Pixel 3, Pixel Slate, and Home Hub

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Dan Seifert went to Google’s Pixel 3 event this week in New York City. After the event, the trio, along with Paul Miller, got together for an early taping of The Vergecast to discuss Google’s product announcements and their first impressions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Hilton. Restaurant or room service, what would the boss do? Either way, the boss would choose Hilton Hotels and Resorts to get down to business and a little pleasure. Check out Hilton Hotels and Resorts. Travel like the boss.

• 0:18Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.mobi. Ooh. It's a real WAP browser kind of day here at The Verge. I'm your friend, Neelai. Paul Miller is here.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:31Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert is here again.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  I'm back.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Why?

• 0:34Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bowe, suspicious of Dan.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I can tell you why Dan is here.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  It's a Google day.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Google day.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, a day leaked for decades previous, but it happened. Google actually had its Pixel 3 event. Dieter and I went, Dan was there.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Can I tell you guys something?

• 0:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  With all the leaks, I, I probably spent about six hours trying to workshop a leak pun and I got, I got nowhere.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  That's really...

• 0:58Speaker 01

  I really, I was really bleak and I was like, oh, bleak? I could do something there, but I just, like, where'd you get the "buh" from?

• 1:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, the front edge of the display leaked right over the top.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Nah.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it happened. Google had an event here in New York. Can I just, first of all, for a disclosure?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Somebody used to work with us, Trent Wolby.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Now is like, helps big companies put on events. He definitely helped with this event. So like, that's my disclosure. But regardless of Trent, who's our buddy, the event was super fun to be in.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I will say though, that Trent, being our buddy and also being there at the event, did not help us in any way get any seating access or anything before anybody asked that question.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  In fact, it was quite distracting because he kept on coming over to hang out.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Apparently he had nothing to do, so he just stared at us the entire time.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  We're like, we're working, buddy.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  I was watching this, this live stream and that they had this moment where they like, open these pods and the devices all slid out and then everybody was taking pictures.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  It was so stupid.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Did you guys get any sweet shots in that?

• 1:55Speaker 02

  I don't know. So I was actually in the worst possible seat. I was doing photos for our live blog, for, for anyone that didn't know. Uh, and I was in the worst possible seat for those pods. They were literally two rows behind me.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Wait, let me just back this up.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I couldn't...

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  We're so deep in the weeds. Google had an event in New York City. The three of us went to it. They announced devices at these event. Trent Wolby was there. A friend Trent was there, but they announced the Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, the Home Hub and the Pixel Slate.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And just as Neel I did just now, they announced all three things fairly early in the event.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  They just went for it.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And made us wait to find out what the heck they were talking about.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  In the moment that Paul's talking about, one of the dumbest, I just complimented this event. It was, it was a delight. It was a good event, but the moment that Paul is referencing, that Dan is referencing, was one of the dumbest pieces of staging I've ever seen, which was there are like huge columns cut at 45 degree angles, like scattered throughout the seating area, which was basically like couches and chairs and pillows.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  And Rick Osterloh, who like was doing the event was like, and here they are. And then like the tops of those columns like slid open and all the devices rose up on platforms. And then there was chaos because everyone was trying to like get a photo or look at them. And he was like, a couple of seconds more, guys, excuse me, everyone. And then they started going away.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  They were out for less than 30 seconds.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  And he was just like, yeah, there they were. Pay attention to me again.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  So what was funny about this event was that was the only time that the physical devices were shown during the whole presentation.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Nobody on stage had devices. They must have been holding a phone at some point. No. Really? No, I'm trying to take photos of them. Yeah, right. Nobody pulled a phone out of a pocket. Nobody held up a new product. Everything was done on these like giant screens behind the present. Wacky. Presenters.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was a lot. Anyway, so we saw all the things that were leaked.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you did a long exclusive video with the Pixel Slate. Yep. Which is pretty cool. Pixel, do you want to start there? You want to do the phones first?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Wherever you want, man. We could talk about the, the cloud that weighed upon this event.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're discussing the Google Plus security exposure.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  That occurred.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, not a breach.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  Not a breach. An exposure.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Potential exposure.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  It was enough of an exposure for Google to be like, we're closing Google Plus.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Casey's, Casey's headline in the interface and he's literally, you can read it every day was the bug that killed the social network.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  Never has a bug been so serious that it has destroyed a product completely.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Although it wasn't serious enough of a exposure for them to tell anybody for like six-ish months. They, they just, they discovered and closed it in March.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And then. So the TikTok here, we're going to get to the phones, but this is hanging over some of this stuff. The TikTok here is, they discovered in March, and the vulnerability, the exposure, the whatever, is there was an API that allowed app developers to grab profile information from your Google+ profile, including like your age and your location, your home location, or you know, a couple of things like that, like where you say you lived, or whatever, your city, and grab that information for your friends, even if you had marked it private.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So it was a bad API, and this, we've seen stuff like this, specifically with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. So they found it, and they closed it down in March. And then they told nobody. They made the decision that like, well, look, we dump our logs every two weeks, so we don't know if anybody actually accesses data. If anybody could access data, we suspect it's fewer than, I think it was like a half a million people or something, some small number. And nobody uses Google+ anyway, so there's probably nothing going on here. But they chose not to disclose it, which may or may not have been a good call. I tend to think it was not. And then the Wall Street Journal got ahold of a memo where like, they, somebody described this whole process and the decision behind not disclosing it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so they wrote the story, and then like a

• 5:53Speaker 01

  couple hours later, Google came out, was like, yeah, no, we're shutting Google+ down, because nobody uses it.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  And the lines about how extremely no one uses it were hilarious. So like, 90% of sessions are less than five seconds long, which is like, oh, Google+ is still, oh, gonna close that down. So it was hanging over the event like a cloud. They made no mention of it.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  Directly.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  But indirectly, they did. I don't, like, I'm sure they wrote the keynote script before this, but the, I was talking to Vlad about this a lot, because one of the things that's interesting about the camera is they didn't really talk about tech specs, they talked about AI. But they, they didn't get into the stuff for a good 15 to 20 minutes, it felt like. And Rick Osterloh, who runs hardware, got up on stage and basically gave like, an apologia, a defense of what Google is and what it means. And like, Google is here to help you, and we use machine learning to help Help you and like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like gave a whole bunch of examples and ran through like really rapid fire, like all the stuff that Google does for you.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  I wrote down this list. These are the three things that Google does.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  One, your own personal Google.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Two, your security. Three, digital wellbeing.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Those are somehow the foundation of how Google does things.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Somehow.

• 7:12Nilay Patel?

  No, they also like licensed help by the Beatles.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  And played a long video set to help about like maps and search and YouTube.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Right. That's your own personal Google.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Does that fold into your own personal Google?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Can we just not use this phrase because all I'm just gonna have to listen.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Dieter has been coming to Peshmane this whole time.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Someone to be your friend, someone to be there. But so, but the reason I'm telling this story about how they tried to like recontextualize Google is one, they want to, you know, make you think of it in that way and not think of the, you know, the Google plus, basically. They don't want Google plus on your mind. But two, Google's entire sales pitch for Google hardware is, we are so good at this software AI cloud stuff that we build all of that smarts directly into our hardware. And there's a direct link between the good feelings you have about the rest of our software stuff and the good feelings you should get out of the hardware.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  And so if, if everyone walks into that room and is like, ah, Google, what do I think of Google? Well, I think of data breaches and I think of them not showing up to Congress. And I think of, you know, they're getting closer to being in the Facebook zone of how I feel about a company right now. And oh, they're also announcing a product. Yeah.

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  Then you end up with what happened with Facebook and Portal.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. So they had to avoid that problem. And so they had to start with like, remember, Google, you like us. We're nice.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  So Casey wrote about this in the interface yesterday. You should go read the interface, vouch.com slash interface. Casey's not here to plug it, but I'm doing it for him. He and I had actually had a conversation about after the event yesterday about this. Google, they had to do it and I agree they had to do it.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  It felt very ham pisted though.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  So I disagree about. That.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  I think this was Google very clearly articulating its value to you, the job it does for you, the user. Right? Like, Google is a set of utilities that you use in your life, and it just keeps, they keep sincerely trying to make them better. That was Casey's lines. They keep sincerely improving these things.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  In a way that does not feel like they're gamifying the product, or they're trying to boost engagement. Sometimes it feels that way with YouTube, but right, for the most part, Google Maps does not try to suck you deeper into Google Maps. Like, it helps you get where you're going and you're done. Google search, you can argue about whether on mobile, too much of the top of search results are populated by Google products. But then there's the list of links and you click it and you leave Google and you're gone. Right? Like, the products are not trying to drive engagement in that way. And even photos, it's just your photos.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  If any, you're just engaged with your own stuff. And their one attempt to build a product that was driven by user growth and network effects to compete with Facebook was such a spectacular failure that when they had a buck, they'd shut it down.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Facebook has that utility argument. Like, the job Facebook does for you is not perceived as valuable. And Facebook does do a lot of jobs for people. Facebook events are a big deal. Marketplace is an economic powerhouse.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Knowing, knowing how to get out, like, I'm gonna find this person, stalking people, honestly.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  But also, like, I want to send this person a message. I don't have their email address. There's like a better than even chance I'll find him on Facebook and I'll take a shot at sending a message on Facebook.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Right? Finding my family, like, blah, blah, blah. There's a bunch of utilities.

• 10:25Nilay Patel?

  Facebook's brand is so toxic that the utility can't overpower it.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  I think Google is doing a pretty good job of saying, here's, here's the value we provide to you. We can articulate it.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  Our brand stays strong because you actually love, you love these products.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  And then you should buy a phone that encompasses all of them. Or a little, a tiny little display for your bedroom that comes like, we made an alarm clock, right?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  So cute.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  So I think that was what they set up. So I, I agree, like, you could have read that as hand-fisted. And in fact, when I was talking to Casey about this yesterday, he's like, I don't want to write a story that just like re-articulates their marketing.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  He's like, all these companies do the same thing. They just market themselves differently. My argument is, I think Google, Google's just like a bunch of, like, this event was like adorable. Like, they're a bunch of nerds who like have a big company and they, like, they're just excited to show us their stuff. Like, the people doing the demos of the Home Hub when I did our video, the actual product managers of the software of the Home Hub. And they were just like bouncing up and down.

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, I take that, you know, like, I, I, I think there's something real, like, there, there's a sincerity there that comes out in the fact that the products are not trying to game you necessarily. And sometimes they are, don't get me wrong. I can be very critical of Google, and I think the YouTube stuff and some of the search stuff is worthy of extreme criticism.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they should build drones for the government. Like, I don't think they should go to China. Like, there's a bunch of stuff that's worth being extremely critical about.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  But Casey articulated it really well in the newsletter. He, I'm not gonna do it as well, but it basically, Google provides you the very easy value that you can see. People see the value in Google's products, whether it's Maps or Search or whatever, that Facebook doesn't provide. Facebook provides entertainment, but then it also provides all this other headaches along with it. And so I think, you know, part of this, this conversation is, you know, we're not Facebook, but it's also, I think, calculated to, you know, counter the arguments that Apple makes, that Google just wants to harvest your data and sell your data and is a data collection company.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I mean, Apple's gonna make that argument as hard as they can. They, that's a great argument for that. It's a great argument for Microsoft, right? I think Google needs to cleave itself away from Facebook and say, this is why it's valuable that we have all this data from you. And so I think that's where they began. Here's the things Google does, as Paul was saying, here's the list, right? Putting digital wellbeing on that list is like, pretty wild, because that's the anti-gamification, it's the anti-user growth stuff that they're doing to say, we're gonna limit your use of these apps. Okay, let's start with the phones.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  Literally exactly is leaked.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Were you surprised by one thing?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  The quality of the screens.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, that is true.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  I was very surprised by the quality of the screens. All we know about them is that they're, you know, quote-unquote flexible OLED. That doesn't mean the screens are actually, they're, they're flat and they're under hard glass. They're not actually flexible, but like, it's just a substrate that they use to, that's more flexible.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  We had a long argument about this yesterday.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  They are very, very good.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I think the, the quality of the hardware overall is very good. It's a noticeable step up from the Pixel 2.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  It feels like, like way more of a premium device.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  So the, the back-

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Good, what does a good screen mean? What do you mean, good? Good color reproduction, good viewing angles. It doesn't look muddy and brown and bleh, like the Pixel 2 XL did. Like, that's it. Like, the Pixel 2 XL, there was a, there was a screen burn-in thing. Is it, is that gonna be a thing or not? And it was very concerning, and I stand by our decision to temporarily pull our review score until we knew what the deal was there. Number one, but number two, even setting that aside, the screen just looked bad.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it looked gritty.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  It looked gritty, but it, you know, I used it. I've used it for the entire year and, you know, nine times out of 10, when I would look at it, I would feel fine and not have a complaint. But when I put it up against another phone, I went eh. But there, they have this new thing called adaptive brightness on the Pixel 3.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  It's adaptive brightness and adaptive color management.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry, adaptive color management. The adaptive brightness has been around. So the, the color profiles, there's like, there's natural, which is just sRGB straight, which is they, you know, they say is like meh, fine. And then there's boosted, which is sRGB plus 10%. And then there's adaptive, which on some apps, when I was looking at in the hands-on area, it's like, whoa, this is, this is a lot of color. And in other apps, it just looked totally normal. But the overall effect of it was it didn't get garish, but it just like, it just looked better. And like, Paul, the other, the other thing is like, the basics of like viewing angles and, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, brightness and such, yeah. Brightness.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Paul, my answer to you would be just like, pretty flatly, Apple makes the best displays. Even when the iPhone was just LCD, and everyone has always yelled at me about this, those LCDs were calibrated correctly. They showed colors naturally. They had great touch response. They had really high pixel densities. They had great viewing angles compared to Samsung's displays, which look beautiful, but I don't think with, like withstand any scrutiny. But you, like you look at a Samsung display out of the box, it's like, the colors are way too bright. The reds in particular can be insanely oversaturated. Reds and oranges in that spectrum can be wildly oversaturated. I, they just don't like, look good. The Pixel 2 display last year, like Dieter was saying.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  The 2XL. The 2 is a different story.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. The Pixel 2 XL display last year, the little one was a Samsung OLED and the big one was an LG OLED. And that LG OLED. Just it looked gritty, like it didn't have like as tight of a pixel pattern.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  It looked like when you have a photo that's too dark and you raise the brightness in software and it gets all noisy and grainy. That's what that display looked like.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  And then they had the color issue where they insisted that the it was dead accurate out of the box, which did not seem correct. And then they shipped a mode where you could turn off the sRGB calibration.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  But then it would then it would just do whatever the display felt like.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so then the display was completely uncalibrated and that like looked fine, but it was still gritty. And so this year, it's natural, which is calibrated sRGB, which, by the way, Google, if you're telling me that both these displays are calibrated sRGB, they should look the same, and they don't. Like, the three looks way better than the pixel in its in its normal mode. Then there's boosted, which is just like, I think Samsung.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  It's not quite Samsung, but it's getting along that line.

• 16:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like it's pushing it. And then this adaptive thing, what they said to us was, we're reading the content that's being displayed and adjusting the.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not quite to the level of they're not like scanning everything that happens on your phone and like trying to match like, oh, this is a puppy. It should be puppy colored or whatever. They're they but they are the way the colors get displayed will be different based on some like machine learning stuff. So what the example they gave like, we want to we want to boost colors, but we definitely don't want to like make faces look weird. And so like if there's like a person in a field of flowers or something, the flowers might have more color, but the faces shouldn't, is the way that it was described.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have no idea how they're actually doing this without scanning everything through the display layer.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I'm sure that they just have like here that the colors of skin don't do anything.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  It's like a list. I mean, it's Google. They're like, machine learning did it. It's like, is the machine, did you just put a list in? You just had, it's a list, right? It learned a list. I got, yeah, it's very clever. So the display looks a lot better. We gotta just let's just start with this notch.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  It is quite the notch.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  It is so much bigger than I thought.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I agree. I mean, there's been so much hate against this notch for basically since the leak started. I mean, I'm on, I'm on the position that like, once you pick up the phone and you use it, the notch really doesn't bother me all that much. And what I do gain from that notch is more vertical space. Because if it didn't have that notch and it was just flat black across the top, housing the cameras and the speakers, it would be pushing the notification bar and the status bar down into where I can put content now. So like when I'm reading something like an article on my phone, which is what I use my phone most of the time for is email and articles. I get more stuff that I can see before I hit the board.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Counterpoint. I, look at it.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I sat down my Pixel 2 XL next to the Pixel 3 XL at the event and I opened up the same webpage on both of them. And I tried very hard to convince myself that I was getting like even a single extra line of text on a webpage. No, I was not.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  And that's a crying shame.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  So the may, so maybe like half a line.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  So the notch exists because they added a second front-facing camera.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Well, well, no, no, no. The notch exists because they want to push the screen to the edges. They could have added a second front-facing, excuse me, a second front-facing camera and just made it a black bar at the top, just like a small one. But what they want to do is get the screen all the way up to the edges because Google's line is people who buy big screen phones want as much screen as possible.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Right. And so.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  And people who buy small screen phones are like, great bezels, just get, I don't care. I'm a small screen phone buyer.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Like the whole, the whole question here, and Nick's actually writing a, Nick's dad's writing a good story about this right now. Um, is, did they justify the notch? So with the iPhone 10, they justified the notch by saying you get all the weird face ID stuff. Plus, we want a bigger screen. With every other Android manufacturer on the planet, they're like, we want a bigger screen. We're going to stick a little camera in there. It'll be fine. And everyone went, okay, fine. With Google, they justify the notch by saying we want a bigger screen and we want to give you dual front-facing cameras. Okay. I actually think that's a very dubious value. I'm, I am super not convinced by this widescreen selfie, but we'll come back to that later.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm, I'm very convinced.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know you would be. But no, for Google, it's, it's the, it's the speaker. The speakers are supposedly 40% louder. And they're dual front facing and like that they did that with the Pixel 2. And I really think that Google thinks that's a thing that people care deeply about. At least like they're super fans. I don't know. And so they they really believe in having big, loud, dual, front-facing speakers.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Here's where that logic falls apart for me. Because the speaker that's up near in the notch is the EarP speaker. Every single phone has an EarP speaker and Samsung is using that for stereo speakers. The iPhone uses it for stereo speakers. What's different about the Pixels is the bottom speaker is on the front of the device.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Not the bottom edge of the device.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And that doesn't.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  To go at the notch here.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Right, but like that doesn't have anything to do with the notch. Like, that's the difference and that isn't related to the notch. So like you can get a Samsung Note 9 has a very loud, powerful stereo speaker system. And the speaker at the top is one of those speakers.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  If they had just aligned these things just at the top and made the bezel smaller at the top.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  So it didn't look like a silly face?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Would all this go away?

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  No, because it's huge. So this is what I'm saying. The reason the notch is there. What I really mean, like, we all live, we've lived with the iPhone X notch for a year. The XS is here, the XR is coming out, like, okay, here's a notch, like, it's ugly, but you use an iPhone for a day and you just stop seeing it.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it only in certain moments do you perceive that there's a notch. Because it's relatively sedate, right? And it also houses like Face ID, like, they, it's, it's this thing and like, beyond just a camera and a speaker, it also houses this whole authentication stack that happens.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  Google's notch is just hu- it's just gigantic.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  It's not just that it's big. It's that it's so tall and it's that like the curves around the iPhone X, they, you know, you can, you, I'm sure that there's a million blog posts about this from fancy designers who looked at all of the special like, you know, math equations that create these beautiful curves that are better than just a straight, you know, round edge.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the curve on the iPhone X notch never actually goes to vertical.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  On any tangent line. I mean, they can, they're great. You should read them all.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  If you, if you ever want to be the sort of person who like, sits around at dusk and like drinks a whiskey and reads about tangent curves. Maybe I'm the only one. These, I highly recommend these blog posts.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  But like, the notch on the, the Pixel 3XL, looks like you're looking at your phone, and then Gonzo came, and he wants to talk to you real bad, and so he rested his nose on your phone.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Or, or it looks like the screen is doing devil horns.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  What I would say is, on top of that, so Apple instructs developers, Apple itself, says, "Don't deal with the notch." Like, it's just there, don't call attention to it, don't try to hide it.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Although, Apple, every one of its photos is a black background. Or a black wallpaper, or they hide it.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  The email app hides it, and a bunch of Apple apps hide it.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so whatever. But their, their official instruction is like, "Don't, just like, leave it alone." Like, "Just leave our notch alone." Google, I would say, is pursuing a similar strategy, but it's so huge that that is a mistake. Right? So Android should have, there's no software affordance for this notch. And the one that drives me the craziest, just using it yesterday...

• 23:03Speaker 01

  They are going to turn, there's a developer option to like, get rid of the notch, and they, Google has tweeted that they are going to bring some sort of option for people to, like, get rid of the notch. I don't know if that's gonna push the whole status bar down, or if it'll do something else, but there's a feature coming.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here are the three modes I saw yesterday.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  One, and I think this is the one that is the worst. The, the two ears, little bunny ears on either side,

• 23:25Speaker 01

  The devil horns.

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  are white, and the notch curves down, and so there's like a horizontal line across the bottom of the notch.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  You've got the two white bunny ears, and then as you scroll, there's no border between the bottom of the notch and the content you're scrolling. So, there's, it's just like a line. So it just like crashes into the top of the screen, like,

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I tried, I tried to describe this in the post, and I couldn't.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  I tweeted a photo of it, you can see it. It's just, it looks like a mess. Then, uh, Google Maps, uh, you can look at my tweet, I tweeted all these from you that, "Google Maps turns the bunny ears transparent, so more content scrolls up under that, and the notch is over that." But then, all the status icons and time and everything run into the Google Maps content. So that looks a mess. And then the third one is just... Everything, like just everything scrolls, right? And that looks insane, too.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. If you have words, like if you're, if you're reading an article or something and your words are going up into the bunny ears.

• 24:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  And they're like getting cut off in the middle of the sentence by the speaker notch, whatever.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  It looks, it just looks openly insane. So like, but should they add a border? Should they like do a thing like, should anyone on the Android team have maybe looked at this phone?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  So here's the thing, the, the one little like image gets crushed or like, I don't even know, like the, the curve is weird or whatever. That's like the one time I notice it, but just as with the iPhone 10, you stop seeing it. And I will point out that it looks way more egregious in photos than it does in person.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  This hard disagree.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  It's just gigantic.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I mean, it is big.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, mate, look, we're, we're, we'll get them.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  I haven't tried to buy one on the Vergecast.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Get the small one.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  I don't.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  The small one has no notch.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  Not gonna.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  It's all has no notch.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Small one's too small.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  The small one, so what's weird is like the big one, other than the notch, it's like these things, Dan, you were saying, they feel like super premium, right?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  They, they definitely feel like a step up.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  The glass really helped there, build quality is better.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Build quality is better.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  The small one does feel like it's a step up, but it's still, I'm just gonna say it. It does not feel up to the like hardware build quality standards of a Galaxy S9.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  No. Uh, yeah, no, I mean, like if Samsung's S9 is like a hundred percent, this is getting to like 90 to 95% of the way there.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  80 to 85.

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man, that's harsh. When you buy one, you can only pick Verizon or Unlocked or Project Fi. You can't pick any of the other carriers in America that exist. That's true.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  You could.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  You're one crushing mistake, Google.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  You know what I love? I love that it's a Verizon exclusive, uh, because you can, it's also on Project Fi, so it's not technically a Verizon exclusive. But Project Fi is such a non-entity that they're just like, it's Verizon exclusive and it's also on Project Fi.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  Black, white. Black or white?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Well, so the black apparently scratches.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so durability, these are now glass backs.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Because that enables wireless charging and the Pixel Stand, which is a cool thing. But because last year's phones were metal and had a certain finish on them, Google tried to mimic that by etching part of the back glass on these new ones. And it basically gives it a matte finish, which feels like interesting and nice. It looks really cool when it's brand new, but A, it's super slippery. So these are like-

• 26:32Speaker 01

  We don't know that yet.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Pretty slippery phones.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  You don't know that.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  The hands-on area, they feel pretty slippery. And then apparently they get scratched up very easily, especially the black ones.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Well, we know it's-

• 26:44Speaker 02

  We saw pictures from yesterday-

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, Ron Amadio tweeted some stuff from the demo area that had some scratches on it.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then they're glass. We know what happens with glass. Like, glass is not a friendly material. If you're worried about scratching and shattering and stuff like that. Every phone is glass now. Every phone scratches.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  Should we talk about the camera?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Snapchat 845 storage. We gotta talk about the camera price. Snapchat 845, eight, is it four gigs of RAM or three gigs of RAM?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Four gigs of RAM in both models.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And then you get 64 or 128 for your storage options.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  And that's it.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  No steal.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  7.99 for the little one, 8.99 for the big one.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the little one is a jump. 150 bucks more than the little-

• 27:21Speaker 01

  We gotta get to the camera, okay? But now we're talking about the price. I am disappointed that it costs more. It costs more than the iPhone XR.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  I'm disappointed that it costs that much more. If it was a $50 price hike, okay, sure, it's a nicer phone. It's improved year over year, whatever. It's $150 more. That's a lot.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  It's too much.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  You were saying this yesterday. If you walk in the store and you see the XR-

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  And you see this, you're like, why would I-

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just think of like- Like, you know, people who are very into this will know why they want a Pixel. But Verizon's going to be selling these. It's gonna put promotion behind them. It's gonna put marketing behind them. It's gonna have a stand and a display in a store. It's gonna train its sales reps. But it's also going to be selling the iPhone XR for $50 less, which has a bigger screen, five colors. It's a new iPhone, blah, blah, blah. I just, I find it very hard to believe that any normal consumer walking into a Verizon store and presented with these two options-

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm proud of Verizon. You go to VerizonWireless.com and the Pixel's on top of the screen.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'll last-

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  Unlike previous years.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  That'll last another day.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  When they were like, "Paul, you want a Pixel?" Walk into this basement.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Paul, what do you think of the pricing?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  It's terrible, but it feels like it's a discount because I'm comparing them in my mind to the XS.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Fair.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  So it's like, oh, well, they managed to make a good phone with possibly the best camera in the world for $200 less than Apple did. So I guess they're winning, you know, like, I do think the specs are, I'm guessing that processor is.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  I mean, there's certain things we know that it's not competitive on the 10s, right? It's not going to be as nice of a build quality. It's not going to have stainless steel frames. The screen is not going to be as good. We've already gone over this. The processor, like you just mentioned, so like, we'll see if the camera is as good. We haven't been super thrilled with the 10s camera so far, so it has a very good chance of being better. But there's like, I get why it's not as expensive as a 10.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  My thinking right now is I'm gonna wait for y'all to review it. And then I'm gonna probably buy a Pixel 3 small.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Ooh, making the switch.

• 29:19Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm gonna tell you.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  You're switching?

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 29:22Nilay Patel?

  Best Buy is selling the S9, 64 gig S9 unlocked for $570, like, right now.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  That's bonkers.

• 29:29Nilay Patel?

  With the same processor, same amount of RAM, micro SD expansion.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Does it do call screening?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  It does not.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  That's actually the coolest feature.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  That is a very.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  I'm gonna screen everybody. Be like, you call me, you're gonna get screened.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  I'll take it, because it's fun to talk to a robot.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Sick of these spammers.

• 29:50Nilay Patel?

  So we did this at the event yesterday.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was super fun.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  Dieter called me.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  It works so well.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  I talked into it and we, I.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Live transcribe, you can see it on the screen, transcribing the text. It's amazing.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  Are there any other Pixel exclusive features? Duplex is coming, where it can call a restaurant, make a reservation for you.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  That's not yet, but soon.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  A bunch of the camera features are Pixel 3 exclusive, but not all, but most, but some, but not, but blah. And Paul is going to read off the list of amazing camera features that are being added to this new phone that just got announced. And as he does it, as he, in his best keynote announcer voice, rattles off these features, I want you to have two questions in your mind. The first question is,

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Is this cool or is this a gimmick? And then you, your second question is going to be, how would I feel, what would my answer be if it was LG with these words and not Google? So Paul, please.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Top shot, super res zoom, night sight, playground, Google Lens.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  And group selfie.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  And that, you know, I should add that to my list.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  There's a world in which this is like, this is some like LG Samsung camera gimmick crap. And we all just laugh it out of the room because we have done that with many, many, many phones over the years.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let's tell the people what they are.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  Because the names are frankly ridiculous.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Really bad, yeah.

• 31:12Nilay Patel?

  Top shot, top shot, is you take a photo of a bunch of people.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  When they're playing volleyball before they get in their fighter jets.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Something. You take a photo, people are moving or it's a group photo and people are like smiling. And it will burst the frames.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  And then it will pick one for you.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Yep. Yes. And it's one shutter press. You don't have to hold the button down and do a burst photo.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And you can go back and pick the better one later. We forgot one. There's also Photo Booth.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Great. Everyone's favorite macOS 10 feature from 2004.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  No, it's cool. Photo Booth is, I'm just doing it now. In selfie mode.

• 31:49Nilay Patel?

  Dieter is so excited.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  We tried it there. You, you point the thing at you and whoever else is in the frame. And then there's a little like bar at the top that like expands. And the closer you get to like everybody smiling, the bigger the bar gets. And then when it thinks it's a good photo, it takes a picture. And so you just sit there and like stare at the phone and everyone starts making goofy faces or whatever. And it's like a video game. You're trying to get the bar to get big enough to actually take the photo.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. Okay. I didn't, I didn't.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  So, so that, that means there's a Google algorithm that they've been training for. I always love visualizing these algorithm training like funny. It's, it's called what is funny? And there's a Google robot watching hilarious videos of Pratt Falls and the Three Stooges.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  And they run back in there and they're like, I don't, yeah, I don't know Emily. I think, I think the algorithm isn't quite right. And it's like, this watches another episode of like as funny as some videos.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  No, but so mentioning Top Shot and Photo Booth together, they're both using that same thing that they learned from clips, which is like, we think we know what a good photo looks like. And if it looks like a bad photo, we'll tell you and we'll offer you a chance to get a good photo.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's cool.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  Into that.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Do these top shot photos, does that whole role of them stay on the phone on your 64 gigabytes of?

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  Not only does it say on your phone, it all goes to Google Photos because you have free Google Photos storage.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  So it's forever.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  It all goes there and then you can, you can go back afterwards in Google Photos and pick another one.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not like you have to like scroll through all the shots, like you see one image, you tap it and then you say you view the other shots that are available.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  And one of Google's like pieces of shade that they like to throw is that when they do these burst shots, they keep all of the shots and they're all full resolution images that are stitched together. It's not like a little movie where there's a bunch of low res ones and then one main central one. They're all like co-equal photos. You just have to pick which one you want.

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  They all run HDR plus the whole thing. Then there's Night Sight, which we did not see. We saw some demo pictures of. So this is a new mode of the camera. It's not in the regular camera mode where basically at this point, what all these companies are doing with HDR is just variations on a theme. So the standard pixel HDR technique is they take a bunch of underexposed photos and stitch them together. Apple's riff on this is they take a bunch of underexposed photos and then they add one overexposed photo. Google's version of Night Sight is they just do, they stitch together overexposed photos and that gets them far better low light performance.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  It remains to be seen how well that's going to work. We weren't able to demo, but they showed us some photos.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  It's interesting that it's, it's a different approach than say like Huawei does with the P20 Pro, which Huawei's attempt to do this like night brightness type of thing is to shoot a very high resolution photo. I believe its camera takes 40 megapixel photos and then it down samples them down to 10 megapixels and uses data from four pixels to create one pixel in 10 megapixels. So Google's using multiple images technique and a computer to figure it out. Huawei's using more resolution.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  So we'll see how good it is.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  We weren't able to see that.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  It's also not going to be available at launch. I think next month or later this year it's going to be available.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  Night Sight is coming to the older Pixel phones though, which is cool, right? So this is not something Apple does with its cameras at all. But the Pixel phones, they got the Pixel visual core, which is their little co-processor made with Intel. Because that's in the Pixel 2, they can take some of these features and bring them back to the other phones. I think that's just super cool. Like, Apple's like, "An emoji only works in the iPhone XS because we have to run our processor at its fastest speed and connect to the Bionic Ultra Core." And it's like, "Really? Because it's just a fake."

• 35:19Speaker 01

  I'm very dubious that I'm gonna like night sight, night shot, night mode, Dark Knight. They're so bright, they look fake to me.

• 35:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay, then there's super-res zoom.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Super-res zoom is technically amazing.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  That is cool, we played with that. When you zoom into a photo, it uses the discrepancy in the images produced by your hand jittering.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Because it's doing these burst shots, like just like top shot.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because the shutter's just running the whole time. So as your hand moves, it can detect the discrepancy in pixels, like the wobble between two frames, and then use that discrepancy to fill data back in, to fill detail back.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  This is, this is Google's reasoning for why it didn't put a telephoto lens on the camera, was that we can do it better with super-res zoom.

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they are wrong about that. Just completely flat. Like, they are not correct that making up pixels is better than just capturing them with a real lens.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  I'm very excited to see these comparisons.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  But, that said, you know, we've seen a lot of phones with these telephoto cameras. They always have an inferior sensor and an inferior lens because

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  you can't get a telephoto lens and sensor down in size to fit into the phone. So you've got a worse lens, worse sensor. So the images from a telephoto camera out of an iPhone, or out of an LG, or Samsung, or whatever, are always worse than the main camera.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  And it's not like they're super-zoomed in either.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Right, they're only a 2X zoom, but Google says it's doing this at a 2X zoom. But, and then, when you're indoors, the iPhone and every other one doesn't even use the telephoto, it just crops it digitally anyways. So like, I can see Google's reasoning here.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Super-res zoom caps at 2X?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  It starts doing the effect at 2X.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Oh, but it goes further, right?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  You can zoom in further, but I mean like-

• 37:06Speaker 03

  This has been a frustration of mine forever. I'm not, I'm not trying to be a sports photographer here, but there's sometimes when I see a really cool thing that is fairly far away and I want to zoom in on it.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  So-

• 37:15Speaker 03

  And I, I, I don't need to have a magazine-ready photo. I just need something that is like intelligible.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  So, so what super zoom does, and at least how I understand it, is that at 2X, you should not notice, perceive a quality difference from 1X. Once you go beyond 2X, then you get into like your digital zooming and you are going to start to notice that it's a digitally zoomed photo and you're going to have a loss of resolution, etc.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  The algorithm takes the wheel.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  It takes a wheel, but like it can only do so much, right? So like if you're trying to get a 7X zoom out of this, it's not going to produce a great-looking 7X zoom photo. It'll be better than 7X zoom on a phone that doesn't have this feature, but it's still going to be inferior to a wide-angle photo.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Alright, so I have two things. Um, one, I want to go back to my, my question. Is this like cool? Or is this just a bunch of gimmicks they threw on top of the, the same cameras last year?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  It is-

• 38:05Speaker 01

  I mean, we need to review it to actually see photo quality, etc.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  I think Top Shot is a smart thing.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  As a software update, it sure does not bolster their argument to raise this, the price by $150.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I mean, it's so hard. We haven't done the thing that we need to do.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  Which is like take a thousand photos, get James Barham and his big Pro Display and look at it. Like, it's so hard to tell, but just playing with the camera yesterday, it is super consistent.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  And my huge complaint about the iPhone XS camera is that it is wildly inconsistent.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  It's, it's also, there's, um, the, the, the reasoning for these features to exist is also sound. Top Shot fixes the problem of someone blinked in the photo and you missed it, or, you know, the, the, they looked goofy or whatever, and it gives you an alternate one because it captured a whole bunch.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  But we've seen that feature before.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Google's implementation is probably hopefully better.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  That's what we, that's what we have to prove out, right?

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  We have not talked about the wide-angle selfie camera, which is a true delight.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  My, my second thing is-

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  The whole time I was like, yes! Somebody thought this through.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  I am pissed about this camera because it, it's the reason we have the notch, number one.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  No, it's because you did the whole thing about speakers, seeing more content.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  But like, if they, if they hadn't put a second camera, they would have figured it out without the notch. They just spent an entire keynote talking about how they can do all kinds of insane things with software and machine learning to a single lens on the front. But on the selfie front, on the selfie side, they can't figure out how to just put one wide angle lens in there and then just make it look normal with software. Like, so they need two, they need two in the front to just, for a wide angle? They can't figure that shit out with software?

• 39:49Speaker 02

  If you ask Google, they'll say they need good quality to hardware to start with before they can even get anywhere with their software tricks, right? The problem is the front-facing camera has to be physically smaller and the lens has to be physically smaller. So it is a inferior quality camera to begin with. And so like when you say like what you said, like just have a wide angle and then like have a mode where it just crops in or whatever. You know, I could see an argument that like, well, that's not going to give you as great of a quality image because we are starting with an inferior sensor and lens and now you're cropping in on this inferior sensor.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  So if the back camera is a 1.0, 1.3 quality, you can multiply the quality of it by, you know, adding software. But if you start with something that's like a 0.5, there's only so much multiplication you can do, the law of fractions.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  That's not how math works, just to be clear.

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  What just happened in your brain? What?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Never mind.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  What? Never mind. That's great.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, so like that would be like the reason. The other thing is that, you know, it doesn't have dual pixels autofocus because it is an inferior sensor. So in order to do good portrait effects, you kind of need two lenses because it can't do that trick that the back camera does.

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But it's in the service of they identified a problem that real people have with their phones and solved it. It is far, if you're gonna add another camera to your phone, I would say adding the wide angle to the front is more useful and will be used more often than the telephone.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  I mean, there's been phones with wide angle front cameras for years. HTC used to talk about this all the time.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they hired everybody from HTC. They spent a billion dollars. They have every HTC trick. They do even do the thing where you flip the phone over and it goes into like shush mode.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you could squeeze the sides again.

• 41:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, HTC's been doing that since like 2006. Like, they're like, a new feature! And like someone with a Windows phone is like, I don't remember us. It's all just, all we're doing is adding Windows phone back to our phones, slowly but surely.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, what if next year they're on stage and then someone rips off a mask and I've been HTC this whole time?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Peter Joe, what's up on stage? Just a recent guest.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  Hello. I mean, it's gonna happen. They, we did hear yesterday that this round of hardware is not yet the fruit of the HTC acquisition. Right?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  They're still using.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  This is still the Google plan.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Partners and ODMs, they won't really talk about them as usual. Yes, and then next year we'll get the, the.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  The full, the full. Next year, they're just gonna ship an HTC bacon.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  It'll be the Pixel ripe.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Or whatever it was.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Whole fruit.

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  HTC pure.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  To answer Dita's question about gimmicks or not, I feel like the, the, the, the metric is, will you actually use these? Will these create results that you will want to share with people? Will you end up rewinding through photos to pick a top shot? Will you super res zoom on things and, and that gives you the, the special shot that you're hoping to get? So you can share with friends on some insecure messaging app?

• 42:50Speaker 03

  If, if these are actually useful, I, I feel like that's what makes, because you can have a gimmick and it can sound like a gimmick and it can look like a gimmick, but if you, if you use it, it's no longer a gimmick.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  I think the top shot thing people use, right? Like, you'll never see it, it won't be, it's not like an Instagram filter. Like you, you as the friend will never see that your friend is showing you a top shot photo. You're just gonna take a photo and it's gonna show you some stuff. That's cool. Maybe you'll see a bunch of night sight photos on that ship. So like, we just have to see how it works. I sincerely doubt we're gonna see a bunch of like extremely digitally zoomed photos popping up on our feeds.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I mean, like, I, I, not as like, you know, something that, a picture that someone's proud of, but like, you will see them when it's like you're creep shotting somebody, doing something weird on the street and you don't wanna get too close to them or whatever. That's where you see those, right?

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  Y'all learned something about Dan today.

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, look, I think the, the way the camera app works, Paul, is there's, it says camera, video, panorama, and then like video, I said video, it says camera, video, panorama, and then more.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  And portraits in there somewhere, too.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what I was thinking, portraits in there. Those are the ones people are gonna use. Sliding over to more to pick one of these other lens, like, let me just ask you a question. Just, when is the last time y'all saw a photosphere? Is it ever? Like, that, it's in that list. It's in the, like, photosphere list.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where you find night shot, or night shift, or whatever. What is it called? Night sight? Oh, my god. These names are terrible. Can I just say, it, the fact that the, the night mode is based on the, the subtle, you know, jitters of your hand, why on earth did they not just call it night moves?

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  They should've called it night moves.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna listen to an ad, and Dieter's gonna rebrand every Google product.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  The camera engineer be like, hey, what are you working on right now? Oh, you know, I'm working on the night moves.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Okay, we're gonna listen to an ad.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:42Nilay Patel?

  Liz is gonna, Liz is gonna do This Week in Elon. When we come back, we're gonna talk about the charging stand, the home hub, and some other stuff. Listen to this.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  A decade ago, during experiments onboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, Merck scientist Paul Riker discovered conditions that crystallize a specific protein. By studying these crystals, Paul and his team determined all new ways to improve the storage of structurally fragile medicines, devising life-saving drug-delivery methods. Paul is just one of many Merck scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at merck.com/inventingforlife.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else, hello and welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato, deputy editor at The Verge. It's been a kind of quiet week in Elon, thankfully, but there has been, uh, some exaggeration going on, and I guess we should discuss it. So Elon Musk does like to exaggerate, right? Like, his timelines are often wrong, they're too ambitious, and like, the things that he says he's gonna do, like, he, he does some of them, but not all of those things. And I bring this up because on Sunday, Tesla published a blog post that said the national high- Traffic Safety Administration tests show the Model 3, quote, "has the lowest probability of injury of all the cars the safety agency has ever tested." Okay, except the thing is that the NHTSA says that's not true.

• 46:14Speaker 05

  "NHTSA does not distinguish safety performance beyond the star rating, with five stars being the highest safety rating a vehicle can achieve. Thus, there is no NHTSA safest ranking within the five-star category," the agency told Reuters. I bring this up because exaggeration seems to be a common theme when it comes to Tesla and Elon Musk. If you think about it, like, and you kind of squint, like, you can understand a lot of the stuff that goes on as being a product of exaggeration, of not just wanting to be good, but wanting to be superlative, right? Like, you know, in 2015, Elon Musk claimed Tesla's cars will drive themselves in two years, and obviously, that hasn't panned out, right? Like, in September, Musk emailed Tesla employees to ask them to test the first full version of autopilot.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  But no, autopilot advances for self-driving were in the most recent version of the software, which was released Friday. Navigate, the first of these features that's supposed to be released to drivers is still, quote unquote, "coming soon." And if you, you know, look at Elon Musk's Twitter account, you can certainly see plenty of, um, hyperbole, let's say, especially around the discussion of short sellers or people who maybe don't take the same rosy view of Tesla as Musk himself does, which, you know, sure. But this is part of the reason why there seems to be such a divergence in the way that people view Tesla, right? The exaggeration. So you have this enormous rhetorical divide between people who are certain that Tesla's going to succeed and save the planet, and people who are certain that Tesla is going to fail.

• 47:43Speaker 05

  And that divide only seems to be widening, frankly, even though people are generally working with the same sets of facts. So why is this? Well, you know, if you exaggerate and you're a Musk fan, like, Elon's exaggerations aren't really that big of a deal, right? Like, if, you know, you really, really believe in the guy, you're like, yeah, he exaggerates sometimes, so what? But if you don't believe in the guy, especially if you're a short, the exaggeration might be evidence of dishonesty. And then, you know, if you follow this line of thought, you're like, well, if Elon Musk is dishonest about the NHTSA rating, if Tesla is claiming something that doesn't exist, like, what else? What else isn't right? So that's kind of the nut of the problem. And like, you know, the reason I bring it up...

• 48:28Speaker 05

  Is that as part of the SEC settlement around the go-private debacle, Elon Musk is leaving the chairmanship of Tesla. And that's important because one of the main things that the Board of Directors does is it thinks about succession planning and it's like basically the CEO's like committee of bosses, which is no longer chaired by Elon, although he certainly sits on the committee of his bosses. And there's been some indication that James Murdoch is the person who might be moving into the role, both from the New York Times and the Financial Times, which puts Musk in kind of a tricky position because if James Murdoch does step into the role, he is the person who could potentially rein Musk in. And that might be good for Tesla, actually, stopping the exaggeration and like letting

• 49:13Speaker 05

  the rhetoric cool down a little. But if the Financial Times's reporting is right, Elon Musk actually wants Antonio Gracias to sit on the board, which doesn't surprise me because Gracias has invested in a bunch of Musk's other projects and is more likely to be Musk-friendly, I think, than James Murdoch, who, well, is James Murdoch. Anyway, it's a thing to keep an eye on as this all develops because there's a short window of time for, you know, Tesla to figure this stuff out, per the SEC settlement, although the settlement window can be extended at a request. Anyway, stay tuned because it kind of feels like the calm before the corporate storm. That's This Week in Elon. If you want to hear more, you can certainly subscribe to my newsletter at theverge.com. I'm Elizabeth Lopato. Thank you so much.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  Thank you to Elizabeth. By the way, Elon Musk is killing, Liz. I don't know. I talked, we talk to her every day and I'm like, how are you? And she's like Elon. And like, that's all she says. She doesn't have other words. She just says Elon over and over again. Pixel charging stand.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  So they made a charging stand. It's vertical. You put your phone.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Wireless charger.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  You put your phone on it.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  It clicks over. It basically becomes like a fancy alarm clock, from what I can tell.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Slash photo frame, slash.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  Slash photo frame. It basically becomes a little Google Home Hub.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Basically.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have, it won't. That's what they want you to think.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I have very serious doubts that the functionality of the Pixel Stand mode thing will be anywhere near as good as the functionality on a Home Hub.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  I mean, for what possible reason? What possible reason is it not as functional?

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Well, for one, you have to have your phone on it, right? So like the instances where your phone is sitting on a stand are like basically two, right? You're sitting at your desk and you put it on the stand. You're going to bed on your nightstand, you put it on your stand in charge, right? The desk one, you're, you could be looking at it. The nighttime, you're probably not looking at it anyways, right? And then the, the UI for Home Hub is, is quite different than the UI that we saw presented when we would put the phone on a charging stand or what Google showed. So I, I, you know, I, I see where Dieter's coming from.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so you put your, your phone on the stand.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  The reason it has to be Google Stand and not any other, it's a Qi compatible stand, but they are authenticating your phone to the stand.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  It's very interesting. Yeah.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  So they can authenticate to other Qi chargers, which are just basically coils. This one, you put it on, it says, I know the stand, this one is in your bedroom. This is your phone, authenticates it, switches it in this mode where it's showing you your data. That's pretty cool. And then you can take it and you can like put it in another room and it still knows it's you. So that's cool. Is this interesting?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  It's a wireless charger. I don't know. We'll see like what exactly you get in the mode.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  You were saying that other stuff is super LG. This to me is the most Samsung.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Why is that? Because Samsung has had wireless charging stands for like five years?

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they've had, but this is to me is like the one where it's like you put it on here and like it turns into a refrigerator. Like it's just like.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it is, it is what Palm did with the pre, when you put it on the touchstone.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. WebOS 2.1 brought exposition mode, which allows you to display data on your phone when it was sitting on a touchstone.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that's the stand.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's $80. A cut down version of what they are doing with like assistant on the.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  And it will charge any wireless charging phone, but apparently it will charge the Pixel faster.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause it knows it's you. And it's like, he doesn't care about fire. Then there's the Home Hub, which is just way smaller than you think it is.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  It is so tiny. Like, all of us, we saw it on stage, we saw it presented, as soon as we saw it in person, every single person's first reaction was, "Look how small it is."

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  It's super small. It's a 7-inch landscape touchscreen. It looks like nothing so much as like a little Nexus 7 tablet, like clipped onto a base.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  That's just what it looks like. Yeah, it's like, here, you want to take it off.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Well, so the thing about it being small, first of all, it's so cute, and then it's like, oh, wait, I would be willing to put this as a night clock. But the other thing that I didn't realize, watching the keynote, was that the speaker on the Home Hub is actually inferior to the speaker on a standard Google Home.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  There's only one speaker in it. The Google Home, if you remember, you can pop the base off, you can see at least two drivers, or three, I can't remember. But there's more than one driver on the Home, so Google does say that the Home will have better audio quality.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  I got this wrong in the video, by the way, this is my apology to the watchers of our YouTube channel who were poring over my every word. The speaker fires at the back, not the front, in the video. I said, "There's a speaker down here," and it pointed at the front. I'm sure you all care so much, that probably affected so many purchase decisions. Anyway, it is super interesting, because it does not run Android, it runs Cast.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Well...

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is just a weird thing for it to run.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  The Lenovo smart display runs Android Things, so you can...

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  No one knows what the difference is.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  You can put a smart display on top of anything, except apparently Android itself, because I don't think that's what's running when you put the Pixel 3 on the stand.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's...

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Google.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  $79, you've got a little stand, you put your phone on it horizontally, and then when, you know, all their commercials for like, stuff like Google Home is like, "Oh, your hands are busy, like, loving your family, like, you're hugging people, or you're like, preparing food," you know?

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  I get it.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  They're giving you a reason why you couldn't...

• 54:40Speaker 03

  You couldn't possibly touch your phone, because your hands are occupied.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  So, but, but why can't that interface be on a phone? And why, especially if the phone's screen is like an inch and a half smaller than this Home Hub?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  It, it is on the phone, but it's not what happens when you put it on the Pixel Stand. It's on the phone in the form of the Google Home app, which has been redesigned and is going to look more like the interfaces on the Home Hub devices and.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Should you do voice controls for YouTube?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just Google Assistant.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, Google Assistant is there, so.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  So you are really looking at three platforms here, right? And some of the platforms run on top of the other platforms. So there's.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Platformception.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  There's Android and its little brother Android Things.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  Then there is the Home app and that interface, which runs on Android and Android Things. And Cast, which is what the Home Hub runs on. And then there's the Google Assistant, which runs on top of all of that.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Which, yeah, runs in the cloud and connects all of them.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  Right, so there's the Assistant, which does the same set of tasks on every device. Then there's this new interface for the Home Hub and the Lenovo Smart Display that looks almost exactly like the Home app on an Android phone. So the Home Hub runs the new Google Assistant UI on top of Google Cast. And the only reason I'm pointing this out is because it is not the same as the Lenovo Smart Display. It's just a different riff on it.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  But it's visually, it presents the same.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  It does, it does all the exact same things.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Except for one thing that it doesn't do that the Lenovo Smart Display does, or the JBL or whatever. It doesn't have a camera.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Right, that's the most interesting thing about this, is that it doesn't have a camera.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Well, that and the ambient display stuff, but yeah, but the camera.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  Right, so they, we saw Rishi Chandra, who is the head of this product. And he told us very directly, like, the design brief here is we wanted a product you could put in every single room without worrying about it. And that meant we cannot have a camera. We want this in your bedroom. We want this in your bathroom. We want this anywhere in your house. And he's like, we figured you can make video calls from your phone, right? But that's what people do with a camera on these things. You can do that with your phone just fine. Great. Do that. And he said, nothing's going to stop us from making one with a camera in the future, but this one is supposed to go. The way to think about this thing is they made an alarm clock.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, just like the Echo show? Echo Spot?

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Echo Spot has a camera.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  The Echo Spot is an alarm clock, but that has a camera on it, and that's probably the biggest fault of the Echo Spot. So if you're like me, you put tape or googly eye over the camera because you don't want a camera staring at you while you're sleeping and you're changing in your bedroom. And I think it's super clever that Google realized that, A, that's a concern that people have. B, I think that, you know, from my experience testing a lot of these displays is that there's this conception that, this notion that you would use these for video calls and that they'd be great for people with, you know, who are having kids and they're want to talk to their grandparents and they're across the country and they want to make these video calls back and forth and things like that. And I thought that would be a great use case for my family. In practice, they're not that great at them because they are like fixed in one place.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  You can't move around with them. They're not natural feeling. They're more confusing to use and set up and to initiate a call than just someone using a phone or a tablet to make a video call. So I think Google probably realized that, you know, maybe video calls aren't that great on these things yet. And there's doesn't justify then putting in a camera, which brings all these privacy concerns.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but there is this new UI where you like slide it down and shows you all your house stuff. It's all coming through Google Assistant.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  The new UI for smart home control, I'm very excited about because the the UI for smart home control that you've had through the Google Assistant before was like virtually nonexistent.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then there's another pane in the interface. There's no like home screen or whatever, like there's no app model here. It's just a bunch of voice commands and then showing you stuff. And the home view pane. But there is a pane where you can click on and say, what can I do? And it shows you all the things you can do in categories. And you can either say them, or Paul, I think you will like this, you can just tap on them and it will happen. So they finally started to bridge that touch voice divide, which I think is really good.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  They had a really great line that I made sure to write down about the home stuff. Many people have connected devices in their home and they don't even know it.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Just nuts.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  That's terrifying.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  They also said, uh, this is the first time you can see all of your smart home devices in one place. And it's like, are you, I don't know about that.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the, like whoever the CEO of Creston is.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  The irony.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  Yo, what?

• 59:20Speaker 02

  And also, the irony is that you can't because unless you own all of Google and Nest products, you can't, you're not going to see your Ring cameras on here. You're not going to see Arlo cameras. You're not going to see anything that's like outside of Google's ecosystem right now.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  The Home Hub to me is a fast, it's, it is the, I think the most closed product Google has ever made.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like it doesn't have a browser, it doesn't have a bunch of open APIs, like you have to, it's the one where you put it in your house and like you have to buy into Google ecosystem to make it more powerful over time.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Whereas everything else Google, the other thing they've made was, uh, you know, a phone and, uh, a Chromebook, like very Googly, very open, just like do your thing on it.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  You can put Linux apps on the Chromebook?

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can just like do anything with a Chromebook. I don't know if the Chromebook runs the new, oh, it does, because that's Android.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Look, there's just multiple layers of Google platforms here that you have to understand. There's Chrome OS, which runs Android, which runs the home interface, which runs Google Assistant.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Look, we all know that Fuchsia's going to save us.

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  They're, they're just going to combine everything in Fuchsia.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  What I think is like most, um, appealing about the Home Hub is I know the smart home controls are going to be cool and stuff like that, but I think people will really like it as a modern, updated digital photo frame, because it integrates with Google Photos really nicely. It has a new mode that will automatically upload the, update the images for like, if you say like, you know, update with fresh pictures of my kids as I take them, as you back up your photos to Google Photos, they show up on this picture frame. And then it has this amazing mode feature thing where it detects the ambient light in the room. And just like the iPad, uh, excuse me, the iPad and the iPhone and Macs now, will adjust the color balance of the image on the screen to make it look as much like a photograph in a frame as possible. And the demos that they showed. Yesterday were really impressive.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they had it under a Hue light and they just kept changing the call of a Hue light.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  And they had it next to a printed photo. And within a second or two, it would instantly change the display and it looked exactly like the.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  It is, there was very little glare, like it wasn't, didn't feel like I was looking at a screen. Does your. Just felt like I was looking.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Does your family use Google Photos? I feel like getting people off of iCloud photos onto Google Photos is as hard, if not harder.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Or more painful.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Root force it.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Than the iMessage stuff.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  Dan and I have children. It's very easy to get our parents to look at whatever photo service you want.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  Like, the baby is here now. They're like, yes, whatever we need to do.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  So like, yeah. The rest of my family, they're all using iCloud photos and I just don't get to see pictures of my nieces and nephews. Just, I just don't.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  See, because you're on the receiving end.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  We're on the sending end. So like, we're in the position of power. We can say, if you want to see these photos, you see them on Google Photos.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  I bought my parents a dumb Nix Play frame, which is like, sort of fine.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  But it's not going to do the auto-color adjustments and things like that. It's not, it, you know, auto-updating, you're going to have to use their app and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  But like, in terms of sharing, there's like, an app on my phone that I never use, but it installed a sharing extension in iOS. It's like, I go through some photos, I hit the button, just send it on.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  I, I mean, like, cool, but you know what Google Photos does? It knows my daughter's faces and it automatically creates albums of them. And anytime I take a photo of my daughters and it adds them to those albums.

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying to curate a lifestyle here, man.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  It will just refresh my in-laws' home hub, right? Which is like.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just want it to be a little bit bigger.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  It would be nice if it was a little bigger, but I get, you know, people don't want a giant thing in their bedroom, for sure. But even in the kitchen, like, you know, a lot of kitchens don't have endless counter space. Like, I just reviewed the Echo Show and the Echo Show has a nice, big 10-inch screen, but it takes up a lot of counter space. You have to dedicate space to this and a wall outlet and all this other stuff, so.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  I will say that it does not have any controls for Google Photos on it. You can flip through pictures, you can like, tap the buttons to go back and forth. But you cannot ask it which album to display. You have to do all that stuff on your phone.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  So like, there's, there's like, a little bit of, this is very much a 1.0 product. It will clearly build out over time, which comes back to me saying, again, it's built on Cast, which is super interesting. Because you don't think of Cast as being an OS that's going to support growth of an operating system. We've, that's Android Things, and it doesn't run Android Things.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  So 149 bucks.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  People are gonna buy the Helios.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be super hot this holiday season, I'm sure.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think people are gonna buy the Helios.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  It's a good time to talk about the face. Go ahead.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. What if you think Dan is a big demo and that only thing that people want to do is put a camera in all of their rooms.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  Connected directly to Facebook.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  With a giant 15 inch screen.

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  What about that?

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  You know what's great about this?

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  My wife works for Oculus, which is a dividend to Facebook, and so I don't have to talk about this stupid ass thing at all.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  The Facebook Portal is $1.99. It's basically a little echo show with a camera that can make video calls in Facebook Messenger. Dieter, just say nothing.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  It does run Alexa. That's why I said it's like a little echo show.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yep. It also is styled, that, that model for $1.99 is styled like an echo show. And then there's the, what is the one above it?

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  The Portal Plus.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:23Nilay Patel?

  Which is $350. By the way, you get $100 off if you buy two of these at a time. That, the Portal Plus, I think Vergecast listeners know this, I am a sucker for insane hardware. The Portal Plus is insane. It is an insane product that makes no sense and is the only reason I would ever think about buying a Facebook camera.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  It reminds me of the new Surface Hub 2 and like scaled down.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  So it's a, it's a tall vertical column with a camera at the top and when it's a 13.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  15.6.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  A 15 point inch, 15.6 inch LCD that rotates from portrait to landscape on it. It's 1080p. And when you move around the room, the cameras follow you around.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  I think there's some really smart stuff there.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Facebook, no one trusts you. Okay, well, we want to release a, a, a video calling speaker display thing for people's houses. Okay, but nobody trusts you. Yeah. So we're gonna make sure the camera follows you around the room. Okay.

• 1:05:22Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. Just to reference Casey again, he put this in his newsletter, there's never been a tech product release where the instant consensus was no.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Just absolutely not.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  I get that some people probably video chat using Messenger. Sure.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  It's a shame because like I'm, I'm, I'm there on the no. Like I do not want a Facebook connected camera in my home. I've been, you know, not using Facebook services nearly as much as I use it, et cetera. However, you know, some of those problems that I mentioned earlier about using these for video calling are that they have a fixed camera. It's hard to get people in frame. It's hard to see the screen. The technology that they're using to improve the video calling experience, assuming it works as advertised, is actually really impressive and useful. If only it wasn't connected to Facebook backend services.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  This doesn't work with like WhatsApp?

• 1:06:08Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  That you can't make your IGTV videos with?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  You know what you can do? You can watch Facebook Watch videos.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, finally.

• 1:06:16Nilay Patel?

  I mean.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  I've been meaning to discover how to watch Facebook Watch.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Instagram would probably never like to acknowledge this thing exists.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  And yet they're the ones making vertical videos. All right. Well, I think we can all agree that this thing is a disaster and move on. But just note that Google was like, yeah, no camera. We want you to put it everywhere. And Facebook was like, the scariest camera ever made.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  Here's the thing. I think this is a disaster, but I want to be wrong. I want to walk into homes and people just have these crazy screens.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  I want to, I want to walk out of that home.

• 1:06:50Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, like I said, you go look at a picture of it. I said it looks crazy. The little one does look like an show. The big one straight up looks like teleconferencing equipment.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  Like if you're, if your strategy is for people across America and the world to install like a Polycom in their house. Like, I don't know what you're thinking.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Why didn't they just say it was teleconferencing equipment?

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Cause they haven't, cause I don't know. They want to buy Polycom, but they, they know the regulate, the regulatory.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  If you had caught Casey's newsletter this week, another plug for Casey's excellent newsletter, you would learn that Facebook wanted to launch this back in the spring, but it couldn't because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So now it launched it in the fall amidst another scandal, which was apparently not as bad of a scandal to delay the launch again, which is just crazy.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  Jake came back from the briefing and I was like, what is it with this portal? And he's like, hey, we asked about the scandal and they were just like.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  Ad. Paul's going to do his thing. We're talking to Pixel Slate. We're going to get out of here.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Verge Cast is brought to you by Hilton. Work, travel, do you stay by the airport or the city center? Do you have a client dinner? Do you order room service? Do you pack your swimsuit? Just ask yourself, what would the boss do? The boss would choose Hilton. From modern meeting spaces to amazing pools, Hilton Hotels and Resorts has everything you need to get down to business and a little pleasure. Check out Hilton Hotels and Resorts. Travel like the boss. All right, Paul.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  Every week. Meal pods two, Jeff Bezos edition. Ooh. Yeah. Okay. So the June Smart Oven, which has been around for a little while, is partnering with Whole Foods. And so now Whole Food, you can buy food at Whole Foods and then bring it. And then the June Smart Oven is already programmed to cook Whole Foods foods. So there's like, it's an over the air software update to an oven.

• 1:08:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Adds an icon for Whole Foods foods. And you, you push that button and then you get a list of the, one tap chef developed cook programs will allow users to automatically make more than 30, 365 everyday value products and other foods sold in Whole Foods market stores. I just like this as sort of, it's sort of a brand synergy thing. You know, they've got June ovens, which are $800, are going to be in Whole Foods stores.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  You control your June oven with Alexa. It's really this sort of end to end food experience that really, it really feels like a corporation owns your whole life.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, it's dystopian in the, in the funnest way.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Nilay Patel?

  Like this is like Jeff Bezos is going to get us to Mars and he's prototyping this. Like on, on Mars, everyone has issued a June oven in like a bio field.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  It's just more efficient.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, it's, how do you, does it, does a June? Have multiple ways to cook? Or does it just like turn on at 350 for 10 minutes?

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  No, the whole idea of the June oven is it's got a camera and then it does like AI cooking. So it looks at what it's cooking and it has programs already developed for just basic foods. But somehow these are more chef developed, it's more curated for specifically foods that you buy at Whole Foods.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  You know what happens when there's a software problem with the oven?

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  It's a June bug.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, Dieter's conflict is no longer in effect, everyone. He's back on the podcast. Hey, buddy. It's good to see you. All right, Dieter.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:10:27Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about the Pixel Slate, man. Oh, I forgot to say this about the, uh, the Home Hub. It runs YouTube, which the Echo Show cannot.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  It can be a cast point, so you can cast from your phone to it.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Except?

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  Netflix is not participating in this. They've locked out Cast to the Home Hub. For now, we're told. They're working on it. I don't know what exactly they're working on. Presumably, they're busy putting the money in the envelope.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  It, you can cast Hulu to it. There are Spotify, Pandora, all that support. Uh, it has YouTube TV, which is the thing everybody asked about.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Can you cast Amazon to it?

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  You cannot cast Amazon.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  I don't think you can cast any Amazon video services to anything.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  So it's a, it's a cast point for many things, but you can't. I don't think you can say, just like, turn on YouTube TV. Like, I think there's no interface for that stuff. Right? There's not like a YouTube TV app on it where you can like scroll through a channel guide and pick a show. You can cast.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. We're gonna be reviewing it.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  We're gonna answer, final answers on all these questions.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  We got multiple conflicting answers about all this stuff yesterday, cause it, it's so wonky. Like, I was like, can you cast to it from a TV? They're like, yeah, of course you can. And he's like, cast YouTube to my bedroom TV and like another TV across the house, like the little fake house started playing. I was like, that's not what I asked. He's like, but it's casting. Don't you see it's cast? All right, Tito, the Pixel Slate. This is all you. You are deep in it.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  So it is a 12.3, 12-inch ChromOS tablet that feels nicer and smaller than the 12-inch, 12.9-inch iPad Pro in some ways. It's just lighter, you know? And it's a tablet, and it's basically the equivalent of a Pixelbook, but it doesn't come with a keyboard. You have to spend an extra $200 to get the keyboard. So there's lots, I don't know, I don't even know where to start. The hardware is very nice. The bezels are relatively small. The screen is LTPS, which stands for Low-Temperature Poly-Crystalline Silicon.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Poly-Crystalline.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Poly-Crystalline Silicon. There it is.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  It's an LCD.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an LCD, but apparently the electrons can move 100 times faster. So it takes up lower power. It's 2K by 3K. I really like that aspect ratio.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  Do electrons move at the speed of light?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  So in a TFT display, it has an amorphous substrate. And so in order for the electron to go like, "Hey, light this pixel up," it needs to align the substrate to get through. And the substrate has to be like, "A blah blah," and then it goes, "Oh, wait, come on through," and then the electron gets through. But apparently with a low-temperature poly-crystalline silicone, it doesn't, it's not amorphous. It's firmer and solider, and so the electron can just shoot on through. And so it can go through 100 times faster, which means it's lower power for higher brightness and higher pixel density. I guarantee you that that technical explanation I just gave you is dead wrong.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  But we are going to have an explanation that isn't on theverge.com in the near future.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm just shaking my laptop lid here, waiting for the LCD blob to do something. It's not doing anything. All right.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Whatever. So, no headphone jack? No headphone jack?

• 1:13:33Nilay Patel?

  It's weird on a laptop.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  It's weird on a laptop. There are two USB-C ports, which is nice, and they are shipping it with the dongle. For those of you who own Pixelbooks, when I heard that there was no headphone jack, the very first thing I said was, "Did you fix Bluetooth since the Pixelbook?" Because Bluetooth on the Pixelbook is a disaster. And like, "Yes, yes, we did. We're sorry."

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  But also, they emphasize the speakers.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  The speakers are great.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  This is part of my new narrative. These companies have figured out. That no people don't actually have Bluetooth. You know what I've been doing now that I'm I'm living in the suburbs. So I'm in a house.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  Often alone.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  I just, I don't even use headphones anymore.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Same.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  I just listen to my phone without headphones.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  This is the future. This is all these companies see it and they're just putting better speakers in their devices.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Because they can't be bothered with headphone jacks and Bluetooth is still garbage.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  So Android tablets are dead. Sorry, Samsung and Huawei. Good luck with Dex. I'm sure that's going to be just fine for you. But Google's all in on Chrome OS, which also happens to run Android apps. There is some confusion about whether or not this thing is ready to be on a tablet. The stuff that I tried at Google's campus felt pretty, pretty good. Not great, but pretty, pretty good. I do think that Chrome OS still needs a little bit of UI work, but there's also just been underpinning work. But I wonder if the reason that at the event, at the Google demo event where things felt and looked just a little bit jankier in terms of moving windows around. If was it they were on a different Chrome OS build because you know, there's three of them all the time or maybe more. This is actually the biggest problem I have with this thing. We can get into the keyboard in a minute.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  They say it starts at $599. If you buy the $599 version of this tablet, like I don't know what you're thinking or who gave you that advice. Don't do it. I do not think that anybody should buy this tablet unless they are the kind of person who would buy a Pixelbook and be willing to spend $1,000.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Because they've got like five or six different, you know, processor SKUs for this thing. It's a Celeron, Celeron, M3, I5, I7. So five. So the two low, the two low end models are Celerons with four gigs of RAM.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  This explains why I thought it was slow yesterday.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  This is well, it's I don't know what they had on the floor, but the the two low end models are Celerons. I think they only have four gigs of RAM, which is, you know, enough for if you're buying a $350 Chromebook for school or for just banging around in the house. But on a $600 device.

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Unacceptable. Yeah, definitely the one I saw yesterday. I was like trying to just bang around switching windows.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Vlad went to the London event that Google had as well, and he said the same thing.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Very poor performance.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  I am very excited by this device because I am that weirdo who is willing to spend $1,000 on a Pixelbook. And I think that this is more compelling to me than a Pixelbook in several ways. But unless you are that person who like believes and understands and knows how to use Chrome OS and really like is willing to spend the money on a really nice Chrome OS experience, you shouldn't get the $600 version. I don't think you should get the $700 version. I think maybe the M3 will be fine, and that's $800, I think, yeah. But like, woof. And then, like, it doesn't come with a keyboard. So you gotta pay more for the keyboard. Now, the keyboard is cool. It's got flaps on both sides. One side like covers the back, one side is the keyboard on the front. The one that's on the back, it folds down with a little tent with a magnet, but the magnet can work at like multiple angles. It just sort of slides down smoothly,

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  which is really clever. It's got like stronger magnet, so it like clicks into the top and the bottom. And then the keyboard itself, very quiet, very nice. It's got circular keys because reasons.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe it's not a little loose on your lap, but that would be fine. So

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is my big question.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  I would rather have this thing than a Pixelbook, but I do not, I just, I cannot emphasize enough. If you're looking at the $600 version, go buy a $330 iPad and live your life.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  Okay, lapability. You mentioned this in your video, Teeter, but I need details. Compared to like the Surface or whatever.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  It's not as stable as the Surface. So you remember the Surface before you could like fold up the keyboard to attach it to the front of the screen? Remember that? Like you can like tent up the keyboard to the Surface to attach to the front of the screen and that adds some stability. So this doesn't do that. It's just, and it's a little bit, the fabric that connects it to the keyboard connector is just a tiny bit looser.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  It reminds me of like the first generation Surface and Surface Pro before they added that.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  I think it's a little looser than that even, honestly. But like, look, so if you're trying to balance it on like one leg, you're gonna be whatever. But you put on two legs, you'll be fine.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Okay, so two legs is fine.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not like it's like floppy. It's just like, there's, there's like, there's some play between the keyboard and the screen that you can get a little jiggle going. But when you tap the screen, it's when it's set down, it's really, it doesn't jiggle at all because it has a full tent behind it. So.

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  I just, to me, it felt really big yesterday.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  So it feels really big if you're comparing it to an 11.5 inch or the smaller 9 inch iPad. It feels very big, but it is smaller in both the X and the Y than a MacBook 13 inch. And it's 7 millimeters thin. So it feels big, but it, to me, it's this weird zone where it's, once you start using it for a while, it like, when you use like a 12.9 inch iPad, the thing is always big. That thing is always, "Look at me, I'm big. You feel how big I am. It is just, uh, look at me." This thing, after a few minutes, after, you know, 15 minutes or whatever, it stops feeling quite that big. It doesn't feel like, "Dip, dip, dip, doo." Big. Um, it's still gonna be big. So like, if you think that you just want

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  a little tablet, or, you know, whatever, don't get this. This is a, this is a straight up, "I wanna, I want this to be my next main computer. I'm the kind of person that is willing to spend a thousand dollars on a Chrome OS device."

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  So it's really interesting to me about that, and this is like, this is the big future of computers conversation, is the reason it's a desktop computer is not the keyboard, or the flap, or the screen side. I mean, the iPad is all that stuff. It's, it runs desktop Chrome.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Well, and it has a mouse, or a trackpad.

• 1:19:29Nilay Patel?

  And it has a trackpad. But like, but really fundamentally, it's because desktop Chrome. And then everything else is Android, right? Like, the, the app model for this thing is the Play Store.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Or Linux, or maybe you'll be able to do Windows someday, who knows?

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  I think the Linux thing is there for like, if you work at Google, you're like, "I need a little bit more than this, guys." They're like, "Okay, you can run Linux."

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  I can't develop on this. Oh, okay, so we turn Linux on.

• 1:19:50Nilay Patel?

  You can just have Linux.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  I mean, I was using a Pixelbook for a while with Android apps, and they just, they feel a lot different than Chrome OS apps. I, I tried to, when I was using a Chromebook, I definitely preferred to try to keep most of my apps, quote unquote, as web apps, because Android apps feel different.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. When you start using it more as a touchscreen, you'll start to feel a little bit different about that, but not entirely.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  When you take this thing off the keyboard, like Chrome OS has changed now, so there's really no way to like force it into windowed mode, or it's not easy to like have it just keep the windows moving around. It goes into like the full screen or split screen tablet. So I don't love that, but it's fine. What about multiple desktops? I'm pretty sure Chrome can do that. Yeah, I could be wrong. I don't, I'm not a multiple desktop guy. Oh, then I guess not. I'm not a multiple desktop guy. You do everything in one desktop? Yeah. How? What do you mean, how? I use window management. Sorry, man. Paul is just staring at me. I just use one desktop too.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Surface Pro uses multiple desktops, supports multiple desktops.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  I just like, there's a part of me that's just sad that Chrome OS is becoming a full-fledged operating system. Yeah, that's fair. Right? Like, to me, the best part about it was it only did one thing. Yeah. I did it really well. And now it's like, okay, get it. Like, here's a bunch of other stuff. But like, it, there's a lot of buttons on that taskbar now. Yeah. There's a home button, the back button, the roll-up buttons, it's a lot of...

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  An assistant button.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  They actually reduced the number of buttons on the taskbar, on the shelf, in the new version. Because there used to be a button for notifications and a button for settings, and they collapsed those two into a single thing. Yeah. I know. It's just, it's, it used to just be like a Chrome icon. Yeah. And now there's many more. I don't know. I'm excited for this thing. I just... I mean, the reason I'm excited for it, I'm excited for like the thing itself as like a Pixelbook replacement, honestly. But I look at what's happening with computers and what I think is about to happen to computers, to big screen devices. Chrome has a tiny little market share, but it's big in schools and Google's pushing really hard. Windows is like, Microsoft is someday going to forget that it's there. But right now, they still remember it's there, so they're developing it.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Apple is trying to increase the productivity abilities of the iPad. And they're also trying to like, you know, make the Mac not die by throwing Marzipan apps on it, right? Meanwhile, we know for a fact that there are flexible screen displays coming, right? And we know that like Samsung and other, maybe Microsoft has sort of hinted at this, that they might be looking at like foldable devices. So... There is more competition, the big screen space, the desktop space, the laptop, whatever the hell you want to call it, the future of computers. There is more competition in that space than in phones. And like phones are just, they, we are out of the land where it was a, like, there was a five-way competition and now it's just a duopoly goodbye the end, right?

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  And anybody else that tries to launch a new phone platform gets laughed out of the room. But we have, we have a genuine three or four, depending if you want to count Apple twice, way of competition for what big screen devices should do and how they should act. And that is just, that's just fun.

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm excited. It's like a lot of stuff going on.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  Haiku, the open source port of BOS is, believe, hit, about to hit 1.0 or just did hit 1.0. So we do have exciting new desktop operating system.

• 1:23:09Nilay Patel?

  All right. I think that's a good place to end it. We've gone a little bit, I don't want to even lie. We've gone for an hour and a half, which is the exact amount of time that we go for every week. We should just stop pretending we don't. Yeah, that's it. I mean, it was just a lot of stuff. Reviews will be ongoing. The Pixel is, you can preorder it now.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:23:31Nilay Patel?

  It's shipping next week, I want to say.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Hmm, sure. I don't remember.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  Shipping soon.

• 1:23:37Nilay Patel?

  I think it's shipping soon.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  The big question will be, what, are they going to keep stock in?

• 1:23:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or will Verizon hoard all 12 of them to dole out one at a time? We didn't talk about that at all, but Google just is in bed with Verizon forever and ever, and it's unclear why. The Home Hub is October 22nd.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  You can preorder it now.

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  You can preorder it.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  But it's not shipping till later.

• 1:23:56Nilay Patel?

  It's not shipping till later, and the Pixel slates later, too.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:59Nilay Patel?

  So as soon as we get the stuff, we'll be doing reviews. I'll promise you right now, those camera review videos are coming, because it's a fight. It's just a fight.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:09Nilay Patel?

  And I am just less and less impressed with the tennis camera by the day. That's all I can tell you. I mean, they tried a new thing. When it's good, it's very good. The rest of the time, it's just, who knows what it's gonna do? Is it gonna make a huge mistake? Who knows? So, we are deep in the camera comparison weeds, and that stuff will be, as soon as we get these phones in hand, we'll be producing many camera comparison videos. More exciting news, Why'd You Push That Button starts next week, October 17th. Ashley was on the show last week. Ashley and Caitlin are back. Why'd You Push That Button, trailer's out, you can go listen to it today. Catch up on the two previous seasons. Next week, that comes out. That'll be really fun. Interview episodes, continue piece. I interviewed the CEO of Ring, Jamie Simonoff. He was on Shark Tank this week. He was promoting a

• 1:24:54Nilay Patel?

  Shark Tank appearance. I asked him some questions about Shark Tank. But mostly, I was like, how'd you start a Kickstarter called Doorbot and end up running a piece at Amazon? And he answered questions. So, check those out. Let me know how those are going. You can also check out the interface. We've brought it up 1,000 times, verge.com-interface. Thank you to Liz for doing this week in Elon. And that's it for this week. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Paul. iMessage lock-in.

• 1:25:37Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Erin Patinkin, CEO of Ovenly.

• 1:25:40Speaker 07

  And I'm Natasha Case, CEO of Coolhaus.

• 1:25:43Speaker 06

  And together, we're the co-hosts of Start to Sale.

• 1:25:51Speaker 06

  We talk to entrepreneurs, one-on-one, about what it takes to build a business from launch to exit. Our podcast is different from other business podcasts because it delves into the journey of entrepreneurship. This isn't just about a startup story.

• 1:26:13Speaker 07

  We'll be hosting the founders of some of your favorite brands. People like Jen Rubio of Away, Piero Giallardi of Refinery29, Jane Wurwand of Dromologica. What's really unique about our conversation is we'll really talk about the experience in the trenches and the most valuable lessons learned to get them out of there. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe to our show today.

• 1:26:45Speaker 06

  And thanks to Smartwater for being the founding sponsor of Start2Sale.