The USB-C Holiday Spec-tacular

The Verge’s Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz start the final show of 2023 with some chat about the state of USB-C: the ups and downs of charging gadgets, the ubiquity of one cable, and what the future looks like for gadgets with ports. The crew competes in a few rounds of USB-C Price is Right, a game we completely made up to show how confusing USB-C and its specs can be. Nilay, David, and Alex each play for a Vergecast listener to win an awesome Verge swag basket from our merch store. Check out the video version of the game below. David and Nilay end the holiday show with Noah Dentzel, the CEO and co-founder of Nomad Goods, to talk about how USB-C on the iPhone has changed his business, the challenges of building cables, and what tech accessories he’s most excited about in 2024. Have a happy, safe, and fast-charging holiday. We’ll see you in 2024! 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

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• 1:21Speaker 03

  iPhone 15 Pro also has the new USB-C connector.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Happy holidays, everyone, and welcome to the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular, the flagship podcast of Symmetrical Serial Bus Connectors and Holiday Spirit. I love it. The two most important things in life. Easily the two most important. And putting booze in the drinks. A critical part of the holiday experience that is under remarked upon.

• 1:45Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's my favorite specs.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone's like, "You're gonna drink a thing called eggnog." And you're like, "Put some brandy in it and we'll talk." Here's a hot cocoa. A little whiskey. Yeah. Holiday party is getting lit at the USB CIF. Anyway, this is a holiday spectacular, our now yearly tradition, where we dive deep on one specification that makes the entire tech industry go. I'm your friend Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 2:10David Pierce?

  Hello. Are we all eggnog people? We should talk about this. We can intro everybody, but I do want to talk about it for eggnog people.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  I think I've had eggnog once.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's good.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  But like the real stuff, the stuff that comes out of like a jug from the grocery store, I'm just not.

• 2:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. Like, I don't know how good eggnog is made, but it exists.

• 2:29Alex Cranz?

  You have to like whip the eggs. I did it once and it was too rich. I was like, oh, it's like a, it's like a pudding base I just drank, filled with alcohol.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. And that pudding enthusiast, that's Alex Cranz that you're hearing from right there.

• 2:42Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who loves pudding in all its forms, set and unset, apparently.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  So this is the holiday spectacular, a now yearly tradition, which is one of my favorite things we do here on The Vergecast. A chance to let go of the new cycle and be gigantic nerds about one interconnect or standard that we all depend on. Two years ago, we did HDMI, which was really fun. Last year, we did Bluetooth, which is Bluetooth. This year, by what I can only describe as popular demand, we're doing USB-C. We're going to have a little talk about the state of USB-C to open things up, set the floor. Andrew has forced us to play a game show, the USB-C Price is Right.

• 3:23Alex Cranz?

  We did it.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm not going to say anything else about it. I don't want to tip your hand on who won or lost, but we did it. And it is actually hilarious. It's really fun. And then lastly, we're going to talk to Noah Dentzel, who is the co-founder and CEO of Nomad Goods, an accessory company. They make a lot of USB-C products.

• 3:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, Nomad makes like fancy accessories, I would say. And Noah was a good hang. He is kind of eyes open in ways I didn't necessarily expect about the weirdness of USB-C. But he's also like psyched about the future of gadget accessories in a way that felt very right for the holiday spectacular.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Very right for the Vergecast holiday spectacular. The man loves the cable. But let me just say this to open. We're like a decade into USPC and the only way I can really describe it is it's a mess.

• 4:10David Pierce?

  That's half the story, right? It's like, on the one hand, like, we got it. Like, we did it.

• 4:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:14David Pierce?

  Somebody, you know, in, in the ancient history of technology was just like, what if all of our stuff plugged into the same stuff and you only needed one cable? And it's like, we did it. It's there. I only need one cable, but we did it in the worst, most backwards and impossibly confusing way possible.

• 4:34Alex Cranz?

  I like that you can sometimes brick a device or catch it on fire by plugging in the wrong USB cord. That's cool.

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what you want. You're like, this one provides the power of a car battery to my phone. Let's just see what happens.

• 4:48David Pierce?

  I will say, have you guys noticed my, my gadgets have been much warmer this year as a result of this? Like, I genuinely believe that that's true, that like, the average temperature of my phone and laptop and tablet has gone up as a result of USBC and the gigantic mess of cables in my life.

• 5:04Alex Cranz?

  I am not cranking my radiator as high this year.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 5:08Alex Cranz?

  Maybe it's just a better insulated home I'm living in, but I like the theory that my gadgets are just warmer.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, uh, you know, it's like spiritual. You're like, no matter what, I will use this amount of energy. And as the energy usage of LED lights drops from my old halogens, I'm gonna pump this into my cellphone instead.

• 5:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's, it's very good. It's like a fix, um, kind of spirituality, you know?

• 5:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, I like this.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  To your point, though, David, this has been the dream, right? We're gonna have one cable, one interconnect. And then the reality of the dream that we live in is that there actually isn't one cable. There isn't one interconnect, but they've just used the same plug on lots of different things to make it appear as though there is one cable.

• 5:52Alex Cranz?

  All life.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  And that is, to some extent, yes, I agree with you, Ox. There's, there's a lot of, I wouldn't call it lying, but like, wishful obfuscation going on with USBC. You're like, what if you didn't think about this too hard? Like, what if this was almost what you wanted? Huh? Is that good enough? But what's happening inside of it is because very few things are labeled correctly, very few devices will tell you what is going on. It feels more confusing than ever, even though in one important way, it's gotten much simpler.

• 6:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. It used to be back in the good old days that your stuff was either, you know, micro USB or mini USB, and you could sort of distinguish them by the way that they looked. And generally, as long as the thing fit in the thing, it was probably going to work. And it was very annoying because all the things had different things. And in order to bring five gadgets, you had to have five things. Now it does feel like slightly more of a mystery where it's like you can plug it in and it fits. Like, you know that thing where you have a bunch of keys on a keyring? And you have the one that fits in the lock but doesn't turn?

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:01David Pierce?

  That's very much like the USB C experience where it's like it goes in, doesn't still, that's not the job, it turns out. Like, fitting in the thing is not, that's not the job.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but here's my question. Has this reduced any amount of frustration? So one of my favorite laptops in the entire world is the PowerBook G4, the titanium PowerBook G4. Do you remember this thing?

• 7:23David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  This is the laptop. I never had one. I coveted it the most of any laptop ever. Like, it was just a beautiful thing that I couldn't afford when I was in college. And I'm looking at a picture of its rear panel, just because you were talking about different ports. And it was wildly more.

• 7:38David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  Than just micro and mini USB back then, right? It's, I bring up this laptop because it was one of the thinnest laptops ever made. It was one inch thick, or as Apple said, one inch thin. It's good marketing. But like, you know, they had done this thing where they had shrunk the computer in a radical way for its time. And you look at the back panel and you're like, the height of this computer has been determined by the ethernet port.

• 8:02David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  And so here's what's on the back of it. Alex, I know you'll love this as I do. Left to right, I'm just looking at a picture. Firewire 400.

• 8:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  The most important port, the god port, as I call it.

• 8:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, the best port.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Ethernet.

• 8:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Two USBAs.

• 8:19David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Giant outlet for its fan. Important. What appears to be a DVI connector.

• 8:26David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, huge mass, like massively wide DVI connector. That's a monitor out. An S video connector.

• 8:32David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  And then I shit you not, an RJ 11 jack for a 56K.

• 8:37David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 8:38Alex Cranz?

  Yes. They don't make them like that.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  This is not happening anymore, but that was the port selection on these computers. And yeah, many ports have come and gone since then, but if you, if you think about, this is maybe one of the most important laptops of all time. And I'm just going back to it because it's port selection. It seems insane now. The design of it is driven by the size of some of these ports. And very often you have the wrong cable. And having the wrong cable is a very common frustration and it's why I'm confident that everyone listening to the show is just like me. Has a drawer full of cables, just cables, just in case you gotta plug one thing into another thing. You're never gonna throw that cable away.

• 9:23Alex Cranz?

  That's how I knew I was an adult was I had like a box of cables. I was like, this is it. Like, I was like 22, straight out of college. And I was like, well, I'm an adult now because I got this big box of cables, just like my parents did.

• 9:35David Pierce?

  So first of all, one box of cables is not enough boxes of cables.

• 9:39Alex Cranz?

  I was 22, I was young.

• 9:41David Pierce?

  But the big change that I made recently in my life was I threw away all the cables that were very old and I didn't know what they went to. So for years, I had a whole box just of cables to mysterious things that I didn't know about. And I kept them all for all this time because I had one really old Western digital hard drive from when I was in college. That I knew at some point I was gonna want again, but never actually took the time to do anything with. And I had a bin full of cables that might have been for the hard drive. And so I kept the whole bin around. And recently I took the hard drive to Best Buy because I literally couldn't get it to turn on again. They got all the stuff off of it for me. And I threw away the whole box of mysterious cables.

• 10:25David Pierce?

  And it was, it was a truly transformative day in my life.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  This is an important thing that you're bringing up. You had a product, it may or may not have had a proprietary cable. It probably just had that weird super speed USB 3 cable.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  So its problem was its power cable, which was a proprietary thing.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes, this is the main thing, right? It had weird proprietary power cable with maybe some weird pins or a barrel connector and that power system, there's still a lot of stuff with barrel connectors. A barrel connector with an adapter and you don't know how much power is coming in that adapter. And if you get rid of it, then you're screwed. You gotta get one of those long, plastic blister packy things.

• 11:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  With all the different barrel connectors and you're like sliding the dips, like that's bad. USB just eliminated that problem from like the jump. Mini and Micro USB started the process of eliminating that problem. Micro USB got pretty far along there and then USB C, I think, has almost completely obviated this thing. Like USB C is the world's power connector. That is unequivocally a success.

• 11:28David Pierce?

  Yes, I agree with that. As the like make it turn on thing, USB C is a huge, huge, huge win.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  And we're now up to 240 watt USB C chargers. There's some really great material science that's going on underneath that. Gallium nitrate is the thing that replaces silicon in all these devices. There is just a furious effort at GaN chargers, gallium nitrate chargers, making them carry more and more power in smaller, smaller spaces with less heat. That is just awesome. Like that's just a bunch of scientists and engineers and physicists making it happen.

• 12:03David Pierce?

  Is it just my impression that Anchor is way ahead on the gallium nitrate stuff? Like, is there a reason Anchor stuff seems to be so popular in that world right now?

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. Anchor's a fascinating company. It was a bunch of people worked at Amazon. They realized this was an ecosystem they could sell into. They went off and started a company. They saw a lot of things now. The CEO of Anchor, Stephen Yang, was on Decoder in 2021. And he told me that they had partnered with a company called Power Innovations, which makes like the bleeding edge gallium nitrite.

• 12:32David Pierce?

  Also a very Amazon sounding brand.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  Truly. No, that's like too many real words. Like now it's just like letters and numbers. But basically Anchor has an exclusive on bleeding edge GAN chipsets. So they get them for like a year, six months to a year before everybody else. And you can see that's really cool, right? Just from like a business perspective, they identified that as a competitive advantage, went out and spent the money ahead of it. And now they have a six month exclusive in the same way that, you know, like Sony buys exclusives on PlayStation games. Like Anchor's like, we have exclusives on GAN chipsets for a minute.

• 13:05David Pierce?

  It's badass.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  That's obviously changing. There's other companies and there are other companies that are more aggressive. Like you go on Amazon, you're like 600 watt charger. It's the size of a quarter. I don't.

• 13:15Alex Cranz?

  Will it catch fire?

• 13:17Nilay Patel?

  But so just from that perspective, USB C is a huge success. Because of GAN, because of this material science innovation, because these companies have identified a market opportunity in selling more higher powered chargers can do everything. That means you can get everything from an electric toothbrush to a laptop off the same charger with the same plug over the sometimes the same cables. The cables have to be rated. That's a just an overall like barrel connector should go away. Seems like a big victory.

• 13:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it has made the like multi port charger thing like a true must have accessory in life. Like the one thing you can plug into the wall that has the three USB slots on it. Anchor sells, I'm sure, infinity of them. So do lots of other companies. I started to see them everywhere. Like I noticed this, I was flying last week and it honestly seemed like one in every three people at the airport either had a battery pack or something you could plug into the wall and get multiple USB ports out of. And that is just now like how everybody charges everything.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that's created the market for battery packs, right? You just see, okay, the market sort of got created here in a big way.

• 14:27Alex Cranz?

  I just call them the flail. Because like you plug enough cords in, it just looks like a little flail.

• 14:31David Pierce?

  You swing it around.

• 14:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  So that's a good thing. Inside of that, still some problems, right?

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 14:38Nilay Patel?

  Not every product supports every charging speed. I still just worry that things are getting hot, as we've mentioned a few times. And then there's the problem, which we've talked about in the Rich House a few times now, where a lot of companies are doing this in the laziest possible way. They're not adding the pennies of additional costs to their products to put on the two resistors that make USB-C power go. So they've effectively just replaced the micro USB port with a USB-C port. And if you plug an actual USB-C to USB-C charger onto it, it doesn't charge because the thing doesn't know how to call for power from USB-C because it's not actually USB-C. You have

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  to use a USB-A to USB-C cord, which just drives me insane. And I, I'm going to propose on this the holiday spectacular, in the holiday spirit, in the spirit of Christmas, that all of those people should go to jail.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  And I can't think of a better present for all of us gathered today around the holiday hearth than jail. But that can be my gift to America and the world. I think we can agree, I will have done the Christmas community at least as much of a service as Mariah Carey.

• 15:48David Pierce?

  We're skipping right past like coal and everybody's stocking. We're going straight to jail.

• 15:52Alex Cranz?

  Straight to jail.

• 15:53David Pierce?

  I like it. All right.

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  And that, I would say, represents the best case of USB-C, right? We've, we've basically solved this power problem. We've created a market for a new kind of product, these battery packs and these multi-chargers. There's a lot of innovation and engineering resources and money and invention going into a thing, and it has tangible consumer benefits. And then there's like 4% of it that's bad, which is like the cheapest products. It's a lot of off-brand headphones and speakers. I think I've mentioned the, the milk frother we use to stir protein powder. It's like, that's really annoying. There's just a bunch of that stuff where they just like, "USB-C will fix it." And they didn't do it the right way. So it frustrates everyone. I, we've had people, since we've mentioned it the first time, we've gotten a bunch of emails from people who are like, "I threw something away because I didn't realize this was the problem."

• 16:36David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  "I thought it was just broken." That's crazy to me.

• 16:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  And I'm saying this is the best case.

• 16:41David Pierce?

  So so far, the worst experience I've personally had is kind of what you're describing with the the A to C connector, where you plug it in and nothing happens. I have not had anything problematic happen. I know there are risks. It's like you could plug something in and your phone could explode. That's a real thing that could, in theory, happen. That has not happened to me. Have either of you had sort of actual bad USB C experiences so far? Mine are just all, I plug a thing in, nothing happens. I take it out, I plug it in, nothing happens, and then I get angry at my battery being dead.

• 17:15Alex Cranz?

  Feel like I busted a hard drive. I feel like I busted like an off-brand hard drive by plugging it into the wrong USB C and it just died. It was just like, nope, no ma'am.

• 17:25David Pierce?

  That actually kind of makes sense. It like tries to come to life and then just.

• 17:29Alex Cranz?

  And like after that, even when I found the right cables, it never worked. And I blame, was it maybe because the hard drive was crappy? Possibly. But I like to blame the USB C.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  I have a similar experience. It is dumber than Alex's. I don't want to, I don't want to mince words about it.

• 17:47David Pierce?

  So you were drinking some eggnog one night.

• 17:49Alex Cranz?

  Was it a beard trimmer?

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  It was not a beard trimmer. My beard trimmer is not yet USB C. I don't, that that needs a full-on barrel connector. To get through this forest, you gotta rev the engine. Max has a like a Vtech Kid Zoom camera. If you have children, you know that these things are just, they're everywhere. Every kid has one. They're fun. They're cute. And they are notorious for being really finicky about what USB C cables are compatible with them. Even just a regular USB A to micro USB cable, real messy. Like, some of them work, some of them don't. And everyone I know just ends up buying a micro SD card to use because the cable thing is so fussy with these cameras. I didn't do that. Every time I would like get, want to get photos off the camera, I remember that I should buy a micro SD card

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  for this camera so I don't have to deal with trying 500 cables. And then I forget, I don't do it. So I'm trying to get photos off this thing and obviously my laptop only has USB C ports on it. So I'm like going through adapters and the adapters end up effectively corrupting photos on the camera. Until I finally gave up, came upstairs to this delightful 2015 iMac that I used to Vergecast from, and plugged directly into a USB A port on the back of it, and I got off whatever photos I could. And I was like, this is bad.

• 19:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that's like a dongle problem and you know, it's like, it's all, it's a kind of all the messes at once. But like, you should be able to just plug into what is effectively an SD card reader and get files without thinking, okay, this thing is USB A, that thing is USB C, this thing is a really finicky micro SD implementation, and now I've corrupted some photos that my kid took on our camera. That's by far the worst USB experience I had, and somewhere in there is that I was leaping through dongle town.

• 19:35David Pierce?

  Well, and the problem with that is it's so sneaky in its problem that it makes everything worse, right? Like, I don't have the right cable for this. It's a very obvious problem. It's a very annoying problem, but you at least know what the problem is.

• 19:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:49David Pierce?

  And then it's like, okay, if I go get the correct cable, everything will be fine. In this case, you're, you're left to like troubleshoot through a bunch of steps that you have no actual visibility into, because something along the way that seemed like it probably should have worked and all fit together, literally and figuratively, didn't work. And that's the thing about USB C that has always driven me the most crazy. Like, the Opel camera came with a USB C cable and would only work with its USB C cable. And it's like, my friends, that is, we're doing it wrong here. That is like not the spirit of a universal connector. At that point, just have a proprietary barrel connector. What the hell difference does it make?

• 20:25Alex Cranz?

  Well, that just explains something about my Opel camera.

• 20:30Alex Cranz?

  I learned something.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  So we, we, I've said it, I've said the magical incantation we have to talk about now. We gotta talk about dongle town.

• 20:37David Pierce?

  The magical incantation is just the word dongle town?

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:40David Pierce?

  And the dongles show up.

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  And now we're in dongle town. You just like say it three times and then you go to dongle town. So USB C first comes out. I remind everyone, it came out first on the Apple MacBook, the tiny little MacBook, still the world's best playing computer. Remember that computer only had a single port. It was so tiny. And again, I go back to the titanium PowerBook G4 that I was talking about. That computer, a real design constraint for that computer was the height of the ethernet port. Apple says, we don't want to do this. This is also what you might call the peak Johnny Ive era. We want to make the laptop as thin as possible. We're going to cut it down to just a single port, because all you need to do with this computer is charge it. Maybe you want to do some data stuff, so we'll use USB C. We'll figure out how to charge it.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  They went to the USB C Implementers Forum, the USB IF. Apple dictates the design of USB C. They have had a hand on this wheel since the very beginning, and it started with that first MacBook.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a lot of Lightning in USB C for that reason.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot of Apple ideas in there. The connector is very much their idea. It was designed to be a partner to Lightning, which is how they got, they were able to get there in the end, with the iPhone, which we should talk about. But this MacBook comes out and everyone says, ah, dongle town. Like, in order to use this computer, you will have to have a series of complicated dongles. And Apple's response to this with that computer in particular was, no, you won't, because no one plugs anything into our laptops. We've done the research, we've done the studies, especially consumer laptops. No one plugs anything in. Be happy with wifi and bluetooth. Fine. And this computer is so underpowered that it is true that no one ever plugs anything.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  When I had two of them, and I truly believe that this is the world's best travel computer. I took this thing on planes. I've live logged a million Apple events with one of them. It had a terrible butterfly keyboard, many, many compromises. But I never felt like I need to plug anything into this other than a power cable.

• 22:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  You move through the years, and Apple releases many more computers. Now, maybe they have two USB C ports. And we are in dongle town. Like, in order to have a laptop, you've got to have one of those like eight-in-one dongles that has a bunch of useful ports on it. Apple eventually relents. Their MacBook Pros now have lots and lots of ports. There are literal cheers in the audience. The SD card reader is back on a MacBook Pro.

• 22:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  My MacBook Pro has an HDMI port on it. Like, we're many ways back to where we started, but all the ports have gotten smaller. And I'm sitting here in 2024, I'm wondering, are we, are we in Dongle Town anymore? Like, I still carry one around, but I don't know why.

• 23:11Alex Cranz?

  Security.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, maybe sometimes I need a USB port, and that's it. That's all I can think of.

• 23:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I carry mine for the USB A. And also, like, I was always in Dongle Town because that stupid DV, like, if you had a monitor, it always was VGA, and then your laptop was always DVI. So you were always doing dongles anyway. I didn't have to carry as many of them. Like, it wasn't for little, small, quick things like SD card reads and, and oh, I need to plug a thumb drive in. So, I don't know. I'm still in Dongle Town. I'm okay with it.

• 23:42David Pierce?

  So, the thing that I wonder, hearing you talk about this, though, is whose fault is that? Because, like, I'm, I'm sitting here on the computer I use every day is a Mac Mini that I have connected to a Scepter monitor that I bought for super cheap on Amazon and could tell you nothing about, except that it exists and it's my monitor. It uses HDMI. So it's HDMI to HDMI, and that is just the way that it works. And I'm like, whose fault is it that I don't connect these two things to a USB cable? Because I think there's a world in which the answer to the MacBook Pro's problem was more USB-C ports, not let's bring back the old ports. And I think bringing back the old ports was the right call, but I can't figure out

• 24:20David Pierce?

  whose fault it is that we haven't gotten to the all USB-C everything accessory universe faster.

• 24:28Alex Cranz?

  It's a lot of cost stuff, right? Like, like, it's more expensive to, to put in a lot of these ports. When you talk to the monitor makers, they, they're like, well, no, our, our people want DisplayPort because there's some stuff that USB-C can't do that DisplayPort can, vice versa.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  I refuse to believe that, that anyone on Earth wants DisplayPort.

• 24:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, DisplayPort is a better standard than HDMI. That is maybe for next year.

• 24:51David Pierce?

  Oh, that's true.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Next year's holiday spectacular is just DisplayPort v HDMI, you know, like, we'll do it as a court case.

• 24:59David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 24:59Alex Cranz?

  But you're, you're, you're seeing it. Like, the monitors I'm on right now are these two, like, $800 LG monitors that I'm still very accept that I spent this much money as I did on them. But they've got USB-C on the back, and, and it works. But they also have USB A, and that's the only way you can use the backlights on them to, like, make the backlights do cool stuff. So it's like, they're kind of dumb.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you got USB C is a connector, might be good and can support all this power. USB C as a standard is not capable of doing all the things that you want.

• 25:31Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  And so if you were to go to an all USB C world, to Alex's point, you would increase cost because you'd be basically building in adapters somewhere along the line to move the data into different kinds of standards or different kinds of pin configurations. And I think you do want an HDMI that is focused on being the best display connector up against its mortal rival, DisplayPort.

• 25:56Alex Cranz?

  Which is better.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  And I think you do want a DisplayPort team that's like, we're taking them down. Merry Christmas.

• 26:03David Pierce?

  You're describing like bundling and unbundling, right? Like we've, we've been through a bundling phase, which is USB C. And then everybody's going to come to the realization that, oh, it's great that all of this is in one place, but what it means when it tries to be everything is that it can't be the best at anything. And then we're going to spend the next decade with like a new series of very specific one to one things that are better at one thing than USB C. And then we're going to do this again in 10 years and be like, wouldn't it be great if we had a standard that just brought everything together and you could just plug it in?

• 26:32Alex Cranz?

  I don't think it's that many things, though. When you think about like what the ports are being used, it's, it's visual ports, right? Like it's HDMI and DisplayPort. And that's because they're really good at doing visual stuff in a way that USB C just isn't quite as good at. But if you think about most like data transfer, everybody's moved to USB C or they're using Thunderbolt, which is like USB C, but more expensive and it's the same port.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  Fancy USB C.

• 26:54Alex Cranz?

  It's fancy USB C. And even audio, you maybe have an optical audio out, but typically the 3.5 millimeter jack is like more than enough for most people. And phones, they are like, no, we don't even need that. USB C is enough.

• 27:07David Pierce?

  I was going to say, I can't believe, Neil, I just let you get that far into that sentence.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  No, I hit that.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  I was going as fast as I could to get. Get there before the hissing.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  No, but yeah, I think you're right. It's like, right, the really fast data transfer like lives in the world of PCI. Thunderbolt and PCI have a connection there that's important. Everything else is kind of on USB. And then the thing that is not is the two display connectors. And even that is getting into a realm of silliness, right? Where it's like, how many 8K displays can Apple plug into one Mac Mini is like, that's how we're measuring how important those are. And maybe some things over time, like additional HDR bandwidth or more colors or whatever is going to be needed there will come and I'm sure it'll be great. But most everything now can run on USB-C. And what you're, what you see is, yep, sometimes you sit in a conference room and there's just a bundle of display adapters sitting on the, on the table.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  But they all have USB connectors on the end. That to me just feels like a, a kind of victory. I'm not sure it's the right one. Like, we defeated complexity with additional complexity, but at least all the connectors are the same.

• 28:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it's smaller complexity, I guess, which is something.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  That's a win.

• 28:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, part of me feels like, I think, I'm torn between these two ideas that this transition is, was always going to take a long time because it essentially involves replacing every gadget on earth at some point. And that's a lot of work. And you can fix your own gadget. And like, I've seen this even with the iPhone 15, right? Getting the iPhone 15, fantastic. Love being able to use USB-C. My wife and I can now charge our phones with the same thing. She has a Pixel, I have an iPhone. It's great. Huge victories for everybody. I have a new cable that I had to get for my car. My phone now doesn't plug into certain things it used to plug into. I have a bunch of accessories that are now dead, right? Like, that transition's going to take a long time and I get that. But also, we've been at this for a decade now and it doesn't feel like we're close.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:00David Pierce?

  And so I can't decide if we're running too slowly or if I'm being too ambitious here.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  Let's wrap this up by talking about the, the big news of the year for USB C. Apple switched the iPhone to USB C. This is the big thing in a, in a normal universe. When that happened, we'd run a headline like, USB C arrives, or it's finally here. The transitions are, and that is just, no one's doing that because of the iPhone.

• 29:24David Pierce?

  That's what I mean.

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  Instead, it's, yeah, to your point, it's a combo of finally, and oh, boy, this is going to take a long time.

• 29:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  And I feel that way, to be clear, I feel that way about USB A too. But because there isn't some giant company that is switching away from USB A to mark a moment. It's hard to talk about in the same way, but it is true that USB A is, I believe in world history, the most popular power port of all time. Like it is the most popular plug outlet in world history.

• 29:53David Pierce?

  I believe it.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  It's just everywhere. It is a standard. You can be anywhere in the world and you see a USB A port and you're like, I'm going to plug these god awful cheap LED strip lights into them and they're going to light up.

• 30:04David Pierce?

  Well, first, you're going to have to flip it over because you plugged it in wrong. But then the second time it'll work.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of amazing. No other plug outlet has ever, I'm going to charge my phone. I found a USB A port. God, I hope it isn't loaded with malware. I'm going to carry one of those little adapters that only, that cuts everything with the power. That's incredible, but that is also, you gotta take all of those out. We, you know, we're renovating our house and buying plug outlets and I'm buying plug outlets with USB C and one USB A in the middle. Cause there's enough stuff that I know I'm going to want to plug into that plug outlet. That's nuts. And now I've just installed another USB A outlet into the wall of this house. It's going to be there for 20 years.

• 30:42David Pierce?

  Right. You're both helping and hurting all at the same time.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  And it's the same with Lightning, like Apple, there's, you know, a billion plus iOS devices out there with Lightning ports on them. Apple's still selling some phones with Lightning ports. Apple still sells some iPads with Lightning ports on them. They're going to keep selling them for a long time. EU be damned. Merry Christmas to the European Commission, says Tim Cook.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  Happy holidays, you bastards. And he ships his billionth iPad. Like, that stuff isn't going anywhere. And it kind of means the core dream of USB-C, maybe no connector will ever achieve it. Right? Because there's always going to be standards sort of waxing and waning. And as everything, it's bigger and everything becomes a computer, the installed bases just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 31:25Alex Cranz?

  People are cheap. I mean, how long has the PS2 port persisted? I think you could probably buy something with a PS2 port right now. And you shouldn't, you shouldn't be able to do that. That's just stupid. It's like, it's older than half of the people that we work with.

• 31:41Nilay Patel?

  That said, this is true. You can get all the way here. I've seen people assemble just the most bananas USB-C dongle chains.

• 31:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Nilay Patel?

  You can get a PS2 to USB-A to USB-C connector and use them on a lot of computers. People still use Apple Extended Keyboard 2s. They're very popular, big clicky keys. Apple Desktop Bus to USB-A to USB-C totally works. It's kind of amazing, you know, when software backwards compatibility is so hard, yet with USB-C in hardware, people almost take it for granted, which is pretty incredible.

• 32:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, kudos to like the people who did this for making it a continuing standard. But I think now we're at a point where we've agreed that this is the standard. And it's going to keep moving so fast that I wonder if we're going to end up sort of accidentally at another unrecognizable standard before too long. And if maybe we're even there already, like, USB-C is a collection of different things that all kind of look the same already. And the EU is out here regulating like what the port has to look like. And I think that's good. But I also wonder if instead of that thing you're describing, where we've kind of had really good connectivity over the years between the ideas of USB, if instead we're going to have a bunch of things that look the same and are very different. And that's just going to be where it lands. I have no idea.

• 32:58Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's what we're doing with HDMI right now and a lot of other ports is there's like that conflict and nobody wants to properly label things. And if they just properly labeled things and made the labels easy to understand, this would all be solved. But

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. If you are a member of the United States Congress, listening to this, the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular about USB-C.

• 33:19Alex Cranz?

  Welcome.

• 33:20David Pierce?

  I think there's at least 40 or 50 senators listening to this right now. No question.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  At least half the Senate is listening to this.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Look, first of all, if you're listening to this and you're in Congress, you are the most effective politicians countries. I want you to feel great about it. You are here on the ground with the people. You're sharing the holiday spirit with them and you are talking about real problems in America. Second, you have an opportunity to outdo the Europeans if you just pass some labeling standards. Everything in tech right now is being regulated by the Europeans. You know, and you can, you can do it. You can take weird Saint Nicholas from France and turn them into Santa Claus in the greatest American Christmas spirit. You can do it. And you can say, look, you were, you were, you're focused on USB C. Here in America, we label our wires. Then you can, you can just take Christmas from them and I want you to do it.

• 34:11David Pierce?

  Please.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Because that is actually what we just put labels on the plugs and say how fast they can charge and how much data they, they can support. And then everyone will be happy. We'll, we'll lead better lives in America.

• 34:22David Pierce?

  You have to also make it a spec that people care about. Like this is the, the learning experience over Christmas is like, sit down and really learn about the charging requirements of all of your individual devices. Take some time. Instead of reading the night before Christmas, read some instruction manuals to your computers.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:40David Pierce?

  Because like, I think about what, what happened to TVs, right? Like everybody got very aware of what 720p and 1080p and 4K and 8K were. And those things get better because people start to care about it and they'll buy the better ones. And now I've become like a zealot for telling people to buy expensive cables, which is the opposite of what I used to say. I used to tell people just like, buy the Amazon basics, the cheapest thing you can find for whatever cable you need. It'll probably work. Now I'm like, if you want to live the as few cables as possible lifestyle, you have to buy good ones. And you have to buy ones that are more than most of your devices need in order for it to work for most of your devices. And people just don't know because they've never had to. And realistically, they shouldn't. Like this should be a solved problem. But we, this has to be a thing people care about. Like I'm the problem because I didn't make sure that my monitor

• 35:25David Pierce?

  was the right connectivity for what I wanted. And if we don't start to demand that, it won't get better.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  That's wild, right? Cause HDMI, which carries much more data on the regular, needs to be more reliable in order to support all that high end video standards. It is kind of like, just buy whatever cable.

• 35:40David Pierce?

  Right. But it's not truly. But it's close enough. Like for most cases.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  If you're out there buying the monster cables, like you're getting taken for a ride. If you buy a high quality HDMI cable, it's gonna be fine.

• 35:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  Right? In a way that if you don't buy a high quality USB C cable.

• 35:56David Pierce?

  You, you're boned.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  You're not guaranteed to get life out of it through, as like technology progresses.

• 36:00David Pierce?

  And you'll notice the difference. Like, I, I work in my basement and my bedroom is two floors away upstairs. All of my cables are right next to me. The thing I use to charge my phone all the way upstairs is a piece of crap USB C cable that takes 100,000 years to charge my phone. And I have to change it. And I have not, because I keep forgetting when I'm upstairs and it's too much work to come all the way downstairs. But it's like, it's a real thing. And you will notice the difference between a really good cable and a really crappy cable in a way that I think with HDMI, like, most people are not going to notice the difference.

• 36:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, most people don't even know, like HDMI 2.0 and 2.1. And so they're like, that's fine.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. And if you're like, let's spend $65 on this cable, like, someone will come out and just start screaming at you.

• 36:42Alex Cranz?

  But you know, if your milk foamer is not charging.

• 36:45David Pierce?

  It's exactly right. Neel I can't make coffee if his milk foamer is not charging. And that's very important.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay, here's my last piece on this. And then we should go to the game show. This was the year that Apple did the big transition to USB C. The iPhone has it now. The EU has mandated it. This is all big news. I feel like that stuff in the weeds of it is less important than how does it feel to use technology that all has this port. So that's what we spend our time on. But it is the thing that happened. Does that feel like it was a success? Does it feel like it will be an enduring success? Or are we just waiting for USB C, USB CD to come along? USB F.

• 37:27David Pierce?

  6G will change everything.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying. Well, 6G changed everything. Or did we get there with this big European regulation and finally the switch on the iPhone?

• 37:37David Pierce?

  Alex, what do you think?

• 37:37Alex Cranz?

  It'll change nothing.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  You think it'll change nothing?

• 37:40Alex Cranz?

  I don't think anything's gonna change, really. I think we're gonna continue this, like, slow roll.

• 37:45David Pierce?

  I'm a little more hopeful than that. I think the iPhone changing is a big deal. I think it would have been a bigger deal if the iPhone had switched 10 years ago. I think there's a really interesting parallel universe if, instead of launching USB C on a MacBook, it had launched it on an iPhone, and how the technology world would look different now, all these years after that. I think it would look very different and much better. I've talked to a lot of people in the last, say, Six months who are very excited about this and what it'll mean for the kinds of accessories you can buy, knowing that they're going to last more than the life of your phone and the kinds of things that you can put into cars and put into fixtures in your house and like with confidence that this port is going to be around in some way for the next, let's say 10 years.

• 38:29David Pierce?

  There's stuff you can do that is cool and different and exciting for everybody. I think if we are still in this place where I can plug a thing into my devices and I have no idea what's going to happen in another 12 months, I'm going to be a lot less optimistic.

• 38:44Alex Cranz?

  Join me.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, either either we're going to spend 2024 like weeding out the crappy stuff on Amazon, starting to figure this stuff out. The next rev, a lot of a lot of these gadgets will make more affordances for that stuff and it'll be great. Or we're just going to be overrun by crappy USB to USB C gadgets and I'm going to be on Alex's side saying, actually, nothing has gotten better.

• 39:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm somewhere in the middle and here's what I'll throw out there to just complexify this whole situation. My family has a wide variety of iPhones in it and some of us have a USB C iPhones, some have Lightning iPhones and the most popular person on my family on our recent family trip was my nephew who had a MagSafe battery pack that worked with everyone's phones.

• 39:27David Pierce?

  That's so real.

• 39:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  And it it was like, oh, there's another thing going on here that is interesting, right? There's another out for Apple, you know, MagSafe and Qi charging Qi 2 and MagSafe are really tightly aligned. That's becoming its own little standard right next to USB C. I think that's going to make the ecosystems a little more interesting and a little more compatible, but we'll see. Like, that's the only thing I'll throw in the mix. I'm also optimistic that at least one turn of it is done and that USB C seems future-proofed in a way. Like, it's the thing. It can support everything from a laptop to whatever. To change the world's laptops to the next power standard, you need a good reason. Like this is a tiny little connector and you get 100 watts out of it, 240 watts out of

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  it. That's most laptops. You don't need anything. Like the design constraint it imposes is not an inch tall ethernet connector. Like you can get what you want out of it. So that's my hope is that it has done what it needs to do for now. And the next turn looks like magnetic charging or whatever. And that is going to make this transition hopefully a little easier because there's something compatible with both along the way. And then if a year or two from now, most things will just have the USBC and people will just understand it.

• 40:40David Pierce?

  And then after that, we get to the thing. What was the thing where it was like a lamp that sits in the corner of your room and like beams power at you?

• 40:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's the they're at CES every year and every year they're like, we could do it. And every year it's like, well, then do it.

• 40:51David Pierce?

  That's 8G, baby.

• 40:53Nilay Patel?

  One year, one of those companies promised that they had a Foreman grill that was wirelessly powered. And I was like, I don't believe you. And I went and I shot a video on a flip cam of them cooking a burger. And it was like, the thing was just sitting on a giant plate. That was, you know, like wireless. I was like, this isn't really, I understand that there's no wire here, sir. But this is it. We haven't gotten very far. All right. Speaking of the complexity of USBC, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with the USBC prices right. And probably some sort of lawsuit from the prices right people. We'll be right back.

• 41:49Speaker 00

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• 42:18Speaker 01

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• 42:27Speaker 02

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• 42:50Speaker 07

  Here it comes from the Vox Media Podcast Studios in New York, New York. It's the USBC Price is Right. Neelai Patel, come on down.

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna get sued. I'm so worried.

• 43:03Speaker 07

  Alex Krantz, come on down.

• 43:04Alex Cranz?

  I can't afford to be sued right now.

• 43:06Speaker 07

  And David Pierce, come on down.

• 43:08David Pierce?

  I always thought I would do a cool dance if I was on the Price is Right. That was like, I had a whole choreography planned. There was a spin move.

• 43:14Speaker 07

  And here's your host, Liam James.

• 43:18Speaker 08

  Okay, welcome to the USBC Price is Right. I'm Vergecast producer Liam James. We have a great game for you today, which will consist of four rounds, all themed around the latest industry standard connector for all your favorite gadgets. Well, Neelai, David, Alex, you should all know that each of you will be playing today for a Vergecast listener that we randomly pulled out of a hat. Let's hear who Neelai's playing for.

• 43:44Speaker 09

  This is James Alexander, and my favorite USBC gadget has to be the very first one I ever got, a Nexus 6P.

• 43:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 09

  Greatest phone Google ever made. Thank you.

• 43:56Speaker 07

  All right, James, I'm in it.

• 43:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, great pick, James. All right, let's hear who David's playing for today.

• 44:02Speaker 10

  Hey, Vergecast team. My name is Kabir Ali, and my favorite USBC gadget is my ceramic bur grinder for coffee beans that I got on Amazon. Awesome gadget. Thanks so much, guys. Hope to win the competition.

• 44:14Speaker 08

  My fussy coffee people. Let's go, Kabir. I'm in. Let's go.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  David, you're my sworn enemy now. And Kabir, I don't know you, but you're dead to me.

• 44:23Speaker 07

  We gotta go back and ask a beer if his thing is actually USB A and doesn't have the resistors and can only charge from an A to C cable.

• 44:29Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, we'll put that in the follow up for the next show, but for now, let's hear who Alex is playing for.

• 44:36Speaker 11

  Hi, my name's Terry and my favorite USB C gadget is my Ventru N4 Pro. It's a three-channel 4K Wi-Fi dash cam. I put it into my car. I have a Kia Soul. It's pretty awesome. Also, I would like Alex to represent me.

• 44:52Speaker 07

  Dude found his people. He's like, I've got a fussy dash cam, Alex.

• 44:56Alex Cranz?

  But he also has a Kia, so his like, insurance rate is more than his car.

• 45:00Speaker 08

  Okay, well, whoever wins, your listener will be sent an awesome, cool Verge swag basket filled with all kinds of goodies. All right, is everybody ready? Let's go.

• 45:09Alex Cranz?

  We're ready.

• 45:10Speaker 08

  All right. The first round is guess the price. Guess the price of each gadget. The closest guess without going over five wins. Get within $5, get a bonus of five points. Let's get started with the first gadget up for bid today.

• 45:27Speaker 07

  It's a 1080p endoscopic camera for your Android or iOS device. Featuring a 2.0 megapixel camera, six adjustable LEDs, this USB-enabled tool is great for inspecting hard-to-reach places like car repairs, sewer maintenance, dryer vent inspection, and more. Made by Panzolin.

• 45:50David Pierce?

  Can I ask a follow-up question? Can we spelling bee this? Where can I ask for like, you know, language of origin? I just wonder how many megapixels was it?

• 45:58Speaker 08

  Two.

• 45:59David Pierce?

  Two megapixels. Okay, that changes everything. The 1080p.

• 46:02Speaker 08

  Okay, whoever gets the closest to the retail price without going over gets the most points. All right, Alex Cranz.

• 46:10Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, what do I want to do? $248.

• 46:14Speaker 08

  Alex Cranz with $2.48.

• 46:18Alex Cranz?

  Wait, $248, not $248.

• 46:21David Pierce?

  Wow. Alex Cranz with an overbid.

• 46:25Alex Cranz?

  I believe it in me. Look, it's long. It's one long wire.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  Look, it's at least three cents per megapixel.

• 46:32Alex Cranz?

  $248.

• 46:34Speaker 08

  $248. All right. Mr. Pierce.

• 46:38David Pierce?

  Okay. Do we have the thing where I can like, look back at the crowd and ask them to guess for me? I, $59.99.

• 46:44Speaker 08

  All right, David Pierce, $59.99.

• 46:47David Pierce?

  And the thing on Amazon says it's usually $74.99, but it's actually $59.99. That's what I think.

• 46:54Speaker 08

  And Mr. Patel.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is very complicated now, because I think Alex is way too high and I think David's way too low. $117.

• 47:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's a good number.

• 47:05Speaker 08

  Neil, like Patel, $117. Actual retail price is $29.90.

• 47:15David Pierce?

  Let's go.

• 47:17Alex Cranz?

  I should have gone with, I should have just kept my mouth shut. I could have won. Sorry, Terry.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  Look, my father was an emergency room doctor. Do not do that with things that cost $29.90.

• 47:31Alex Cranz?

  Check for dryer lint?

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 47:34David Pierce?

  My dryer vents are gonna be so clean. You guys don't even know.

• 47:37Speaker 08

  Okay, that means all three of you actually bid over the retail price, so no points are awarded for this gadget. But let's move on to our next USB C gadget.

• 47:49Speaker 07

  It's rechargeable heated socks by Weston. These stockings will keep your feet warm all day with the power of two small batteries you tuck into a pocket sewn into the socks, which are rechargeable by the included USB C cable. Rechargeable socks by Weston.

• 48:05Speaker 08

  All right, contestants, currently on Weston's website, these socks are actually 50% off, but at what price?

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  But what is the discount price or what is the regular price?

• 48:16Speaker 08

  What is the discounted price?

• 48:18Alex Cranz?

  That's harder.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  I feel like this tracks with what David is saying, is that these are probably never sold at the real price.

• 48:23Speaker 08

  Correct.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, you have to psychologically manipulate people into believing they're getting a deal in order to sell battery socks?

• 48:29David Pierce?

  Normally, these are $1,000. And today, they're $6.

• 48:34Speaker 08

  All right, contestants, are you ready?

• 48:36Alex Cranz?

  Ready.

• 48:37Speaker 08

  Okay, this time, let's go with David Pierce to begin with. It's one pair of socks, yes? One pair of socks. $22.49. All right, David Pierce with $22.49. Mr. Patel.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  I've learned my lesson. $11 flat.

• 48:53Speaker 08

  $11 flat from Mr. Patel and Ms. Krantz.

• 48:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, see, because it's socks. Socks are sneakily expensive sometimes. So I'm going to go with $37.96.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  You think the socks cost more than the camera?

• 49:09Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 49:10Speaker 08

  Actual retail price is $79.95. Oh, my God. Krantz, our winner. That's the half-off price? That is the half-off price.

• 49:21Alex Cranz?

  I told you, socks are pricey.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm just going to say this out loud. What I've learned from two rounds of USBC prices, right? Is people respect some parts of their body much more than other parts of their body.

• 49:33Speaker 08

  You can get the USB-A version of these socks for $1.99.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:38Speaker 08

  I'm kidding. I totally made that up.

• 49:41Speaker 08

  Okay, let's get to our final gadget for Guess the Price.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  It's the FLIR 1 Pro Thermal Imaging Camera for Android phones. This infrared camera mobile accessory has an adjustable USB-C connector and lets you find hidden electrical problems, energy loss, water damage, and other heat-related issues with its thermal imaging with the help of the FLIR 1 app.

• 50:04Speaker 08

  By FLIR.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  That's so jaunty.

• 50:08Speaker 08

  All right, contestants, right now on Amazon, you can get this gadget for what price?

• 50:14Alex Cranz?

  I reviewed the Lightning version of this in like 2017, and I don't think that's going to help me at all.

• 50:21Nilay Patel?

  You got to factor out the MFI tax.

• 50:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I got to factor that and also the many years since I last reviewed this.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, inflation. What does Bidenomics say this is worth now? $4,000.

• 50:34Speaker 08

  Okay, first, we have Alex Cranz.

• 50:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I hate it. $268.42.

• 50:45Speaker 08

  All right, $268.42 from Alex Cranz.

• 50:50Alex Cranz?

  I feel like that's a good number.

• 50:52Speaker 08

  Neelai Patel, what is your guess? 207. 207. 86. 207.86. We have a last-minute correction.

• 51:02Speaker 08

  David Pierce, what is your guess? $1. $1? Price is Right, baby. Let's go.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  David's taking the entire middle range there.

• 51:10Speaker 08

  All right, actual retail price is $420.50. And 50 cents.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 51:19Alex Cranz?

  Why didn't anyone guess $420? Oh, I'm sorry. But wait, I still win, right?

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  You do. You're super wild.

• 51:27Alex Cranz?

  Yes!

• 51:27Speaker 08

  Wow. You absolutely won. In fact, let's take a look at our scoreboard as it stands now. Rounding out the back is Neelai Patel with 0.

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, James. I'll send you a Nexus 5, man, no matter what happens.

• 51:43Speaker 08

  Joining him is David Pierce with 0. Come here, I'm so sorry. Alex Cranz, our fearless leader, at 10.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  A commanding lead.

• 51:52Alex Cranz?

  All for you, Terry. It's all for you.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  I can't send you a Nexus 5 because it's a mini USB. I'll figure it out.

• 51:58Alex Cranz?

  Get an adapter. Dongle it.

• 52:01Speaker 08

  All right, contestants, the next game we have for you is called the Match Game. Match the gadget to its max wattage over USB-C. 2 points per correct match. Here, we have a list of 10 USB-C gadgets and 10 of max power delivery stats in watts. As you all may know, power delivery is a specification on USB-C that tells us how much power the gadget is allowed to receive for charging. Use your expert gadget knowledge to match each USB-C PD number with the appropriate tech.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say this is proof positive that USB-C PD is bananas? I'm just gonna read you the numbers that are available. 100 watts, 45 watts, 140 watts, 3 watts, 80 watts, 18 watts, 30 watts, 96 watts, 27 watts, and 45 watts. Many of these numbers are virtually the same.

• 52:58Nilay Patel?

  Universal standards, baby.

• 53:00Speaker 08

  Let's tell the audience what the devices are. First, we have the Nintendo Switch from 2019. We have the iPhone 15 Pro. We have the 16-inch MacBook Pro, M3. We also have the Steam Deck OLED model. We have the DeWalt DCB 094 USB charging kit. We have the PS5 DualSense controller. We have the Samsung Galaxy S23, the OnePlus 11 5G. We have a 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M1 model. And finally, the Pixel 8 Pro. Everyone should have a worksheet. We provided for them with all this information. Please match the gadget with the appropriate power wattage. You may start now.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  Again, I'm just gonna point out it's 10 different devices, many of which are exactly the same category in 10 different numbers.

• 53:50David Pierce?

  Listen, Neil, I stopped stalling.

• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm going.

• 53:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I did this one wrong.

• 53:54David Pierce?

  Did you guys do the thing that I did where you get almost to the end and you realize the two highest ones you haven't done yet? And all that's left are ones that don't need that much power?

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  C, and I was like, C, C, C. C, 45.

• 54:11Alex Cranz?

  I goofed.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  No, I think I nailed this. Actually, you know what? I nailed this.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  Confidence.

• 54:16Speaker 08

  All right, contestants, let's see how everybody did. We're gonna take these one at a time, starting with the Nintendo Switch at 18 watts.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, that's a big no. Anybody get that one?

• 54:28Speaker 08

  Nope. Next, we've got the iPhone 15 Pro at 27 watts.

• 54:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I was close on that one.

• 54:35David Pierce?

  Did you guess 30? I guess 30.

• 54:37Alex Cranz?

  I guess 30.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  You know what's horrible at this is that we keep going, the more it's guaranteed that I'm wrong.

• 54:43David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 08

  Next, we have the 16-inch MacBook Pro, M3 model, at 140 watts.

• 54:50Alex Cranz?

  Dang it!

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  Hell, yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 08

  You should have all gotten that.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  I knew that was a thirsty bee.

• 54:53Alex Cranz?

  No, I knew it was thirsty, but I thought something else was thirstier.

• 54:57Speaker 08

  All right, next, we have the Steam Deck OLED model at 45 watts.

• 55:02Alex Cranz?

  Yes!

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  That's low. That feels low.

• 55:04Alex Cranz?

  I got that one.

• 55:05David Pierce?

  It does feel low.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  That means I know nothing.

• 55:07Speaker 08

  I was surprised by this as well.

• 55:08Alex Cranz?

  I put a little line in.

• 55:10Speaker 08

  All right, next item on the list is the DeWalt DCB 094 USB charging kit. At 100 watts. Wow.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Alex Cranz?

  I had it in the MacBook Pro, the 16-inch. I switched them.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, I got that one wrong and everything else waterfalled to wrongness after that. There was just a cascade of inaccurate answers after I got that one wrong.

• 55:33Speaker 08

  All right, well, we'll rip the Band-Aid off gently here. It's the PS5 DualSense Controller at 3 watts.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 08

  Let's go. Samsung Galaxy S23 at 45 watts.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 08

  OnePlus 11.5G at 80 watts.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's the only thing I know about OnePlus is that it'll just suck down power. That's what they do, baby.

• 55:56David Pierce?

  I put 100 because for the same reason. I was like, OnePlus, just get after it. Light that battery on fire.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  Hey, put that shit on a hot plate. Let's go.

• 56:05Speaker 08

  All right, the 14-inch MacBook Pro M1 model at 96 watts.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 56:11Speaker 08

  Finally, we have the Pixel 8 Pro at 30 watts.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Hey, bang.

• 56:16Alex Cranz?

  I got two.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  I told you I'd take this home.

• 56:18Speaker 08

  All right, contestants, let's find out how you did. A reminder that each one that you got correct here counts for two points.

• 56:26Nilay Patel?

  A reminder that this is the winning worksheet. And if I had gotten the DeWalt thing correct.

• 56:32Speaker 08

  All right, Mr. Hotshot, tell us how many you got right.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  That's five.

• 56:35Speaker 08

  Got five correct guesses.

• 56:37David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 56:37Speaker 08

  David Pierce, how many correct guesses do you have on your worksheet?

• 56:40David Pierce?

  I got a whopping two right.

• 56:42Speaker 08

  Two correct from David Pierce.

• 56:44David Pierce?

  I have probably five other ones that are one rung away. Like, should I have put 100 when I put 96? Yes, I should have. Should I have put 80 when I put 96? Yes, I should have. Tough beat for David. Camer, I'm sorry. Four points for me.

• 57:01Speaker 08

  All right, Alex Cranz, how many correct guesses do you have?

• 57:04Alex Cranz?

  Well, I can't make fun of David because it's the exact same.

• 57:07Speaker 08

  Two.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  I also got two right. But I got two right in the last round, so I'm winning.

• 57:12Speaker 07

  Did you both try to do the highest and lowest first? Like, I knew that PS5 was the lowest.

• 57:16Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 57:17Speaker 07

  And then I was just trying to figure out where the highest was, and I knew it was the MacBook.

• 57:20Alex Cranz?

  I did highest first, and then I started to scramble because I realized I'd done it all wrong, but it was too late. So I was like, oh, PS, PS, I know that one's gonna be low. And that's, that's the one I got right.

• 57:31David Pierce?

  I very confidently, the first line I drew was iPhone 15 Pro to 30 watts, because I was sure that was like, no question that was correct.

• 57:40Alex Cranz?

  Three watts off.

• 57:41David Pierce?

  And then, no, I'll tell you what threw me while I'm being angry about this, is that the Nintendo Switch is famously the hardest gadget on earth to buy cables for. So I looked at this and I was like, what's the most random number on here? Because I bet that's it. And I landed on 27 for the Switch. And I was so sure that was right, because I was like, no other cable, except the one dumb one that Nintendo will sell you, will work. So it has to be a random one. And I was wrong, and I'm furious.

• 58:06Alex Cranz?

  I just randomly chose 96, and I was crock.

• 58:10Speaker 07

  You think the Switch takes 96 watts of power? The Switch has the processing horsepower of a phone from 2009.

• 58:19Alex Cranz?

  I was like, maybe it just gets thirsty.

• 58:21Speaker 08

  Well, I will just say, you guys are doing much better than you did last year on the Bluetooth Jeopardy game, so.

• 58:26Speaker 07

  Fair enough.

• 58:27Speaker 08

  Let's review the points from that round. Neelai got 10 points for his five correct guesses.

• 58:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:33David Pierce?

  Worst to first.

• 58:34Speaker 08

  David Pierce and Alex Cranz each got four points for their two correct guesses, bringing our grand totals to Neelai at 10, David at four, and Alex at 14.

• 58:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 07

  Santa's back.

• 58:47Alex Cranz?

  I got you, Terry.

• 58:49Speaker 08

  All right, now we go into round three. Round three is Mad Libs. We have given you a sentence with a bunch of terms missing, but all the terms are jumbled. The sentence comes from a recent Android Authority article spelling out just how complicated USB-C has gotten. Fill in the gaps in the sentence with the provided terms. We'll give you three points each per correct placement. And the sentence is...

• 59:13Speaker 07

  Blank is based on blank and aligned with the blank specification, thereby bundling in blank tunneling support for two blank or a single blank display output and blank capabilities on blank devices.

• 59:31Alex Cranz?

  Do we have four hours to complete this?

• 59:33Speaker 08

  And the terms we have for the sentence are: DisplayPort 2.0, 4K, PCI Express, hub, Thunderbolt 4, USB 4, Thunderbolt 3, and 8K. All right, everyone, please use your worksheet to fill out the sentence. I got it.

• 59:54David Pierce?

  Can I ask for definitions on several of these words? Also, is PCI Express a trick because no one has used that in 25 years?

• 1:00:01Alex Cranz?

  Are there more words than there are slots?

• 1:00:04Speaker 08

  No.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Nailed it. By the way, that's how I took the LSAT, in case you're wondering. I finished the worksheet and just stood up and said, nailed it, after every section.

• 1:00:12David Pierce?

  I'm having deep regrets already, but I'm locked in. I hit the buzzer.

• 1:00:16Speaker 08

  Kranz, you ready?

• 1:00:17Alex Cranz?

  Well, I guess I'm gonna have to be.

• 1:00:21Alex Cranz?

  I barked something somewhere.

• 1:00:23Nilay Patel?

  I knew the people who took the LSAT that way, too.

• 1:00:27Speaker 08

  All right, let's hear your sentences, contestants, starting with Alex Cranz.

• 1:00:32Alex Cranz?

  That's rude. That's very rude. "Thunderbolt 4 is based on Thunderbolt 3 and aligned with the PCI Express specification, thereby bundling in..." Hmm, this is where it goes really bad. "...USB 4 tunneling..." No, that's just wrong. "...support for up to two hub or a single DisplayPort 2.0 display output..." Hmm. "...and 4K capabilities on 8K devices."

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  You really just ran out of words there. That's how that feels.

• 1:01:09Speaker 08

  Okay, let's go with David Pierce next.

• 1:01:12David Pierce?

  "Thunderbolt 4 is based on USB 4 and aligned with the Thunderbolt 3 specification, thereby bundling in PCI Express tunneling support for up to two 4K or a single 8K display output and hub capabilities on DisplayPort 2.0 devices."

• 1:01:27Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that makes sense!

• 1:01:29David Pierce?

  I'm not sure that it does.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  You guys do not spend nearly enough time on the DisplayPort Wikipedia page.

• 1:01:34Speaker 08

  Sean Hollister is very upset somewhere right now. All right, Neelai Patel, tell us your sentence.

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  USB 4 is based on PCI Express and aligned with a Thunderbolt 4 specification, thereby bundling in Thunderbolt 3 tunneling support for up to 2 4K displays or a single 8K display output and DisplayPort 2.0 capabilities on hub devices.

• 1:01:54Speaker 08

  Alright, I believe Nilay is gonna be our winning contestant here, but let me read this sentence for you. It's actually, "USBC 4 is based on Thunderbolt 3 and aligned with the Thunderbolt 4 specification." What? That doesn't make any sense! I got one right!

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  I refuse!

• 1:02:13Speaker 08

  "Thereby bundling in DisplayPort 2.0 tunneling support for up to 2 4K or 1 8K display output and PCI Express capabilities over hub devices."

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  I just got two words and they are the same word. Thunderbolt and PCI Express are the same, the same thing.

• 1:02:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, so why didn't you put them in the right places, Patel?

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  Homonyms! The power of suggestion.

• 1:02:37David Pierce?

  No, I maintain the first clause of this sentence objectively makes no sense and should not be allowed. I refuse.

• 1:02:45Speaker 08

  Just like to remind you, this sentence came from an Android Authority article spelling out just how complicated USBC has gotten.

• 1:02:53David Pierce?

  I'd like to have a word with Android Authority. Could we bring them on the show?

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I'd like to question your authority, good sir.

• 1:03:00Speaker 08

  Alright, so let's review that round of Mad Libs to see how we did. Nilay Patel got 5 correct guesses for a total of 15. David Pierce got 2 correct guesses for a total of 6 points.

• 1:03:12David Pierce?

  Don't say it like that.

• 1:03:13Speaker 08

  And Alex Cranz only got 1 correct.

• 1:03:15Alex Cranz?

  Got 1!

• 1:03:17Speaker 08

  For a total of 3 points. Let's go back to the big board to see our totals. We've got Nilay Patel at 25 now, taking the lead.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes!

• 1:03:25Speaker 08

  David Pierce at 10, and Alex Cranz at 17.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  And it would be more if it wasn't for the corrupt Android Authority, whose administration I will bring down.

• 1:03:35Alex Cranz?

  I gotta crush Nilay in the last round.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  My sets are higher, Krantz.

• 1:03:39David Pierce?

  I think for an extra 10 points, can Nilay be forced to explain this in English?

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  Yes, now that I have the correct one. So the way that I always think about this, just very quickly, and I know I'm going to gloss over the details, but the way I always think about this is that Thunderbolt and PCI Express are the same thing. And PCI is what's in your computer and Thunderbolt is that exact same connectivity over a wire. That means Thunderbolt has lots of bandwidth, it's really fast, you can do expansion with it, which is how you get PCI expansion chassis over Thunderbolt. It's all makes sense. So, all this is saying is, over time, USB 4 and Thunderbolt, as USB gets faster and faster and faster, it starts to inherit the capabilities of Thunderbolt, because Apple and Intel are all mixed up in the standard here, they're starting to align

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  the things, so that you can do more Thunderbolt things on USB as it gets faster. So here, USB 3 is inheriting a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 capabilities, in alignment with Thunderbolt 4, which is itself getting faster, and that means USB 4 can now do Thunderbolt 3 things, like DisplayPort 2.0 for 2.4K or 1.8K device, and PCI expansion on hubs.

• 1:04:47Speaker 08

  I also appreciate that Neelai said it in more words than Android Authority. So, good job Android Authority.

• 1:04:52Alex Cranz?

  Significantly more.

• 1:04:55Speaker 08

  Alright, let's go to that final round, everyone, which is the showcase. Guess the price of the combined showcase without going over. The closest guess wins 20 points. Guess within $250, we'll give you an extra 5 points.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  I hate this. Can we go back to Mad Libs?

• 1:05:13Speaker 08

  Guess within $100, get an extra 10 points. Guess within $50, and we'll give you a whopping 50 bonus points. Alright, Kabir, this is our moment. Let's go. Let's see what we have in this showcase.

• 1:05:27Speaker 07

  In this package, experience USB-C in all of its many uses with this all-inclusive podcasting kit.

• 1:05:33Speaker 08

  Oh my god.

• 1:05:34Speaker 07

  This cutting-edge package would in theory include a 16-inch 2023 MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip, 12-core CPU, 18-core GPU, 16-core neural engine, of course, 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports, and 140-watt USB-C power adapter. Along with that, we have the Sony WH1000.

• 1:05:53Speaker 07

  XM5 wireless headphones, chargeable by USB-C. And then Rhodes NT1 fifth generation studio condenser microphone, which allows connection with both XLR and USB-C. Anker's 563 10-in-1 USB-C docking station. LG's 28-inch 16 by 18 dual-up monitor with USB-C. And to top it all off, a waterless portable essential oil diffuser, rechargeable by USB-C. By Lintra.

• 1:06:25Speaker 08

  So it's a wellness podcast. I just want to be clear. All right, contestants, please guess the price of this deluxe podcasting kit. We're going to start with our leader, Neelai Patel. Okay, $4,179.99. All right, we've got Neelai at $4,179.99. Next on the scoreboard, we have Alex Cranz.

• 1:06:48Alex Cranz?

  $4,856.

• 1:06:51Speaker 08

  We don't know how much that microphone costs at all. Alex Cranz is going with $4,856. And David Pierce, what is your guess? $1.

• 1:07:04Speaker 08

  In a classic Price is Right. I wrote down an actual number that I will tell you when I find out whether I won or not.

• 1:07:12Speaker 08

  All right, we'll get there in a moment. The actual retail price of this package is $3,847.96. And 96 cents. Come here, we did it! But I'm closer. You went over, it doesn't matter. Is that how that works? Because this is Price is Right rules, if you've gone over, you lose. Which means... The comeback of the century.

• 1:07:38Speaker 08

  No one knows how much that microphone costs. Yeah, can we get individual prices? All right, let's break that down in more detail. The 16-inch 2023 MacBook Pro with M3 chip was $2,499.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Got that exactly right.

• 1:07:53Speaker 08

  The Sony headphones were $329.99.

• 1:07:58David Pierce?

  Ah, I was $20 off on that. I was so close.

• 1:08:00Nilay Patel?

  That was a little high there.

• 1:08:01Speaker 08

  The Rode NT1 condenser microphone was $249.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it was just a little high, actually. It was only 50 bucks high.

• 1:08:09David Pierce?

  I was 100 bucks below.

• 1:08:10Speaker 08

  The Anchor 563 docking station was $129.99.

• 1:08:15David Pierce?

  That's a good deal. I'm way off on that one.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Andrew, you put together a nice little package.

• 1:08:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  It's very affordable.

• 1:08:22Alex Cranz?

  I put it at $50.

• 1:08:24Speaker 08

  The LG DualUp monitor with USB-C was $599.99.

• 1:08:29David Pierce?

  I put 650. I was pretty close.

• 1:08:31Alex Cranz?

  Why is my LG monitor half that size and twice that price?

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  You love pixel density. The thing you don't know about the DualUp is that it only has 10 pixels.

• 1:08:41Speaker 08

  And finally, the Lintro 2023 waterless portable essential oil diffuser from Amazon at $39.99.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  No, nailed that one. Yeah, I know my Amazon garbage.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  Your company's called Lintro and you put the year in the product description, you're not going over 50.

• 1:08:58Alex Cranz?

  This is much more affordable than I thought.

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  I was high on the headphones, the microphone, and the docking station, and that allowed David to win.

• 1:09:04David Pierce?

  I had that MacBook at 3 grand, not 2,500, and I blame Apple for not making any sense with what it sells you. And I was in aggregate, basically, dead on with the rest of it. So I ended up, the number I wrote down was $43,9561. And if you take away that 500 bucks, I was like, I was right there. So I'm feeling good about this, but also I won anyway. So learn how to play the game, Patel.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  David is fired, and what you've won is being alone for the holidays.

• 1:09:31Speaker 08

  That's correct. David got 20 points from this round, our other two contestants with zeros. That makes David our winner today with 30 points. Eli just behind him at 25. And finally, Alex Cranz with 17 points.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  Rigged by the corrupt Android authority.

• 1:09:48Speaker 08

  So sad. Congratulations to our winner, who David was playing for, Kabir. And let's tell Kabir what he's won. In our Verge swag gift bag, we've got a Vergecast t-shirt from the popular What's a Photo? series. We've got this awesome pair of Vergecast sweatpants, a Verge mug, a Verge hat, and of course, a Verge fanny pack. Thank you to everyone for playing and thank you all for listening. Please get your pets paid and neutered. Help control the pet population.

• 1:10:20Speaker 08

  We'll be right back after this break with more of the USBC Holiday Spectacular.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

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• 1:11:37Speaker 08

  All right, we're back. I'm going to tell you right now, I feel like USBC Price is Right is rigged, and I should have won. David is my mortal enemy now.

• 1:11:45David Pierce?

  I also feel like that. I feel like I just really didn't deserve to win that. Like, I did it. I did it for Kabir, and I did it for everybody, but I didn't deserve that victory. I'll take it, to be very clear. But I'm just looking at the sentence that I wrote and I don't deserve anything.

• 1:12:02Nilay Patel?

  I was so close. I also can't believe we won with the $1. Anyway, whatever. We're gonna have some beef next year and also most assuredly trademark lawsuit. It's just coming for us and that's fine.

• 1:12:12David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Alex, in the meantime, has gone on vacation. She's just on Santa sleigh, flying around the world, giving out gifts to all the good boys and girls. It's great. I hope she enjoys her break, but David and I are sticking around to talk to Noah Dentzel, who is the co-founder and CEO of Nomad Goods. In this conversation, David, I really enjoyed it.

• 1:12:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was fun. We talked about USB-C. We talked about wireless charging. We talked about just like what it means to be an accessory company in this new world of USB-C. And it's very clear that this is a thing he spends a lot of time thinking about and having ideas about. And like, he didn't tell us as much of the weird stuff that they're building as I wanted him to, but he told us some of the weird stuff.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  What's fascinating about this is the iPhone switching to USB-C created a vast new market for USB-C products, which is really interesting. And Noah got all the way into what that means for how he runs the business and how you can build a business around a standard like USB-C. Great. All right. Without further ado, here's Noah Dentzel, the co-founder and CEO of Nomad Goods.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  Welcome, Noah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 12

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  Thank you for celebrating the holidays with us by talking about USB-C.

• 1:13:23Speaker 12

  Hey, this is a USB-C holiday. I'm sure there's gonna be, it's a good subject for around the, around the table discussion. Confusing, not too controversial.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. Everyone's got an opinion, but none of the opinions matter.

• 1:13:33David Pierce?

  Confusing, not too controversial is like the perfect tagline for USB-C. It's for a second moment in time. That's very good.

• 1:13:40Speaker 12

  It's definitely confusing. There's a lot of potential. It's a, it's a standard size, but what's going on in that size, there's all kinds of different things going on.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. So this is why we wanted to have you on here because you're, you're somebody who is actually like making this stuff for people in the world, right? And like, just sort of poking around your website. It seems like you went at some point in the last year or so, basically like all in on USB-C. Like I had a hard time finding non-USBC stuff for sale from Nomad, which I feel like in the past, your thing was kind of always like, we have all the cables for all the people. And now you're just like, it's USB-C time. Get out of here.

• 1:14:16Speaker 12

  Yeah, our customer base tends to be very early adopter and we internally are as well. So like the second that something's even announced, we see this, we saw our sales shift from Lightning to USB C before the iPhone 15 was shipping. For context, historically, when we've had micro USB stuff or USB C stuff and Lightning stuff, we've always been way stronger on Lightning and five or seven times more. And then all of a sudden, earlier this, this summer, we saw that our USB C, we, we launched a product, actually Charge Key, we launched a USB C and a Lightning version. And the USB C version was outselling the Lightning version. That would typically never happen. This was before the iPhone 15 debuted.

• 1:15:00Speaker 12

  That was just based on rumor and speculation. So our customers are living in that forefront.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  So like as soon as the EU says it's USB C time, people just start going to Nomad's website and buying USB C stuff, basically.

• 1:15:11Speaker 12

  It's wild, it's fun. They keep us busy and that's where we like to play. You know, that's the, that's the thought, being on that front edge. When you're at the beginning of a new cable era, obviously, USB C has been around for a while, but until the iPhone does it, you know, it doesn't seem to get the recognition it deserves. But it's, it's this future proofing, which is really cool because anything you buy right now, I mean, if I were buying a car right now and it didn't have a USB C port, I would rethink that car purchase, right? That's a massive purchase. I just would not want to be stuck behind. I mean, I honestly personally wouldn't even want it to have a USB A port. But if it did, I would be okay with that. That's just like, we're ripping forward through USB C and it's way better.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  The car example is really interesting, right? The experience a lot of people have with USB C up until nowish maybe, is that it's the new charging connector. So they would buy an Android phone, it would come with a cable, maybe even a USB A to USB C cable, and that's how they charge their phone. And that might be how they charged everything. But then it also has this huge data functionality that is very complicated. It can also be a Thunderbolt cable. You're an accessory maker, how have you been thinking about just communicating what does what to people? Cause that seems like the hardest part about USB C.

• 1:16:23Speaker 12

  So we have some materials on our website and some blog information and we probably need to do even more to explain what is USB C because to us, we get the problem of we're just surrounded by this and we've been thinking about it for years and we assume everybody knows. Sometimes we talk about how higher wattage, you know, charging at faster speed, but sometimes a really helpful piece of communication is language surrounding like minutes to charge, you know, 20% in 20 minutes. That might be more relatable or 30% in 20 minutes. So like, what is the core thing that the person wants and how is it really helping their life? Because what all these numbers mean? I mean, sometimes these numbers and specs are so high and crazy and you can't even use it. The iPhone can

• 1:17:08Speaker 12

  only charge at, I think it's only rated for 20. I think it charges closer to 30. And often that's only for, for a very short amount of time, right? You're not necessarily getting peak speeds at all times. If you're over 80%, if you're really high up on your phone, you're going to charge slower. So trying to break it down, let people know that sometimes using the like analogies of like, it's like a hose and the size of your hose versus, you know, these are terms that our engineers here will explain it when we're debating internally. But

• 1:17:37David Pierce?

  This makes me think like, I hate buzzwords all the time. And this makes me think we like really need some good buzzwords here. It's like, like Tesla did a good job with superchargers, right? Where there's like, people now understand that there is like a way to charge your car and then there are superchargers and those are faster because super is a big fast word. And now it's like, maybe we need like cables and fast cables and like mega cables. And it's like, people will suddenly understand how these things work.

• 1:18:02Speaker 12

  We do. In companies like Nomad, we try, I mean, we come up with our own little internal buzzwords, often from a marketing standpoint to be like, you know, for example, you know, supercharging capability or something. It is kind of nice when there's actually a standard because then it's like, cool, we're building to that spec. We'd obviously building to a certain spec and it can be confusing for the consumer too, because there's, there's real things that are like from USB, you know, the USB system, USB standard and there's protocols on that standard. And then there's marketing Things that A may be actually helpful because it's like, oh, I can make sense of that supercharging. B, it could just be buzzwords from a company, but maybe that company is so big that their language confuses you and sounds official when it's actually not. So,

• 1:18:48Speaker 12

  so it's wild. Yeah.

• 1:18:49Nilay Patel?

  So that's the the basic challenge of USB C, right? It can do so many things and so many different permutations that even just talking about it is hard, which is fascinating, right? You've got to market the products. You've got to invent new things. You've got to tell people what they can do. But the business is built around something that's pretty amorphous, right? Like Nomad makes USB C accessories. What's your relationship to the standard? Like, are you thinking about the next version of how much power can come through a PD cable? Are you saying, okay, here's where the base of iPhone owners is? We got to rush some products to market. Building a company around a standard seems like you need to pay a lot of attention to the standard, but you can't get too far ahead because the market hasn't gotten there yet.

• 1:19:34Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think you just brought up a great point mentioning PD. So power delivery was a great example of of kind of a of a standard term or threshold wattage, at which point that is considered kind of the standard of fast charging. Challenge is, USB C has been just ripping and roaring forward. So I think it was 20 watts before, maybe it was 18. And so at this point, charging at that speed could almost be considered kind of slow. So power delivery, which was fast just a couple of years ago, and like in my book, I'd call that like, good, you know, solid. So yes, staying on point with the standards, we absolutely have the problem of chasing the front edge so much. That's where the fun is. That's where the excitement is. But it also can be like too far

• 1:20:16Speaker 12

  out there for sure. We've had that happen. We actually launched our first USB C product in 2016, I think it was. And I think it came out in 2014. But like, that product had a 3000 milliamp hour integrated battery. It was 12 volts. And so you plug it into the 12 volt, the cigarette lighter thing, and it charged itself up its battery and also had an A and a C out. Everyone is using the A and not the C on it because it was just so early and it was kind of ahead of its time. That was in 2016. So we've been doing this. See for a long time, we've been waiting for this moment for a long time. Sometimes it can be really expensive when you're trying to get on that really, really front edge. And you might make a product and it's super cool. And it's like, do people really need this? And to need it, they're going to need to pay for it, right?

• 1:20:58Speaker 12

  Because some of the stuff that's not at the mass scale yet, it can be substantially more expensive. So it can be finding that sweet spot of the front edge or certainly where things are moving. I came across a really great word the other day called extensibility, extensible. It's a quality of something that's basically future proofing, right? So the cool thing about USB C is it's extensible. So they have this, the standard size, it's updating and it's growing, right? You know, 4K, then 8K, and then the high speed data and this and that. So it's cool that we seem to have come to this standard size that is extensible and it's growing. And it means that for an accessory maker like ourselves, we have a big pool to play in.

• 1:21:39Speaker 12

  And we have a lot of, we can bring forward ideas, we can adapt, we can update, we can be thinking about power, portable power, data. What if we want an issue where there's not data for security? Sometimes when you're charging in a public environment, maybe you want to ensure that data's not going through. It's exciting and interesting and it means that there's opportunities and challenges for us to build for it. But it's certainly got so many pros and we like that, we embrace that. We, it's annoying as a customer, as a consumer to have six different cables and you always seem to have the wrong one. Those days are kind of over, at least largely improved.

• 1:22:16David Pierce?

  I'll give you largely improved. I think over is, is hopeful.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  Like that's what you gotta take to the holiday table, David. You gotta, you gotta be like, grandma, look, it's largely improved. Do you feel the spirit of Christmas?

• 1:22:27David Pierce?

  No, to your point, like the thing all of that relies on, and I'm curious how you feel about this, is like getting the connector itself right. If we're at a point where it is so sort of future proof and extensible, like you're talking about, that we won't regret that choice in a decade, a lot of things will change around it. And it like, you know, there will be backwards compatibility stuff, but whatever. But like, do you feel like we got the connector right? Like as somebody who works with it all the time, is it, did we do it correctly?

• 1:22:51Speaker 12

  I feel like we did, I've gotta say, when we started in 2012 with our first product, charge card, it was a 30-pin adapter for the iPhone. So that, I think they switched in 2012 or 2013. So when we started, it was the 2012, and they shifted to Lightning, and it was, it was cool, it was good, it was Lightning, it was great. What we've seen, there's been kind of these like, looks like there's kind of a 10-year window. So does this usher in a 10-year window? I think that we're at the beginning of a relatively large window. It's hard to say. I mean, it makes sense to me that ports would also stay around for charging, but of course, we have the whole component as well of wireless and Qi, and the Qi 2 standard that's coming out. And does Apple want to go portless? Do some devices

• 1:23:33Speaker 12

  want to go portless and drop the port altogether? Nonetheless, remaining the port, but with some option of wireless. So from what I've seen, from what we've seen, it seems like we should probably have a good 10-year window. These are the types of windows you need for it to be useful, because otherwise, you're on an airplane, and then you're like, gosh, darn it.

• 1:23:53Nilay Patel?

  But aren't we at the end of the 10-year window, right? USB C hit in, what, 2015?

• 1:23:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's one version of it that says we're nine years into a 10-year window.

• 1:24:01Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's, I guess it depends on the, the level of the adoption, and the, a big impactor is, look, you know, the United States, the iPhone is the leading smartphone. It's a leading smartphone globally. They just took it on this year. I think that's big. That's a big impactor there and should give us a decent window. It's hard to say. If they do change, it will be there.

• 1:24:20David Pierce?

  There's nobody like telling you about USB D already, right? Like, is this, is this a thing that's, that's coming next year? That we just don't know that yet?

• 1:24:27Speaker 12

  All right, gosh, I, not, hopefully not yet. Give us a little bit of time to, to get the standard rolled out.

• 1:24:33Nilay Patel?

  So let me ask you about Apple, actually. I'm always curious to ask accessory manufacturers this. For the longest time, there was Lightning, and that was your volume seller, right? You pointed out, like, that's where all the volume was. That's where people were buying. And Lightning was pretty fixed. Like, they rolled it out in 2012 or whatever, and it never changed. It was the thing it was for the whole time, and you were able to build the business around that. And mostly, it was charging. Like, there were just not a lot of, like, cool computer things you could do with a Lightning port. I had like a silly little camera attachment for my iPhone at one point, but like, all this stuff fizzled out. Was that because that's how Apple wanted it? Is because you didn't have the market? I always wonder, if that's where, what all the people were buying was Lightning accessories, why were the only Lightning accessories?

• 1:25:19Nilay Patel?

  Like cables and battery packs. Why weren't there anything else?

• 1:25:23Speaker 12

  Yeah, it was a very controlled and somewhat conservative market. So MFI is made for iPhone. That's the the Apple sort of guidelines and program that manages it. And it's very clear and very strict guidelines. There's some wiggle room. You could submit exception requests to products. We actually had a couple of products that exception requests that had to do largely with the housing that was holding the connector. So we can make, we made like a carabiner cable that was really cool, cool. We made, we made our key, our little charge key short cable. So these were, these were not the most, you know, wild exceptions. They're more like in a industrial design exception, but it's very controlled environment. And then you think about female, right? So when we think of lightning, we tend to think of the male. These are the connectors that you buy and you integrate them on cables and this and that.

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, I feel like we just need to explain to people exactly. You mean the part that you go into, right? There's the plug and there's the socket. And so when you say female, you mean the socket.

• 1:26:16Speaker 12

  The socket. So it was that, very few products had the female lightning on them. From Apple on theirs did, right? The iPhone has anything that takes, takes a lightning or the battery pack. For example, lightning was really, generally speaking, was really a male program, right? It was really just a little, the connector plug that goes in. You think of USB C, it's, it's double universal, right? It, it turns around, it's 360, you can turn it on both sides. Lightning did that too, of course, but both ends can go both ways. It's actually one of the things that I'm really excited about is, is that they've enabled reverse charging. And I know I get in trouble on these things. I say like, you know, the iPhone did this. It's like, yeah, well, the Android did that years ago.

• 1:26:57Speaker 12

  I know, I know. It's still, and it's so amazing now in USB C because it can go both ways. So, you know, you're out at the bar and your phone's dead. You buy someone a beer, you charge your phone from their phone or vice versa. So if you're irresponsible and your battery is dead, you need one of these on these. If you're responsible, you, you need one of these on you so you can charge other people. So, so there's just cool stuff going on with, with USB C. And so there's things like that, that never were really part of the lightning thing because it wasn't going both ways. So there's things like that that just make it better and interesting. And again, confusing, right? If we put power in the mix, which way is it going? What's charging what? You know, you need to kind of choose on the phone or does it just go out? If it's to the AirPods, it's just going out. You're not charging the phone from the AirPods, but interesting stuff there.

• 1:27:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and even beyond just charging, it seems like one of the things we were amazed by with the iPhone was how not locked down its USB C setup is. You can just plug most things into it. Some of them work, some of them don't, but we were sort of consistently surprised by the number of like computery accessories that suddenly worked with the iPhone. And I feel like for you, you're now in this position where you can build one set of accessories that works with iPhones, which are, it sounds like the majority of your customers, but also with the whole universe of Android phones. And then also do this gigantic set of things that you've never been able to do before with accessories. Like, has it changed the list of things you feel like you can build? Just because it is this universal port that theoretically you can plug almost anything into and it'll do something?

• 1:28:26Speaker 12

  Absolutely. A, from a technical standpoint and B, from an like now we have the opportunity to do it standpoint, meaning now that everyone's together. One of my best friends is a diehard Android user. And when we launched this charge key, he sent me a message. He bought five and he said, "You finally made something for Android." And of course, of course.

• 1:28:46David Pierce?

  You're like, sort of.

• 1:28:47Speaker 12

  And of course, I'm thinking like, dude, we've been making the best cables for USB C for years. But it's true, we're largely iPhones. So from a customer base standpoint, so it's huge for us. And I just say that because we, we're all about building portable power, keeping it charged on the go, keeping it protected on the go with our cases and so forth. But we've, it's always been part of us. And now though, that it's obviously like this cable without question, that there's two models and one sells more than the other, there's one model and it goes to everyone. That's huge for us. I mean, from a, from a research and development standpoint, it means let's probably invest more into this because we don't have to build two of them or we don't have to make a judgment call. Is there a market for this one?

• 1:29:29Speaker 12

  So it's incredible from that standpoint. We have a lot of great ideas brewing right now. We have a couple of products that are in development that are going to be released in 2024 that I think are a little bit ahead of their time, if not early. We're trying to, there's a challenge that it poses as well is the Apple Lightning ecosystem was a protected kind of ecosystem, right? You, you see products at gas stations and so forth. That were non-MFI, right? But if generally a customer wants to buy something, if you're buying quality product, it's MFI. So it was a controlled environment. So while there are all these annoying rules and stuff, it was a safe environment. One of the challenges of USB C is there's less of that, right? So you go to the gas station. How do you know that that $5 cable is good?

• 1:30:12Speaker 12

  Well, if you're buying a MFI lightning cable, it costs a lot of money, $20 or $30, but the components are coming through the, from the Apple ecosystem. So these are going to be challenges that we face from a, what you had mentioned earlier about the standard in marketing and these key terms and buzzwords, but these are going to be challenges that we face. And so from our side, that's, I can already see that, that there's going to be a little bit of a, some fun coming together. And hopefully some things do prevail, some, some solid standards and, and so forth. So we can give clarity to customers and what they're buying and what they can expect from the products.

• 1:30:47Nilay Patel?

  With all that extra, you know, resource available for research and development, do you see more and different kinds of USB C accessories coming out now?

• 1:30:56Speaker 12

  Yeah, great question. I mean, having a cable on you at all times becomes more important than ever before. So, so perhaps portable cables, portability could be, could be more important, especially as there's this universality. It's like, there's way more reasons for why you would need it. Before, do you want to bring a cable with you? You might use it for one use case and you need another cable for another use case. That, that's kind of annoying. So, so I think we're going to see more things like that, more, more portable cables. And perhaps just maybe some higher quality cables where you're investing in a strong, because you know, before you're so annoyed, you know, you've already bought 20 cables. You have a drawer in your desk filled with random cables. You know, you don't, the last thing you want to do is spend $30 on a cable. And now it's like, hey, do the research.

• 1:31:41Speaker 12

  There's a really incredible high-speed data cable. I think it's the Thunderbolt one from, from Apple out there, 240 watts.

• 1:31:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Speaker 12

  This and that, just, it's nice to know that that's going to be around for a while and it's going to have so much universality and usefulness. So it could be worth investing. We, we have Kevlar in our cables. You know, that's coming from DuPont light. It's a licensed thing. It's like the real deal. So our cables aren't cheap, but they're really well made. We have metal tips to them. So I could understand why someone would be annoyed a few years ago and they just want to buy the cheapest cable possible. Cause A, it might break on them. B, the standards are changing. C, they need to have five different cables. But now with one, you can be a little more thoughtful about it.

• 1:32:18David Pierce?

  Yeah. Do you think, I was gonna ask you about the Kevlar cables because you were, you were early to the idea of what I would call a ludicrously fancy charging cable. Like the Kevlar stuff you started doing like in 2019, I think, right? That's which is like ancient history in the charging cable universe. But I think the idea that you should eventually carry the one sort of, the cable that charges the hardest thing you have to charge and then kind of scales down to everything else. Like, that seems like where we have to get in this crazy world of charging that we're getting into, that you either carry a bunch of different USB C cables or you carry like the one like epic cable.

• 1:32:54Nilay Patel?

  God cable.

• 1:32:55David Pierce?

  Right, the god cable.

• 1:32:56Nilay Patel?

  It's Christmas. It arrives in a virgin birth.

• 1:32:59Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying to make the Christmas jokes as much as I can.

• 1:33:03Speaker 12

  So that the, just the universal best cable.

• 1:33:06David Pierce?

  We're calling it the god cable. It is now officially known as the god cable. Like, is the god cable gonna be a thing?

• 1:33:10Speaker 12

  Well, I guess the god cable is kind of.

• 1:33:14David Pierce?

  We already made it a thing. It happened already. This is great.

• 1:33:16Speaker 12

  The USB C cable. And I mean, I would argue, I can't, I can't, I love this product. It's the best cable is the one you have on you. So I love our chart, our charge key because the best cable is with you when you need it.

• 1:33:28David Pierce?

  But isn't that the problem with USB C is that that's not necessarily true anymore?

• 1:33:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, how fast is a charge key that you love? It's great. And I understand why you like it. Can it charge my MacBook at 100 watts?

• 1:33:38Speaker 12

  Ours, right, this version right here will just charge up to 60 watts, but we're probably gonna increase the speed to go 100. The MacBook Air tops out at, I think, 35 watts. So 60 alone, you're charging really, really high speed.

• 1:33:50Nilay Patel?

  I gotta run these M1 ultras, dog.

• 1:33:52Speaker 12

  We're coming, we're coming for it.

• 1:33:54Nilay Patel?

  So there's something else happening there. You mentioned it before, which is MagSafe, Chi2. Just to make this stuff, there's a whole bunch of really hardcore engineering, probably for you, a bunch of supplier deals, right? The bleeding edge of USB power is all in GAN and getting supply of GAN chips in Chi2. I'm sure that the supplier base of people actually making Chi2 stuff is pretty limited right now. Let's start with GAN. That's what you need to have in order to build the most powerful USB C stuff. How does that market work? Are you in it? Do you have exclusives? Do you have to fight off other vendors?

• 1:34:26Speaker 12

  Yeah. So GAM, gallium nitride is the kind of the high speed, dense, sort of compact, high speed standard, I guess you could say. When you're doing these things at first, earlier on, it's going to be more expensive. So back to your point on the supply chain and the suppliers and contract manufacturers, they're pretty on this stuff. So we're usually one of the early companies to be excited and be pushing the boundaries of those things. And for GAN, that was, that was a couple of years ago where it was more really on the forefront. It's certainly become the kind of premium commodity tech, let's say, because there's still plenty of stuff out there that's not, and it's going to be, it's going to be less expensive, it's going to be bulkier. And when you think about costs as well and supply chain,

• 1:35:09Speaker 12

  there's the cost of freight and air freight and shipping. So it depends.

• 1:35:13Nilay Patel?

  What's the thing you want to build that you can't now, but the next rev of GAN would let you build?

• 1:35:20Speaker 12

  Well, I would love to go even really compact so we could have the AC to C integrated, right? So AC 120 volt in or up to 40, whatever for your other places, AC to C extremely compact, extremely compact, so hyper compact. So it's so small, it fits on your keychain and it's smaller than a, than a key fob. So it's kind of like game over with this, you can charge.

• 1:35:51Nilay Patel?

  You just have a wall plug on your keychain?

• 1:35:53Speaker 12

  But it's so tiny that it's elegant, right? We don't want to be carrying around a funky brick with us.

• 1:35:58Nilay Patel?

  I love this answer. This is completely not what I was expecting. I love, yeah. A straight 110 plug on a keychain is what you're after.

• 1:36:05Speaker 12

  You're like, where's my 200 like crazy charger thing?

• 1:36:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was like 200,000 watts.

• 1:36:13Nilay Patel?

  Like you can plug a Tesla into a USB C like, and you're like, here's what I want, like a wall plug. But that's actually really interesting to think about it. If that's what you can stretch out to, we're kind of just back to having power cables.

• 1:36:25Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? Only this is a power cable that has intelligence in it to self-negotiate a rate. Like we are just back to power cables. Is that? Like I don't know, I bought a power strip for $7 yesterday. It's a real thing that happened. And I did not think, I mean, maybe you should not buy one that you're going to run too many amps on. But like, most people do not think about a power strip. They're like, I'm gonna buy a power strip, it's gonna have six plugs in it. Hopefully I can fit all my wall warts on it and that's how I'm gonna evaluate this power strip. And you don't think about charging speeds or delivery. With USB, you have to. And yet, USB C is gonna become the power cable for the world. Are we gonna get to a place where we can just stop thinking about it that way? Because you're gonna integrate a regular power plug on the end and we'll just negotiate it intelligently? Like, how is that gonna play out?

• 1:37:11Speaker 12

  Yo, you've got me thinking to your previous question as well as I'm just really hopeful that it becomes as universal as it can become. I'm just thinking about all the products that we have that don't use USB C, but do use their own AC to DC wall wart thing. And you're plugging in with a barrel connector. It's called the little circular plug. And to think of your Dyson vacuum cleaner, your, you know, any, it's certain mini household products, et cetera. So we still have so many products out there that are using all their weird little power systems. And then if you lose the thing, you don't know, I have a charger, I have a little air pump, like mattress air inflator thing, and I can't remember where I put that barrel plug. And I like, don't buy things if they don't have USB C, if they could have USB C.

• 1:37:53Speaker 12

  I've been waiting for years to do a USB C electric shaver. So there's all these household items and all these things that I'm excited for it to come to it. And as that happens, like back to your point on what's your like dream build? I guess like, I don't know, maybe as well, again, really boring answer, but building the cables that can supply the wattage for these household appliances and devices that might take a higher wattage to charge. Because I don't wanna have still, when you look at, even though USB C's become universal for all of our portable electronics and so forth, it's not quite universal on household appliances and all these other things that are running on DC anyways and probably should go USB C.

• 1:38:36Speaker 12

  And sometimes the supply chain there can be slow to change. I'm sure we all have had the experience where you bought something and you're like, wait. It's still using that cable.

• 1:38:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Speaker 12

  You know, I'm using a mic. Granted, it's an older one right now and it has a mini USB on it. And it's really high quality mic. It's from years ago, but even when I got it was, when we got it, it was weird that it had the mini on it. So, so sometimes things can take a while in the deep supply chain. You might go into REI to buy a light, a camping light, and it might still have micro. And I'm at a point where I'm not buying that. Like, I'm gonna, unless it's the only one of its kind, it's just, it's gotta be USB C.

• 1:39:14David Pierce?

  One of the things I've been wondering is as we get to that universality, like the, the sort of addressable market of everything USB C goes up in a really big way. Now that it's kind of universal and available to everybody, like everybody's just gonna have USB C stuff. And part of what that makes me wonder is if like, you're talking about these sort of super niche accessories can start to come back, right? Like, I feel like especially in the electronic space, you can spend an outrageous amount of money on like a really fancy case for your iPhone. And that's about it. And I now wonder if like, if Neelai is gonna be able to get his ultra fancy, many thousands of dollars, multi-device charger.

• 1:39:53David Pierce?

  Because there aren't tons of people in the world who would buy that, but there's just enough. And now they all can because it's USB C. And I wonder like, are we gonna, all of the stuff that's been out there until now has been sort of mainstream on purpose because you have to be in order to sort of be accessible to people who would buy this thing. But now I wonder, the market is just so much bigger. If it's just gonna get much weirder and niche-er and fancier and more luxurious. And part of that is just really exciting to me that we're gonna get to like the speaker market, right? Where it's like, you can buy the $20 speakers everybody has, but you can also spend 50 grand on a pair of speakers if you really want to. And there's just enough people in the world for that, that it works. And like, I wonder if we're gonna get there with some of these accessories too. I kinda hope so.

• 1:40:34Speaker 12

  I hope so. I imagine it's coming. I was just chatting the other day with our supply chain director, a guy named Darren, total audiophile and spends a good chunk of his paycheck going into these really nice speakers.

• 1:40:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm with you, Darren. Let's hang. Let's hang, buddy. Our people.

• 1:40:50Speaker 12

  And he was buying Monitor, British company, and just really beautiful work that they do on their, on the metals and the housings and industrial design, just kind of, kind of in that really upper level category.

• 1:41:04Nilay Patel?

  My, my left, rights and centers are monitored. I'm with you. Darren, we vibe, baby.

• 1:41:09Speaker 12

  You guys would love it. And he, it was just funny looking at it and he was getting all excited about these details. And I could just imagine so many companies who are in the broader electronics, speaker, consumer space, you know, companies that have been around for a while, have really high standards, build really cool stuff. This is an opportunity for them to go, oh yeah, that, that thing finally settled, all that BS of all the different cables and this and that. And granted, before the cables, not only were there different standards, they didn't have the capabilities that USB C has. USB C has a lot of capabilities. So like I was saying, we just got some new monitors in the office and instead we can now get USB C cables for them or, or USB C HDMI cables, because I'm sort of sick of

• 1:41:50Speaker 12

  the whole HDMI thing too. So it's just really cool what, what can happen. And I do think that with more universality, it opens the opportunity for people to take it seriously and for it to jump in and to build really cool stuff. I hope that Nomad can continue to be one of those. And I expect we're going to see some high end competition and it'll help us, help keep us sharp. And Eli, I think we're gonna, if we don't make it, granted, we got some cool stuff in the works. I think we're going to be seeing stuff like that out there and we're, and that's totally up our alley too. So.

• 1:42:18Nilay Patel?

  I love it. All right. Now we gotta let you go. I gotta say, in the, in the spirit of the holiday, there's no better place than this than with some light shit talk about HDMI. Like that, that's a perfect ending for the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular. Just throwing it right back at the HDMI people. They were our first spectacular, by the way.

• 1:42:36Speaker 12

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:42:36Nilay Patel?

  Deeply political organization, I have to tell you.

• 1:42:38Speaker 12

  I thought we were going non-controversial.

• 1:42:40Nilay Patel?

  No, no, it's the holidays, man. We're lighting this thing on fire. Let's talk politics. No, amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular.

• 1:42:48Speaker 12

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:42:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, boys and girls, that's it for the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular USB-C Edition. We hope you have a happy holiday season. We hope your families are safe. We hope you get a lot of charging cables in your stockings that can go at 240 watts and transfer data at 40 gigabits per second. The jeezy cable, if you will. It's the holidays. We hope you have a happy new year. Hold your loved ones tight. Throw away their lightning cables and move to one universal standard for serial communications. That's it. That's the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular. Safe travels and rock and roll.

• 1:43:50Speaker 13

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• 1:44:19Speaker 14

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