Google is shutting down Stadia / Amazon's hardware launch event

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Jay Peters discuss Google deciding to shut down its game streaming service Stadia. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins the show to chat about all the products Amazon announced at its hardware launch event this week, including the new E Ink tablet for reading and writing. Google is shutting down Stadia Google is trying to reinvent search — by being more than a search engine Google’s trying to become a one-stop shopping destination Google will help you find better results without tagging ‘Reddit’ onto every search The 11 biggest announcements at Amazon's hardware launch event Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an E Ink tablet for reading and writing Amazon fifth-generation Echo Dot smart speakers get a host of new features Echo speakers can now be Eero mesh Wi-Fi extenders Amazon’s new Echo Auto is smaller and easier to mount in your car Amazon’s latest 4K TVs improve picture quality and borrow ideas from The Frame The new Amazon Fire TV Cube has an HDMI input for controlling cable boxes Alexa is getting some much-needed smart home upgrades Amazon’s Halo Rise is a bedside light to track your sleep and wake you up Blink's new Mini Pan Tilt adds robotics to its compact home security camera Ring's new Spotlight Cam Pro mashes its most advanced features into a wireless design Sonos Sub Mini review: low end for a lower price Intel and Samsung are getting ready for ‘slidable’ PCs Leaked Galaxy S23 renders suggest Samsung could ditch the camera bump A smart lock with long-range wireless power is finally a reality Asus launches massive 17-inch Zenbook with Ryzen 6000 Intel’s 13th Gen processors arrive October 20th with $589 flagship Core i9-13900K Wacom announces the Cintiq Pro 27, its latest display graphics tablet Logitech announces its first mechanical keyboard specifically for the Mac Stage Manager isn’t just for M1 iPads anymore Hands-on with aptX Lossless, the new tech promising CD-quality audio over Bluetooth 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, we mourn the unexpected loss of Google Stadium. Then Jen Patterson Tuohy joins us live from CD Expo 2022 to get into all the smart home news and everything from Amazon. That's coming up right after this.

• 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.

• 1:58David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Google graveyard. I like to imagine we're like the local radio station. We just like broadcast from the top of the Google Reader tomb. That's just, that's just where we are.

• 2:08Alex Cranz?

  That's where we're at.

• 2:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. I'm your friend David Pierce. Alex Krantz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 2:14Alex Cranz?

  Hi, I'm still upset about Google Wave. It could have been a thing.

• 2:18David Pierce?

  It could have. I wholeheartedly agree with that. I also don't remember which one is Google Wave and which one is Google Buzz.

• 2:24Alex Cranz?

  Don't ask me to tell the difference.

• 2:25David Pierce?

  I couldn't tell you.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  Google Wave was, it was the better one.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  OK, that's good to know. That's Jay Peters. Jay Peters is here. Hi, Jay.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  I am Google Wave.

• 2:33Alex Cranz?

  Jay is the Wave.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  You work like half the time, but you seem cool. Is that, is that basically the fine?

• 2:38Speaker 04

  That's accurate. Yeah. Don't tell my boss that, but yeah.

• 2:41David Pierce?

  Neelai is not here. The excuse he made was that he has, has like 45 weddings to go to this weekend. So if you have tips on how to be a good wedding guest, please send them all to Neelai. He's at Reckless on Twitter, and I'm sure he would love to hear all of your wedding tips. We have a lot to talk about, but we definitely need to start with the big breaking news of today. Just a couple hours before we started recording this, Google Stadia is dead.

• 3:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:03David Pierce?

  Jay, you, you found out about this like 10 minutes before it was happening. Tell us what's going on.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Yep, so Google is shutting down Stadia. It's cloud gaming service. It'll stay online for folks who subscribe or play games on it until January 18th of next year. The good news is if you've invested into hardware or software on Stadia, Google's going to refund everything to you. But if you loved Google Stadia because of the dream of cloud gaming, Stadia will not be part of that dream anymore, unfortunately.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  So wait, every penny that anyone ever spent on Google Stadia, Google is giving back?

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Not quite. If you subscribed to its Stadia Pro subscription, they're not going to refund those. But if you were subscribed...

• 3:50Speaker 04

  You can still use Stadia Pro through until the shutdown happens.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  Got it. What are like incredible admission of not only failure, but like, we are sorry, we conned all of you into thinking this was a thing we were actually doing.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  That they're just giving all your money back.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not, you know, I mean, I'm happy that people get their money back because I think a lot of people, well, maybe not a lot, but a fair amount of people really, uh huh, really believed in what this could do. And, you know, it very pie in the sky. Sounds awesome, right? You can stream your games onto whatever platform, whatever screen you're in front of, but for Google, it's not a reality.

• 4:26Alex Cranz?

  I think it's because it was always a beta. It was, it was always a beta that they just charged for.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it, it launched super rocky and without a bunch of the really cool features that they announced right at the start and, you know, they slowly added some of those things, but like it wasn't enough. And, and when you have to think about like, is my internet connection going to even work to play this game? Like, I think that's enough of a barrier for people that it just can't catch on.

• 4:51David Pierce?

  I was talking about this with Tom on Wednesday show that like, there is just this invisible barrier for people that it's like internet gaming is a good idea. It's probably definitely the future. And it is just not something people are ready for. And the thing that really amazed me was going back and reading some of the stuff from the launch in 2019, like this service was never very good. Was the thing that I forgot. It was like a cool idea. And there were some people who were like, yeah, this could really turn into something. But even at the very beginning, it was like, there is some big important stuff missing here, namely like, there aren't really very many good games to play.

• 5:25Alex Cranz?

  That wasn't true.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  And it's like, if we have learned one thing, it's like, just have good games.

• 5:30Alex Cranz?

  There were good games. They had good games. The problem was the internet in the United States is garbage. Like it's bad. Everybody has bad internet. Very few people have good internet. We are currently recording this podcast and all of our videos are super pixelated.

• 5:49David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 5:50Alex Cranz?

  Because the internet is so bad, it can't handle video streams. So of course it wasn't going to be able to handle Stadia. And like, I remember talking to the heads of Stadia when it came out and I was like, what are you going to do about this? And they're like, well, you know, ISPs recognize when things are bad and they improve them. And I was like, that's just, are you dumb?

• 6:09Speaker 04

  But Alex.

• 6:10Alex Cranz?

  They were like, no, it'll happen. And I was like, but it didn't. It wasn't gonna happen.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Alex.

• 6:14Alex Cranz?

  How are you gonna make that happen?

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Well, 5G was the obvious answer for that one, of course.

• 6:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Everybody was like, 5G is gonna be, 5G and cloud gaming together, hand in hand, will transform the world. And it's like, they won't, because you still have to get fast internet.

• 6:31David Pierce?

  You say that like it's a joke, by the way, but that really is what they said. Like, that really genuinely is what they said.

• 6:37Alex Cranz?

  They really did say that. They were like, this is gonna save the world. You're gonna be able to like, cloud game, doing laparoscopic surgery on your best friend's dying mother with Stadia. They didn't say that part. But then like, these were all these huge, massive promises. And they kept forgetting the fact that, at the end of the day, you still have to have pipes that pipe the internet to, to the 5G broadcast towers and to the people's homes. And nobody wants to pay for those.

• 7:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think.

• 7:06Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, I get very passionate about internet infrastructure.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  I mean, it's important, it's important for a technology that requires good infrastructure to make the games work. So I think you're really justified in being passionate about this one.

• 7:21David Pierce?

  Well, and I think.

• 7:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:22David Pierce?

  If you're, if you do the business in a very different way, I think you can maybe get away with it. Like, I, I have a PS4 down in my basement, and I use the PS4 Remote Play to play video games on my computer. And it's like, it's kind of what you're describing. It's like occasionally blocky, there's a little lag, but it's a free thing that just sort of exists. And so anything about it that like works at all feels like a victory, and I will take that. Google came out and said, not only are you gonna pay for the games that you want, you're gonna pay for the privilege of streaming the games that you want. And at the beginning, they were making people buy that like weird expensive package that also included a Chromecast. And it's just like, they set it up as this very premium, very like, high intensity future of gaming thing.

• 8:07David Pierce?

  And you know who's gonna buy that is people who need way more out of their games than Google Stadia was gonna give them.

• 8:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes, 100%.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  I really like Microsoft's approach personally, where it feels like cloud gaming is like an add-on to the things you can already, you know, you can buy game from the store. And just play it on your Xbox and that's fine. But if you want to test one, you can test that using the cloud. I think that's a really perfect application of cloud gaming technology with the internet infrastructure for the vast majority of Americans right now.

• 8:38Alex Cranz?

  And I think it's like notable that Microsoft and Nvidia are the two that are still like really in this. Amazon's out there doing Luna. I'm sure it's going to get canceled next week. They're gonna be like, oh, oh, we're canceling these now? Yeah, we're out of this game too. But you know, Microsoft and Nvidia both have been doing this for a lot longer. Microsoft has been doing this for, since I think at least 2019, right? Was when they first launched their beta, I think.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  I think that sounds right.

• 9:08Alex Cranz?

  Nvidia's been doing it even longer. And in doing a free beta, don't charge you any money. They only started charging very recently when everybody else started charging. Before that, they were like, yeah, this is cool technology, but we know it's not worth your money yet.

• 9:23David Pierce?

  I've been wondering about Nvidia, actually, and I'm curious what you both think because like the state of GeForce now is exactly what you just described. And I think Nvidia got away with it because Nvidia was just selling all the Bitcoin mining rigs that existed in the universe.

• 9:38Alex Cranz?

  It was doing it before Bitcoin.

• 9:40David Pierce?

  But like the GPU business has been so good for so long that like Nvidia could kind of get away with this, right? And now, like what's clearly happening here is all of these companies are going through and saying, okay, where are our money pits? Where we can go and actually like the economy is not great. We're like potentially headed to a recession. Everybody's doing hiring freezes. It's like, if I'm Google, it's pretty easy to look at this and say, okay, we're paying a fortune for games because we set it up in this weird way where you have to like build an extra version of your game just to run on Stadia. We have all this cloud infrastructure that's really expensive and no one is signing up for our services. So like, obviously we should kill this thing. And I wonder if there are going to be a bunch of other companies who make that same kind of calculation.

• 10:23Alex Cranz?

  I don't think Nvidia and Microsoft will be those companies. Microsoft, because as Jay like rightfully pointed out, it's treated very much like an add-on. This is like a nice bonus perk. And they've got the infrastructure in place, right? Like they're one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world. Nvidia also really big cloud computing company. Like they've had these servers for a long time and they've been doing this for a long while. And it's, it's a different thing for them, but they've actually like, it's an actually good service. I can go play, I've been, I've played civilizations six on Nvidia GeForce now since like 2017, 2018. Been doing it for ages. And like, yeah, is it pixelated? Is it buggy sometimes? Sure. Is there one time where like, it just wouldn't quit the game?

• 11:07Alex Cranz?

  And I would like go away and I'd come back and my game was still running like four hours later, even though I'd left the browser? Yes.

• 11:14David Pierce?

  This is not the compelling case that you think it is.

• 11:17Alex Cranz?

  It's great. I love it.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  I mean, I, I think it's nice purely as an option. Like when I was visiting family one time, I played through all of Donut County on my phone using Xbox Cloud Gaming. And that was like, oh, this is a fun game about a hole that just gets bigger and bigger and eats up all the stuff. But like, if I was really into Destiny, I don't know if I would invest, you know, tons of time into Destiny on Stadia where you have to shoot good, right? Like, and I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I can do that on Stadia or other cloud platforms.

• 11:49Alex Cranz?

  You can't.

• 11:50David Pierce?

  So what happens to all this stuff now? Like there's all the infrastructure, there's people, the strangest thing I've been noticing is there are a million people who are really curious about the controller. I've never actually used the Stadia controller, but people seem to really like it. What's, what's happening here?

• 12:04Speaker 04

  I haven't used a controller either. It looks like a good deep, you know, a good controller. Like it looks fine. Like.

• 12:11Alex Cranz?

  It's nice. It lets you play the games.

• 12:15David Pierce?

  People are psyched about it. They're like, okay, you can shut down Stadia. I don't need my games, but like this D-pad y'all, like I need, I need the D-pad.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  Well, what I think, what I was, what I've been reading, and I haven't dug into this myself, you know, all the way, but I think like you can't connect it to your, be a Bluetooth to your computer or whatever. You can plug it in with a wire, but like way more controllers, you know, probably everybody has a couple just sitting in a drawer somewhere can connect to the computer or another thing with Bluetooth. And so like, I think there's a good chance that people just stop using these controllers.

• 12:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, the controller doesn't serve a purpose after this because the controller was built to connect directly to Stadia. It didn't like connect to your Chromecast.

• 12:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Alex Cranz?

  And then go through. It connected straight to the cloud. It's got its own wifi. And I'm sure somebody will get out there and hack it. Please, please hit me up on Twitter. If you're that person and you successfully do it, I want to talk to you.

• 13:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Alex Cranz?

  But for most people, it's now just a piece of plastic that is going to go into a landfill and be bad for the environment.

• 13:18David Pierce?

  Google made so many weird decisions here. The like, I forgot that the controller was connected to the internet. Like, it just, Google tried way too hard here, I think.

• 13:27Alex Cranz?

  Because they wanted to avoid the lag.

• 13:28David Pierce?

  It's just such a classic Google thing.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the real death knell happened more than a year ago when it shuttered its internal game studios. Like, if you're trying to make cloud gaming a thing and you're not going to keep your own game studios for, let's assume they're in production for two years, like, most AAA games take at least three years to make. Like, that was a pretty clear sign that they were not in this for the long haul.

• 13:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, I have been wondering why Google didn't just shut this down a year ago. Like, in a certain way, it would have been cleaner. And then everybody has been resurfacing these, like, vociferous denials that Google is shutting it down. And it's all, it's so brutal now because every one of them is like, we're in this for the long haul. Like, we know you think Google kills lots of products, but we'll never kill Stadia.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  It was like two months ago, too. Like, yeah, it's not a great situation.

• 14:24David Pierce?

  No. And it causes, like, all the things everybody already thinks about Google products, this just makes even worse. But to your point about the games, I do think the one thing that makes me think, like, Luna might still live, is that Amazon, potentially against all odds and rational thinking, is very invested in making video games and seems to have just continued to try spending money on making video games that people will play. I don't know if it's ever going to work, but it seems to be trying.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the gap we still need to see them cross is like them to take New World, which is this fairly popular MMO. I don't remember how big it is now, but like, I don't think you can play that on Luna yet, right? I think the big, when that, that will all come together when Amazon makes these big, ambitious, live-service games.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  And then you can just play in with your Luna subscription. I think that's when that will all happen, but will it happen is the real big question mark.

• 15:19Alex Cranz?

  I don't think it's gonna happen. Like, I just, I fundamentally do not think Luna is going to survive. It's got, here is my litmus test for a cloud gaming platform and whether or not it's got legs. Go on Reddit, look up the subreddit for the cloud gaming platform. And how many followers does it have? Stadia has over 100,000.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  How many does Luna have?

• 15:42Alex Cranz?

  Let's see.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Reddit, Luna.

• 15:45David Pierce?

  Oh, man. Can I just say, the mood in the Stadia subreddit is so bleak right now. Like, it's really, just the top comment on like, the main thing saying it's shutting down just says sad, but probably the best possible way to shut the service down. It's like, they're not even mad. They're just like, oh, what a, this thing had like, a beautiful life and now it's over. And let's just mourn it.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  At least I'm getting my money back.

• 16:11David Pierce?

  I guess, it's so bleak.

• 16:14Alex Cranz?

  But, uh, but to the point of like, who's actually using these services? Stadia had over, you know, dedicated cloud gaming service, over 100,000 followers on subreddit, on the subreddit. Luna Cloud Gaming, which is like, kind of the main subreddit for Amazon Luna, 2,000.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  2,700. It's a big difference.

• 16:33Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Really big difference.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  Huge difference. Like, yeah, this thing is, this thing is not gonna survive. And you look at like, the games are all games that have been out for three or four years. It's like, come on.

• 16:47David Pierce?

  I just can't stop reading this Stadia subreddit. Sorry, somebody's very mad that Stadia is being shut down. And the biggest reason that they're mad is because today is the same day that Hot Wheels Unleashed was released, and I was looking forward to playing that on Stadia.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Oh, man, that's brutal.

• 17:02David Pierce?

  RIP Hot Wheels Unleashed.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  That's so sad.

• 17:05David Pierce?

  Tough, tough day.

• 17:05Alex Cranz?

  It is notable, though. Jay, how are you feeling about the fact that Stadia, the Stadia subreddit scooped you on, on Stadia being shut down?

• 17:14Speaker 04

  You know, I'm glad for them, honestly. They are watching so close. This is, this is their pride and joy. They love it. Like, I'm glad that they, I'm glad they were able to come to terms with this a little bit sooner than everybody else was.

• 17:27Alex Cranz?

  They noticed 15 minutes before it was official. Because they were all, somebody went on the store to buy a Stadia game presumably, and there was just a sign saying, this is closing. In January 2023 and they were like, is this real? And there's like a whole flurry of it. And then it's like Jay's story and they're like, yep, it's it's real.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's real. I think what it it doesn't seem like Google told hardly anybody like it sounds like Bungie, which makes Destiny, they they're learned at the same time pretty much how everybody else did. I feel like I've read a couple of developers on Twitter who were not aware of this. And so, you know,

• 18:08Alex Cranz?

  Larian Studios.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, like Stadia will be going away, but it this creates some collateral damage that developers have to deal with, which kind of sucks for them, especially since they had no warning that this is what they'd be waking up to.

• 18:23Alex Cranz?

  I am really curious about, so Larian Studios does big RPGs. They they have the new one coming out Baldur's Gate 3. People bought the game on Stadia because it was like one of the first games announced for Stadia and it was going to have this really cool exclusive to Stadia feature where it's like it's Dungeons and Dragons, but a video game. And so you were going to be able to roll dice while like streaming it directly to YouTube via Stadia and people could roll the dice for you, like viewers could. And it was gonna be like, okay, that's cool. That's neat.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:54Alex Cranz?

  All gone, just all dead. And you go and like Larian Studio has made no comment. They have not talked about this. Baldur's Gate is still not out of beta.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:05Alex Cranz?

  It's still not been released.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  I mean, they have to pivot so fast. Although is that game coming to other systems? It must be. Yeah.

• 19:12Alex Cranz?

  It is. Yeah, it's totally coming. So it's coming to a lot of systems, but there was like a big thing was, well, we're not being exclusive to Stadia, but we are giving Stadia exclusive features like this dice rolling mechanism. I mean, that's that's really cool. And oh, you just wasted three years.

• 19:32David Pierce?

  You can only assume that they're say, as they're saying that Phil Harrison is like standing behind them, just like hucking hundred dollar bills at them, right? Like, No, no one in their right mind is making a Stadia exclusive or even like a Stadia optimized game without Google. And I think-

• 19:47Alex Cranz?

  There were Stadia exclus-

• 19:48David Pierce?

  There are-

• 19:48Speaker 04

  There were very few of them, I think. Like-

• 19:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  They were, they were there, but there were not many of them.

• 19:54David Pierce?

  And you're not doing it unless Google really, really, really makes it work for you.

• 19:57Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 19:57David Pierce?

  Which is, I think, part of, has been part of Google's problem is like, it's kind of like Meta with The Quest, right? Like, at some point-

• 20:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:04David Pierce?

  It just becomes so expensive to fund this thing unless other people buy in. And Meta seems to so far have the stomach to keep funding VR, but Google seems to have just run out with Stadia.

• 20:16Alex Cranz?

  I think it's the same thing we see time and time again with new game consoles, where you have to have a lot of established relationships with developers.

• 20:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Alex Cranz?

  And that was, besides the internet problem, the big problem for Stadia was they don't have those relationships. Nvidia and Microsoft do. That's been their success. Amazon bought those relationships by buying studios and, and building their own studios. Stadia was always just like, anybody wanna put a game on a, on a service?

• 20:45Speaker 04

  We got this great cloud service-

• 20:47David Pierce?

  Do you like games?

• 20:49Alex Cranz?

  You wanna come on over to Stadia Town?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  It streams from the internet.

• 20:52Alex Cranz?

  Nobody did!

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:54Alex Cranz?

  Well, excuse me. A hundred thousand people in the Stadia subreddit maybe did.

• 20:58David Pierce?

  10.2 thousand of them are online. This is like, this is, this is the most interesting Stadia has ever been in its history, including to Stadia fans. Uh, that's very sad. The whole, this, I cannot get over this subreddit. Everybody is just like, they've gone through the five stages of grief so fast and they're just moving on to like, you know, we had a good run and now Stadia's in a better place. And that place is like the landfill along with my controller. And it's, it's just, it's just bleak. Game Pass is the big winner here, right? Like, this, Game Pass now becomes the, if you want cloud gaming, Game Pass is, is like the default answer. And it kind of was already, right? But like, this is now even clearer than before.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:37Alex Cranz?

  Nvidia.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Nvidia too, but I mean, like for the average consumer to just jump into cloud gaming in any way, shape or form, doing it through Xbox Game Pass is probably the way most people can and may want to do it.

• 21:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like I just always liked it as this nice extra. The other people we're not talking about is Sony. Sony does, in fact, kind of have cloud gaming.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you can get it.

• 22:06Alex Cranz?

  Technically?

• 22:07Speaker 04

  You can get it through there. PlayStation Plus, I think it's the ultra, ultra premium tier offers cloud gaming, but like.

• 22:15Alex Cranz?

  Is that like $400 a month? You have to buy a PS5 every month.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's before you can get the VR headset. What I'm curious is what this all means in five to 10 years, because I feel like there was a big rush of cloud gaming stuff in like the early 2010s, and then it went away for a little bit. And we had this rush a few years ago, and this could be the dip of that next, that next movement. And it's like, are we going to see this again in 10 more years? Like, I don't know.

• 22:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:43David Pierce?

  My guess would be it's, it seems unlikely that it's going to go all the way away again, just because Microsoft in particular is just so in on this being the long-term future with Azure and Xbox. And it's like, it is the perfect confluence of everything Microsoft wants to do.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Sony relies on Azure for its cloud gaming. So like, you're right, that Microsoft stands to gain quite a bit, especially now that Stadia is going away.

• 23:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, is Google trying to make this a Google Cloud thing? They're trying to like, they've been like white labeling it for folks, right?

• 23:16Speaker 04

  They have been white labeling it. In the blog today, they kind of talked about how the technology in Stadia will be utilized in other ways at parts of the company. I mean, I don't think that's going to mean like AT&T can buy Stadia on Google Cloud or whatever. Like, I doubt that that's, I, this to me feels like a big retreat from cloud gaming.

• 23:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, that definitely means like you can connect the controller to your phone and use it to play Sudoku. Like, that's what that means. I don't know. I would not bet on anything else. Yeah.

• 23:54Alex Cranz?

  Well, I was always curious, did they own, like, we know AMD worked with them on the servers they used. Were those servers just always use Google servers that they repurposed to do Stadia? Or were those like, specific built for Stadia servers?

• 24:08Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, you have to imagine that at least the plan was to have built for Stadia servers, but like, I'm not sure about that.

• 24:17David Pierce?

  Google has talked a lot about the infrastructure behind it and the amount of work that it did. And I would assume, in the same way that like, building data centers serves gaming, it also serves other things, right? So there's probably a version of stuff that they would have had to build, and they're going to build both the hardware and the software slightly differently to do games than to like, run Gmail. But I can't imagine very much of that stuff is just going to be like, mothballed because they're not doing gaming anymore.

• 24:43Alex Cranz?

  They're just gonna like, switch Google Docs over to it. Now, Google Docs is just gonna like, really fly.

• 24:48David Pierce?

  So fast.

• 24:49Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be incredible.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Google Meet is gonna look great, you guys. It's gonna be so good.

• 24:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Alex Cranz?

  This is how they get Google Meet. This is how, this is how it's coming back.

• 24:59David Pierce?

  You can do your video chat in a Hot Wheels car.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Why didn't, why didn't they put games in Google Meet? This is why Stadia failed, you guys. Like, this is, this is it. We figured it out. Yeah.

• 25:09David Pierce?

  I think we fixed it. Yeah, this is great.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Well, they have, they got three months to turn that around and unannounce that, you know, oh, Stadia's coming back as your favorite new Meet feature.

• 25:19David Pierce?

  Uh huh. And we're now renaming it, there's going to be Meet, Meet Original, and Meet Stadia. There's going to be three Meet. It's gonna be amazing. You're gonna love it.

• 25:26Alex Cranz?

  It'll be four, because it'll be like, the Destiny Edition, will be the Hot Wheels Edition, the Baldur's Gate Edition. It's gonna be great.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  I retract this idea. I don't want it anymore.

• 25:37David Pierce?

  The absolute best part of that is you just described Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the metaverse. Like, I just, I just want you to know, that is, that is what he wants.

• 25:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Maybe, maybe he's the one. He's gonna be like, those servers, what you doing with them? I got some ideas. Get in on this, Meta.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Meta has their big, uh, quest event soon, you know, big announcement.

• 25:58David Pierce?

  That's true. That's, yeah, that's in two weeks.

• 26:01Alex Cranz?

  We bought Stadia.

• 26:02David Pierce?

  That'd be amazing. Phil Harrison works for Meta now.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  I mean, he's, he's, he has worked at Sony, and then it was Microsoft, and then it was Google. So Meta seems like a logical next jump. If he, you know, if he wants to work at all the companies.

• 26:15Alex Cranz?

  Not Amazon?

• 26:16David Pierce?

  It's gotta be Web 3 next. It's gotta be.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  I hope not. Oh, boy, I hope not.

• 26:19David Pierce?

  He's gonna go like, run Axie Infinity, and, and everything's gonna be insane.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Good luck to him. I wish him all the best.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  We should quickly talk about the other Google news of the week. They had their big search on event this week. Jay, you and I both wrote some stuff. You wrote about MultiSearch, which I actually think is like, the most interesting new Google products when it comes to search stuff. What, what was new this week? What, what happened?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  So MultiSearch is this pretty cool technology where, on your phone, you can hold up through the Google app, you use Google Lens to take a photo of something, and then you can add text to that photo search. So it's like pointing at a jacket that you like and saying, what if it was in green? And Google will show you a jacket like that, that is in green. And so it, it's a really neat way, I think, to search a little bit differently in ways that just writing out a query in text doesn't let you do. The, it's currently available globally in English, and it will be expanding to more than 70 different languages in the coming months, which is what Google announced.

• 27:25Alex Cranz?

  Is it gonna understand that I'm very into brands, and like, I want my designer labels? Or is it gonna be like, you can go buy this $2 knockoff at H and M?

• 27:38Speaker 04

  I don't know that. I, I tested it by pointing it at my AirPods Pro case, and then I typed "green, black" is what I think. I did just to like really see what it would throw up and it showed me like greenish air original AirPods case. So like it was Okay. close. It wasn't perfect, but like it was definitely like in the right direction of what I was intending. And of course, Google's gonna invest a whole lot into this, unlike other products that we've recently talked about. And so I think it will get better over time.

• 28:09David Pierce?

  Alex, I'm just imagining all of your searches where you just like take a picture of somebody's clothes and then you type but make it fashion.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:15David Pierce?

  And that's, that's just, that's the Alex Cranz way.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  What's the expensive version?

• 28:21David Pierce?

  This times 10.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  I have not tested that one.

• 28:24David Pierce?

  But add a zero.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  I need the Gucci version.

• 28:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. And Jay, you did forget one part of the step, which is that then Google will send you to Google Shopping and say, please, dear God, do not buy this on Amazon.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Uh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot that step.

• 28:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, they'll, they'll beg you to do that.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Do they, do they like blacklist Amazon results? I don't think they're legally allowed to do that.

• 28:44David Pierce?

  No. But can they shove them so far down the page below a bunch of Google Shopping results that you never even see them? Yes, they can. And they, and they will.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  I bet they will.

• 28:53David Pierce?

  Um, all right, we should take a break. We're gonna come back and talk about, uh, Amazon, because the tech news just keeps coming. Jay, thanks for hanging out.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 29:01David Pierce?

  We will be right back.

• 29:06Speaker 05

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• 30:25David Pierce?

  We're back. Jay's gone. Jen Toohey's here. Hi Jen.

• 30:29Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 30:30David Pierce?

  You're in Texas. Is this correct?

• 30:33Speaker 06

  I am in, yes, I'm in Dallas, Texas, right now, having a great time at the CDIA trade show, which is the custom integrator, smart home, audiovisual, all that kind of fun stuff.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Alex, how aggressive is your FOMO right now?

• 30:46Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's super aggressive because...

• 30:50Speaker 06

  She was tweeting me places to go and eat while I'm here.

• 30:53Alex Cranz?

  And she was like, I can't get to any of those. I was like, they only serve cheese and beans and beef. That's it. Do you want healthy food? You're not getting it in Dallas.

• 31:04Speaker 06

  Probably not.

• 31:05Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, no, I love the show though, too. Like Dallas obviously sucks because I'm from Fort Worth and we always call it Dal Ass because they call us Fart Worth.

• 31:13David Pierce?

  I like that.

• 31:14Alex Cranz?

  And it's big rivalry. So I'm sorry you're in the worst of the two towns of the metroplex. There's more than two towns, but I'm sorry you're in the worst one. But CDIA is cool. Like CDIA is a, is a show I actually really enjoy because it is all of these custom installers doing all this really weird, cool shit. And then like LG is there, Samsung's there. It sounds like Amazon is there showing off Aero stuff. Like, there's a lot happening there.

• 31:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's big. Google's here. Google's actually sponsored the whole thing.

• 31:45Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  So yeah, yeah, Google Pro, I guess they're calling it. You know, it's, everyone's here. It's a big show, but it's a little show. Like it has, it feels comfortable and small. It's not scary and huge like CES, so.

• 31:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's intimate.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  I've been enjoying it.

• 32:00Alex Cranz?

  It's an intimate show.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  Yes, very intimate. Next time you'll have to come with me.

• 32:05Alex Cranz?

  I know. Well, we'll go together and then we will drive out to Fort Worth to go to get real good food. It's not in Dallas.

• 32:11David Pierce?

  I just, I'm really hung up on the fact that Fart Worth is a much funnier joke than Dal Ass.

• 32:16Speaker 06

  Dal Ass.

• 32:17David Pierce?

  And I just, it's like Fart Worth is just very good.

• 32:20Alex Cranz?

  That's something a Dal Ass person would say. Everybody knows Fort Worth is superior. We have culture. What does Dallas have? They got CEDIA. That's it. And they only, CEDIA, I think you only got like-

• 32:31Speaker 06

  Just this year. That's true.

• 32:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's not here every year, so we'll have to wait till it comes around again.

• 32:37Alex Cranz?

  We'll go together.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  But there's a lot of cool stuff. The show floor is exciting and it's packed. There's a lot of people here. This is the first big in-person show that we've had for a long time. So everyone's excited. There's a, there's a real good vibe here and lots of loud, loud sounds everywhere.

• 32:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  Everyone playing their speakers as loud as possible.

• 32:58David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 32:59Speaker 06

  Lots of music. It's a party. It's a party here, for sure.

• 33:02Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God. I love it. Well, we had, we wanted to talk to you today because in addition to being at CEDIA, seeing a lot of the stuff that's happening at the show, Amazon also had this massive event this week. And I feel like you were blogging all week to cover this event. A lot of stuff happened. Kind of, kind of walk me through some of, walk us through some of the stuff that happened.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah. So, um, big event. Not actually as big as Amazon has done in the past. We sometimes had, you know, 72 product announcements in five minutes. But they still managed to cram a lot in. I'm impressed with David Lim's diction at that speed. He does well.

• 33:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Very impressive.

• 33:45Speaker 06

  But yeah, well, the most important, most exciting thing, I'm sure, and I can't believe you haven't mentioned this yet, if you've been on the Vergecast for like more than two seconds, is that Kindle now comes with a stylus.

• 33:55David Pierce?

  We've been waiting as long as we could. I'm very proud of Alex for making it this long. And I think at this point, we have waited long enough that Alex, we've reserved three hours for you to just talk about the Kindle.

• 34:06Alex Cranz?

  I know, there's gonna be a very special episode. I was like, emergency meeting, we need a four hour verge cast, just so I can talk about this. Yeah, no, the Kindle was definitely, I think for me, the most exciting thing that came out of this because this is their 10.2 inch, 300 PPI Kindle that you can also write on. It is not the first product that's a 10 inch writing e-ink tablet, not by a long shot. Remarkable, obviously, has done two of these already and we're waiting for a third. Books is out there. Big Me's out there. We've got a lot of companies doing this, but this is Amazon. And Amazon is like the biggest, biggest e-ink producer in the United States.

• 34:50Alex Cranz?

  Like, they're the only ones really doing it at the scale. Kobo is way, way, way behind them. They sell the most e-readers in America. So this is a huge, huge deal because like, they're kind of the de facto e-reader in the United States, which means this is now the de facto e-ink writing tablet thing in the US, maybe. I worry.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  Well, and they were showing off little, you know, how you could use it to sort of annotate while you're reading stories to your children or add notes when you're doing your research. I mean, I could see a lot of use cases for this. I mean, it's expensive, though.

• 35:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's, it's actually, it's interesting because the price is, it's kind of right between the Remarkable and my personal favorite of these devices, which is the, it's a really long and obnoxious name. I'm so sorry. The Onyx Books, spelled with an X. Yeah, Nova Air 2.

• 35:43Speaker 06

  Catchy.

• 35:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, rolls right off the tongue, that one.

• 35:47Alex Cranz?

  Hold on, you didn't let me finish.

• 35:48David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 35:49Alex Cranz?

  Plus. And which is, which is another 10.3 inch, another, you know, 10 plus inch device, same weight, pretty much as, as the new Amazon one, same size, same form with the, with the, the handle on the side, all of the same stuff, but it has Android on it. So I can also do like Barnes and Noble Nook or the Kobo e-reader or Libby.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 36:14Alex Cranz?

  And this is very explicitly for writing and reading in Amazon's ecosystem.

• 36:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Which is a large ecosystem, but definitely limits the wider appeal.

• 36:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I, I think for some people, for myself, I try to, I've been trying to like, cut back on the stuff I use in Amazon because I'm like, ah, I don't know how great things are ethically sometimes.

• 36:36David Pierce?

  But you're like amped about using a tablet from a company no one has ever heard of.

• 36:41Alex Cranz?

  In China.

• 36:42David Pierce?

  That.

• 36:42Alex Cranz?

  Where I have to like do weird hacks.

• 36:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. Of mysterious.

• 36:46Alex Cranz?

  To like activate the Play Store. I am not consistent in my, my moral code. Let's, let's be clear on that.

• 36:56David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 36:57Alex Cranz?

  If Amazon ran it with Android, I'd probably be like, buy five.

• 37:00David Pierce?

  My, my big theory about this is it is going to be like a, just a monster slam dunk, huge success instantly. Like if it's good, and we've only seen demos and stuff, but like the, the closest thing I got to a demo is I was on a call with one of the execs on the Kindle team and he held his up to the webcam and wrote, hi, David on it. And it looked really good, but that is the extent of which like, that's the only in the wild.

• 37:26Speaker 06

  That's all you saw.

• 37:26David Pierce?

  Kindle scribe I've actually seen. But if this thing is good, it's going to be a gigantic success because it's like, it's the kind of thing a lot of people want, especially like business people, which I thought was really interesting. Like they make, they're making a big pitch for this. It's like, it's a way to take meeting notes. You can have to do lists on it. It's like a thing to bring into the room with you for business meetings, which is like classic Amazon way of thinking about things. But I think it's, if it's, if it's not bad, I think it's going to be a huge hit. And it might be bad.

• 37:56Alex Cranz?

  I, I like, I think it's, I think it will absolutely be a hit. One, because. It's the first really big e-reader that Amazon's done since, what, the DX? They haven't had a big one.

• 38:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was like a decade ago.

• 38:08Alex Cranz?

  And people love that thing. People want a big e-reader. Like, that's a common complaint is, why are they so small? I want like a big screen so I can look at it from this far. So I don't have to put on reading glasses or anything like that. I can just read it. And so, one, it's really big. And two, it can write. And if they can get the writing down, but that's hard to do. It took Remarkable a long, long time to do it. And a lot of the other people in the space have really struggled with it. Books is a great example. Like, the first few miserable. There's one that I'll write on and feel even remotely okay writing on. And Remarkable has kind of a crummy UI. It's the experience outside of the actual writing, which is wonderful, is kind of crummy. And so if they can get those things down, like, that's a big success.

• 38:53David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 38:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm excited to try it. I upgraded to a paper white from the original Kindle recently. So I'm really behind the curve. So, yeah, I'm...

• 39:06David Pierce?

  Wait, like the original, like with a keyboard Kindle?

• 39:09Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  It was old. I don't think it had a keyboard.

• 39:14David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  But it was very old.

• 39:17David Pierce?

  That's still very impressive.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  This is what's so good about the Kindles, though. You know, you don't need to upgrade. It's not like a phone that you have to do it every, or feel compelled. You don't have to to upgrade every year or two years. I mean, you read a book on the Kindle, it still works. I only upgraded because I like, I needed the bigger size because, you know, I'm getting old.

• 39:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 06

  Needed bigger fonts. But yeah, I'm excited to try it.

• 39:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's...

• 39:43Speaker 06

  But, you know, Amazon did announce a lot of stuff.

• 39:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a lot of stuff.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  Do we have any more Kindle feels?

• 39:51David Pierce?

  No, we'll have more Kindle feels next week. We have lots more Kindle stuff to do.

• 39:55Alex Cranz?

  Like, I think I'm, like, forcing David to do an entire special episode about the Kindle. So I think we can save a lot of those feelings for a future date. But yeah, there was a lot of other stuff there. We got a lot of, like, router news. We got matter news, news that matters. I'm sorry.

• 40:14Speaker 06

  News that matters.

• 40:15Alex Cranz?

  I had to pun.

• 40:15Speaker 06

  Well, yes.

• 40:18Speaker 06

  It's just, it's like they made that name. They chose that name because they're like, The Verge is gonna have so much fun with this name, with all their puns.

• 40:27Speaker 06

  But yes, it was, so Amazon, they started out with their same shtick that they do every year, the ambient smart home, which is, Amazon, your smart home will work without a smartphone. That's essentially what Amazon is saying, because who doesn't have a smartphone? Amazon. So you need to be able to use, to control your home without needing a smartphone. I am totally on board with this, though. I do not like using a smartphone to control my home. So I'm good with that. And the ambient smart home is what Amazon is trying to move. That's its vision that it's bringing us to in its smart home. Sensors, devices that react intuitively, hunches. I mean, they use the, I think personalization was kind of a big focus of this.

• 41:10Speaker 06

  They've got new features for routines that can be personalized. So when you say good morning to Alexa in the morning, it will tell you your personal calendar events and your traffic, rather than, say, your husband's or your spouse's. So it, there's lots of small sort of updates to how Alexa works in the smart home. Jen had a good run.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  I was gonna say.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Did you lose me?

• 41:33David Pierce?

  Not allowed to talk about Amazon. Oh, you're back. We lost you for a second.

• 41:37Speaker 06

  You lost me? Sorry.

• 41:39David Pierce?

  Yeah. We heard, we heard your husband or your spouse, and then you were gone.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  Okay, that was, okay, all right. So, yes, Amazon is trying to get in on the personalization front, which is, which is a good angle to go for, because, you know, most homes, they're a lot, they're more than one person. And the smart home does not work well for more than one person right now. Especially, my, my family will attest to that, because they get very frustrated. But that, you know, I'm a use, I'm a, I'm a unique use case.

• 42:09Speaker 06

  I know, I have like all four voice assistants.

• 42:11Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna say, how many times have you accidentally like turned all the lights off on somebody in your home?

• 42:17Speaker 06

  Often.

• 42:17Alex Cranz?

  Just like plunged someone into darkness, possibly in a bathroom situation.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Well, the biggest problem I have, and I wish someone could solve this for me, and this is a personalization issue. My husband is a firefighter paramedic, so he works shifts. Which means if I have any kind of automations or routines that work every day, that is not good for someone that's trying to sleep in the middle of the day. And you can't set something for every third day, it just doesn't exist. And that's a solution I would love to see. I want a button that I can just press, and this is something you can now do with Amazon. They introduced buttons, we can get to that. They used to have buttons, they took them away, now they brought them back. But I would love a button I could press that just turns off all my automations. Just shuts it all down. Because, you know, I get yelled at. Kenny, there's music playing.

• 43:07Speaker 06

  Turn the light off.

• 43:09Alex Cranz?

  He's just trying to sleep and you're like, no.

• 43:11David Pierce?

  They did add some scheduling. There were some new scheduling stuff, right?

• 43:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, there were quite a few. And these enhancements aren't live now, they're coming later. There was a lot of coming soon. Coming shortly and coming soon, and not coming this year. Which I think was very specific wording. But yes, there was some scheduling updates, so you can now say to Alexa, sorry, am I setting off everyone's devices? You know, turn, lock the front door in an hour, or turn the lights off in 15 minutes. And that's a really nice feature to have. And that could be, yeah, that would help, that might help my situation a little bit. But the biggest news, the thing I was most excited about, and I actually got to, I didn't get to see the Echoes here, but they have new Echo Dots. And they're going to be mesh Wi-Fi extenders.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  Now, this is only very exciting if you already have an Eero mesh network. It's only gonna work with Eero. But the concept is a good one, and you know, we may see it trickle down to other manufacturers that also have smart home devices and routers, Google. So, you know, I like the idea. Smart home needs connectivity, and Amazon realizes we need. To bathe your home in Wi-Fi. And Aero devices, whilst less expensive than they used to be, are an investment. And this way, you've already got, you need to buy one. And if you have a couple Echo speakers already in your house, you're extending your range. And it's not like super extending, like it's not super fast Wi-Fi. It's not, you're not going to get the Wi-Fi six gig.

• 44:44Speaker 06

  So Aero's Wi-Fi six has great speeds if you get those speeds into your home. But most people don't. Right. You know, most people aren't on gig speed internets. This gets you 100 megabits, which, you know, is more than enough for streaming, would help connect, say, your camera, if you have a camera on the side of your house. So I think this is a really good new feature because not only is it in the Echo Dot that they announced, which was the new Echo Dot and Echo Dot Clock, which is the fifth generation, but it's also going to be enabled on the existing Echo Dot, which is the fourth generation, Echo Dot with Clock, and the existing Echo fourth generation speaker. So if you have Eero mesh, you've now got.

• 45:23Alex Cranz?

  So, so, but these are all like products that are like $50, $100. Like, these are cheap, whereas an Aero is usually like $200. This is like a big kind of price cut to extend your Wi-Fi.

• 45:34Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. And that's what's, I mean, you need good Wi-Fi for a smart home to work. You need good Wi-Fi for the ambient smart home. And so it really is in the, in the company's best interest to make sure our Wi-Fi is good. And this is, you know, why Ring ended up with its Ring Alarm Pro with a built-in Aero, because so many problems consumers have with Ring video doorbells are connectivity based. And, you know, Ring can't, it's too hard for them to sort of troubleshoot that. And so, you know, if you, if you have strong Wi-Fi, you get a strong smart home. And, you know, there's a few other really interesting upgrades for the Echo Dots, especially the Echo Dot with Clock is now going to have a scrolling LED display, which I think is really fun. I love, I love LED displays.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  So you can have your song title scrolling along, maybe your next calendar appointment. It's kind of a nice way of having information without having to have a screen in your face, which I'm all for, because there's too many screens in my world.

• 46:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think I think it's very cool. And I think to me, the like, the Eero thing is very clever to me because like, we should be clear, it's not turning your Echo Dot into an Eero, right? Like, it is not.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  No, it's not an access point. No. It's a good old fashioned Wi-Fi extender, like you used to plug into, you know, those terrible ones you used to plug in.

• 46:50David Pierce?

  Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it's like, you're gonna get more latency, you're gonna get slower speeds. But what it is going to do is it's gonna put Wi-Fi in places you might not have otherwise had Wi-Fi. And that alone is awesome. And I think that kind of thing is gonna be super useful to tons of people. But and it is especially for Amazon, which is like, very invested, like you're saying, in the idea that everything in my house should be able to connect to a network. It makes that possible in a way I think is very cool. And I really like the idea. Like, it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, the technology behind that is not terribly sophisticated. It's just Amazon figuring out how to basically reuse a thing that has Wi-Fi capabilities. And so in theory, this could be much more pervasive even than just putting it in the Echo Dot, right?

• 47:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I spoke to Nick Weaver, who's the CEO of Eero, and he said, yes, it's definitely something. So the concept is called Eero Built In. And he said, they're looking at other ways of extending that. They I asked about the Echo Shows, and he said, yeah, that's definitely something we're considering. He says, it's more, it's a little bit more complicated, but it's possible. And yeah, it's all done over a software firmware update. So it's not something you're gonna have to buy new hardware for. And this is something the smart home's been really bad about. You know, again, like the smartphone, every two years, buy a new smart thermostat. You know, that's not the way the smart home should work. So yeah, I think I love seeing upgrade into existing devices in our in our home. And that's another thing that Eero came out with. They now are gonna have a

• 48:15Speaker 06

  new capability for internet backup. So your Wi-Fi goes down from because, say Comcast cut someone cut a cable somewhere. And you can actually have your entire network. So everything that's on your network default over to your mobile hotspot from your smartphone, or if you have another Wi-Fi network in your home. Some people have to. Or maybe you can steal your neighbor's Wi-Fi. And so you can keep everything up and running, which is a feature they introduced with the Ring Alarm Pro last year. It's, you know, when I tried it, my smart home kind of killed it, because I have so many things. But it's a good feature to have, especially when everyone's at home and you've got to do

• 48:58Speaker 06

  both my kids are home today and e-learning days because there's a hurricane and they need to do their schoolwork, but if the wifi went down, they'd have a backup. And so I think that's another good feature that now is coming to any era. So I really love this backwards, you know, backwards compatibility for devices.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  It really does feel like we're, we're heading in the direction of Amazon eventually just being like, we will be your ISP, we'll give you internet for free, we will run cables to your house, just please don't let your smart home go offline. Which has become, it's like, the, the theme of this episode is like, if only our internet connections were better, right? Like, wouldn't the world be a magical place? And it's really, it's just really interesting to see Amazon in particular, basically like, hack around every edge it can to try to find ways to make sure your stuff doesn't go offline. Because like, you just see it all the time and there's like the, I, I always think about the horror stories people have about like, when, when the Nest services go down and all of a sudden your like, house plunges to freezing and it's like, it just takes so little for this stuff to fall apart in these really spectacular ways.

• 49:58David Pierce?

  And if you're Amazon, you have to do absolutely everything you can to make sure that that doesn't happen and it's gonna like, that fight is gonna get messy because our internet sucks real bad, everywhere.

• 50:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. The other day, my wifi died, or my, my internet died and I just, I was trying to go to bed and I usually use like an automation to go to bed and I was like, just couldn't get my lights to turn off. I was like, I just want to sleep now. I think it's a light switch.

• 50:26Alex Cranz?

  What is this decade?

• 50:27Speaker 06

  No, you finished that.

• 50:28Alex Cranz?

  How dare. I was like, very upset.

• 50:32David Pierce?

  You just slept with the lights on, didn't you? Be honest. You just slept with the lights on.

• 50:35Alex Cranz?

  No, I have, I have a Philips Hue little light switch in the other room and that, I guess, worked over like, local network. So that one still worked. It didn't need to call out. So I got it. I turned my lights off. Did I have to get out of bed? Yes.

• 50:50Speaker 06

  Yes. Well, speaking of sleep, Amazon is going to try and help you sleep with their new Halo Rise. So I'm not that excited about this product, but but because there's a lot already out there that offer this capability. But it's it's definitely something. They've done a nice job. There's no cameras. There's no microphone. There's no speakers. So for anyone that doesn't want to put any of those things by their bed, which is, you know, the large majority of us, it's a good option.

• 51:20Speaker 06

  And I like, I'm a big proponent and I'm excited about circadian lighting, you know, lighting that helps you wind down or helps you wake up. And so that's it. It takes from the Philips lamp that Philips has a lamp that is very similar looking to this. But will, you know, the light will come on gradually to wake you up in the morning. And apparently there's some algorithm and learning that will actually figure out when you should wake up, the best time to wake you up. So that'll be interesting to try out. Otherwise, it has a lot in common with the Google Nest Hub, which has the sleep sensing.

• 51:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 06

  It uses, I don't think they've specifically said, but I think it uses some sort of ultrasound detection to see how your breathing rate and to track your sleep.

• 52:02Alex Cranz?

  Right. They said it was going to use ultrasound to like, kind of bounce off of you to figure out where you are and determine if it's you, if it's somebody else in the bed, if it's a pet, that's some fancy ultrasound.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  And to do sleep tracking, so you don't have to wear a wristband or basically they don't, you know,

• 52:21Alex Cranz?

  You don't have to wear a wristband, put anything in your bed with you, like no wearables. I thought it was kind of an interesting thing, but I did think it was also weird that they're like, you know, we're not going to put a microphone in it. We're not going to put a camera in it. But we are still going to track your entire body and how your body moves in the bed. So we're still doing the tracking.

• 52:43David Pierce?

  But not in a creepy way, super normal.

• 52:46Alex Cranz?

  Like in somehow like not a creepy way, but a very creepy like it's just a weird, an interesting way, I think. But yeah, that's that's wild.

• 52:56Speaker 06

  I still think they need, someone needs to come up with a smart alarm clock that doesn't rely on a battery. Cause I mean, it does have a backup battery. It doesn't rely on hardwired power because I've written about this, but my, back to my husband, who's gonna be so mad about me talking about him so much. And he will not use any smart alarm clock. I've tried to get him to use because he doesn't trust that it's gonna wake him up. Because what if the power goes out? And, and you, you know, old fashioned battery, old fashioned alarm clocks always have batteries in, like what his did. And you just stick it on your bedside table and it always worked. Or it, it plugged in, but it had a battery backup. But none, you can't get smart alarm clock with a battery backup, which I think is a fail. I would have, that's the one thing I was listening when they announced this.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  I was like, come on, tell me it's got a battery in it.

• 53:42Alex Cranz?

  Nope. Yeah, it tracks the, it also like tracks the humidity in the room, the temperature in the room, the amount of light in the room, which you can go get a thing at a Walmart or a Target that does almost all of that for about $12. It does, that runs off a battery. Like doesn't shine a light in your face and know when to wake you up.

• 54:02Speaker 06

  To wake you up. Well, and the other neat thing here, and this goes to the ambient smart home again, and I, I was impressed with this, is when it senses that you've woken up, it can run your good morning routine. So you don't even have to say anything or do anything. And, and that's a really nice touch. I don't know how, it's gotta be tricky there though, because if it gets it wrong and wakes you up, you're gonna be really mad.

• 54:26David Pierce?

  Yeah. If it does that once, you're, you're

• 54:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's going in the trash.

• 54:31David Pierce?

  I will say, Jen, the, the next thing we need to do is we need to start slowly sabotaging your husband's alarm clock. That's the move here is like, maybe just pour a little water on it. Maybe just to like, like you don't want it to like totally break, just slowly over the course of a week, kind of fall apart. And then you can start making the case for all of your cool, technical stuff. But I did wonder, the halo rise, the more I think about it, the weirder it strikes me as a thing for Amazon to even do. Like to your point, there's a ton of these out there. The idea of like a, a light that wakes you up based on the right time to wake you up is not particularly like new or novel. People who want it can get it. And it doesn't, it's not really, it's not a way to talk to Alexa.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  It's not a speaker. It's just, it's just like a, a thing. I don't like, what, what's your sense of why this is worth doing for Amazon?

• 55:24Speaker 06

  Well, I think the last point that we just discussed is probably where it's coming from, helping to kind of integrate the routines into your sleep. So, sleep was one area they hadn't really got. Their wearables haven't, don't seem to have taken off.

• 55:38David Pierce?

  Nope. Nope.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  Not popular. And people don't like putting Echoes by their bed because they have cameras in them. The Echo Dot with clock was kind of the solution there, and that has ultrasound motion sensing, so you could use that. They could have, I'm surprised they didn't work, somehow work that into the new Echo Dots, in the way that Google Nest has done with its Hub. But I feel like this is kind of a bit of a like me too, not me too, that's the wrong word, samezies. You know, we've got to have one too, because our, because our competition has it. It's very similar in functionality to the Google Nest Hub Max, which is good, not Max, sorry, Google Nest Hub, without the camera. And actually, my husband does like that. He likes the sleep tracking for that one.

• 56:23David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 56:24Speaker 06

  That was the one he allowed to have on his bedside for more than a week. But it doesn't, not having a microphone means it can't track snoring, which is, is something quite key, I think, for sleep, for good sleep habit, is to understand if you are having sort of respiratory issues at night, that can be one of the biggest issues from, from preventing you from having a good night's sleep. And I don't think this is going to help with that at all. So, it's, yeah, like I said, it seems a bit like they felt like they needed a space on your bedside table. They needed, they didn't want it to go somewhere else.

• 56:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, I buy that. And I think it's, it's going to be really interesting to see Amazon try to start to put some of that stuff back into devices like this. Because I, I'm just assuming that like V2 or V3 of something like the Halo Rise will start to have speakers and microphones and more sensors and start to do some of that other stuff. And I think Amazon is starting to get very good at just like sort of slowly normalizing these things into people's worlds. But I still feel, like, I don't, I don't know about either of you, but like, I don't have just totally anti microphones on the bedside table, no cameras on the bedside table, no speakers on the bedside table. I have one of those old Casper lights that they made for like 15 minutes before Casper stopped being a good business. I love that thing. It's awesome.

• 57:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is great.

• 57:42David Pierce?

  And then my phone, which is of course all of those things, and I'm sure undoes all of the privacy concerns that I'm trying to solve. But it does feel like The bedroom definitely feels like it's going to be the hardest for any of these companies to make real moves inside of. So I guess if Amazon can do it here, I think you're right. They're in a pretty powerful spot.

• 58:02Alex Cranz?

  I think it's gonna be, I think it's always gonna be a challenge.

• 58:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 58:04Speaker 06

  Well, they are hampered by, you know, by that PR angle. People don't want Amazon tracking them. So yeah, it is, it's a tough one. And I think, I'm not sure this product's gonna hang around, honestly. I don't know that we'll see a version two or a version three. I feel like this is kind of maybe something they started developing a while ago and they're like, we don't have much else. Let's throw this one in.

• 58:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Just a little test balloon.

• 58:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, there are a lot of Amazon products.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, we have, so there is the glow lamp they have, which is similar to the Casper Glow that you can put on your bedside table and can wake you up gently. It doesn't have the smarts that this does in terms of tracking your sleep, but they have other devices that, you know, you could use that don't have speakers and cameras that give you light on your bedside table. I don't know. I just, the design of this one too, it doesn't really fit in with the whole kind of Amazon Echo ecosystem. But we'll see. See if it might be a huge hit. Who's gonna, who's testing it out? I don't know who's gonna review it. I guess that's probably gonna be me.

• 59:07David Pierce?

  I don't know. Sounds like not, I don't know. We'll see if your husband will last

• 59:11Alex Cranz?

  that. You, your husband or Victoria, like just all fighting over it.

• 59:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 59:16Alex Cranz?

  Or not fighting over it.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  It is a useful reminder that Amazon's product strategy is basically to like make everything it can think of, make 60 of them, and then put it on sale on amazon.com and just sort of see what happens. So it's like, all of this comes with like the gigantic grain of salt, with the possible exception of like the Echo Dot, which I suspect they know they will sell an awful lot of, that all of this is just like, see what happens.

• 59:38Alex Cranz?

  There's also the TVs though, right? They just, they announced a TV this week, the 4K one that's ostensibly like the Frame from Samsung, because it lets you put pictures on your wall and it'll just like stay on all the time. But it doesn't look like a Frame. It is just a TV. Like people will still look.

• 59:59David Pierce?

  It's just called leaving your TV on. Like what, I don't understand this at all.

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not.

• 1:00:04David Pierce?

  You're just leaving your TV on. I can do that already.

• 1:00:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, it doesn't really have the same aesthetic as the frame. It doesn't have that nice kind of matte look. But it is essentially a huge Echo Show on your wall now because it has all of the Alexa capabilities and built in and the widgets that you got on the new Echo Show 15, which has now become a TV. Because they've turned that in. You can now use Fire TV on the Echo Show 15. So those two, the Fire TV products are sort of, and it makes sense to put Fire TV on the Echo Show 15. You could even put it on the Echo Show 8. I mean, I try and watch TV on, or shows on that screen. It's not a terrible experience. But it's, Amazon has had a very limited support for video streaming services on any of its devices other than the 15.

• 1:00:53Speaker 06

  So I was excited to see Fire TV built into that. But this obviously is an Echo, it's like an Echo Show on your wall for, with the TV, but it's not touchscreen. So you use this remote. And actually, the remote I was most excited about. I thought the new remote was really quite interesting. Well, it's.

• 1:01:10David Pierce?

  I totally agree. I'm so glad you said that.

• 1:01:12Speaker 06

  Well, why do you like it? You tell us.

• 1:01:14Alex Cranz?

  Because you guys really love Peacock and DirecTV. Like, you needed those buttons at the bottom?

• 1:01:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, A, I love a good remote, just at all times. Love a good remote. And B, I think they, they did a couple of things that I thought were very smart. One is to have like a big Alexa button, right? But the other is to like, they seem to have imagined this as a thing that you both like use sitting in front of your TV, but also maybe sort of carry into the kitchen while you're doing stuff. Like you can program routines into, was it in two of the buttons? I think are there for you to pick to have routines?

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  And that's genius. I mean, and they should be doing that with more. We need more buttons. And that's something else they've announced, we alluded to earlier. So they used to have these really cool buttons. Do you remember the Echo buttons?

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

  You could use them to like play Jeopardy. It was so fun. And I use, I get emails regularly from readers saying, why did they take those away? Because they discontinued them and you can't use them anymore. And they were Bluetooth, so they were kind of flaky. But now they're introducing compatibility with more wireless access switches. I think is what is the phrase that they use. But. I don't know what they have and give us any specific models, but being able to press a button and have one of your smart home routines run is, you know, well, they don't have a smartphone, so they need buttons, back to that point. And it's a nice experience. Like, if you sit down with your remote in front of your TV, rather than having to say, "Hey Alexa, run movie time," and maybe shout because it didn't hear you properly, you

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  just press your button. So I think that's a nice experience. I'm here, one of the things I'm going to see while I'm here at CEDIA is a fancy, high-end remote that you can't buy unless you're a custom integrator and are spending a lot of money on your home. But it runs Google Android on the remote, and you can control your whole smart home from it. It's by Ava, A-V-A. And I want to go look at it because I want to write a piece about how you can create the best smart home remote. So someone will go and do it. Because since we lost the Logitech Harmony, we have no, there is nothing good. There is no good solution.

• 1:03:21David Pierce?

  I agree. The world needs more remotes.

• 1:03:22Alex Cranz?

  Thank you for also being upset about the Harmony remote. I still use mine. I've got the little buttons for my lights. I can just be like, okay, new routine. I just, I want all the lights off so I can watch Marvel movies in darkness. And it's wild that you can't do that with more remotes. You have to use your phone.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I want to get the phone out of the living room, you know, because otherwise you will need to really engage with your content. No TikTok scrolling while you're watching a good episode of She-Hulk.

• 1:03:51David Pierce?

  Amen to that. No, and I think the buttons is such a good one because it's like, and Jen, you and I have talked about this before, that like, the gold standard for the smart home is like, the only way I'm going to use it is if it's easier than walking up and flipping that light switch. And you know, it's easier than walking up and flipping that light switch is like mashing the giant green button that I have sitting right here on my desk. And like, I'm in. Like, put buttons. I want, I want like a wall of buttons that I can just do all kinds of stuff with. I'm gonna have like a, I'm gonna have like a suit of buttons that I just walk around my house in. Like this, I can't, this sounds awesome.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  Bolt a bunch of stream decks together and just wear all of them as a nice little desk.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  That I would love to see.

• 1:04:29David Pierce?

  My pajamas are just going to be buttons everywhere.

• 1:04:33Alex Cranz?

  You look great, David.

• 1:04:34David Pierce?

  I love this.

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  I was just gonna say, just the one thing, the last thing on Wi-Fi we didn't mention is the new Fire TV Cube has 6E, which is quite exciting.

• 1:04:42Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, that is exciting.

• 1:04:43Speaker 06

  Because that is a real use case. Like, I've struggled to find a use case that I really need for 6E at the moment. And, but streaming is the perfect one, because that's the one where you want the wide bandwidth, so that you, you know, when someone goes and like turns on their computer upstairs and does some work, you don't suddenly drop your streaming when you're watching your movie. So I think that, that's, and you know, that's a really good use case. I'd like to see more of that. And I, I've never really gotten comfortable with the Fire TV Cubes. They never worked that well for me, but I'm interested, I'm really interested in this one because of that 6E capability. And being able to, I think it also connects, it has, what's the other thing it does? It connects to your...

• 1:05:25Alex Cranz?

  It connects, it connects to your, your cable box. So you can, you can plug in...

• 1:05:29Speaker 06

  Yes, the cable box, so you can control...

• 1:05:30Alex Cranz?

  The HDMI cable from your cable box directly into this and funnel it everything...

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  So you have voice control, yeah. Not that I have a cable box, but...

• 1:05:41David Pierce?

  So, since, since Neelai is not here, I feel obligated to be the one to remind our listeners that the HDMI pass-through IR blaster combo is a bad idea and no one should ever try it. And everyone who has tried it, it always goes badly. Microsoft was like, "Oh, turn your Xbox into your cable box HDMI pass-through." That went horribly and they lost a whole generation of game consoles. Google tried to do it with Google TV, which went just horrifically badly. Like, Neelai tweeted a thing that he wrote in 2013, where he said, "We've been overlaying fancy interfaces on top of cable signals and praying for IR blasters to adequately control the boxes for years now, and it's never worked." And that was in 2013.

• 1:06:24David Pierce?

  So, kudos to Amazon for trying, but I, I, I am not holding my breath on this particular one. But I like the idea. It should work.

• 1:06:31Alex Cranz?

  But you got Wi-Fi 6E. So you can, you don't even have to do any of it. You can skip all of that and, and just go enjoy 4K, even when people in your home are deciding to stream Stadia in the next three months before Stadia dies.

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  Before it goes away.

• 1:06:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, get rid of your cable and stream so fast over Wi-Fi 6G. Problem solved.

• 1:06:54Speaker 06

  Well, and there were a lot of other announcements. I know Ring had announcements, Blink had announcements, but I do have to just say, I went to the Ring booth to see their new cameras, they have new cameras, and I saw the drone. You saw the drone? How big?

• 1:07:07David Pierce?

  Oh, it's real.

• 1:07:08Speaker 06

  It's real? It's, it's not that big, but um, it's like the size of a toast, piece of toast. Okay, alright. It's, it's quite small and, but they wouldn't let me touch it. But it was up in the air, but it was hanging from strings. Hmm, suspicious. Yeah. Suspicious.

• 1:07:30David Pierce?

  Oh, so it's nothing? That doesn't count, no.

• 1:07:32Speaker 06

  But I did talk to someone who told me he has it in his house and promises it does actually work. So he says it's coming soon. Did he show you video footage? No.

• 1:07:45David Pierce?

  It sounds like they showed you a chandelier in the shape of a drone.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  A very tiny chandelier.

• 1:07:50David Pierce?

  A very tiny chandelier.

• 1:07:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, I, I was like, can I bring it down? Nope. Can I reach up and touch it? Nope.

• 1:07:59Speaker 06

  So. It exists, it's real. It exists.

• 1:08:01David Pierce?

  It exists. Take it, it's, it's out of the renders phase, so we'll, we'll take that.

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  I have seen it in person, so I felt like that was a step forward. It's in the physical mock-up phase. Yes. And in this guy's home, apparently.

• 1:08:15David Pierce?

  Thank goodness. Um, all right, we really do need to take a break. Uh, Jen, do you have a few more minutes to hang out and do a little lightning round thing with us before we go?

• 1:08:21Speaker 06

  Sure, happy to.

• 1:08:23David Pierce?

  Excellent. Okay, all right, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be right back to do a lightning round.

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• 1:09:43David Pierce?

  We're back. There was so much other news this week, so we're just gonna do a little lightning round. Basically, Jen, since you're new to this part of the show, everybody just picks a thing that happened this week that we haven't talked about yet that you thought was interesting and cool and worth talking about. And you can go last, so you can have a minute to decide what you thought was interesting that you want to talk about. Alex, what do you have?

• 1:10:04Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it was absolutely the Intel Samsung slideable PC.

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Alex Cranz?

  That they showed off at the Intel event. We've kind of, everybody's been alluding to something like this was gonna happen at some point. We've seen phone versions of this. This was a laptop version. And you're initially like, that's so cool. And then you watch the video and the guy's kind of fighting with it a little as he pulls it out. So you know, like, oh, that's, that experience is not smooth yet. That's not coming this month to a Best Buy, dear you.

• 1:10:36David Pierce?

  I've watched that video so many times now, and I cannot figure out how it works. It's just like, it's, I just keep getting like fruit by the foot vibes from it, where it just sort of, you just, you just like peel it out from itself as it opens up. It's very, it's very weird. I don't know.

• 1:10:53Alex Cranz?

  It's the same thing that LG is doing with its rollable TVs, which I think, Jen, you might get to see one. I know they're showing one at CDIA. They just announced a 42-inch one. I'm stealing all of the lightning rounds, I'm sorry.

• 1:11:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I haven't got to see it yet, but it is here.

• 1:11:09Alex Cranz?

  But it's just an OLED and OLEDs have gotten to the point where you can kind of, I want you to please like send me pictures just, just to me personally. You don't have to put them on the website or anything like that. We don't need that. But I just, I just want to see them myself. But, but it's the same, it's the same concept, right? It's just an OLED display that, that's really kind of tightly wound up. And, and because it's Samsung and Samsung's gotten very good at this like bindy OLED technology, right? They're, they're better than anybody. They figured out a way to like make it tight enough to make a pretty svelte looking device. Notably, it just showed an image. There's was no computing or anything really happening with the thing. I wouldn't, this is just a proof of concept that a

• 1:11:54Alex Cranz?

  display like this could work. And then now they have to pack it into a thing. And every other time we've seen like, what about a foldable laptop that's got screens everywhere that like the mockup is, you know, a few millimeters tall. And then the actual product's like four inches.

• 1:12:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:12:13Alex Cranz?

  So yeah, this is not going to be in your next iPad, but it's just cool.

• 1:12:18David Pierce?

  These always kind of bum me out if I'm being completely honest because they're like, they're very cool. And you look at them and they're very exciting. And then inevitably there's that like one line in the story that's basically just like, this is just a science project that some guy made in a lab and they have no plans to do anything with it. And this one screen that they showed you, this demo costs $6 million. And, and it will almost certainly never be a product. And I just get to the end and I'm like, oh, that was a cool, like basically animated gif that I just saw.

• 1:12:47Alex Cranz?

  That's the way, that was the foldable phone for years. And, and now it's like an

• 1:12:52David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:12:53Alex Cranz?

  Maybe almost mature.

• 1:12:55Speaker 06

  Everywhere here. Everyone has it here.

• 1:12:57Alex Cranz?

  Really?

• 1:12:58David Pierce?

  Really?

• 1:12:58Speaker 06

  Because everyone's from Samsung.

• 1:13:02David Pierce?

  Is everybody just walking around doing like cool moves where they like aggressively close their flip phone when they're done?

• 1:13:07Alex Cranz?

  Just slap it close.

• 1:13:08David Pierce?

  Or it's like at the end of the meeting, everybody like folds on cue and then you stand up and leave.

• 1:13:13Alex Cranz?

  The end of every presentation, they snap them shut and walk off stage. I do. I want one. So cool.

• 1:13:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Alex Cranz?

  All right, David, what was yours?

• 1:13:20David Pierce?

  I, I feel obligated to talk about Stage Manager. I don't want to, to be clear. Stage Manager just makes me angry and sad, but there was Stage Manager news and I feel obligated to talk about it. So the, the news this week was that Apple is bringing Stage Manager, which it originally said was only going to be for iPads with an M1 processor to, I think, the most recent two generations of iPad Pros. It's coming to those without one feature, which is the external display support. So you won't be able to run Stage Manager on a monitor while also having your, your screen.

• 1:13:55Alex Cranz?

  Oh no.

• 1:13:56David Pierce?

  But.

• 1:13:57Alex Cranz?

  It's terrible.

• 1:13:58David Pierce?

  But they, but they're bringing Stage Manager to other things, which to, strikes me as exactly the wrong impulse. Like to me, there should just be one, they should make one iPad, not even like a model, just one iPad that runs Stage Manager and give it to Craig Federighi because he really likes it and no one else should have to have Stage Manager. Like fork iOS for Craig and leave the rest of us alone.

• 1:14:18Alex Cranz?

  No one else.

• 1:14:19David Pierce?

  To not have Stage Manager. That's, that's, that's what I want. Not more, less. And it does seem like the, the betas keep coming of iPadOS and Stage Manager seems to be getting.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  It's coming, David.

• 1:14:31David Pierce?

  It's, I know it's coming and it makes me sad. And it seems to be getting better in some ways and worse in other ways. And it's like, it's just, it's just a mess. But the good news is many more people are going to get to experience the mess. So congratulations, everybody.

• 1:14:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm so excited to experience the mess with all the M1 iPad Pro owners.

• 1:14:50David Pierce?

  It's just not good. That's the thing. It's just not good.

• 1:14:54Alex Cranz?

  It's just bad. What are you gonna do if it comes out and somehow between the latest beta release and the release of the new OS, it gets good?

• 1:15:06David Pierce?

  I'll be psyched. Are you kidding? I've spent a decade trying to get better multitasking on the iPad out of Apple. And this is like, the most, I was gonna say the most interesting idea. It's an idea.

• 1:15:20Alex Cranz?

  Could the pile be good ever?

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  I don't know. Maybe. Potentially.

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  Craig could be on to something.

• 1:15:26David Pierce?

  Craig loves his piles. That's all I know. And Craig, Craig likes weed jokes and piles. Those are the two things that we know about Craig.

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  I've given up on trying to multitask on the iPad, honestly. I just, it was, it's never been a good experience. But also, I don't want to multitask on my iPad that much. I like using my iPad as my non multitasking device. It's like, pick our lane. Is this a computer?

• 1:15:51Alex Cranz?

  It's my focus device.

• 1:15:52David Pierce?

  That's fair. Well, I think the problem is that there continues to be this very small, but incredibly loud minority of people who want to do like, real, like, capital P power user stuff on their iPad.

• 1:16:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06David Pierce?

  And those people have, tend to have a very loud voice on the internet and talk about this stuff a lot on the internet. And so they drown out the people, I think, who are most iPad users. And, and it seems like Apple has struggled to make both sides happy. And I think is sort of increasingly pushing towards this, like, how do we give the power users more stuff to do? And I'm not sure that that actually turns out to be the right strategy all the time.

• 1:16:30Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think they run into this problem of like, they've got this M1, they've got these really nice processors in it. They've got the M1 processor in it. And so it's like, okay, that's the same one as in the laptop. So it should be able to do laptop stuff. And it's like, no, it shouldn't. Maybe you shouldn't have put that in there. Maybe we don't need a $2,000, when you get the stuff iPads.

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  I was sold on the argument that the iPad was now a computer, once they brought the iPad Pro out with the keyboard. And my husband went back to school. I'm sorry, my husband again. So we got him an iPad Pro, and he did three years, three years of college with it as his main computer. I felt like this was a big test for how, and he is not techie. He doesn't really use computers. He, you know. So this was a real challenge. And it failed spectacularly.

• 1:17:20Speaker 06

  It really did. I mean, he survived. He graduated with honors.

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  But it couldn't, half the time, I would have to pull out my computer to help him access something and then upload it to the iPad for him. And it just, he could write his paper on it, that was fine. That's what the main thing he wanted to do. But to use things, some of these tools like Blackboard and Canvas that a lot of these college programs use and schools use, it just didn't work. It was, anyway, it was, it was, it was not a good experience. And that Apple keyboard that comes with it, or doesn't come with it, sorry that you spend a very small fortune on, it's worn away. I can't read any of the keys on it anymore. He's only had it for a couple of years. So, yeah, it was not, it was not a success. I was very disappointed. But now it's a great TV watching device

• 1:18:12Speaker 06

  for him, now that he's graduated.

• 1:18:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, there you go. It does. The iPad fails very gracefully over the course of its life, which I appreciate about it. It's, I've always liked that. All right, Jen, what's, what's yours? What's your lightning round?

• 1:18:24Speaker 06

  Okay, so I have, big gadget news in the smart home is Roomba has its new, or iRobot has its new Roomba this week, they announced, just the day before the Amazon event, because technically they're no, they're not owned by Amazon yet, although Amazon is trying. And they have announced, finally, very late to the party, a robo vacuum and mop in one. But what's neat about it is that it actually is a robotic mop. So all the other mops, you have to kind of, all the other robot vacuums that have mops, you have to stick the mop on, like you have to pick it up and

• 1:19:00David Pierce?

  Oh, right.

• 1:19:01Speaker 06

  Stick it on the bottom of the robot, and then it goes off and does its job. This one, Roomba has, it kind of raises itself up on aluminium arms and then slides itself underneath the robot and then goes off and does its mopping. And then when it's done, or if it comes up to carpet, it will stop and then lift the mop up and put it on, back on top of the robot, vacuum the carpet, and then vice versa as it goes off around, on its merry way to clean your house. So basically, it's the two in one. You don't have to get your hands dirty at all if you want to mop and vacuum.

• 1:19:37David Pierce?

  So is there just a gross wet mop inside of your Roomba at all times now?

• 1:19:44Speaker 06

  So you do, yes. That's the answer.

• 1:19:48David Pierce?

  Okay, I mean, that's fine. It's just gonna take me a minute to get used to.

• 1:19:52Alex Cranz?

  What's that smell? I haven't changed the mop in my Roomba lately.

• 1:19:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. It's removable. You just rip it off. It's Velcroed, washable, throw it in the washing machine. And then you do have to manually attach it to the bottom of the mop plate when you when you want it to be clean. But it has it has a water tank in, so it's squirting water onto the mop, so keeping it damp as it goes around. And it has, it's smart enough, so iRobot has their, what they call their robot OS, the fifth generation that kind of helps make the robot smarter. And it applies to all their robots, not just the new one, which is called the Roomba Combo J7 Plus.

• 1:20:34Alex Cranz?

  Woof.

• 1:20:35Speaker 06

  That it will go in, when it goes into a room, it does the, it will go intelligently and do like the mopping first and then vacuum the carpets or vacuum the carpets first and then mop. So it can be efficient rather than having to stop and reload its mop every time it comes across a carpet, because it can map your room. So it knows where your carpets are or where your rugs are versus your hardwood floor or your tile floor. So I'm, it's a very expensive robot, over a thousand dollars, but it does come with the auto empty base, so you don't have to get your hands dirty emptying the little bin. You do have to fill it up with water. And yes, you do need to clean the mop. You can't just leave the mop on.

• 1:21:16Alex Cranz?

  So sort of like every morning before you leave the house, you feed the dog, you give the dog water, and then you go and you like feed the mop into your Roomba. You're like, goodbye, guys, have fun, and leave. That's like the idea?

• 1:21:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then the robot will, well, actually, that's one of the good things. They just came out with a new capability in this new OS to avoid pet bowls, or if you want, clean really well around pet bowls. So it has, so it has visual, it has artificial intelligence that helps it identify a pet bowl and know that it shouldn't bang into it, because Roombas do bang into furniture. I've actually had a Roomba knock my chairs down regularly. But now it can identify a pet bowl or a litter box and not bang into it. But it will also, but it'll clean and mop closely around it so that you can come home to a nice clean pet bowl rather than a sloshed.

• 1:22:13Speaker 06

  Mess that your Roomba has created while you were gone.

• 1:22:18David Pierce?

  That's pretty good. I make a lot of fun of fancy Roombas, but I also own a fancy Roomba, and I love it to pieces. Like, it is a truly glorious device to own. And I got the one that empties itself, and it just runs, and I don't think about it. And it is truly, truly delightful. So when they make one of these that goes into a swimming pool and cleans itself at the end of the day, that's where the magic happens. I want one that goes right into my washing machine at the end of the day, and cleans itself, and then just sort of scoots back.

• 1:22:49Speaker 06

  Well, they do have, there are two that will clean their own bottoms, as I like to say. But they, and it goes in, there's the Omni by D-Bot, and then RoboRock has one. And it goes in and scrubs the mop, and then blows a little hot air on it to dry the mop, so that you never have to deal with it. But that one's even more expensive.

• 1:23:09David Pierce?

  It's like a little car wash for your robot vacuum.

• 1:23:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a car wash for your robot vacuum, exactly. And it makes a funny little noise. It's like...

• 1:23:21David Pierce?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:23:22Alex Cranz?

  I love it. This is the closest I've ever felt to wanting to buy one of these things. Thank you.

• 1:23:27David Pierce?

  It's worth it. It will change your life. It feels ridiculous when you're buying it. From experience, I can say, there is a time when you're gonna look at it and be like, am I really about to spend all of this money on this thing? Like, I could just vacuum like a person. And then...

• 1:23:40Alex Cranz?

  But then your floors are clean.

• 1:23:41David Pierce?

  And then you don't have to vacuum like a person. It's great.

• 1:23:45Speaker 06

  I do have one more gadget, if you want it. One more lightning gadget.

• 1:23:48David Pierce?

  Sure, do it.

• 1:23:50Speaker 06

  So, Ufi, which is Anker's smart home brand, has released a very interesting new camera system. It is the Ufi Cam 3, and it comes with a home base 3. And what it's artificially intelligence-powered data processing that does it all locally on the little home base in your house. So it's not sending your video up to the cloud. And it has facial recognition, animal/pet recognition, vehicle detection. So the idea is, you shouldn't get hundreds of annoying alerts saying, "There's motion at your door." It'll say, "There's a person at your door," or "There's a dog," or "A pet," or "A vehicle." And then the facial recognition kicks in, and it can say, "There's a stranger in your yard," as opposed

• 1:24:34Speaker 06

  to, "Your husband's in your yard," or "David's in his yard," or "Alex's in..." And that's

• 1:24:40Alex Cranz?

  I don't have a yard.

• 1:24:41David Pierce?

  Alex is frequently in my yard, though. I never, I never ask, but she's frequently in my yard.

• 1:24:46Alex Cranz?

  At the window. Peek again. What you guys doing there?

• 1:24:50Speaker 06

  You get facial recognition on a number of cameras these days, but most of it has, has to have some kind of cloud component for the processing, whereas this is all edge processing, which is really makes it a lot faster, which means for a security system is, is pretty crucial. It also has up to 16 terabytes of local storage, which they tell me can hold 60 years of video before you need to erase any of it. You have to buy the extra storage separately because obviously a 16 terabyte hard drive is not cheap.

• 1:25:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Speaker 06

  But if, when you buy one of these, when you add a hard drive to it, you can add a terabyte hard drive up to 16, it gives you continuous video recording, so 24/7 video recording, which again is something that really doesn't exist in this, in the DIY smart home space right now. Google Nest has it on some of its cameras, but it's not a big, it's something a lot of people ask for, but most companies don't offer because you're using cloud storage, but this doesn't.

• 1:25:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and it's not going to the cloud. So it's like, if I fall down and accidentally record myself looking like a dumbass because I fell down, no one will ever know.

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  No one's gonna, no one's gonna see it.

• 1:26:02Speaker 06

  No, and they

• 1:26:03Alex Cranz?

  I can delete the footage.

• 1:26:05Speaker 06

  And bringing this back to how we started, what I really love about this is they have new cameras that come with the Homebase 3. It's the Ufie Cam 3 and they're 4K, they have built in solar power. It's, it's a, it's, it's an impressive system, but if you have Ufie cams and you buy the Homebase 3, this AI capability, which Ufie calls its bionic mind, will work on all your existing cameras. So it works with every

• 1:26:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's dope.

• 1:26:30Speaker 06

  Ufie cam. So you're basically upgrading your existing cameras by adding this hub. So, and that's a really, you know, that's a good strategy for companies, I think.

• 1:26:40Alex Cranz?

  That's sick.

• 1:26:41Speaker 06

  Improve the company, you improve what you already have.

• 1:26:44Alex Cranz?

  I was like, that, no, that's like, I, I don't need any cameras in my home, but if I did, that would be incredible. That's what I would want.

• 1:26:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, and especially now that that stuff is like trickling down to all these other brands that that's especially ones that aren't trying to like charge you an arm and a leg for other stuff. That's pretty exciting.

• 1:27:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's no fees for this. You just buy the device, stick it in your home, and it will keep going for 60 days, 60 years.

• 1:27:08David Pierce?

  60 years. And I'm sure all the gadgets will last that long also. It'll be great. All right, we have gone way over. Jen, thank you for going to that deeply sad looking press room to hang out with us. But yeah, thank you both. Tons of good stuff on The Verge. Esther Wang wrote a great piece about the campaign to stop Asian hate. You should go read that. I'm supposed to promote Decoder on this show, but Neela's not here, so I will absolutely not do that. Don't do it. Under no circumstances should you go listen to Decoder. Don't watch it. We're gonna have the third episode of our Future of Music series on Monday. The first two have been really awesome. I love that. It's so good. It's been really fun. Yeah, it's two, two great, great shows so far. I'm hosting the third one, and I'm confident it will be the least good of the three, but it'll still be fun. So check that out. We're gonna be back next Wednesday. We're doing some more

• 1:27:53David Pierce?

  earbuds testing, and I know there are some people who hate that segment, so I'm sorry, but we're doing it anyway. We're gonna have more Amazon stuff to talk about because we're not done talking about Kindles. We're also, if you have cybersecurity mysteries, we're doing an episode at the end of October all about cybersecurity. So if you have some weird cybersecurity thing going on in your life, and you would like to talk to us about it on the show, and maybe we can help you solve your problems, hit us up. That is 866-VERGE11. You can follow us all on Twitter. Alex is AlexAcrans, Jay is J Peters, Jen is JP2E, and I'm Pierce. That's it. That's The Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  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 Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:29:11Speaker 07

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• 1:29:40Speaker 08

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