Privacy risks in post-Roe USA, the internet's recommendation problem, and our Asus gaming laptop guide

The Verge's David Pierce and Alex Cranz chat with health technology reporter Nicole Wetsman and senior privacy and cybersecurity reporter Corin Faife about the privacy vulnerabilities for people seeking abortions in a post-Roe United States, and how people can protect their information. 29:28 - David reports on why the internet is so bad at recommendations, with insights from executives at Yelp, Pocket, Pinterest, and Likewise. 46:27 - Senior reviewer Monica Chin explains the confusing names behind Asus' ROG gaming laptop line, and which laptop may be the right for you. Email us at [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of unhackable encryption. I'm your friend David Pierce, and as we speak, it is currently day eight of me having COVID. I don't have a headache anymore, and I've mostly kicked the cold symptoms because I just drink tea all day now, but I still kind of get tired, like, walking up and down stairs, you know? Luckily, I work from home, so I don't have to do that very often. Just go from bed to desk and desk to bed. It's a lifestyle. Anyway, coming up on the show, we're going to talk about what you should know about how your data gets collected and used now that the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v. Wade. We're also going to talk about recommendations and why it's so hard for the internet to just show you stuff that you like. And we're going to talk about Asus' ROG, or is it ROG, lineup of gaming PCs, and which

• 0:48David Pierce?

  ones you should buy, and why it's so freaking hard to figure it out. Let me finish making this tea. It's called Shenandoah Blue, in case you were wondering, and it is delicious. And then I'll slowly trudge upstairs into the home studio, and we'll get into it. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  First up today, obviously, the big news in the world is that the Supreme Court recently struck down Roe v. Wade, and in doing so, totally changed the way the United States regulates abortion services. In the days since the ruling, there's been a lot of information and talk out there about, well, a lot of things. But one of them is how your online data, through period tracker apps, social media posts, even search history, can be used by governments or law enforcement to find out whether you had an abortion. It's a tricky question with a lot of overlapping parts about what you should do and how it really works. So Alex Cranz and I grabbed The Verge's Corin Fife and Nicole Wetsman to try and make sense of it all and figure out what you need to do to stay safe.

• 3:22David Pierce?

  Alex, Nicole, Corin, hello. Thank you all for doing this.

• 3:25Alex Cranz?

  We're here. We're in the office.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27David Pierce?

  We have lots to talk about, but I want to start with period tracking. Because I feel like, to me, the thing that I have seen over and over on Twitter over the last several days is this loud admonition to delete your period trackers, and that that is suddenly a hugely scary source of data.

• 3:41Alex Cranz?

  That's all I see on my Instagram, too. Constantly on my Instagram, it's just like, delete it. And I'm like, do I? So I guess, Nicole, do I need to delete my

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:49Alex Cranz?

  my period tracking apps?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about period tracking apps is that while they have a lot of data about you and your cycle, and that data could theoretically be used against you if you were in a place where Abortion or certain types of healthcare were criminalized and you were kind of being targeted for that. You know, that could pose a problem, but this is like not the biggest risk that we're talking about. This is actually a very small piece of the things that are actually scary in this sort of post-war landscape around data and privacy. This isn't a way that we've seen people targeted in the past because we are, we have already seen people targeted using health information because they're suspected of having an abortion or

• 4:35Speaker 03

  seeking out abortion-related care. So, you know, the period checking apps are a piece of this. They're a small piece of it. They are something that experts sort of think, maybe we're going to start to see this become more of an issue. It hasn't been so far. I mean, here's the thing, if you want to delete your app, you should delete your app. If it makes you more comfortable, you should delete it. Deleting it is probably a good step, particularly if you're in a place where you think information you're collecting about yourself could come back to haunt you. It is maybe a little bit necessary, but definitely not sufficient, is how I would characterize it. And, you know, it's the sort of thing that's going to come into play once you're already the target of an investigation. It's not something that, at least yet, we're seeing as like a, let's scrape all this data and find people that we're going to come after.

• 5:20Alex Cranz?

  Because you guys have dug deep into this. You've been digging deep into this. What is the data that's kind of being used against people to find people to prosecute under these new laws?

• 5:30Speaker 04

  So I think, yeah, I'm just going to chime in and second what Nicole said about the period tracking app. As it reported, it covers a lot of privacy issues here at The Verge. I absolutely agree that it is never, as she said, a bad idea to delete an app that you think is collecting too much data on you. Maybe we should just delete all of our apps. We would be a lot more safe. But in terms of how that meets a legal and regulatory framework, you know, because we have the Fourth Amendment, data cannot generally just be searched without a warrant. However, once there is a criminal investigation, once there is a probable cause, then that's when law enforcement agencies will start sending subpoenas to tech companies. And there are a lot of times that we do see data like search

• 6:14Speaker 04

  history, like other app data can become part of the case. And unfortunately, now we're in this awful situation where a whole lot of reproductive health procedures are potentially criminalized, and that does bring more data to the table potentially.

• 6:29Alex Cranz?

  So the data itself is like not necessarily being used to say, oh, that's a person we need to go after and attempt to prosecute. It's after they've already identified someone, then they're going to go back through their records, go back through their history, their search history, look through their apps and be like, yes, got them.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  At least so far.

• 6:48Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's sort of what we've seen historically over the past couple of years. And that is sort of how people, I think, are expecting things to proceed. I do think, that is not to say that this isn't a hypothetical risk that is real.

• 7:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  And, you know, law enforcement is tech-savvier than they have been. And these anti-abortion groups are savvier. They use data. And so I don't think we can say that this sort of like aggregate level, big picture stuff is not going to be used in this way. I think we haven't seen it so far. And it's sort of up in the air how it is going to end up being used. I think we're still waiting to kind of see how these different groups that are going to be coming after people are going to make use of this data. We just, I think, don't really know the answers to that yet.

• 7:35Alex Cranz?

  Because it's not just going to be law enforcement, especially in places like, is it Idaho and Texas, where there are these bounty systems that are encouraging non-law enforcement people to like just go out there and abortion vigilantism or something.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, abortion vigilantism, that's exactly it. Unfortunately, that's another just awful part of this new landscape, is a new legal framework that was developed prior to the Roe overturn. So with the intention that it would be able to skirt protections for abortion as they previously were. But the Texas SBA law, as you mentioned, kind of deputizes private citizens or organizations to go after people, to pursue anyone who is suspected of terminating a pregnancy and to receive a financial reward. So to be incentivized for pursuing them in that way. Again, I think it's fair to say we don't know exactly how that will shape the landscape. We don't know exactly what kind of information they will have available to them and how

• 8:33Speaker 04

  they will be able to obtain it through subpoenas or other methods. I think it also definitely fits. Gets into this bigger picture of surveillance of pregnant people that has been going on for for a really long time, again, way before the overturn of Roe. There was a piece that ran in MIT Tech Review about anti-abortion groups and the amount of data that they've been collecting from, say, physical surveillance of abortion centers, just standing outside with a notepad and pen, collecting people's license plate data.

• 9:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Taking photographs of people, trying to identify them. Now, we're in a situation where that could all be evidence in a criminal case.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  We're thinking about the ways that people are being targeted, kind of at the front end, like, all this evidence comes into play after, obviously, where it's gonna say, we think that you had an abortion or had a healthcare procedure that is now against the law, and here's all the information we're gonna use to prove that. The way that people are being flagged as people to be investigated are much lower tech than anything we've been talking about. It's someone coming into a hospital with a miscarriage and being.

• 9:43Alex Cranz?

  Because we've seen that. We've seen, we've seen women have gone into hospitals with miscarriages and former spouses, former partners have said, ah, ah, ah.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:52Alex Cranz?

  Which is terrifying.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's, you know, that's an analog situation. You see situations where doctors are reporting people that they think had an abortion or attempted to have an abortion to law enforcement.

• 10:05Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that like a HIPAA violation?

• 10:07Speaker 03

  That is not a HIPAA violation.

• 10:09Alex Cranz?

  Oh, oh, oh. Drew, should we do the HIPAA stuff? Should we get into it?

• 10:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's talk about HIPAA. This is what I was gonna ask about, because I think this is the, like, the other piece of this, I mean, we've talked about, you know, search history and location data, which I wanna get into also, but I think this question of, like, where does this process now start, I think, is way more complicated, certainly than I realized, and I suspect more complicated than most people realized, and actually comes from, like, in a certain way, it would make more sense if it came from, like, period tracker apps, but that is, to your point, not mostly how this is starting.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  And also, honestly, the last couple of years of the pandemic as well have really revealed what HIPAA is and is not. And HIPAA is not like a magic force field protecting your medical information. In fact, it is incredibly leaky and has a lot of problems that have become clearer and clearer and clearer. So HIPAA, as it is written, prevents covered entities, so these are like hospitals, health organizations, like category of covered entity, from disclosing identifiable health information without your consent.

• 11:13Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  But there are a lot of ways that information can be disclosed under HIPAA that is like perfectly part of the law. Something that comes up a lot is that de-identified data is like fully not covered. So a hospital can batch off de-identified health records to like a tech company and be like, here, you can just have this information and use it to make products. Like, that's totally fine under HIPAA. Something that's really relevant here is that if a covered entity, a doctor, suspects that a crime has been committed, it is permissible under HIPAA for them to disclose medical information that is relevant to that crime.

• 11:51Alex Cranz?

  So potentially, if you are in a state where it is now criminalized abortion and you go out of that state, you get an abortion, and you come back and you go to your general practitioner in that state, and they're like, wait a minute, I suspect that this person has had an abortion, they could report you.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, the crossing state line thing, I think, makes it more complicated. But like, say if you're in a state that has criminalized abortion, you come into a doctor's office bleeding.

• 12:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  And the doctor thinks that you did something that would be trying to get an abortion, trying to obtain an abortion, they could then call the cops and tell them and disclose medical information about you.

• 12:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  And that would be totally fine under HIPAA. If a doctor goes to respond to a medical incident on a scene and thinks that a crime is taking place there, same thing. And HIPAA does not protect your medical records from being subpoenaed or subject to warrants. So your medical record is not going to protect you here. Like, it's just not.

• 12:49Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  And there's very little you can do about that. Frankly.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  And in many cases, your medical records aren't even necessarily yours. I mean, that was a line you guys had in the story that you just wrote that was like, we think of our medical records as sort of tied to us as people, especially as like digital things, but they're not. There are these things that are like very hard for us to control or even access that belong often to somebody else, right?

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, the hospital and clinic, they own your medical record, really. There are some places where there's a little bit more patient control of their medical record, but on the whole, kind of the expectation that people should have is that, you know, my doctor has medical record, I don't own my medical record. And there's a lot of legislation that has given people more visibility into their medical records. Like, you have to be able to see it. Have to be able to see it is not the same thing as easily being able to see it most of the time, particularly if you're not going to be super aggressive about advocating for yourself, because a lot of times they'll just be like, I don't know, I don't have to show that to you. So that can be kind of complicated. But, yeah, it's not yours. You don't really have any control over what goes into it.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  You can petition for things to be taken out of it, but the hospital or doctor doesn't have to say yes. Like, that's, you don't get any say over that. And doctors can put like whatever notes they want. It's often like super decontextualized. So a lot of the concern about how these records can be used to criminalize abortion is that you can tell a story with a medical record that is not real, that is not actually what happened. Someone could look at your medical record with bad intentions and say, I'm going to put all these pieces together and say, this looks to me like you had an abortion or were seeking out an abortion, because it's like not a clear narrative. It's like, it's just billing codes a lot of the time.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And the people who are going to be most vulnerable to that sort of manipulation are people who have more stuff in their medical record that could be perceived as bad. So that's going to be people who have limited access to healthcare, you know, poor people, people of color, and communities that have, are under-resourced, tend to have kind of more stuff in their health record that is going to be coded more negatively. Then that stuff can then be used to tell a story that's like, oh, you- You know, we're like negligent in X, Y, Z way to your other children. And then we see this bleeding when you were pregnant and you had a pregnancy test and then you were no longer pregnant. And we're gonna use this to say that you were like an abusive parent and then you gave yourself an abortion like.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, when maybe you just, there could be totally reasonable explanations like for a lot of stuff like you can, if you have bad intentions, you can, you can turn this stuff into a bad story.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  This idea of putting together a narrative is very much also how the personal data comes into the policing of abortion. So particularly with, with search history, which is another thing that people have rightly flagged, is something that can, can be used and is used in a whole range of criminal cases. The reason is that it's, can be seen as a proxy for people's intent. You know, if you're suddenly searching something like, how do I hide a body? And then, and then your best friend or frenemy goes.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Disappears.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Goes missing, then that looks pretty bad for you. But as far as abortion goes, there's one high profile case that's often referred to, a woman named Lettie Fisher, who is a black woman in Mississippi. She was already a mother of three children. She was pregnant and she had, by her account and her legal team's account, had a stillborn child.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  The state decided to investigate and the state medical examiner used a controversial test called a lung float test. We don't need to get into the details, but had some suspicion that the child was actually born alive.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  And police somehow, it's not exactly clear how, were able to access Lettie Fisher's search history through her phone and found that she had searched for how to buy misoprostol, abortion pill, online. Because of that, they made the case that she had already demonstrated an intent to end the pregnancy and actually tried to indict her for murder.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  For simply searching.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Yes, on the grounds that she had already shown intent to get rid of this baby. They were alleging that the child had been born alive and that she had actually killed it or negligently allowed it to die.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  So she was. Indicted on a murder charge. Subsequently, the case was dropped, but that was years later and understandably completely upended her life.

• 17:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  And that's one of the cases that's really referred to a lot in terms of how these how these things, how this this data and things that we might think of as innocuous can then make its way into a criminal case.

• 17:33Alex Cranz?

  And these companies like Google, if the cops come to them with a warrant, they will abide by it, right?

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. So in general, they're trying not to disclose data to law enforcement that they don't have to. I think all of these companies do realize that users, you know, we expect a certain degree of privacy, and if they are seen to be very bad at protecting our privacy, then

• 17:53Alex Cranz?

  We'll go somewhere else.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  We'll go somewhere else, exactly. At the same time, they do comply with law enforcement when they are required to, and if they receive an appropriate warrant or a subpoena, which is a little different because it doesn't need to be issued by a judge, then they will generally hand over all of the data that they're required to.

• 18:12Alex Cranz?

  So if you are in a state where these rights are now very much under threat, which is quite a few states in this country, you should be very, very mindful about what you're searching, even months, years. It sounds like DuckDuckGo is a really good thing to maybe start using.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, DuckDuckGo, I think, does have better privacy protections than Google. There's also, the way that the EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it in their recommendations is to think about compartmentalization. So ideally, what you want is just for any of your search history or browsing history, whatever it is, to not really be linked to you.

• 18:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  So the idea would be that you create an entirely new account. If you're going to use email for any of this stuff, create a new email account. Don't use your regular Gmail or whatever provider it is. If you're going to be searching, don't be signed in through your regular Google account that will link all of your search history back to you. If possible, people suggest if you have access to another phone that isn't your regular phone, a burner phone, that's a good idea, too. Of course, that's not viable for everyone, but all of these things do help.

• 19:19Alex Cranz?

  So these are all tools that I think everybody in this room David, where you are as well, are very aware of, we're journalists. These are things that when we're talking with sources, we kind of go through these practices with them because we're trying to protect them. And now, people who aren't necessarily in those situations are also going to be expected to do that and start being much more mindful of their habits because they could come back to haunt them in really horrible fashion.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's part of the unfortunate reality. I think it also points to just this much bigger problem that we can't expect everyone, we shouldn't expect regular people to be taking the same kind of precautions that we as, say, journalists working with sensitive sources and sensitive material should take. And even recognizing that it's hard for us to do things.

• 20:04Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Right. I think that's partly why there's been some kind of move to put some of the onus onto the companies collecting the data in the first place. There have been movements to say that Google should not be collecting the kind of data that can be used in the criminalization of abortion.

• 20:20Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't it start, I don't know, auto deleting all of that data after 30 days? That was something I've seen at a lot of journalist organizations. They have Slack and their Slack will auto delete every 30 days. And that's because, okay, if they get subpoenaed, then it's like, well, we auto delete. You can't have that information. It's gone. And that seems like something that Google, a large company that is collecting our data solely for financial reasons, could probably do to better protect its customers.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. I think it's going to bring some pretty existential questions for Google and Google users because, yeah, absolutely, Google's business is built on collecting this data, using it to serve ads. We know that they hand over data to law enforcement. Previously, there's been, I would say, broad agreement, this is hand waving over a lot of, you know, back and forth, but broad agreement that if Google is getting a warrant for things, there is some legitimate reason behind it. And now we're in this situation where actually a majority of the country disagrees with the new interpretation of the law. And Google is in a position, and it's not just Google by any stretch, but Google is in a position of helping the enforcement of a law that fundamentally, most of us feel is very unjust.

• 21:32David Pierce?

  Corin, your point about it not being just Google is one I want to talk about here. Because I think part of what I've found in reading about this and talking to people about this, and even seeing like how others are responding to it, is there's this feeling of just like helplessness and hopelessness, where it's like, okay, you as a person, here are the steps you can take. And it's like, well, yes, but there are also thousands of data brokers out there who are better at collecting your data than you are at hiding your data. It's too much work. There are a lot of people who just don't have the knowledge or tools to do this stuff. It's more than just Google. Like even if Google decides to be the good one here, they're only solving, you know, their slice of the problem. Is there anything that's going to happen here outside of some like magical change in Congress

• 22:14David Pierce?

  that leads to real, actual data privacy reform here? Like, are there real moves that do anything outside of that?

• 22:22Speaker 04

  I mean, I think we're still, we're still in the early stages of this. It's fair to say that it is possible Google could retain a lot less data on us. At the same time, they've, they've built an immensely profitable business on keeping all of that data and passing it on to advertisers. I think that there has been a growing resistance to that and a growing awareness actually of the role of data brokers and the way they've built this shadow industry that actually gives a huge amount of power to advertisers, but potentially to other people trying to employ these same surveillance techniques too. So there's an argument that this, this could bring us to a kind of real inflection point

• 23:03Speaker 04

  where people realize how, how powerful this is and what the negative consequences are. I think ultimately, it's too early to say how that will play out.

• 23:12Alex Cranz?

  And to be clear, it's not just Google. It's also Apple if you're text messaging. It's Facebook if you're using Instagram or WhatsApp or something like that. Like, well, I guess not WhatsApp because it's got encryption, right?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:26Alex Cranz?

  But all of these companies are collecting this data. They have all of this data. They have access to a lot of these records. And those can all be subpoenaed. Those can all be acquired by warrant from law enforcement. So it really is like, you know, if somebody is concerned about this, what tools should they be using? DuckDuckGo, it sounds like, probably.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  As far as email goes, Proton Mail is a good encrypted email.

• 23:49Alex Cranz?

  Love Proton Mail.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  For messaging, Signal is a good choice if people are able to use that and have other contacts that do. I mean, this is a great opportunity to download it and tell all of your friends to do it as well. Signal encrypts all of the messages. It doesn't store copies on their servers. So because of that, it's not that they're not complying with warrants or subpoenas. It's that if law enforcement serves them with a warrant, there really is no way for them to hand over the type of information.

• 24:17Alex Cranz?

  Including the phone carriers who are still on SMS because RCS isn't a thing yet. So they're still on SMS. They are collecting a lot of data around you. Like, that's something that the SEC, I think, has allowed in the last couple of years, right? That these companies can actually look at all of your messages, your texts on SMS and collect that data. And if they want to hand it over to law enforcement, they can.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. And generally, they will, with a subpoena, phone carriers will generally give the metadata. So they will hand over details about who you call and who you text, but not necessarily the contents of those messages. With a warrant, they will definitely hand over all of their text messages and other saved data, like voicemails that they have on their servers. And even within a more serious warrant, even, you know, the contents of real-time conversations.

• 25:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I noticed in your piece, you also mentioned that this applies to banks, this applies to credit card companies, so that actually the best way, if you do find yourself in a situation where you need an abortion... You do go, you get one, don't whip out your normal card, you don't write a cheque, you should get a gift card, right?

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. So that was a recommendation that came from the Digital Defence Fund. They've been working to protect digital abortion rights for a long time. And some people have suggested that cryptocurrency is a good use case here. I think that's kind of a...

• 25:41Alex Cranz?

  Like, if they have your wallet, anybody can track your crypto.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  I think for most people, that's probably a non-starter unless you've got some serious crypto skills.

• 25:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  But in general, yes. I mean, using cash, of course, is great, the original untraceable currency.

• 25:57Alex Cranz?

  But a lot of people don't necessarily, like, these procedures, and now, because a lot of times it requires travel, this is costly. It has gone from being like a little expensive to extremely costly. And a lot of people don't have that access to that cash.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, and if you do need to pay for things digitally, which there are a lot of situations where you would, you can generally get a prepaid gift card. So, you know, you pay a hundred dollars, or whatever it is, you get your card loaded with a hundred dollars, but that isn't tied to your name and address and all of the other information that your credit card is.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  I also think that, you know, we talk a lot about the things that individuals can do to protect themselves. Those are obviously, like, people are gonna have different levels of access to be able to take those steps.

• 26:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  But this is also something that abortion funds, activist groups, community networks have been thinking about and building for a long time. And so I think that it's also, you know, good to recognize that there are groups that have the experience and skills and, like, on-the-ground understanding of how, like, different communities and law enforcement, different communities are acting and coming after people. You know, this is a situation that is, like, very big and scary in the sense that you have the power of the state using the power of the surveillance state and tech companies to come after vulnerable people when they're in their most vulnerable moments. And that's like an incredibly overwhelming and scary situation to be in.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And you know, I think that's something that comes up a lot or has come up a lot in the past couple of days is like, there are people who have been doing the work and understand how to do the work to protect people as best they can. And doing what you can to help and lean on those communities that have already been in place is kind of the way that we navigate through some of this stuff because like the imbalance is going to be enormous. Like it is an enormous, enormous imbalance in power. And that is like crushing on an individual level. It is slightly less crushing when we lean on and put resources into and support the places that have been doing the on the ground work to build the structures that can keep people as safe as possible.

• 28:07David Pierce?

  Well, thank all of you for doing this with me. We will obviously be covering this story a lot. Like you said, this is the beginning of a thing that is going to take a long time to play out and we'll see where it goes. So we will have you back in the studio to do this many more times. But thank you both and we'll talk again soon.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  Thank you.

• 28:27David Pierce?

  We'll be right back.

• 28:34Speaker 05

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• 29:36David Pierce?

  Welcome back. I want to tell you a story about recommendations. But first, I want to just do an experiment. And I call this experiment, what does my phone think I'm going to like right now?

• 29:48David Pierce?

  So let's start on TikTok. This is terrifying. I'm just gonna open TikTok and we're gonna see what happens. So the first video on my TikTok, when I open it, is a video of Ryan Reynolds about how he's being a good dad.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  Which is just absolutely perfectly geared towards me. Then we have a live video of somebody working at Epcot, which seems weird and boring. A duet with two rappers rapping the alphabet. Very into this. An ad for Milk Foliant, which is a holy grail to skincare, which feels like a sick burn from TikTok. I usually get ADHD ads, I don't know what to make of that. And a video of a guy critiquing someone making a cheeseburger wrapped in bacon.

• 30:36David Pierce?

  So this is actually pretty on point, I would say. Not perfect, but I'm into most of this stuff. Let's go to Instagram. Instagram, there's a video of a snapping turtle opening a beer on a golf course. A Dove Men skincare ad, again with the skincare ads. Okay, Spotify. Spotify thinks I should listen to Land of the Giants from Vox Media Podcast Network. It thinks I should listen to mostly a bunch of music I've been listening to. Oh, and Drake. I don't really like Drake. You can yell at me about that if you want, but Spotify has not yet figured out that I don't really like Drake. So I open Hulu, and Hulu really thinks I should watch Machine Gun Kelly's Life in Pink, which I'm assuming is a documentary about Machine Gun Kelly and which I can tell you confidently is not a thing I want to watch. Let's go to Netflix.

• 31:21David Pierce?

  The top recommendation for me is voyeur, which is, I guess, a new Netflix movie. It says it's provocative, cerebral, and a hidden gem, which is a weird thing to say about the top thing in the Netflix carousel. All right, one more of these. Let's go to Amazon. The top thing is movie tickets for Minions: Rise of Gru. It's telling me to keep shopping for foam rollers. I've been shopping for foam rollers because my back hurts all the time, because I'm an old, old, old man. Almond nut thins, crackers, Old Spice deodorant, and a bunch of books in the sex and sexuality category, which I have no answers for that one. Anyway, the point of all this is, when you start noticing how pervasive recommendations

• 32:00David Pierce?

  are in digital life for stuff to read, and watch, and listen to, and eat, and look at, and go do, and buy, and basically everything else, you kind of can't stop noticing it.

• 32:15David Pierce?

  And this is part of the whole premise of the internet, right? All the stuff in the universe is right there. All the platforms, all the systems take all of that stuff. They learn about your habits and they create this beautiful system in which the whole world is endlessly personalized for you. Except it doesn't really work like that, right? Their internet's algorithmic approach to recommendations actually leads to echo chambers and filter bubbles and misinformation and a huge amount of other problems. But let's even leave aside most of the complicated and political stuff for a minute. I just want to talk about a simpler problem. Have you ever wondered why the internet can't just tell you what restaurant you should go to? Or which chocolate chip cookie recipe is objectively the best one?

• 32:58David Pierce?

  Or, this is the one I think everybody experiences, why your streaming recommendations never seem to actually get you? When I open Netflix, I don't want a thousand rows of a thousand icons. I just want Netflix to be like, here, watch this. We know this is what you want. Is that really that hard to do? I've been asking people all over the tech world, versions of that question for a few weeks now. And I'm starting to understand why even simple recommendations are a harder problem than I realized. It's kind of our fault. Humans are complicated, it turns out, and we are constantly changing.

• 33:31Speaker 07

  It's extremely expressive. Let me give you an example.

• 33:35David Pierce?

  That's Akil Ramesh. He's the head of consumer product at Yelp.

• 33:38Speaker 07

  I recently met a high school friend of mine in Tahoe. He'd recently become a father. He's a vegetarian. And that afternoon, he was talking to me and said, look, I'm really sick of eating Indian food a lot. I'd like to try some Thai food if it's available around. I've got this little baby with me, so I'd love to have some high chairs. And hopefully he's next to the lake, because we came here to hang out next to the lake and take a walk there afterwards. That is the intent. That's very expressive. When somebody opens the app, they probably hit one button or search two words, you know, Thai restaurants. With that, it's really impossible to guess the rest of it. So this is exactly why it is not a straightforward solution.

• 34:13David Pierce?

  Akil's point, and one that I heard from a lot of folks in tech, is that understanding what you actually want at any given time is virtually impossible. Because it's based on so many things beyond, say, what kind of food you like. Our preferences and tastes change based on who we're with, where we are, what we ate yesterday, what commercials we saw today, and like a thousand other things that even we might not understand. But there is a fun thought experiment buried in there. So let's just say, for the sake of argument, that a service like Yelp could know everything. It becomes this omniscient AI, knows everything about you and your life every second. Yelp would know I had pasta for dinner last night, it's raining, I'm home alone,

• 34:56David Pierce?

  I just binged all of Stranger Things, I'm getting over being sick, and I had a long day at work. If it knew all of that, could Yelp just turn into a big "bring me dinner" button that I just smash and food arrives 20 minutes later? Akil said no to that without missing a beat. And actually, beyond that, he said it's not even worth trying for that, because I would probably instinctively mistrust whatever showed up at my door.

• 35:20Speaker 07

  I often joke about this, that if God landed in front of me and said, "This is the person you're gonna marry and you'll never have to waste a second", I wouldn't believe a second of it. I would go do my exploration.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  I think he's right. Even if the objectively correct thing for me to eat was sweet and sour chicken, I'd take one look at it and be like, "Ugh, I just wanted a salad." That's a big part of why most folks I talk to aren't trying to build a perfect recommendations machine, to give you the one true recommendation like that. Instead, it's a process. Have you ever heard the term "algotorial"? It's a horrible term, and I hate it, and I will not use it again, but it's one I heard from a bunch of companies I talked to, and it refers to a sort of human-machine symbiosis that is probably the best source we had of good recommendations. It's part algorithmic, part editorial. In some instances, the editorial portion of that equation comes from people who work at the company or platform itself.

• 36:16David Pierce?

  Think about the people who curate playlists at Spotify, for instance, or the editorial team at Pocket, the super-popular Read It Later app. Matt Quiddin, who runs Pocket at Mozilla, said that that team at Pocket is the true secret sauce.

• 36:29Speaker 08

  We essentially have humans, you know, our users, going out in the world and finding all these amazing things and saving them into Pocket. And then we use algorithms to kind of create prospects and kind of pull them out, and we use editors, human editors, to then take those prospects and combine them in interesting ways and pull them together and put them on kind of different surfaces.

• 36:49David Pierce?

  In other cases, the human side of the human-machine relationship is you and me, the people actually using the services. When you listen to an album 100 times in a row, or you give a movie a thumbs up on Netflix, or you go into those Yelp filters and select pet-friendly, you're giving the system super-strong signals about what matters to you. In general, if these apps and platforms can get us to give them more of that, to just tell them what we like and don't like, things can actually get better really fast. Here's how Naveen Gavini, the SVP of Product at Pinterest, explained it to me.

• 37:22Speaker 09

  If you compare it to a physical personalization experience, like, let's say, for me, I have a barber that I've been going to for 10 years that cuts my hair. And if you think about that experience every time, it's a personalized experience. And I don't need to tell him when I walk in how I want my haircut, because he knows me. But it started with that first conversation. It was an explicit conversation on like, "Hey, how do you generally like your haircut?" And then from there, we kind of learned and grew together, right? So that's what we strive for at Pinterest, to make that dialogue a little bit more explicit.

• 37:49David Pierce?

  Pinterest is based on that theory, right? You pin a bunch of stuff that you like, and then Pinterest's job is to give you more stuff that you like. But even that is a tricky trade-off. I don't want useless recommendations, but I also don't want to fill out a form every time I open Netflix or have to spend a month using a platform before it gives me any good new stuff. Some companies, like Pocket, don't have to make that trade. They have it easy, because their whole reason for existing is just to fill it with stuff that you like.

• 38:16Speaker 08

  Saving something is this private and personal thing, for the most part. Maybe it has some aspirational aspects to it, for sure.

• 38:24David Pierce?

  But not everybody has it so good. So one trick you'll see in a lot of content apps particularly is that screen right when you sign up that asks you to pick a bunch of genres or a few favorite bands or whatever, just to kind of get you going. One app I use called Likewise makes you pick 20 shows and movies you like before it'll even let you in the app.

• 38:43Speaker 10

  People actually enjoy this whole experience of telling.

• 38:46David Pierce?

  That's Saleem Hamdani, the CTO at Likewise.

• 38:49Speaker 10

  The payoff is huge. The more you tell, the better it's going to be, right? So people never stop at 20. It's kind of funny. Like, we say you have to have at least 20. They keep going, because first of all, it's a playful experience, and then those just add up.

• 39:02David Pierce?

  Likewise is one of the few companies I've found that's trying to build a platform out of all kinds of recommendations. Movies, shows, books, podcasts, they all live in this one place in Likewise. But I should say even Likewise doesn't believe in the idea of the one true recommendation. The company actually started out to be more like a social network built around content, but it has shifted then towards putting content at the core and using your network as just another way to get you good recommendations.

• 39:29Speaker 11

  We said, you know, this is great for the people who bring their whole social network in, or even bring a couple of friends right in, but we're being unrealistic. We need to supplement this.

• 39:39David Pierce?

  That's Ian Morris, the CEO at Likewise. Likewise now has an editorial team that is scouring the internet, looking for what people like and are talking about. It also has lots of social features so that I can like make a list of all my favorite early 2000s rom-coms and make it publicly available. I found one really good one just yesterday that's titled scariest paranormal movies, and it has 28 options that I'm gonna just have to start working through quickly. But Likewise also set out to build a recommendations AI that was better than anybody else's. It starts, as you might guess, with those 20 movies and shows that you pick right at the very beginning when you sign up for the app.

• 40:14Speaker 10

  When you tell us like, these are the genres that I really enjoy, you pick drama, comedy, thriller, true crime, and all that delightful experience, and then you go and pick items, and all of your picking is western, war. So we know a lot about you. You think you like romantic comedy, but everything you're enjoying is dark crime. Now, that's a very good signal for me. Likewise loves that.

• 40:37David Pierce?

  Likewise takes all that information about you and the stuff that you like and puts you in a cluster. Cluster is the technical term, and it's one that I heard a lot. It's just a group of other people who like the same stuff that you like. And that, it turns out, is the single most important thing to get right in the recommendations game.

• 40:54Speaker 10

  Right now, we have 5 million or so users. We basically cluster them into different clusters. And then that gives us an initiation point to say, how many people are like David in the world, and how many clusters can we create? How granular those clusters can be, or how broad those clusters can be? And how does it actually interact with the trending curated content in the marketplace? Once you start there, everything opens up.

• 41:20David Pierce?

  I went into this wanting there to be this crazy, complicated system going on behind the scenes. But it turns out that the best, most reliable thing AI recommendation systems do is basically a version of this. You liked Severance and all these other people who liked Severance also liked Yellowstone and The Lincoln Lawyer. So you probably will too. That sounds so simple, right? Like, too simple. But it turns out it's the best strategy we've got so far. And then, as the platform, the more users you get and the more stuff that they tell you they like, the better and smaller and more accurate to you those clusters become.

• 41:56David Pierce?

  But still, recommendations are tricky for lots of other reasons, too. For one thing, giving you the exact right thing probably isn't a company's only goal. They want you to keep coming back to explore new things. I mean, if HBO Max was just like, hey, here are the six things on HBO Max that you're ever going to like, and you can watch them all right now in a row. That's kind of bad business, right? There's also a big data gathering issue here, too. All that information about where you are, how you're feeling, what you're doing, who you're with. Would you trade that for better Netflix recommendations? I don't think I would, and the companies I talk to don't think most people would. And beyond even that, Naveen from Pinterest told me, users ought to be able to control what we see and why.

• 42:39Speaker 09

  I think as consumers, we all have a right to have greater transparency into the sort of signals and what's being used, whether it's implicitly or explicit things, and have the right to change those.

• 42:52David Pierce?

  But ultimately, the biggest problem is a philosophical one. The idea that there is a right answer is just flawed. I mean, even when you actually choose something to watch or eat or read or do, does that mean that it was the correct answer? No, it's just the one you picked. In that sense, Netflix's Play Something randomizer button is basically as good a recommendation system as any. Just gives you something and it's probably fine. So I think the short version of the story is that I'm never going to get a world where Spotify always knows what to put on when I put in my AirPods, and Netflix won't just play the right show as soon as I launch the app. But things can get better than they are, and I think they will. We might soon do away with the endless side-scrolling lists of TV posters and instead get a handful

• 43:37David Pierce?

  of really good, really personalized ideas of what to watch. That's about as good as it's ever going to get, but I think I'll take it.

• 43:48David Pierce?

  All right, we're gonna take a break and then the next thing we're gonna talk about is gaming laptops and specifically why Asus is making buying the best gaming laptop so unnecessarily complicated. We'll be right back.

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• 45:28David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So, in the last couple of years, we here at The Verge have covered Asus laptops a lot. Which is not that weird on its face. Asus makes a lot of laptops. Some of them are very good. We cover laptops. There you go. But it's the names of those laptops I just cannot get over. There's the Asus Rog Flow X16 and the Asus Rog Zephyrus G14 and the Asus Rog Strix Scar 15. I can't make heads or tails of any of it, except that Rog stands for Republic of Gamers and might be You pronounced ROG, but I'm pretty sure that underneath all of that insane naming is a really good set of gaming laptops, including maybe the one you should buy. Luckily for me, The Verge's Monica Chin understands what Asus is doing here much better than I do. She's also reviewed a

• 46:11David Pierce?

  whole bunch of these rog laptops over the years, and she's here to explain to me what's going on.

• 46:18David Pierce?

  Hey, Monica.

• 46:19Speaker 12

  Hello.

• 46:19David Pierce?

  We're here to talk about gaming laptops, and I have a bunch of very specific questions for you, all of which end with me being really annoyed at how products are named. But first, let's real quick just like lay the land of the gaming laptop market, because I feel like gaming laptops are still like a slightly non-obvious thing to some people. Like gaming PCs, people understand they're like the big towers with RGB, and then there's like just buy a MacBook. But in the middle, the gaming laptop space has gotten really good. There's a ton of options out there now. Give me the kind of rough sense of like who's out there buying a gaming laptop, and what are they looking for right now?

• 46:51Speaker 12

  I mean, I think an interesting thing is that for ages and ages, gaming laptops were really like just for gaming. There's like the stereotype of like a gamer who like sits in her basement. For a while, that's sort of who they were targeting. You know, gaming laptops were like huge. They were like eight pounds. They were like only meant to sit on your desk. They had like no battery life, decked out in all kinds of like RGB, because it's like it's just gonna be in your basement. Where are you gonna take it? They were just garish, and that's what a gaming laptop was for like a while. But a new, I think, vision of what a gaming laptop can be has emerged in the past decade or so, and I think the Razer Blade 13 was like an early example of like a

• 47:29Speaker 12

  gaming laptop that could very easily also just be a laptop but could play games. In 2017, or whenever that the first one came out, that was like a pretty big deal that you had a 13-inch laptop that could run a game and not have it be really, really terrible. So now, I think a lot of popular options that you're seeing today are, you know, stuff like the Zephyrus G14, which we're going to talk about, and, you know, the Razer Blade smaller family, like the Razer Blade 14 laptops that really like can run games but are also like something you could bring to the cafe or could use at work. So I think that's sort of a big shift in the market that we've been seeing recently.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  So and then in this space, this Asus line is one you've covered a lot, especially over the last two years. And I confess, it makes absolutely no sense to me. Like, one of the themes of the Vergecast is that I think all product names are terrible and should be solved. And this might be one of the worst-named set of products I can think of, for what seems to be a very good set of laptops. So, we're gonna try to make sense of this for people. Let's start at the very top here. What is the, first of all, is it ROG or is it ROG?

• 48:35Speaker 12

  You know, we talked to Napoleon Lu from Asus a couple of days ago, and he said ROG as well.

• 48:42Speaker 13

  For the ROG lines, as of right now, we have three main lines.

• 48:45Speaker 12

  Some people I've talked to at the company say ROG.

• 48:47David Pierce?

  Whatever you call it, what is this lineup? What is its job?

• 48:50Speaker 12

  It's their gaming line. They have like another line, the TUF line, that's sort of like more entry-level, but the ROG laptops are really what you're getting if you're like really into the gaming space.

• 49:00David Pierce?

  Okay. And where would you put it kind of in the scheme of the rest of the gaming laptop world? I feel like, you know, you have the brands everybody knows, the Alien wares and the Razors, and where does ROG fit kind of in the whole gaming laptop space?

• 49:12Speaker 12

  Well, they make the best ones you can buy. I mean, the ROG Zephyrus G15 is currently our top gaming laptop pick. The ROG Zephyrus G14 is going to be very high on the list very soon. I just reviewed it and haven't updated the page yet, but it's gonna be very high on that list as well. They are the best gaming laptops you can buy for your money right now.

• 49:29David Pierce?

  Well, then, all the more reason we should sort this out for people. So, even within this unpronounceable top name, there are a bunch of other names. So, there's the Flow, there's the Zephyrus, there's the Strix, and then, within those, there's a bunch of other names. But like, make sense of the lineup for me here.

• 49:46Speaker 12

  If you're like listening to this podcast and you're like, which gaming laptop should I buy? The Zephyrus is probably the one that you are looking at. Those are like the normal people-looking laptops.

• 49:55David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 49:56Speaker 12

  They're very nice-looking, they're very light, they're really easy to carry around, they have great keyboards, they have great touchpads, they have amazing battery life, like some of the best battery life, not only among gaming laptops, but like among laptops in general. They last forever. They have great frame rates, they're not like outrageously priced. In fact, the G14 is like very reasonably priced, depending on the model that you get. Napoleon told us like, the G14 is their best-selling line.

• 50:19Speaker 13

  I think people really, really appreciated the 14-inch factor, which I would say we were one of the first, if not the first, to offer it in a gaming laptop. So, people love that.

• 50:29Speaker 12

  The Strix is, like we were saying earlier, like the traditional sort of like garish, like gaming laptop for your basement. That's what the Strix line is. Those are gaming laptops. They are just for games. If you're gonna buy that and expect that it's gonna last you eight hours on battery, you're gonna be disappointed.

• 50:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, these seem like the ones where like laptop is kind of a stretch for some of these.

• 50:49Speaker 12

  We're not quite getting to that point.

• 50:50David Pierce?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:51Speaker 12

  But they don't have great touchpads. They don't have great keyboards. They're not terrible touchpads or keyboards, but you know, they're not like category topping from my perspective. They're not like my favorite ones. They are covered in lights. The Strix Scar is like one of the most obnoxious looking laptops I've ever seen. There's like a light bar along the bottom that changes colors all the time. There's like lights on the lid, like coming out of the logo. There's like the keyboard is just constantly animated. It's all RGB everywhere. You know who you are if you're buying the Strix. Like, those are for gamer capital G people. The Flow is kind of a weird one because the Flow, for a while, was not its own line. They put out this laptop called the Flow X13 and it was like really funky. It was like really thin, really light two-in-one, which there

• 51:34Speaker 12

  are not gaming two-in-ones. Like, that's just like a very unheard of weird thing. It had like a really cool design. There was like some graffiti-ish type stuff on the lid. It had this like super high resolution screen. It had like a not very good GPU inside and then it was bundled with this XG Mobile eGPU. And that like obviously gave you much higher frame rate. So the idea was like, okay, during the day, you can like have this light two-in-one that, you know, you can do your work on, hang out with your friends, whatever. And then at night, you bring it home, you put it on your desk, you pull it into the XG Mobile. Oh, and now it's a gaming laptop. I guess that product did well enough. They announced they were gonna be putting out a whole line of Flow products, which are sort of that same idea of like, okay, it's really thin, it's really light during the day, and then you plug it into this XG Mobile at night and it gets you desktop

• 52:19Speaker 12

  frame rates.

• 52:20David Pierce?

  Okay, well, this is all very helpful. So for most people, the Zephyrus is the answer. But this is the problem, and this is where I start to get like truly driven insane by what Asus is doing here, is that is nowhere near the end of figuring out which one of these models you're supposed to buy. There's M's and G's and there's a whole numbering scheme. Do any of these mean anything to anyone?

• 52:40Speaker 12

  So the Gs and the Ms are in the Zephyrus line.

• 52:42Speaker 13

  Okay.

• 52:43Speaker 12

  The Gs are the ones that you probably want if you're like listening to this podcast and you're like, which one should I buy? Those are the top sellers and those are, as Ace told us, those are really good value buys.

• 52:54Speaker 13

  The difference between these two is basically the processor and also the price point. If they are like more budget conscious, then they go for the G15. G stands for good value.

• 53:04Speaker 12

  G stands for good value, yeah. G stands for great laptop.

• 53:07Speaker 13

  Perfect.

• 53:07Speaker 12

  So I think the confusion probably comes between the G15, which is currently our top pick for best laptop, and the M16, which looks exactly like the G15, but it is named with an M.

• 53:19Speaker 13

  Perfect.

• 53:20Speaker 12

  The main difference is Intel versus AMD. So the G14 is now fully AMD powered. It is not only an AMG processor, but it's also an AMD GPU. The M16 is an Intel device. Like for the past few times it's been released, it's been an Intel device. The first, like most easiest, the easiest differentiator is size. Like the G14 is 14 inches, the G15 is 15 inches, the M16 is 16 inches. 16 versus 15 is obviously not like the biggest difference. So the Intel versus AMD is really the other differentiator.

• 53:50Speaker 13

  Okay.

• 53:51Speaker 12

  The Intel processor brings like its various Intel things. AMD processor brings a lot longer battery life, a lower price range and better frame rates. But the target audience, I think, is largely similar. It's just companies often put out these sort of dual, like this is not an uncommon thing to see in gaming laptops. Like they'll put out like one AMD version and one like Intel version. And the way they'll pitch it, and this is the way Napoleon pitched to us in the interview. It's like, oh, well AMD fans can buy the AMD one, Intel fans can buy the Intel one.

• 54:17Speaker 13

  I know people have a preference. So if they like the AMD processor, they go for the G15.

• 54:23Speaker 12

  I'm not convinced these people exist. Like, and I said this in the interview, like, I just don't think there are that many people out there like, ah, I'm rah rah Intel, like, I'm rah rah AMD. Like, I think most people like want the better one. And like, in most cases, that is the AMD one. Like, given the current market, the G15 is just getting us better battery life, better frame rates, better battery gaming performance. But there are some folks who probably will do better on the Intel one because Intel does have some features that make certain apps run better. On it like quick sync for Premiere Pro and video stuff is like a huge benefit to people who do that work. Intel has Thunderbolt, of course, which is, you know, lots of people, if they have Thunderbolt accessories, then you're going to want to go with Intel. So I would say that the M16 is a little bit more niche for people who like have a specific reason they want Intel and AMD.

• 55:08Speaker 12

  The G series is sort of more of like the mainstream one between those two.

• 55:12David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. So G stands for great laptop and M stands for like meh.

• 55:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's, that's a great way to put it. That was sort of how Alice, our reviewer, felt when she reviewed the M16 for us this year. She was like, meh, it's fine.

• 55:24David Pierce?

  Okay. I also think to anyone listening to this show who has like really strong chip brand loyalty, I'd really like to talk to you. I have a lot of questions for you.

• 55:33Speaker 12

  I'm sure there are some of you who exist, but I just can't imagine that, you know, the average person in Best Buy is going to be like, oh, I know exactly which processor company is for me, you know?

• 55:42David Pierce?

  Well, especially in the face of like, I don't want the best one. I just want the one that's Intel is a, is like a pretty, it's a pretty wild thing to feel in 2022, but I, I respect you if you feel that. This is too many options, right? Like the laptop world, as you and I both know, has always had too many options. Everybody has too many specs, too many SKUs. None of it has ever made any sense. And I feel like one of the reasons Apple has been very successful for a long time is they're just like, here's the MacBook Air. It's just, we did it. Have the MacBook Air. The gaming laptop world seems to be like crazier than this than most. Like I was on the, the ROG webpage and they have this amazing thing where it just says, view all recommended products. And there's 107 of them and that is too many recommended products.

• 56:23David Pierce?

  So like, is this a reasonable strategy for Asus here? Like, why are they doing this? Why is this so crazy?

• 56:28Speaker 12

  Yeah. I mean, I think gamers are pickier.

• 56:31David Pierce?

  I'll give you that and they know what they want more, I guess.

• 56:33Speaker 12

  More people who are shopping for a gaming laptop, like have a set list of things that they think they need. Like they need this much memory. They need this level of upgradability. You know, they want this screen. I think there are just a lot more things in there, you know, the, a lot of these are also people who like build their own PCs. And these are people who are sort of more plugged in and attentive to that stuff than I think like my dad, who is just wants the next MacBook Pro for his Excel spreadsheets. I would guess that that's part of it. In general, they're Trying to cater to a really wide market. They said this to us in the interview. They're trying to spread a really wide net. And this is something that a lot of companies that aren't Apple do. You know, I interviewed the CEO of Acer Computex last year. And I basically asked him the question you're asking about AC. So it's like, why do you have all these like random products that like?

• 57:18Speaker 12

  We don't really understand, like, are you just throwing shit at the wall? And he was like, yes, that's what we're doing. We are just trying a lot of stuff. And I think that's a strategy that a lot of these companies take.

• 57:29David Pierce?

  I appreciate the honesty, I suppose. But I wonder, two things make me think that might be about to change. And I'm curious what you think about this hypothesis, which is that like, A, as you were saying, I think a lot of people have come into this market over the last couple of years as they've been looking for a device that can kind of do everything, including play games. And obviously, just like the pool of people who play games is growing really fast. And I think is going to expand it to people who want to play games, but don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about the hardware they use to play games. And then also, it seems like we've gone within the PC market to a couple of like de facto choices. Like, I spend a lot more time now telling people who ask me to basically buy one of two things. It's just like the Dell XPS 13 is really good. The HP Spectre X360 is really good.

• 58:14David Pierce?

  You will almost certainly be happy with one of those two things if what you're looking to buy is a Windows PC. And it feels like even the Dells of the world still make way too many laptops, but make fewer laptops than they used to because they're just sort of like centralizing on their good ideas. Is the gaming laptop market going to do that a little bit too? Do you think like, will Asus eventually just like listen to you and stop making all this other stuff and just be like, look, it doesn't have 12 names. It's just called the Zephyrus and it's very good and you should buy it.

• 58:39Speaker 12

  I think price range, the way that that's looked at in gaming laptops is like just a little bit different from the Dell XPS 13 market. Again, it's sort of referencing my interview with Acer last year. Their top selling lines aren't their Predator. Like, it's not their really fancy stuff. Like, it's the Nitro, like, it's the stuff at Best Buy that's like $800. And, you know, Napoleon in this interview, you know, he told us as well, the G14 is their best selling model. It's not the G15, it's not the Strix and the Star. I mean, those stuff, they told us also sells well, obviously, but. The G14, you know, their lowest and arguably model in the Zephyrus series is what's selling. When I'm talking to someone and they're asking me like, I like need like a personal laptop, what laptop should I buy?

• 59:22Speaker 12

  I will probably say buy the XPS because even if you feel like it's a little out of your price range, I think it's going to save you money in the long run. Cause you know, it'll last you longer and like, all you're doing is Excel spreadsheets, like whatever. With gaming, I really think there's a lot more that you have to consider when it comes to what is the best one for your money. Because depending on the games you're playing and depending on the frame rates that you want, lots of people do not need to be spending as much as like the G15 or spending as much as the Scar. And I do think that there are people for whom like, you know, if you're just playing like League of Legends or just playing like Overwatch or whatever, and you don't care about having it on the maximum graphic settings, I will tell you to just spend like $600 or $700, $800. Like, I don't think you even need to go up to the G15.

• 1:00:07Speaker 12

  There are a lot more categories of people in the gaming sphere. And I think there are probably fewer people for whom the top options are really the one that you should necessarily be recommending. Because the top options are overkill for most people in a way that I think like the XPS isn't overkill for most people.

• 1:00:23David Pierce?

  All of what you just said is totally true, but it does feel like if you were to make a default recommendation, it's the Zephyrus G14, right? And it's the base model?

• 1:00:31Speaker 12

  No, so the saga with Zephyrus G14 is the first one they sent me to review was like one of the most expensive ones. And part of the reason it was the most expensive was it has this like fancy little display on the lid that like is like animated, like real animated LEDs. And it's very cool. Like there's like pets you can have on it that you can like feed and you can like put words on. You can have it say like hello to your friends on if you want. And it's very cool, but it was like over $2,000 and I was like, no one should buy this.

• 1:00:57David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:00:58Speaker 12

  So after I slammed that one in a review, they were like, do you want to review one that's like a thousand dollars cheaper? And I was like, yes. So they sent me that one. I was like, oh yeah, this one's very good. Get this one. So it's a thing where like, if you want the LED display, then like you're going to have to pay more for that, like whatever. But most people don't need to spend money on the LED display and you can get a great laptop with great frame rates.

• 1:01:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, just buy it and then buy yourself like an LED belt buckle and you will have solved all your problems.

• 1:01:22Speaker 12

  A 14 screen isn't going to be big enough for everyone. So, you know, I think that looking at the G15 is is also a reasonable thing for a lot of people. But the 14, I think, is very nice and very light and portable. And so if you're someone like me who really prioritizes being able to take it around to places, being able to travel with it, I think the 14 is is a very good option for you.

• 1:01:42David Pierce?

  I like it. And I'm going to put links to all of this stuff in the show notes because these names are, like I said, very confusing.

• 1:01:47Speaker 12

  They're very confusing.

• 1:01:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, Monica did all these reviews. They're all very good.

• 1:01:51Speaker 12

  One of the things I think is interesting is, you know, we did after doing this interview with Napoleon, he did tell us like, yeah, we need to make our naming simpler. Like, it's too confusing.

• 1:02:00Speaker 13

  It is something that we need to make it clear for everyone what is it that we're offering, because it is true that we have put a lot of thought into the different series and we try to offer the best options for the different audiences that are looking into powerful devices. So yeah, we need to make that clear. So people can get what they want.

• 1:02:19David Pierce?

  That makes me feel slightly better. We'll see if they ever fix it. You'll come back on and we'll just we'll cheer for them. All right, Monica, thank you. This this is really fun. This is really helpful. I really appreciate it.

• 1:02:28Speaker 12

  You're welcome.

• 1:02:32David Pierce?

  That's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more coverage of everything we talked about at theverge.com. And you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Corin is Corin TXT. Nicole is Nicole Wetsman. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Monica is MC squared 96. And I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Eleanor Donovan is our executive producer and The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or more questions about Asus laptops, you can always email [email protected] and reach all of us. Alex Nylyna will be back on Friday to talk about the week in tech news. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:03:21Speaker 14

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