CES 2020 roundtable: Concept cars, Quibi, foldables, and more

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Ashley Carman, and Sean O'Kane highlight the most important, weird, and surprising things The Verge saw at CES 2020. Stories from this episode: Sonos said what every smaller tech company was thinking: working with big tech sucks Amazon’s hardware boss responds to Sonos accusations of stolen technology Sony’s electric car is the best surprise of CES Byton’s 48-inch screen might not be as distracting as it looks Mercedes-Ben’s Avatar-themed concept car with scales Sony surprises with an electric concept car called the Vision-S Segway S-Pod Quibi versus the world Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads 2020 might be the year of reasonably okay foldable PCs, maybe Foldable and dual-screen laptops desperately need Windows 10X Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold is a $2,499 PC with a folding OLED screen PS5 logo Intel NUC Extreme platform Neon CEO explains the tech behind his overhyped ‘artificial humans’ Samsung’s ‘artificial humans’ are just digital avatars This is Intel’s first discrete graphics card in 20 years, but you can’t buy one Samsung’s Ballie The most promising AirPower alternative isn’t ready yet Royole’s new smart speaker has a wraparound touch display 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Today on the Vergecast, Ashley Carmen and Sean O'Kane join the show to talk about everything that's been happening in CS. We get into Sonos lawsuit against Google, talk about all the car news here, into the streaming wars in Quibi, and some foldable PCs that's going up on the Vergecast.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is AMEX Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology, 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of this moment. I'm your friend Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Egg.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Egg.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Egg.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what that means.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Egg.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  We foolishly invited Sean O'Kane here.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  At your welcome.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Ashley Carmen's here.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  I missed the egg memo.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't really know what's going on.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  We'll get there.

• 1:04Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot happening. We're at CS, as you can tell by my defeated, defeated tone of my voice. We've been in Las Vegas for some time now. Dieter, what would you say about the show? You've been writing about it every day.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  I have been writing about it every day. It is a show full of a lot of companies that aren't really sure what they should make next, so they made a lot of ideas.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  I love ideas.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Ideas that fold, ideas that have lights in them, ideas that potentially unfold, but they won't let you try.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Ideas that roll around.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Who knows what's happening? So, we obviously did one Vergecast earlier this week. We talked about all the TV stuff that had come out. A bunch more stuff has happened since. But to me, the thing that's been hanging over the show from the first day.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  The morning the show floor opened, there was a story in the New York Times that Sonos is fed up with Google and Amazon, and they're going to sue Google. And then, indeed, Sonos dropped a patent lawsuit on Google. Dieter, you want to kind of walk us through the twists and turns of what's going on here?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  So for years, we've been asking Sonos, hey, what's going on with Google Assistant on your speakers? What's going on? And they're like, you know, you know, and then they finally started demoing it and we're like, cool. It'd be great if, you know, you could have both wake words on at the same time and like, yeah. And then they demonstrated that they could do it. And it turns out that they weren't allowed to because Google said they weren't allowed to. Amazon denies that they said no to this. And Sonos is like, we're tired of getting crushed. And we have a lot of foundational patents for the idea of having multiple speakers in multiple rooms on the same audio system. And so we're suing you for infringing on our patents, Google. We're tired of being under your thumb and we're tired of you infringing our IP. And they'd been negotiating for a while, apparently, but Sonos got tired of it.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  And it's huge. And like, the most interesting thing to me, well, there's so many interesting things. But one of the most interesting things to me is the New York Times article explicitly states that they could sue Amazon too, but they can't afford to take on both giants at once.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which makes sense to me. Like, just the way lawsuits work, like, Google can just keep stringing them out until they're dead. Right? Like, that's just like a thing. Google has enough money to do it. So you go up against Amazon too. You're, you're fighting two fronts. You're spending literally twice as much money for lawyers. You've got, that's a big risk. Also, I strongly suspect that baked into that was they know what assistants people are using. And I bet everyone is using Alexa on their Sonos speakers and no one's using Assistant.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, we'll just go with the one that sucks.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  How does Sonos afford to fight Google? Seriously?

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they have, I mean, they're a public company. Yeah, I looked at their financials the day the lawsuit was filed. I mean, they're doing well. They have a bunch of cash in the bank. I mean, they are selling more units than ever before.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Well, the other thing I'll say there real quick is I suspect that Google will not feel completely free to go like scorched earth on Sonos.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause I just walked through the Google house here at CS and like, they have a display of like Sonos stuff working with Assistant. Like, it hasn't, they haven't like blown it up. And to me, the question is, and actually you've covered like a lot of hardware startups. Can you be like a small or midsize hardware company and survive? Like, and Sonos is-

• 4:05Speaker 03

  That's why I'm like, how are they going to afford this?

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Because I'm like, it's already really difficult to make it as a hardware startup without fighting Google, who has literally unlimited funds to just decimate you.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think the thing that's different here, and I, Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, has been on this podcast a bunch of times. We've talked a bunch of times. Sonos is like over 15 years old. They can, they launched like 2001, 2002. They have this portfolio of like 700 patents. They have loyal customers who like literally buy every product. They've got like happy, rich customer, like Jay-Z has like Sonos speakers in his house. We know this because he says it in the songs. Every rich Silicon Valley executive has Sonos speakers in the house. So they've got this like base of goodwill. They do have cash in the bank. They can probably go forward to do this. What really gets me though, is we did sit down with Sonos and say, well, I want you to allow both way words. And they had to like shiftily look away and be like, people will be confused about what timer they're setting.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  I mean, that was like one of the most interesting things to come out of this story.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  It's just that Amazon and Google won't play nice and will not allow Sonos to put both on this.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  So the, the Amazon won't play nice thing is especially interesting because there was like a, some sort of correction there. And also Amazon started this alliance of like, let's, let's have all voice assistants play nice with each other, like a year and a half ago, I think it was. Actually, I have no idea how long ago it was. It could have been a decade ago, the way time works these days.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  And that alliance got launched without Google, Samsung, or Apple, clearly in the middle of all of these backroom fights over what would work with what.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I read the lawsuit, because of course they did. And so like the story is basically like Sonos wanted to do this thing and have all the assistants work neutrally on its speakers. They approached both companies. They had already done an integration with Google Play Music to work on Sonos. That integration, according to Sonos, is like, these are Sonos' allegations. That integration was deeper than their standard one because they let the, the Google Play Music app, R I P.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  They bet on a Google service lasting. They let the, they let Google's app control the Sonos speakers directly, which they had never done before. So like, we had this like deeper partnership and then Google like turned around and launched Chromecast Audio and they said, we're, you're infringing our patents. Like, don't do that. I read these patents. I suspect that they've won lawsuits. Like they sued Denon in like 2014. It took three years. They actually won a jury trial where they said Denon was infringing their like wireless streaming patents. The patents are for things like A Wi-Fi setup interface using a phone, pairing two speakers in stereo and managing the time differential between them. Wireless speakers are hard, so if you have multiple speakers playing and they have slightly different clocks, then you have to pick one and like sync the clocks and make their, as the clocks drift, they get resynced. So it's

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  like patents on stuff like that. It's, none of it is like so crazy you'd never think of it. Like, it's patents on solving the problems of, I took a speaker out of the box, it's got to get on Wi-Fi network, here's the flow for how to do it. Or I have multiple speakers, they need to talk to each other, how would you do it? Like, they're, they're pretty foundational. I think that's Sonos' leverage here. Because what they want is behavioral concessions from Google. They want Google to say, you can run both assistants at once. They want Google to say, we will let you extend our platform in ways that we don't let other partners extend our platform. That's not patent lawsuit stuff. But they don't have the ability like Spotify has in the European Union to sue Apple and say, you're anti-competitive. Like, we don't have laws that work that way. So Spotify is like

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  in the EU being like, we can't get on the Apple Watch. We'll just sue you and say that's anti-competitive and Apple will back down. Like, you can't do that here. But if you have this big patent portfolio on all this foundational technology, and say, we're going to sue you on these five patents, two of which we've won, and our settlement, you will agree that we can run both at once. And I think that's kind of the big strategy here.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's worth pointing out, on the patent stuff specifically, Amazon says it didn't use any of Sonos' technology, and Google didn't initially say that. And then, like, a day later, when I asked them for comment again, they added a sentence saying, we didn't use any of their technology when we invented our stuff.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  I think the key here is like, to make wireless speakers, you have to invent some of this stuff. And like, some of the solutions, I think, are, are like the solutions, but they invented it first and they have the patents. And like, whether or not they did it on purpose, it kind of doesn't matter. It only matters in terms of damages. Like, do you, are, does your product infringe the patent or not?

• 8:25Speaker 04

  I just love that CES always has a B-plot.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Whereas every year, there's something going on here that isn't going on here that's also definitely going on here.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think that- The murmurs of all the indie hardware companies here, all the smaller hardware companies here are like, finally, we hate working with the big companies. They're constantly trying to squeeze us. They're constantly infringing our IP. They're taking our inventions and using them. And we can't do anything about it because we need them to survive. We need to interoperate with Alexa and HomeKit and Google Assistant. We need, we need our app on the iPhone and have all the sides that they're going to slow down our updates to get apps through because they're mad at us. Like, our product will die. So I think the B, the B plot is, like, we're really mad at these companies. We hate, that was the title of your piece.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, the, them making this story come out an hour before the show floor opened, guaranteed that everybody on the show floor, instead of saying, so, how's your show, said, so, so no say. And that, that, that changes a lot because a bunch of these little companies are going to be talking to each other about how they hate being vassals of, you know, Google and Amazon and maybe even Apple, instead of talking about what the coolest gadget was they saw.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  And if you're a small hardware company and you can't figure out your business, just become a patent troll.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  You are guaranteed to survive.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Is there any obvious break in this pattern? Like, is there a chance some sort of, like, SoftBank vision fund for hardware startups, like, arrives in the next couple of years? And like, starts bankrolling some of these startups so that they, you know, have a better shot of competing, competing with these giant companies?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  I think SoftBank is weirdly smarter than that.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  That's a hell of a statement, yeah.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is your work. I mean, this is why you cover many pods.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  I've been very disappointed with the pod technology at CES.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  The ScentPod people have a booth here.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  I know, they went all in. They have a freaking neon sign.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  They've got like weird, like, like, phone booth things that you walk into so that the scents don't bleed into each other.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  I was shocked.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  I walked into it and I had a headache within three seconds.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  I was just like, damn, business must be really freaking good for ScentPods.

• 10:25Nilay Patel?

  People love ScentPods.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  I'm not hating. I'm just amazed at how good business seems, that they can afford the big neon sign.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  There's a whole, like, MLM around it, too.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  Of course, there is.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everyone, I've started selling ScentPods.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Use my code.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  So that's the Sonos story. This, obviously, like, everyone's talking about it. I think Sonos is like playing the game here. Patrick Sensus is about to testify in front of Congress on July 17th. It's Sonos talking about patent infringement. And the other company is PopSockets. Like, Sonos and PopSockets are gonna testify at an antitrust hearing.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Wait, are you kidding?

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm absolutely not kidding.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  I did not get that memo. PopSockets is gonna be there?

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You're like in it. You're like, wait, PopSockets?

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Wait, why is PopSockets at the...

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  Because they are very mad that Amazon ripped off PopSockets. Wow.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Wow. I was like, already like, okay, this is the perfect Neely story. Like, Sonos patents.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  That's got every little...

• 11:20Speaker 03

  And now, it's like, phone, PopSockets is mad at Amazon?

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  With our powers combined.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Oh, I am ready now.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  I mean, that's the best thing is like, all these big tech companies are like corralling these weird sort of alliances and like cohorts. Like, where like now PopSockets has like the same argument as like Allbirds. Where they're like, yeah, Amazon, this isn't cool. Like, we're now gonna team up.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  And this is the thing, though, that, and that's actually really interesting. I don't know if PopSockets has IP or anything around there. I'm gonna assume...

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Clearly not.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so this is, this kind of speaks to the hardware problem. It's like, Sonos is smart. They created technology. You know, Magic Leap also is, just that's top of mind for me right now, has IP. Like, they invented something, they patented it. They could become patent trolls if they wanted to.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Other hardware companies that do something that is like inventive, PopSockets is inventive, it's taken over, people love grips on their phone. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to protect.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  And like, that's, that is the struggle of hardware, and that's why every hardware company now is also a software company, if they're smart.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  I really am dying for the moment on the 17th, when like, some senator is like, what is a PopSock?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Oh my god, I can't wait for this.

• 12:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a socket that pops. Sorry. And then like the big speech, it's like, children across America are struggling to hold their giant phones. And this inventor popped the socket. Like, that's like going to happen, right?

• 12:38Speaker 04

  My shoulder popped out of its socket the other day.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  And then like, just like a random other senator, just like grandstanding about some other issue. It's gonna be great. Amazon is a scourge in an American like this is gonna be great and the pop socket guy is gonna be there like holding his phone with the handle. Um, look, I'm with you. I think the problem is can you be a middle medium sized company? Like, we should have medium sized companies, like they should be good competition. And right now it seems like you can't be a medium sized company. The other one I keep always thinking about is Eero, which like failed for a variety of reasons, but like when they sold to Amazon, we're like, ah, you could have, you could have been it and they, they turns out they could not.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I wrote this report about wireless charging tech while I'm here and the air power, the, the white space where people think they're going to fill in where air power couldn't. And the reality is they want to create these charging pads that are able to charge wherever you put your device, but because of the Apple Watch limitations with Qi, they can't do it literally. So like Nomad is going to be one of the first companies to release something widely that can do this. And they're like, yeah, we just can't do it. They're a medium sized company. They're like, well, yeah, we just can't do it.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  Another good example, this sold a few years ago, but it's August. So they have a new smart lock here. It's a little bit smaller and they sold to Yale, which is owned by LaGrande. It's like a big, it's like the, the lock. That's the Apple is the big company. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. Uh, so it's not like selling out to a huge company, but it's like in order for August to have survived after a bunch of other people started just making things just like them. They're like, well, we gotta get, we gotta go somewhere. There's no way that we're gonna keep on, keep it on. Here's a plug. I interviewed August CEO Jason Johnson for the show two days ago and he's gonna, you'll stick around your feed, kids. What do the podcasters say? Keep refreshing. Yeah, cool.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  I don't think we have a good thing.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're gonna work on it. We're definitely keeping this in the show. Yeah, ring that bell. Wow. Do it. Okay, so this, I want to transition out of Sonos and how hard it is to be a midsize company of tech. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna transition from there to the Sony car. Oh, wow. Which is, I try and believe one of your favorite things here. So Sony unveiled an electric car. So here's my, my theory about this car. It is so hard for Sony to like partner with the big companies and be like, here's a bunch of cool Sony idiots about a car, that it was easier for them to just build a car. Right? They couldn't be like, Google, we're gonna extend Android Auto into this new experience on the inside of a car. We're gonna take it and extend it and build it the way that we might be able to do with Android.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  They couldn't roll up to, I don't know, whatever big purveyor of, like, Apple is not gonna let them extend CarPlay. BlackBerry, like, is not gonna let them, like, or FCA is not gonna let them redo Uconnect. So they had to just build their own car, because it was easier to, like, build a functional car.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  And be like, this is the Sony vision of a car than actually to partner with any company that supplies that stuff.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  All right. Well, yeah, because there are.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  See, I did it.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  There are so many, so many of the automakers are sort of picking these sides with some of the tech companies on, as far as like the software goes, which is one of the big focuses of the Sony car, which is the, not just the entertainment aspect inside, because it's full of screens and stuff, but like also the UI and everything. And so, yeah, I guess you're probably right. They were basically, so we're better off doing this. And so I, I thought it was really interesting because, you know, how many times do we go, come to CES and companies, whether they're startups or whatever, they'll, they'll announce like a concept car and, you know, it might look really flashy. It might have a couple of things that move and everything. And ultimately, it's a thing that doesn't really work.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  And it's really just about the idea. Whereas Sony, what was really interesting about it to me was, well, first off, it was a total surprise. No one had any idea this was coming. And honestly, they were like, they didn't even really give it the sort of attention it deserved. They were doing their own press conference for other things unrelated to the automotive world.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Including announcing the PS5 logo and really like leaving everybody out on the limb, thinking there was gonna be something more coming. And at the very end of the press conference, they were just kind of like, and also we want to support the future of mobility. And a car just rolled on stage and they were like, our sensor tech and our entertainment and all this stuff would be great for the automotive world. And everybody was kind of like, wait, a car? And like, like people hadn't really even caught up to it yet before they were like, goodbye. And it was just over. And everybody was kind of like. And so, yeah, no, I mean, I think you're right. Like, the thing that was interesting to me was talking to them. Their whole pitch is that idea of like, you know, our camera sensors are really good. There's no reason why our camera sensors can't be in the sort of like vision-based

• 17:14Speaker 04

  driver assistance packages that are going into a lot of modern cars. Eventually, potentially autonomous, like fully autonomous cars. And then, same with their entertainment stuff, and they were like, you know, we could make a concept car that just has some of that stuff nominally, or we can make a car that works. We'll partner with, they partnered with this automotive supplier called Magna that is like a contract manufacturer and a couple other companies. And they're like, let's make something that actually drives. And then that way, when we go to these business meetings with these companies that might be our customers, we can say like, hey, we, you know, we don't know, we're not in the trenches with you, but like, we understand how hard it is to design an electric car from the ground up now in some capacity, in a way that maybe these other companies don't.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  And like, I think they're just sort of expecting like that to maybe gain them a little bit of credibility in a way that they wouldn't if they just rolled out a big hunk of plastic.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Tell us about the actual car.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  So it's an electric car. It's built on a sort of skateboard-style platform where their battery is just like all across the floor. It, you know, allegedly has around 300 miles of range. It's, you know, it's got decent like performance specs as far as that side of it goes. And then, you know, on the outside, it kind of looks a little like maybe a Tesla. And everybody kind of has a different opinion on how it looks.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  We've heard everything from Hyundai to Porsche to Tesla.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Honestly, the thing I think it looks the most like is like, especially from the side profile, it looks a lot like the Lucid Air from the EV startup Lucid Motors. But, you know, it's like, you know, smooth, clean lines. It was all silver, like barely a paint job on it. A real sort of like sweeping glass roof across the top. But the real focus of it is on the inside where there is a set of displays that stretch from one pillar to the other. Three displays, one in front of the driver for digital instrument cluster stuff, a touchscreen in the center for infotainment, and another touchscreen in front of the passenger for infotainment and navigation.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  And all that stuff. And what was really cool about all that, that whole setup is like the user interface and the software, all of that, the design of it was really smooth, really slick. I wish I had had more than like 15 minutes in the car to like play around with it because, you know, it may have just been like a demo setup to work. I don't know how it was running, how deeply it was connected to the car, but like it was a lot of fun to use. And the animations and stuff are really nice.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  Sony making a good non, non jittery touchscreen interface might be a first for that company. Well, they only made one.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  And then there's like the, there's another screen kind of in the center console.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  There's like a touchpad like coming off the tender center console. So you don't have to reach up and use the touchscreen. You can, it's got like haptics. So you can sort of like flick through. It's almost like a card based system, like the menu system in the, on the main touchscreen and, um, you know, and there's a lot of features that they sort of teased in there. There's like, you know, it's using one of the cameras up front to record dash cam footage all the time. You could then theoretically, they showed us an example of this, uh, you know, say you were driving through San Francisco, but you were worried about like paying attention to the road. You could go back and look at that dash cam footage and like re, you know, enjoy your drive through the city. By looking at the footage again and like set music to it and stuff like this and like, uh, and then there's.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  That's some real like, we gotta come up with some.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  That was where it started to veer in the like, you might've been like stuck on this project a little too long kind of thing. But yeah, and then, and there's some other, you know, kind of, uh, future like kind of bleeding edge, maybe not bleeding edge, but futuristic tech, like, uh, side cameras as opposed to side mirrors.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  You know, their big selling point for that, that's not a thing that's legal in the U S right now, but it's a thing that's catching on in Europe. And their big selling point there is like, these are HD cameras and they're going to be automotive grade and the ones in Europe right now, like they're not as high quality. And, and so, so that was basically the whole pitch. But it was honestly, the funniest thing about it was like, they really had no idea that it was going to be this like well received. Like, I think they were just completely overwhelmed. Cause everybody saw it was like Sony car. And then everybody's like, like just obsessed with that idea. And I think something that's going to be really interesting to watch over the next, like probably five years or 10 years is like.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  We're gonna get to a point, and we actually are almost kind of here. I was talking about this the other day with somebody, and then I met someone from Bosch, and they were like, oh, we did this. We're gonna get to a point where like the electric vehicle tech comes down enough in cost that like one of these big automotive suppliers is going to just be able to design one of these sort of skateboard platforms where it's just batteries, electric motors, and like, you know, sort of like plugs that run right up into something that you could just plop on top. And Bosch actually has an example of that on the floor here. And like, I don't think it's hard to imagine a scenario where like, you know, in five or 10 years, if that is cost effective enough, Sony could just like buy that skateboard. Well, I mean, not them, because they put the work into making this one.

• 22:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Any other company could buy that skateboard and make like a 5,000 run, you know, whatever car, you know, a GoPro car. Like, it could be anything. Like, and I think there is a scenario where something like that could exist. But for right now, they have no plans to mass produce it. They're like, we have no plans to mass produce it. I was like, does that mean you have plans to do a limited run? And they're like, no, we don't mean that. So they're not planning on making it. It's not something you're gonna be able to buy. It is a very B to B thing. But, you know, it was, it was just really striking, because usually, usually people don't put that much work into their concept cars. I mean, they call it a prototype, but usually at CES, there's not that much, uh,

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  People don't show their work as well as that.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  So what struck me about looking at the inside, there's the three screens.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  They're just flat displays, like rectangles. There's a lot of other cars here. There's a lot of, there's a lot of flexible and folding display tech everywhere. And like, Bitten is here, they're, they've got a 40 inch curved screen. I think we saw T's in the new Escalade that has like a 38 inch curved OLED. Like, I think the idea of flexible screens inside of cars, we're not just like doing the Model 3 thing, and it's like Elon went to CompUSA and like, just bought a bunch of 17 inch monitors.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  Where you're actually conforming it to the design of the car is super interesting. But you went and looked at the, the Bitten display as well.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got to drive the car. Um, and, and they're like a really interesting story. They're a Chinese EV startup, um, one of many. But they showed up at CES here two years ago and showed off the concept version of this car in this very sort of wild and wacky press event. And in the time since, they've Struck a deal with First Auto Works, which is like the original state-owned automaker in China. So they have like some pretty legitimate backing now. They're trying to get it into production this year and the headlining feature is that screen. They're not trying to make this, their electric SUV, anything like super performance or whatever. It's, they're really focusing on that and some of the other tech in the car, like facial recognition and health tracking and all this other crazy stuff. But, you know, they were

• 24:04Speaker 04

  offering drives. It was just in like a parking lot, as most demos tend to be in CES. So, you know, I could get a sort of a sense of like what it's kind of like to drive the car, but I was really trying to focus on, you know, this screen is so massive. Everybody's kind of looked at it and said, that's so distracting. It's so unnecessary, and for good reason. And so I just wanted to get a sense of like, is that really going to be the case? And they have said that they put a lot of work and thought into trying to design the user interface so that it won't be distracting. There are like, basically, so it's 48 inches long, or across, or whatever. Goes from pillar to pillar. It's pretty tall, too. It's probably about like maybe 10 inches tall. And the way they sort of divvy it up

• 24:45Speaker 04

  is there's, there's almost like four sections. There's no like physical divider, but like the one right in front of the driver is like always only going to be like instrument cluster stuff. And then the next three are like widgets and you can basically flip through different things. You could put like a stock app thing up. You could put a news headline thing.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  I love the idea that you're like customizing your button screen. You're like, I gotta get that stock widget.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, yeah. And they, but they said that those widgets won't update while you're driving.

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Same thing with like, obviously this screen is, you know, a pretty good fit for media, but you won't be able to play video while you're driving. They showed off on stage, you know, an integration with teleconferencing stuff, but you wouldn't be able to do that while you're driving. They're, they're basically saying, the idea is like ultimately if this car was able to drive itself, like obviously then you could use all this stuff like while you're on the highway or whatever. But in the meantime, they've done all of that kind of stuff. And then like the just the UI elements in general, they've tried to make it pretty minimalist so that it doesn't distract you. And one thing I did like about it is, well, two things that made it feel not too distracting. One is that the screen is really kind of sunk into the dashboard. The dashboard sort of like dips down and the screen's like, it's not as in your eye line as you think

• 25:57Speaker 04

  it might be in the photos. And then the other thing is, I actually really liked having like the speedometer and the range and everything. It's like right under your vision, like almost in the spot where like a heads up display is on modern cars. And so, you know, their pitches like, you know, in a Tesla Model S or X, you're looking not only over but down because of the vertical screen. And so like, having that information like right there is, you know, potentially safer. But the thing that was really distracting is there's a screen in the steering wheel, too, which is, you know, their pitches, because the big 48 inch screen isn't a touchscreen. It's just a, it's a regular display. And so you control it with either the touchscreen in the steering wheel, or they also have a

• 26:40Speaker 04

  touchpad coming off the center console. And it's just like, this one is like, I was trying to figure out like, why it was so disrupting. And it wasn't until I was like, writing about it last night, where I was like, I guess I'm just never used to having a screen that close to my face that I'm not like, purposefully holding. Like, it feels like it's being like thrust in your face. And there's something very, there's like a tension there that made it feel really distracting.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  So, I mean, I think that like, because they've gone so all in on this screen, like they definitely, it's partially up to them to like, really justify this. But like you said, like, there are so many other car companies that are going this direction that like, we really can't rely on them to be like, the arbiters of whether or not this is a good idea. Like, it's really going to be up to everybody to just like, push back on the idea, like really force these companies to make the case.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  And it's going to be a lot of them that are going to have to make that case.

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  I think this this year is an inflection point in flexible displays like they're here.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  Right, like everybody, my favorite like show floor like trivia bit is Royale, which made the bad folding phone.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  And they made a they made a speaker with a screen that goes around it.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, so they've got one trick. They're like Dyson, like what's Dyson's one trick? They like made a fan.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Like now there's anything that has a fan in it, there's a Dyson version. Like Royale is like, we definitely figured out how to fold the screen.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  What if we put it like literally there's a top hat with like a Royale screen. That's my favorite thing at CES. They made a purse. But like they set up their booth right outside the LG booth. So it's like they're just hoping some LG executive walks out and like, we should buy this company.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:11Nilay Patel?

  But you see it's like it's here, like there's flexible displays everywhere.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  And I think that, okay, we're gonna, we're actually gonna reconceptualize the interior of cars because we're not working with rectangles.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it does have like kind of a curve to it and it's, it is a nice looking screen. Like the resolution and everything is really good and if you wanted a giant screen in front of your face, like this is probably the one you'd want.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  This discussion has been very earnest and thought provoking, interesting, look at the future. It is time to talk about the Avicar.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  Mercedes Benz.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, Mercedes Benz made a concept car. As they often do, they are a, both they and parent company Daimler are very into telegraphing where they want to bring things by making extremely flashy concept cars and often debuting them here at CES. We've seen a lot of them over the years here. Oftentimes they have a more specific technological purpose, like the the F zero. Like the F zero one five.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Was this one that they showed off of maybe four years ago or something like that, that was like all about like here's like what we think like an autonomous car could be like in 30 years or whatever. Whereas this one, so this one was, it was so funny because they were being extremely careful about telling us anything about the event. It was just basically like, come to this thing, you want to be there and And it was because they were working with an entertainment property, you know, like they were working with Hollywood and so like it just gets more difficult. And so they made a concept car and they made it in conjunction with the people behind Avatar, including James Cameron, who came out on stage. Um, and the, the car is called the Mercedes Benz Vision AVTR.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  And it is inspired by Avatar. Uh, the

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Who hasn't been inspired by Avatar?

• 29:59Speaker 04

  The film from 2009 that has spent a decade teasing sequels.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Avatar is bad.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Avatar's a bad movie.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Avatar's really bad. And instead of like promoting a, a particular technology or, or whatever, what they were really trying to do with this concept car is say that they, like many other automakers, have really big sustainability goals for the next like 20 or 30 years. And they were saying like, okay, so by 2039, we want to do X. So what would a car look like in that really far off future? That would be like the most sustainable thing in the world or like the most environmentally friendly car in the world or whatever. And so they were, that was like the genesis of the concept car. How they got tied up with Avatar, I'm really not sure, but at one point, you know,

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, James Cameron was like, look, I've got this idea for a car in my movie, but I'm never actually going to make this movie. Would you like to build the Avatar?

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. So they tied up with Avatar at some point and then the whole thing becomes like, you know, in, in Avatar, the, the, the, there's a battle over natural resources or what, you know, whatever. That was basically the trend.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  Do you control it by putting your ponytail and do its ponytail?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  No. Okay. So, so the environmental thing is one thing, right? Like I'm, I'm into that. If that's like how, cause that's sort of what they normally do with concept cars. But then there's this whole other part of this where like this car, you know, it's supposed to be autonomous if you want it to be, but there's no steering, so there's no steering wheel, there's no pedals, nothing. The only way to control this car is in the center console. There is this, it's hard to describe. It's like a, like four layer, like oval thing that like accordions up from the center console to meet your hand and like you put your hand on it and you can like just move it forward and that like launches the car in autonomous mode. Or there's supposed to be a mode where like you can use that almost like a joystick to drive the car around.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  This thing also matches your heart rate and breathing. And so like, this is where they lost the plot where This and some of the other things in how you interact with the giant screen in the front is supposed to be the literal, and I mean that like they actually said, literal merging of human and technology. And like, they went down this whole path. And James Cameron did this too, when he came out on stage where he was like, I forget the exact quote, but he was basically like, yeah, like humans and just like the Navi and the Banshees, like, and they plug their hair. Like, I had totally forgotten about Avatar. He was like, you just have like, they plug their hair into the Banshees and become one with them to like, travel. He was like, we will merge with the machines. And so it was like, it

• 32:27Speaker 04

  was so weird because like, he's also on this like, big, you know, he did an interview with CNET and he was like, you know, like, I'm super into like, the environmental concerns and like, whatever. But he was also very into this idea of like, oh, we're definitely gonna merge with the machines.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  So he's like, you remember my hit movie, 2009's Avatar?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  You're aware that the, the main characters are a race of beings called the Navi? And they have horses called Banshees? Like,

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  You have to care so much about Avatar for that.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  And so like, yeah, so that was kind of-

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  Also, I believe that Navi make love to each other doing the hair thing, right?

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Oh, God. I don't know. I hadn't seen it in so long because I only ever watched it once because it was a terrible movie.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Also, like, how many years does he have to be able to reference Avatar and assume people know what he's talking about?

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  No, because he has like the theme park-

• 33:09Speaker 03

  There's no way teens have seen Avatar.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, they have the theme park and then the sequels are supposed to be coming. In fact, part of the event on Monday night was showing off concept art for Avatar 2.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Concept art for Avatar 2?

• 33:20Speaker 04

  They spent an hour debuting this car and that was the only thing they showed off. And so it was like, honestly, it was like the opposite end of the spectrum of the Sony car where like, this is just like, way too much. And like, honestly, I think the weirdest thing about it, I didn't really write about this, because they didn't really get at it, but it's kind of what they're getting at, which is like, Okay, back to the environmental stuff. Like, you're talking about this movie where these indigenous people are protecting their natural resources and like, it just felt like really weirdly like appropriative of like, of fake culture that doesn't exist. It's like, Oh, you wanted to promote your environmental sustainability by appropriating an indigenous culture from a fictional piece of work? Which is also appropriating indigenous culture.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is also, yeah, it was like, I don't know, there was something really gross about that, like the more I thought about it. So that's the Mercedes Benz Avatar car.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Um, I don't think you mentioned the most important aesthetic property of the car, which is the scales.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. It has thirty-three bionic flaps, Mercedes Benz called them on the back, but they're scales. And they like, kind of, it's honestly like, if I was standing behind them at one point and on the stage and they like, they all actuate up and they do it in like different patterns and stuff. And this is another point where they lost the plot where they were like, oh, it would be used to maybe communicate with other people outside the car or the driver. And it's like, how is it going to communicate with the driver? You can't even see through it. Like, there's no way to see it from where you're sitting. Obviously, people walking by your avatar car are like, oh, I recognize that pattern of flapping. Yeah, someone is in distress. But like, yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  I just can't wait for it to show up in like a Migos music video in like a year. Like, Quavo's on this shit.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Was it, was it the Cybertruck? Yes. Travis Scott. It's amazing. All right, that's enough Avacar. Tell us very quickly about the Segway S-Pod, then we're gonna take a break. Egg, egg, egg. You know, Segway entered our hearts like two decades ago with their weird stand-up two-wheeler self-balancing vehicle. Uh, they did that for a long time with a bunch of different iterations, including like off-road versions and whatever. And they got bought by Ninebot in China. Uh, and they started making hoverboards and like, you know, no one cares about hoverboards anymore. And so now Segway has basically like the next generation Segway, which is another two-wheeled self-balancing vehicle. But instead of standing, why not sit?

• 35:41Speaker 04

  And so there's this thing that kind of looks like, you know, half an egg. And it's a chair and it sits on the two wheels and it's called the Segway S pod. And it's basically a seated Segway. You don't have to lean to move it. There's a little joystick on the like, sort of right armrest. And, uh, and you can like pilot it around and, you know, it's ridiculous. It's definitely gotten a lot of flack already because people are kind of like, wow, this is the thing from Wally. And like, how lazy are we that we need to sit down on a Segway to move around? But I think for one thing, like, one thing I was going for it is like, it is kind of hard for some people to get used to the like balancing you have to do on a traditional Segway. It could have sort of like applications for people who have mobility challenges.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  They didn't really talk about it in that sense. I really do think that they want this to be the thing where like you and your family go on a tour, a Segway tour of like Washington DC. And like your grandma's

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  Laziest tour.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Your grandma's not gonna like stand up on the Segway. She's gonna sit in this thing, but well, that's a whole other thing. And so I got to ride it and it's, or drive it and it's, you know, it's kind of wild. It's supposed to have

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Sean, let's just be clear. I was told that you crashed it.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  You crashed it.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  I did not crash it.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  You are so ashamed of this pack. I think you should wear it as a badge.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  To be clear, a crash occurred.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  A crash occurred. The joy, no, so I went to,

• 37:02Speaker 04

  we were basically done filming. This is how it always happens. It was basically done filming and Phil, our video director was like, go over there. We need like one more shot. And so I went down on this little track they had at their booth to try and turn around and do like one more thing. And as I was like driving away from Phil, the joystick just like popped out. Cause this is like a full CES prototype.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Like it worked really well. I'm actually was like really surprised at how well this thing, it's, it's a lot of thunder drive. It's pretty nimble and it is just like rock solid. Like you, you press the button and it lifts up and like, it does not feel like you're on two wheels. Like they, all of the experience they've gained in developing this technology over the years was like pretty evident. But it was a prototype and so the joystick just popped out and it sort of like locked me into that screen. And like into the wall I went, like punched, punched a hole in like the wood wall.

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  Automatically stop when it hit the wall?

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it like tilted down like it certainly wasn't like

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Like a set like while I like

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then like the headrest popped off and it was it was just very much like

• 38:01Speaker 03

  They gave you a helmet for a reason.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, they gave me a helmet for a reason and it's like it's the perfect example of like how these like CES is like always like one small move in the wrong direction away from like breaking apart like everything here is just like

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  I will never forget Joanna Stern and the the we the we the robot suitcases.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  It's just like endless disaster of the robot suitcase.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, it's it's it's not something they're gonna start selling to consumers right away. It's something they want to trial in like, you know, fleet man like fleet settings.

• 38:30Nilay Patel?

  I want one of these for the office. Here's here's

• 38:33Speaker 04

  I'm telling you, it's one of those things that you you'll ride and like all of the things that you think you'd would be worried about, especially like how you look and everything go completely out the window because as soon as you're in it and driving it, you're like, this is awesome.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  This is how Wally literally begins. Everyone's like, what if I just stay in this chair? All right, we gotta take a break. I'm gonna talk about streaming wars.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  We've returned. Ashley Carmen.

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  You've been to war.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  You could say that, I guess.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of content companies here. Yeah, just CS in general, but like Warner Media had a thing. NBC like mentioned Peacock, but they have an investor day a little bit later. The Peacock ads are so deeply confusing.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  ViacomCBS even announced a deal with Bitin to provide content for their screen. So it's it's all over the place.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Yes, finally, two and a half men in your electric vehicle. And that's what everyone's been dreaming of. Spotify had a bunch of announcements, but let's start.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  I mean, there were streaming companies here, but the streaming Company that was here was Quibi.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Quick bites.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Vergecast, like Vergecast listeners know what Quibi is, right? Like, we don't have to run through the whole rigmarole of like.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Quibi is Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman's new streaming service that provides quick bites.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Quick bites.

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  That's what I got for you.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Two hour long movies broken up into 10 minute or less chunks that are serialized. So you can only view these 10 minute chunks once a week.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  So you have to wait to see the two hour movie.

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  Brutal.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  And then at the end of all the weeks, then you can watch the two hour movie still broken up into 10 minute chunks. But you could do it all at once.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then there's like all this stuff, but they, they like, they're like, CS, we're doing the keynote.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Jeffrey Katzenberg, Meg Whitman, prime time, Wednesday morning keynote at CES. They came, we didn't know what they were going to be debuting here. We figured, okay, we've heard about Quibi, they've been making so much noise about their content deals. They have everybody from Spielberg to J Lo to 50 Cent.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  Favorite. Polygon has a deal.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Polygon has, yeah, Polygon of Vox Media property has a deal. Um, they've just been announcing tons of content deals. So, you know, we knew that side of the business and we figured it's CES. This must be the moment where we're going to get a peek at the app, like.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Naturally, this is CES.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  We're going to show it to us.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Right. This is the time. That did not happen.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  It did not happen even a little bit.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Nope, not even a little bit.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  Uh.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  We were told, we had a, a press briefing ahead of the keynote where we got a little bit of a preview of what they were going to discuss. And they said, we'll send you some photos, like a teaser of the app. The teaser of the app was a render of a phone with a Quibi logo on it.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  It's the loading screen.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Okay. Oh, is that the loading? Okay.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  What they did show is their, their flippy tech.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Right. So what they said, so we didn't get to see the app at all. We heard that it might, it's inspired by Tik Tok and Instagram more than Netflix, where you see a list of titles. They want you to get into the content right away. That's what we know.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  They also showed us their patented technology called TurnStyle, which allows you-

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  TurnStyle is well with why, by the way.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  I was, oh, is it really? I was just thinking that and I was gonna ask that and I was like, is that a CES fever dream that I had?

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  No, that's all right.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  TurnStyle. So TurnStyle is a technology that allows you to seamlessly switch between portrait and landscape mode. The directors are filming their content with this technology in mind. So some of them are really lean and hard where they are creating two fully different cuts. So maybe if you're in portrait mode, you'll see one thing. And if you switch into landscape mode, you'll see a totally different scene from a different point of view, which isn't supposed to entice you to want to switch your phone back and forth throughout your 10-minute quick bite.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's 10-minute quick bites and there's also like two-minute daily things and there's weather and horoscopes and-

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Right, there's other content-

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  Any quick bite you want, available to you.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  For $5 a month-

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  For $5 with ads-

• 42:50Speaker 02

  With ads.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Right, that's just crazy. There's ads in the 10-minute bite. It could be less than 10 minutes, there's ads.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  What if-

• 42:57Speaker 03

  Neil and I know wants to go deep on how TurnStyle works.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  What if the $5 a month thing is like not, I mean, it's real, obviously, but what if they don't actually expect anybody to ever subscribe? They just need to put a price there to seem legit? And what their real monetization strategy is, is just content deals with cellphone carriers?

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  So they only have one, which is with T-Mobile. T-Mobile is quote bundling it.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  We were told that it won't be preloaded on phones.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  But T-Mobile is gonna market it.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  And like something, something, something, if you have it on your phone, if you download it and use it, like there's some rub share there.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  But it's not like, you know, like what is AT&T gonna do? Like obvious horrible thing they're gonna do, like the HBO Max app will be like preloaded on every Android phone that AT&T makes. T-Mobile is not doing that here. So we didn't see the app.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Did not see the app.

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  We did see Jeffrey Katzenberg, which was a true experience.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Amazing, amazing.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  I think actually you pissed him off.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  I did.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Because I brought up Disney. Katzenberg used to basically run Disney.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  And he was fired from Disney.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then, yeah, so bad blood. And we brought up Mandalorian to ask how, if Quibi, you know, could learn anything from Mandalorian, specifically the viral success of Baby Yoda and how maybe when greenlighting all this amazing content, he might consider the memes.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  And that that's it. That set him off.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he was like, I've been doing this since before you were fucking born.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  Listen to me, like, yeah, TV shows are great, like, big hit TV shows are great. But I get to say that I've been doing this since before you were fucking born. It was great. It was. Uh, Jeffrey Katzenberg, we have to like spend more time with him. That's what I would like most from Quibi is just a Jeffrey Katzenberg show.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  I'd pay five dollars a month for that.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Those quotes set next to the ambitions of Quibi in your piece was like the most hallucinatory thing I've read this week. It's incredible.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  So that's how, okay, so I want to talk about that, that. But just really quickly in turnstile, I don't think that we actually saw it working.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, so you, this, this was like Nilay's moment during our. I was just like, Nilay, run free. Go, man.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  If you show me a piece of technology, I will try to break it.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I want you to pull over and imagine that you are doing, making a product that has anything at all to do with video.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  And then imagine what Nilay's first question will be and just pause.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  Make sure you have an answer to that question.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  The answer is he will, he will grill you on bitrate.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  Yes, okay.

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll just make it very simple for people. If you're gonna ship creators to make their videos on Quibi, they have to upload two different video files. They upload a portrait one and a landscape one.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Right, it's not like one weird new format. They're just uploading two videos. They're cut in different aspect ratios.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  So if you're gonna instantly rotate between them, the easiest answer is to just send both files to the phone. Which means every video will be twice as big as a regular video, which is bad because they're designed to be viewed on phones. They usually have data plans. So we're like, how are you solving this? And like, this is the big patent is like, they have a proprietary compression tech. Where a lower res version of the thing you're not watching comes along in a sidecar. They call it the sidecar. And when you switch, it switches to a lower res version and then scales up. So every time you rotate the phone, the video downgrades, like just by nature of thing. But we were rotating the phone and everything was perfect. And I was like, is this real? And he's like, it is real. We just preloaded it because the wifi is bad.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  And we haven't actually seen it working on mobile yet. We haven't actually seen it streaming yet. And I think that is like the big question mark is every time we rotate your phone, if the video gets worse, you're not going to rotate your phone.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  I will say like-

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  That's the end of my, my bitrate compression.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  There's a lot that can be said about Quibi and how ridiculous it is. There is, I mean, like, they did the thing that I think we all love. And there's definitely a very CES thing, which is they made that piece of tech. And they'd made an idea that is just like, there's something deeply interesting about that, even if it becomes a thing that no one ends up using, like-

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Just figuring that out is like a fun challenge to solve.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Their CTO, Rob Post, told me that like, even when they do the offline viewing and they send the whole files, the way compression works is you still don't get, you still don't use double the data. It's still less because they're compressing so many similar pixels in portrait and landscape.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  So that's like really cool.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's super cool.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  That's awesome, right? Okay, I buy it. But the hallucinatory part was like, Jeffrey Katzenberg would be like, this is a third era of filmmaking. And it's like, wait a minute.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  The Training Day director told us Quibi has invented a new language of cinema.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, so first of all, I definitely asked a very leading question. I was like, is this cinema? And he was like, of course it is. And I was like, wow, we're in it now.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Can I, can I just very briefly, this is, I was going to write this in the newsletter and I got halfway through. And then I was like, I can't finish this thought. And so I'm going to delete the last hour and a half of work I did. And an unfinished thought is perfect for the Vergecast.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  That's what we're here for.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Anton Fakua is totally right.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  This is a-

• 48:02Speaker 02

  New language of cinema.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  Maybe.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Here's the thing.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Maybe it is.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  The, the first TV shows were basically just like radio shows that happened to have cameras in front of them.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  This is 100% the Quibi like high real.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  No, but it's an anime- It's about that does exactly what you're about to say. They did make this thing.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, the keynote, they literally ran through the history of media.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  I am a huge sucker for, oh, we have a new screen. We need to figure out how to change things that feel so it feels right on the screen. This is why I'm super into iPadOS. This is why I was super into WebOS back in the day. Is like, oh, we should actually like, think about this thing. And it's always the second or third generation that gets it right. Cause the first generation is just imitative of what came before it. And I am not saying that he's right. I'm not actually saying that he's right.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  But that's what you're saying.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  I do, I just, I love the idea that they are trying. I don't know if they're right. Probably not. But the fact that they're like, taking serious to the idea that they should change what professional video is for a phone is interesting.

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  So it's funny they brought up WebOS.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  Because, because failure. No, I remember the WebOS keynote very distinctly, as I'm sure you do. It had the same vibe, which is they were acting like they had already won.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  They are acting like they already had millions of users and they had already changed all these behaviors. And they're showing you how the world would work in the future. And we all bought it. And maybe I'm just jaded because we lived through many of those moments together. But I was like, you don't have any users, like zero people have this app on their phone.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  No app, no work, like technical demo that is actually, you know, connecting to their servers and delivering.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  It was just like.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  So that's the fact.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  You've got like, there's a lot of missing pieces.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Although he was not at the keynote, so maybe not.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  I was expecting a parade of stars at the keynote.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  I mean, but this is what's so interesting about Quibi is regardless of whether it fails or not, it hits on so many of the moment conversations right now. Like the cinema conversation of Netflix is buying movie theaters because directors are like, I want my film shown on a big screen. Now you're going to ask these directors to put the effort in to build videos specifically made to rotate on phones. It's like, okay, that's a whole new level to this discussion.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the advertising piece is actually super interesting. They've, it's, they've, they claim they've already sold out their first year of ad inventory, which comes to $150 million. Procter and Gamble was on stage being like, we love this. They showed off a Pepsi ad. There's a Mountain Dew ad too with a car, I think I saw somewhere. I think advertisers don't want to be on YouTube. They don't want to be on Twitch. Like, those are dangerous places for their brands.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Because of the things that happen there. We cover, how often do we cover demonetization? So it's like, there's more yawning commercial demand for this service to exist than maybe consumer demand.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, everyone in Hollywood wants this to exist. Everyone, like, every advertiser wants this to exist. Jeffrey Katzenberg wants it to exist. And like, I don't know if people want it to exist.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  So what you're saying is that Quibi's gonna cause the next recession?

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, it's just like, it's one of those things where like, yep, they checked all the boxes. Like, what if there was a thing that was better than YouTube that you could watch that was full of Hollywood celebrities? And what if it didn't cost so much money? And what if that was a great advertising? Like, yes, check, check, check. You know what's really hard is getting anyone to download an app and pay $5 a month to watch ads. So we'll see.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  I mean, IGTV has tried to pursue this. Not to the, obviously, the billion-dollar funding, you know, actually giving Spielberg money to build a two-hour movie. But IGTV has been pursuing stars. They hired a full LA team to literally sit down with Drake and be like, "Hey Drake, check out this cool thing you can do and how you could use it to market to your audience." That is their job. And like, the stars still don't want to use IGTV.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  They had some not-so-kind things to say about IGTV and Facebook, right?

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They were like, Katzenberg was like, no, his amazing line. They're spending, they're making content at $100 a minute, we're spending $100,000 a minute.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is like, you usually say that.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  By the way, Los Angeles Times, LA Times reported yesterday that they got an additional $400 million investment.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think like, and one of their, one of their big partners is actually Google. Right? Like, there's a bunch of Google stuff happening here. So like I said, I think like, it could just get willed into existence because people want it to exist. But they ought to show us an app. Like, it's amazing they have.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  And they're supposed to launch April 6th, so they have.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  They got, they got some time. Yeah. I'm sure they have an app somewhere.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  I want to believe if you have a billion dollars, you will build an app. I want to believe that you can do that thing.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna fully, like, I want to believe. I'm not jaded yet, completely.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  Everybody wants to believe. I, that the power of belief is strong here. I'm just telling you, I believed in Windows Phone. You know what I'm saying?

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't believe QWERTY could succeed necessarily. I'm just saying, I believe the app might, might show up.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. The billion dollar app sounds like an Apple TV Plus exclusive reality show that would fail instantly.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's take a break and come back and talk about some gadgets and then wrap this up.

• 53:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 53:41Speaker 07

  Hello. Thank you for those kind words of introduction, Eli. I'm Paul Miller and I'm here from an undisclosed location that is not in even really that close to Las Vegas. And I just wanted to, to, you know, do my, uh, the thing, you know, the thing I do every week. And it's called, so you want to get into the GPU biz? So you may have heard that Intel is gonna do discrete GPUs. So Intel is a CPU manufacturer. They put embedded GPUs, you know, like the Intel Ultra HD or Iris Graphics, that kind of stuff, into their current CPUs.

• 54:23Speaker 07

  But now they're gonna do discrete GPUs so they can compete with Nvidia and AMD. So you want to get into the GPU biz? There's some, some. A little bit of a checklist. And so I'm just, you know, I'm gonna cut a vibe out. Is Intel ready for this moment? One, do you have patents? GPUs are heavily patented. Your grandma can't just go out there and make a GPU because she's going to get sued to oblivion by Nvidia and AMD and Intel. Well, Intel looks like their new GPU, the DG1, is a scaled up embedded GPU. And now that's probably not entirely true.

• 55:06Speaker 07

  But it's not seemingly not that much more powerful than Intel's embedded graphics. It is more powerful and but a lot of that's going to come from the fact that as a discrete GPU, you can put more power and more cooling because you get you get you get double the cooling basically because it's a separate part from the the CPU, right? So that's that's step one. So I think Intel has the patents because I don't know how much new stuff they're actually doing here. Two, do you have a confusing naming scheme? Of course, Intel has got this. The the graphics card is right now it's called the Intel DG1, right? So that discrete graphics one, I think that's what it's for.

• 55:51Speaker 07

  But it's and that's, you know what? Actually, now that I think about it, that's pretty straightforward. But under the hood, it's built on the XE architecture. That's capital X lowercase e, which I'm tempted to pronounce as Z, but you know what? What's what it's also the logo is X to the power of E, which is great. And there's XELP, that's low power, right? XEHP, that's high power. And then there's XEHPC, which is, you know, Intel claims that this XE architecture is going to scale from ultra mobile.

• 56:31Speaker 07

  That means like very thin and light laptops to ExaScale, which I don't really even remember what that means. You know what? I think they're gonna really nail the confusing naming scheme in the long run. But DG1, you know what? I don't know. Maybe that's too simple. Step three or requirement three for being discreet, doing discreet graphics, superfluous design accents. The Intel DG1, if you, if you go on the verge.com, one of my favorite websites, there are pictures of the Intel DG1, but as a discreet graphic, like, like a, like a 1080 card, right? Actually, not, not that big, more like a 1060, you know, like a short graphics card

• 57:13Speaker 07

  that you put into a PCIe slot in your, in your desktop, right? But that's not what the DGI, the DG1 actually is. The DG1 is, the first iteration is actually going to be a discreet graphics for laptops in the new Tiger Lake Intel laptops. So it's not going to look anything like this because it's going to be tiny and inside of a laptop. And this is a big card. So apparently this, this picture of this DG1 card is actually a card that's going to go to developers because there's a lot of like, I don't know, driver work that needs, or I don't, I really actually don't have any idea, but this, this card is for developers.

• 57:53Speaker 07

  It's not for putting into your desktop PC because the actual card, the first discreet graphics they're shipping are just for laptops. So of course, the, all the design accents are superfluous because, you know, this is nonsensical as a, a, a design for a laptop card, because it is obviously not for laptop. You know what? This got confusing and that's on me. I'm sorry, but anyways, I just wanted to welcome Intel to the GPU biz. I think they're totally ready. This is going to be really fun, really exciting. Obviously AMD is also doing a bunch of, uh, really refocusing on laptop graphics as well. It seems like that's pretty exciting.

• 58:37Speaker 07

  So the whole, whole scene is going to be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to it. Thank you. Have a good time in Las Vegas. Don't eat any questionable meats.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, right before we started recording, we did our best of CES picks.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  We did.

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  And I demanded that we pick that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 fold and everyone got very sad, including you.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got very sad. My, my eyes went dead. I looked for the nearest ocean.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  You made, you locked eyes with Sean and both of you like wanted to die.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but I think a laptop with folding a lead screen is by far the best thing here.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  There's a lot of. The X1 Fold in particular is the best one here because Lenovo announced a price and said they were shipping it. Yeah. Nobody else did. Yeah, winner by default. That's what I'm saying. But there's like a lot of like good foldy PCs floating around here. There's a lot of foldy PCs floating around here. So not all good, but all interesting. The really important thing to me is that nobody really knows exactly what to do yet. No one really knows how the fold should work. No one really knows, should it fold this way or that way? No one really knows how sturdy you need to make the thing in order to make the screen not crease, how durable the thing is going to be really be.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  But the most important thing that not anybody really knows yet or is not talking about directly yet because they can't is the thing Tom Warren has pointed out, which is for all of these foldy PCs, what's the software going to look like? Yes. Because Windows 10 super can't do it. So we need Windows 10 X and we know very little officially of exactly how that thing is going to work on these foldy screens.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  They should talk to the turnstile folks.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  10 X is coming later this year, right? Yeah, so 10 X is like, we know it's coming on the Neo. Neo, I always get the Microsoft Neo and Duo, Surface Neo, Surface Duo confused. Yeah. I think it's like mostly going to be a full screen paradigm instead of like Windows, you know, which is Windows 10 X, not anyway. But it's going to be aware of multiple screens and multiple positions of those screens. I forget the word that they use to like all the different ways that a screen can exist in relation to another screen. And so they're thinking through that and Microsoft is the best position to do that probably. But the thing about Microsoft and new versions of Windows is when they try and come up with a grand new paradigm, the first time they do it, it's bad. And then the second time they do it, it's good. Yeah. Right?

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  I mean, this is the Windows 8, Windows 10 story in a nutshell, right? The Vista stuff. Yeah. All of that. Every other. Every other tic tac tic tac. And so I think it is actually fair to say that 10 X is going to be like the tic. It'll be the first one. And so I don't have a huge degree of confidence. That when these things actually start being sold, they're gonna be great because I don't, I could be wrong. Microsoft couldn't nail it and then everything will be fine and beautiful and wonderful. But I don't know. And then the very last thing I'll say about the foldables is every time you bring up, you know, is this thing really durable? What about it's plastic, basically, and like you gotta have all this protections around it. You know, what about, what about glass? And they're like, yep.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, glass. Soon as we have glass, it'll be fine. It'll come. And not in a way of like, whatever they don't, they like, hope someday it happens, but it's like, sigh, I wish I could tell you what I know, but I don't, I can't. Yeah.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Because there's one glass supplier in its corner.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  And they'll be like, you're the one who told you get no glass.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, I've heard that too. We'll see. I'm just excited. I'm actually very excited for form factor evolution. I think holding screens are gonna push new form factors and like, I've been trying out this phrase, the tyranny of rectangles.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  Time for squares.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  That's all I'm saying. The revolution is here.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Sam Byford wrote the best headline, though. 2020 might be the year of reasonably okay foldable PCs, comma, maybe. Just like, yep, that's, that's how I feel.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  I feel good about it. Okay, let's run through a few other things that happened here. Samsung, Samsung.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Samsung.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're here.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Samsunged with a vengeance this year.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  They really came at it. So yes, they did TVs. Yes, we talked about the AI fridge race, which is amazing. They continue to have like smart closets that can shake your clothes free of debris. All right, whatever. Let's just start with Neon.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  So there's.

• 1:03:01Nilay Patel?

  Everyone sighed.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a small group of people somehow associated with Samsung in some way who have promised to change the entire universe and that they think is as great, as grandly as Da Vinci and Michelangelo. And they're gonna make these digital avatars.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  The reason we said those names is because they compared themselves to those people.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, like word for word. And so the idea is there's a human on a screen that looks and talks and acts just like a human on a screen. It can see you, it can interact with you, it has emotions and facial expressions and is actually helpful, it can actually do what you want it to do, like give you the information about where to go in the airport when you're lost, or how to file your taxes, or get your, you know, license updated to the DMV, I don't know, whatever you'd want a digital avatar to do. But it's all driven by AI, it's not like a recording, and it'll look and feel naturalistic. That's the idea, and that was the big hypey world-changing promise that we got teased for days and days and days. And then the time came for them to actually show us instead of tease

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  it, and Sam Byford was there, and yeah, it doesn't look.

• 1:04:07Nilay Patel?

  It didn't work.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  It didn't work.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  It crashed.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  The CEO of this project, I think it was called Star Labs, they're wholly owned by Samsung, CEO of this guy, Pranav Mistry, and he's like, yes, we're owned by Samsung, but no one can tell me what to do.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  This is the other hallucinatory piece.

• 1:04:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he absolutely compared himself to like Renaissance masters. He's like, you have to think this big. And he's like, we don't have any business model associated with this. Honestly, who knows how rich Michelangelo was, which is incredible. It's like, at the time, he really cared about it, I'm sure. It doesn't work. There's like, there's a bunch of buzzwords in the specs, and like apparently it ran on like a pretty hardcore PC. But like James Vincent is like, our AI reporter, and he was like, I don't know what's happening here.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  James is so smart. He just always has the right take. So everyone should read what James writes about these things.

• 1:04:57Nilay Patel?

  The artificial humans from Samsung. Samsung, in addition to artificial humans, released a ball.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  They released nothing.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  They had a ball on stage and it has a little camera on it and it should be able to follow you around. It should be able to like roll up to your TV and use its IR blaster to turn the TV on, which I know Neil I loves.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  And it's supposed to be like a companion that like toodles around your house and helps you out, makes cute little droid noises. James Vincent is going to write that like the main reason this thing is compelling is that it makes little droidy noises and that's cute. And so it's a more approachable robot.

• 1:05:36Nilay Patel?

  It's a minosphere.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they didn't announce if they were going to sell it, exactly what it would do, when they would sell it. And when they were demoing it on stage on like the, you know, keynote before the night before CS opened, there was like an asterisk in the lower right of the stage that you could barely see that was like, may not represent final functionality.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Which the functionality was nothing anyway.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  It was just, it's a ball.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  We accidentally shipped this cube. It doesn't do as much.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  At the booth, it was behind glass the entire time.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  You were not allowed to get up like.

• 1:06:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you weren't even allowed to step up to where it was.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  You could only watch.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Well, they had a, they had like a main demonstration area that was also behind glass.

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  And they were like relaying the commands too, right? Like you couldn't actually directly talk to it.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  No, you couldn't directly interact with it at all. And so I am not accusing Samsung of this, but there was nothing in that demo that couldn't have just been somebody with a remote control who driving the ball around.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  I don't think that's what happened because the people did walk up to him and say, come here, come here. Then like the ball did it and you could do that at any moment. So like that, that worked. There wasn't actually somebody just sitting there driving the ball, probably 99%. But like it's so vague in what it is supposed to be and do and serve and purpose it's supposed to serve that, I don't know, man.

• 1:06:48Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Ash was like, when I was like Samsung.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just think it's cute.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  Into it.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  Let me have the cute thing. It's called Bali.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  It's the ultimate, like, let me know the ultimate, but it is a very good example of how far Samsung has distanced itself from Bixby. Where like, there is probably a timeline where this could have been the Bixby ball.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  The Bixby ball.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they were like, we've, we were punting on Bixby, we're just calling it Bali.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Did anybody see any Bixby at this booth? I don't think I saw it. I walked through that Samsung booth like maybe 10 times.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  Like a magnified.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  Where is Bixby? They promised they're going to ship the little Bixby speaker.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  And they, they have completely ghosted talking about the big speaker. Like it's just, it's just memory holding.

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, so RIP Bixby. Bali is my new best friend.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  I loved, I watched, I watched that whole Bali demo.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  It's like exactly, they know what we'll play in like Good Morning America CES roundup. And it's like Bali, the ball of Bali around, like exactly.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  There's just always like a big, there's like always a lot of dissonance when somebody announces stuff like that without ever acknowledging the fact that there are hundreds of other like robot balls.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  It is definitely just like the CES, make it to Good Morning America's roundup.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  Wow, the cynicism is overtaking.

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  Is totally right.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  I still like Bali.

• 1:08:11Nilay Patel?

  Like you gotta get on the local news. What do we got? We got a ball. All right.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  That chirps. Absolutely.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  So the other thing about Bali that I thought was ridiculous was they had it and like the other display was like companion robots for like elderly folks. And so like they have like other ones that they've had for a long time. And they're like, and our newest one, Bali. It's like, I hate you, grandpa. I didn't get you a puppy. It's just a ball.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Well, their demo video has the ball with a dog and like, tell me what dog wouldn't just wreck this thing.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  My dog would tear this thing apart, but you know what? It's like the ultimate, it's, it made me mad at how I like moved I felt in the moment where the ball rolls up and like curls up next to it.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  Like cozies up next to the dog that's curled up and it was like, oh.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  And I was like, god damn it.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, Bali's for everyone. I'm doing it. I can't wait for, it charges via USB-C.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Of course it does. I'm so excited. I tweeted this, therefore it's good. So I take it back. Bali's good.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's where we're ending it. We're ending it with our own Good Morning America roundup.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  I'm not letting you end it there because we haven't talked about the Intel NUC.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  You really want to talk about this? This like it's it's You've wanted to talk. It's all you've talked to. It has caused some controversy. So Intel makes these little these little PCs, right? And like they've been trying to do it for a while. They're called NOX. And so now they've made a slightly bigger one that you can put a graphics card in. And the entire motherboard and Intel chip is modular. So like you could theoretically swap it out later. Yeah. And so the idea is you can have like a really powerful, good gaming PC where it's easier for a regular person to swap out like some of the core components that you traditionally never would. So it's like it to me, it's interesting because if I want a gaming PC, I'm going to want to make a cute, small one. And making a cute, small one turns out to be a little bit more difficult than I expected.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  So this all seems great, but on the other hand, it like it basically turns a motherboard even more proprietary to like Intel than it was before. Because it's just basically like it's like a huge SoC, right? Right. Yeah. But what well, but you can open it up a little bit and like swap out the the storage and the RAM and stuff. But what's interesting about it isn't just that Intel said, we're doing this because Intel does that every year. And everyone's like, okay, Intel, we believe in you. But they actually got other companies to get on board to use this like framework and platform for their own little mini gaming PCs like Razer is making a box that uses the same card that has your motherboard and your Intel chip on it. So it's it's one of these like this could be really cool, or this could be a dystopian

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  hellscape where Intel controls yet more of the the PC market. We just don't know yet, or it could just fizzle and be a nothing and like, but it's like it's fascinating to watch. It's made a lot of people like pretty like grumbly. Really? I wouldn't expect these grumbles because it's like they stopped doing the other stuff. Well, it's they haven't stopped doing the other stuff, but like it could. And it's it's this weird combination of like more modular and giving you more freedom to upgrade later, but also like less open and less ability to upgrade the way you want later. Like it's like moving from a car whose engine you can screw around with to a car whose engine is sealed. That's just you are able to like easily replace that sealed engine if you want.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I look, I'm the Intel's biggest available market is like gaming PCs. They want to like expand that market, get more people to build the stuff or use the stuff. They have to make it simpler than it is now. So I get what they're doing. I feel like the motherboards are proprietary now. Like that argument was like actually lost like some time ago. Like it's it's another market over there.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait for you to get a Nook and then like really.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  I might, I might do it. I haven't owned a like a proper gaming PC in a while because I decided I was going to simplify my life and just be a console person. And maybe it's time to to give up that decision and make my life more complicated again. Yeah, I think I need that. The other, the other PCB plot is AMD chips, but we we've running out of time.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  We, I interviewed the CEO of AMD, Lisa Su. If you're interested in AMD chips, I assure you there's 45 minutes of that. Soon to be in your feed. Ring that bell.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  What?

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  That's how you subscribe to podcasts now.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  Subscribe and you said ring that bell.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, notifications.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you bring the bell, you get the notification and then Spotify targets.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  We have to stop this. This podcast is over. I hope you can tell that we're very sleepy. Please forgive us. I love you all for listening to the Vergecast. Thank you, everybody. Rock and roll. Goodbye.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:13:05Speaker 08

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