The best laptops for school, tablets for reading, and routers for home

The Verge answers questions from The Vergecast Hotline. We hear from David Pierce on balancing privacy and modern conveniences for digital journaling, Alex Cranz on tablets for reading, Dan Seifert and Allison Johnson on tech reviews at The Verge, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on smart home routers and doorbells, and Monica Chin on laptops for college. Further reading: My impossible search for the best, most powerful, most private journaling app ever The best iPad to buy in 2023 Ethics Statement - The Verge Nest Wifi Pro review: better, faster, shinier Eero Pro 6E review: faster Wi-Fi but flakier performance Aqara Video Doorbell G4 review: this battery-powered buzzer needs to go back to basics The FTC wants to ban those tough-to-cancel gym and cable subscriptions Best laptop 2023: 15 best laptops you can buy Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Hey Vergecast Hotline, it's your friend David Pierce. Just calling to say, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 800 number management. I am calling you from the Alexandria Amtrak Station in Alexandria, Virginia. And I'm just calling to tell you about the show we have coming up for you today. We are going to spend a whole episode talking about your questions from the Vergecast hotline. We've got a ton of good ones. Thank you so much for calling in with all of your questions. We're going to get questions about laptops, questions about the smart home, questions about privacy, all kinds of good stuff. And as always, please keep calling the hotline, 866 VERGE11, or you can just email questions to [email protected]. We love your questions. We love answering them on the show. Please keep them coming. Anyway, that's all coming up in just a sec, but I have a train to catch. This is the Vergecast. See you in a second.

• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 1:13Speaker 02

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• 1:44David Pierce?

  Welcome back. As I said, we're going to spend this whole episode answering your questions from the Vergecast hotline, 866 VERGE11, by the way. Keep them coming. I want to start with this question that we got from Chris.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  Hey Verge, my name is Chris. I'm from the US, from Iowa. For several years now, I've been struggling to find the right balance between mobile online privacy and modern conveniences. Everything you do on your phone is being tracked nowadays, and it feels like the more you go toward privacy, the more you compromise on convenience and vice versa. My question is, what is the best approach to have the best of both worlds? Is it iPhone? Is Apple really the customer privacy advocate that they claim to be? Is it a tracker-blocking VPN? Is it a de-Googled custom Android ROM like E-Foundation's EOS? Is it something like a light phone, a flip phone, no phone at all? This has been a real struggle for me, and I can really go on and on about it, but

• 2:41Speaker 04

  thank you for taking the time to answer this, and I really love the show. Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:46David Pierce?

  I love this question, and it's actually something I've been thinking a lot about personally. Two things happened to me recently that made me ask a lot of these same questions. First, I had my first kid in December and suddenly had a million people asking for photos and videos and information about how he's doing, and a million photos and videos and information about how he's doing. And two, my 2023 resolution was to start a personal journal again. I've written in a journal every day of 2023 so far, which is maybe the best I've ever done on a New Year's resolution. Honestly, I'm very proud of myself. So, like I said, this made me start asking questions about private spaces and personal spaces and what it means to have stuff that you care about be yours on the internet.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  And the thing about all this is, it ends up being surprisingly philosophical. Some people are really worried about privacy, and they don't want to do anything that's even remotely close to risking losing or leaking data. Other people are like, "Well, I have nothing to hide. Who cares?" I don't really agree with that last take, and I'm not here to pick fights on any of that, but let me just say this: What I know about myself is that I do things differently when I have full trust that something is private. I rate differently in my journal if I know that maybe someday someone will see this versus I'm just gonna burn this thing and it's gonna be gone forever. My Instagram feed and my Camera roll are filled with really different kinds of photos because people might see one and might not see the other.

• 4:13David Pierce?

  The truth is, we just act differently in public than in private. We just do. So personally, I've become worried about the companies who sell my preferences and know my whereabouts, yes. But I'm maybe more interested in finding places that I can trust to just be for me, so that I can be completely myself. In all of this, there's really private spaces and there's personal spaces. They're similar, but they're not the same thing, and I'm trying to find both. Anyway, when I started journaling, I downloaded Day1, which is like the giant of the digital journaling space. I didn't want a paper journal because I also like to save photos and links in my diary. Plus, my handwriting is borderline unreadable. My wife likes to say I write like a serial killer.

• 4:56David Pierce?

  Also, I work for The Verge. I like technology. So I downloaded the app, paid for Day1 Premium, and started writing. And I noticed a few days later that Day1 was storing kind of a wild amount of data about me. It has all the journal entries I type, obviously, but it was also pulling in all my calendar events for the day, all the locations I'd been to, all the photos I'd taken. I gave it all these permissions, but I kind of did it without thinking about it. And on the one hand, it makes for a great journaling system. I have these really cool, really complete records of all of my days automatically. But also, you know, yikes. That's a lot of really personal, private information for one app to have. Even more so when you factor in that my Day1 journal, the thing I actually type in,

• 5:39David Pierce?

  is maybe the one thing on earth I most want to keep private. That, to me, is the perfect encapsulation of what Chris mentioned in his voicemail. Sure, a paper journal under my mattress would technically be more private, but I want all the modern niceties and upsides of an app like Day1. Is it even possible to have it both ways? So I called up the folks at Day1 to ask them about this.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  Paul Main, head of Day1 at Automattic.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  Murphy Randall, lead of the web client team on Day1 at Automattic.

• 6:09David Pierce?

  Paul told me that when he was first starting Day1, the features and privacy trade-off was right at the top of his mind.

• 6:16Speaker 05

  I wanted something that I trusted myself to capture and store all of these memories that would exist like even after me, but mostly around the comfort of knowing that I could put whatever I wanted there and it's unlikely or impossible for anyone else to even see it. And that manifested in the early days where it was, we were scrappy and just bootstrapping an idea to be offline first, where everything was basically a webpage and apps just synced with a server. So Day1 was starting with the Mac to be stored locally on your file system, where by default, only you, whoever has access to your computer, would see it. The downside being if you lost that computer, you lose all of those memories.

• 7:00David Pierce?

  Early on with Day1, there was no way to sync your stuff between devices because there was no way to do it privately. Then, for a while, you could sync through Dropbox, but eventually Day1 built its own end-to-end encrypted service because it didn't want to just offload everything and trust Dropbox. But again, even that is a trade-off. End-to-end encryption is a good thing and something you should look for, but it's still a risk. And Murphy, who recently led a whole project building a Day1 web app, said that Day1 is constantly making trade-offs between privacy and convenience, features and personality. And every one of those choices has consequences, sometimes ones you don't see.

• 7:39Speaker 06

  That's the line we walk all the time. And we've really messed ourselves up by being a little overzealous with the privacy at times. Like, for example, we originally locked up so much about entries that like we didn't even allow ourselves to see the date on which the entry was written. Like, you know, the entry date. You say like, "I'm writing an entry on Christmas." The server that we had didn't know that you said it was on Christmas because we wanted to say as much as possible is invisible to us. But it turns out like if you want to make a web app that can pull down a few entries, you kind of got to know the dates. And so... That's a line that we had to walk and we are limited in the features we can offer now in some ways because of the stuff that we locked up in the past. And so now, you know, we can release an app upgrade that would say like, well, okay,

• 8:24Speaker 06

  maybe we'll just decrypt that one date and make it so that we can let the user say, what journal entries do I have for Christmas? And then, you know, get it from the web app. But we do what we can to work within the confines that are set. So the new web client that we're releasing very soon, that's in private beta right now. Originally, we wanted to make something kind of like Evernote, the Evernote experience, where if you go to Evernote, you can just see a few of your most recent notes and edit them, and it's a very lightweight experience. But since our stuff is end-to-end encrypted, we ended up having to go all in and write like a more advanced client that would pull all your entries down from the server, decrypt all of them, index them, so that you can interact with them in the day one

• 9:09Speaker 06

  way, you know? You can't just like fetch a few entries and work on them. That's a technical cost that we incurred by opting for privacy.

• 9:18David Pierce?

  One example I really like here is passwords and encryption keys. The most private thing an app can do is say, here's your encryption key. We don't have it, so write it down. And if you lose it, you're hosed and we can't help you. Privacy-wise, that feels great. Convenience-wise, it's a total pain in the ass. Here's how Paul explained how Day1 thinks about all that.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  What we do is we rely on the device manufacturer or OS manufacturer, in this case, Apple and Google, to store in their private key storage solutions. They have a key store that only Day1 can access this key, and then we put it in there, and then the app automatically fetches it from there. When you go sign in on another device, it'll, it'll find it in there because you're authenticated with your Apple account. So less secure than managing your own private key. And Apple's continuing to advance their security around these things as well. So as they get better, our encryption is better. But it's more of a consumer-friendly way of offering end-to-end encryption, private

• 10:21Speaker 05

  key storage without the user, the downside of like managing that key in a physical way that if it's lost, all is lost, like it is with a wallet.

• 10:31David Pierce?

  I also asked Wesley Roche, the developer of another journaling app called Everlog, about the same stuff. He said he's also trying to figure out how to do secure sync, because that turns out to be the first privacy feature trade-off that you really want to get right.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  Right now, the way it is, your data, it's secure on your device. So it's secured by Apple's Secure and Clip and everything. But the moment you sync with Psychload, there's a small chance that the app could be breached by, I don't know, someone at Apple owner. So that's pretty important right now.

• 11:03David Pierce?

  I asked Wesley if there are any features he just straight up can't add to Everlog, purely for privacy reasons. And he said, yeah, there are lots of them. The big one is AI.

• 11:14Speaker 07

  One big thing will be sentiment analysis. Like, it would give the AI your entries and it would say, this entry is positive, this entry is happy, this entry is, you're anxious, or whatever. That could be great for stats and, but again, I don't think people would be interested in sharing their their stuff with third parties.

• 11:36David Pierce?

  The more I thought about this trade-off between privacy and convenience, between having lots of features and having something that feels like it's just yours, the more I started seeing it everywhere. Like in another app I use, Obsidian, which is a super popular new note-taking app. Part of Obsidian's whole appeal is that the files it's working with are just Markdown files saved on your computer. They're not stored on a server somewhere, they're just there in a folder on your device. Obsidian does have end-to-end encryption, but you don't have to use it to use the app. But Obsidian also has this big ecosystem of third-party plugins, where anyone can write code and post it on GitHub that changes the way Obsidian looks or adds new features.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  That can get really messy, really fast, and be a weird privacy thing if you let it. Stefan Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, told me he thinks control is the key. He likes the idea of starting with a totally private experience and then letting users choose how much they're willing to give up in exchange for new features.

• 12:35Speaker 08

  That means that if you want to build a ChatGPT plugin, I think there's like four or five of them already out there that are slightly different variations on how you might want to use ChatGPT with your, with your notes. And it comes with, you know, caveat emptor, like, there's like a little bit of, because we give you so much freedom, it means that the user has to make their own choices about what they're willing to give up.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  The trade-off here is that Obsidian is kind of awkward to figure out. When you first set it up, it doesn't do that much. It's just a text editor, basically. You have to figure out how to allow yourself to have plugins, and then find, and research, and add, and explore all these additional features, basically by yourself. But to some extent, I think that's probably a better strategy, privacy-wise, than just dropping you in the deep end and forcing you to figure out how everything works. You might notice, by the way, that AI keeps coming up here. For good reason. If you want to look ahead to where all of this goes next, look at ChatGPT. There are a bunch of companies out there trying to build tools that apply ChatGPT to your life. Which sounds great, right? You could ask a chatbot to find that link you were looking at yesterday,

• 13:44David Pierce?

  or remind you what your dentist's name is, or, I don't know, anything else you can think of. But that means giving a tool like ChatGPT access to a vast amount of your personal data. Dan Seroker, the CEO of a company called Rewind, is trying to figure out how to bring AI chatbots to life while still getting that privacy-convenience balance right. Rewind is an app that records everything you do on your computer. It takes screenshots every two seconds. It records all your meetings. It stores all your web history, and much more. And now, you can use ChatGPT to interact with all that info. You might think that's useful. You might think it's a total privacy disaster. Dan said he's trying to find a way to get as much of the upside as possible with as little of the downside as possible.

• 14:27Speaker 09

  I think using privacy as the main constraint and respecting people's privacy is the key technological insight here that will allow this to be adopted by not just tech enthusiasts, but mainstream users. Because the reality is, we live in a world where more and more of your data is for sale, more and more of your privacy is being, you could say even compromised, for utility. And I think, in that world, finding a solution that strikes the right balance and respects your privacy, doesn't just pretend it doesn't exist, is, I think, the key unlock to this.

• 15:02David Pierce?

  The way Rewind does it is to send only the relevant bits of your data to OpenAI in order to make ChatGPT work. So instead of uploading all your data, Rewind is first curating just the stuff that matters, turning it into text, and then sending it for processing. This feels to me like a pretty good middle ground, but it's still a big trade-off, and I'm not sure I know if the usefulness outweighs the intrusiveness. Ultimately, I come back to something Obsidian Stefan Ango told me, that the best answer is probably lots of answers. Everybody has different principles and needs around privacy, and the best thing tech companies can do is give you the information you need to make choices, rather than trying to make them for you.

• 15:40Speaker 08

  It's the same thing as kind of the right to modify, right to extend, right to repair. Like, those types of ideas, I think, are strong within the Obsidian community. We want to give the user control, you know, respect the user's ability to work with the software in whatever way they want.

• 15:59David Pierce?

  Anyway, let me get back to Chris's initial question for a second. I think the answer is complicated. But Chris, to your specific points, based on what I've learned, here are a few things I would say. One is that most people seem to agree that, on balance, the iPhone is a more secure ecosystem than Android. I don't think you need a VPN for most everyday web browsing, but if it makes you more comfortable, go for it. There are some good ones out there. And I would encourage you to keep different kinds of information in different places, and keep your most important, most private, most personal stuff in a place all its own, ideally one you control and understand as completely as possible. Be wary of things that automatically share stuff with other people. Make sure you understand how the sharing and publishing and collaboration settings work,

• 16:43David Pierce?

  and go for end-to-end encryption anywhere you can. I started out thinking that maybe the only really good answer here is just as little tech as possible. Throw your phone into the river, move into the woods, and like, write on parchment paper, or whatever. But I'm actually encouraged by the potential here, that as more people start to care about privacy, there will be more products that actually start with privacy and then build from there. But it's very clear that there will always, always be trade-offs, especially as we get into whatever this AI world is gonna be. You just have to decide which ones you're okay with. Personally, I'm sticking with day one. Big fan. Okay, we need to take a break, and then we're gonna come back and answer a lot more of your hotline questions, all of them, I promise, much more quickly than I just did. We'll be right back.

• 17:32Speaker 01

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• 18:56David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. And as promised, we're going to answer many more hotline questions, all of them much more quickly than the one that we just did. First up, Alex Krantz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 19:07Alex Cranz?

  Hi. I bet I know what it's about.

• 19:09David Pierce?

  There's like two things you come here for, and it's, it's great. And this one's not about Plex, so there's only one possible option. But let's just get to it. We have a question, I believe it is from Andrew.

• 19:17Speaker 11

  Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm a longtime listener and reader of The Verge, and I'm a law student now. I've been thinking about buying an iPad or potentially an e-ink tablet, but can't seem to decide which might be better for reading and taking notes. So I'm interested to hear some pros and cons. Thanks.

• 19:35David Pierce?

  Do you see why you're here, Alex?

• 19:37Alex Cranz?

  I see why I'm here.

• 19:38David Pierce?

  So there's two questions here, and we should take them in turn. The first question is, do you buy an iPad or do you buy an e-ink tablet? And then there's going to be the which one question, but let's start with just that breakdown. Do we, should this person buy an iPad or an e-ink tablet?

• 19:52Alex Cranz?

  I feel really bad for saying this, but they should buy the iPad because they're going to law school, right?

• 19:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Alex Cranz?

  If they were just digging around at home, like reading and sometimes marking stuff up, I would say get the e-ink tablet. I would have no regrets. But they actually need it to work all of the time consistently and not be probably messing with a bunch of, like fighting the user interface all the time. And so they'll have a much better time with an iPad if they do that.

• 20:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was thinking about this, and I think the way you just laid that is exactly right. Because like my heart says, buy a remarkable tablet because it is a truly lovely thing to read PDFs on.

• 20:27Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 20:28David Pierce?

  And in the actual moment of reading, the e-ink tablet is much better, right? Like I still have not used a Kindle Scribe, you have, but my guess would be that literally in the like, I am highlighting a page of a PDF thing, the e-ink tablet is going to be better.

• 20:42Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent, yeah.

• 20:43David Pierce?

  Managing all of those things, getting them on and off your device, moving them around, submitting them to things, sharing them with people, total disaster on anything not called the iPad. And for like, that's where I end up with like, the iPad is pretty good as a reading experience and really great as like a life management experience. And the e-ink tablets are really good for reading and just full hot garbage for the other side of things.

• 21:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I would honestly say get the iPad, but then do what Dan did, which is get like that, that matte

• 21:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Alex Cranz?

  screen protector, so it feels a little bit more like writing on paper. And it look, it doesn't have the glare. Like I think that'll probably be the best for the majority of people who actually need to get work done on the device.

• 21:29David Pierce?

  I think that's right. We did a whole segment on that on last week's Vergecast. So if you haven't listened to it, Dan was very helpful.

• 21:35Alex Cranz?

  But then, once you get your law degree and you get your signing bonus at whatever big fancy firm you're at. Go buy the e-ink tablet. You're gonna have a great time with it. You're gonna love it.

• 21:44David Pierce?

  The e-ink tablet is like, you make partner and there's like a person who will do all the file management for you. And then all you have to do is just like, kick back at your desk with your loafers up and read some PDFs. Like, that's when you get the e-ink tablet. And life is incredible.

• 21:58Alex Cranz?

  Like, you're just marking up other people's briefs? I assume that's a thing lawyers do.

• 22:02David Pierce?

  You just chuck your tablet across the room at them?

• 22:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Throw it at their heads.

• 22:06David Pierce?

  Ferguson, read this.

• 22:09Alex Cranz?

  That's why you have one else. You throw, throw the tablets at them.

• 22:12David Pierce?

  And do, what do we think? Like, the, probably either the iPad Air or the iPad Pro, depending on how you feel about money and keyboards?

• 22:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think the iPad Air is enough for most people. I think they'll have a great time with like, an iPad Air, that matte screen protector and a nice little pencil. That'll get everything they need to get done, done.

• 22:33David Pierce?

  I think that's right. All right. We've, we've helped. Andrew, you're welcome. Let us know how it goes. Let's move on to the next one. Thank you, Alex.

• 22:39Alex Cranz?

  You're welcome.

• 22:40David Pierce?

  For our next question, I have two people here. Dan Seifert, hello. Hello. Allison Johnson, hello. Welcome back from vacation.

• 22:47Speaker 12

  Hello, thank you.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  And our question, I believe, is from Nick. So let's hear it.

• 22:53Speaker 13

  Hi, Verge. My name is Nick. I had a question about how phone reviews work at The Verge. Who reviews it? How you decide who reviews it? And then what that process looks like? Love what you do.

• 23:06David Pierce?

  So, I love a good meta Verge question. And I feel like this is a fun one. We like, reviews just sort of like magically appear. And it's like, let's talk about this. Yeah, they just magically happen. Yeah, they're just there on the website.

• 23:19Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 23:20David Pierce?

  But, I, phone reviews, I feel like are actually a pretty good one, because the, our process, I feel like, has gotten much better for it over time. But, Dan, you run our reviews program. Allison, you do, I would say, most of our phone reviews. So let's talk through it. New phone comes out, or new phone is coming out, what happens? We're The Verge. People kind of want us to review their stuff, right? Like, what, how does this stuff start?

• 23:42Speaker 14

  Yeah, I guess we could, we'll start right at the beginning. So let's take the example of Samsung, which recently announced the S23 line. So Samsung announces a phone, their PR department will generally contact us and say, we've got a new device coming out. And a lot of times, they will require what's called an embargo, which means that we say, we agree to not talk about this thing until after a certain date. And then they will provide the device to us for testing purposes and review, so that we have access to it ahead of when it goes on sale. And then we are able to publish our review before or on the day of when it goes on sale, which is usually around the timing when the embargo lifts. And so that is like, kind of like a working relationship that we have with lots

• 24:24Speaker 14

  of companies with their PR departments. The unique thing there is that we agree to the embargo, and that's about it. Beyond that, companies don't have any influence on what our review looks like. They don't get to see a preview of it. They don't get to, really, the only time that they see the review is the same times that the audience sees it, when it publishes live on the site. And then sometimes they send notices if we, you know, get a factual error wrong, they give us a heads up, or sometimes they just say, we don't like your score. And we're like, tough rookies. You know, that's the kind of relationship there. That's all detailed in our ethics statement, if you're curious about it, on the site. So you can go check that out. Determining who gets to review something is actually pretty straightforward now, because we have folks like Allison, who are really

• 25:08Speaker 14

  assigned a beat. So Allison's main job is to cover phones at The Verge. That's what she does all day in, day out. She's our lead phone reviewer. So she is the one that really reviews the vast majority of things. Occasionally, other people will review phones. I think the best example is John Porter over in the UK. He has access to devices that we don't get here in the US. They don't sell them here in the US. They only sell them in Europe or UK. And so he will review those devices, because it makes most sense for him to review it. He can get access to them. He can test it on their networks. Half the time, those devices don't even work on our networks. I know Allison has a few in her possession now that are like, yeah, good luck getting a signal and forget about 5G. But that's kind of like the split there. And then, because Allison is one person, and this is a very large

• 25:51Speaker 14

  Beat to cover. Occasionally, other folks around the team will help out if Allison's got a really swamped workload and we feel that we need to get a review out in a quicker amount of time than Allison's able to get to it. So occasionally, I play kind of like a floater across the team. If someone's swamped or on vacation or something like that, I might pick up a review to so that we have it up on the site and things like that. But really, Allison has right of first refusal and really the first expectation that she's going to be the reviewer. And you could see that across all of the categories of products that we review. Monica Chin is our laptop reviewer. She's the one reviewing vast majority of our laptops and is like right of first refusal on those. Whereas we're recording this today on Monday, Chris Welch just published

• 26:32Speaker 14

  two Sonos reviews. He's our speaker and TV and home audio reviewer and headphone reviewer. So he focuses on that. So like when these products get announced, we kind of know who's going to review it already. And there's like just kind of like extenuating circumstances where it might be somebody else. Occasionally, Neelai likes to like swing in.

• 26:50David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, when a big iPhone comes out, Neelai magically appears out of the woodwork to review it.

• 26:55Speaker 14

  He likes to do his iPhone review once a year. We like to let him do that, you know, and what who am I to argue, right?

• 27:01David Pierce?

  Keeps him off our back the rest of the year. It works out fine.

• 27:03Speaker 14

  Yeah, exactly. And you know, the funny part is generally, that is actually a very good example of like where Allison can't really review all the devices that are released at that point in the timeframe that we have. Going back to like when we're getting devices ahead of release, a lot of times we have as little as one week or sometimes less to review a device before that embargo. And if it's an iPhone review, there's a lot of moving parts involved with that. Allison's got to test the device. She's got to take a lot of photos. She's got to take photos of the device. She's got to take photos with the device. She's got to kind of like formulate her thoughts and write it all. And then generally, she's working with the video team. So there's got to be a video that's got to be shot. They need to shoot B roll of it. They need to edit it. All these things generally have to happen within a five to six day span, oftentimes over

• 27:45Speaker 14

  a weekend. So like, it's a very compressed type of schedule. So when Apple releases two, three new iPhones at a time, having a somebody like Neelai or somebody else on the team that's able to pick up one of those helps us able to be a little bit faster with our publishing and have it out there in time when all of our wonderful competitors will be publishing as well or ahead of the release date or the in-store date. So that's kind of like the general process. But Allison, once it gets passed off to you, then what happens?

• 28:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, so I've I've kind of figured this out over the past couple of years, but I've settled into kind of a method when I get a phone and it has to do with like, I really like to have my SIM card and make whatever phone it is my phone for the week or two weeks or however long. I can't make it work, you know, having like a personal phone that I'm texting on and in a review phone. So that's possible with all the major Samsungs and iPhones.

• 28:43David Pierce?

  So you must spend like a quarter of your time just switching phones at some point. Like, I feel like we've all been through this pain and it's a lot. I feel you on that.

• 28:51Speaker 12

  And eSIM has ruined my life.

• 28:55David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 12

  Just slowly. And I have a lot of thoughts on eSIM. But anyway, one way or another, I get my SIM and my plan onto the phone I'm reviewing. I have a password manager. I would be totally lost without it. So I set everything up kind of from scratch. Download the password manager, download my handful of apps that I actually really use, which is a shockingly small number.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  I was gonna ask, what are the like?

• 29:23Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 29:23David Pierce?

  When you first get a phone, you're like, I need these whatever six apps.

• 29:27Speaker 12

  It's it's a little embarrassing. Starbucks is always on there. It's like,

• 29:31David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 29:32Speaker 12

  without fail, day one, I need to download Starbucks. I put Strava on there, even though I don't really work out. But I like to, I like to try and do a GPS kind of like walk or run or something. Spotify always. And then the social networks. But yeah, that's I try to like, I make a phone call with the phone, which is something you can easily forget about. But like, I use it as a phone. I use it to listen to music. I just do everything with it that anybody would do with a phone. And I try to do it all within a week.

• 30:10Speaker 14

  I think that's a, that's a great point there, Allison, is like, you do a lot of the testing that may not show up in the end product, the end review, you might not have a line in there being like, phone calls sound fine, like exactly as you expect, or like, it played the music, but that's still part of your testing process, because if it didn't work, then it would be part of the story for sure.

• 30:29Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly. Nobody needs to hear about how I watched a bunch of succession, you know, sitting on my bed on a device and it worked fine.

• 30:40David Pierce?

  What kind of like, specific tests do you run every time? Like, do you have a, do you have a picture you take every single time you review a phone, or like a place you go to try something?

• 30:49Speaker 12

  I have a couple scenarios I really try and do. I try and do one day where I really stress test the battery and I, I leave my house, which is, um, whoa, very difficult to do in this day and age, but like, I like getting on the light rail train in Seattle and just kind of using that as like a commute, just cosplaying someone who goes into an office. So yeah, I scroll things on the phone. I take pictures of my toddler, because I think that is the ultimate stress test of a smartphone camera system. Still haven't really found one that can keep up with the toddler and the cat. I think taking pictures of cats is probably the most important thing I do.

• 31:34David Pierce?

  I would, I would agree with that. Video is obviously a big part of this. So how does that all factor in, especially now? Like, if we're gonna get real meta about The Verge, we all used to work in an office and it was easier to make these things. Now, if we're gonna do like a big cool video, how does it work?

• 31:48Speaker 12

  It's changed a little bit since I started. I was being directed over Zoom for some of them, which I think by the time I came on, you guys had all been doing that for like a year and a half. So it went, it went very well. I think, you know, Becca and Veeran and Phil at that time had a really good grasp of like, how to get someone like me to shoot usable video of me talking about a phone. But with the return of in-person things, you know, I get to go to San Francisco and we have, you know, Veeran's out there and we shot some things when I was there for Samsung. So yeah, it's changing. I'm excited for what it looks like when I can be face to face with someone and we can shoot these things

• 32:33Speaker 12

  in real life.

• 32:34David Pierce?

  What a world that's going to be.

• 32:36Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 14

  I think that, I mean, you, you kind of highlighted some of the challenges of creating video now that we didn't have the same challenges before. But I think ultimately it's allowed us to have a lot more variety in our videos and they look different, generally a different set setups, different locations and things like that. Whereas when we were all in the office, we got really used to shooting in the same studio all the time and our videos frequently looked very similar from, from shot to shot. So that's kind of one of the upsides of the, the new format now.

• 33:05David Pierce?

  So Alison, you say you try to only have one phone at a time. Realistically, how many phones do you have at a time?

• 33:09Speaker 12

  Oh my God. So something will happen and I'll need to like check, you know, some software update on one phone. And then I have a, I'm like, well, what does it look like on this one? And our dining room table will be like seven phones at any given time. And my husband is so patient, like a, an alarm will go off. I'm like, shit, I don't know which of these seven phones it is, you know, like I live in fear that I'm forgetting to turn my wake up alarm off. Cause I've just got to like pull into the dining room and be like, stop it. Which one is it? So the answer is a lot.

• 33:45David Pierce?

  I remember years ago, getting a phone call from the security guard at the office saying, there's something in your desk that has been playing semi charmed life by third eye blind for like two hours. And it was, I had, I had set that as the alarm on the phone because I thought that was the thing I wanted for my alarm for some reason. And so from like 6:00 AM to the time I showed up, it was just playing semi charmed life on repeat. And so I feel your pain. These are the perils of being a phone reviewer.

• 34:14Speaker 12

  You never know what, what phone's going to tell on you.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  All right. We need to take a break and then we're going to get to a bunch more hotline questions. Dan, Alison, thank you both. Really appreciate it.

• 34:24Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 34:24Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 34:25David Pierce?

  We will be right back.

• 34:32Speaker 15

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• 35:15Speaker 15

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• 35:59David Pierce?

  Welcome back. We have a bunch more hotline questions to get to. And for the next couple, I have Jen Tuohy here. Hi Jen.

• 36:06Speaker 16

  Hi, really happy to be here.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  Let's get into it. Our first question is from Hayes.

• 36:12Speaker 13

  Hi guys, my name is Hayes. I'm living out here in southeastern Idaho, and I recently graduated college and got my first apartment as an adult. It's been great. There's been a lot of stuff to learn, it's the learning curve. But the main thing is that I don't understand how to set up a home Wi-Fi network. I have always just lived in a place where you just went with the default. And we've talked in previous episodes about how there aren't a whole lot of choices. And I think that that actually makes people a little less aware of what to do. So I just want to know, as I go about setting up a home network with, you know, certain smart home integrations and Wi-Fi standards, you know, what do I really need to look for? What do I need to know to be ready to to set up that network, you know,

• 36:56Speaker 13

  in in terms of all these different terms that I've never heard before, you know, gateway and a modem and a router? And what what do I do? So anyway, thanks. Bye.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  I love this question so, so, so much.

• 37:07Speaker 16

  How long have we got?

• 37:08David Pierce?

  Right? So, OK, I think, first of all, Hayes, congratulations.

• 37:12Speaker 16

  Yay.

• 37:12David Pierce?

  I hope your new apartment is awesome. This is a good moment to like, build from the ground up here, right? Because we spend a lot of time talking about like, the best mesh networks and should you which fancy router should you buy? But like, very beginning, you want to start with a thing that works. Where would you tell our friend Hayes to start? What's the answer here?

• 37:32Speaker 16

  Oh, well, Wi-Fi is, it can be quite subjective. But he said he's moved into his first home, so I'm assuming it's not a 1500 or 2000 square foot house. It's probably a smaller apartment. Although, you know, in Idaho, they do have a lot of space. So it could be sizable. But if you're in an apartment, maybe 800, 1000 square feet, you know, your base, you just need to start with a good router. And now, this is different from a modem in most instances, depending on your ISP. Quite often, your ISP will supply you with a modem router. So it's both. To throw in the gateway phrase, I think gateway is is less relevant. You're the most important two you need to know are modem and router.

• 38:16Speaker 16

  Gateway is sort of something that you may use in other parts of your house, like you might have additional gateways throughout your house. But modem router are the two important ones, and they are very different, even though they may be in the same box, which can cause confusion. But if you have a small, smaller home, you are fine to have both in one device. But you probably do not want to stick with whatever your ISP has sent you. That is kind of the the rule of thumb, because generally, these devices aren't as high powered or as feature rich as something you might buy off the shelf. If you have a slightly larger home, And or if you are interested in smart home, which we know you are, it's worth considering

• 38:56Speaker 16

  a mesh router because devices like doorbells, security cameras, aren't going to be very close to your router and they still need strong wifi. That's where mesh comes in. But as David said, we're starting at the beginning, so we can get to mesh a little later. But to start with, you want an ISP modem and then you want to buy your own router, which gives you generally a stronger signal, better features.

• 39:22David Pierce?

  Okay, I'd like to argue with this advice. I would like to pick one very small fight with you about this advice, which is that I think generally speaking, if they're just going to give you a modem, great, because I think in general, as long as you get like a pretty good modem, your router ends up being the much more important piece of technology. But at least on my bill, my cable company Comcast, disclosure Comcast is an investor in the Fox Media and sucks at providing internet to my house. The Comcast router, to me, is I think like $10 a month, and that's a terrible deal. And if you buy an even pretty good modem for yourself, it will pay itself off very quickly.

• 40:00Speaker 16

  Modem as opposed to a router?

• 40:02David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 40:02Speaker 16

  Because some ISPs won't let you use your own modem.

• 40:06David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 40:06Speaker 16

  To Comcast's credit, they will let you.

• 40:10David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 40:10Speaker 16

  They have a long list on their website of ones that will work. I, for many, many years, was with AT&T, who will not let you. You have to use their modem. So it will depend who you use. And knowing Idaho as I do, I am guessing it's Cox Internet, if they still exist as that brand of, they may have changed names, but Cox was what I used when I was there and it was sort of your only option. So yes, depending on your ISP, yeah, if you can bring your entirely your own equipment, go for it. But if you're limited, at least bring your own router. One, because you don't have to pay the monthly fee and you end up saving money in the long run. And two, because you can make sure your router has some much more interesting features. For example, some of the things that a few of the router companies I was going to recommend

• 40:55Speaker 16

  here offer will help with your smart home. For example, both Google Nest and Eero, who both have mesh routers, offer Thread, which is a very key part of the smart home, the new standard Matter. And even if you're not involved with Matter, Thread is a great local protocol that will help make smart home devices like sensors and light bulbs work speedier in your home rather than having to rely on the cloud. And if you're looking at starting a smart home, you're in a great place right now because this is the time where you can go out and buy Thread-enabled devices and not have to worry about relying on the cloud or Wi-Fi. So you want Thread in your router. You also want dual band.

• 41:37Speaker 16

  And if we're starting with basics, you want a 2.4 and 5 gigahertz band. Don't worry too much about 6e, which is the tri-band, 6 gigahertz. You probably don't need to worry about that yet. That would be your next router upgrade. I would also recommend Wi-Fi 6-capable router because that will help if you have multiple devices on your network, which most people these days have, even if you don't have a smart home. So that can help with speed and connectivity in your home. One key feature to look for when you are considering buying a router and you want to use smart home devices is the ability to split your bands and/or pause the 5 gigahertz

• 42:19Speaker 16

  band because frustratingly, still far too many smart home devices rely on the 2.4 gigahertz band and they sometimes can't connect to your network if you have a dual band. So Eero, for example, has a neat option in its settings where you can just disable 5 gigahertz for five minutes and help onboard your devices. A number of other manufacturers don't offer that option, so that's something to look for. TP-Link, Orbi, Netgear, Eero, those are all good places to start. Eero and Google are only going to offer mesh. If you don't think you need mesh...

• 42:59Speaker 16

  Then TP-Link, Netgear are great brands to look at. We haven't done an awful lot of testing at the verge, but we have a lot of anecdotal information from our staff based on standalone routers. I've done a lot of mesh testing in the smart home because I believe mesh is really key in the smart home. And I've tested the Eros and the Google Nest Wi-Fi and also the new WISE router, which has been very good and is relatively inexpensive, which if you're starting out in your first home, I'm guessing budget is probably a large consideration. So I would recommend checking out WISE's new routers. I have found them to be pretty reliable. Just don't put it on anything that might melt because they do get really hot.

• 43:45David Pierce?

  Okay. I agree with everything you just said. I think the one thing I was gonna say is that I think it is almost always worth it in my anecdotal experience to go mesh over the other things. I've talked to so many people over the years, especially if you have a slightly goofy layout, like you sort of have two walls between you and your router at some points. A lot of people will buy the extenders and the repeaters and those just don't work.

• 44:11Speaker 16

  Don't do that.

• 44:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just, it's a waste of money. Like it just, it is worth the slight extra expense to buy the mesh network. And the other part of it is you can buy the basics of the mesh network and then test it for a little while. And if you're like, oh, I don't have anything in my kitchen, you can add to it. So sort of starting small with one of these modular networks as opposed to buying a bunch of repeaters and it's just gonna set you up much better for a much longer time. But I agree with you wholeheartedly. And my last question about this, and then we should move on, is between the mesh ones, like you were saying, I think for most people's purposes, the best thing to do is probably just kind of deal hunt, right? Like I think for an average person's use case, they're all pretty good. And the best thing to do is just kind of look out for the one that

• 44:55David Pierce?

  feels like the right price at the right moment as opposed to like deep aggressive brand loyalty. Do you, do you agree with that? Or is there one that you think is drastically better?

• 45:03Speaker 16

  No, I agree that deal hunting is definitely worth doing. Eero, because it's now owned by Amazon, constantly is on major sales. And Google Nest often will sort of price match at the same time. You'll notice the sales all happen simultaneously. However, if you are a dedicated Google Home user or a dedicated Amazon Alexa user, there are some benefits. I would say Eero, because Eero actually is a Zigbee hub for Amazon Alexa smart home. So if you're thinking that you're going to want to use that voice assistant, I'll try not to keep saying the name, sorry. If you think you're going to want to use that voice assistant, then Eero is definitely worth considering. On the Google Nest side, there is similar integrations,

• 45:44Speaker 16

  although I feel like the Eero Alexa integration is a lot tighter. And it does things like you can turn on in the Alexa settings, the option to automatically look for devices as they join your network. So they just join your Amazon network without you having to do anything, which is a very seamless, user-friendly setup. I also really like the Eero app. One of the things that's changed in recent years with these mesh networks is that you control your entire system through an app. And that is actually so much easier than having to go onto a web browser and type in your router's code and start fiddling in the backend. And those apps are much easier to control. And you can set up lots of useful features like parental controls, which probably isn't going to be Hayes's thing right now, but maybe in the future.

• 46:29Speaker 16

  The one downside of the Eero one, though, is once your network goes offline, it's very hard to troubleshoot because everything's through the app and you don't have internet.

• 46:37Speaker 17

  Oh, true.

• 46:38Speaker 16

  That's been something I have found a bit of a frustration. But these, I'm getting in the weeds a little bit here. I agree with your point. Generally, most of these are somewhat interchangeable. Personally, I would suggest looking for, for your first router, your first mesh network, you don't need all the bells and whistles. Just look for some good security features. Those are going to be key, especially if you're adding smart home devices. And don't think you have to spend the most money to get the best performance. You do want to focus on the speeds that you have coming into your home. There's no point in buying a router that supports, you know, multi-gigabit speeds if you're only getting 500 megabits, you're just kind of wasting your money there. So that's something you need to check with whichever ISP you have.

• 47:19Speaker 16

  But if you are getting speedy speeds there in Idaho, then you want to max out as much as possible and go for multi gigabit speeds, which both Iro Pro and the Google Nest Wi-Fi Pro do offer. And then back to the Wise, they also have the Wise Pro, which I believe supports gigabit speeds. But if you don't have gigabit, you can go with the non-pro versions and save a little bit of money.

• 47:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, got it. All right. Well, Hayes, good luck. Let us know how it goes. Send pictures. We have one more for you before we let you go here, Jen. We have a question about doorbells.

• 47:51Speaker 16

  Yay, my favorite thing.

• 47:53David Pierce?

  Let's hear it.

• 47:54Speaker 18

  This is Stephen World, ladies, and I have a question for Jennifer Tuohy, your smart home expert. She's got an Akara G4 video doorbell. Would love to know her thoughts on it, maybe a quick review. And how does she feel about the whole chime hug situation? Kind of a weird setup. Also, what about Matter? Matter's been out. There's some Matter devices out there. Do we still care about Matter? Can I actually do anything for those of us just in the homekit space? Thanks a lot.

• 48:20David Pierce?

  Okay, we're not talking about Matter because we don't, we don't have time. We will do that another day. We're going to come back to Matter. This has to end at some point. So we're going to leave Matter. We'll do that another time. But you just wrote a long review of the Akara G4 video doorbell. So what's the take, Jennifer Tuohy, smart home expert? What do you think?

• 48:38Speaker 16

  Yes, I did just write a long review and I'm guessing it hadn't posted when Stephen called because Stephen and I have worked together before on podcasts. He's actually the host of the HomeKit Insider podcast. And I know he just picked up one of these and is probably really anxious to find out more about what I thought about it. And my review is it's a great battery powered doorbell for HomeKit, but it has some flaws. And one actually, as he points out, is this chime box, which is an interesting workaround. And I guess there's a little backstory here. There are no battery powered doorbells that support Apple Home and HomeKit Secure Video, which is Apple's version of a sort of cloud storage for your videos,

• 49:22Speaker 16

  but your own iCloud. So you don't, you're not sharing your data or worried about having your data in someone else's cloud. It's in your own iCloud. And so it's a very popular service because people obviously have concerns about videos going into the cloud and

• 49:37David Pierce?

  Correctly so, as we've seen over time.

• 49:39Speaker 16

  Correctly so. HomeKit Secure Video certainly navigates that and provides a very secure, as the name implies, way of using a video doorbell. But you've only ever been able to use a wired one, so you had to have doorbell wires, which, you know, is tricky. A lot of, I'm sure, haze, back to our last question, you know, you know, when you move into an apartment, quite often you can't swap out your doorbell or you don't have doorbell wires. Having a battery powered device to stick on the wall would be great. So this was very exciting. Everyone was excited to see a battery powered HomeKit doorbell. But it turns out the way Acaria got around this, because battery powered doorbells are not supported in HomeKit, is they developed a chime box that has to be

• 50:19Speaker 16

  plugged into power, and that is essentially the battery powered doorbell that is connecting to Apple Home, and then it uses a proprietary wireless network to talk to the doorbell, which is essentially just a camera with a bunch of batteries in it. There's nothing else in it.

• 50:35David Pierce?

  That's very clever, actually.

• 50:36Speaker 16

  It is very clever. But the downside is if someone unplugs your chime box, your doorbell stops working, as I discovered after someone was vacuuming my house and had unplugged it to plug in the vacuum cleaner and my doorbell wasn't working anymore. So, you know, you've got a bit of a potential flaw there, and it doesn't work with your existing chime, which is something a lot of people want. So when you press your battery powered smart doorbell, you'd like your existing doorbell chime to go off as well. It doesn't, which is a bit of a, bit of a shame. But it does what is kind of neat about it. You can stick a micro SD card in this little chime box and record video locally from your doorbell. And then you've got a little micro SD card that you can either pop in your computer

• 51:18Speaker 16

  or you can view through the Acaria app, and it will record 24/7, which very few doorbells do. Not that everyone really needs that, but personally, I love being able to watch the possums go across my front door at night. For some reason, motion detectors don't catch them.

• 51:33David Pierce?

  Everybody has their thing. There's like a whole TikTok genre of that, I'm sure. Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 16

  So yeah, the Chime is is an interesting workaround. It's unique in the doorbell space. It's actually very similar to what a lot of door locks use because they don't like, they don't want to use wifi radios in their door locks because it's incredibly battery draining. And by using a backup power source that's plugged in, you're able to do the heavy lifting in this separate device. But yes, you need to have it plugged in. That is a bit of a flaw. It does, though, play tunes. So you can you can download an MP3 file to the Chime box. And then when you come home, because it has facial recognition, it can play your theme song as you walk up to the front door.

• 52:15David Pierce?

  It's like walk up music in baseball, but for just life. That's awesome.

• 52:18Speaker 16

  It is cool.

• 52:19David Pierce?

  What's yours? What does it play when you come home?

• 52:21Speaker 16

  It's the Taylor Swift anti-hero. It's me.

• 52:26David Pierce?

  That's so good. I like that very much.

• 52:30Speaker 16

  You know, and Dave, if you came to my door, you could have your own theme song. But yeah, this doorbell has so many features. And as I say in my review, I loved a lot of them. They were great. They were innovative. When I come home and it recognizes my face, it can set the home and my home automation systems to the way I like it, which is really neat. But sadly, it has a 16 by nine ratio. And this means it can't see packages on your doorstep, which is one of the reasons many people buy video doorbells, is to stop potential package thieves. And so this was a bit of a letdown. Also, the video quality was not very good. It's a very inexpensive doorbell, though. Hundred and twenty dollars, which in the scheme of doorbells with these types of features is a bargain. So there were definitely trade offs.

• 53:15Speaker 16

  And the video quality wasn't great in my experience because I have a covered porch and there's no HDR imaging. So you couldn't really make out the faces that clearly unless I kind of, you know, stick your face right up at the doorbell, which is not something a package thief is probably going to do. Yeah, it had some trade offs. But for their first effort at a doorbell, it was good. I did like it. I would recommend it if you have Apple Home and you need a battery powered doorbell, especially if you want Taylor Swift to sing to you when you come home.

• 53:42David Pierce?

  That's very important. Yeah, I mean, that's actually is the kind of thing that like good concept probably needs a couple of like little revisions, but I like the idea of separating the smarts out of the doorbell itself and into like the chime. That actually makes sense to me as a as a system that you could be more upgradable over time. It'll be easier to replace the batteries and to hang and all this stuff. So I can see why that might be really useful. But yeah, it seems like it needs a little bit of fine tuning over time.

• 54:11Speaker 16

  Yeah, I mean, it was it's a new concept, a new very entirely new category for this product as well. And for the first attempt, I think they did a really good job, but there's definitely, as I say, some some issues to work through. But I do have a very long, extensive review on the site. If you want to find out more about all the different features, and I actually didn't even mention, it does work with everyone else, too. It's not just HomeKit. It works with Amazon's assistant. It also works with Google Home, and it can stream to those smart displays, and it can use any of those smart displays or speakers as your chime. So even though you can't use your existing chime, you can have your speakers say, hey, there's someone at the door. And you can hardwire it. So it has the option of battery or hardwire. And you actually need to hardwire it if you

• 54:55Speaker 16

  want the 24/7 recording, because otherwise you'll be changing your batteries like every day.

• 55:00David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's just, this is the life that we live. I like it. All right. Well, thank you, Jen. We should keep rolling through some of these questions, but this is very helpful. Thank you.

• 55:09Speaker 16

  Thank you.

• 55:11David Pierce?

  All right, let's get to our next question, which is about subscriptions.

• 55:15Speaker 19

  Hey, David, this is Vijay. I recently had a bad experience trying to cancel my cable TV subscription service. I was wondering why they make it so easy to sign up, but so hard to cancel, you know, in this day and age. If I can sign up over the phone, I should be able to sign out directly, right? And they want me to call to cancel. It was a complicated process. I was wondering why in 2023, we still have to deal with this. Thank you.

• 55:43David Pierce?

  Okay, the answer to this one is very simple and very frustrating, and it's just because they can. There's nothing preventing these companies from making it really easy for you to sign up and really hard to cancel, and so most of them do. The good news is streaming services and such have made it easier over time because there's so much competition. One of the things they have going for them is how easy it is to kind of come and go from a service as you want to. So it's much easier to cancel Netflix or YouTube TV than it is to cancel your cable subscription. So in that sense, it's getting slightly better, but it mostly still sucks. And the only reason these companies make it hard for you to do is because they can. The FTC is actually in the middle of proposing a formal ban on that. Basically, when you call and they say, you know, we'll make it cheaper or give you a

• 56:27David Pierce?

  special deal in order to keep you as a customer, there has to be a thing, if this ban goes through upfront, where you can just say, no, shut up, leave me alone, I want to cancel, and you should be able to get out. And that'll go for things like gym memberships, which are notoriously hard to cancel, and your cable bill, and basically any subscription. For me, it's like news organizations are often really hard. You can sign up online, but then you have to make 11 phone calls to cancel your newspaper subscription. That kind of stuff might start to get better, but the only way it's ever going to get much, much better is regulation. But the good news is, it seems likely that that regulation is coming. It's kind of like robo calls in the sense that it's an easy win for some of these agencies because everybody hates it and it's worth fighting against. So that's that. Stay tuned, it might get slightly better over time.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  All right, let's move on to our final question for today, which is about laptops, which means we got to talk to Monica Chin. Hi, Monica. Hello. Everybody, it turns out, has questions about laptops, but this one comes from Kevin. Let's hear it.

• 57:25Speaker 20

  Hi, my name's Kevin. I'm an engineering student, and I'm a diehard Apple user. But my friend asked me the other day what kind of laptop you should get. And as an engineering student, you know, running CAD software, I can't really tell him to get a Mac. But then I was also like, I have no idea what PC to recommend. There's so many options out there. So, you know, what would you say for like battery life while a student running CAD software? What would you say is your top pick for a new laptop these days?

• 57:54David Pierce?

  Okay, so I just want to say before we get into this, dear listeners, if you have a question like this, you gotta tell us your budget.

• 58:01Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 58:01David Pierce?

  Because that's the first question is how much money do you have to spend? So I would say for our purposes here, let's try to keep it like reasonable, right? Like, we're gonna, we're gonna say we have some money to throw at this problem, but not all of the money in the known universe. And it seems to me this is like a classic Windows computer problem. It's like power versus portability. Because like you're still a student, you still want to do stuff, but you also like want to run the hell out of CAD. Where, where does your head go? What would you recommend for our friend Kevin here?

• 58:29Speaker 17

  Yeah, so look, I mean, looking at the current landscape, this is a tough question. And there's not really a great answer and be able to give you that doesn't ask like some amount of compromise, especially if we're not going into the crazy budget realm. So it depends a little bit on what software your friend is trying to run. I will say, I know I'm not supposed to answer this way, but a lot of good 3D software does run on Macs these days. I know that like not all of it does. If there is a way he can run the software on a Mac, if he can, he dual boot Windows, like, has he looked into every single option and made absolutely sure that he can't get an Apple Silicon Mac? Because that is really, in the current laptop landscape,

• 59:11Speaker 17

  the best way to make sure that you're getting both power and battery life and portability. And there really are not a ton of other great options that measure up to that. I will say, like, one of the more powerful Macs, like with the M2 Pro and the M2 Max or the Mac Studio, we've used these with stuff like Maya, like 3DS Max. They all run very well on them. These are basically the only, some of the only laptops, if you're looking at the laptop space, they're able to get that can run these programs well that have like any kind of battery life at all.

• 59:39David Pierce?

  That's the main trade-off, right? It's like, because I think to some extent, you know, you can litigate power versus sort of physical size and stuff like that. But it seems to me that the main thing is just, especially on the Windows side, if you want a lot of power, battery life is going to go to absolute hell. And that that is like the real thing the Mac has solved is being able to do both of those at once.

• 59:59Speaker 17

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that is really the only one that I've tested that I can recommend that I think will not have you needing to plug in like probably at least once a day, if not multiple times. Now, I do know that for an engineering student, there will be use cases for which running Windows on a Mac isn't necessarily going to be ideal. And I know that a lot of engineering departments do recommend that you not get an Apple Silicon MacBook. So I understand why you're trying to steer away from that direction. I will say, I do know engineering students who use MacBooks who have like no problems with them. But I know that you still may not want to go in that direction. I do understand that. So as a college student, as someone who went to college, as someone who talks to college students a lot about what their,

• 1:00:43Speaker 17

  what their laptop needs are, portability and battery life are really, really huge. Because if you're going to be out eight, nine hours a day, you know, having to search for an outlet all the time is going to be a huge pain. Having something really bulky, taking up your entire backpack is going to be a huge pain. If you're going to four to five classes, you may have a ton of other stuff you need to fit in there. So my advice would be is to think about whether having tons of power that can run these graphically intensive applications really, really fast, or having battery life that can get you through the day is more important. I think you should, if I were in the student's position, I would go a little more towards the battery life side just because,

• 1:01:25Speaker 17

  as I said before, the college lifestyle, you're really, really benefited by having a lot of battery life. And the other thing I will say is I think using these programs on a small screen can get really, really tough. Just if you have lots of Windows open, if you have a lot of little text, using those on a 13 or 14 inch screen, it gives me a headache after doing it for a couple hours. I really think they should be looking at at least a 15, if not a 17 inch screen. My best recommendation for something that will give you battery life, and I know you mentioned that that is a priority Yep. for your friend, is the LG Gram 17. Among Windows laptops that I tested last year, that showed some of the best battery life that you can get. It's not close to what you get from Apple.

• 1:02:09Speaker 17

  Apple, but compared to most Windows laptops with its level of power, it is a pretty solid contender. The downside is this is not as graphically powerful. It can only come with up to a GTX GPU, which is not like, is not anywhere close to Nvidia's top GPU. It can help out with basic graphic tasks. And I would expect you'll be able to run the software that you need to. It will be a little bit slower than if you had something with an RTX GPU or a way more powerful processor and a big chunkier laptop. But it is a thin laptop that will be easy to carry and it is light and it will probably give you more decent battery life than you'll get from other Windows options. If instead you think that's not, a GTX isn't enough power for you, and I would encourage your friend to look up,

• 1:02:52Speaker 17

  if they're not familiar, if he's not familiar, like how much power each of these GPUs will give him and what exactly he needs. If he thinks he needs an RTX GPU, I would go for the Dell XPS 15 or the Dell XPS 17. These are very thin laptops. They're not super, super light, but they are not as chunky as like a giant workstation. These will not get you super great battery life. They do get very hot if you are running super intensive programs on them for long periods of time. But they are quite powerful and I think they will run these programs much faster than you would see in something like the Gram.

• 1:03:26David Pierce?

  Okay, what about like, money is no object. Power is more important than anything else. Is there a laptop that's kind of satisfies the brief there on the Windows side? That it's like, it still needs to work, right? We're not saying like buy a gaming rig and bring it to Starbucks with you every day. But like, on the sort of super powered Windows laptop world right now, is there one that you like more than the rest?

• 1:03:50Speaker 17

  Well, if you're, if you're going for portability, then I think the XPS is what you want to go for.

• 1:03:55David Pierce?

  Okay, but let's just say I need, I need like this much portability and like this much power. You know what I mean?

• 1:04:00Speaker 17

  Yeah, the XPS is still my answer. Because anything else around, like for example, if portability is not an object and you really want something you can keep on your desk all day and maybe move once or twice, then I would say you could go for something like the Acer Concept D Easel, which is like a giant, like seven pound laptop that has a screen that can fold like seven different ways.

• 1:04:19David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, I've seen this thing.

• 1:04:20Speaker 17

  I love that thing. It's so cool. It's honest, it's one of my, the most fun laptops I've ever tested. I think that would be great for, for engineering students. It can come with, you can get with a Quadro, all kinds of super powerful chips.

• 1:04:32David Pierce?

  But then you're basically the guy who like plugs in the iMac at Starbucks every morning.

• 1:04:36Speaker 17

  I mean, that's kind of what it is. Like it has a stylus you can draw on the screen. It's really, really cool. It comes with like, there are these like 3D screen options with like glasses free 3D that it comes with. It's so, so cool. If price and portability are no object, that's what I would get. But if you, assuming that you want more portability and less money than that, I think, you know, XPS or the LG Gram is what I'd be looking at.

• 1:04:59David Pierce?

  All right. I like it. Kevin, let us know what your friend picks and if they like it. Monica, thank you. Appreciate it.

• 1:05:05Speaker 17

  You're welcome. Thank you.

• 1:05:09David Pierce?

  All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Alex, Allison, Dan, Monica, Jen for being here and thank you so much for listening. Also, thank you for sending us questions. Like I said at the top, this is my favorite thing to do on this show is talk about your questions and the stuff you're thinking about. So please keep it coming. 866 VERGE11 is the hotline and you can always email questions to [email protected]. There's a whole lot more on everything we talked about from e-ink tablets to weird laptops to privacy stuff at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but make sure you go check it out. As always, if you have thoughts, feedback, or feelings, or bought one of these weird laptops and want to talk about it, email us, [email protected]. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast

• 1:05:54David Pierce?

  Network. We'll be back on Friday with a bunch more stuff on all of the news. It just continues to be a weird world in the tech world out there. We have a lot to talk about. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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