like it's kind of the investors and stuff. I think, I think there was always this like expectation of nonstop unrealistic growth until the end times.

• 33:23Speaker 06

  Cranes, are you saying that Wall Street has unrealistic expectations? Really? Like, really?

• 33:28Alex Cranz?

  Wow, it's crazy. And like Netflix is just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're drinking the Wall Street juice. Yes, we are, we are, and we lost 200,000 subscribers. It's time to lay off another 300, this is like, what, 450 people so far that they've laid off total? And like, why are you panicking? You have so many things you can be doing to like, deal with this. And also, it's okay to lose subscribers. Well, I shouldn't say that because I'm not working at Netflix.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  But they have, they have 220 million of them. Losing 200,000 is like, it's not good, but it's not like a signal of a broader crisis inside of Netflix. But then Netflix is also out there saying, you know, they, they confirmed, as far as I know, like aggressively and exactly for the first time that they are doing an ad-supported plan. They keep pushing on the video game stuff like Netflix is gonna be fine. Which is why I think like your stuff about binging is way more interesting. Because to me, the question is not like, is Netflix dead? It's like, why is Netflix such a bad service?

• 34:28Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Because like, we saw also this week, I think Wall Street Journal did a piece about how Netflix is like talking to a bunch of different people for advertising. They're, they're talking to NBC Universal for ads. Because it's like, yeah, we're just gonna go to our competitors. They got this. And they're talking to Google. They previously, there was reported, they talked to Roku, like, they're trying to figure out their ad game, and they're trying to figure out how to get all their subscribers back. And then they're like, oh, is there anything we could do to fix our actual app? No, nothing.

• 34:56David Pierce?

  Couldn't possibly. Just rows of, rows of endless content from categories that don't make any sense to anybody. We had solved.

• 35:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:03David Pierce?

  We're good there. Everything's fine.

• 35:04Alex Cranz?

  Like, it's wild to me that you cannot do a playlist on Netflix.

• 35:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, give us the rundown of this piece that you wrote a few days ago, because I've been thinking about it obsessively after three days of lying on the couch scrolling through Netflix. I have, I have determined that you are right. So like, give us, give us the argument.

• 35:20Alex Cranz?

  I mean, this was entirely because I was watching, I started to re-watch, first time watch, I don't really remember watching Star Trek, the original series as a kid. Like, I watched it. But if you asked me what happened episode to episode, I couldn't tell you. And I started watching it. But Paramount Plus will only, like, if you want to watch it in order, their order is how it was aired in 1966, when it was chosen by like, a bunch of executives who were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you got too many big ideas in here. We need, we need like bikinis, and we need like, guys ripping their shirts off and punching each other. And so like, the first five episodes are just like, William Shatner losing his shirt, and then being like, oh, ladies, hello. You're like, what is happening here? And

• 36:02Alex Cranz?

  why can't I just watch it like, the way it was intended to be watched by, by the, the writers? And Paramount Plus doesn't let you do that. It's all the, all the shows have that. And it's like, why can't you just like, watch it in another order? Why can't you choose the order? Without having to like, go through the whole app, I think is the clear clarification here. Because technically, I could pull it up on my phone, and I could choose the episodes I want to watch, and manually select them. But wouldn't it be nice if I just had a playlist, like I can do, I've been doing in iTunes since 2001? This is not new technology.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, so this is where I should confess that I have never watched one episode of any Star Trek anything. I'd like to, and we should come back to that. I'm like, I'm an aspirational Star Trek fan. Dan, are you, are you a Star Trek guy?

• 36:49Speaker 06

  I used to watch Star Trek when I was a kid. I was a big Next Generation fan, but I think the last show I watched was Voyager, which was mid, late 90s.

• 36:57Alex Cranz?

  I think that's what most people did.

• 36:59Speaker 06

  And then I saw the recent movies.

• 37:01David Pierce?

  Okay, all right. Well, at some point, I need the like, how to get into Star Trek thing, which I guess is kind of the point, right? Like, there are a million Star Trek shows, and the same is true with Star Wars, except there's just like, less of it, so it's easier to sort of put in order. But you're like, what order should I watch these things in? And the order in which they were produced is not necessarily the correct order, because they all move around in crazy timelines. Everybody has theories about the canons of them. They all cross over with each other. Marvel is even worse like this. Like, there are 100 different ways you could watch the Marvel Universe in order, and it would all make different kinds of sense. And it just feels like, to your point, it's such a like, basic thing to just put them in a different order, and show them to me. Like, there's, there's, is there some like secretive governing body

• 37:44David Pierce?

  that says these shows have to be shown in this order? Like, I'm kind of, I'm to the point now where it's like, the only thing I can think of is there's someone on the other side who's like, you must do this, this way.

• 37:54Alex Cranz?

  I honestly think it's just laziness, because you saw this, like, when, when Disney released The Simpsons, and everybody like, lost their minds, because The Simpsons were in the wrong aspect ratio, and it was cutting things off, you were losing the, the duff beer jokes and stuff. Like, I think it's, they just, they know you want the content, but they're like, eh, they don't care how they get the content. You just shovel it in. They got this.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  I think this goes back to the first thing that you said, Alex, which was that they are so focused on the content, they are not focused at all on the experience. And like, I think all of the streaming apps are this way. Like, HBO Max rebuilt its whole streaming app, and it still sucks. And Netflix continues to suck. And Disney Plus sucks. Like, like, they are all terrible at like, I'm watching a show on Tuesday night, and I go to bed, and it's Wednesday night, and I want to watch the next episode of that show, doesn't want to tell me that. It wants to tell me a million other things. And it's just like, I'm sure there are like metrics involved because Netflix especially, but all of these companies are very data driven at this point. And there's probably metrics that say like, more people will watch more things if we make

• 39:01Speaker 06

  it this annoying to use than if we made it easier. But it's just like, none of them consider the experience at all. When it comes to like actually setting up, navigating, finding what you want to watch, continuing what you want to watch.

• 39:14David Pierce?

  I just want to complain about the fact that the continue watching row is in a different place somehow every time you open a streaming app. Have you ever noticed this?

• 39:22Alex Cranz?

  You will never notice.

• 39:23David Pierce?

  Sometimes it's at the top where it clearly should be. Sometimes it's like the 11th thing down. And I'm just like, there is a 97% chance that I'm coming here to watch something that I already started watching. And Dan, I think you're right that they're like, all these companies know that the only way to keep you using their service is to just like relentlessly turn you on to new stuff. But that's just like not the experience of watching things like.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  It's not a pleasant experience.

• 39:45David Pierce?

  No, it sucks. And it's like, and there's even a way to do it that's like, I mean, everybody should take a like some learnings, but not all learnings from YouTube in this respect, right? Which is that there's like, there are really interesting ways to do recommendations.

• 39:58Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 39:58David Pierce?

  And there you can do stuff like on topics, you can do stuff on like people, like there are a million ways to show people new content. And these companies just seem to have no interest in doing any of it, which blows my mind.

• 40:11Alex Cranz?

  I think for a lot of them, Netflix excluded, they were all entertainment companies first, right? Like, all they knew was content. Disney may be the exception because they have their whole theme park experience. They should know better. But for the most part, they were all these like companies who were just making lots of content and that's what they know and they know that. And Netflix used to actually care a little bit more about that experience. Like, the big news from Netflix used to be not what new show was on, but like how they tweaked the app, how they improved it. And, and I think they've just all kind of ignored their app to be in this like content race and see how much stuff they can churn out. And it's like, well, you also have this whole other thing that will keep people sticking around if you make it not suck.

• 40:52Speaker 06

  Did we forget to say a disclaimer that we have the future of on Netflix right now? Wonderful show that you should absolutely go watch on Netflix. Disclaimer, disclaimer.

• 41:01Alex Cranz?

  Neil is in like a TSA line right now and he just felt it. He's like, oh my, they didn't disclaim something. I can feel it in my bones. But yeah, we do own it. Thank you for the disclaimer, Dan. It's wonderful.

• 41:13David Pierce?

  But I will say on the front, like if you have to choose between tech and content for these apps, like content is clearly the thing to choose, right?

• 41:19Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 41:19David Pierce?

  The flip side is like Quibi, which had a million different, interesting ideas about how an app should work and no shows anybody should watch and died immediately. But I think the part that drives me so crazy about this is the stuff that we're asking for is not wildly complicated. It's not like invent new filmmaking techniques or like build new technology for televisions. It's like, it's playlists.

• 41:40Speaker 06

  They do the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos. They do the nerd stuff already.

• 41:44Alex Cranz?

  They don't. Most of them don't, though.

• 41:46Speaker 06

  Well, you know, Netflix does and Disney Plus does and HBO Max does. Like the nerd specs are there. It's like the very simple stuff like David just said, like, give me a playlist that I can make your watch list make sense. Why do I have to, do I, like the thing with HBO Max, I can add individual episodes or seasons or shows to my watch list and I don't know which one, which button does which. And like, which is going to let me watch this show tomorrow when I want to watch the next episode? I do not know. Oh, I added episode three to my watch list, but I really want to watch the rest of the season. Like, like it just doesn't make any sense.

• 42:24Alex Cranz?

  But you're just going to watch episode three forever, just on loop.

• 42:27David Pierce?

  These are the things where you can, you can see why Apple is so obsessed with this idea from like a pure like design UI perspective. To use one of these apps is so infuriating that I'm sure they're all in a room just being like, what if we could pull it all together and be the ones who actually make this make some sense? And I would say there is no indication from Apple's existing products that that is actually possible for Apple to do, but you can see why Apple is so obsessed with it. Like the Apple TV app is just as guilty of this as anybody else, but it at least is like slowly pushing in some of those directions.

• 43:00Alex Cranz?

  It's like Plex for years. I know I gotta bring up Plex. I'm sorry.

• 43:04David Pierce?

  I can't believe we made it this long.

• 43:06Alex Cranz?

  We went so long in this, but like Plex for years, they've made it very, very clear. They want to do the same thing that Apple wants to do. They want to be like the place you go and you aggregate all of your content. They, they released that, that new function that kind of lets you do that. And it also took them over a decade to give you playlists. And even then, like, one of the most requested things that you see from, from Plex users is, I want to just like, set up a TV channel of like, random episodes of The Simpsons and Futurama. So I can feel like I'm like, getting ready to have dinner 5:00 PM after high school all over again. And they still like, it's still really hard to do that. Like even the people who like, they have to focus on the app because that's all they have,

• 43:51Alex Cranz?

  struggle with this. And nobody has an answer. They're just like, yeah, well, we're working on it.

• 43:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. And for all the reasons that's hard for a company like Plex, because like, all these streaming companies and content companies are like, super intense about how the stuff that they own is used in all these aggregator apps. There's just no excuse for one of the streamers. Like, it's, it's hard for Plex and I get that. And I think Plex is like, trying to do the right thing and is running into like, legal walls because these companies don't want to have their content next to each other.

• 44:20Alex Cranz?

  For a while there, they were even doing that with all of your very legally gotten content that you brought to them. They were still like, it's really hard to do playlists. And I'm like, this, again, iTunes has been doing it for how long? Creative Jukebox was doing it?

• 44:33David Pierce?

  You have one and then you have the next one after it. And then after that, another one.

• 44:37Alex Cranz?

  Something about videos, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, playlists for videos?

• 44:41Speaker 06

  Do it for you guys. You put avatar dot MKV, then you put Batman underscore begins dot MKV.

• 44:48Alex Cranz?

  VLC, just out there, changing the game. Thank you VLC. Everybody do what VLC did in 2001.

• 44:58Alex Cranz?

  But Netflix, they're gonna do their own thing. They're gonna lay people off, go spend another 30 billion per episode of Stranger Things. It'll be four hours long each episode. David will never stop watching it. He's just being a Stranger Things loop.

• 45:14David Pierce?

  You know that feeling sometimes when you like, you get to the end of something and you're like, "Oh, it's over. That was good." And then like, the screen goes black and then there's just more after it. Like, I don't know if either of you saw The Batman, but that movie ended like six times. Oh man, the longest movie ever. Yeah, and it's like, I actually enjoyed that movie fine, but it literally ends, I think, four times. It just keeps ending and every time you're like, "Oh, good movie." And then it's like, "Oh, there's another scene." Stranger Things is like that. And somehow, I'm like, "Okay, I'm like 53 minutes in, like, cool cliffhanger." It's like, "Oh, oh no." It's too long. We're going back to Russia now. Like, that's, we're just gonna hang out in Russia for a while. So many nights to get through that. It's a lot.

• 45:55Alex Cranz?

  It's incredible. But we're gonna take a break. When we're back, we're gonna talk gadgets. Dan's gonna tell us all about his favorite gadget of all time, right, Dan?

• 46:05David Pierce?

  Maybe of like, the last six months, we'll say.

• 46:07Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great. Stay tuned.

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• 47:22Alex Cranz?

  And we're back. And Dan, tell us all about, is it the HTC Vive? Is that your new favorite gadget?

• 47:29Speaker 06

  HTC Vive, it runs Android 2.3 with HTC Sense UI. No, I wrote a piece last week, or I published, we published it last weekend because I revisited the Surface Duo 2, which if anyone remembers, came out last fall and it was like kind of a disaster. And it was the second disaster in the Surface Duo line.

• 47:50Alex Cranz?

  I think you're being very kind to say kind of.

• 47:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, the first one is a disaster. The second, everybody was just kind of like, oh, that's probably bad and instantly forgot about it.

• 47:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it was bad. Like, it was like functionally broken at launch. Like, I could not type on the screen. I wrote our review. I used the thing. I tried it out. Went back and forth, got gaslit by Microsoft PR, who insisted they did not see these problems. But like, I couldn't use the phone. And so it made it really hard to kind of like wrap my head around what the idea with this product is and like what the goal of this product is. So anyways, I keep seeing these reports that Microsoft has been issuing software updates and that they've been actually updating the phone and making it better and things like that. So I figure we're like eight months later, they're cost less now, so they cut the price by 33% or something, which is a sizable amount. And I was able to trade

• 48:43Speaker 06

  in some things. I got my hands on a Surface Duo 2, and I had been using it for the past like month. And I kind of like it. It's very much not a device for everyone. And it's not even like my primary phone. I don't even use it as a phone. I use it as an iPad Mini. But it's like, kind of great, because it's an iPad Mini that I can fold in half and shove in my pocket. And then when I go to like my kid's gymnastics class, and I'm sitting there in the waiting room for an hour, I just opened my little iPad Mini book, which is the Surface Duo, and I can read books on it really easily, or I can watch YouTube videos, or I can do anything that you can do with a phone, except I now have this like eight and a half inch screen that also fits in my pocket, where I could run two apps

• 49:25Speaker 06

  at the same time and like multitask if I want to get some work done or something like that. And because Microsoft has addressed a lot of the core issues, the touch response, the bugginess, the fundamental broken nature of the original launch, I can actually like use this now and it's not frustrating to use or annoying to use. And I kind of like it. So I, you know, it's become one of like my go to devices for the past month and a half or month or whatever. And, and it's like more exciting and interesting to use than a typical slab phone. And I can, it's more portable than a tablet. So it's, it's kind of like hitting this weird niche that I'm getting a lot of enjoyment of. I like it. It's fun.

• 50:06Alex Cranz?

  So you finally found like an Android tablet that you like.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, like it works like a phone, right? So it runs phone apps and like you can stretch apps across the two screens. Not a great experience. Most of the time when you do that, unless that app is made by Microsoft, which designed its apps to go against both screens. But it's super convenient to be able to have like in the morning, I'm, you know, drinking my coffee and I've got Slack up on one screen. I've got my email up on another or a web browser on another. And I'm like catching up with things really quickly and easily. And I can like view things and respond to messages while I'm viewing it, all on this device that fits in my pocket. Normally I would need to use a laptop or a larger tablet or whatever to really do this kind of stuff. And I'm able to do it really easily with the Duo. It's just like second

• 50:52Speaker 06

  nature on that thing, which is really cool. But like, it's not replacing my phone because in order to do anything with it, you have to open it up, which is kind of cumbersome. You, I put this in the piece, it's a very intentional type of device. Like it's not the kind of thing that like I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I want to like kill some time by doom scrolling and I pull the phone in my pocket with one hand and unlock it, all that things. Like you can't do that with a Duo. You have to open it up. You've got to go through a process of like using it that requires both hands.

• 51:19Alex Cranz?

  Always have to use both hands?

• 51:21Speaker 06

  Basically, I mean, like you can fold the screen behind it, but in order to get it into that folded state, you have to use both hands to open it up and fold it. There's no screen on the outside. It's annoying to check notifications with and things like that. It's also like cumbersome to use as an actual phone against your face. So it's not a great phone, but if you think of it as a secondary device or like as a tablet replacement, a small tablet replacement where, you know, David mentioned in the Vergecast on Wednesday that he uses his iPad mini as just a reading device. Like this is like a really cool, modern feeling reading device, whether it's Kindle books or my pocket queue or websites or whatever, long emails, stuff like that. Like it's, it's really like great for that stuff.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  So I have to say that all totally tracks for me. And I think like it's, it's sort of wild to me that Microsoft has not just always tried to sell the thing that way. Like the thing that they have always tried to do is make it a phone.

• 52:16Speaker 06

  Well, they didn't. They didn't with the first generation Duo. They refused to call it a phone because they knew everyone is going to be like, this sucks as a phone. But then the problem was it's a $1,400 or $1,500 device. And now it's like, oh, it's a $1,400 or $1,500 device that is not your primary phone. You also need to carry another phone around to make this usable life. Like that is like a problem. So I think they, they realized that problem with the Duo too, and they changed their marketing, but it really didn't make any sense for me until that price came down almost a thousand dollars from its launch and they fixed all the bugs.

• 52:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's what I was just about to say is I think the, the price was the thing for me because I totally buy it as a separate device. Like it, this, it sounds really stupid, but just having the Kindle app where you can see two different pages on two different screens is lovely. It's like, oh, I'm reading a book like a, like a person. It's, it's nice.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 53:05David Pierce?

  And I have a, I have the original Duo still floating around in my office here somewhere. And every once in a while I pull it out because I'm like, I, I want to love you. Like for all the reasons you just described, like it's sort of the perfect, like sit and have coffee in the morning and like catch up before the world like collapses on you as it does the minute you open your phone. All of that makes total sense to me. The stylus is really good. It was three times the price it should have been. And it tried to be a phone. And for me, it's like, that's the thing with all of these folding devices right now. Even the Samsung fold, like when you close it, it just looks like a TV remote. It's like too tall and weird and doesn't quite work. But then you open it and it's like, oh, there's something like magical happening here.

• 53:48David Pierce?

  And I feel sort of the same way about the Duo. Like, I kind of like the idea that it's not just a screen staring at me all day. But it has to give me more than what it gave me before. But it sounds like, like kudos to Microsoft for actually like continuing to support this thing that as far as I can tell, no one bought.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, like realistically, the people that bought this are all on the Surface Duo subreddit.

• 54:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  Like, they all exist there. And they are all very passionate about it and they really love their devices.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  It's just you and a bunch of Microsoft employees.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  A bunch of Microsoft employees. But like, I opened the piece with, it is so rare that a product actually gets better after launch. And this is like consistently gotten updates. It's gotten some small updates for like security patches, but it's gotten a lot of like big bug fixes and also new features added. Like in June, they added new features that didn't exist. And they should have been there at the beginning, but they didn't have it. But now like it has some new features that didn't exist before with the, the pen's got some new features and the, the glance bar, whatever they're calling the, the hinge notification thing, it's gotten some new features. So like, they're continuing to invest in this, which is like, most companies would not be able to do this. It only can be like a Google or a Microsoft or Samsung or an Apple who have endless resources,

• 55:02Speaker 06

  can let this thing lose money forever and still have engineers working on it and making it better. We're going to talk about a bunch of startups in a minute, but like, a startup couldn't do this. Like, a startup might've had an idea for this, of like this hardware and stuff and maybe even could have gotten hardware onto the market. But like, as soon as it's out there, like they can't continue supporting it because they don't have the revenue coming in. So it's remarkable, it's rare. You know, we talked about the, the studio display earlier this year, launched kind of bad. Apple has issued updates, it's still kind of bad. Like, the camera's not good. Like, like that hasn't gotten better. This is an example of something that has actually gotten better. Better after launch and you should never buy something with the promise or hope that it gets better after launch.

• 55:47Speaker 06

  But it's just fun to see something kind of like buck that trend.

• 55:50David Pierce?

  And it's kind of a classic Microsoft move, which I really love about Microsoft is like be a few years early to a pretty good idea. And then sometimes Microsoft gives up before that good idea becomes a good product. Sometimes it doesn't. And in this case, like, I mean, the the foldable phone thing is gonna get there, I think. There are enough of those moments where you're using a foldable device and you're like, this is clearly better. That I think like it's, we're gonna get there. Uh, and it's just a matter of what it looks like. And I think Microsoft like has a bunch of very good ideas here. Cause it was all this super basic stuff that was broken when it launched. It's just like, you couldn't launch apps.

• 56:25Speaker 06

  Couldn't launch apps. You couldn't, you couldn't like close app like the the gestures to navigate both screens just made no sense.

• 56:31Alex Cranz?

  But couldn't you like run Microsoft Word on it?

• 56:33Speaker 06

  I mean, I get it. The people that are gonna buy this thing, right? And they know it's fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars. They are going to be like the diehard Microsofties who use all the Microsoft services. And they like a live and breathe Redmond and like they're the ones so like, it makes sense to me that like, we're gonna talk about how PowerPoint works on it and how you can use it as a PowerPoint remote and how you can do Teams calls and take notes while you're in the middle of a Teams call and all this kind of, all these things that I've never actually done because I don't use any of these services. But like, I get that like original pitch with it. But like at a certain point, they have to be able to move beyond that and beyond the crowd. And and the perennial joke with Microsoft is it takes three generations of a Microsoft product to be good. Windows three point one was the first usable version of Windows, right?

• 57:18David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 57:19Speaker 06

  And Surface Pro three was the first good Surface product on the market that was like mainstream people can buy this and not really have mean, lots of issues with it. So maybe if Microsoft sticks with it and keeps doing this, maybe the Duo three will be it. Like, like, that's what we're holding out hope for. Like, maybe it'll come out at a price that is reasonable. Maybe it'll be functional at launch. Maybe it'll address some of the things like, you know, it'd be really a lot easier to use this phone as a phone if it had a screen on the outside of the cover. And it doesn't. So maybe the next one would have that or something like that.

• 57:52Alex Cranz?

  Well, should it though? Like, I think that's also the question is, is you guys keep talking about it as this device that works best when it's not being used as a phone. Should so should the third iteration of this kind of? Step away from that and be like, no, this is, this is a foldable iPad mini with Android.

• 58:09Speaker 06

  I would love to not have to carry two phones.

• 58:13Speaker 06

  Like, I mean, like, that's like, the, the reason I'm carrying two phones when I use the Duo is because one of them I use for certain functions that they work really well at, and the other one works better at other functions. I would love to be like, the, the, the pitch for foldables, especially with Samsung's foldables, is that it replaces your phone and your tablet. And it is like this convergence device that fits in your pocket. And Samsung's much closer to that reality than Microsoft is currently. Even if the Fold 3 is kind of like this weird TV remote when it's closed, you can use the outside of it and you can send messages and take phone calls and do that stuff. And then open it up and have the big screen deal. You can't do that with a Duo, like you have to open it to use it.

• 58:50Speaker 06

  And so I think that adding a screen to the outside, bringing the price into a more reasonable territory and making sure that it fundamentally works at launch as opposed to like having this string of like horrible bugs.

• 59:03David Pierce?

  I think Microsoft would be way better off going all the way the other way. And it's like, the, what does the new Surface go, like 400 bucks? Like, yeah, make it cost about that, make it be pure tablet, don't even try to do phone stuff.

• 59:17Alex Cranz?

  Just be fun.

• 59:18Speaker 06

  So that's a, it's an interesting thought example. So like, if it was pure tablet, then what is, what software does it run? Cause the Duo runs Android because it has to be a phone to do phone stuff.

• 59:27David Pierce?

  Right.

• 59:28Alex Cranz?

  We're not doing, it can't be a Windows, no.

• 59:30Speaker 06

  I mean, like, that's what the go is, right? And that's what the, what was the other one that they never launched that folded? The Neo, that was supposed to run a lighter version of Windows, which got folded into Windows 11, but the product never launched. So like, that could be like, an interesting approach is as the, that middle secondary device in between your phone and your laptop.

• 59:50Alex Cranz?

  But I feel like the go is really dependent on having that keyboard case.

• 59:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Go is pretty bad.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  Like, I think Windows, Windows, generally speaking, as much as we call, we like to call the Surface and the Go and everything tablets, they're really just computers that you only get half of when you buy it and you have to buy the rest. Like, I think if the Duo did that, then you're like, okay, well, I gotta get my Duo, and then I gotta go get my, my sweet keyboard so that I can actually like navigate and do anything on this device. I like, I think Android is much closer to being a good tablet competitor than Windows, and I would love to see it as like, just an Android iPad Mini. And they're like, just go have fun with it. We're not gonna care about our camera.

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  It's gotta fold in half.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  We should still have the camera, though?

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  I could lose the camera entirely. But part of that is because I'm carrying my iPhone in my pocket.

• 1:00:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And the camera's bad, right?

• 1:00:44Speaker 06

  The, the camera is not the best, but that's not, like, the performance of the camera is not really the problem with the camera. The problem with the camera is, in order to use the camera, you have to open up the phone, and it's like, you cannot, it's really hard to use one-handed. It's hard to be quick with, it's hard to be, you know, in the moment with, because it's this big device. It's like shooting with an iPad. It's not a pleasant experience. So that's why I don't use the camera. But the other side effect of the camera is that because they had to make a better camera for the Duo 2, they put this giant lump on the back of one half of it, so that when you fold the other half around, it doesn't like fold or sit flush against it, like the original one, which was one of the coolest things that the original one did, was it folded around in this like really flush felt thing. Now it's got this lumpy camera on the back that prevents it from doing that.

• 1:01:29Speaker 06

  And for me, because I don't use the camera, and because I carry another phone in my pocket, I would ditch the camera entirely and just have a nice, more compact, sleeker hardware.

• 1:01:38Alex Cranz?

  I got it. I got it. Okay. So you know how like with the, with, with the Surface Pro and the Surface Go, they're really at their best when you get the case. What if there was like a camera case or dongle or something? And you're like, all right, I gotta take a photo, plug in.

• 1:01:55David Pierce?

  We've just turned this into the most Microsoft product of all time.

• 1:01:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is the combination of the modular phone ideas that have failed for the past decade. And folding phones, what if we put them together? Oh, God.

• 1:02:07Alex Cranz?

  Neelai wasn't there to stop me as I started saying that. Sorry. But no, I'm like, maybe, you know, they always are kind of like, well, you need to buy something extra to make this truly usable. Like, all right.

• 1:02:18Speaker 06

  To be fair, they already do that because the pen doesn't come with it. And then you buy the pen and you can't charge the pen unless you buy the charging case. So it's like, they're getting you, Alex. Like, you don't need a keyboard.

• 1:02:29Alex Cranz?

  What if the charging case had a camera on it? See? You buy all this stuff. You want a camera? You want a stylus? You just go spend $400 extra. And for now, you can just have your $400 device. It's fine.

• 1:02:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're not at the $400 price. I don't think they'll ever get to the $400 price of this.

• 1:02:46David Pierce?

  Probably not.

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  But, you know, it does need to come down from the $1,500.

• 1:02:50Alex Cranz?

  Well, speaking of phones, we're starting to see more of Nothing, which is a real sentence I can say.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  And the big news is that we won't see much of Nothing.

• 1:02:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  In the US.

• 1:03:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, so like, Dan, walk us through the Nothing news.

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  So the big news this week, a couple of beats on the Nothing phone. It came out that Nothing is not apparently going to be selling the Nothing Phone 1, which is the name of the product, in the US. It's not going to be compatible with US networks. We really don't know what the details are there. Like, it might work if you throw a T-Mobile SIM in there. It might work on some bands. But it's not going to have full support. It very likely will not work on Verizon. And you're just kind of be, I have a poor experience, pretty similar to like, if you imported a Chinese phone to the US now, made from Oppo or Vivo or whatever. So if you were hoping to buy the Nothing Phone 1 in the US, that's a little bit of a bummer. We did get a preview of what the back of the phone looks like from MKBHD.

• 1:03:48Speaker 06

  He did like a video detailing how the LEDs work. It is like, the unique feature of this phone is it's got an array of LEDs on the back, which can light up with notifications or when your phone rings. Lights up with a different pattern, or when you plug the phone in, it lights up like when you're charging, which is kind of clever. It's kind of a little gimmicky, but kind of neat. And of course, it'd be covered up by a case when you put a case on it. And then just today, it came out that apparently if you are in a country where they are selling this, the only way to buy it is going to be through an invite system. So it feels very much like the original launch of the OnePlus One back in 2014 was very hard to get. You had to jump through

• 1:04:29Speaker 06

  a whole bunch of hoops to get an invite to buy it. Seems like Carl Pei, who is the one of the co-founders of OnePlus, is now co-founder or founder of Nothing, is using the same tactic here.

• 1:04:39David Pierce?

  The thing that jumps out to me about this is like, the, the launch stuff doesn't totally surprise me because A, it's really hard to launch a phone globally, which we've seen from many, many, many startups over the years. And what too many of them do in the US is like, sign the one exclusive carrier deal, which is just the instant kiss of death to all smartphone startups everywhere. So like, kudos to Carl and Nothing for not doing that. But then, the invite thing seems to also be, I would guess, purely like, supply-driven.

• 1:05:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, they're a small company. They're not going to be able to compete for the already limited parts.

• 1:05:16Alex Cranz?

  You don't think it's just like, to build hype?

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  It does build hype too, yes.

• 1:05:19David Pierce?

  It, it helps, but I don't, I just don't think the world is the same as it was in 2014. Like, the, that was a time when people were like, amped about their phones and wanted the, and I just don't think that's the world we live in anymore. Like, there's Samsung, and there's the iPhone, and there's just, I think the audience for people who are like, deliberately looking for something else, is just shrinking really, really, really fast.

• 1:05:44Alex Cranz?

  But I think like, I think that's the point, though, is I think they're trying to find that shrinking audience, who's currently buying the OnePlus or whatever, and saying, no, come, come buy our thing. We can be exclusive and weird with our like, rollout too. We've got this. And we've got lights on the back.

• 1:06:01David Pierce?

  Well, and they've done some of that, right? Like they did a stock X drop where I think with, I think a hundred phones that by all accounts does not seem to have gone as well as they might have hoped. But that kind of stuff totally makes sense to me as a, as a pure hype driven thing, but

• 1:06:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  For what nothing is trying to do here, like artificially restricting the number of people who can buy your phone just seems backwards to me. So it's possible that they're going to do like the preorder thing and have invites and then everyone who wanted one will get one very quickly. But my guess would be that this is just the fact that it's very hard to make phones right now and

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:06:36David Pierce?

  Uh, unless you're a company as big as like Apple or Samsung or Huawei, it is hard to stay on top of your supply chain. And like, I have no inside knowledge of this, but I, I would be very surprised if that's not the limiting factor here.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's kind of what, what they are alluding to, that it is, it is, you know, a supply chain driven thing. It does conveniently build hype, I think. Uh, I think that is definitely part of it. If there's one thing Carl pay is very good at, it's marketing. And it is driving interest in hype and

• 1:07:06Alex Cranz?

  It looks cool though. Like, I know we're going to knock, we, we have knocked on the nothing. We will probably continue to knock on some of the elements of the nothing, but it looks cool. Right?

• 1:07:17Speaker 06

  I guess, but would you buy it? Like, is it cool enough to buy it? Like, that's the thing.

• 1:07:22Alex Cranz?

  It's not cool enough to buy, but it's just neat looking. Like the lights and stuff I thought were just a hokey, like I honestly, the first time I saw the, the screenshot of it from MKBHD's piece, I thought it was like a mock-up or a case. And I was like, okay, cool. That's a dumb case, but you do you. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, those are real lights. Okay, that's cool. I don't want to buy it, but I'm really excited about what you're doing here, even though like if I saw this in a movie theater, somebody's phone started ringing and just the entire row is glowing, I would lose my mind.

• 1:07:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this like a hundred times. There are just a bunch of little things that you see like in, in Marquez's video that like you plug the phone in and it gives you the, the charging indicator of like where it fills the space as the battery charges. Super neat, cool idea, fun to watch into that. The lights will sync with notifications or ringtones. They have a bunch of custom ringtones, like all that stuff. I'm like, okay. It's, it's neat. It's cool to see companies like actually do something with the back of their phone, which it's been a long time since anyone really tried anything. Bring back e-ink screens on the back of phones is my personal opinion, but I think I'm gonna lose that fight permanently. But like, Dan, your question is exactly right. Like, I get to the end of that and I'm like, okay, this is neat.

• 1:08:39David Pierce?

  Okay. Like, 90% of people put cases on their phone. And the people who don't care way more about like, the camera and the battery life and like, the basic functionality of the software.

• 1:08:53Alex Cranz?

  Have they said anything about any of that? Like, have they, have they talked about how durable it is? Or whether the camera will be good? Because most startups, you know, I keep thinking of Essential and it's garbage, garbage camera. That did not improve with time, unlike some other products in the world. It just got worse.

• 1:09:11David Pierce?

  Well, it did. It just went from literally unusable to like, pretty bad.

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  In, in terms of like, details on the phone, mostly what we have is like, the design. And then these lights. So like, we don't exactly know. I mean, it could have a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, whatever the latest version of that is, and like, 12 gigs of RAM and like, a decent panel or whatever. It all comes down to the software optimization for things like the camera performance. And that's where the startups generally struggle because they just don't have the experience or the resources to, to make that work well.

• 1:09:42Alex Cranz?

  But he, he should, right? Like, didn't, nothing like, they, they bought Essential, didn't they? And they, they like...

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  So they, they bought like, the Essential branding.

• 1:09:51Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:09:52Speaker 06

  Like, we're gonna talk about what happened to the other half of Essential in a second. But like, there, there's not like, a ton of Essential, I think, staff at nothing. I think it's a lot of the branding and like, the, the domain that they bought. The engineers from Essential started a new company called OSOM. And they announced that they were working on a phone last December.

• 1:10:16David Pierce?

  Wait, can I, can I just pause you real quick? Is it not called Awesome? I thought it was called Awesome.

• 1:10:20Speaker 06

  I never made that connection. So maybe it just went right over my head.

• 1:10:25David Pierce?

  It's also very possible that I'm wrong. I just assumed it was called awesome.

• 1:10:28Alex Cranz?

  How is awesome spelled? I think, I think for listeners.

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  O S O M.

• 1:10:33David Pierce?

  If it's not awesome, it should be. I'm just saying that.

• 1:10:35Speaker 06

  So in December, they announced that they were working on this phone called the OV1. It looked like an essential phone, just modernized, and it was going to have modern specs and everything like that. Turns out today, here we are in June, six or seven months later, and Solana, the crypto web three company, which I know very little about, so quickly getting out of my depth here, and has an announcement that they are announcing a phone, and it's made by Awesome. And it turns out that this phone that Solana is announced and releasing, they say, early next year, is the OV1 phone that Awesome announced back in December. They've rebranded it to the Saga, and it is the Solana phone. So there's no more OV1.

• 1:11:20Speaker 06

  Awesome is not releasing that phone under its own branding. It's only going to be the Solana Saga, which is a crypto web three blockchain type of phone.

• 1:11:30Alex Cranz?

  What, what is, where's the crypto, where's the web three?

• 1:11:33Speaker 06

  What does, what does any of it mean, Alex? Isn't that the eternal question?

• 1:11:36Alex Cranz?

  The pain on your face right now. Just trying to think, like, I just.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  I believe their pitch is that it will have a crypto wallet on it, and you can trade crypto with it and store crypto with it and access digital NFTs and things like that with it. Beyond that, it's just a smart, it's just an Android phone.

• 1:11:55Alex Cranz?

  I'm just, I'm, I'm reading our post, Chris Welch wrote it, for support for decentralized apps that rely on the Solana blockchain. That's, that's the blockchain element of it.

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

  Yes. It's a workaround, I guess, for the Play Store, but you don't want to buy a phone that doesn't have the Play Store.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15David Pierce?

  I mean, I think, A, it, it's very interesting to me that our friends at O S O M, Awesome, decided to go this way because clearly what this looks like is the company thought they were going to be able to build a competitive, like, security, privacy-based Android phone and kind of ride that wave. And what they've decided is that actually the wave is web three, and if you want to, like, halfway gimmick your way into a successful phone, that's a better track. I'm not sure if that's true. I just think it's really interesting.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  It's worked well for HTC so far.

• 1:12:48David Pierce?

  But the only thing about this that I think is interesting is like, there's been this big debate over the years about whether your phone should be your hardware wallet for crypto. Because in theory, right, the idea is like, it's a, it's a device you have with you. Like, your phone is very handy for that. It is a, it's a computer that you hold that can do all of the identifying for you. But then, because it's, because it's connected to other things, because things get software updates, because phones die much quicker than like thumb drives do, lots of people have always said, you know, don't use your phone as your hardware wallet. But in the sense that if you imagine a world in which blockchain and cryptocurrency is the future, which I strongly believe is not the world we actually live in, but if you imagine that world.

• 1:13:28Alex Cranz?

  Jack Dorsey wants that world.

• 1:13:30David Pierce?

  Right. In, in Jack Dorsey's Web 5 world, there's, there's some interesting problems to be solved here about like, how do you do on-device payments? How do you let it be your hardware wallet? How do you do that kind of like cryptography and encryption on your device? It's all very interesting. I think it's like incredibly trying to catch a wave that crested a year ago.

• 1:13:50Alex Cranz?

  It's just so late to the party. It's just Kool-Aiding, Kool-Aid Manning in at the weirdest moment.

• 1:13:59David Pierce?

  Pretty much. Yeah.

• 1:14:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I like, it's gonna be a thousand dollars. The specs are nice, you know, 6.67 inch screen, 120 Hz OLED display, like the Snapdragon 8 plus Gen 1, like, it seems nice specs, it looks cool. It just, why would you do Web 3 in 2022?

• 1:14:23Speaker 06

  I mean, I, I get like, you know, kind of David alluded to, this awesome company probably realized, or they couldn't line up the money needed to actually bring a phone to market at this point. And so, you know, you, you, you catch the wave of, you know, Solana is an exchange, they've got money, they've got resources, there's a lot of buzz and interest still in the Web 3 world, even though like markets have been crashing and things like that. So like, I get the, the pivot here. Do I think it's gonna be a successful device? Do I think anyone's going to ever buy it? Probably not. Even like crypto hype enthusiasts probably won't buy it.

• 1:15:00Alex Cranz?

  If you wanna buy this phone, if you're like, yes, this makes sense, please, please DM Dan, not me.

• 1:15:09David Pierce?

  I'm just, I'm just gonna go on record and say, I don't think this phone ever launches. I look forward to this being thrown in my face in, what was it, Q1 2023? This is supposed to launch. When that happens, please take this clip from the Vergecast and send it back to me and ruthlessly make fun of me. I do not believe this phone is ever going to launch.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  I mean, this is one of those areas where we love to be wrong on. Yeah. So like, please make fun of us if we are wrong on this.

• 1:15:34David Pierce?

  If Web 3 is like, real and cool, that gives us so much interesting stuff to cover, that'd be great. I don't, I don't, I don't see this.

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  Hold on.

• 1:15:41David Pierce?

  Being the thing that makes it work.

• 1:15:42Alex Cranz?

  Hey Siri, set a reminder for April 1st, 2023. Awesome phone. You didn't pay attention at all.

• 1:15:54Speaker 06

  I mean, it's incredible that you thought Siri would be capable of this.

• 1:15:58Alex Cranz?

  Yes, it's at the reminder. All right.

• 1:16:00David Pierce?

  There we go.

• 1:16:01Alex Cranz?

  I'm very excited, David. It's gonna pop up in a Vergecast in 2023. We're remembering it. We're setting that, we're setting the calendar.

• 1:16:09Speaker 06

  I bet you it'll like, play its reminder at 12 a.m.

• 1:16:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna be asleep, just be, what, awesome phone? Go away. Okay, we're gonna move on to the lightning round. David, what you got?

• 1:16:24David Pierce?

  So, there's this new Twitter feature called Notes that Twitter is testing. Twitter has been saying for like, years that it is interested in the idea of longer tweets. And Twitter just rolled out blog posts. Like, that's just, just what it is. Twitter is testing blog posts on Twitter.

• 1:16:40Alex Cranz?

  But like, image blog posts, right? Like, they're images. They're not even like, text.

• 1:16:44David Pierce?

  Oh god, the thing that drives me the craziest right now is you, you're in the Twitter app, and you're like, oh, look, a note. And they're just like, this is just a test, so only a few people have access to it. There's only a few notes out there. You hit one, it takes you to the in-app browser, makes you log in again, separately, still in Twitter, and then finally lets you read the note. But basically, like, the idea seems to be, Twitter's done all this stuff on like, longer form things, like, they, they bought Review, the newsletter company, they're very interested in the idea of like, letting people make stuff natively on the platform. And now it's blog posts. Will this go the way of? All of the other things Twitter has tried in that vein, which have not worked at all ever. Probably, but I still think it's kind of interesting. So I'm, I'm very curious to see how that pans out. I can't imagine why I would ever use it, but here we are.

• 1:17:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I don't understand the use case. Like if you, if you're writing a blog post, you're putting it on a website, preferably your own website, but maybe you're putting it on Medium or, you know, another place. It's like indexable and searchable and findable. Like otherwise, how does anyone see these?

• 1:17:48Alex Cranz?

  I think this is just for celebrities who want to like clarify.

• 1:17:52David Pierce?

  It's to replace the Notes app apology.

• 1:17:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yep. There you go. And they designed a thing to replace the Notes app apology.

• 1:18:00David Pierce?

  All right, I'm in. I changed my mind. This is the best idea Twitter's ever had. I love it. It's perfect.

• 1:18:04Alex Cranz?

  They're like, we don't want this indexed. We just, no, you want notes. That's the note. You need notes. We gotta have it. Also, this week, the FDA said Juul, you cannot sell e-cigarettes in the United States. Kind of not good seeing as it's like Juul's whole thing nowadays.

• 1:18:23David Pierce?

  There was a, I think it was Dan Primack at Axios who, like back in 2019, when all this started, predicted that Altria's investment in Juul might go down as the worst corporate investment of all time. And, cause I think I'm, I'm going to butcher the numbers here, but it was something like they invested $13 billion at a $43 billion valuation. So I'm like, I'm wrong, but like I'm in range.

• 1:18:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46David Pierce?

  And the thesis was basically like, if things goes badly for Juul, as it looks like they're about to, that's going to essentially go down to zero. And he just wrote a thing today that just said, update, worst corporate investment ever.

• 1:19:00David Pierce?

  It's like, yep.

• 1:19:02Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's a rough one. And I know a lot of people who are not minors, to be clear, who love their Juuls. There's like a whole black market for the pods, the other flavor pods that they discontinued a couple of years ago. Like very, very interested to see how that goes. Very interested to see if this finally gets the teens to stop smoking. This is it, guys. We did it. We got rid of the Camel mascot. We got rid of Juul. Definitely won't be other reasons that kids smoke.

• 1:19:30David Pierce?

  Smoking is over.

• 1:19:31Alex Cranz?

  Not at all. It's over. It's done.

• 1:19:34David Pierce?

  We solved it.

• 1:19:35Alex Cranz?

  We got it.

• 1:19:35David Pierce?

  Great job.

• 1:19:36Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're just going to go after the rest of the, the vaping community next, right? Like they, they kind of put off the rest of the vaping community to go after Juul because it was so easy to use. But they're still like, you can go get popcorn flavored. Nicotine fluid. I did that one time and I didn't pay attention and I thought I got like the lowest nicotine dosage. No, I didn't. And then I was like, why can't I sleep? Why do I just keep vibrating out of my body? Oh, I've just overdosed on nicotine.

• 1:20:04David Pierce?

  There are like several big mistakes in that one story that you made.

• 1:20:08Speaker 06

  Butter popcorn flavored nicotine.

• 1:20:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, right? Like that's none of that strikes me as like a good decision that you made.

• 1:20:15Alex Cranz?

  It was a, I mean, it was like, I was like, all right, let's see. And it would taste like popcorn and kind of like a tortilla and a little savory and a little sweet. I don't hate it. Oh, wait, I'm vibrating out of my body because I did like the 6% instead of like the 0.5%. Dan, what's going on with Amazon?

• 1:20:33Speaker 06

  Uh, what is going on with Amazon? Who can say? Uh, so this week, uh, Amazon had its, uh, what they call their re Mars conference, which is kind of where it shows off ideas and things that it's been working on. So they showed off this week, a thing that they've been working on where they can synthesize someone's voice and use that voice to, uh, read a story or act as a virtual assistant or something like that. And the way that they position it is they could synthesize a dead relative's voice and then you could hear your dead relative's voice come out of a smart speaker, maybe to read a book or say something or something like that. It's very strange, uh, and it's a little off putting.

• 1:21:15David Pierce?

  Of all the ways to explain that, like at the beginning, it's like, oh, synthesize a person's voice that you know, and use it for things like, oh, I can make sense. And then they're like, what if your dead grandma could read you books? No, Amazon, no.

• 1:21:28Speaker 06

  It's, it's kind of funny. There's been a lot of, you know, commentary on this out there. And one thing, and I can't remember who it was, it was someone in my Twitter feed was like, the real way people are going to use this is they're going to make their Alexa speakers say, talk in Beyonce's voice, but Amazon can't say that. So what they are framing it as is grandma's talk, grandma's back and grandma's reading you a story again.

• 1:21:50Alex Cranz?

  Grandma's telling you the weather today and that she cannot turn off those lights because she cannot find them on the Hue app.

• 1:21:56Speaker 06

  It's an interesting like category. Our friend Joanna Stern did a documentary over at the WSJ last year about trying to capture relatives in a virtual way and how it can be a very therapeutic and I think to help people with grief and things like that. So there is a lot of like research into this and thought in behind it and things like that. I think it's just the way because it's Amazon and because it's associated with the Echo smart speaker and because it's associated with Alexa, it is extremely like off putting immediately because the thing that I immediately thought of was like, my grandma's going to say, by the way, did you know that diapers are on sale? Like, that's what I expect to happen because it's going to be tied to an Echo or some Amazon service. So I think

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  that's like a lot of the hesitation here. But it is strange.

• 1:22:45Alex Cranz?

  I'll see if you get dead grandma to be alive at some point and record those audio clips, right?

• 1:22:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, one would assume. I mean, I don't know the exact.

• 1:22:53Alex Cranz?

  Like, I presume my grandmother, who's been dead for 10 years, is not going to be showing up on my Alexa anytime soon.

• 1:23:01Speaker 06

  But you know who's got a lot of recorded footage that you can make a synthesized voice off of? Beyonce.

• 1:23:06Alex Cranz?

  And Neelai. I was thinking Neelai. I was like, Neelai, are we going to make Neelai and Alexa?

• 1:23:11David Pierce?

  Neelai could read me stories. That sounds nice.

• 1:23:14Alex Cranz?

  We're just going to do a podcast one day and it's just going to be all of us. Just we'll record our voices on Alexa and just have them talk to each other.

• 1:23:20David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 1:23:21Alex Cranz?

  That is it for the Vergecast, I think, today. We are done. Neelai's not here to tell us anything. So too bad. We have absolutely gone over. You can find me on Twitter at Alex H. Cranz. You can find Neelai at Reckless. You can find David at @Pierce. Dan is at DC Seabird. And Monica, who was here earlier talking about the MacBook Pro, can be found at McSquared96. That's it for the Vergecast. I'm not going to say rock and roll because I'm not Neelai, so make good choices. Goodbye.

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  Later.

• 1:23:59Speaker 08

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

• 1:24:32Speaker 09

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• 1:25:17Speaker 10

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