Apple Watch Ultra review: an aspirational debut

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, David Pierce, and Victoria Song discuss using the new Apple Watch Ultra, the next-gen GPUs, and a bunch of gadget news. Future reading: Apple Watch Ultra review Apple AirPods Pro (second-gen) review: same look, better everything else This RTX 4090 is so ridiculous it needs a ‘Dark Obelisk’ RGB support stick Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs Nvidia says it built too many GPUs — expect sales while it works on something `new` DJI's new smartphone gimbal aims to get you filming quicker than ever Logitech’s G Cloud Gaming Handheld arrives in October for $349.99 ByteDance’s Pico 4 VR headset is a Meta Quest 2 competitor Framework’s new Chromebook is upgradable and customizable This new turntable can play music directly to a Sonos system The PS Vita’s time is now, again Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, on the Vergecast, Victoria Song joins the show for a deep dive on the Apple Watch Ultra. And for some reason, we let Alex talk about GPUs again. It's coming up right after this. That's the Vergecast, coming up now.

• 0:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Richast, the flagship podcast of very large wristwear.

• 2:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Honestly, I didn't think about it too much beforehand. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 2:09David Pierce?

  Hi, I have a small watch and I'm sad about it now, but we're gonna talk about it. I have feelings.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Get ready. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:16Alex Cranz?

  I once had a 50 millimeter watch, but I was also in third grade. So it was just like comical.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Did he just look like Flavor Flav?

• 2:27Alex Cranz?

  There's a photo somewhere on the internet of me with it. It's incredible. Little like bob haircut. It's great.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  And Victoria Song is here. Hey, Vic.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Hey, I am double wristing the largest Apple watch possible and the smallest one simultaneously.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Are you like selectively deciding which one to deploy depending on situation? Like I'm at the bank, big watch.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Um, I should, but I haven't. So I will now.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, we'll get into it because V just reviewed the Apple Watch Ultra, of which I spent, I don't know what my contribution was. They sent me one too. And I also played with it, but V actually reviewed it in the context of an actual review. I just tried to avoid breaking my NDA as I walked around the world with a giant watch on my wrist.

• 3:11David Pierce?

  How successful were you? Actually, I actually wondered this about both of you because one of the things we heard from Apple, like right off the bat, like there was this story that they were telling us that like during the event, as they announced the Ultra, all the Apple executives had to take off their watches and put on Ultras because otherwise they were so large you'd be able to tell.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:27David Pierce?

  Did you guys get caught out for wearing Ultras before you were supposed to?

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  Like constantly.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Not at all.

• 3:34David Pierce?

  No?

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  That's so funny.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  No, not at all, which you would think people would notice it more on me because I have really petite wrists. But, you know, I went grocery shopping. I went to all these places. Not a single person clocked it on me. And when I went hiking with my friends, one of them was just like, oh, is that the new series eight? And she's a non-techie. So that's, that's to be expected. I was like, no, you heathen. It's an Ultra.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, I will say, so it happened to me, and I live in the middle of nowhere. At like 20 yards away at a golf course, a dude came, which I think is like where dudes notice watches.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's a target, rich environment for watch dudes. Wants the grocery store. And then when I was getting my new booster, the pharmacist, like, needle in hand, right? Like, shooting the stuff in the air. It was like, ooh. And I was like, let's, one step at a time. I'll talk to you about this afterwards. So, yeah, I mean, I, maybe it's just like a, like a dudes noticing watches thing, but I, it just, it's so big. Also, what watch face were you using, V?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Uh, I was switching between a bunch of them, but I was using the Wayfinder one because that's the one that's exclusive to the Ultra.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, we should get into, so, like I said, Victoria reviewed the Apple Watch. We've got AirPods Pro, the second gen review to talk about. Although I think Chris Welch is coming on the show to really get into it with that soon. There's a bunch of GPU news to talk about, and a little lightning round of gadgets. So we're starting with the Apple Watch review. So I was using the Infograph Modular Face, like the straight face I always use, which is like pretty colorful and full of text. It's got like, I have my calendar in the middle and it's got, obviously the rings and whatever. And that one just seemed like everyone could read it from five miles away. Cause the, the screen is really big.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  It, it's like the main thing. If you're not like an extreme sports athlete, what you're getting out of this is basically infinite battery life. And the screen is gigantic.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:31Alex Cranz?

  The good baby boomer watch.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Or if you're like me and you have the world's worst eyesight, so like I go into the accessibility settings and crank the text up to the largest possible thing. And everyone can just read my texts from my wrist. It's bad, but I can read it. So that's great. And

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Alex Cranz?

  That's all that matters.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  And texting's easier. No typos when I use swipe to type on the Ultra, whereas it's Typo City everywhere else. So there are benefits.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  It's big enough that I could just push the letters. I wasn't even swiping. I was just like, boop, boop.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  This is just a keyboard that I'm using on my wrist. I think it's in your review. Like, this is as close to like an iPhone on your wrist.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  As you can get without actually crossing over to it's a phone on your wrist.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Especially because the screen is flat.

• 6:18David Pierce?

  V, you, I know you have tried to do this many times and it's borderline impossible. But like, I still cannot wrap my head around how big this thing actually is to wear all day. Because like, you see all the pictures, everybody's wrists are different. And like, I think you had the same experience I did in, mine was much briefer. But like, picking it up and putting it on and being like, oh, this is lighter than I expected. It doesn't feel monstrous. But like, it looks humongous. And I feel like, I'm like, putting on my coat, I feel like it would catch every single time. I feel like I would like, scratch it on doorways as I walk through. Like, I don't know, how big is this thing actually?

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Well, David, I'm glad you asked because I had such cognitive dissonance over the past week. I was like, am I getting ultra-pilled? Do I not understand what size is anymore? What's going on? And the thing is, is that this is a 49 millimeter watch. But it's like, I would say it's the equivalent of a 50 to 51 millimeter round watch. But it gets to be small. Like, you can tell, I have spent like, nights staring at the ceiling, thinking about the size. Because I was just like, it was just like, so the width is 44 millimeter. See, I can tell you the measurements off the top of my head. I even bought digital calipers to help me because I was having like, I was having just such an existential crisis. Because I don't love big watches.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  And the, it is like 44 millimeters in terms of the width, which is the same as the 44 to 45 millimeter Apple Watches. Okay. Which is why, when you look at it, it doesn't seem as humongous as a 49 millimeter watch should be. If this was a 49 millimeter round watch, it would look like a dinner plate on my wrist.

• 7:57David Pierce?

  That makes sense.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Now it just looks gigantic, but not like, oh my god, what are you doing gigantic?

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  I don't think I put this together, you're saying it's, it's the same width as the previous ones, but it's taller?

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  The software has to have scaled differently then.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it does. But when you put the 45mm Series 8 next to the 49mm Series 8, you're just kind of like, oh, it's not that big. But, you know, at the same time, if you put the 40 or 41mm watches next to the 45 ones, you're like, oh, that's not that big. It's when you put the the smallest watches next to the largest one that you're like, oh, this is honking huge. This is gigantic. This is what the hell? It's the size of a Fig Newton. That's what it is.

• 8:39Alex Cranz?

  I was about to say, you were tweeting with like calipers and like, it's the size of a Fig Newton. Which is heavier, a Fig Newton or the watch?

• 8:47Speaker 04

  The watch.

• 8:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  A Fig Newton is not titanium.

• 8:53Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're hefty cookies.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  Also extremely limited connectivity on a Fig Newton.

• 8:58Alex Cranz?

  No, yeah, really bad connectivity.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Zigbee only.

• 9:01Alex Cranz?

  It's almost none.

• 9:03David Pierce?

  You can only swipe type on the Fig Newton. It's a real problem.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  I was just trying to find something that everyone could like go into their house and be like, oh, this is what it is, so that you don't have to like memorize numbers.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for the people out there who are gonna put a Fig Newton on their wrist, just like for a day.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, just to figure it out.

• 9:21David Pierce?

  Like having a bag of flour to prepare for a baby.

• 9:23Nilay Patel?

  Like the Palm team walked around with a block of wood to like, see what a Palm Pilot would look like. Like, I've just got a Fig Newton on my wrist. I'm just seeing if this is worth $800. That's the, the size of it is something. It's lighter than you think. I actually, I think it's too big. And I have bigger wrists than V. V, it sounds like you are ultra-pilled. You're like, this is fine. This is what I'm doing.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  I really hate to admit it, but I was talking with Dan over Slack and we're like, are we ultra-pilled? Are we okay? What's wrong? Because we're both very firmly on the side that smartwatches are getting too big. And I still believe that. It's just, you know, I didn't realize how bad my eyesight has gotten over the course of my life, because I'm just like, wow, I can read without squinting and putting it right directly in front of my face. And that's been a revelation. So like, there are reasons to have a bigger watch. Fashion is absolutely not one of them, but there are reasons.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  Neelai, I'm shocked. You're a big watch guy, though. I mean, I do wear a larger watch when I, well, I buy the larger Apple Watches. It's still not a big watch on me. And then when I wear a regular watch, I tend to buy big watches. But you think this is too big? You know, it's interesting. The thing that he's talking about with the screen. So I'm very much appreciative the screen is bigger. I am like paranoid that if I was in an office or out in the world, like everyone could read my texts. Like it's, I don't need to turn up the font size all the way, but it's already at its default, just like big enough to, I think you can just comfortably read it from far away. So like, you know, and you can just like change all the settings. I've turned it all off. So it shows you the preview until you hold it up.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  But there's like a, I think there's a real balance here between how personal the information that comes through on your wrist is. On a thing that's on display versus how big the screen is. And I, you know, I just like have to use it to be comfortable, like thinking, oh, maybe one time the text will come through. The settings won't work and you'll just be able to read whatever, because my hand's on the table.

• 11:16Alex Cranz?

  I'm just thinking of like celebrities at a basketball game, sitting courtside. And they get like a really spicy text from somebody and it's just photographed by everyone.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  You're thinking of like Adam Levine.

• 11:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Just that spicy text.

• 11:32Alex Cranz?

  Courtside Lakers. I don't know.

• 11:34Nilay Patel?

  I know where your brain went.

• 11:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, immediately. Incredible.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, we won't quote the Adam Levine text. I will tell you that you should read them because they're hilarious.

• 11:44Alex Cranz?

  They're very funny.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  Flatly hilarious. And it's also not black. So it's for $800. I want a black one.

• 11:50Alex Cranz?

  Oh, interesting. The color's part of the problem for you?

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it would like look smaller if it was black. Also, I like things that are black. And it's, you only can only get one color. Your choices are what extremely loud color band do you want? And I spent the day wearing the orange one. That's the trail one, right?

• 12:06Alex Cranz?

  That's the Alpine one. Yeah.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I was just walking around being like, I'm already paranoid. Everyone's looking at this thing. And now it's bright orange. And I'm just in my house. I mean, but these are like purely aesthetic concerns. I think the other thing for me and V, I don't know if you felt this way. The software is so much the same. And it really is just scaled up. And it's surprising to me that I didn't even realize it wasn't scaled like perfectly linearly, that the screen is taller than it is wide on the series eight. Because it's so similar that unless you are paying attention, you would not see it. That actually the screen is a different aspect ratio and the software has changed its scaling. Because unless you're using one of the new modes, the experience of this watch, apart

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  from the battery life, which is phenomenal, is exactly the same.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  That's kind of the story of all three of the Apple Watches this time around is that the bulk of what makes them good is in watch OS nine, which is it's a significant update compared to like watch OS eight was just like, hey, be more zen, you're all stressed. But watch OS nine is an actual update update. And it's just kind of weird what they decided to include on what watch. But just generally speaking, having used all of them, the software experience is basically the same. So you're really only getting the ultra for either aesthetic or durability or battery reasons. And let's be real, most, most people don't need the durability, even though, you know, people are screaming that I need the sapphire crystal.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Most of you don't, you just don't like, you don't.

• 13:40Alex Cranz?

  Well, I thought that was interesting. There's some stuff that's gate kept to it that seems really odd to be gate kept to it, like the, the night mode where it just goes completely red. Why is that only on that watch and not the other ones? Do we have an answer to that?

• 13:54Speaker 04

  I guess they're assuming that you're going to be in pitch black conditions outside when you're on a trail and that might help you read more. New York City has so much light pollution that I didn't really get to try it in pitch black settings just yet. I will in Iceland, but you know, I did sit in a closet. I did turn the lights off.

• 14:11Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  And I did turn it on night mode and I was like, okay, this is fine. I feel like a gamer. That's cool. I guess it works. I don't know that it's actually easier to read.

• 14:21Alex Cranz?

  Somebody was tweeting about how like they were an astronomer and that mode was going to be really exciting for them because their eyes weren't going to get like, they wouldn't have to worry about the light change fluctuations like they would with a regular watch.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I have an app on my phone called Skyview where you like hold it up to the sky and it shows you where the stars are and it has that red mode and it rules. Also, that app is cool if you can see stars.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  I'm gonna have to try it.

• 14:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's a great idea. That seems dope.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go chase the northern lights next week in Iceland, so I'll try it then and report back.

• 14:52Alex Cranz?

  Does it only work with like pitch black conditions?

• 14:56Speaker 04

  I just don't think like if you're in a closet and you turn the lights off, it's just like anticlimactic. You're like, oh, it's red. That's fine.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  I really think it's gonna be for outdoor use that you really see the difference. And I just, you know, there's freaking streetlights on every corner in New York. It's not.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  And no Apple, standard Apple Watch owner is ever outside in the dark.

• 15:15Alex Cranz?

  No, never happens. Never. I've never, never been outside in the dark. And like, that was the thing that kind of bummed me about it. It was like, oh, I would use that constantly. Because when I'm trying to, like, I wear my watch a lot of times when I'm sleeping. And the, the normal modes are all too bright. Like, I've tried setting up a dark red and it's just, this seems much better.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  What's fascinating about this is it's not a feature of the watch. It is a feature of the watch face.

• 15:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  And you have to, like, none of the other watch faces inherit this mode.

• 15:45Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  Which is weird for this watch. You'd think they could just sort of add it to everything. But it's just this one watch face, which you could theoretically just bring to the other Apple Watches.

• 15:55Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  But Apple actually restricts watch face creation on the Apple Watch for some mystifying reason.

• 16:03Alex Cranz?

  There's a color that I have the stainless steel gold watch. And so I have a gold color, but I'm only allowed to use it on this watch, not any of the other watches I might have. And only in certain watch faces. Other watch faces, it's like, no, you don't get gold. You can get brown or you can get yellow.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Alex Cranz?

  It's just the restrictions on watch faces is super weird at this point.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then they opened up the Nike watch faces to all the watches this time.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the Hermes ones as well.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  You can get the Hermes one. That's the one that like, there's ones that I would understand.

• 16:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Nilay Patel?

  The Hermes one is like, yeah, you gotta buy.

• 16:37Alex Cranz?

  You gotta spend the money.

• 16:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, yeah, I can put a Gucci logo wallpaper on my phone whenever I want.

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  I can be that guy.

• 16:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm a 40 year old Indian man. I can put a Gucci logo wallpaper on my phone whenever I want. It's in character, but I just like, but it doesn't make it a Gucci phone.

• 16:56David Pierce?

  Kind of.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  Whereas I think like that, that makes sense with the, it's weird like what they allow and what they, I think it just comes down to how they think about it as a fashion object. As much as a tech object and that dynamic is back and forth and it never really, it hasn't really landed on a, in a thing that you can understand.

• 17:14David Pierce?

  No, it's in that messy middle of like, they want to give you more stuff to do, but not so much that you can make it ugly. It's like, we talked about this with the, the iOS 16 lock screens to some extent almost, right? It's like they're caught between wanting people to customize things so that they like them and doing things that are like aesthetically pleasing to the 12 designers at Apple who make these things. And those two things turn out to be further apart, I think than they get credit for sometimes.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. He's just, but there's a spreadsheet somewhere like Tim Cook has an Excel spreadsheet.

• 17:42David Pierce?

  He has many.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  On files on his iPad.

• 17:44Alex Cranz?

  He has so many.

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  It's a very confusing situation for him. That's like a model of if we allow everyone to use the Hermes Apple watch, watch face. This is how many fewer Hermes Apple watches we will sell.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  From two to five.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Someone has done that math.

• 18:04Alex Cranz?

  Now only 10 people are buying it.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. And then they've made that decision. And then at the same time, they've made a decision that's like, if we let other people turn their watch faces red, we will not sell Apple watch ultras. Like Apple is an instinctual and you know, somewhat emotionally driven company, but it's also a company that's run by Tim Cook. And there's definitely a spreadsheet in files app on an iPad somewhere.

• 18:26David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  That's like, how do we restrict some features to sell more watches? And it's weird that the extremely high end luxury watch face is like, screw it, everyone can have it. And the, it's red is like $800.

• 18:40Alex Cranz?

  No, you gotta pay for that.

• 18:41David Pierce?

  I think that probably says a lot about what Apple thinks sells Apple watches. Like I think, I think you could make a pretty strong case that a lot more people want a red face than want an Hermes face and are willing to pay extra money for it at this point.

• 18:55Nilay Patel?

  In the life of the Apple Watch. But then the Nike one is a good example, right? Where that has become so much like a sort of mainstream piece of what people do with the Apple Watch, that having like a separate thing that is the Nike Apple Watch, I think, stopped making sense a long time ago. So actually bringing that to everybody tracks.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  I think the red face is also just kind of like, not only from like a fashion standpoint, it's to encourage athletes who are like somewhere between middle, intermediate, who aspire to be, I don't know, DC Rainmaker are thinking of, because the compass features like backtrack and waypoint go all the way back to the Series 6, and you can even get them on the SE. So there's like a reason for athletes to actually save some money and not go for the Ultra because they have those features. So if you really want people to get the Ultra, you have to kind of limit this red mode.

• 19:49Alex Cranz?

  You're saying it's for nerds. You're saying it's for gadget nerds who want to be athletic, but don't really want to be athletic.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:57Alex Cranz?

  Which is true. Like, that's me. That's, I really want that red face. I want it so bad.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  There you go. So you're on this spreadsheet.

• 20:04Alex Cranz?

  I know.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  You're one whole column of this spreadsheet.

• 20:06Alex Cranz?

  Just me.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  Things Alex will buy. How do we get crayons dot XLS? It's a long column.

• 20:11Alex Cranz?

  I'm one of those nerds that like, I want it because it seems like a cool gadget feature, but I don't necessarily want to pay $800 for it and also have it an iPhone on my wrist.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Alex Cranz?

  Or a Fig Newton, excuse me.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about those features. So, I mean, that's like the bulk of what you reviewed, right? They added all these sort of extreme sport features, even the, you're supposed to pick when you buy it, which of the three bands is the extreme adventurer that you are in your soul, right? Are you an ocean? It's literally a choose your character in a video game. Very much is like, which Voltron lion are you? Are you the volcano lion? Are you the ocean lion? Are you the forest lion?

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  I don't know their names.

• 20:49Alex Cranz?

  You're the alpine, right?

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm, I think I'm the, well, I mean, in my heart, I'm the black lion.

• 20:58David Pierce?

  We don't need to explore that any further. Leave that right there.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  That's great. We can end the show here. No further analysis.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  But I think in terms of the Apple Watch, Apple thinks I'm the green lion.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Well, it also thinks I'm the green lion, but I'm the runner lion. So I was just kind of like, oh, I wanted the trail loop.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  That's the one I wanted, but you gave me the other two that I didn't want. And I understand why, because those two are much more visually engaging. But yeah.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. But you're supposed to like pick, like what, who are you? And you like buy one. I immediately put my regular Apple Watch band on the thing. It was fine.

• 21:38David Pierce?

  I just want to say, I like it much better the other way where it's like the sorting hat in Harry Potter, where like you go into an Apple store and you say, I would like an ultra. And like someone at Apple decides what kind of adventurer you are.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Siri is like, all right, we're doing some on-device processing to figure out who you are. Did you know you love the ocean?

• 21:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Here you go.

• 21:59David Pierce?

  Like, I love to run. And it's like, no, you don't. You'll never run again.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  I gotta say, I wanted the trail loop because it is the lightest thing that I have ever picked up as far as like straps go. And in my head, I was like, okay, they're gonna give me the trail loop. All I ever talk about is running. I'm insufferable about running. And this is a big boy watch and I am a small girl, so they're gonna give me the thing that's gonna trick me into thinking that this is lighter and better than it is. And I opened it up and was like, I got the orange one. Okay.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm a. Yeah, because you live in the mountains now.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  I'm a biohazard. That's fine.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  This is very bright. So let's talk about those modes. So like, that's the point of the watch down to like, here's what you can buy it with. It just seems like your review of it was, Apple's taking some baby steps, but the garments of the world are safe for now.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. So I think the biggest omission is the fact that, you know, they're saying explorers, adventurers, this is the watch for you. But we won't give you offline maps or turn-by-turn navigation. And it's sort of like.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Okay, but why? Like, I went to a mountain to like test out the compass features over the weekend, and it was very much like me and my buddies had zero cell signal. And we had to rely on a combination of the Ultra's backtrack, and the horrible Google Maps that wouldn't load, and the horrible offline maps that just didn't make sense whatsoever. Because trail maps never make sense when you look at them. And I was like, oh, you know, if I had a Garmin, I could just condense all of that into the Garmin and be fine, and have turn-by-turn navigation so it would tell me where the F I'm supposed to go. This was just like, I don't know, praying to the gods a little bit. And I was very happy that I had backtrack on,

• 23:48Speaker 04

  because they actually closed one of the gates that you pass through early. So my friends and I were actually kind of stranded. And like, we have to find an alternate route, and we are not good at this. So let's just use a combination of this and luck to find a way back to the part where it meets again. So that was, I was really happy to have that, and I write that in my review. But it's just baffling to me that you don't have offline maps or turn-by-turn navigation, which is basically what puts Garmin on the map for trail runners and hikers. So that's omission number one that I'm baffled by. Yeah. And then...

• 24:23David Pierce?

  And it kind of seems like there's one of those in every category Apple is trying to do here. And this is like the thing I kept coming away with from reading your review, is basically like, Apple gets sort of 60% of the way there with a bunch of different things, but never fully completes the job. Like, I've talked to a couple of people who are furious that there's no recovery metrics in the workout stuff. And that's a huge problem. And it's like, for a giant number of people, that is an instant deal breaker. And it just feels like the list of those is long enough that you kind of get to the end. And it's like, is there anyone for whom this is like actually correctly designed?

• 24:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really do think it's for weekend warriors, and it's for intermediate people who are making the leap. So like, an example, again, running that I would give is someone who is very comfortable running a 10K, probably has a half marathon under their belt, and is like looking at the, um, whatchamacallit, the full marathon and going like, hmm. Hmm, like that level of person, I think, is who this is for. Because you don't want necessarily the Garmin, like, deluge of clunky interface and 70,000 charts and maps that you have to kind of sit and read what they mean. That type of person, this is going to be easier for you, just because it's, it's just, it just is.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  And then there are people who really like Excel spreadsheets and tracking all of that stuff on their own. And then on top of that, just want, they don't want to make a compromise between a fitness watch and a smartwatch, right? So they're looking for something. I have seen readers comment on my reviews, like, "God, I'm thinking of ditching Garmin, because I just need something that's smarter." Because they're not out every single day doing three hours of exercise. They're, they're backpacking on a weekend. Those are the people who this is going to be really great for. But if you have people who are like, "This is my 50th marathon. I take training super seriously, and if I'm a woman, I train based on my cycle." Like, there are those athletes out there. This is not going to be enough for you.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  You need those recovery metrics. You need to understand, like, where your, your physical strain is at. And, you know, like, those recovery metrics are kind of, let's just say, take the accuracy with a grain of salt, but those are the people who this is just not going to do enough for. So it's just a really interesting, it's just interesting. And I, I attribute a lot of that to the fact that this is their first attempt. I really think Garmin should be like, "Ooh, we're cool for now." Next year, I think, I think it would be a mistake for them not to see what Apple's doing and start brainstorming. If they're not brainstorming, that's, that's a huge mistake. But right now, they're like, "Pfft, we're fine." Like, that's how I feel.

• 27:04Alex Cranz?

  I just really want to go back to, you said, one of the, kind of the core audience members for this is someone who really loves spreadsheets.

• 27:13Alex Cranz?

  And also really just wants a watch that looks nice. So is that just Tim Cook?

• 27:18David Pierce?

  That's literally just Tim Cook.

• 27:19Alex Cranz?

  That's just Tim Cook. Yeah, that's, I love that. I love that.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  No, wait, no, no, no. Didn't you mean people who train with spreadsheets?

• 27:26Alex Cranz?

  Maybe he does. He has spreadsheets for everything. I absolutely believe Tim has a spreadsheet for his exercise workout, like his exercise routine.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  I tweeted a poll the other day to, just because the thought came to me that all the current tech CEOs have to be spreadsheet masterminds. Cause they're all, I mean, just like look at them.

• 27:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, who's the best Excel power user? Is it Cook, Nadella, Pichai, or Jeff Bezos? Who is no longer the CEO of Amazon, but you gotta put him on the list. And people are just like, pick Nadella because he runs Microsoft. I'm like, no dudes, it's Tim Cook.

• 27:57Alex Cranz?

  It's Tim Cook. It's Tim Cook. He's also.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  It's 1,000%.

• 28:00Alex Cranz?

  He has never used numbers in his life.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cooks looks at numbers and he's like, get this out of my face.

• 28:07Alex Cranz?

  He's like, how dare you?

• 28:08David Pierce?

  He like opens Excel and immediately just like pushes his mouse away and he's like, I will not be needing this.

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  He's got like the external number pad on his, his hands go into straight like sideways macro mode. Do you think he, Tim Cook, like watches the Excel world championships?

• 28:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes, 100%.

• 28:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Man, you know, when I was a code, I asked him this like big thinky question about like whether the phone is, you know, like partially to blame for social media, you know, like philosophical. And I was like, no, we're fine. I should have been like, do you watch the Excel world?

• 28:38David Pierce?

  Who do you think's gonna win this year, Tim?

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's like you and me, buddy. I know Johnny's here, but like you and me, eye to eye.

• 28:45Alex Cranz?

  He's super in it.

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  You streaming that shit?

• 28:49Nilay Patel?

  And the next time I see him, I'm 100% asking if he watches the Excel world championship. I don't care where my career goes after that. I just need to know the answer. But wait, V, you meant people who train with spreadsheets, right?

• 29:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Nilay Patel?

  Like the people who play video games with spreadsheets.

• 29:02Alex Cranz?

  I, I know several of them. I am sometimes one of them myself. I go back and forth. It's, it's just too, I have a whole Notion page with training info on there. It's sad. Like I'm embarrassed for myself right now, admitting it, but.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Right, but then the Garmin can like send you CSV data, right?

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  And the Apple Watch is just not built to do that.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  So when I do my testing and I do comparisons, I'm old school and I go spreadsheet. But I know there are smarter ways to do that and to like export all your fitness data. So I'm not the person to ask for that, just because I like to be really, really hands-on with the data when I'm comparing and I'm anal retentive about the columns and how they look. Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. But yeah.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Welcome. This is fine. This is home. We are your people.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like I just have a spreadsheet at home and it is psychotic looking, just like percent of change accuracy. And it doesn't, I realized a long time ago that no one wants to read that in the review. But rest assured, I'm doing it and I've been doing it for years. I mean, people want to read that. There's an audience. You don't want to read like, okay, so on four different runs, it was off by negative 0.2%. Like as these get more accurate, it gets less relevant. That's the thing. Like six years ago, when I was doing it, I was like, the LG Watch Sport was super accurate. And this LG Watch Style was off by 0.2% and it's awful. And it was color-coded and everything. It's so sad.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  But yeah, like accuracy is really interesting because accuracy in wearables is less relevant than consistency. It's just a thing that I came to after a long time. If you're consistently inaccurate by the same margin, you can still track your progress.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  And the progress is the thing that matters most.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  So it just seems like Garmin has this advantage, right? Because it right now can do more. It's got more metrics for fitness. It has offline maps. It's built to be worn for the task, right? It's like task-specific in a way that wearing a Garmin as a general-purpose smartwatch doesn't really make any sense. Apple's bridging the gap. Do they have to do more on the general-purpose smartwatch side? Or is it when you push the button and turn on the I'm hiking mode or the I'm diving the ocean mode? It needs to do more there to compete with the specialized devices?

• 31:21Speaker 04

  It needs to think a little bit harder about design in some ways. So like I love the action button. But the action button was built by a general use company trying to pull in specialized people. But the more I think about the action button, they left out a huge thing with the action button here, too, is that a lot of athletes use physical controls to swipe through screens. And you would think that that would be the case with the action button, but it's not. It's all like pause. So like, it's great. They thought about, really hard about how to make a more intuitive way to pause with physical controls. But they forgot a more intuitive way to use buttons to scroll through menus. Now, that's something that, you know, everyone who uses a Garmin is super used to.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  It's something they love. It ensures with like, no doubt that if you wear gloves, if your fingers are sweaty, if you're in the elements, that you can scroll to the menu that you need. So with Apple, they added the Workout Views, which freaking great. I love the new Workout Views. But you're still having to scroll with the digital crown in order to view them mid-exercise. And that's just, I end up having to take like, a short walk break sometimes to scroll through it. And the digital crown is bigger, it has grooves, it's more tactile. That's great, but it's not the same thing as being able to press a button and scroll through your menus. And I think that's a, that's a bit of a whiff.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  Would you say the digital crown is an input device on par with the mouse?

• 32:46David Pierce?

  And multi-touch?

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  And the multi-touch display?

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Wow. Like, don't get me wrong. I don't know. You would? You say it's as big a deal as, as the mouse?

• 32:57David Pierce?

  Revolutionary.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  No, I misunderstood what you were saying.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  I was just saying, when Apple introduced the digital crown, they were like, the mouse.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  And multi-touch. And now the digital crown.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  No, I totally misunderstood. Is the action button there? The action button is not there yet. I actually think the action button should be on every single Apple Watch. It shouldn't just be on the Ultra. But it's, like David said, it's, I want to say 70% of the way there. I'm super excited that there's a third physical control, which makes things more accessible. But like, keeping, it feels like they were saying, you still have to use this digital crown. We made grooves, so it's easier and more tactile for you to use, but really... Because they want it to be the mouse. Because they want that. It's the mouse of the watch. But if you really listen to what athletes have been saying online, and I've just been like, going through all the comments and questions and opinions, it's just, they wanted a button so that they could scroll through stuff. They don't have it.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm shocked that you can't just assign it to open an app on the phone.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  Yes, this is what I was gonna say. It's so nuts that it's not more customizable.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can pick like, what, six things, five things, V? Like the, and it's Apple's list. It's like, you can turn on the, it's like the stopwatch, the flashlight, and the workout app are what you can do.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  And dive and shortcuts, which, you know, shortcuts are so clunky to program, but so you can do things like, if you're willing to go through the whole shortcuts app nonsense, you can like press a button and it'll notify people at your next meeting that you're running late. That's cool. Do much work for me. It would be great if you could do other things. And I think that's coming, you know, because there, there are certain like, I just wrote a how to on the action button and there are certain settings in there that make me believe that you'll be able to choose which app it triggers eventually.

• 34:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, interesting.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  But I don't think, like, right now, like, you go to the workout app, there's a little button that says app and you press it and it's the native workout app because none of the other developers have developed for this yet. But I think in the future they will be and that'll add some customizability. But right now you have your choice between what Apple says you can choose. Like, why won't they let me start a timer?

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  I would love to start a timer with the action button.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. Why can't I open the home app or the remote app for the Apple? This is, you can tell where I used it.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, V is like, I make spreadsheets down to the, like, half a percent on how consistent the watches are. And I'm like, I'd like to pause the TV.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Very important.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  Give me the button that I can pause the TV with. I use my Apple Watch for two factor auth, like, maybe anything. Let me just open Authenticator. Like, let me just do it. Why not? You know, like, it's, that's like the one where you can see how you have to build the entire system of APIs and hooks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, for, to fully enable it to be customized. But open arbitrary app, I don't think you need to do much work to do. It's baffling that they missed that. But you can get there by writing a shortcut.

• 35:51David Pierce?

  No.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  Which shortcut is totally bad.

• 35:54David Pierce?

  Shortcut is an answer to nothing. And there, there will come a time on this podcast where I'm feeling spicy and give you like a 65 minute long rant.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm setting up the shortcut that notifies you that you're doing a bad job.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  Text David, like, work a little harder, buddy. Just like once.

• 36:09David Pierce?

  No, it's my, my overwhelming theory about shortcuts is that shortcuts.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Please do it.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  You spam it during the podcast?

• 36:19David Pierce?

  Says you blew it.

• 36:22David Pierce?

  You blew it. Yeah, no, I mean, that's the only good shortcuts idea I've ever heard in my entire life is my point about shortcuts. Shortcuts is a terrible idea and Apple claims it. Everything you don't like about all of your Apple devices, Apple's like, oh, shortcuts. And that is not an answer to any of it because shortcuts is a terrible idea.

• 36:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're like, just become a developer, but like-

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  Not like a good one.

• 36:47Alex Cranz?

  Like, not a good developer, but just develop. Come on.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  And there's a weird, especially in a watch, shortcuts are particularly slow. So the shortcut you set up to open the app is like, you might as well just open the app.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  So there's a really funny thing because I was trying out every single possible use case for the action button. And so I dabbled with the shortcuts and I immediately remembered why I don't normally. But you press shortcuts and you select which shortcuts you want. There is one that says, quote, "What is a shortcut?" You can set the action button-

• 37:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's my favorite one.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Something that says, "What is a shortcut?" And then it's like shortcuts are blah, blah, blah, blah. And here are three that you can try. So like one of them-

• 37:27David Pierce?

  That's literally Clippy. It's just Clippy.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  There was one of them that was just like, oh, turn on theater mode. And I was like, literally, so you want me to press it so that I open something else? So I can press something to do theater mode when I can just swipe and hit theater mode? That's, that was kind of the, so-

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  But you want the shortcut that's like, you know, I'm going out to do ocean stuff.

• 37:53Alex Cranz?

  Ocean stuff me up. Watch.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like, I gotta put my boat in like lockdown mode and I've put all these smartphone accessories in my boat. And right as I dive elegantly into the water, I reach over and click and then like all the shades in the boat-

• 38:12Alex Cranz?

  You have a very nice boat.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  And my calming music plays.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  See, that's the tech nerd side of it.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  That's like the far expanse of what you want the shortcut for.

• 38:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't know that that's true. There's a dive. The dive one is a lot more practical where you press it and it starts your dive for you. You know, which.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  No, but yeah, we just add that into the shortcut.

• 38:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's just part of it.

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  So you're like mid dive and you're like, shit, I forgot to prepare for this. I'm already in the air.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  Kenny G isn't playing yet.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I gotta hit the button. It starts dive mode on the watch. It lights up the underwater speakers. It closes all the shades. It probably turns down your thermostat.

• 38:56Alex Cranz?

  It sets the timer to contact help if you don't appear again.

• 38:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why this isn't in the ads. Why are they crashing cars? They could be doing jazz action.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Zero people from the, the audience that they aspire to buy this watch would buy this. Like, I mean, when you like, you probably, like Nilay, you know this.

• 39:15Alex Cranz?

  Victoria's just like, absolutely not, Nilay.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Your burn is not a thing. It's like when you open the Ultra Box, we both got the hiking version, but you, you like open the box and there's pictures of mountains on there. And it's like, huzzah, you are a hiker now. And I, I was looking at, I was like, wow, this is extra. But the people who are buying this are like, yes, I am a mountaineer. No, mountaineer is going, let me press this shortcut. That does this nonsense that's super techie and nerdy. They're like, oh, let me press this.

• 39:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, no, the hiking one would lock your BMW that you've already paired with your watch.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  This is ridiculous.

• 39:54Alex Cranz?

  Because you own a BMW, because that's the hiker that buys this.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  Hmm. Yeah. No.

• 39:59David Pierce?

  It pops the tent on top of your Subaru.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  That one's, that one's like running a command tier.

• 40:05Alex Cranz?

  Subaru owners do, will never own an Apple Ultra.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  What's the connectivity situation on Subarus these days? Real good Vergecast question right there.

• 40:13Alex Cranz?

  Real bad.

• 40:16Alex Cranz?

  They got, they got Bluetooth, but they, they're still using their own, like custom built. Entertainment system software that's terrible.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. So what you want is like, you want like the middleware at your house that's connected to like Rivian. So you run the shortcut and it like locks your Rivian doors.

• 40:33Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  Puts it into the

• 40:34Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Rivian's have all these air suspension modes.

• 40:37Alex Cranz?

  This is where your hike is started.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 40:39Alex Cranz?

  We'll call the cops if you're not back.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  And then the Rivian like auto drives itself to the bottom of the trail.

• 40:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's what I want.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Y'all are wild, but that is not.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  I just can't stop hearing, do Subies have Bluetooth as the title of a children's book that Neil is gonna write?

• 40:53Nilay Patel?

  There's all the cars with Bluetooth. Do Subies have Bluetooth? And you unfold, you open the garage.

• 40:59Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 41:00Nilay Patel?

  And there's like a cross track and it's like, I do.

• 41:04Alex Cranz?

  Wow, okay.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to our show. It's like this all the time.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  See, you guys are a very specialized case. The majority of people who are gonna buy the Ultra are not that nerdy. They're nerdy, but don't want to be. They're like going to a hike and they're pressing the action button and they're like, ah, I am disconnected from the world, yet I have this giant honking computer on my wrist. It's that like contradiction for the Ultra. It's

• 41:31Alex Cranz?

  So it's like people who glamp.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Yes, it's, well, but they glamp, but one level grungier than glamping, if that makes sense.

• 41:40David Pierce?

  It's people who buy really fancy looking, expensive camping gear.

• 41:44Alex Cranz?

  They buy

• 41:45David Pierce?

  It's REI customers is basically what we're talking about.

• 41:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's a

• 41:47David Pierce?

  Right, like

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say Yeti.

• 41:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, there you go.

• 41:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeti, REI.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  That's me.

• 41:52Alex Cranz?

  Patagonia wearers.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  See, Alex is holding up a Yeti right now. And I know that as she dove into the ocean, she would want to lock down her smart

• 42:02Alex Cranz?

  I would, I would want my smart boat to just be like, just quiet down.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  Although Alex's smart boat would immediately start like pirating movies for her smart boat.

• 42:10Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God, it would. It'd have its own server, yeah.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  She'd be like, start background ripping DVDs.

• 42:15Alex Cranz?

  I need the next episode of She-Hulk, stab.

• 42:17David Pierce?

  The underwater Plex projector turns on.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. I want to say we've exhaustively covered the Apple Watch Ultra.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Battery. We didn't talk battery.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  With this conversation. Oh, battery.

• 42:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, we should talk about the battery real quick.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  It's good.

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  I was not able to kill it. So I went 56 hours before I went like off the charger, just lying around the house.

• 42:37David Pierce?

  It's a lot of Apple TV remote usage in 56 hours, I would assume.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  Furiously watching.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  So like, that's a horrible test.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  I don't think it's a horrible test.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Basically not using it. It was on my wrist, hadn't turned on any of the workout modes, hadn't used cell service, just some wifi. And then I was actually gonna go and play golf where the person spotted me and I knew I was gonna use the workout mode. So I was like, I gotta at least get this thing back up. I had gone 56 hours, I was 14%. I was like, I gotta charge it because I know it will make it through this. V, you got to like 60 hours.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, last night I got to 60 hours with no low power mode on, always on display on, and several workouts, like, well, several workouts, but a lot of them not GPS related, just only one of them was. So, you know, they're saying it can get, Apple is super conservative with its battery estimates because, you know, they've been saying 18 hours for several watches now and it's more than 18 hours. You're gonna get more than 18 hours. So with the Ultra, when they said 36 hours, I was like, hmm, we're gonna get 48. And generally, if you are working out and using cellular, you're gonna get 48 with regular usage. If you have a rest or recovery day, or if you just don't work out, which a large portion of people who buy this watch are not people who give a damn about the fitness features whatsoever.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  They care about the battery. Those people, you can get 60 hours without a low power mode enabled, without the special further battery optimization feature that's coming. It's, it's insane, the battery life on this, when you think about every other Apple Watch that's been. It's the first true multi-day battery that, it's just multi-day battery. It's great.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I was incredibly impressed with it. Also, you know, it's interesting, we, the last episode, we talked about the iPhone always on display and how much I think it is killing my iPhone 14 Pro battery.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Turned it off immediately. It's terrible.

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  I turned it off and now the battery like lasts forever.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  This thing has essentially that same always on display.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  And it's just like, just cruising, it's obviously much smaller, but it's just cruising along for hours and hours at a time. It's pretty impressive.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, like, I feel like an always on display is essential to a watch, but really unnecessary for a phone. That's just how I feel. It's, it's interesting. Because I thought I would like an always on display on my phone, and I was like, nah. I put it like face down all the time anyway, so I don't need it, and I have a watch. It just makes more sense on a watch.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  How did they test the battery on the watch? Like, did they, because on the, on the phone, on the laptop, they usually do like a video rundown. Are they just playing a tiny video on the watch? Is that what they do?

• 45:07Speaker 04

  No. Not at all.

• 45:11Alex Cranz?

  I just really like the idea of that.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  I mean, I, I, in, in some cases, I would like a benchmark for, like, some sort of test I could run on the, on the watch, but it's really, that's not useful to anyone at all. It's just lifestyle usage that the, when you're testing the battery life, you have to do, okay, daily smartwatch usage, okay, heavy GPS usage, and then heavy cellular.

• 45:33Alex Cranz?

  So they average a bunch of different, like, use cases together after they get the.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like, usually when you get.

• 45:39Alex Cranz?

  That's much less funny.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Well, duh. But when you get smartwatch battery estimates, there's usually a little asterisk in the fine print, where it's just like, with about one hour of GPS usage per day, under these settings, and, and so like, that's just generally the, the case for it. But Apple, I think they take that, and then they like minus five hours from it, just to, to cover their butts, which is the exact opposite of what Samsung does. And, yeah, so they gave us a bunch of different battery estimates for regular usage, for absolute max usage, and then absolute max usage with low, with like, it was with LTE. That's what it was.

• 46:17Alex Cranz?

  Low power, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  So it's like, they're saying, if you put low power mode on, you can get 60 hours. Well, I got 60 hours without low power mode, so I'm not sure. I don't think there's enough time in the world within one week to meet embargo, to see how long this thing would last with low power battery mode on, let alone the additional battery optimization setting that's coming. So I, I, I would like some time to just go, how long can I really make this thing last? But that's different from how long can I make it last within a triathlon? So it's supposed to be able to last with low power mode on an entire Ironman, which is about 14 hours.

• 46:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  So that's impressive, but still not at the level of a chorus or a Garmin.

• 47:02Alex Cranz?

  That seems nice.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, we have to take a break. We spent an hour with really smart thoughts from V. Thank you. On the Apple Watch and then whatever we did. We were also here.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  He lies on his boat.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  On our boat. He also participated. I'm just thinking about my extremely beautiful smart phone. It's great. That is powered entirely by shortcuts. David, you're gonna have Chris Walsh on to talk about the AirPods Pro Gen 2 in some way, yes?

• 47:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're gonna do a deeper dive on that in the next couple of weeks. The short version of it seems to be they are precisely AirPods Pro. Everything is slightly better. Noise cancellation seems to be potentially substantially better, but not as good as the new Bose ones, which seem to be ridiculous. But we'll, yeah, we'll, we'll get into that in a big way in a couple of weeks, I think.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the surprise hit of our second episode segments has been putting Chris Walsh in noisy environments and headphones. So we're just gonna double down on that.

• 47:54David Pierce?

  Some people really like it, some people really hate it.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  So stay tuned for that. We'll talk more about the AirPods coming up. We gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

• 48:08Speaker 05

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• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  We're back. V, sticking with us. Thanks for hanging around, V. But welcome to Alex Krantz's Dark GPU Zone.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Oh, I've been here before.

• 49:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you've been here.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  I've been here before.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Alex and Victoria used to work together at Gizmodo. So I don't know how Krantz managed to recruit you back into this situation, but.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  She was always assigning me stuff that I was like, why? Why are you doing this? And then she's like, because I know you're gonna have fun. Sorry in advance.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  That's great. That's perfect. That really tracks.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay, the reason I called it the Dark GPU Zone is Nvidia had an event. They announced the RTX 4090 and the 4080. They're huge, etc. There's some metaverse stuff we should talk about because I did some metaverse noise in the middle of this keynote.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  But I just want to read you this headline. This RTX 4090 is so ridiculous, it needs a dark obelisk RGB support stick. And I purposefully just did not read the rest of that story so I could ask Alex what is going on.

• 50:24Alex Cranz?

  So Nvidia announced their 4090 and their 4080, the first of the new 40 series. This is the successor to the 30 series itself, the successor to the 20 series, which is when they introduced ray tracing. So like those two previous generations, the 4080 and the 4090 have ray tracing. Great. Like those two previous generations, they're enormous. One of the companies that's making one of those GPUs is Galax, and they're the ones that really like RGB'd it up. They've also got like an anonymous hacker thing going on with the box. If you look at the box, there's just like a weird dude, like half a mask. So it's like a, some real, like Phantom of the Opera situation here.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  Phantom of the Opera?

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's Phantom of the Opera crossed with V for Vendetta. That's the only way I can describe this look. That's good, actually. Yeah, that tracks. Yeah.

• 51:12Alex Cranz?

  And because these things are, they're big, they're hunkin' huge, they put out a lot of heat. A lot of them have, are gonna have a 3.5, like they'll take up 3.5 slots on the back of your computer.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  Good lord.

• 51:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  It's huge.

• 51:24Alex Cranz?

  It's like, ew. My 2080 does two slots. And I was like, this is too much. So this one is gonna take up nearly four slots, which is gonna mean a lot less computers are gonna be able to use it, which I personally was bummed about because I wanted to make a really tiny computer. And this will just never fit in it. But this particular one decided that it also needed to have extra fans and. The stick and it's just a big.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  And the stick just holds it up?

• 51:52Alex Cranz?

  Yes. It's just like a prop.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  Some like high tech thing that's there to like augment the way that it works. It's literally just a thing that holds it up so it doesn't collapse the rest of your computer.

• 52:03Alex Cranz?

  Because it's so heavy, like the way, I mean, I don't know the last time you guys have built a computer.

• 52:09David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 52:09Alex Cranz?

  But you usually have to like, you plug it into the PCI slot. You usually put it pretty far down because it takes up so many slots and you don't want to like lose a bunch of your other slots. So you have to plug it in pretty far down. And then the only thing holding up a very heavy GPU is the soldering from the piece like the PCI slot. And this guy is so heavy that they're like, I don't know if the soldering is going to hold it up. So we need to have a prop.

• 52:37David Pierce?

  Incredible.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  So we made a stick and the, the stick itself has RGB.

• 52:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And the stick has RGB lights on it.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 52:44Alex Cranz?

  So, and it, but the other ones, like the founder's edition, which is Nvidia's, one that it made itself and is releasing, does not have the stick. It's only the Galax that's going to have the big RGB stick.

• 52:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I just want to read you the caption, which I know people think our fonts are hard to read, but this font is so hard to read that I'm not a hundred percent sure what, what it says. My belief of what it says in the caption of this image is 5G exclusive, our RGB support stick. And it's the 5G exclusive that really sticks out to me. Because I have no idea what that means. It might be SG exclusive.

• 53:24Alex Cranz?

  Maybe?

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  It's hard, it's just hard to say.

• 53:27Alex Cranz?

  Unclear.

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  It also might be ARGB.

• 53:29Alex Cranz?

  What? None of that makes sense though.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:32David Pierce?

  This thing is like one Bluetooth speaker away from being like the exact center of all of Nilay's interests, just right.

• 53:38Alex Cranz?

  Party speaker.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  Sony put out a new party speaker this week. It's $898 and literally the video opens with now with six tweeters. Which is just probably two tweeters.

• 53:56Alex Cranz?

  Still cheaper than any of these GPUs.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  They're like, I'll stick another one on there and make a video. $900.

• 54:01David Pierce?

  As always, our offer stands to the Sony Party Speaker team. We will give you one full hour of the first cast. Please come.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Craden has reached out on behalf of Decoder. We will, we will go into it. I want to know, how many $900 party speakers do they sell? That's how I feel about the RTX 4090.

• 54:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, who is it for? So the 4080 actually starts at about the same price as the new Sony speaker, but the 4090 is gonna start at $1,600.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy. This picture of the Asus one, where it's just holding up an entire motherboard in like a T shape,

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  is incredible. Like, this is one of the biggest graphics cards I've ever seen.

• 54:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  So what does it do? We should, we have not, we've talked about how big it is and how silly the RGB lights are and whether or not it's a 5G exclusive.

• 54:47Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's basically just like, it's, it's, there's not any of the big, the, the enormous jumps like we saw with the, the 2080 where they finally introduced ray tracing. I'm gonna make lots of people mad because I said that, but it's true. They're, they're, most of the big jumps here are like, it's gonna be just a lot faster. It's got better storage. It's using GDDR6X memory, which is wicked fast. I've been living in the Northeast too long, but it's just super, super fast.

• 55:12David Pierce?

  But isn't there this Ada Lovelace thing that Nvidia is trying to say is like a whole new universe of how everyone thinks about everything?

• 55:20Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's, it's, it's their new architecture, right? Like, they, they, they moved one architecture up. So, so they do kind of a TikTok, like CPU companies do. And this is, this is their new architecture. But for most people, the practical experience is just gonna be it real fast. Like, like for the majority, the vast majority of people, it's just gonna be a lot faster. And the thing that got me really excited is it's gonna have native AV1 support, which is the big, like, there's HEVC. That's what most videos are, like, your phone, your iPhone will record in HEVC. Most, most stuff does. AV1 is an open source video codec that's really popular, but it's kind of resource intensive, so it's not used as often as maybe it could be.

• 56:04Alex Cranz?

  So this is gonna have native support, which will be really helpful for, for streamers and stuff. And anybody who is, for some reason, I don't know, ripping enormous Blu-rays onto their computer.

• 56:15Alex Cranz?

  And wanting good playback. So like, that was the part that got me the most excited was the AV1 support, which is a very small part of the puzzle, but pretty exciting. Maybe Apple and other people will start adopting it and using it in their processors.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  They're never going to use an individual.

• 56:29Alex Cranz?

  They're never going to. So never.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  Ever, ever going to happen.

• 56:32Alex Cranz?

  They, they, they were like, who?

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  And they said, they're all in on their own GPU architecture now, which does not require support sticks.

• 56:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, no, I think they can still support AV1. Like, they can still support this codec, but also Apple, like, I don't think ever natively supported, like, they've always been butts about video codecs and video containers and supporting them. And just, I'm still very upset.

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Except for HEVC.

• 56:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, except for HEVC. They're like, we're on.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  They're like, what about this one that you hate?

• 56:58Alex Cranz?

  Everybody's gonna use it. Send it to everyone.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  Actually, Protocol today had, uh, Inco Protocol had a piece about Google coming up with its own new open competitor. It's Adobe Vision and Atmos.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  I saw that.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  And how because of YouTube, they were able to just force AV1 into the world.

• 57:14David Pierce?

  And now they're trying to do the same thing with basically HDR 10, right?

• 57:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they're, they're packing it. Right. It's fascinating. Like, this is nothing to this video card. The other thing that was really interesting with the Nvidia announcement to me, so RTX 490, 480, great, that's what we covered. That's like the consumer part. Then there was this like hard gear down shift into metaverse, like enterprise metaverse stuff, which is becoming an arms race kind of between Nvidia and Epic, which makes Unreal. So Unreal is pushing really hard into Hollywood. So all those news, Disney, I'm assuming, I know it was true of the Mandalorian, I'm assuming Andor as well, shot on huge sound stages with micro LED screens that are showing renders out of Unreal, which is crazy to

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  think about. That's happening all over Hollywood. What was the, um, Jon Favreau just did a whole movie in VR. What movie am I thinking of?

• 58:06Alex Cranz?

  You thinking of, um, Lion King?

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay, I'll say that for real. John Favreau did like all of The Lion King, like directed it in VR.

• 58:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like, there's this big push in Hollywood for that. And then there's something called the, I hate this phrase, there's like enterprise metaverse stuff where they showed Lowe's and other companies like building what they call digital twins of their stores.

• 58:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  And assembly lines and factories. And then they're having AI try to optimize the layouts of the stores or like the how the factories work. And you can't do that in real life. You need like a actual 3D model of the thing that works in the same way. And so Nvidia is just like pushing super hard into the stuff. The keynote's worth watching just for this part because it's, it's really boring on its face. But on the other side, you're like, oh, like they can just go capture a whole video game in 3D. Like they can put their camera in the middle of any video game and do volumetric capture the video game and then reconstruct that as like a metaverse situation.

• 59:04David Pierce?

  Well, and, and not only that, I mean, one of the things Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, did a really good interview with Ben Thompson at Strategery, I guess, like right after the keynote. And one of the things he was talking about is, because Ben brought up that, that like gear shift you're talking about. And basically what Jensen said is like, the future of video games, but also all this other stuff you're talking about, the enterprise metaverse, you know, movie making, all this stuff is about like generative graphics and the idea that you can like build as you go. It's not just about rendering something really fast at a really high frame rate. You are changing the thing that it is on the fly. Like that's what Minecraft is and Roblox is. And it's like, if we're going to get to the point where

• 59:43David Pierce?

  we have these like lifelike metaverses, like that is like, holy shit, the GPU power we're going to need in order to do that in a real way. And that was like, he drew a much sort of straighter line between those two things than I expected, Rich.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  I mean, he's like, very financially incentivized to draw that line, right? Like, like we saw Nvidia's in the toilet, right? Well, not in the toilet, but it's way, way down stock.

• 1:00:07David Pierce?

  It's tough times.

• 1:00:08Alex Cranz?

  Right, right. Yeah. And that's because they've lost, like, they were being propped up to Kind of a like absurd degree by cryptocurrency and everybody was buying their their GPUs to mine. And that's gone and they still have a super robust server business. They still have their this consumer GPU business. They still have their like straight to business GPU business. But they need they need people to be pumped about GPUs again. And they're they're specifically their big, super powerful, super hot ones. Because like these GPUs sound really, really great, but they are so far ahead of what you're getting in a PS5 or an Xbox, which is what most game developers are developing to.

• 1:00:48Alex Cranz?

  They're not game developers do not develop to Nvidia without a lot of stuff going on in the background. Right? Like, like the game developers go and they have conversations with Nvidia and money sometimes exchanges hands. It's it's it's a

• 1:01:03Nilay Patel?

  Wow, Alex.

• 1:01:03Alex Cranz?

  You know, they're working together.

• 1:01:05David Pierce?

  Sometimes there's a boat at the end.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  Wow, wait, you really rescued that. You're like, you know, you just pay them to protect you a little bit. It's great. It keeps you safe. It'd be a shame if something happened to your video game.

• 1:01:19Alex Cranz?

  It's very telling that they're doing like Nvidia has DLSS, which is their own. It's it's basically like the software that makes the video games look prettier. And you have to work with the developers to make this is like super overly oversimplification of DLSS. I'm so sorry. My dog is snoring loudly and asleep. I clue. Yeah, but DLSS is is this Nvidia software that is like exclusive to Nvidia. AMD has their own version of it. Intel's going to have their own version of it. It's using AI to to basically upscale games and make games look a lot prettier than they might out of the box. But it still has to be supported by the game developers.

• 1:02:00Alex Cranz?

  And I think it's really telling that only 35 developers are coming out of the box with the new 4090s in the 4080s. So you're only going to see 35 games have that support. And that's because the real support, most of the money is going to AMD and to the PS5 and the Xbox. So they kind of need a bigger business. They need more stuff. And yeah, saying, oh, you want to go and do like build the metaverse? Yeah, we're the guys to come talk to. Oh, you want to, you want to compete and build your own giant mini LED screen to render graphics on the fly for shooting a movie? Yeah, come talk to us. Like, they need that if they want

• 1:02:41Alex Cranz?

  to continue to advance compared to Apple, who's just schooling everybody in the GPU and CPU space right now.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  It's also fascinating because the idea of you having a big GPU on your desk might be going away. Is game streaming particularly comes to the foreground?

• 1:02:56Alex Cranz?

  Well, I mean, that was part of the AV1 thing here is that they're like, you want to have the best stream, you want to have the fastest, most efficient stream and just look the coolest. Get a big 3.5 slot thick GPU. And if you can fit it in your computer and it won't break the motherboard, it's going to be a great time for you. Like, I don't even think my computer could fit it.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what were you saying? And then we got to take a break.

• 1:03:19David Pierce?

  I was just gonna say, it is interesting that there's this like huge enterprise pivot for a lot of these companies. And it was, I was just thinking as I was reading about all this about, I believe it was a Bloomberg story today about all the chief metaverse officers who are getting hired at these companies.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that story ruled.

• 1:03:35David Pierce?

  It's fantastic. And, and it's basically these people are getting hired with these big lofty titles. And it's like, figure out the metaverse. And it's like, what the hell do these people do all day? And I think if I'm a company like Nvidia, like, all these companies are just throwing money at this in case it's like the next big thing. And I think Nvidia will not be the last company who just like uses it in a lot of branding things to try and make some money in the short run.

• 1:03:58Nilay Patel?

  But I don't think this is just branding. They have built some real tech here that is fascinating.

• 1:04:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, the omniverse thing is very cool.

• 1:04:05Alex Cranz?

  Like, they've had this tech for a while where they can go and do this because they were originally marketing it to streamers and to gamers. So you could take like the raddest screenshots of all time by being able to move the cameras and stuff in the games.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  Someone, there was someone in Nvidia is like, you have to make this a real business.

• 1:04:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  It's not just screenshots. And they came up with like, hyper optimizing a loose layout with AI.

• 1:04:29Alex Cranz?

  Like, I cannot tell you how many CES that I went to where they're like, do you want to see how cool our screenshot camera system is now? And I'm like, okay, sure.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  That's great. All right, we got to take another break. We had a little lightning round. Come in, stick around. We'll be right back.

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• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Okay, I'm gonna start with the new DJI smartphone gimbal, the new Osmo. It's the Osmo Level 6. For some reason, I bought this immediately. Why? I don't know why. I have an Osmo already that I never use. Here's, and I was like, oh, you know what? This one feature they added will make me use it. I'm spending $180 on it.

• 1:06:20Alex Cranz?

  Is it the telescope?

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  No, not the selfie stick. It has a magnet. Oh, God. And so you put the little mat on your phone. So you can pull the phone right off it right away, which is a big annoyance. But then you clip it back on, it runs a shortcut and it opens the app for you right away. And I was like, oh, this is it. This is, I'm gonna be gimbaling for days. If only you could launch that app. Are you guys ready to see some of the smoothest Instagram stories of all time? Oh, my God. Because they're coming and you're gonna think to yourself, god damn, that boy is smooth.

• 1:06:51Alex Cranz?

  It's so smooth. No. The shortcut, automatically doing stuff.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  V did not enjoy that just now. I just want, I just wanted everyone to know. She's never coming on the show.

• 1:07:04Alex Cranz?

  The loud noise. That was a lot.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm so sorry. That was mine. Someone else, feel free to go.

• 1:07:14Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I'm super excited, as I have been for a while, about the Logitech G Cloud Gaming handheld.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, it was announced this week.

• 1:07:21Alex Cranz?

  Not excited about that name, though. That name is...

• 1:07:24David Pierce?

  It's very bad.

• 1:07:25Alex Cranz?

  That's a bad name. Or the price. It's $349.99, which is the same price as like a budget phone. But I think this is still better than a budget phone for cloud gaming.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it, I mean, it's the same price as a Switch.

• 1:07:39Alex Cranz?

  It's actually more expensive. It's $50 more expensive than a Switch and $50 cheaper than the cheapest Steam Deck you can get.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Okay. But you are excited about it.

• 1:07:47Alex Cranz?

  I'm still excited about it. I like, I think, I think the phone is a terrible way to cloud game. And if we want cloud gaming to be a real thing, there needs to be real hardware to support it. And this is a great first, if expensive, poorly named step.

• 1:08:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, just the idea that there is like going to be real multi-company, multi-platform competition over handheld cloud gaming. I think it's very exciting. Cam Foxon and our team wrote a really good story this week about one, like, I think the headline was the PS Vita's time is now again.

• 1:08:17Alex Cranz?

  This time it'll work.

• 1:08:18David Pierce?

  And it's like, on the one hand, like, guy needs a hug. Like, he's been through a lot with his PS Vita. But on the other hand, like, he's kind of right. It kind of is. It's this

• 1:08:27Alex Cranz?

  It is.

• 1:08:28David Pierce?

  Little tiny gaming consoles. Bring back the Game Boy.

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  My husband agrees. My husband is such a PS Vita fan. He like, will be having dinner and then he'll just sigh and go,

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  "I miss the PS Vita. I don't understand. I just don't understand." He's just like, "You don't understand."

• 1:08:46Alex Cranz?

  Just eating a tomato?

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:08:47Alex Cranz?

  Being like

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  On a like random road trip, he'll be like, "You know, I really miss my PS Vita." And it's just like, "I don't understand it." I showed him Cam's article and he was like, "I've written something like that before, too. I understand."

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  So the G-Cloud Gaming, horrible name, 3400, as much as Switch OLED, that's what I was thinking of.

• 1:09:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but less, less, you know, it's not an OLED display, it's an LED, it's a traditional LED display. It's got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G processor, 4GB of RAM, it's gonna have 64GB of storage in it. It's basically a Chromebook, but for cloud gaming instead of cloud PCing.

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, so here's the line that really caught me. You can launch Xbox Cloud Gaming, but it's just a progressive web app. I mean, that's amazing.

• 1:09:35David Pierce?

  But what, yeah, what else do you need it to be?

• 1:09:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's the way it's done on, on the Steam Deck now. Like, I've got, I've got the, I went through the whole process of setting up X-Cloud Gaming, whatever it's called, on my Steam Deck, and it's just a, it's just a website, but it works perfectly on, on my little Steam Deck. Does it? So, like, why should they reinvent the wheel for this as well, when they've got the app built?

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  The web isn't dead, everybody.

• 1:10:01Alex Cranz?

  The web's here.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  Here's the evidence, theverge.com, and the Xbox Cloud Gaming progressive web app.

• 1:10:10Nilay Patel?

  The future is bright for the web. All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:10:13David Pierce?

  I'm pretty excited about Framework's new Chromebook. Framework is this company we've covered a bunch, that their whole thing is like, super upgradable, super repairable laptops, and they made a, they made an Intel-based Windows laptop that I think is like, a little too expensive for what it is, but people really like it, and I think they have like, started to actually deliver on the promise of making these things upgradable, and that's very cool. And now, now they have a Chromebook, and as we've talked about, I was sad about the Pixelbook, so this made me feel a little better. There's like, new people doing interesting stuff with Chromebooks, and it's still super upgradable. It looks nice, I think it's a thousand bucks, which feels like a lot of money again, but you can choose all your ports, you can choose, like, lots of things about how it works, you can choose the RAM and the storage, and it's

• 1:10:56David Pierce?

  just like, I don't know, the tinkerer in me is very excited about specking to death a Chromebook.

• 1:11:02Alex Cranz?

  But you'll still be using Chrome OS, which is, I've come, I like, I love, but I think is super ugly.

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  And needs an entire refresh?

• 1:11:12David Pierce?

  Oh, I totally agree.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'll tell you. Framework tweeted, "Google is committed to a minimum of eight years of updates on a Framework laptop Chromebook edition."

• 1:11:21David Pierce?

  That's a long time.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Google isn't committed to Google search for eight years.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Like, this is a huge commitment.

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  But at any moment, they're like, "Fuck it, we're shutting down search. Like, it's time to sunset search. We're very sorry that you relied on it. Here's, do YouTube stories."

• 1:11:37David Pierce?

  We're just Maps now.

• 1:11:40Nilay Patel?

  I just like, don't buy it. It's amazing how Google has like, torched its brand in that way.

• 1:11:46David Pierce?

  It really is. I mean, to be fair, like, eight years is like, a ludicrously long time for Google, but I feel like, if you're gonna bet on anything, betting on Google Chrome to last a while is a decent bet, I would say.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't take that bet.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  Just telling you. Sorry.

• 1:12:01David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 1:12:02Nilay Patel?

  Google's like, "We don't support QWERTY keyboards anymore. We've looked into it, and..."

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  They're dumb.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  It's over. V, do you have a lightning round entry?

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  Is it a gadget, or just a story that I like this week?

• 1:12:12David Pierce?

  Something going on this week you're into.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  Whatever you want. You've earned it by being on the show today.

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  Well, if it's something I'm looking forward to, then it's probably the Pixel Watch, just because I am dying to know what this thing is gonna be like. I've just been, it's just been haunting my nightmares ever since it was announced.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  Nightmares?

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  Yes. Cause Wear OS before Wear OS 3 was an absolute nightmare, that every single time a new Wear OS 2 watch was announced, I just sat on my bed and cried. It was not, you know, that's, that's an exaggeration, but it was just...

• 1:12:44Alex Cranz?

  Gentle weeping.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  It was sad. It was so sad. And, you know, like, I don't know, I'm just so curious as to what this thing is gonna be, because Google was at the forefront of wearables back in 2014, like, Android Wear was first to the game. And then, they were like, "Meh, we give up." And then they were like, "Oh no, smartwatches are popular now." Uh oh. And then like in 2019, they just started like building, they like bought a bunch of fossil stuff. They were fit bit and they were just kind of like mulling it. And then Rick Osterloh comes out and I just remember being there at the made by Google event in 2019. He's like ambient computing. And I was like, oh, are you gonna fix it? Are you gonna fix it? And then I

• 1:13:28Speaker 04

  had to wait another like two years to get that Samsung. And I was like, you kind of didn't fix. Okay, well, I'll wait another year. And then, and then I was like, oh, it's, it's, it's, you know, I still see the promise, kind of. You kind of made some progress. And then I tested the Mont Blanc Summit 3. And I was like, oh, no, the fragmentation is still there. So there's just so much I'm curious about with the Pixel Watch. I really want to get my hands on it and probably break my brain testing it, just comparing it to what Samsung's done with it. And Well, it's coming soon, right? Yeah, it's haunting my dreams. It's coming soon, October 6. I'm just so curious what they're doing with it.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  I feel like in the abstract, you described all of Google hardware.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  You did.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, if you just take out the words watch, you're like, did they fix it? And then Rick Osterloh said some stuff, and they bought some stuff, and you waited a year, and then Samsung did a thing, and then Google didn't do a thing. And then, oh, my God, the fragmentation. And I gonna do it. It's like, I, it's all of it.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Nilay Patel?

  That's Google.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  All right. My last one is Victrola put out an $800 turntable that can stream directly to Sonos, which is cool. They should have done this, like, Sonos should have done this. It's just funny that it's Victrola, which is until recently, just like one of those like zombie brands that you buy at Target for $99.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  It's like RCA.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  Biggest glow up for a zombie brand that's ever occurred.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  Good for them.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, the $99, like, you know, those like blue suitcases that have turntables in them, step up to $800 streaming directly to Sonos. Very good. All of us should be so ambitious.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  That's it for us. Victoria, thank you so much for entering us on the show.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  It was mostly fun.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:06David Pierce?

  Literally the best we can hope for.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm blaming Alex. You can tweet at us. We'll be back on Wednesday. David, what's the hotline?

• 1:15:14David Pierce?

  Next Wednesday, we have a bunch of fun stuff. I did a whole story on scooters because I can only stop myself from talking about scooters for so long. So we're doing some scooter stuff. We have some other stuff, but the big thing coming up is we're doing a whole episode about cybersecurity at the end of October. And what we really want is for people to give us cybersecurity mysteries we can solve on The Vergecast. So if you have big, small, weird, extra weird, call us and tell us about them. It's 866-VERGE11. Call the hotline. Also, the next episode of the Future Music Mini Series is going up on Monday. Ariel Shapiro is doing it. It's awesome. Lots of fun stuff going on.

• 1:15:50Nilay Patel?

  All right. You can tweet at us. David is at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Victoria is Vic M. Song. And I am Reckless. We love hearing from you. Please keep sending in redesign feedback. I love reading it. I'm trying to get back to everyone slowly but surely. It's great to hear. And I'm glad it's clicking with so many people. We are going to tweak it, but I'm glad it's like working. So that's like great to hear. That's it. Bye, everyone.

• 1:16:19Speaker 07

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:16:57Speaker 08

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