CES 2016 Day 1

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn are joined by Dan Seifert, Lauren Goode, and Sean O'Kane in Las Vegas at CES 2016. The panel discussed the numerous keynotes, including Intel, LG, Samsung and Sony, being very tired, and 3D printed souls. 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. I'm Neil Patel. I just realized I have no idea what day it is, or what time it is. But I know that it is either the first, second, or third day that we have been at CES.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  We are now calling... Hello, I'm Dieter Bohn. In previous years, we called this the press day, the day when there are all the press conferences. We used to call it Day Zero.

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  That's correct.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  But that's dumb.

• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, because yesterday was Day Zero.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Nah, yesterday was Day Negative One.

• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert is here.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, this is Dan Seifert.

• 0:35Nilay Patel?

  Sean O'Kane is here.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  I'm a fan of the negative number days as well.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the negative number days... So here's... Let's start with some real, real inside-baseball-media shit.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:47Nilay Patel?

  Or let's start with the sound of a large forklift. So, if you haven't heard of The Vergecast...

• 0:52Speaker 03

  It's early enough in CES that they're still building it.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  We are a podcast. It's early enough that I'm still...

• 0:56Speaker 01

  We should introduce The Vergecast to all our brand-new listeners who are following us because of CES.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  That's true. So, hello, this is The Vergecast.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  We're very professional.

• 1:04Nilay Patel?

  It is the flagship podcast of multi-channel media experience known as The Verge.com.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Today, we're broadcasting from Home Depot?

• 1:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, but we are live at a large trade show called the Consumer Electronics Show, CES for short if you're in the know, or if you're an extremely pedantic employee of the Consumer Technology Association, which recently renamed itself from the Consumer Electronics Association, because electronics is a bad shitty word, but technology probably means you're like a startup billionaire.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I see what they did there.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Pretty sure that's what that means. So, anyway, we're at CES, the biggest trade show in tech. It happens, for whatever insane reason, the first week of January. So you go home, you see your family, you open presents, I don't know what you do. Whatever you do at the holidays, whichever way you wish to celebrate.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Drink.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  You drink, you relax, and then you get on a plane to Las Vegas for a week to be, basically, just overwhelmed by insane things, all of which light up and have LEDs. So if you're me, that fills you with rapturous joy. If you're the rest of the tech press, mostly you just, like, I don't know, complain on Twitter. But I love CES, and I have for years. And so this show... It's weird. It used to just be about like home theater stuff. And then now it's basically about like smartphone, things that connect to your smartphone.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  It's a giant smartphone accessory show.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  We have cars that are smartphones.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if I have to hear another major-

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Volkswagen made a car that they called like the Volkswagen something, something touch.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  It's called the E-Touch.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  The E-Touch.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  The E-Touch. It's literally a name that HTC rejected for a phone when HTC was still relevant.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Everybody else stopped putting E in front of things like three years ago.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I'm-

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Now they're all at the end of it. It's something E.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  The Moto G E-Touch. Bowling for beers? Bring him over here, Frank.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  We need bottle opener.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Here's what you need to know about the Verchass during CES week. We do it every single day of the show.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  We are strung out.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Do you have an opener? It's a real key concern here.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'll have one in my bag.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  So we do it, we do this every day of the show. And each day it gets progressively crazier and more tired.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  So this, this day-

• 3:29Speaker 03

  And we're starting at a pretty high level of crazy and tired right now.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  We are. It's been a long day. So the show floor at CES officially opens tomorrow.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  That's when we can run inside and do all the stuff. But if you just think about logistically how a show like CES works, you can't let people run around booths full of new products unless you've announced those new products.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  So the day before, everyone has all their big press conferences where they announce all the new stuff. And what's happened now at CES is there's so many companies that are here. It's so many new kinds of companies, not just Sony, Samsung, LG, but a million car companies are here as well. Whatever. There's now two days of pre-buildup before the show begins. So you have day negative one, you have day zero, and you have day one.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  We're declaring this year that press day today is now day one. That's how we did it on the site and is what we mean.

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  So we have-

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Because they added an extra day on the front end.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  You know, we're putting a Sony press conference vibe here. We've talked for 10 minutes.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  CES is also your non-stop destination for nomenclature discussion.

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  I have to tell you, look, if you have thoughts about what number of days should be, and I assume that Vergecast listeners are really into numbering days.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  The calendar buffs all.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  We just spent like two weeks counting down. Most of us just spent two weeks counting the days to Christmas. I mean, this is like what you do in the winter. When you can't go outside.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  You wait for some.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  You count days.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  Sean has weird holiday traditions.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  No, don't you add them calendars?

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. Okay, so we're here at CES.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's been two days of stuff. This is our first day of Vergecast. We're gonna have the Vergecast every day here. We're doing a control, walk, delete from the stage. We are at the Verge Lounge at CES. It is not yet built. The show floor is not yet built. We're in early. So if you hear construction noises and.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Don't let this fool you.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  Workers screaming in pain. Uh, it's because nothing is complete.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  They are not added special effects. That is actually happening.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Just so you get a lay of the land, we're here in Central Hall. Uh, we are, I would say, a half kilometer away from Sony City. And just two clicks down from Samsung Town.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  And Panasonic Stadium is down over a few blocks away.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  It has a sign that says Panasonic Stadium. It's unclear what sports we played there.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Inside Panasonic Stadium is the 4K bullpen.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, there's, and then just next door to it.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Real 4K TVs? It's the backup 4K TVs?

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  Let me give you a sense of how fucking crazy this place is. Panasonic built a house. It's in its booth. Like, they're like, we make a lot of smart house stuff. What if instead of just connecting it to each other and showing you how it works, we showed you what it looked like inside of an actual house? And then they built like a very nice sort of midwestern.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  House.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  House. Anyway.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Inside the stadium.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  Inside the stadium.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Inside the, there's like a rhyme or riddle here.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  Actually, what's funny is, um, that house is really expensive because you can see right into Panasonic from the roof. It's like Wrigley Field. Uh, okay, so let's start. Um. We guess it's. Can I just tell you, we all went to press conferences today.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:33Nilay Patel?

  This is why I'm making this joke about Sony, and we'll get really deep into Sony in a minute. Sony had so little to announce at CES that Kaz Hirai, the CEO, literally came onstage in front of, you know, a thousand people or whatever, in a livestream and like all this hype, and he was like, "You know, we could talk about new products."

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Uh-oh.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  "Why don't we first talk about CES?" CES is kind of amazing, right? There's like all these people here, so many people. You put up a chart of like how many people attend CES. He's like, "You know what really got me? They serve 600,000 pounds of food at CES." And then he like put up like 600,000, like in like little like icons like an infographic. He's like, "That was enough to feed like a million bears." And then like, it was just like, "What? Are you announcing CES? Sony, is your product CES itself?" And then they just literally pattered for 25 minutes before announcing a single sad 4K camcorder.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess I'd want to lead with the meta discussion before a 4K camcorder.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  That's sad though, isn't it? I mean, they were like the craziest and wildest press conference. They were one of the biggest of the last couple of years.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  Right, so my theory is that the first Samsung was Sony, and then Samsung was Samsung, and now Huawei is Samsung. Think about it.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, um...

• 7:48Speaker 03

  We'll come back to that.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Intel tried to be Samsung.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, Intel got a little Samsung-y.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  They're still Intel.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so we gotta start.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Intel's full Intel.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  Sean, you're here. We should start with yesterday. The biggest news yesterday, I think, yesterday was a lot of like little gadget stuff.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  It was like a lot of USB Type-C accessories, we can talk about that. But the biggest, like the big hype-ridden, must-attend journalists flying in just for this one event.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Was a car company.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Called Faraday Future.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  We did a profile on them that was like Faraday, it was like lengthy, Tamara Warren did it, it was great. They're like, "They're a new car company, they're building up to something big at CES," and they talked to all the people. And then they had their event. Do you want to take us through that event?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I mean, if you're familiar with car events, especially over the last couple of years, it actually felt a lot, and I think this was purposeful, like a Tesla event.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  It had that like plain white stage, but it had the sort of, it was built like Musk usually builds his announcement stages, not like, you know, you look at some like, we're gonna be the National Auto Show next week in Detroit, and you look at some of the like the LA Auto Show, like, car announcements usually have like a much more grandiose look to it. This was very, this was a white stage with a, some sort of car under a curtain.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  And we had to listen to a lot of people talk.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Four different people talk.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  And so they're like, SVPs, Nick Sampson, who's like a well spoken British man.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  And so the combination of like, the extreme tech staging and the accent made it seem like a parody of, you know, like before Prometheus came out, they did the fake TED Talk.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Like explicitly.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  It had that vibe, which is why it felt so much like a Tesla thing, because it was like, if you closed your eyes and like, you could think that like Elon Musk was up there.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  Because they paraded out like three or four executives before they like got into the, you know, meat and potatoes of the event. They were comparing themselves to other car companies and at the end they compared, well, I won't explain that. And we heard, we heard that people pronounce Jaguar probably seven hundred times.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Jaguar.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  Jaguar.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  I'm calling it shaguar for the rest of my life.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, so that was great, because a bunch of them were there. So what they announced, they get on stage and are like, we're a new company, we're so happy to be here. Um, yeah, the student Sampson's like, we have worked at every company in the world and we can do it. It's just like insane. I mean, he literally sounded like an evil dictator for a while. And then what they basically announced was, it's been 18 months since we started. In that time, we've hired 750 people.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is up, like even from when we profiled them in the fall, it was like 500. I mean, they're moving.

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  How are they doing that is an open question.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  They have secured a huge investment from a Chinese company whose name eludes me.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  LTE.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  LTE.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  I knew it was LTE something. LTE.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Self-described Netflix of China.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  Right, which is an entertainment company.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Which is very interesting. They said, "This is not about buying cars, it's about new ways of doing cars." They had like the governor of Nevada on stage.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Because they're opening up a big ass factory in Nevada.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  They're spending a billion dollars to build a factory to build their... So, well, actually, let's back up real quick. So, we've known about this company for a while. We know that they want to make some sort of electric car that probably has some sort of, or a big level of autonomy.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Also, will probably be some sort of subscription-based ride-sharing service. That's like a little more vague. Like, we know they want to build an electric car, probably a bunch of different kinds of electric cars. And then, so they've been based in California while they've been teasing out this information over the last two years. And recently, they announced that they were going to go sort of the test... Build their own cars with a billion-dollar investment in a factory in Nevada because Nevada is doing a really good job of attracting lots of, especially electric car companies, but lots of new tech companies. And, uh, and yeah, their governor... I mean, I was at the Daimler Freightliner, uh, created a self-driving truck and showed that off in Nevada last year because they have looser restrictions on autonomous driving.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  And he was there, he was like one of the first ones riding in the truck, uh, with like the crazy German head of Daimler Freightliner. It was like the most amazing, like, like they honked the horn on the drive out of the tent.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  We're Sony again, we got it, we... What did they announce?

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so, so they've spent all this time teasing this stuff and like leaking out these little bits of information, but like kicking the can on that actual announcement of like what the car is gonna be. And in the meantime, we found out before the press conference, but officially at the press conference, uh, that they've spent a lot of the last 18 months like sort of, "Yeah, we're building this electric car and this whole big service, but we also made this prototype," which they unveiled on stage last night. And... Admittedly is a really cool looking car.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  It looks like a Hot Wheels.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  It's a concept car, so...

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Literally looks like a Hot Wheels I would have had when I was like 8 years old.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  And run on that orange track in my bedroom. Like, not the Hot Wheels that are like a Corvette or a Mustang. It's like when, when like Mattel has its own like crazy designs and they put these giant fins on things.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, so what they, that was like a, they fucked it up, right?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  That's what everybody's talking about. That's not what they announced.

• 13:01Nilay Patel?

  That's not what they announced. What they announced was, hey, our company is huge. We hired all these people from Apple and Tesla and every major car maker. We have this huge investment from like an entertainment company, which is interesting if you think about the autonomous car part of it.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  Um, they're basically like movie theaters on wheels, right? Like, that's weird. Um, and what then, then what they actually announced, like the thing that is real, was something that they're calling with the, the vehicle platform architecture.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Or the variable platform architecture.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  That's what, the VPA, um, which is...

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Not necessarily a new idea.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a totally old idea. Um, but it's, uh, it's the core platform for a series of vehicles that is modular. So you, the wheelbase can get longer and shorter. You can add batteries to it. You can power 2 wheels or 3 wheels or 4 wheels.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. The added benefit for them for sure is the idea that like it, you would imagine it requires less engineering, changing from one model to another because of the way electric cars or the, this electric car and Tesla and probably most electric cars going forward are going to be built is this like bed of electric batteries. They're laid out in a grid because you don't really, we don't have the technology to build like one big battery that lasts a long time yet for lithium ion. So you lay them out, you, you, thousands of them or hundreds of them, but most likely thousands of them in, in the base of the car. And that, it looks like it lends itself nicely to making modular cars because it works really well on a graphic.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  But yeah, that was, that was the most we learned about what they're actually doing.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Right, I mean, that was like the thing that they do. But then they're like, so we can scale this platform any way we want. And they like, they had a video where they were showing like, wireframes over the platform. And like, the wireframes are very boring. It was like, a hatchback, a sedan, SUV.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, crossover.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, and it can scale all the way up to this stupid car.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it like, looks like the Batmobile is in Tron, basically.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like, our, our transportation reporter, Jordan Goslin, I think, said it best. It looks like a 60's Batmobile made for, like, the 21st century.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, it looks insane. It has one seat. It's like, bonkers.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  It has one seat, it has oxygen and water pumped, like, right to your mouth.

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  There's like a head and neck restraint, like you get in fancy race cars.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  There's also no indication that it moves.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  There's also no indication of how you get in it.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's clear, like, they...

• 15:22Speaker 03

  I think you have to be born from like, the cybernetic weave underneath.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  Look, he hires 750 people. Like, make a couple clay models. Like, we got nothing to do. Like, make a Batmobile. Anyway, so that totally distracted from their event.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  So they put it out, and like, my entire Twitter timeline was just like, jaded tech people being like, "This won't disrupt Tesla." And it's like, that thing is not supposed to.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  This like, big factory and this architecture is supposed to.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's really weird. It just shows that like, people haven't really paid enough attention to, and maybe rightfully so, because it's easy to be like, "Who are these guys coming out of nowhere, doing whatever they're doing?" But like, to think that that was going to be the thing that they're actually going to compete with, like, the Model X or the Model S or anything that Tesla's gonna make, like, is just not, it's not what's happening.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so Chris Siggler and I were talking yesterday, and it's like, what they should have done was been like, "We have a plan, using this platform, to make a hatchback." And you don't have to show it. Be like, "Here's our planned model lineup. Like, here's, you can start here, and you can scale it to here, and like, we're gonna make a little hatchback, and a little sedan, and a little blah blah blah, and then, here's this, and if you turn up the crazy dial, like, we can also use this platform to make this race car."

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  Um, but, I think what precludes them from doing that is this autonomous car-sharing entertainment thing.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  Because...

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 16:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, it just seems like, what they want to do is build movie theaters on wheels.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Where you get in the car, you like, call up a car, and you like, sit down in it, and like, I don't know.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  LETV plays at you.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Right. There's some sort of entertainment deal that's like, maybe subsidize the ride, or you know, there's some sort of, maybe you want to get in the ABC car.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Well, the other problem is, once you say, we're definitely making a hatchback.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  If we're picking, if the future of transportation is like, major American television networks, and you have to request the like...

• 17:12Speaker 03

  The Big Bang Theory car.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Mom, I want a limo to go to the prom. You're getting the Big Bang Theory car, because it's all I can afford.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  You have to take the Bazinga.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's awful.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's really bad.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  That's terrible. The Dancing with the Stars car.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  But, once they say, "We're making a hatchback", now, we could make a hatchback, we are going to make a hatchback, then all anybody's gonna be saying is, "When's the hatchback coming? You're late. Where's the hatchback?"

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, they didn't even have a timeline.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  I mean, this is the problem.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  And they already gave you a timeline, so we're gonna have a car out in a couple of years. That's what they said.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this is the problem with, with hype. I mean, this is, this is them... They played this game for as long as they could, which was over the last 18 months, you know, being really coy about what they're gonna, I mean, they knew what they were doing with this entire process, as far up to like this week, where it was like, "We're gonna give an interview finally, with some of our lead designers in our factory, and we're gonna do it in front of this..."

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  By the way, there's just people carrying huge ladders, just walking all around you.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  "Oh, we're gonna do it in front of this like, car under a tarp, and we're gonna like, make a mention of it, but we're not gonna..." And it's like, "Is that our car?" And it's, I mean, they've been very careful about like, how they've done this.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  Right. Anyway, so that was like, the big one. And then,

• 18:19Speaker 03

  This is the hype catching up to them.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  And then what happened, this thing about entertainment cars is super interesting to me, because the same day, was it Volvo, showed off like, a rotating dashboard, that was just like, huge screen, so you could like...

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Basically, the glove compartment on the passenger side.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  What was that thing called? Was it called the knee anvil?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Right?

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's unclear whether they think that you're gonna have a passenger in that seat.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  So you're the driver of an autonomous car, and then you push the button, and the thing flips up, and like, the steering wheel like, recedes, and you like, lean back, like, watch the huge screen.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  But, so that thing, uh, Jordan and Chris were telling me is like, been around, this idea that you're gonna flip up this huge train. It looks super fucking awesome sci-fi, like,

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  When you're a little kid, and you're like, in a car, and you have no idea how anything works, and like... How space works and you're like, I wish I could push a button and the whole dashboard would flip up and the hood would fly away like.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  That's why when they showed off the first version of this in the fall, Jordan, like one of the first videos he did for us was sitting in that first version of like where the seat moves and like dash moves and all this stuff. But like that, I mean, what we saw yesterday was like this cool animation of like the interior of a full car, whereas like what he got to try out was just the skeleton of like inside where it was just the seat, just the dash and nothing else. So like you're right.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  What was cool about this, so the folding whatever is like awesome. Like I literally just watched that gif for like an hour. What's, what was interesting about it is what Volvo was actually announcing was a streaming video service that intelligently connects the length, that predicted the length of your commute when you enter your destination.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  And then shows you, picks shows for you, like assembles content for you that fills that amount of time, which is wild.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which is like airlines don't even do that as good as they're trying to do this in a car.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Airlines are like, would you like to watch this popular movie that we've ruined in very specific ways?

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Lauren Grush on the way here tweeted, she was watching The Martian.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and she was like, this line goes from like, we're going to have to science the shit out of it to like, we're going to have to science the ship, the spit.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Spit.

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  Spit out of it.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  It would have been better if it was ship.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  I mean.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  That movie is amazing, by the way.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  Can we just talk about The Martian?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  It's a pretty movie. Lauren Good, don't go away. Oh, she can't hear me.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  Just yell at her.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Lauren Good. Don't go away.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna, we're gonna get done talking about cars and we're gonna, Sean's gonna exit. She can't hear me at all, can she?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  No, yeah. She'll be able to listen to it.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  And it is really compelling radio.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. What else happened with cars? A bunch of stuff.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the other, the last big car thing, I think, was, uh, CarPlay. So Fiat Chrysler said it's going to be in Chrysler's Jeep, so whatever. Ford backed all the way down, they're going to do it. And then Toyota was like, you know what? We're going to license all of Ford's stuff, but we're not going to do the CarPlay in Android Auto piece. And my theory is that will eventually impact Toyota sales. Like, I think, so.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Our listeners may not know this.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  Toyota, like, proudly announced yesterday.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yesterday?

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  Today. Whatever day Toyota did stuff. Um, let's see, yes, don't worry about it. Just let it blur into a mix. That car sales are higher this year than they have been in forever. Like.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Record-breaking car sales this year. Um, so like, there's this industry narrative that the car industry is about to explode. Because Tesla is gonna disrupt it, and Uber is gonna disrupt it. Meantime, people are buying the shit out of cars.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  And I think if you're out there trying to buy a car, you are an idiot if you're not buying a CarPlay and Android Auto car.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, you've had a lot of experience with them, too, and it's like. I mean, we've all had experience with bad infotainment systems, so we know that something better needs to be on the horizon.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  And Android Auto are, you know, they're desirable, but they're still, like, far from being good.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  What about a roll of duct tape and an iPad?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  You know, that might be a better experience. Let me tell you this. There's a long-running joke that, you know, someday, you know, Microsoft is gonna get Windows in your car, and then your car's gonna blue screen. Well, Android Auto needs to be rebooted. Sometimes it needs to be rebooted when you're doing 70 miles an hour down the road.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you mean, you don't mean, like, conceptually rebooted. You mean, actually?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Actually.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  I thought you'd just been saving up that burn for, like, weeks.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  No, you actually need to unplug your phone, restart your phone, because the thing won't accept a voice command. Like, this is where we're at. And CarPlay is not much better, if it's better at all. So like, to say, to base your entire, you know, maybe, might be a $25,000 purchase decision on Android Auto and CarPlay, I don't think a lot of people are going to get there for quite a while. But, there will be a point where you are gonna want those, and they are gonna be a must-have feature. And I do think down the road, Toyota's might see the folly of its ways.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, there was this report from GM dealers, like, in late December, that was like, people are coming into our dealerships and asking for these cars.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  And we are, and GM dealers are now ordering. When they place their wholesale orders, they're no longer ordering GPS units in the cars. They're just ordering the Android Auto and CarPlay.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  The, uh, the, I went to the Ford, uh, press conference this morning at like 7, 6:30. It's really early. Um, and they, they did a bunch of things. Um, you know, they, it talks to Amazon Echo Now. Uh, and they announced a bunch of other stuff, but they, they said that like Ford Sync, um, like something like 80 plus percent of their customers said that Ford Sync factored into their purchase decision.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  And so like they care, uh, but-

• 23:46Speaker 02

  And which is crazy because like Ford Sync was not good.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  No, right.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  It was garbage.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  There's a new version of it.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  One of the better ones.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  But Ford Sync is just GPS. Like they're just saying like having a map in my car.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  No, it's like, it's an app platform. It does all this stuff.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  But, but when you collapse it to what the consumer wants, they want the nicer stereo with GPS.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  And something that connects your phone fast. That's one problem.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, the advantage is obviously you get to play the media that's on your phone. You use the apps like Spotify that's on your phone. You have your contacts on your phone and you know, you're so used to using Google Maps for everything anyways. You can now have Google Maps in your dashboard.

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember when people used to put like Mac Minis?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  In cars.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  You know, there's like the whole hobbyist thing of like putting a, an iPad Mini in the dash or a Nexus 7 like in the dash.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Or a giant 17 inch tablet like in a Tesla.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  The, the crazy thing about the Ford event and like a lot of the car stuff that I heard is like, oh man, they, oh, traditional carmakers are super defensive. Ford spent like 20 minutes to be like, yo, we make our self-driving cars. We make autonomous cars. We've been working on this shit. We've been around forever, guys. And you know what? We're going to partner with another company to do ride sharing or something like that. We're really into it. We, it's going to be a big, important company. It's going to be really awesome. And we'll tell you later.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  That was literally how they ended their press conference.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they do have the advantage. They do have the advantage of, I mean, tech companies, I guess have this too, but like they can spread this out. I mean, they have Detroit Auto Show next week. They have, they, they don't need to rush. They've done, all these big, traditional carmakers have done like the first step in saving face, which is like getting themselves out there and like admitting that they're behind the curve and like, apparently that's not affecting sales because like they're able to right the ship in some way. So like now they're just trying to like, let's make progress without making too much progress, but like we need to catch up.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. The Ford thing was we have one foot in today and one foot in the future.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  That's their thing.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Anyways, I really want a Focus RS.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  That's a line I didn't expect in 2016.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  So I will buy a Ford if it has sync.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we're like, we're sponsored by Ford, man. I get it.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  I just really want that Ford. You know, I've got a garage to park it in.

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't love a Mustang? America's car.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  What was weird to me was like, I was sitting there watching that Faraday.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  Bitching Camaro.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Uh, that Faraday event last night. And it, I know, to me, it was fun because like, I guess I understood what was going on. Uh, and so like, it was fine to me. Like, I love concept cars.

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  And like, it gives me, it gives you a lot of things to think about. It gives a company a lot of things to think about. It may not ever really matter too much, but like, you know, it, it does in some ways. And like, they have, the reason that that exists is because they have talent behind it. They've been, they like Tesla, like Apple, like Google, any company that's involved in electric cars or in self-driving cars right now is just like, working out of this like increasing pool of talent where they're just stealing it off of everybody else.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  It's a sign of like what they're, what they've got and like what they're growing. And so I was really excited to see that, uh, even though we don't really know what Faraday future is going to be.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like what right next to it is like, the same day GM invested half a billion dollars in Lyft to build self-driving cars.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:57Nilay Patel?

  Which is the same idea.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  What they need to do is get Netflix on board.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  And be like, we, instead of cloning Uber.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Get the Netflix of Netflix.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  It's funny because like, I've spent the last couple of years thinking about how.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a streaming service that just streams other streaming service subscriptions here.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  I spent the last couple of years thinking about how like.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  That makes no fucking sense.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  How like, uh, like Elon Musk whole thing with Tesla, if you buy into like his take on Tesla is that like, he doesn't necessarily want it to be the car that everybody owns, which is why he's okay backing down the estimates of how much they're going to sell every year.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  His thing is like, he wants to, you know, he wants to disrupt the industry. He wants to make the car that makes everybody else think, oh shit, we need to make that car. We need to make something electric. So I've been enjoying watching that ripple spread through this industry. And so if it does really get boiled down to like the Netflix car or the CBS car and these entertainment companies end up mixing in.

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  That is the worst possible future.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's dark.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine like, I don't even know.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  We're not even at CES day one and it's dark.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Like the VH1 car.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Monster cables, monster cables to get involved in cars.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  Monster cables?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like what's the most evil company at CES?

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  What's the most evil company at CES?

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Oh god. How much time do you have?

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  We gotta talk about a bunch of other companies.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that was the other really quick thing that I'll say about Faraday Future was like, I sat there last night and I was like, wow, we've been right for a couple of years. This is a car show.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And then today happened.

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  It's a car show.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  But then today happened and I was like, oh wow. We had a lot of like old tech stuff going on. Like I was sitting in a...

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  There's so many cars today.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  There are.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  Volkswagen, Ford.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  But we...

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  For today.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Toyota.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  Toyota.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Volkswagen's is really exciting too. We haven't even talked about that. But like, I don't know, I felt like most of the day I was like, oh man, we've got some, we've got some consumer tech here.

• 28:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  We've got cameras. We've got action cameras. We've got...

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  Gadgets are back, man.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Well, gadgets are back. It's gadgets and cars.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Revenge of the gadgets.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Revenge of the gadgets.

• 28:48Nilay Patel?

  The gadgets awaken.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  The gadgets awaken. Brought to you by Disney and ABC Car.

• 28:53Nilay Patel?

  You know what's great is when you watch a Disney movie in a Mustang. Think about it.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  God. That's your ad read in three years. You realize that, right?

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  When I'm driving my robot Mustang, I like to settle in with a great wreck-it Ralph session. I don't know what that means. Hey Lauren Good. Lauren, do you wanna come on the, on the podcast? Lauren is gonna kill me. So we're back. Lauren Good is here. Dan just took off, peaced out.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan Seifert.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just do that. That's all, that's all Dan does. He just announces his name dryly over and over again.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  And then leaves.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  So I, so I don't know if everybody knows, my role at TS is like largely, like I'm a dance...

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Ceremonial.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  I walk into things, I walk into rooms. I do, I, I, I go to meetings. My favorite fucking thing. But Lauren and Dieter and Sean are just running around looking at stuff for two days. So what's, what have you been seeing so far?

• 29:52Speaker 04

  First off, let me just say I love how you say that. Is though those, one of those roles is like way more desirable than the other. You say like running around and looking at stuff, like you would rather be doing that more than anything in the world.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  That is all I wanna do. I love running around looking at stuff.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  And I'm thinking, oh, I would like to go to your dinners that you're going to. That sounds pretty amazing.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they're...

• 30:13Speaker 04

  But in either case, uh, so I'm like...

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  I eat delicious food, I drink fine wine.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Hang out with CEOs.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  You actually had dinner.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  You're wearing a very nice suit.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, cuz you gotta look good for these like, you know, these like masters of the universe.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  You're really not making a case for yourself right now in this argument.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  I know.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  I've been carrying around a backpack and dressing like, I don't know, I'm going into some type of military mission or something.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  So, my first years at CS, I definitely wore like a tech vest with like hundreds of pockets, full of SD cards and like USB cables.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got like, I don't even want to know.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  I basically looked like a remote charging station.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Oh man, Lauren just pulled out all kinds of crap out of her pockets.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Pulling gadget after gadget out of her pockets. Alright, so, well, whatever. I think that you, the running around looking and stuff, that's what the people want to hear about.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  The people.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  The people, the tens of thousands of Vergecast devotees who are willing to suffer through how tired we are to listen to the show. But no, there's like a bunch of stuff and we had a bunch of press conferences today. So, yesterday was, you saw a bunch of new wearable stuff.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm on the wearables beat this year. I started out this morning by going straight to the Fitbit press conference first thing in the morning.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  The Fitbit blew up this, everybody wanted to look at the Fitbit.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  What did they do? I totally missed this. Oh yeah. I was too. That's okay, you were running around looking at things.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. Why is the Fitbit so good?

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Fitbit is, I don't think Fitbit's getting quite enough credit for the kind of year they had in 2015. 2015 was a major year for Fitbit. The company went public, that was a big deal. So, as part of going public means they now have quarterly earnings reports and in those quarterly earnings reports, we were finding out some really interesting stuff about the company, like they make money and they sell millions of devices and stuff like that. And they also just have, just little things like startups in San Francisco don't always do or have. And they have this amazing brand recognition, they really are the Kleenex of the fitness tracking, yeah, of the fitness tracking world. And so they've got all that going for them and everyone's been waiting to see what is the next Fitbit going to be because last time they came out with something new was

• 32:17Speaker 04

  early last year around this time. And so it's the Blaze, it's like this new fitness smartwatch that's not a smartwatch because it doesn't run third-party apps, but it's, but it has a display for the first time, a color display. It does not. No, I mean, the Surge is really, the Surge is the mother of all Fitbits, as I like to call it. It's a GPS-equipped fitness watch, has long battery life, it has a display, it tracks a bunch of different activities, and it will show, Fitbit does show you smart notifications from the phone.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  So you can pair it, oh, I can't wait to review this Intel wearable. I'm gonna put this one on right with my other ones.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. How many are you wearing right now?

• 32:56Speaker 04

  I'm wearing...

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I will say, we were at, uh, wait, is that, so what's, what's the one on your wrist?

• 33:01Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, I don't know if Lauren's gonna come back from her first CES Verge experience.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  This is actually my seventh, but it's, it is my first with the Verge, and it's just, it's a, it's a totally different CES. But, you know, so this is the Pebble Time Round.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  It's dead. This is the new Under Armour band, one of the other new fitness trackers we've seen. We can't, now the embargo's lifted.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  We were at a wearables briefing yesterday, and she got lots of attention, obviously, from the people there, but, but people were loving that she was wearing a Pebble Time Round. They were fascinated by it.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lot of people ask me, "Why do you wear the Pebble?"

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  And I, and I say, "Well, in an event like this, you just want to wear something that has the longest battery life possible."

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Because you don't want to have to charge it something else every day.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  My Apple Watch died on the first day, and I have not yet recharged it.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Well, you recently performed like a social thought experiment on everybody, right? Didn't you like go with it dead for two months or something?

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Yes. No, it was like six months. I just wore a dead Apple Watch for like months, and no one noticed.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  The only person who noticed repeatedly is...

• 34:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Oh, we're talking Fitbit. Oh, yeah, okay, so the Fitbit Surge was last year's big Fitbit announcement, and there were a couple other ones as well. Uh, this Fitbit, the Fitbit Blaze, is a fully-featured fitness watch like the Surge. It'll track a bunch of different stuff, but it doesn't have GPS. It also happens to be the first Fitbit with an LCD color display. Fitbit's never done color displays before. So in like a weird way, it's inching a little bit more towards a real smart watch in terms of its looks, the aesthetics of it, but... It's not quite a real smart watch because it doesn't have third-party app support, which some people might like, actually. But it's also not quite a full-featured fitness watch because it doesn't have GPS.

• 34:42Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  So it's sort of this weird in-between thing. I mean, I wrote a whole thing on theverge.com about it that it's a little bit harder to categorize, I think, than some of the other Fitbits.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's crazy because people love Fitbit. Like, I think you've written it. Like, Obama just wears a Surge.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Dude loves that thing.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  And he was just wearing it recently again in a video, the Seinfeld video, the comedians in cars. And it's like, the president just like endlessly wears a Fitbit Surge. And I know all kinds of people who wear charges, Charge HRs. And you're right, they're like the Kleenex. It's like, you're gonna buy a Fitbit thing, or a fitness thing, you just kind of end up buying a Fitbit.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  And then the Blaze is like, well, first of all, you saw it in person. In the photos, it looks horrifically ugly.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it looks really bad.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  It is not a very attractive Fitbit.

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, it has a giant bezel, and it kind of looks like the first Basis.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Oh, that is mean.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Which, I will say, I'm not gonna lie.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  It's like, super angular.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Samsung's first wearable, like, fitness watch.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  The Samsung Gear Fit? The one that was like a band?

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, like, the watch, I don't know.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the very first Galaxy Gear, you mean?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Galaxy Gear and the Basis are two of the more common things I see on the New York City subway.

• 35:54Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 35:55Speaker 03

  And in New York, yeah, it is bizarre how much I've seen the Basis.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the first Galaxy, they gave a ton of those away for free, though.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Well, that's why. But the Basis, like, who is like, "Man, I have that Basis."

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  Wasn't that the Basis the first one with Heart率?

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, Intel did buy them.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Intel bought that and, like, forgot it away. They were like, "No, there's no..."

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  I received a free Basis at the Code Conference, like, two years ago.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yes, I did as well. And people, actually, a friend of mine tried to, like, buy one recently, and she couldn't. And she said, "Do you still have that Basis from the Code Conference?" And I was like, "Yeah, you can have it. Good luck with the updated software for that thing."

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, because Becky is like, "I want..." She's like, "I want one with Heart率." And I was like, "Try this Basis." And she, like, looked at me, and she was like, "I want a Surge." Or, like, straight up, no, she wanted a Charge.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Oh, she wanted the Charge HR.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I was like, "Really?" She's like, "I know what it's called. I want that one." I was like, "Damn it! I can't force this other garbage."

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the new one has optical heart rate sensors, too. So it doesn't have GPS, but it does have the heart rate tracking. But it's actually a pop-out tracker, which if you don't see it in person, you can't really get the full...

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Is that what's so huge?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Well, it's a it's a frame, right? It's a frame around a square tracker. So you pop the square tracker out. There are actually gaps between the top of the in the bottom of the frame and this thing. So you pop it out and then you could maybe pop it into a nicer band, like a leather band and frame or a different frame, a rose gold frame coming down the road.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  If you want to dress it up a little bit. I'm I'm a little, I don't know, we're gonna have to wait until we really test this thing before we make our full assessment. I mean, I guess the one thing that Fitbit has going for it is that because there are these millions of people that have bought Fitbits, maybe some people are already tied to their software. And so if you're already sort of sucked into the Fitbit system, then...

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Because they made the big decision to not integrate with like Apple Health or whatever.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Apple Health or Google Fit.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  And then they got kicked out of the Apple Store.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Which is like kind of like if you just think about that whole thing and then they're still huge and popular and make a ton of money. I don't know.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  But it's if you're asking like, why, why are we talking about Fitbit so much? This was literally the top post on our site all day yesterday.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Was it really?

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  Oh, that's great.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  And I think it's crazy that a company like Fitbit just has this insane loyal, like everyone just who has Fitbit is like, I want the new best one. Or I want to upgrade, or I want to wear a band. When I always think of Fitbit as like the commodity, like it's the little thing that you clip to your pants and like lose.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  Oh, that's so cute in 2010.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  I know. Now it's like all about strapping things.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, boy.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  I have to say the most interesting thing that I think I've seen.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Your wrist.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Wait, let's talk about the Intel one. What is this? What is this?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  So Intel at their keynote keynote today. Intel's keynote today, it was the grand CES keynote, which traditionally either Microsoft did it, Qualcomm had an insane one. It's it's like a big blow. We're gonna show you the future. And Intel had the best press conference of all last year. So they got the keynote this year. It's gonna be awesome. And instead, their CEO, Brian Krasanich, was on stage for like three hours.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  It was a long one.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  It was not the kind of guy that could...

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  And other companies that typically go long went short this year, so it felt even longer.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  And he could not hold the stage for that long. So anyway, this, this thing has Intel Curie in it, their tiny little computer chip thing that can like track all sorts of positioning data. And so it lights up and we were supposed to wave our wrists around while.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  They were taught to dance.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  We were taught to dance that we didn't do. The entire audience was like, yeah, we're not gonna dance.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  There is an instruction card.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Who is the, who is the guy that, that played? And so then the musicians also use them to like play invisible instruments.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  I don't even know what you're saying.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  My brain is not processing anyone.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's doing the thing where he live logged it, so he wasn't there. Like, his brain went away. He was like a typing machine.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  So Intel makes, Intel makes a chip called the Curie.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Yes, I'm familiar with it.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Which can track all kinds of stuff.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  They announced it last year.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  This year, they're like, we're putting the Curie in stuff now. So you can put it in a snowboard and it can like tell what trick you're doing because of the Curie. And so they've put it in this little wristband. This is what Taylor Swift did a while ago. And they could, we could like clap and make a thing happen on a screen. Or we could, they, they could like make it light up and sync with during to the music while we waved our arms in a certain way. And whatever else.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  It was, it was a very weird thing to see a keynote for CES, considering that this idea has been around in music, not just Taylor Swift. Like this idea of like, wear something or put something on your phone that will enhance the audience participation by turning it into like, you know, a, a fourth sense, you know, like there are apps and other wearables like this that people have like downloaded and gotten upon entering concerts for the last couple of years now, where it's like, it'll sync up with the music. Like Dan Deacon did this like a couple of years ago in like smaller shows and then it spread to like big arena shows. And so Intel was like, putting a lot of attention on, just because it has Curie in it. It's like this thing, look at how cool this is. Like, we're gonna enter keynote on this.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  They have a reputation for showing things off at CES that really are true prototypes and in a lot of cases don't come to market. So what, did they say anything about wearables that we'll actually see this year?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Uh, the New Balance promised to make an Android Wear watch.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  That was the whole thing.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  That was the news.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  New Balance is 3D printing soles for shoes now too.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  It'd even better if they were just 3D printing soles.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the one thing that I will give Intel credit for.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Need a new one.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Here, mine is dead now.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Last year, they showed that drone that.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  The battery died.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Last year they showed the drone that could dodge trees.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  You, you have, there's no light in your eyes.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  I don't care.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  I have 3D printed you a soul.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  No, you're right, you're right though, because this was the one thing that, uh...

• 41:29Speaker 03

  This was the one thing they actually built on.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  You can't 3D print a nonexistent thing.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Oh my god, Dieter doesn't have a soul.

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  3D need one.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Well, let's go over...

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna curry.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Let's go over to the sands.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  Whip it up.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  And find some 3D printing companies.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  Call me bounce people.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Let's play some Casey Newton around tomorrow to 3D printing. Somebody's been asking if they can print souls.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  Have you noticed when Casey's doing like the big video thing, he talks like a 1940's gangster?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Really?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Well, now I, now I have.

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to do an impression. If you 3D print me a soul, like he does it. The withings activa tape.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  I still need to watch that video that you guys did. Thank you for reminding me.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  This is gonna be one of those things where people are gonna watch this video and they're gonna say, this is just not funny. And we're so loopy right now that we...

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  No, I've had two days of tweets from people who are like, when are you gonna get drunk and make an ass of yourself? On a podcast, and we did it, we're here for you.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  But Dieter, continue, I'm sorry, we so rudely interrupted you.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Intel gets credit for, the drone they showed off last year with a real sense that could dodge trees and while it follows you. They are, they found a company to actually make it production for under two grand. And they had it on stage. And like, it works.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, whereas last year it was like, they set it up in this big net area and it was dodging like, buildings that were made out of like, paper.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  This year they set it up in a big net area and it was dodging trees that were made of paper.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  It wasn't the idea that these were the cameras also used?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  For to feed the 3D printer? Right, weren't the photos taken, or the photos of the souls taken with?

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  It was a ghost camera. Intel made a ghost camera to begin taking photos of souls.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  They can stick a tablet in your face and like, go like this for a couple of seconds and then your face gets pasted on to the body of the main character in Fallout 4.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  It's funny because until you said pasted, it sounded like you were gonna make a joke about looking at souls.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  You can see your aura. It's a strong one within you.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Intel whiffed their keynote super hard.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  I think everybody whiffed their fucking keynotes.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  They had good stuff that was bad.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  The only two keynotes that were good, in my opinion, so far, were sections of two keynotes.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  It was Samsung and LG.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  When they started talking about washing machines and refrigerators.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, I have never, I mean, you want to talk about swagger. Like, the dude from, like, LG is like, he literally was like, he's like, "We are leading this industry trend, the game-changing industry trend, towards black stainless steel." And it was like, no one, like, everyone, like, no one else operated in the same headspace?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  I have this theory.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  And he was like, "Fucking mic drop."

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I have this theory about these appliance guys at Samsung and LG. Imagine you're an appliance executive, right?

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  I imagine every day.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  You live a super boring life.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  They look, they're all super fit.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  They have great suits. That dude from Samsung has that really nice pin stripe.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  That's what I'm saying.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  It looks like that guy that's gonna slip you a $20 bill at your graduation party and be like, "You're welcome."

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Imagine these guys outside of CES, like, the coolest they can be. They can't be cool at all. They're, they go to Sears, right? They go to meetings with, like, Kenmore.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  They're in there, man.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  This is their Super Bowl.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  Those guys, can you imagine the fucking guys on the other side of the table at Sears? Like, "Dude, Samsung dude's coming. Like, everybody comb your hair. Shine your shoes."

• 44:49Speaker 01

  If they have that kind of cool and swagger onstage at CES, imagine what happens when they go meet with Kenmore.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  No, I think we have to start going to, like, appliance conventions and just seeing how, like, how throwback.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  I'm sick that week.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  You have to go to the appliance pepcom.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, you have to run around and do.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  I'll make it fun. I'll talk to the guy.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  The Samsung Smart Fridge, this is so stupid.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  The family hub.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  It was the first thing that leaked out of CES and, like, the first post on our site that, like, had an immediate traffic spike.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  And it's like.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  There's a touchscreen on the fridge.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  It's like a 21.5-inch touchscreen. It has, like, Android controls at the bottom. It has, like, a home button. Well, it's Tizen, but like.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  And when you're traveling.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  I feel like if I said, even to our audience, "It has Tizen controls at the bottom," people are like, "What?"

• 45:38Speaker 01

  What does that even mean?

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  They're like, pull over their cars and start googling.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  One of the supposed features is that when you're traveling away from your connected fridge and you're in someplace with a dumb fridge, you can get on your phone and you can send a little message to your family back home on the fridge screen. So when someone's like in the kitchen late at night, they get totally freaked out.

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  It's your face. Also, like, but also in reality, most people have phones. Like, why would you be like, "Please go to the kitchen"? Like texting your son, you're like, "Son, I need you to go to the kitchen."

• 46:16Speaker 03

  It's like the basis of a Black Mirror episode where you're like sending this heartfelt message and like your family has like left. You think they're home, but like sending your husband like a...

• 46:24Speaker 01

  How long until a dick pic is at the fridge?

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  Immediately. Like if you are the sort of person who's like buying like a $40,000 fridge, you're like, "You know what? I'm gonna put my junk on it."

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Is that how much it is? It's $40,000?

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming it's some enormous.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  They're really expensive.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  The LG one has a sensor in the bottom. When you walk up to it with your foot, it opens itself for you.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  That's actually pretty cool. And LG did one a few years ago here. I don't know if it ever... I think it actually is on the market, where it would like chill your beer and wine in like eight minutes.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, they've all got like that.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  A special chill drawer.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Is that not new anymore? Am I that behind the times with refrigerators?

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Netflix and chill drawer.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  We're all behind it. That doesn't mean anything.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Not at all.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. The Samsung fridge probably has a Netflix app.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  You can watch Netflix and chill your wine.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. See, this is the problem.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yes, it does on the smart TV.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  Look, guys, this refrigerator fragmentation has gone too far.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  How are they gonna get developers?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  The smart fridge is awesome. It can mirror the TV show on your Samsung smart TV in the kitchen.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Can you retweets?

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  I only want, I want to check the milk.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  What about Snapchat?

• 47:29Speaker 04

  And I want to tweet about it immediately if it's gone bad.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  You can pull up the app on your phone and get the picture of the inside of your fridge from the last time the door was closed.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, that first world problem is not big enough for me.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's kind of, it's just so, like, this is what I mean, the appliance guys, like, every other part of the Samsung thing was like, "We have invested in the same UHD logo as the other partners in the UHD alliance."

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Oh, Samsung was super angry about how they are the only ones who understand how to make super UHD, SUHD TVs, and everybody else's SUHD is garbage. Like, everyone, like, not like a "We're the best way."

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna go ahead and contrast that, that level of confidence in actual products displayed, uh, with our friends at Sony, who began building up an announcement for their, uh, UHD television, only to back it off by saying, "And we are announcing the industry's first UHD logo."

• 48:21Speaker 04

  What?

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  And they displayed a logo, and that was the announcement. And they're like, "This logo will teach consumers that they can trust in Sony's UHD." And it was like, "You're, you announced a picture?"

• 48:33Speaker 04

  What?

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a picture, like, you're just gonna glue it on things. The Sony one was so, so deeply confused. They just hung out.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  What, did this, did, I, I'm so, so tired. Did they show, did they show anything exciting?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  They showed a camcorder.

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so they, the-

• 48:50Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Lots of 4K camcorders.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Oh, I was gonna say, does it work with VHS?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, it was like-

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Does it work with 8mm?

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  Sony's like my favorite, uh, favorite company alive, like, here, because they usually have, like, I was saying, telling a story earlier, uh, to the staff, not to the people listening to this, I'm gonna tell you this right now. Um, sorry, it's just brain, just not working. Uh, words. Uh, but like, five years ago, Sony had like Taylor Swift play, and like, everything was in 3D, and then there was like 4, and like, this year, the cause rolled on stage, and he was like, "Let's just talk about CS." And then he would, like, they just brought out some partners, like, they're like, "Here's the president of Screen Gems, a Sony picture company." And literally, Microsoft, the president of Sony Electronics, was like, "So let's get to the question that everybody's asking themselves." And everyone was like, "Yes, like, what new prototype camera have you been using?" And he's like, "Why are Sony cameras the best?"

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  The guy was like, "They are the best." And it was like, "Are you guys just like, bro-ing out a little bit?" And then he left. That was it.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  That was it. He didn't actually answer the question.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  You know, he, he was just like, "They're best, you know, like, we can hang them up, we can like, move them around, we can shoot things with them."

• 49:55Speaker 04

  He's like, "We make cool sensors."

• 49:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then he brought out a guy from YouTube, to capture souls. Every Screen Gems, uh, movie, actually, if you watch it in a black light-

• 50:03Speaker 01

  You lose your soul.

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just souls.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Especially if you watch it in the self-driving car that just came to pick you up.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  The Screen Gems car that's bringing you to... Oh my god.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, god, this is the darkest timeline.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  I know, I'm so scared about it. I could have nightmares today.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  Um, anyway, uh, god. Uh, and then they brought out a guy from YouTube and they're like, and he was like, YouTube is growing, everyone loves YouTube. And Microsoft was like, you know what? YouTube is pretty great.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Who's the guy from YouTube?

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Lucas something.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  Um, but they just talked about YouTube for a while. Like, they didn't talk about what Sony was doing with YouTube.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  They just literally discussed YouTube and how cool it was, and the guy left. And Sony was like, that's the kind of stuff we like to see.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  What?

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and like, literally no products were announced. They announced a 4K camera, a camcorder, the hottest product category at CES. I, uh, asked, I bet David Pierce a hundred dollars that he couldn't get the headline, "Camcorders are back into wired tomorrow." So, here's looking at you bud, if you could pull that off, you got money waiting for you.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  It never went away.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, he doubled me up. He said if he could get camcorders or lit as fuck, I'd give it 200 bucks, so we'll see.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  Uh, anyway, so they announced that, they announced, um, I don't know, headphones and speakers, they announced a record player.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, a record player.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Record player's like the hottest category at CES this year.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  We're sitting right near a record player company.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  A cool turnstile record player?

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like Technics, Panasonic brought the Technics brand back.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  It's like the legendary SL-1200, they put out like, super expensive.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Retro is back.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so retro's back, and then, uh, Kodak is putting out like a film camera.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Super 8.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  So, like retro gadgets are having a real moment here.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Kodak's not only making, putting out an 8mm film camera, Kodak's making something, right?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, they're...

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Like, they've, they're like, polaroided over the last couple of years where they just are like, oh, you'll take our brand and give us some money? Like, yeah, put it on whatever, that object looks, looks cool.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  I read something in the New York, New York Times did a fantastic story on, um, Kodak last year, and something like, at one point Kodak had 145,000 employees, and now they're down to like 5,000 employees or something like that.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, that was the thing, like, in the, in the 40s and 50s, Kodak was Apple.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they no longer, I mean, they make a fraction of the amount of film that they once made and the film that they do make now, they make to sell specifically to like certain Hollywood studios that they have deals with and that's the only reason why they make the film.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  And that's 35mm and 8mm is even harder to find.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw some on B&H today, actually. I was poking around after I saw that the Super 8 was coming back out.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  And getting it developed is even harder.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  And getting it developed is expensive.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  I shot some on a project a couple of years ago.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  It's somewhere between like 25 and 50 dollars a roll, right?

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  The cartridge, I guess.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  It's closer to 50 and then getting it processed is another 50 to 100 and then getting it digitized is like another 50 to 100.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  So Kodak has said, I believe, that they will do the digitizing if you send your film to them to be processed. It will give you some type of digital copy that you can project.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  So this is a thing. Sony had like a similar, it's totally different. Sony's not gonna do anything for you. They're just gonna, they're just gonna show you their friends. But their record player is like a high-res audio record player. It's a very nice record player. And then it plugs into your computer over USB and there's an app that like converts your records into high-res digital files for their like library of high-res digital audio goods. And they're like, it's all the convenience of digital plus the thing you love about vinyl. And it's, it's just funny. Kodak's thing is like, use all this like ritualistic analog stuff and then we'll give you the digital files you want anyway.

• 53:34Speaker 04

  And they'll process it.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  And it's, it's kind of a weird, I'm not sure that that's the answer. Like, that's the old answer. Right? Like, I think people like record players because there's all this like ritualistic stuff and they're not like, man, I wish I had these files on my phone. Like, they, they have them anyway.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you're listening to an album on Spotify, like, you just have, you don't, I don't know, it's, it's very, like, that part of the RetroGadgets thing is like, I don't think the companies know why people like them. So like, Cause for Eye today was

• 54:00Speaker 04

  Or they do know and they're just blatantly tapping into nostalgia.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  No, I was like, I asked Cause for Eye today. I was like, why do you think there's a vinyl, like, there's a boom in vinyl sales. Like, people are buying vinyl records again and there's a bunch of turntables here at CES. And I was like, why do you think this is happening? He's like, I don't know, like nostalgia? Like, and he like, kind of went down the like millennials are crazy road. He's like, you know, these millennials, they like, they like the rituals and like the, and I was like, you don't actually. Like, I think it's like Spotify kind of sucks as a music experience and it's like you love bands, you want to pay them, you don't want a CD, so you like you buy this, it's like, there's all this other stuff about it. And like, I don't think like, shooting film is like what you want to do is shoot film, send it back, send it away and then receive back.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Get a digital copy back.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like an SD card.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's like-

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Well, it's the only way you can edit it. I mean, no one-

• 54:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  We gotta rap.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  She knows how to edit film.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Because of the saw that's buzzing?

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Oh, we need to talk about the bra.

• 54:55Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about the bra.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  We can talk about it another time.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  Another time. Are you going to be on tomorrow?

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Stay tuned. They're sawing. It's quite literally- I think we're gonna die.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna die. She's laying there not picking things. Wait, Dieter, I have one note here. Well, Lauren, say two sentences about the bra. And then I have a note here. All it says here, all I've written down is, Dieter has a lot to say about Samsung. Oh, wow. So I want to hear about the bra and then I want to hear just a taste of what that is or we can pick it up tomorrow. Alright.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  I've been wearing a connected sports bra.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 55:23Speaker 04

  And it's actually pretty cool.

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah?

• 55:25Speaker 04

  I'm not wearing it now, but for working out.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. But we'll have plenty more on that. We're gonna do a booth video with the company behind it.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  There's a story on theverge.com about it right now.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  Right now?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  It's, uh, it's 11pm?

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Yep. Uh, I wrote that one like, I don't know, like one in the morning the other night or something.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  So you know it's gonna be good.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I was working out in this, in this smart bra all weekend before I came here and it's, I was like, oh, whatever. It's just like a-

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  What does it do?

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Heart rate strap that's built into a bra, but it's, it's cool. Um, so it's, it's called the Om Signal Bra, the Om Bra, and it measures your heart rate, your breathing rate, your heart rate variability, your overall activity. But the cool thing is that it pairs with an app for like live monitoring while you're working out. So you keep the app open and you see like, you actually see your heart pulsing and like, I don't know, in either case. But then, the best part about it is, it, because it knows your activity levels, it tells you how hard you worked out after the fact. And I found out that like, I think I work out really hard and you really don't.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Like, I worked out for an hour on Sunday and I thought, Sunday morning, and I thought, because I'm, I'm a rock star. And then I looked at the, at the Om Signal app, I was wearing the sports bra, and it said, it basically said you worked out for like 15 minutes at the level you should have been. And five minutes were warm up and 40 minutes were junk.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  This is the new theme of wearables, they make you feel bad about yourself.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, is that something you haven't been getting? You wear a lot of stuff, the fitness stuff, and you've tested it in that way.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  But if you do, if you go for like-

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Is that something you haven't gotten from those?

• 56:57Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, if you, if you hit 10,000 steps or you go for a three mile run or something like that, you feel a sense of accomplishment. You're like, okay, I got my daily activity in and I'm, I'm gonna be a healthy person and, and stave off disease and all this stuff. But if you're not actually working out hard and getting your heart rate up to a certain level, um, and you don't have anything to like tell you that, then that's a whole different thing. Like, a lot of people don't really know what heart rate zones they should be in and what they should be doing. And so, I mean, this is next level. This is, this is like, this is beyond just, I need to get off, off the couch, right?

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  This is, this is like for people who maybe are like, okay, I'm ready to train. Um, so I just found that really interesting. And I'm definitely gonna have to test it a lot more. This was based on one weekend of using it, but I was, I was intrigued by it.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm telling you, wearables make you feel bad. That was the whole theme of Unveil the Story for me.

• 57:43Speaker 04

  Really?

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was like, like, every wearable is like, your hair is falling out. Let's shoot lasers at it.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  It's true. It's true. Like now there are smart scales. I don't know, but there are like scales now that you step on and the scales are like, oh, you still have 17 pounds to go.

• 58:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Hmm. And then you're like, you're like, no, don't send that weight to the app, don't do, and then, and then it's like sinking.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  And you're like, it's, it's already there. And then you open your phone and your phone's like, you're fat, like it's-

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's like, as people, we're not allowed to say that to each other anymore. So we've pushed it off to the robots.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  The robots are like, you, you could stand to lose it.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Shame wearables.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  Shame wearables. No, we, Casey and I were looking at one called the Sculpt yesterday that, uh, you like, you spray water on yourself and you hold this like Bluetooth electric thing on you and it tells you what your muscle adequacy is, or muscle quality, not, because one of the things is like adequate. And it's like, muscle quality?

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, can I just have some? Can it just say some?

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, all of them.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  You have inadequate muscles and you're lacking a soul.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  All right, preview your many thoughts about Samsung.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Uh, Samsung's smart TV platform, the new, the new stuff, looks really good.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and LG has a partnership with Time Warner Cable, so the TV is actually a cable box.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Samsung does. It's not, it's not a cable box.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Samsung does. Samsung, sorry.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  They were very vague about the Time Warner thing.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  LG had it last year.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  If it were the cable box, I would have been flipping out, but they, it can like, it can, it can interact with the guide in some way. But, so the thing that they do, they didn't fully explain how it works, so I'm pretty sure this is how it works. When you plug a peripheral into the TV, it uses HDMI-CC to detect what it is. Like, because, you know, an Xbox says, "Hey, I'm an Xbox."

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  And then, this, you, and you say, "Okay, I want the Xbox cube on the interface to be here." And as you do that, Samsung's like, "Oh, you want to use this Xbox." "That's cool. I know it's an Xbox. I'm gonna download from the database in the cloud in the sky, all the remote control commands for it, and automatically put it on your remote."

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  And it just, boom. Like, you, as soon as you plug that shit into your TV, your remote is programmed for it.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  That's genius.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty cool.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  And that's not even like, "Oh my god, you solved this insane ecosystem problem." That's just like, "Oh, you know what? We actually have these Lego pieces. If we just made them talk to each other." Um, and I think that's cool. I think like, they deserve to be commended for it. I have no idea if like, every other smartphone, or smart TV platform, that it will be complete garbage in, you know, three months after you buy it. Uh, but, you know, as a demo, it was great.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just interesting, because if the core, man, I could talk about, we should do this tomorrow, because I could talk about TVs online. But if they, if you're, like, Samsung represents the realest competition for Apple in TVs, right? Like, if you buy the big, beautiful 4K OLED Samsung TV, and it has a reasonably good operating system that is like, cool to use, and like, does all this stuff for you,

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  integrates actual television, and then has Netflix, and lets you buy movies,

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Then what Apple needs is like, really killer fucking apps for the Apple TV to get you to use it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  And that is the piece of the puzzle to them.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  But you're putting the Apple TV box in the same category as Samsung's smart TV interface.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, in terms of needing, needing to compete with.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  Why would you need to buy that thing?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  Why would you need to buy the Apple TV thing?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  When, when the Time Warner executives started walking on stage, I was literally vibrating.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  No, the Time Warner executive, no, no, no.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  What's gonna happen?

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  I have, oh, I have, oh, this lies.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  I knew, I knew, I knew it wouldn't actually happen.

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  The Time Warner executive walks on the stage every year.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  But he said we, he said, they said something like, they said the word like integration. And I was like, "Huh?"

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  "Huh?"

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  This is the dance. This is the dance, the make you dance. It's awful.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  "Huh?"

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  But this year-

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  And it never actually happens, is what you're saying.

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  It's, because they're just, they're bad at it.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  "Huh."

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  It's why-

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, we'll pick this up tomorrow. Uh, tomorrow on The Vergecast, it's CES. It's the Vergecast Trader Cast-

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  With David Pierce, Joanna Stern, and Sam Sheffer.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  That's gonna be ridiculous.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Is any actual Verge player gonna be on it?

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  You.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Surprise, Dieter.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Pretty sure it's you.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Oh, Dieter, what are you doing tomorrow night?

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah. Um, but anyway, so that'll be exciting. Um, I think that's, and we have two more Thursday and Friday as well. So, tons of, tons of stuff from CES. This one, surprisingly normal. Um...

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you say that, but if you were to listen to it-

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, there was the, uh, electric sawing that occurred. Anyway, that's it. Please, uh, listen to The Verge, listen to The Vergecast, watch our videos, subscribe to us on YouTube.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Definitely subscribe to us on YouTube.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, YouTube.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  We're just pumping videos on YouTube.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  It's, it's, yeah, big props to our video team. They're-

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone's here. It's a super fun week. I love CES. I think it's, there's a lot of garbage that gets announced here, but there's also like, just a lot of fun to be had with toys. And isn't that why we do what we do?

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. Thank you, guys, so much. We'll, we'll see you tomorrow.