Amazon buys Roomba, non-watch wearables, and the best cheap(er) phones

David Pierce taps into The Verge's reviews team to explore where we're headed with smart home gadgets, wearables, and midrange phones. 01:56 - Verge smart home reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy comes back to the show to break down the news of Amazon acquiring iRobot, maker of the ever popular Roomba robot vacuum. 24:46 - Verge wearable tech reviewer Victoria Song joins David to explore the fascinating world of non-watch wearables: rings, earbuds, sports bras, and sleep trackers. Afterward, we hear from Whoop CEO Will Ahmed about his approach to wearable technology. 53:40 - Verge mobile reviewer Allison Johnson and David discuss the ideal version of a mid-range smartphone, and what are the best trade-offs for the price. Further reading: Amazon to acquire Roomba robot vacuum maker iRobot for $1.7 billion Amazon bought iRobot to see inside your home The best sleep tech you can buy right now Whoop 4.0 Review Oura Ring Gen 3 Review Google Pixel 6a review: midrange parts, Tensor smarts Apple's new iPhone SE is a modern phone stuck in yesterday's design Apple should have followed Google’s Pixel 6A playbook with the iPhone SE OnePlus 10T review: call it a comeback Nothing Phone 1 review: something else 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.

• 0:04David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Chargers Not Included in the Box. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm at the gym because I was on vacation for a week, and pretty much all I did was sit by a pool and drink beer. And it's just, it's just time for me to get back to the gym. So today's plan is to walk slowly on the elliptical while I watch The Office on my phone until I feel good enough about myself to leave. Anyway, we have an awesome show today. We're going to talk to Jen Toohey about Amazon's big iRobot acquisition and what it means both for Amazon and for the floor plan of your house. We're going to talk to V Song about the best non-smartwatch wearables and why sleep tracking is all the rage right now. And then Allison Johnson and I are going to try to figure out how to make the perfect mid-range phone and which trade-offs are actually worth making in the name of saving a few hundred bucks.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  All that's coming in just a sec, but first I have to go look busy near an exercise bench for five minutes before I can give up on the gym and not come back for three months or so. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

• 0:59Speaker 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.

• 1:45Speaker 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.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  Welcome back. We had some big smart home news last week when Amazon announced that it had bought iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba robot vacuum, for $1.7 billion. I had a lot of feelings about this announcement, both as a tech reporter interested in smart home stuff, but also as a person who has owned a Roomba for a really long time and generally really loves the thing. My Roomba's great. So why is Amazon getting into the vacuum game? Could Alexa make the Parks and Recreation dream of DJ Roomba really come true?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  I strapped an MP3 player to one of those floor cleaning robots. Call him DJ Roomba. Little guy cruises around and plays music. What's hot, DJ Roomba?

• 3:12David Pierce?

  And maybe most of all, is this a bad thing? My Roomba knows everything about my house. Should I be worried that Amazon is now going to know even more about where I live and what kinds of messes I make all over the place? Also, wait, why is Amazon so obsessed with the smart home in general? Like I said, I have lots of feelings. So I brought in Jen Tuohy, who's a smart home reviewer at The Verge, to help me sort through them all.

• 3:40David Pierce?

  Hi Jen, thanks for being here.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Hi, it's a pleasure as always.

• 3:43David Pierce?

  Okay, so Amazon buys iRobot for a whole lot of money. What is going on here? Why would Amazon want to buy a vacuum company?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Well, first off, it's interesting that it isn't actually that much money in the scheme of things. iRobot really wasn't in a great shape financially. It had quite a big loss recently, huge amount of competition in this space. So I think they were really looking for a buyer for a while. So it was interesting, I think a lot of people noticed that it was a bit of a deal. And I think that is probably because I think Amazon wanted to buy it more for what it can contribute to its smart home ambitions and data collection around the smart home than that it wanted a robot vacuum cleaning company. I mean, there are a lot of robot vacuum companies out there now. The competition is fierce. Every day, another company starts producing a new robot vacuum. TCL suddenly now has

• 4:38Speaker 03

  robot vacuums. I mean, it's like- Everyone has a robot vacuum. So I'm not necessarily thinking we're going to be seeing an Amazon robot vacuum coming out of this. I think Amazon bought iRobot for what it can offer in the smart home in terms of data and in terms of what it can bring them inside your home. And those are the maps.

• 4:59David Pierce?

  Right. Okay. So but before we get to that, I think the the robot vacuum thing is actually an interesting point because one of the things I've been trying to figure out about Amazon all this time is like, it's been buying all these companies. And part of it is like, is this just a vehicle for Alexa? Is this just a vehicle for it to sell you more stuff through your doorbell or whatever? But like, Amazon has has really invested in Ring as like a line of products and Eero continues to be Eero and sell products. And I don't know, Blink is probably out there doing stuff. I haven't thought about Blink in a really long time. But like, I feel like you're right that the robot vacuum world is like, huge and all over the place and very competitive. But my impression at least is that the Roomba is still kind of the best thing out there. And at least it would make

• 5:39David Pierce?

  sense for Amazon to like, keep giving a crap about robot vacuums, right? I think, maybe?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yes. No, you're right. I mean, from a broader perspective, yes, Amazon's bought now the kind of key smart home companies. So what most people want in their smart home is a video doorbell, a robot vacuum, good Wi Fi, and security.

• 5:58David Pierce?

  Wow, that's true. When you put it like that, geez, okay.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  That's what you want. And you you look at the most recent product that came from Ring was a combination of an Eero and the Ring security and almost like a little smart home hub. And, you know, that's basically, you now have the kind of four most important and most popular smart home products owned by Amazon, the product leaders in those categories. So yes, from that sort of company perspective, they've kind of got the, not the trifecta, but all four.

• 6:28David Pierce?

  Quad factor.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  And they also have obviously Blink, and there are others, and Amazon has their own smart home line. And yes, so I think that from that perspective, it makes perfect sense. And I don't think they're going to sort of subsume Roomba. I believe it'll continue to run as a separate company in the same way that Ring has and Eero has. You know, the CEOs are still there. Nick Weaver at Eero, Jamie Simonoff at Ring. Colin Angle staying at iRobot as they've announced. So I think they're going to continue, it's going to continue as is as a smart home company. That's a leader in its space. It has a lot of competition, but so did the others. But I, you know, for, for most people, it's also the smart home entry level point. The same with the Ring doorbell. It's, you know, the robot vacuum is one of the first things you buy that could be connected.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Because it's got such an obvious use case, just like the video doorbell has such an obvious use case. So it's what we like to call the sort of the entry drug to the smart home. And once you get one connected thing, that's when you start, you know, depending on your personality, going all in and getting totally smart. The only thing that they don't really have is smart lighting. So, hey, Philips, signify, watch out.

• 7:36David Pierce?

  I was just gonna say, but then I kind of feel like that stuff is becoming sort of rapidly like commoditized. I think we're gonna get pretty quickly to the point where like a smart light bulb is just a light bulb is just a light bulb. And all the other stuff is where you can do really interesting stuff. And then it's like, who cares about the light bulbs?

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Right, and that's, that's really key. And I know this probably didn't come top of mind to most people when they were commenting on this acquisition. But this does have a lot to do with Matter.

• 8:01David Pierce?

  It always does. Tell me more.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Okay, so commodified smart home devices is key here. Because all of the large smart home companies and the small ones, they always have differentiated themselves based on who they worked with. And who does everyone work with? Alexa. Right, so Amazon was a leader in the space because pretty much anything you bought that was smart home related, worked with Alexa. It was wide open, the APIs were really easy for people. I mean, you could even build your own skill, like you, you know, in your own home. So they made it super easy to use any of their devices, any device with Alexa. But now when Matter comes, connectivity and who works with who. Isn't going to be as important because the whole point of Matter is everyone will

• 8:45Speaker 03

  work together. So what the smart home companies platforms, so the Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, Samsung SmartThings, what they're going to be doing is looking for ways to differentiate the platform, making that platform more innovative, more useful. And Amazon's already started to do that with their Hunches platform, which is where it will automatically come up with scenarios that you might want your home to do for you without you having to do anything. So all of these platforms are looking to differentiate now that Matter is making connectivity less of a conundrum. You won't have to worry about who works with who. So that's one of the reasons why I think they bought iRobot because there's an excellent platform that iRobot's been working on called RobotOS, which Colin

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Angle, the CEO of iRobot, told me before the acquisition, they're designing to help smart home products communicate with each other where they are in the home, which is a really key part of the smart home. So when you buy a smart light bulb and you go put it in the lamp, you have to open the app, you have to connect it, you have to say it's in this room and you have to say, okay, I want it to do this during the day and this at night because it's in the kitchen. So I want bright light in the morning and dimmer light in the evening. But in theory, what Colin Angle was saying his platform would be able to help do is you screw in a light bulb and the RobotOS platform will know where you've put the light bulb, which room, and can automatically set all that stuff up for

• 10:13Speaker 03

  you. This isn't, to be clear, something that was already happening, but this was his plan because what his robots can do is provide context because they can map, they map your home and they know where everything is.

• 10:26David Pierce?

  Right. Well, and this comes back to the like this big question about like, what is Amazon actually buying here, right? Because I think

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:32David Pierce?

  My immediate reaction, I've had a Roomba for a long time and it's like sort of a weird thing to open the Roomba app and look at the map that it has of your house. And it's, it makes sense, like it understands where all the things are, but like it understands where all the things are. It's like it can't go up and downstairs, which is probably for the best in the scheme of Things, but it's annoying as a vacuum. It's good for, you know, the robot takeover of the universe. But it has this like square inch knowledge of things in a way that no other smart home device can really do. And so the immediate jump that I made, and I think a lot of people made is like, this is Amazon essentially like buying the floor plan to your house. Is that what this is? Is that what's going on here?

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yes and no. I mean, a lot of people point out, well, Amazon already knows what's in your house. If you have the Alexa app because you've labeled all your rooms, right? Or go onto Zillow and you can see floor plans for your neighbors' houses. But the key here is that it's constantly updated data. So your robot runs every day, most likely, and is constantly updating its map. And so it can see when you, you know, if you've moved the couch, or if you've taken the spare room and taken the bed out and now you have a crib. So maybe you have a nursery. So maybe you're, you know, this kind of data, this changing data about what's in your house will be so valuable from a sales perspective in terms of knowing what you might be buying in your house,

• 11:57Speaker 03

  knowing how big your house is, knowing how many rooms you have, knowing the context of your house from a sales perspective. And yes, Amazon's primary goal in life, I don't think anyone would dispute, is to sell us more stuff. But from a smart home perspective, I think it's also useful because you see the context when things change. So I believe the map data is one of the largest elements that appealed to Amazon about buying this company. I think Amazon's been trying to do this for a while. They've got their Astro robot actually does map your house. That's their day one additions still in beta robot that's meant to help you around your house.

• 12:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. What do you make of that? Actually, because one of the things I wondered is like, if Astro was great, would Amazon feel like it was worth spending $1.7 billion to buy iRobot? Or would it feel like it can solve this problem on its own? Is there anything? Should I read any tea leaves into that?

• 12:52Speaker 03

  I think it was trying. I mean, I think it just shows that this is what they want is that that Amazon wants to get this data that it will be useful for the company on many levels because Astro, they claimed, I think David Limp said when it was first released, that it didn't really have a purpose. They were wanting to see what it could bring and what it could do in our homes. I mean, they didn't specifically say, we want it to map your homes, but it does map your home very well. And again, it's something that does it every day. It goes around the house all the time and it can actually identify different pieces of furniture in your house. A lot of robot vacuums do this, too. They can tell fridge is where the fridge is, where the stove is, so that you can say to your robot vacuum, go clean by the fridge to make it a lot easier. And then they also have the Ring Always Home

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Cam, which is still not out, but it also has mapping capabilities. So they were already trying to add this mapping capability to their products, but it was going to be a really long time. I mean, that's a thousand dollar robot by Astro. I don't see that as a mass market appeal. That wasn't going to be in everyone's home by the end of this decade. Same with the flying drone. Don't know that that's going to be in anyone's home by the end of this decade. So yes, I think it's getting inside our homes. It sounds scary, I know. And I know we'll probably get to that part shortly. But that context is so valuable for any smart home ambitions. And Amazon's said very publicly that they are striving for the ambient intelligence in our smart home, where our home knows

• 14:22Speaker 03

  how to react to us. And the one thing you need in order to know how to react to the occupants of the home is to understand the layout of the home, where things are and how, you know, where the furniture is. So it's an obvious piece of the puzzle here.

• 14:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, let's talk about both sides of that because I think the two sides of that, the like scariness of it and the sort of like beautiful, perfect vision of this ambient computer that is wonderful are like, that is the tension of the future, right? That it's like, all this stuff could be so cool and personal and great. And also, it requires things that are like deeply terrifying to a lot of people for a lot of really good reasons. So let's talk about the sort of ambient computing side of this for a while because I think Amazon has been talking about this for a long time as. Like one of its main goals and it seems like it's less interested in like the smart home as a thing. And more in the smart home is like an avenue to this kind of big ambient computing vision that we've talked a bunch about on this show before. Why Amazon like this? I've been coming back to this over and over like Amazon fundamentally wants to sell me stuff, right?

• 15:17David Pierce?

  And you can draw a straight line from everything it makes to making it easier for people to buy stuff. But this like ambient intelligence thing, I have a harder time drawing that straight line.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Why they want to do it?

• 15:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. What's your sense?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  I do feel like it's a very sort of separate part of the company in a way at this stage. Like when I talk to the engineers and the people that are working on the smart home side, you know, most of them have come from smart home startups. You know, it's, it's a different part of the business, but obviously there's a lot of synergy there, a lot of advertising potential. But I mean, Amazon is a technology company now. It may not have begun that way. I mean, it began on the web, but it began as a storefront, but today it's become accidentally almost part of our smart home. Because again, Alexa was released, that Echo speakers came out without a very clear idea of what we were going to use them for.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  I remember I had the original one and it was quite a while until there was much you could do with it other than just ask it to play some music. But once they started to realize the potential of voice in the smart home, that has become a very large part of what Amazon is striving to achieve. Because the smart home, and I say this all the time, so forgive me if I've said it before. But in my opinion, the smart home isn't a fad or a sort of just for techie people. The smart home is the natural evolution of our homes, you know? We used to have homes that didn't have doors or door locks or electric lighting. Our homes have become technologically advanced and the next stage is the connected home that understands what's happening,

• 16:53Speaker 03

  understands the people in it, can adapt to be more energy efficient, which is great for the environment. Also helps save you money because you don't run your AC when you aren't home and you can turn your lights off when no one's in the room and is more convenient and more fun. It is fun. The smart home has a lot of great benefits. So for Amazon, it's, I think they just see this is the future of the home. Their main selling point is the home. We, most of what you buy on Amazon is for your home or for how you live in your home, from food to reading to furniture to consuming content, Prime Video, they're in every corner of our home. So it's an obvious, you know, again, an obvious move for them to move into the smart home. And as a technology company, they've got the tools to do it.

• 17:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I guess it is true that Amazon is definitely a company that wants to sell you stuff, but is also like increasingly a lot more than just a company that wants to sell you stuff. And this has like, as a sort of connective tissue across all of that stuff does make a certain amount of sense.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, the smart home is not mainstream yet. And that's why a lot of people, I think, find this a little confusing and they don't, you know, especially non-tech audience, which probably isn't our audience, but it is the future of our homes, whether most people are willing to adopt it at this stage or not. The question is, what kind of a future is it going to be? Is it going to be a locked in ecosystem? You know, do you have to choose your ecosystem of your home? Or is it going to be open and free? Or is it going to be locally controlled? Is it going to be in the cloud? You know, Amazon has a huge investment in the cloud. So most of the smart home companies that run cloud services use Amazon Web Services. So they've kind of got the lock in there as well. And Matter is going to bring it back to potential of local control.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  And I know that's a thing a lot of people are looking for in the home, not just for privacy, but also because it works better. Waiting for, you know, your light switch to talk to the cloud and then come back down and turn your light on, not fun.

• 18:47David Pierce?

  No, not great. It should work like light switches. That is, that is the rule.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  That's what we're aiming for. We will get there. And then people will understand why the smart home is great. But right now it's like, yeah, it takes longer to do it this way as opposed to just flipping the light switch.

• 19:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, the light switch is just right there. It's, I love that as a bar, right? And I think it's like a perfect thing for this because it's like, okay, if you can make your product easier than that switch right there, then we'll talk. Until then, we've accomplished nothing.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  It's so true.

• 19:15David Pierce?

  But real quick before we go, the scary side of this, I confess, I own a Roomba, and it has been in my basement for a long time, and I honestly, I love it to pieces. I hate vacuuming, and I absolutely love my Roomba. I have looked at it sideways a couple of times since this announcement, because it's like, I don't know, there is a thing that makes me nervous about the idea of any company that already has this much data about me now knowing this extra piece of data about me. What do you make of this? Are people who are afraid of that stuff scared about nothing? Or is this like, is there a reason to be nervous about sort of Amazon's coalescing of all this stuff?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  I think there's two parts to that. The first is, you know, iRobot was an independent company. It's always kind of sad when an independent company gets snapped up by a big corporate entity. And many people who had Roombas now may not have had Amazon devices and now sort of feel like, ah, I've got this thing in my house that I didn't want. And that's really unfair to the consumer. But we don't know yet what Amazon's going to do, whether they're, you know, going to change the privacy policies, because they have, you can turn off smart mapping in your Roomba if you have one. Not every Roomba maps your home, just to point that out, only some of the newer ones. And there are options to sort of shut that down, but it doesn't work as well, which goes

• 20:30Speaker 03

  back to what we were talking about before, you know, it's convenience versus privacy. You know, do you want it to do that? Do you trust it? A lot of people don't trust Amazon. I see in our comment sections, lots of people saying the Roomba's going in the bin. Well, that's, you know, there are a lot of other options out there. Whether you trust those other options is another question. I'm sad from that perspective, there are so few standalone companies left in the smart home today. But Roomba was one of the leaders in the space, iRobot. And, you know, it's definitely, it's kind of synonymous. Roomba is the Kleenex of the robot vacuum world, you know? That's what people, that's what you think of. And they've been around for 20 years, which is, you know, it's not like they were a little startup.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  And so from that side, you know, I can understand people being upset. They've kind of maybe feel bait and switch. But again, we don't actually know yet what's going to happen. So keep an eye on those privacy policies. We will be doing that for you, too. From Amazon knows everything about you perspective, if you already have a lot of Amazon devices in your home, I don't think you're going to feel like this is suddenly going to tip the bucket. But I do understand why people would rather not have this kind of data shared with Amazon. And I think people should be right to be concerned. I mean, Amazon says, we do everything we can to protect customer data. And we feel, I think the direct quote they gave me was customer trust is something

• 21:54Speaker 03

  we have worked hard to earn and work hard to keep every day. And so that comes down to your personal feelings about whether you can trust Amazon or not.

• 22:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, the like, do you trust the tech company turns out to be like the existential question of our lives right now, which is cool and fun all the time.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  I know. And it's like, you don't see some scrappy startup coming in and knocking these big boys off their perch right now. But I do, again, believe that matter will help with some of this concern because you'll be able to, you won't have to rely on one platform. You won't have to be locked in on a platform. And when one platform does something that you don't feel comfortable with, it will be really easy to switch to another one. So that's going to really help people feel to be more comfortable accepting smart products into their home because it's going to, it should be, we don't know because it's not here yet. It should be a lot easier to say, right, I'm done with anything from this company and I'm going to switch over and use someone else's platform.

• 22:51David Pierce?

  I like it. Well, as you know, The Vergecast is the official podcast of believing in matter. So we're going to have to come back and do this a bunch more times. But thank you, Jen. Appreciate it.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Thanks so much.

• 23:03David Pierce?

  Okay, we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about wearables. But not the Apple watches and Pixel watches and Samsung watches and whatever else watches that are out there. I want to talk about the wearables that aren't just big touchscreens on your wrist. We'll be right back.

• 23:25Speaker 04

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• 24:25David Pierce?

  Welcome back. This is going to be a big fall for smartwatches. Apple probably has a new one coming. We already know Google's Pixel Watch is coming, and Samsung has an event today where I suspect we're also going to see some new smartwatches. We're going to talk about all of those and all of that later. Right now, I want to talk about wearables that aren't watches. Because remember when those were going to be a thing? We were supposed to get sensors in our clothes, and our shoes, and our glasses, and our headphones. Everything was going to be wearable. And I feel like instead, all we got was smartwatches. But maybe I'm missing something. So to find out, I brought in Victoria Song, we all call her V, who reviews wearables for The Verge. We're going to see how many she's wearing right now and what to make of all of it.

• 25:11David Pierce?

  Hi, V.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  Hey, what's up?

• 25:13David Pierce?

  I'm very glad you're here, because we're talking about something that has actually been strangely on my mind for a very long time, and I have a lot of questions that I feel like you are the right person to answer. But basically, what I want to talk about is all the wearables that are not smartwatches. Is this an interesting topic, or am I just the last person who cares about non-smartwatch wearables?

• 25:30Speaker 06

  No, no, there's a lot of reason to care about non-wrist-based wearables, particularly in the arena of sleep tracking. Because, you know, I'm not the only person out there, but there are, like, my best friend, she basically is like, "I can never use a wrist-based smartwatch or a fitness tracker because I'm just going to rip it off in the middle of the night." And she does. She used to be my roommate, and I would hear like a thunk in the middle of the night because she was throwing off her Fitbit. It was just way too uncomfortable for her to sleep in, so... So like, that's why something like a smart ring is a great option for for that particular thing. It's just very few people have kind of nailed how to do a smart ring that people

• 26:12Speaker 06

  actually give a crap about, I think. Or it might be the only one out there right now that is like in the mainstream mind, like people have heard of it. But there are a bunch of other experimental ones that I've seen. And I have one that does ECGs, actually, in my review queue.

• 26:29David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 26:30Speaker 06

  But yeah, smart rings are probably the non-wrist wearable people think of the most. But I actually think that we're going to see a lot in terms of clothing and smart glasses going into the future. The clothing is going to take a while, but there's a lot of interesting research being done on that.

• 26:49David Pierce?

  Interesting. Your point about sleep, I think, is right and really interesting because it's like, when we first started talking about fitness trackers, it was like 10,000 steps, right? It was they were they were step trackers, like fundamentally, that's what they were. And now they do all this other stuff and they, you know, they measure your blood oxygen and that you get your glucose levels and they tell you everything you need to know about how you are as a person. And but it seems like the next thing like beyond step tracking, like the thing that seems to have caught for people is sleep tracking. But I feel like I still talk to people all the time who are like mostly convinced that sleep tracking is sort of bunk science. It's just like a lot of lies were being fed by the industry to try and convince us to buy new products. Is the sleep tracking thing real? Like, how good is this stuff at actually being useful to people at this point?

• 27:32Speaker 06

  So I do a lot of sleep tracking. I just finished a sleep tech buying guide. So I've just been testing sleep trackers nonstop for the last few months. And, you know, they they can tell when you're awake and when you're not. That is something that they can do. But it's more accurate now than it was a couple of years ago, because they actually do have the ability to track your heart rate and your SBO2 or your blood oxygen levels. So, you know, based on that, they can get an approximation of your sleep and your sleep quality. But it's still not what I would call super 100% accurate.

• 28:10Speaker 06

  Depending on the use case that you want to use it for like, you know, Fitbit has been chipping away at the sleep apnea diagnostic feature since 2017. That's when they introduced the SPO2 tracker, not SPO2 tracker, but the sensor on the Fitbit IONIC RIP. That thing got recalled. It was a hot mess. So that's like about as long as people have been thinking about sleep tracking and sleep apnea having some sort of like relationship there, but it's not there yet. I think the only tracker on the market that has any kind of FDA clearance for that would be the Wything Scan Watch, and that's just to see if you have breathing disturbances.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  So that's kind of where they've gone with that. They're like, oh, we have SPO2 trackers and we can see when you have breathing disturbances. And so that's kind of the angle that they're going with there. Kind of like how heart rate sensors dovetailed with ECGs and telling you when your heart rate's out of, out of whack and AFib and arrhythmia. So with the sleep trackers, they're really kind of leaning into sleep apnea, which is, which is a serious problem.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  And on the other flip side of that coin, they're using sleep trackers to track your nighttime heart rate variation, which is the change in time between your heartbeats, which is apparently a very good indicator of how well recovered you are from physical activity or other kind of stress.

• 29:37David Pierce?

  That's an interesting one because I think like a bunch of the stuff you just described strikes me as like not sort of like mainstream useful in the sense that like 10,000 steps is mainstream useful. You know what I mean? And it's like 10,000 steps is like not a perfect metric and became this like magic number based on nothing, as far as I can tell, but it works, right? And it's like, okay, if you're, that, that is a good number to shoot for that many people don't get. And if you don't get it, the solution is to get more steps. And it's like that as a sort of circle of fitness tracker is sort of perfect in a way that I feel like nothing else that any of these devices have ever tried is. Cause the thing that drives me crazy about sleep things is it's like, David, you didn't sleep enough. And I'm like, I know I didn't sleep enough or like, that's why I'm angry. Like, leave me alone. And the sleep. Solution is just like, sleep more.

• 30:22David Pierce?

  And it's like, you were awake for two hours in the middle of the night. Don't do that. And it's like, well, that's not, this is nothing. You're not doing anything for me. And I feel like the, the sort of, what do I do about it? Question has always been the thing for me with fitness trackers. And it feels even more necessary with sleep. But then on the flip side, all these companies have just said, like, forget that. We're going to market this towards people who have like actual health issues that they know about and would like to better understand. And maybe that's just where this goes and is the future of kind of all of this stuff. Cause it's not like a, you know, woo woo feeling about how to do better. It's like actually solving medical issues for people.

• 30:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's going to be a little bit of both because it depends on the person. Wearables, I think, is one of the most personal types of technology you have out there. Like when people are saying, well, who would you recommend this for? I always like sit there and I sigh because it's like, well, this particular device is good for X, Y, Z person who does this, this than that. But particularly when it comes to health, well, you know, the Apple Watch got so many accolades for adding ECG. Most people don't need ECG for like AFib detection. Like the biggest risk group is people over 65. So unless you're over 65 and have known cardio issues, you're never going to use the ECG app.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  I almost never use that app, except for when I'm testing it or comparing it to other watches that have added that. But now they all have it because Apple did it. But you know, something like heart rate variation is a lot more popular nowadays because there is something actionable about that. You know, you can look at your heart rate variation and go, oh, wow, I worked out and I'm so tired. That's probably because I went really hard on a run yesterday. And you know what? I think I'm going to take it easy now. So recovery is an actionable thing that a lot of people actually need help with when it comes to tracking. Because like, I'm guilty of this and I think everyone is where you just go, oh, I have to lift

• 32:20Speaker 06

  until I'm sore and then go hard for two weeks and then totally fall off the wagon. Like recovery is a huge part of your fitness and your health that everyone ignores in, in favor of going all out and then burning out. So that's why you're seeing that shift towards recovery in this space.

• 32:38David Pierce?

  This sounds very familiar. I really like to go to the gym three days in a row, get really sore and then don't go for eight months and then three days in a row. And then, yeah, it's a really, it's a great system. I highly recommend it. But the rings I hear about, it's basically just Aura. And I feel like especially during the pandemic, Aura like really had a moment, right? Where like a lot of people were worried about their health again. They started talking about like, can my Aura detect that I have COVID before? Things do like understanding body temperature is really important. Is Aura sort of winning this space as big as it maybe was a couple of years ago? Is there new interesting stuff coming in?

• 33:08Speaker 06

  Alyssa Aura just released the Gen 3 back last fall, like November-ish. And they have basically gone all in on predictive features. They just announced a partnership with Natural Cycles so that those users can use the Aura Ring's body temperature information as a contraceptive, which that personally, I'm kind of like, okay. But the FDA did clear it for that purpose. Although cleared is different from approved. We could go into that for a long, long time. But so, you know, it is cleared. They have at least reviewed it. And they just basically added the SPO2 feature, which as I mentioned, is basically scanning for what kind of breathing disturbances you might have night to night.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  And Aura themselves says is like, this is a very passive feature. You probably won't look at it day to day. But once you understand what your baseline is, you may understand when you're starting to get sick. And they also did that with period information. That was one of the big things that they launched within the last year to kind of predict women's cycles based on their bodily biometrics. So it's interesting. They're definitely doing a lot of research in this space, which is funnily enough, why they added a $6 per month monthly subscription, which our readers have let me know vociferously in the comments that they are not a fan of.

• 34:31David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 34:31Speaker 06

  Understandably so, but yeah, they're they're super into the research. A lot of researchers use them, so they are definitely winning when it comes to the smart ring space, but they're not the only players out there. Like, at CES, I I talked to this really small startup called Movano, and they were really interesting with their ideas for smart rings. It's, you know, similar to the Oura ring, but also not. I just think it's a very hard form factor to master because, like, a smart ring is small. How are you going to stick all these sensors in there and have good battery life? It's it's a tough thing to do.

• 35:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, the Oura is kind of amazing in that sense. And I even argue, like, I have an Oura ring and I sort of intermittently wear it because it's like, big enough that I never really stopped noticing it, but it's small enough that, like, I can genuinely wear it all the time. And that in itself is kind of an incredible achievement, that it is not four times the size that it is. Like,

• 35:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:28David Pierce?

  It's it's an impressive piece of kit. I still think it's bigger than I'd like it to be. And there's like, like, I wear a wedding ring and like, there's a time when it's going to be that big that I will wear something like this. But we're already closer to that than I would have expected, which is cool.

• 35:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. It is chunky. I'm also wearing my Oura ring Gen 3 right now. And

• 35:45David Pierce?

  Was that the gold one?

• 35:46Speaker 06

  It is the gold one.

• 35:47David Pierce?

  I like that. That's good looking.

• 35:48Speaker 06

  I I opted for the gold one over the silver one because the the two I had was silver. But, you know, it's it is chunky. Like, I have other rings and

• 35:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  Like, that's the other thing about wearables in general that's really hard to solve is style.

• 36:04David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  Because everybody's body is different. So like, if we're talking non-watch form factors, glasses are the big one that everyone also is trying to solve, but they are not getting it for whatever reason. Like, I am a pretty big skeptic that we're going to see a workable pair of smart glasses anytime soon, just because there are so many problems that they have to solve that I don't think anyone has a solid enough grasp on for the consumer space.

• 36:32David Pierce?

  Okay, so I agree, but I also have a counterpoint. And my counterpoint is that the Bose Frames, which I think, if I'm not mistaken, you like as much as I do, are kind of like a magical, incredible device that like, I can never explain to people why I liked the Bose Frames that I tested so much because they're just, it's a pair of glasses that have speakers on them, essentially. But I loved those things. And I feel like that's a space where I'm like, okay, there's much more interesting stuff to maybe do here with glasses than just AR smart glasses, which are gonna take god only knows how long to do. Am I right in remembering that you liked the Frames, that you thought they were pretty cool?

• 37:06Speaker 06

  I do like the Frames. I especially like the second iteration of the Frames, just because the first iteration of the Frames tried to really lean hard into audio AR, and there just wasn't a use case for it.

• 37:18David Pierce?

  That's right, they had like an app store, right? There were like, "Look at all these games you can play in audio AR." And I was like, "Mm, Bose, like, we're good."

• 37:24Speaker 06

  They were bad apps. They didn't work. Like, I thought the most useful app would be Directions, right? So I'm directionally challenged, I get lost all the time, smartwatches, they don't help me find where I'm supposed to go. So I was testing this, and it was supposed to tell me when to turn and when to get to places. I got lost, didn't help me. It just wasn't there yet, but the second iteration kind of got rid of all the AR aspects and just really leaned hard into being an excellent pair of open ear audio sunglasses. And when you're running, that's amazing, because you get great audio quality, you can still have awareness of where you're around you.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  And those things lasted five hours on a single charge continuously. I wore them at the New York City Half Marathon in February. I really, really like them, but it has a specific purpose, because the tempo, I mean, you look like a jabroni wearing it, but they help you see better, and you can listen to your tunes, and they're sweatproof, like, it's great. I frickin' love my Frames.

• 38:27David Pierce?

  Well, and the reason I'm glad you brought this up is I feel like that is still such like interesting, unexplored territory. And I've always felt this way about like the like Aftershocks bone conduction headphones. And there's just like, there's this interesting space of like stuff you can do on people's face and in their ears that is not nearly as complicated as we're making it. And also, I've talked to people who are like, what an amazing place to put, you know, biometric sensors like on your face. All kinds of good things we could do there. But it feels like, at least as far as I can tell, that is a thing not that many people are paying attention to. Are we just kind of waiting on the next, next thing? And so nobody's really worried about it in the interim phase?

• 39:04Speaker 06

  Well, there are definitely people out there who are thinking about it, trying to figure out ways to make it work. But let's talk about the ear and the face in general. So have you ever tried the North, uh, Focals by North?

• 39:15David Pierce?

  Yes, the ones that they got bought by Google?

• 39:18Speaker 06

  Yes, they did. But back when they had a little boutique in Brooklyn, I went and I had to get my face 3D scanned. I had to go back a couple of weeks later.

• 39:27David Pierce?

  Oh, I remember that.

• 39:28Speaker 06

  Right? So your face is very unique to you. Like, your glasses are a unique fit. And from like a mass production purpose, it's just really hard to make a pair of glasses that look good. So when you look at the Echo Frames, when you look at the Google Glass, when you look at all of these smart glasses that have come out, they look like the same boring pair of most basic Warby Parker glasses that you can see, because they're just trying to fit everyone's aesthetic. But, you know, we're a vain species for something that are like glasses, which is the first thing people see on your face. You want it to say something about your personality and your style. And I had a bunch of different options for the

• 40:10Speaker 06

  Focals by North, but they all basically were like the same kind of boxy, big hipster looking frames that are out there. And if that's not your style, that's not your style. And if it's not in, then what are you gonna do with that? With the ear, like you mentioned, the face is like a really good place for biometrics. And that's so true with regard to the ear, because it's actually a better place to get heart rate than your wrist. Your wrist is actually a really bad place to get heart rate. Because there's just so much noise from your tendons and all of that stuff moving around that they have to tweak in the algorithm. Your ear is a much better place for that, as is your fingertip. But then again, fit. Your ear is different from my ear. And you know, everyone argues about whether or not the AirPods Pro will fall out of your ear

• 40:54Speaker 06

  or not. And for some people it does, and for some people it doesn't. And that's the problem that we have with ear-based tech, just because fit. Fit is incredibly personal. Everything about wearables is incredibly personal. So how do you get something that really fits on your face well, that fits everybody? That's the hard part. Rings, you can size. Wrists, you can size. And that's why I think these are the two form factors that we see most commonly now.

• 41:19David Pierce?

  Got it. And I guess the other part of that is even beyond like, style and comfort. You have the fact that like, to get good metrics from these things, they have to be really specific. Like, I remember getting a like, a tutorial on how to wear some old fitness bands. And it's like, it has to be this tight. You have to wear it right here. It has to be like, placed just so on your wrist. And that's true all over your body. It's like, if the whole point of these things is to get good data, having them flopping around in everybody's weird ears is just not gonna work.

• 41:49Speaker 06

  No. Like, there was a pair of Jabra's. I forget the exact model. I think it was like, sport, elite. You know, they all have those kinds of things. But there was this one specific pair that actually had a heart rate sensor in them. And I was testing them, and it was super cool, because I was getting heart rate from my ear, and I didn't have to necessarily wear a watch to get that data, except half the time, the fit wasn't right, or my ears would get really sweaty. So then, the contact was bad. So it's just a tricky thing. And like, to your point about where you're supposed to wear a smartwatch, I have that down pat. It's one inch or one finger length from your wrist bone.

• 42:25David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  And I got chewed out a couple of years back by some companies, because they were like, you're wearing multiple watches on one wrist. You're gonna get bad data that way. And I was like, I was just thought, I was just thinking that I would save time and not have to run 70,000 miles in a week to test multiple things. But as it is, you can only wear one watch per wrist. So, there you have it.

• 42:47David Pierce?

  So you're doomed to running 70,000 miles a week?

• 42:50Speaker 06

  Yes. I have to run so many. It's actually like for my beat, it's not fair. Like I have to do from my standards, at least three two mile runs, at least two mile runs to see how accurate one particular device is versus another. So that's just, that's just a lot of running.

• 43:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's like eight months of exercise for me. That's tough. I feel you. So last thing before we go is clothes. You mentioned it at the beginning and it feels like there was this future a few years ago where it seemed like the world we were going to live in was not that like you had sort of specific tracking devices, but that like everything you wore was going to have sensors in them and you'd have some in your shirt and you'd have some in your shoes and there would be some in your headphones, whatever. And they would like sort of collectively like smart home if I your body and make it all make sense without needing tons of dedicated devices. That does not feel like the world we live in, at least to me anymore that like Nike seems to have sort of walked away from the idea that like, what if we put cool sensors in your shoes? Is there cool stuff going on in that space too? Or was that like a bad idea that we gave up on?

• 43:52Speaker 06

  No, people have not given up on that. Under Armour kind of took up the torch that Nike let down. They have a whole line of smart shoes that help you track your running form. They're okay. I used them for a few years, but they're not like good for my feet and I ended up with like shin splints.

• 44:10David Pierce?

  Another good example, by the way, of fit being the thing, right? It's like, not all pairs of shoes work for everybody.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  Exactly. Like this is a very common theme with wearables, just fit being something and a challenge to the form factor. But you know, that's, that's the shoe space. Under Armour is doing a lot there. And then you have clothes. I think where you're really going to see this first is with the professional athletes. I just saw an article today, actually on NBA athletes adopting like compression pants that help track certain things or some fabric in their shoes that can measure the force of how they're jumping and how that relates to their health. So I really do think you're going to see it from the sports sector first because they're one of the first like first adopters towards wearable technology with regard to that.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  Like the NBA adopted the Ora rang back during the pandemic. The NBA. Actually, like, you gotta keep an eye on them because they're super into just adopting wearable technology. So, yeah, I really do think at some point you're gonna see basketball players wearing smart shorts or whatever like that. And then Whoop. Whoop is another athletically focused wearable that has started experimenting with clothes. So they have their own line of sports clothes that have these little pockets sewn into specific places that you can stick their tracker so that you don't have to wear it on your wrist if you're running. So they sent me like a sports bra when I reviewed the Whoop 4.0 and I was like, oh my god, this is a gimmick. This is so stupid. But then, you know, I stuck it in there and I was like, wow, this is so

• 45:43Speaker 06

  comfortable and it's tracking my heart rate data. This is great. So I really do think when it comes to clothing and other types of unique form factors, you're really gonna see it in sports first. So I don't know the first thing about basketball, but I do pay attention to the to the tech that the NBA adopts.

• 46:01David Pierce?

  The clothes are the most important part, so you're doing fine. Don't worry about it. Okay, actual last thing, and then and then we should go. I need you to recommend a product for me. Do you remember the original Jawbone Up? That was just like it had no screen. It was just a band. It looked cool. It didn't do anything when I was just wearing it. It was just a thing I wore. I want that again, but Jawbone is dead. And and it's like I can buy an Apple Watch, but that has a screen. All the Fitbits have these big screens. I just want a thing that feels like a bracelet, but that like is also a fitness tracker. Does that exist? And if so, which one should I buy? Do you have any recommendations for me?

• 46:36Speaker 06

  So if all you want is something unobtrusive that's never going to notify you, then the Whoop 4.0 is actually pretty great.

• 46:44David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 46:45Speaker 06

  It tracks your sleep and it tracks your recovery. The only hesitation I say with that is that Whoop comes with a $30 monthly subscription, which is pretty rough.

• 46:55David Pierce?

  That's a lot.

• 46:56Speaker 06

  The hardware is free, quote unquote. It's not. It's it's built into the built into the subscription there. And, you know, you already have the other one that I would recommend, which is the Oura Ring, because that does track your steps. It does track your activity and it's not gonna notify you because what are you gonna see on a ring? Nothing. There's just nothing there to distract you from day to day living. It's very seamless. So there's that. The one I would not recommend is the Amazon Halo, just because I don't like their 3D body fat imaging tech in the app. I think it just makes people feel terrible.

• 47:29David Pierce?

  Creeps me out. Not a fan.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, if you feel terrible, you're not going to stick with it. So that's my issue with them. But that is another tracker that's much more affordable than the ones that I just mentioned that has no distraction type feel to it.

• 47:44David Pierce?

  Fair enough. I like it. All right, I'm gonna go charge my Oura ring. V, thank you. I appreciate it.

• 47:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is fun.

• 47:58David Pierce?

  Okay, so V got me thinking that maybe Whoop is a company I need to know more about that's actually doing some interesting stuff in this space. Whoop's been around for a while, and I've kind of known of it for a bunch of years. But I always thought about Whoop as this like, super high-end thing for professional athletes. But maybe it's more than that. So I called up Whoop CEO, Will Ahmed, and asked him about some of the things that V and I had been talking about. Here, for instance, is what he said about why Whoop didn't want to make a smartwatch.

• 48:26Speaker 07

  The problem with being a smartwatch is you're, one, doing a bunch of things that don't relate to your health, which is gonna therefore cut into all the resources that you need for really great health monitoring. And, two, you're then competing with every other watch out there. So much magic from health monitoring comes from being able to measure the body 24/7. And if someone's wearing a wearable one day and not wearing it the next, even taking it off to charge it, then you're not getting accurate data, or you're not getting continuous data, and you might miss the important moment where you need to intervene on someone's health.

• 49:02David Pierce?

  And not only is Whoop not a smartwatch, it's also not really a wrist wearable at all. Will told me he thinks the sensor is the thing, and that the best version of the sensor is one that works basically anywhere on your body, which is why Whoop is suddenly a clothing manufacturer.

• 49:20Speaker 07

  When I founded Whoop, I didn't think I was gonna be designing bras and thongs and boxers and shorts as part of a mission to improve people's health. But we have discovered that making Whoop as easy as possible to wear anywhere on your body will overall enhance the likelihood that we can improve your health. If you're a nurse or a doctor, for example, you just can't wear something on your wrist during the day when you're in an operating room, or when you're in certain environments. So that led us to looking very carefully at how we could collect data accurately from anywhere on the body and then designing clothing that was able to make the sensor collect the data at the same accuracy level.

• 50:05David Pierce?

  It sounds simple when he says this, but I asked him, isn't that hard to do? Like Vee was saying, bodies are different, people are different, and getting good data requires things to work and attach to your body in these really specific ways. So can you do clothes in a way that actually works for everyone?

• 50:23Speaker 07

  We have what's called Whoop Labs, where literally every day, we have different people coming in, different body types, different skin colors, different harriness levels, different BMI indexes, and wearing bodysuits of Whoop data collection mechanisms. And through that process and hundreds and thousands of data sets, we've been able to triangulate around certain locations and certain garment fits. That's a never-ending process, and we're gonna inevitably, over time, come out with more locations and more types of garments.

• 50:58David Pierce?

  Will has this thing that he likes to say about how wearables should either be cool or invisible, and I really do think that invisible is the future. You wanna wear it on your wrist? Fine, good, great, but the best kind of wearable, I'm convinced, is one that you wear all the time, and that means it has to be super, super flexible and versatile and just stops looking like a thing on your body. Getting there is tough, but I think it's possible. Okay, we're gonna take a break, and we will be right back to talk about this run of mid-range phones that we've seen over the last few months, and which trade-offs are the right ones to make when you're trying to save a few hundred bucks on your smartphone.

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• 53:05David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So over the last few weeks, we've seen a bunch of new phones launch that are trying to thread a really hard needle. They want to be a really awesome phone without costing $1,000 or more. The quality of phone you can buy for $500, $600, $700 has gone way up over the last few years. And just this summer with the Nothing Phone 1 and the Google Pixel 6A and the OnePlus 10T, the possibilities there are going up even more. But the thing with these phones is that they all require trade-offs. That's how you avoid being a $1,000 phone, right? You can't have the best screen and the best camera and the best processor and the best everything else and still be cheaper than an iPhone. It's just not possible. So all these phones make different trade-offs.

• 53:50David Pierce?

  And I think some of them are the right ones to make and some of them are not. The Verge's Allison Johnson has reviewed all of these phones and knows how those trade-offs feel better than anybody. So I brought her in to see if we can figure out the right ones for manufacturers to make. Hi Allison.

• 54:05Speaker 08

  Hello.

• 54:06David Pierce?

  So I brought you here because I was reading your review of the OnePlus 10T, which seems like a very good phone. But it just made me think a lot about like what a good phone actually takes. And we spent a lot of time, especially on this show, talking about like the best of the best and like the high end stuff, things that cost thousands of dollars. But like lots and lots of people don't want to spend a thousand dollars or more on a phone. And so the big question is like, what do you get when you buy a phone for like four, five, six, $700? And a lot of your 10T review was basically like, here are the trade offs that that requires. And there are some trade offs that are good and some trade offs that are bad. What I want to do is like, try to figure out which are the right trade offs to make. And I thought this would be a useful exercise.

• 54:48David Pierce?

  There have been a bunch of these phones out recently and I want to just go through and figure out what you can get rid of to make a phone cheaper and what you shouldn't. Does that make sense? Is this, is this a good way to go?

• 54:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's like a, it's like a fantasy phone draft.

• 55:01David Pierce?

  That's exactly right.

• 55:03Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 55:03David Pierce?

  Okay, so I listed a bunch of the things that I could think of and we're going to get into all of them specifically, but I'm just gonna, I'm gonna rattle them off to you.

• 55:11Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 55:11David Pierce?

  Here in this list that we have in our Google Doc. And I just want you to know if you, if there's anything you can think of that is missing from this list that we should talk about. Okay, so, so here's the list. It's body size, just the size of the phone, screen size and under that, screen quality, camera, which is like overall camera quality, and then the number of cameras, and then battery, operating system stuff, charging, which is basically just like wireless charging versus not wireless charging, processor, waterproofing and updates slash general sort of life cycle of the device. Am I missing anything else that feels like it belongs on that list?

• 55:46Speaker 08

  I think that's a good list. I think that covers it. I think I would like, if I was ranking, that would be where it becomes tough.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  Okay, good. So this, this is what we're gonna do here. We're gonna come up with an answer at the end of this. But let's just, let's just go through a bunch of these. So the first one, and this is the one that really jumped out to me with the OnePlus 10T. There's this debate about sort of size of phone versus price. And we, we've had this kind of idea for a while that like the cheaper phones should also be the smaller phones. And you pretty aggressively made the case that that is actually the wrong set of trade offs. Tell me why, because I violently disagree with your take, but I want to, I believe in you and I want to know your take before I tell you mine.

• 56:26Speaker 08

  All right. The challenge is set before me. So I'm a small phone proponent. I'm a small phone enjoyer personally. This is not like the reality that we live in. Like, most people want a big phone. They want a bigger screen. So I, very scientifically, based on nothing except my own thoughts, come to the conclusion that 6.1 inches is the perfect screen size for a phone. And, you know, with some modest bezels, if it's a mid-range phone.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  I like it.

• 56:58Speaker 08

  You're just looking for like a balance of, you don't want to feel like it's too small and you're squinting at it and scrolling forever. iPhone SE, I'm looking at you.

• 57:09David Pierce?

  Yup.

• 57:09Speaker 08

  But then, I don't, after a certain point, I'm like, this doesn't need to be so big. The 10T is on the big side for me. But Pixel 6A, 6.1 inches, so good.

• 57:21David Pierce?

  I mean, I guess I agree in the sense that just having a smaller phone is not where you should save a lot of money. And like, the theory would be basically, it's like a smaller body, smaller parts, smaller screen, thus cheaper to make. And I'm not actually sure how true that actually is in terms of like what it takes to make a phone. I don't know that shrinking 2 tenths of an inch is like a $700 difference in the phone. But I do think it's true that most people want bigger phones. And the idea that like, the iPhone SE is like the proof of this over and over, right? Apple keeps being like, "Look, it's the phone that you want." And everybody's like, "Nah, I'll take the bigger one." Like, what people want is cheaper phones, not smaller phones. And so I think in that sense, I do tend to agree. But I also think there should be a world in which you can

• 58:05David Pierce?

  get a very good smaller phone. I'm not sure it's possible just because of like physics and batteries, but like, I want there to be high-end small phones.

• 58:13Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 58:13David Pierce?

  But I guess also mid-range big phones is a thing that should exist.

• 58:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, I agree with that. I want there to be a small phone at every price point. And I can concede that mid-range phones are probably gonna be kind of on the big side.

• 58:26David Pierce?

  That brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is battery life. Because one other thing that tends to be true on these mid-range phones is they tend to not last as long because they don't, they don't get the newest processors, which tend to be the most efficient. They're not usually as big, which means they don't have like physically as much battery. They tend to be less long lasting. And for me, at least, I would put that at like the absolute top of the list. I'm like, give me a worse phone that lasts three times as long, charge me $600 for it, and I'm a happy, happy, happy man. Do you agree with that?

• 58:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, personally, and that's what I sort of lead with in my reviews, especially in this class. You don't want to go shopping for a phone again in three years, or get the most phone you can for your dollar, I think, around the $500 price point. $500, you can absolutely buy a phone now that's going to last five years. The iPhone SE, you know, for its flaws. I have an iPhone SE from 2016 that I put iOS 15 on, and it's okay. The screen is too small to actually use like a human being, but yeah, I think I put that, I put that really high up on the list of what you should consider in this price point.

• 59:37Speaker 08

  And you can, you can expect more than you could, I think, a few years ago.

• 59:42David Pierce?

  What is the battery champion of the mid-range phones right now? Is there anything better than the just like, use it all day, charge it every night?

• 59:51Speaker 08

  They kind of are all a little middling, I think. Motorola especially will do the like, you can get three days on a single battery charge, but that's kind of in the like, under $300 bracket. And I think that's sort of like, well, this phone can't do much else, so here you go. It has a really long battery. But I think they hit a sweet spot in the mid-range where it gets you through a day, maybe a day and a half, if you're kind of conservative with how you use your phone. But it's generally not something you need to worry about or think about. And kind of coupled with the longer software support updates that are coming for some

• 1:00:35Speaker 08

  of these phones, I think that you can reasonably expect the battery in the phone to keep going and keep up for four or five years.

• 1:00:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good point because I think it's easy to think about like how long my battery lasts, you know, today and tomorrow. But the thing that's much harder to figure out is like, how long will this battery hold out before I have to get a new phone? And I think especially for people shopping like in this price range, that is just as important, right? It's like if I have to buy a $500 phone twice as often, I have accomplished nothing by saving a bunch of money.

• 1:01:05Speaker 08

  Or spend your life by a power outlet and never leave.

• 1:01:09David Pierce?

  Right. Which is currently, I have, I have an iPhone 12. And as of like a month ago, I have reached the point where my battery dies at like 1pm.

• 1:01:18Speaker 08

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:19David Pierce?

  Which I enjoy because that means it is inevitably about to be iPhone time again. So.

• 1:01:22Speaker 08

  Congrats.

• 1:01:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm going to be the person chasing after the 14. It's going to be good times. But anyway, okay, so next on the list, and this is one where I suspect you and I disagree. And I think I also disagree with just like the verge as a whole.

• 1:01:35Speaker 08

  Uh oh.

• 1:01:36David Pierce?

  Which is displays and not necessarily size because I think we, the size thing, I think we're actually like relatively aligned on. But like quality of screen. If I'm trying to make my phone cheaper, is it the right thing to do to put a worse screen on it? Or is it the wrong thing to do?

• 1:01:51Speaker 08

  I think, you know, I think there's a kind of a bottom line and you don't get the best screen. You're going to have to make some concessions to get a $500 phone that's going to last. So I think the screen ends up being one of those places. It definitely is on the Pixel 6A. You get the standard refresh rate and it's just not a, not a very fancy screen. But I end up like, I'm okay with that. But I think there is like a kind of basement level where you don't want to go below like, there's some bad LCD panels out there on budget phones. I've seen them.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:02:28Speaker 08

  I think it is a good point to make that the quality of the screen is something to really consider beyond like looking at some specs because that is your phone. You look at your phone screen 10,000 times a day. If it bothers you a little bit, or if you're squinting at it outside, then like, do you want to live your life that way? I don't think so.

• 1:02:51David Pierce?

  That's fair. And I think, I think there is a floor, but what I think is true is that my floor for display quality is much lower than everyone else that we work with. Like, I will take just about any screen that I can see.

• 1:03:03Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:03:04David Pierce?

  If it works in daylight, which is not nothing, not every screen is easy enough to see in bright light, and if it gets very dim at night, which is like, I want to be able to look at it outdoors and in bed without it sucking. And as long as it accomplishes both of those, I will take almost anything. And that's possibly a bad trade off and a mistake, but that's generally how, like, I'll look at a phone with like, a kind of low end, like 1080p screen. I'm like, it's fine.

• 1:03:27Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27David Pierce?

  I'm fine with this. I have no issues.

• 1:03:29Speaker 08

  You can see the content. The content is there.

• 1:03:31David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it's like, I don't know, I'm not buying this phone to spend 12 hours a day playing high end AAA games on it anyway. And I think, I don't know, I'm not that worried about the refresh rate of my screen in general, much less if I'm trying to like, find ways to save money on my phone.

• 1:03:47Speaker 08

  Yeah. Controversial.

• 1:03:50David Pierce?

  The flip side of this is the one where I think way too many of these companies do compromise, which is camera quality. Like, to me, the only thing you cannot get wrong about your phone is the camera. It is like the single most important thing. And to me is like, the first thing I would not sacrifice in a phone. But we see tons of them that do. Like, am I wrong? Am I, do I care way too much about like massively high end camera quality in smartphones?

• 1:04:13Speaker 08

  No, I think that's totally fair. And these are our cameras. There's, we're not carrying around point and shoot cameras anymore. This is it. So it's fair to expect good decent quality from a camera from a phone around $500. And this is my biggest bone to pick. Well, maybe my second biggest bone to pick with the iPhone SE is that it's a really good camera overall. They did not put night mode on it. And there's really no good explanation for that, except that Apple wants you to buy a more expensive phone.

• 1:04:48David Pierce?

  Apple kind of hates the iPhone SE and wishes it didn't exist, is the explanation.

• 1:04:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a, it's an unfortunate reality for them, I guess.

• 1:04:58Speaker 08

  It just gets back to like, what are the reasonable kind of bare minimum expectations you can have for a budget phone? And decent, low light photos is one of those. So I think there are more, I mean, around $500. I think the camera quality is like decent overall. Things get a little hairy under the $300 mark.

• 1:05:25David Pierce?

  But even in like the Pixel 6A, right? Like Google made a bunch of decisions about what to keep and not to keep in trying to find ways to make the 6A cheaper than the 6 and the 6 Pro. And one of the things they did, I think, was like relatively aggressively downgrade camera quality. And they're like, their big bet is they have a bunch of software that can do a bunch of extra stuff, but like the camera is not as good. And to me, that just feels like the wrong call. I would rather have downgraded a lot of other stuff and keep the good camera.

• 1:05:52Speaker 08

  Okay, I'm going to disagree with you on that one. Because I think that it's good enough. It does meet that, like, is this the most amazing camera? You know, you're gonna, you're not gonna wow all your friends with it. But it's good enough. You get decent, low light performance. Some of those like tricks that Tensor does, like there's a mode on it called Face Unblur. And it's one of those things that like the phone just does. You don't enable it. You don't know that it's doing it necessarily, but you're taking a picture of a kid in low light, they're moving and squirming around. And it'll use the ultra wide camera to kind of fill in information and give you a sharp photo.

• 1:06:36Speaker 08

  Like that is, that's cool, I think, for a mid-range phone. You know, I don't even expect that from every flagship phone to be able to figure that out. So I think it does do just enough. It is old hardware. You've got that and the ultra wide. Nothing fancy, but I think there is enough of that software kind of magic to make it, especially at that price point, like, pretty good.

• 1:07:02David Pierce?

  Hmm, all right. I mean, I guess it's fair. I just feel like, to me, it's like, the camera is like, the main thing people do on their phones increasingly. It's like, it would be like shipping a worse keyboard on your mid-range phones, right? It's just like, it's like how you do stuff, that it just feels like it's the hardest thing to sacrifice. But you bring up a good point with the Pixel stuff, which is that Google made a big bet, that the main thing it should continue to spend money to put in its mid-range phones is the processor. And that if you have enough processing power, you can solve for a lot of these other things. And I don't really remember companies making that bet before. Everybody would ship their high-end phones with like, the high-end Snapdragon stuff, and then have either, you

• 1:07:44David Pierce?

  know, older Snapdragon, or like severely sort of downgraded processors in these other things as a way to save a lot of money. But Google was like, no, like Tensor across the board, high-end chips in all of our phones, no matter what they cost. And I feel like, I haven't spent any time with the Pixel 6A, but reading your review of it, it seemed like that might have been the right call.

• 1:08:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think it really showed Google's priorities. And it has shifted from, I mean, a few years ago, you sort of thought of the Pixel as like, oh, it's that phone with the really good camera. And the cool thing about like, the Pixel 3A was that you were getting that same camera as the more expensive model. Kind of felt like you were getting away with something. So when they moved to Tensor, I think they had a choice. You know, they couldn't do everything. And it's like, what is this phone known for? What is a Pixel phone? And I think the answer has shifted to like, a Pixel phone does cool stuff for you, can translate things, it can whatever else magical AI things that they

• 1:08:47Speaker 08

  want Tensor to be doing. Like, that is what you're getting in the 6A, and like, a camera that's pretty okay.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  Fair enough. So it's like, I mean, I guess that's, that's true with a lot of these, right? Is I think kind of where you land is like, you can make some sacrifices, but there is a floor below which you just like cannot go. And if you're gonna, if you're gonna ship me a phone that's good, even if it's five, $600, it still has to be a pretty good phone. Like when we start talking about like $100 phones, that's a very different universe, right? But like for this sort of mid-range space we're in, you do still have to make a pretty good phone. Like there's increasingly a smaller list of things that seems like you can get away with. And speaking of, there are a couple of things that I think you can get away with that I'm curious if you agree. One is charging. To me, the very first thing, if I'm making a mid-range smartphone and trying to find a way to cut money is I just get rid of wireless charging.

• 1:09:36David Pierce?

  Done. Nobody's gonna miss it. Don't care. Easy one. Not worried about it.

• 1:09:40Speaker 08

  Totally agree. This is like, this is kind of an SE versus Pixel 6A thing is iPhone SE, you get wireless charging. That's really cool. But at the end of the day, I'm gonna pick the 6A every time and get a usably sized screen and I'm not gonna miss wireless charging. I'm just gonna plug that sucker in at the end of the day and live my life.

• 1:10:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. And then the one that I'm conflicted about, and I'm curious how you feel, is waterproofing. Cause one of the things we see on a lot of these phones is they go from, you know, pretty, like you can drop it in the water and it's likely to be fine to like splash proof, which is like something, but it's much worse. And I get that like, that's actually from what I've heard, a relatively expensive thing to do to waterproof a device like that. What's your sense of how mission critical that actually is?

• 1:10:30Speaker 08

  You know, I think it is important, but it is one of those, like I wouldn't expect IP68 for sure. I think, you know, the 6A and the Galaxy A53 5G are both IP67. And that feels, at least to me, that's like a reassurance. And sort of like, I can live my life with this phone and not feel like, well, I don't know, like, is it gonna be all right if it gets splashed? And can I throw it in the bottom of my purse, which is like the dustiest environment in the world?

• 1:11:05Speaker 08

  You know, it would be great to do kind of long-term testing on that or some torture testing on mid-range phones and see like what really is splash proof, but um yeah, not something I've done.

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, to me, it's like I should be able to drop my phone in the sink while it's running and it should be okay. And I fish it out after one second and it should be fine. I don't like the thing where like I throw my phone in the pool and get it out 20 minutes later. It's like, all right, I can sort of understand that that might not go great. I would like for my phone to be fine after that. And I appreciate that like most very modern phones are, but I get that that's not how that works. But it does feel like the basic thing of like, if life happens and I drop my phone in a puddle, it's going to be fine. Or I spill my water, my glass of water onto my phone. Like, that stuff feels like table stakes to me at this point.

• 1:11:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:57David Pierce?

  Okay. And then, oh, the last one is something I have not thought a bunch about before thinking about this stuff, but is something that has come up in a bunch of your reviews is like promise of updates and sort of operating system longevity. And this came up in particular talking about the Nothing Phone, which is a new company that has no track record of being bad at this, but also no track record of being good at this because it's a brand new company. And there's this question of like, it goes back to the same thing as batteries, right? It's like, how long am I going to be able to use this phone? And I think one easy way for companies to not have this stuff cost a lot is just to not support their devices for very long. And that has been an issue in the past. How sort of high does that rank for you?

• 1:12:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, I rank it really high. And I, I kind of tie it in together with, yeah, everything that points to like, what is the longevity of this phone? What is the chance that someone could still be using it four or five years from now? And they're not just like cursing the day they read my review and told them to buy it. Samsung has been leading the charge on giving you more years of security support, all the way down through its A series. I think that A53 is slated to get four years of OS updates and five years of security updates. And they slowed down. At the end of that, I think you get maybe like two a year on year five.

• 1:13:18Speaker 08

  But that's awesome. I think pointing that out as loudly as I can and as often as I can, I I hope kind of spurs other manufacturers to try and meet that and keep pushing. You know, you can keep using your phone after it's gotten its last security update, but it's often not a great experience that just degrades very quickly.

• 1:13:43David Pierce?

  I'm just thinking about this as you talk, like, one of the things I've said to people for years is that you should try to buy the absolute best, highest end newest phone you can possibly afford, because if nothing else, it's just going to last you the longest, right? It's like, this is the same advice I give with laptops, right? Like, if you buy, if you buy a crappy laptop, you're just going to need a new laptop sooner. And ultimately, what you pay ends up being not that different, and you'll be much happier if you just buy a nice thing. But I think with with phones, like, that shouldn't be such a huge trade off. And it sounds like the good news is like those two things are getting sort of increasingly close together, where it's like, if I buy a $1,200 phone from Samsung, I can reasonably expect it to last four or five years. And now, if I buy a $600 phone from Samsung, I'm increasingly able to reliably assume it's going to last four or five years.

• 1:14:27David Pierce?

  And that's good, and I think pretty new. Like, that was not the case not that long ago.

• 1:14:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, I've been, I've been really happy to see that. And I think phones are such a part of our life now. Like, it's is just the thing that you have on you all the time that's getting you through every part of your day, pretty much. And it's so good to see that at a multitude of price points, there's good quality hardware, and it's being backed up with, you know, software that's going to keep on going. So I appreciate it. I think it's, it's also kind of exciting, like, you know, a flagship phone at this point is going to be really good. The next $1,000 phone that Samsung makes is going to be really good.

• 1:15:07David Pierce?

  Yes, it's going to be slightly better than the last one, which is just where we are.

• 1:15:11Speaker 08

  But you're kind of finding those, those gems in like the midrange class or the $300 class where they stand out. And you're like, this is actually a lot better than I expected for this kind of money. Like, that is really exciting to me, so.

• 1:15:28David Pierce?

  Totally. So, and that's, that's actually a fitting place to end. So, okay, just to recap, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but I've been taking notes as you go. I think the perfect size for a phone is 6.1 inches, which is, which is heretofore gospel truth. If you disagree, I don't even want to hear it. Battery life, important, but like, as long as it lasts all day and hopefully a little more, no problem. Display, big is important, but mostly good, but it doesn't have to be the greatest thing you've ever seen in your life. Cameras, again, same, is, is good enough. Oh, here's a question for you. There are three camera options. There's the zoom camera, the regular camera, and the wide camera. And it seems like most mid-range phones pick two. Which is the correct two to choose? I have very strong opinions about this.

• 1:16:07Speaker 08

  Oh, I have so many opinions. So, I mean, you've got your, your standard wide camera. Go with the ultra wide after that. And then so many manufacturers are guilty of crimes where they put in an extra, like, one or even like two camera sensors. It's like a two megapixel macro, or a depth sensor that's maybe like not that helpful. Yeah, two. Let's go with two cameras. Don't, don't be throwing in a bunch of extra lenses just because you got them lying around. No.

• 1:16:41David Pierce?

  So it's the, we're at the 1X and the .5X, the wide and the ultra wide. That's where we're at. Okay, I'm with you. Those are also my strong opinions. I think a lot of people are like, give me a zoom camera. And I'm like, no, walk closer. You know what I can't do is make your eyes bigger, but I can, I can teach you how to walk closer to things.

• 1:16:56Speaker 08

  The telephoto camera seems to be off the table for the mid-range class right now. Maybe that'll be next year's, like, oh, Samsung put a telephoto in the A54. Who's gonna do it next? But right now, it seems to be the thing that you just can't get.

• 1:17:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, unfortunately. I would take three. Don't get me wrong. But if those are the two, it's the wide and the ultra wide. I totally agree. Okay, so then we have charging. We don't care if there's wireless charging. In fact, please get rid of it if it saves me money. That's, that's my opinion. And then longevity of software and security updates is very important. So, is that a good summation of, of where we've landed? I agree with all of that. I thought we were going to fight about much more than this. This is very upsetting.

• 1:17:37Speaker 08

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:17:39David Pierce?

  So, given all of that, what do you feel like is, is the best option out there right now? There's obviously a million of them. You don't have to just pick one if you don't want to. But is there like a, is there a manufacturer or two who is getting this the most right right now?

• 1:17:51Speaker 08

  So I would put the Pixel 6A right at the top of the pile.

• 1:17:55David Pierce?

  And Okay.

• 1:17:56Speaker 08

  If you're an Apple user.

• 1:17:58David Pierce?

  Then we're so sorry. This does not apply to you.

• 1:18:00Speaker 08

  So sorry about that. Maybe consider switching to Android. Yeah, no, the 6A just, I feel like it just nails all of those. Do it well enough, but it doesn't have to be fancy. Like, it's, it's just there. You get a decent amount of storage at the base level model, which it is 128 gigs. The iPhone SE starts at 64 gigabytes, which, come on, that's not enough.

• 1:18:23David Pierce?

  Agreed. All right. So the Pixel 6A is the, the one to beat so far.

• 1:18:27Speaker 08

  It is. I think that the Samsung A53 is pretty close behind it. I would give the 6A the edge because of that flagship level chipset. And I think I like its odds in the long run of like four years from now, it's going to be running pretty well. The A53 has the nicer screen, has a bigger screen, if that is important in your life. And it matches the Pixel for a number of years of security updates. It's just a question in my mind of, is it going to be running fast enough in four or five years? It might not be doing great.

• 1:19:03David Pierce?

  All right. Well, Allison, we're going to come back and probably do this at some point very soon with a bunch of new flagship phones that are coming. But for now, thank you. This was really fun. Appreciate it.

• 1:19:10Speaker 08

  Yes, it's fun. Thank you.

• 1:19:13David Pierce?

  That's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more on everything we talked about at theverge.com. And you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Jen is JP2E, V is VicMSong, Allison is AllisonJoe1, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norrie Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, birthday invitations, or big thoughts on foldable phones, you can always email [email protected]. Alex, Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about whatever Samsung announces today, plus the future of private messaging, fancy new Sennheiser headphones,

• 1:19:57David Pierce?

  and a bunch of other stuff. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:20:10Speaker 09

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