Handheld gaming, scooter subscriptions, and a Techtober preview

Today on the flagship podcast of low-latency controller input: 02:12 - David Pierce talks with Tom Warren about the trend of handheld gaming devices like Valve's Steam Deck and the Logitech's G Cloud Gaming Handheld. 21:20 - David tries subscribing to a scooter rental service and starts to rethink the concept of ownership. 33:40 - David chats with Nilay Patel and Alex Cranz about the ten big tech events happening this October. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank 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 low latency controller input. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am currently on a scooter, riding around my neighborhood, trying to find a place that will sell print magazines. It's a long story, but basically if you see a copy of New York Magazine with a full-page Vergecast ad in it, send me a picture. I really want to see it. Anyway, we have an awesome show for you today. We're going to talk to Tom Warren about the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch and the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld, which is the worst name ever. But there's all kinds of interesting stuff happening with handheld gaming consoles and we're going to get into all of it. We're also going to talk about scooters and how the way that we ride and try and buy them is changing, because it is changing. And we're going to talk about all of the tech events coming up in the next several weeks,

• 0:48David Pierce?

  because there are a ton of them. Product announcements, trials, other product announcements. It's going to be a big one. We're going to figure out what's interesting and what isn't. All that's coming up in just a second, but first I got to get this scooter home because I'm down to one bar of battery and things could get bleak pretty quickly here. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

• 1:09Speaker 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.

• 1:54Speaker 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.

• 2:39David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So, one of the most interesting things happening in the gaming world right now is that handheld consoles are making a big comeback.

• 2:50David Pierce?

  The Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch have both been big hits, and now there's the new Logitech G-Cloud Gaming Handheld, which is a terrible name, but seems to be a very interesting product. These are all an interesting confluence of a bunch of things. Faster chips, which mean you can do more with less hardware, new kinds of games, and maybe most of all, a really big push toward cloud gaming. The idea that most of the work done to show you video games should happen somewhere else and then just stream it to you like Netflix. It's a really interesting moment, and there's a lot more to come over the next few years in this space. So Tom Warren is here to talk about all of it.

• 3:28David Pierce?

  Hi, Tom. Thank you for being here. Hello. Good to see you and good to be with you. There's like a bunch of things going on here simultaneously, which is kind of what I wanted to talk about. But I think the place I want to start is this weird new Logitech thing, the G-Cloud handheld, which is, I think, like the all-time worst game console name. Yeah. Put this thing in context for me. Like, why does this thing exist? What is it here for?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's that's probably my biggest question as well, actually. So it's it's essentially an Android tablet that will basically run any Android mobile game within reason, you know, because it doesn't have like the best chip inside. But really, that's not how they're marketing it. They're marketing it as a as a device that will connect up to cloud gaming streaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now and obviously X-Force Cloud Gaming and stuff. And they've worked with Nvidia and Microsoft for this. But when they said they've worked with these two companies, it's pretty light work. Let's put it that way. But either way, it's it's basically an Android tablet that connects up to cloud gaming. And that's the way that they kind of see the vision of the future of handhelds is that, you know, you're not necessarily going to be doing local compute and local gaming that

• 4:34Speaker 02

  you might want to play AAA games, you know, the games that you don't typically get on mobile, but that you don't want to do that on your phone with, you know, one of those clip on cases that's just going to drain your battery life and all this sort of stuff. So it's it's kind of a bet, but it's an interestingly timed bet, I think.

• 4:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's talk about the timing of this because I think that sort of overarching vision you just described makes tons of sense to me, right? I think the the idea that like a video game should be an 80 gigabyte thing on a hard drive somewhere in my house, like, just can't be the future. Like, it just seems wrong to me that that is where all of this is headed. So i- in theory, the idea of cloud gaming, especially as these things become more sort of massively multiplayer and like, like Fortnite should be a cloud game. That makes total sense to me.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:15David Pierce?

  But it does seem like, to some extent, this all might be happening before the world is ready for it, whether it's like the gaming industry or even like the internet bandwidth. But everybody seems to be betting on it like right this minute. So like, what do you make of the timing of all this?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's definitely the best way to describe it, that it's not quite there yet. And I think with Logitech, they've obviously gone all in on the marketing of this being a cloud handheld and and really not even really talked about like the local installing Android games like you would on a bunch of this.

• 5:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like on the side. They're like, oh, also it has YouTube.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  So the marketing is a little bit, a little bit wonky there. I think it all comes back to how we perceive cloud at the moment. So I think a lot of the success that we've seen with cloud gaming is where it's an add-on. It's an optional thing. It's like a bonus. Let's put it, put it that way. But it's not the center of a service. So obviously, Google tried with Stadia to put that as the center of your gaming, you know, the stadium, basically, of your, all your cloud gaming's visions, essentially. But it didn't kind of work because people weren't really ready just to be always connected, always online to play these things. And that kind of comes back to, to Logitech. This thing only has wifi, so it doesn't have a SIM card inside. So you, you know, you hop on a plane or a train or in your car, whatever, instantly you don't have connectivity. So it's, you fall back to whatever's installed in the device, right?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  So I think until that's all there, these kind of devices are a little bit too early, I think. I get the vision of them, but I think also the pricing here is a little bit of an awkwardly priced sort of model. Cause it's, it's two nine nine if you preorder it, but in reality it's three four nine, which sits perfectly in between Nintendo Switch at two nine nine. And then the Steam Deck at three nine nine. So it's like, who is this exactly for, like, right now? In five years, it makes sense maybe, and, and probably the pricing would change. But yeah, like the infrastructure is not quite there. And just, I think the general selling of something is just cloud or like primarily cloud. It's just not quite the, the best way to market something right now.

• 7:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's an interesting thing because I think even if it's true that most games people play require them to be online, which

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:23David Pierce?

  It's probably not like all the way true, but it's definitely more true than it was even a few years ago. The idea that all of a sudden my device is useless if I don't have an internet connection. It's actually, it's like Chromebooks in a weird way, right? Where it's like, do you need the internet to do anything useful on your laptop? Like, yes, of course. Does it still feel weird that your laptop is an absolute useless piece of junk if you don't have an internet connection? Also, yes. And so I feel like we're in this sort of weird middle space where like, even if it's true, the experience as you would get it, it just feels bad.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  The thing with Chromebooks is that we've probably all laughed at them like 10 years ago. It's just a browser and all that sort of stuff, but like now you live in the browser. Like everything.

• 8:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Browser technology's got so much better that you don't need those outside apps. So it's less of a problem, but like a Chromebook, I'm not necessarily using in the back of the car. But like a kid who wants to play games is probably using it at the back of the car. So that like this sort of device just isn't quite there for that. For like where the Nintendo Switch and even the Steam Deck has really sort of risen and in popularity and really proved that these powerful handheld gaming computers basically are on the way. This thing is kind of pulling away from that, that vision, but like, I think it is, you know, in 10 years, sure, that's the way things are heading, like cloud gaming at the moment. I think Nvidia's GeForce now with the RTX 3080 Edition or whatever they call it. That thing is probably the closest that we get to like actually, like I play that on my gaming PC here.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  And like, it's the closest thing to actually being legitimate competitive to that, which is quite a feat for cloud gaming at the moment. But until we, until we get that like really aligned and the infrastructure and everything like that, it's just, it's just a little bit too early to, to rely on that, I think, right now.

• 9:02David Pierce?

  So with cloud gaming in general, one of the reasons I want to talk to you is like, I think you are a much more intense gamer than I am. So like, I play cloud games and I play like, I play a lot of like FIFA and like Fall Guys, the kinds of games where like teeny tiny bits of input lag don't bother me.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:18David Pierce?

  And the story I've heard from people over and over and over again is that like, actually input lag is not as hard a problem as you think, because it's just this tiny piece of data that actually, as long as you have pretty good downstream video, which increasingly lots and lots of people do, then, then your input is actually not going to be the holdup over time. I have also heard and seen a lot of people who play much like faster Twitch, more intense games, say that that is a marketing lie and actually input lag is still a real problem and it's kind of holding this whole experience back. What do you make of it?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  So I think it all depends on what games you play and how you play them. So if you're used to playing on like a, you know, PS4 or Xbox One or a TV that isn't OLED and you're used to that latency, then there will actually be very little difference between moving to cloud gaming, because that TV has a bunch of latency. Anyway, and those those consoles do. So when you when you add up all that system latency versus all the network and displayed latency on cloud gaming, sometimes it's about the same. Um. So it's all what you perceive. So like, imagine you have a one gig internet connection. And that's what you're used to. And then someone else has, you know, a hundred meg, and that's what they used to. You obviously have different expectations of the quality of your internet.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Um. Whereas those people won't have those expectations until they have that one gig. So it's it's also the same. So if you're a PC gamer and you have a low latency, super quick games, uh, first person shooters, you go play cloud gaming, you're probably gonna hate it because you're used to such low latency that like anything just feels laggy. But if you're the other way around, you're a console gamer, you don't have an OLED TV, which, you know, is super low latency. It's all what you perceive. And then those games like, yeah, like platformers, all those sort of games that you usually use controller for, you're not really getting noticed latency as much. But you if you're playing a twitchy first person shooter, you're playing Fortnite, you'll probably notice it more, or Call of Duty.

• 11:03David Pierce?

  As always, the rule is don't buy nice things because it ruins everything else for you. That's that's basically the that's basically the play here.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  But yeah, like if you if you do have an old console and you're thinking, you know, should I upgrade to get an old console? Should it go cloud gaming? Like, it is surprisingly good now. It's getting there. It's just, it all really does depend on your your latency at home, your internet connection, how far you are away from these servers as well, where you live in the world. Like, that makes the biggest difference, really.

• 11:29David Pierce?

  So and then on the handheld front, your point about the G Cloud handheld, which is again just the worst name, being right in the middle of the Switch and the Steam Deck is really interesting because I do think like that seems to be sort of the spectrum. The Switch is like the simple thing with some kind of online capability. The Steam Deck is like the massively powerful PC in your hand. And the G Cloud handheld is somewhere in the middle. And if I were a betting man, I feel like I would bet on the Steam Deck getting, sorry, the Steam Deck. God, these names. I would bet on the Steam Deck getting smaller and cheaper and better quicker than some of these other devices can go in the other direction. What do you think?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's fair because the Steam Deck is pretty, it's pretty chunky. The battery life is not very good. That's one thing that Logitech is, is kind of really honing in on is these, the battery life, they have like 12 hours, which is kind of insane for a handheld.

• 12:21David Pierce?

  That'd be amazing.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, like that, that's, that's great. But obviously it's all, you're just basically streaming video on it. So.

• 12:27David Pierce?

  Which is part of the appeal, right? Like the whole upside of cloud gaming is it's just all you need is a screen and a battery and all the hard work is being done somewhere else.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  But with the Steam Deck, I have a Steam Deck and I can do all this cloud gaming on there anyway. So like I, I get the benefits of that. It's, it's not as, obviously as easy to set up. It's, it's a bit of a process because it's all Linux based and it's all just, you know, you feel like you're hacking sort of thing.

• 12:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  And it's not, it's not as easy to use, but like it's definitely interesting that this, this G cloud gaming handheld thing is in the middle of those two price points. Cause I think if the pricing was a little bit less, there'd be less of a, I've seen like a kind of reaction to it, like whoa, the price, you know? Cause it is a surprising price when you put it in, in context of those two devices as well. And like on this, on the switch side, it's very portable, it's very usable and easy, you know, the usability is easy for anyone to pick it up and install stuff. But the Steam Deck, you know, like that's, unless you're playing just pure PC, you know, Steam games, then you want to load on emulators or you want to get to cloud gaming. And it gets a little bit more complicated right now.

• 13:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. Steam Deck's a lot of work.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. They've got some work to do there on improving the user experience, but I don't know what Logitech would do to then go in the other way to sort of like more support local gaming. So they'd have to like beef up the processor a little bit and that obviously adds to the expense. So.

• 13:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  It's a little bit tricky in both directions, but it is just definitely interesting where, where it is in the middle.

• 13:47David Pierce?

  Totally. And the thing that amazes me the most is that Microsoft and Sony are for all intents and purposes, nowhere to be found here. I mean, it's.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:54David Pierce?

  You, you've got to figure there's a handheld Xbox or like the PS Vita is going to come back, right? Like these have to be coming.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I think with with Sony's case, their cloud gaming platform isn't quite there yet. You know, they they still got some work to do to to to make that a little bit better and a bit more usable. But in Microsoft's case, this is basically their Xbox handheld in a way. Like, I mean, they've kind of co-marketed with Logitech. It's like.

• 14:18David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting. They've used a bunch of their marketing channels to sort of back this up, which they do a lot of the time with like close partners and stuff. But there is rumors of Xbox handhelds. There has been for like, as I don't know, like 10 years, you know, like it's just a constant rumor. And you have to imagine that if Microsoft was gonna do an Xbox handheld, it would probably be similar to what Logitech's vision is there. With, you know, a focus on cloud gaming, because it it just makes sense.

• 14:43David Pierce?

  Yeah. What is your sense within Microsoft? Because I think there's a sort of outside sense that cloud gaming and game pass are what Microsoft sees as like the future. Like, that is that is the big bet of all of this. But then, obviously, we're still in a point where contracts are complicated and the way that video games get made is having to change. And also, Microsoft is out here like buying every gaming developer it can find. So if if Microsoft is gonna like lead the charge here, and it kind of seems like it is, where are we headed? What's the next like year or so gonna look like, do you think?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in the short term, I think it's very much of what it has been the last couple of years, which is their big focus on game pass, which is kind of what they've been pushing. But I think in the longer term, you can see where it's lining up. They want the industry to move to a model where they basically support game developers and studios. They'll come to them and say, look, if you put it on day one on game pass, we'll, you know, invest this amount of money into your game. We'll help you with this amount of marketing, all that sort of stuff, which is deals that they've done traditionally in the past to have exclusivity or some sort of marketing rights over the game or even publishing it and all this sort of game industry mechanics. And I think that's where they're ultimately trying to push the industry towards. And I think Sony's obviously pushing back on that. They believe in their generations. They believe in $70 games and you're paying for the game.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  They obviously have launched their own subscription service, but it's not quite matching the Xbox. So they don't have day one releases there. So they, you know, they're still generating their revenue individually on those big launch titles. But I think it will push the industry in a interesting. New way. And also, I think like, not a lot of people have really talked about it, but is it good? Like, is it good not to have ownership of your games, like in the way that we don't really have ownership of music and?

• 16:21David Pierce?

  Fair question.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  And movies and everything else like that ownership going away has never really been fully addressed in the digital space for like MP3s and and music and and and movies and everything else. So like, I can't sell you my copy of an album, can I? Like, I can't transfer it to you like easily.

• 16:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  So I think there's a lot of things, a lot of questions around that and like where gaming will head as a result of that. But I think in the near term, for Microsoft is getting the game pass numbers up, right? And and Xbox Cloud Gaming is just like an add on on top of that. So it's like, we're everywhere, you know? As long as you've got a browser, you can play our games and that's that's kind of their approach right now. And I think ultimately it'll end up with like, there'll be an Xbox apps on the PlayStation. There'll be a PlayStation app on the Xbox.

• 17:01David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  That's kind of the way we must be heading, surely. Like, if this vision is true and they put billions of dollars into it. That's the end goal, I think, for for for all of them to have their own apps across everywhere. Where you get your exclusive content, just like you do with Disney Plus, Netflix, you name it, so.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  That's true. If if Apple will make Apple TV apps for other platforms, anything is possible. So we're we're gonna be okay.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, I will also say you just made, you came dangerously close to like making the case for why the blockchain will fix video games. And I almost led you there, but we'll just, we'll we'll stay away from that for a while.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  NFTs will save us all.

• 17:35David Pierce?

  Yeah. But the last thing, and then and then I'll let you go, is the appeal of cloud gaming again is that like anything you have with a screen suddenly becomes a thing. And I feel like these controllers that attach to your phone have felt like a good idea to me for so long. And they don't really feel like they've caught on. And like Backbone has made these things, they're very nice, Razer is making them now. Is this a real market? Are people gonna start to buy these in droves as cloud gaming picks up?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they will become more popular, but I do feel like, I mean, Alex wrote about this on the site like a few months ago before the Logitech G-Cloud. Don't mean Christ, trying to say that together is just.

• 18:12David Pierce?

  It's terrible.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Before Logitech announced their handheld. And she basically was arguing that, you know, these devices are great. You know, it's great access to to cloud gaming through your phone and stuff, but it takes your battery, the screen size isn't always perfect. Like this, you get a notification, you're out of the game, like someone tries to phone you, all these considerations, which I think are very irritating if you actually do play cloud gaming on your phone regularly. So I think the hardware is interesting. It's a good stopgap, but we probably are heading towards, you know, these dumb devices, even pucks in the living room, you know, like an Xbox. Microsoft's working on one of those already. They have an Xbox TV app and I think there's a clear vision for the future of where things are going. And I think handhelds will definitely be a part of that.

• 18:55David Pierce?

  So like dedicated hardware, but cheap, simple hardware might be where a lot of this is headed.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think dedicated hardware that has like the UI of that particular streaming service mixed in with, you know, some other third party apps like YouTube and all your sort of media content. That sort of stuff is is kind of interesting, particularly if they get the hardware right, you know, the controls and everything's quite lightweight. You can see why they'd want to do something like that. So I would not be surprised within the next couple of years, we see an Xbox handheld.

• 19:23David Pierce?

  It's just got to happen. Like it's just got to happen. It seems so obvious to me that that would be a thing Microsoft to do. It's like they already make the Surface. It's like it's just take the Surface Go and make it an Xbox. It's like, there it is. We did it. We fixed it for you.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, like it just seems inevitable at this point, but it's just the timing, I think, would be when, when it makes sense. Cause they they got a lot of work to do also on the backend for like Xbox cloud gaming to make it stream at 4K on the TV and stuff. Cause it's still 1080p. So they've got a lot of platform work to do as well to to get it to a certain point. But I mean, that doesn't necessarily impact the handheld so much, those resolutions, but they still they still got some latency work to do for sure.

• 20:00David Pierce?

  Okay, fair enough. All right, well, thank you, Tom. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you why I love scooters. We'll be right back.

• 20:18Speaker 03

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• 21:36David Pierce?

  Welcome back. I have to start this next segment by admitting something. I'm a scooter guy. This is still a slightly embarrassing fact to admit about myself. My wife in particular really likes to remind me of this one day when she saw me on the street and I was wearing sunglasses and AirPods and riding a Bird scooter and the fly on my pants was down and I rode right past her and her friends. And I think that moment was probably the most she ever regretted marrying me. But the thing is scooters have been a huge help in my life. I was in San Francisco when Bird and Lime first showed up a few years ago and I immediately started riding them almost every day. My apartment was a mile from the train and on the other end, it was about a mile and

• 22:21David Pierce?

  a quarter to the office. And by scootering on either side instead of walking, I shaved like a half hour off of my commute each way every day for just a couple of dollars. It was amazing. And when I was done riding, I just got off the scooter and walked away. It was the perfect setup.

• 22:39David Pierce?

  But over the years, the whole ride-share scooter thing got to be less convenient. As they got more popular and more people started riding them, the scooter I left outside my office in the morning stopped being there at the end of the day. And then even when I found ones, it seemed like half the ones I found were out of battery or broken in some way, or just not where the app said they were. But the biggest problem was scooters just got more expensive. The companies that made them needed to find ways to make more money, especially as they went public or got acquired by bigger companies. I actually went back through some of my recent rides, and the numbers really add up. I had a six-minute, 0.8-mile ride to my friend's place, which was $5.59, and the 1.7-mile

• 23:23David Pierce?

  ride from there back to the train was $10.28. I'm paying about five bucks a day just to ride from my house to the train a little less than a mile away. And I actually got a $20 fine from Bird the other day for apparently incorrectly locking my scooter. This all gets really expensive really fast, so I started looking around. Should I just buy a scooter for my commute and for all those quick runs to the grocery store and to pick up dinner? I found this company, Unagi, which makes a scooter called the Model 1, that I think is generally considered to be the best scooter on the market.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  Unagi scooter. A scooter with soul.

• 24:02David Pierce?

  But Unagi doesn't really want to sell you one, at least not at full price. It would much rather you subscribe to one for about $55 a month. I thought that whole setup was kind of odd, so I called up David Hyman, the CEO of Unagi, to convince me that renting a scooter is the move.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  We kind of envision our subscription service, it's like mailing a giant Netflix DVD mailer. They're so lightweight, that's kind of what helps make the model work. It shows up at your door in under 72 hours. If anything happens to it, we send you a new one. If you threw the box away, we send you an empty box and you send yours back. We don't make you wait to get yours repaired. You get a new one right away. People's transportation, they want it to be effortless. They don't want hassle, they don't want downtime. Car downtime sucks.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  David told me that this idea is really working. About 20 people subscribe to an Unagi scooter for every one that buys it outright. And the case he makes is pretty convincing. I don't want to care about maintenance. I don't even know that I'm going to want this scooter forever. So spending $1,000 on it seems crazy. But I do know that $55 a month is actually a lot less than I'm spending on scooter rides right now. More broadly, this is a real trend in the industry. Bird will happily sell you one of its scooters, for instance, and has tried a similar thing where you can pay extra to make sure there's always a bird nearby. But the thing I couldn't shake was the convenience part. It's so nice to just get off a scooter, lock it up, and then never think about it again. Not my problem.

• 25:31David Pierce?

  And now I'm supposed to lug this thing around and charge it myself and like carry it into the coffee shop with me? David said, yeah, it's a trade off, but he thinks it's worth it.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  I always put it down next to me in a cafe. I bring it into a movie theater and put it in the aisle, throw it in the shopping cart at the supermarket. That's how I handle it. It's not ideal. Really, when I go to a restaurant, nobody cares. But one day, if everyone were to do this, restaurants would start going, no, we're not going to have 20 scooters in the restaurant.

• 26:04David Pierce?

  You know what this means, right? This means valet scooter parking is going to be a thing. What a world we live in, my friends. Anyway, I ended up giving it a shot.

• 26:14David Pierce?

  I went to Unagi's website and forked over $55 a month plus a $50 setup fee to get a scooter. This was, I think, 4th of July weekend or thereabouts. I've been riding it around all summer and I have to say, I think Unagi is on to something here. Yes, it is, in fact, a little annoying to have to carry the scooter onto the train. And the person at my hair salon the other day was very confused about why I wanted to bring my scooter inside. But it feels like a worthwhile trade just to have the scooter there whenever I need it. It weighs about 28 pounds, which will sound like a lot to some people and not much to others, but to me, it's been okay to carry around, at least for small bits of time. I'm more of a scooter guy than ever after the last few months, and I'm still a pretty happy Unagi subscriber.

• 26:57David Pierce?

  $55 a month sounds really steep, but it's been easily worth it for me. The math totally pans out in my case.

• 27:06David Pierce?

  And now, Unagi also has a new scooter called the Model 1 Voyager, which David told me he hopes will convince even more people to buy into the scooter lifestyle. It's a little heavier, but it's faster and works better and has more range. And the idea is it's much more of a commuter vehicle. More broadly, though, the idea of vehicle subscriptions is totally fascinating to me. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it going forward, especially as new kinds of vehicles keep being introduced into our lives. Like, here's Lee Hang Nong, the CEO of a mobility company called Nimbus.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  The ability to use a vehicle like this and not have to commit to an ownership is really appealing. Combine that with the convenience of getting the vehicle delivered to you. You don't have to think about, like, when you buy a car, you have to go to the DMV, you have to get insurance, all that stuff. If that's taken care of for you as well, that's really convenient and really nice.

• 27:58David Pierce?

  Nimbus makes a vehicle called the Nimbus 1, which is this futuristic-looking thing that's kind of a cross between a tricycle and a car. It's this super skinny thing with one seat and three wheels, and you sit inside it and drive it with a steering wheel, but it tilts as it goes like a motorcycle.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  We call it a POD, P-O-D, because we don't think it's a car. We want to stay away from that paradigm.

• 28:25David Pierce?

  Whatever you call it, it's not available for sale yet. But when it is, you'll be able to buy one for about 10 grand or subscribe to one for a couple hundred bucks a month. Or, if you don't want to do that, just grab one off the street whenever you need one for a few minutes. Nimbus wants to do all the things, all the ways.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Rent by the minute, free-floating, that's really convenient, but it's going to cost a little bit more because you're basically paying someone to move it for you and charge it for you. So that's going to add a little bit more to the cost. But if you're in a hurry, you don't really care. If you're using something day-to-day, then you want that vehicle to be yours.

• 29:00David Pierce?

  There's a big galaxy brain take in there somewhere about the end of ownership and the fact that people are increasingly willing to pay for convenience rather than having something that's permanently theirs. I tend to agree with Lee Hang's take, though, that the answer is actually lots of business models and lots of different systems for lots of different things. And weirdly, over the last few months, I've now been thinking about that subscription spectrum with almost everything in my life.

• 29:26David Pierce?

  What do I want to own? What do I want to rent? And what do I want to just be there occasionally when I need it? I should probably just buy The Office because I watch that constantly. I'll subscribe to YouTube TV in the fall because I need football. And then I'll cancel that. And then I can just pay $10 for a month of showtime when a new season of Yellowjackets drops and then cancel when I'm done. I don't even really own my phone, but I pay $50 or so a month and I get one. And then I can upgrade it every year. So that works. I don't know that I need to own my phone. But I do own my computer because that thing better last me a decade. And I also want to keep it around just in case even after that. In so many places in our lives, there's going to be a spectrum of ways to own, subscribe, rent, borrow, everything else.

• 30:10David Pierce?

  And then also a lot of companies competing to help you manage all that stuff in a way that makes sense. This all feels new and different and expensive, but I kind of think it's fascinating.

• 30:21David Pierce?

  And I asked David from Unagi how far he thinks this will go. He's been in subscriptions forever. He was early in the streaming music game. He founded Mog, which became Beats Music, which became Apple Music. And he's seen a lot about how people's feelings about music ownership and everything else ownership has changed. People don't buy CDs anymore. So is everything going that way?

• 30:42Speaker 04

  I don't think it works across all hardware. There's a whole bunch of numbers involved, like the cost to acquire a customer, what the churn rate is, cost of servicing. The fact that the scooter is lightweight and that we can ship them small parcel back and forth is kind of a cornerstone to making our model work. I don't think it works for electric bikes. They're too heavy. The cost to ship them back and forth and the fact that they have so many moving parts with derailers and gears. I think both for shipping and servicing them, those costs will break the model. You know, I think it's going to be very industry specific. We're rarely at much the forefront of this hardware as a service category

• 31:25Speaker 04

  that's going to, I think, grow a lot in the next 10 to 20 years.

• 31:31David Pierce?

  I'm still torn about all of this, honestly, because part of me thinks it is just too expensive and complicated, and that maybe we should just go back to buying things and taking care of them, and just a simpler idea of how we think about our stuff. But I also like the idea that when it gets cold here in DC, and I don't want to ride this scooter for six months, it won't cost me a nickel until I want to get back on. Only paying for things when you actually use them? I like that a lot.

• 32:05David Pierce?

  Okay, we need to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and go through all of the tech announcements that are coming in the next several weeks, because there's a lot coming. We'll be right back.

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• 33:37David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So today, September 28th, is the beginning of just a crazy run of tech events over the next several weeks. And honestly, my head is totally spinning about what's coming, whether any of it matters, what I should buy, what I should care about, and what I should be watching out for. So I brought in my co-hosts, Neelai Patel and Alex Krantz, to help me figure it out. Neelai and Alex, thank you for coming to me in this trying time of mine. I appreciate it.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm here for you, buddy.

• 34:05Alex Cranz?

  We're here.

• 34:06David Pierce?

  I didn't tell you either of you what we're doing here, because you would not have come if I told you. So the shtick of what we're gonna do here is, I have a list of 10 producty, launchy things coming in the next four weeks.

• 34:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh, boy.

• 34:17David Pierce?

  And we're just gonna blast through them, and we will talk about them in as much or as little detail as we want to.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  So we're gonna read your calendar together.

• 34:25David Pierce?

  Yes. And I'm gonna tell you which flights I'm taking for each one. Okay, and the good news is, we start very quickly, because I think we can get past this one pretty fast. The first one coming up is today, the day a lot of people will be hearing this episode. Wednesday, September 28th, is Google's big Search On search event. This is the thing they do every year where they talk about search. Do we care? Are we interested? Do either of you have anything you're interested or curious about from this event this year?

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  I always want to know how many search results Google is gonna keep for itself. And I feel like they should just announce that at the top of the Search On event.

• 34:59Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, interesting.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  Be like, we're sending less traffic to people who use our search engine every day. And this year, we've turned the knob, and now we're keeping 80% of the traffic.

• 35:08David Pierce?

  They probably do have that number, don't they? Like, that is somewhere that they know.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  They have to have that number.

• 35:12Alex Cranz?

  Because that's how, like, they make money. They keep the traffic.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  And David, you just wrote the piece about using TikTok as your primary search engine, and it was like, fine. And I think Google knows this.

• 35:23David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  And a huge problem with the experience of using Google right now is, everybody is trying to game the search engine. So if you search for how to do something, you end up with a page that has been written for a robot instead of a person. The classic example is, if you search for a recipe, you end up with like, a personal essay. It's there to game the search engine.

• 35:44David Pierce?

  Right. And the people who make those pages will tell you that. I actually wrote a story about that a couple of years ago, where I was basically like, why are all recipe webpages awful in exactly the same way? And every single one of them was like, it's just SEO. Like, if I don't do it, literally, no one will find me. So I have to write 2,000 words about how my day went before I get to the recipe, or else Google literally will pretend I don't exist.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then you like search for the recipe on TikTok and someone's like, here it is in two minutes.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  Pause if you want to see the ingredients.

• 36:07Alex Cranz?

  But how do you know if those recipes are good? That's why I like the, I like the little essay. I'm, I'm like, I'm like, Google does this. I want to know, I want to know how much love your mom put into that biscuit recipe.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  What was up with the pioneer woman this week?

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  Tell me more.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think this is like the real challenge for Google because the more of it they keep and the more they synthesize the result into directly the thing, the more it cuts against, oh, decades of how people have thought about Google's search engine and how to participate.

• 36:34David Pierce?

  And in a real way, like the, the thing I'm curious about is like, Google as the homepage of the internet is a thing that I think Google has always tried to play down. But every time, like for that TikTok thing, I went and looked at a bunch of studies and it's like, the most popular search terms are like the word Facebook and the word Google and the word YouTube. And that's just, that's like how people explore the internet. They like type the thing they want into Google and then go that way. And that is like a level of power, especially as Google starts to pull that stuff back for itself that it's going to get even crazier.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  People typing TikTok into Google and getting YouTube shorts is.

• 37:05David Pierce?

  Ooh, yeah.

• 37:06Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, I love it.

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be a game that gets played.

• 37:08David Pierce?

  It's coming.

• 37:09Alex Cranz?

  That's beautiful.

• 37:10David Pierce?

  Okay, next one, the same day, also today, is Amazon's whatever product announcement it's going to be. I call this one the, the traditional like spaghetti throwing day by Amazon, where they're just like, here's some things that exist that have Alexa inside.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  Like 48 different microwaves that all have Alexa.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  It's always hard to know, they're going to change the Echo. The holidays are coming, so last year it was a sphere. This year I'm hoping for cube. Why not?

• 37:34Alex Cranz?

  Really sharp edges.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  This one's called a rhombus, like, which is do whatever you want to do. Like, I mean, that's the thing. They haven't added capabilities to it in a year and I don't think they will because it's still hardware. And then it's like, whatever else they can put Alexa in, maybe some ring cameras, right?

• 37:49David Pierce?

  I just assumed they're going to talk a lot about football.

• 37:50Alex Cranz?

  I mean, a robot, we could get another robot.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  Does anyone have the Astro? Did that work? Like, has this thing resurfaced at all since it was initially announced?

• 37:59Alex Cranz?

  I think the only people who have Astros are people who had to review them.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think some people want them, but they, they, look, Amazon has to solve the problem of what is Alexa good for beyond sending a timer and maybe some smart home automations? I'm hopeful we hear a bunch of stuff about Matter, which expands that universe of smart home stuff, but we'll see.

• 38:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do think of all of these, it was very funny because Amazon is the one that literally could go absolutely any direction, uh, which kind of makes those events fun because you just. You just never know. Like it, they could announce anything and it would not surprise me.

• 38:29Alex Cranz?

  Except for every year, I'm like, this year they will announce a Kindle at this event. And every year they were like, we will not announce a Kindle at this event.

• 38:37David Pierce?

  Okay. Next one is on Friday, I believe, is Tesla's AI day. I assume more robots.

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  So Elon has promised they're going to show off a prototype of this robot, right?

• 38:47David Pierce?

  Oh, he has. Oh, okay.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  The hype machine is like off to the races.

• 38:50David Pierce?

  Will it be a person dancing, pretending to be a robot again?

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  Last year it was a guy in a, in like a bunny suit, not a bunny suit. What's that thing called? The unitard?

• 38:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. He was just in a unitard, like just in a unitard and a mask, doing his little dance.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  It was very confusing. I mean, in, you know, in the classic Elon way, also hilarious. Like Elon knew it was a guy in a suit.

• 39:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  But was he fooling anyone? Who knows? We're supposed to see it and it's supposed to do, like, we'll see. I don't think they're actually going to show a robot that can do anything other than stumble. Like, how many Honda robots have we seen in our lives?

• 39:24Alex Cranz?

  I do not think we will see a robot that does anything more substantial than maybe Wave.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Alex Cranz?

  Cause like walking is really hard for robots. And if they do the like, the Honda Sony robot that looks like it's pooping itself, like Tesla can't afford to do that.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, look, the bar here is Boston Dynamics is like, these robots can dance and maybe murder you, right? It's like this, this robot dog can run up a flight of stairs, open a door, and then like do a full choreographed dance routine. Also, we're not saying we haven't put a gun on it, right? That's the bar of robots.

• 39:59David Pierce?

  This one doesn't have a gun, but here's where it would go.

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  Exactly.

• 40:03Alex Cranz?

  The little hand.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. Elon's got to hit the Boston Dynamics special. That's what I'm saying before, before we can say we're so, so impressed.

• 40:10David Pierce?

  Yeah. The, the Verge's official stance on this is that it is absolute vaporware until proven otherwise, right? Like I remember the stories from last year that were basically like, just to be clear, everybody, this is probably nothing.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:20David Pierce?

  Let's all move on with our lives.

• 40:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we'll see.

• 40:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's the Hyperloop of robots.

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  Remember when they announced a full Hyperloop in the city of Chicago? And they're like, this will get you to the airport so fast. Everyone's like, the blue line, just make the blue line good. There's no Hyperloop in Chicago.

• 40:35David Pierce?

  Surprise. Okay, next one. October 6th, like a week from now, is Google's Pixel 7 Pixel Watch event. And I feel like that one, we know everything about. Google has just resorted to the strategy of just like leaking its own things to death.

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just announced. It's like making videos for the Pixel Watch you can go watch.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Nilay Patel?

  So V thinks that the videos are hiding the world's biggest bezel.

• 40:57David Pierce?

  Oh, is that why they're all dark? All the backgrounds are always dark?

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  She's like, I guarantee you there's a world's biggest bezel on this thing. So that's one thing I'm curious about.

• 41:04Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  They've got to differentiate against Samsung, which is running the same operating system now, which is curious, right? Like, how are they gonna do it without pissing off their partner? Who knows? I just want to see what the battery life on this thing is like, because Wear OS does not have a great history here.

• 41:18Alex Cranz?

  I'm kind of excited about the tablet. It's been a while since they made a tablet, and that one was bad. Maybe this one could be good. I don't like, I think, I think Chrome OS and Android both make sense for a tablet. So I like, I want it to succeed, just because it seems like a normal place for a tablet to exist, but it has to actually not suck. And that's been historically very, very difficult for all the different parts of Google to do.

• 41:43David Pierce?

  Yeah. Part of me wonders, like with the news about the Pixel Book from a couple of weeks ago, like if Google hadn't announced all of this stuff already in June, if it would still be planning to ship all of these things in their current form. Like, the tablet in particular seems like it would be a very easy one for Google to just sort of nope out of, except that it already announced it's doing it, and they can't bail again, at least not yet. They'll bail again in a year and a half. But I am curious to see how much they talk about the tablet and how much it feels like a thing they care about as opposed to like, oh, and also, look, it's a tablet. You can have one.

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  I will be surprised if they spend more than five minutes on the tablet.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, over/under, they spend more time on the tablet or more time on RCS?

• 42:19David Pierce?

  I'd bet on RCS. I think I'd bet on RCS.

• 42:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:22David Pierce?

  Because it's also like, it's a fun knife that Google gets to twists now. And especially after what Tim Cook said a couple of weeks ago at Code, this is a moment like, Google does not get a lot of like moral high ground moments in the fight against Apple. And this is one that I suspect Google's gonna just absolutely milk the hell out of. That'll be fun.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a bold prediction that they're gonna spend more time making fun of Apple than announcing their own product, but I'm with you. I think that's true as well.

• 42:45David Pierce?

  That might just be hopeful rather than an actual prediction. But I'm definitely hoping for it. Okay, so next up, another thing that I think we actually know quite a bit about is October 11th. There's, I believe it's called MetaConnect now. It used to be Oculus Connect. Now it's MetaConnect. And I think the thing that we know is coming, there will presumably be other stuff, but we know that this is when Project Cambria, their high-end VR headset is coming, right?

• 43:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:08David Pierce?

  You think? We know?

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, we've seen the thing.

• 43:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  This has also been, it was left, I'm making the most sarcastic of quotes with my fingers. It was left in a hotel where someone found it. And that someone was Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan Experience. Yeah, so it was left, people found it, it showed up on Reddit. Separately Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan Experience and Joe Rogan got to play with it, it appears. That's what they made it sound like.

• 43:32David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  They did kickboxing together.

• 43:34David Pierce?

  Are we interested? Do we care about this? I can't decide on the spectrum of like, those crazy, like, Microsoft prototype headsets that they were like, these cost a million dollars and six people will ever buy them, but they have cool technology, all the way down to like, a Quest 3, which I would be very excited about, like, where on the spectrum I feel like we should be?

• 43:52Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think it depends on how good the fidelity, the visual fidelity of the thing is, right? That's the point where people who have adopted VR, which is, what, more than 4 million people have picked up a Quest headset at this point? Like, that's a decent little market of folks. And if they can make something that is visually interesting, that's a step up, kind of like consoles used to be a step up every time you bought a new console, that's a deal. That's cool.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  We're going to the holidays.

• 44:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  And this is a thing that you can buy a tech person in your life that they probably don't already have, which is, I think, why the Quest 2 was so successful, because it was reasonably cheap.

• 44:27Alex Cranz?

  100%.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  And if you have like a gearhead in your life, you like, buy them. And it's cool. Like, the thing works. It's a great, I think the Quest 2 is a great product.

• 44:34David Pierce?

  I agree.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  I think the question is, is the Quest Pro going to be like, the same size and more capable, like, have more features, more visual fidelity? Or do they make it smaller and better? Because if you leave it the same size, you could do a lot in that case, but that's, the Quest 2 is still pretty big.

• 44:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's not comfortable to wear for a long time. But if you add a bunch of features to it, then you're like, you should wear it for a long time, but then it's still too heavy. So like, there's a little trade-off inside of the size and it's, it's like horsepower that you gotta make, that I don't think Facebook has figured out yet. That's the thing I'm most curious about.

• 45:04David Pierce?

  Well, and as Facebook has, as Meta, I guess, has talked about all these different prototypes they're working on and stuff, they're pushing in every direction of that all at once, right? It's the like, how do we do more in the space? How do we make it smaller? How do we make it the same size but lighter? And it's going to be interesting to see which one they picked to actually be a thing that people put on their heads. It's a real like statement of intent, which direction they want to go with this.

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  What I think they should do is come out with a ceiling mat that holds your head up while you're wearing a heavy headset and you're just kind of like tethered to the ceiling, just kind of floating along.

• 45:32Alex Cranz?

  Wasn't that the original, the, the original headset? Like the very first VR headset was tethered to the ceiling?

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  But with like a cable. I don't think it was like being held.

• 45:41David Pierce?

  So it like, it basically, it's like a chandelier and you just sort of get into it.

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. And then you've got, and you're doing like a, like a wire foo kind of thing, just like floating around in space.

• 45:51David Pierce?

  Oh, I love this. It solves all kinds of problems. You can have legs then. Who needs legs? You're floating.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  You're just kicking. You're just doing kicks.

• 45:58David Pierce?

  That's good. Okay. Well, you heard it here first. That's what's coming. Okay. And then the following day, Microsoft is having a Surface event. And I believe if my math is not mistaken, this is the 10 year anniversary of Surface, which I think presumably means this is going to be something. I feel like Microsoft is a company that likes the anniversaries. So I would not be surprised if there's like some real meaningful new hardware here.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Alex Cranz?

  They've kind of given up on the dual screen. They flirted with dual screen and then they stepped back from it.

• 46:25David Pierce?

  Dan Seifert loves his Duo.

• 46:27Alex Cranz?

  But not as his main phone.

• 46:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just the most expensive ebook reader of all time. It's perfect.

• 46:31Alex Cranz?

  He could never make fun of any of the e-readers I've bought this year, given that he owns that one e-reader. But yeah, no, I think like we're, do a refresh on the Duo, but I think the Surface is, you know, Microsoft, give them credit. They did create this entire new form factor, like this whole new category of computing devices. Are they going to do something weird there? Or is it just going to be like even sleeker, even thinner and nicer? But also a full Windows machine.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, and the thing they're pushing up against is that there was the big PC market acceleration in the pandemic two years ago.

• 47:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  That is now just slowed down.

• 47:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  So a lot of people who are going to buy laptops and PCs over a long timeline all bought them at the same time. And now it's like they all have them. So convincing someone to upgrade from the great laptop they bought last year is actually pretty challenging. So we'll see.

• 47:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  But I bet they do something cool for the end. I mean, you know, Panos is going to have a time.

• 47:23Alex Cranz?

  The Surface Go, maybe? That was their, their really small one. That's cool. And I feel like there's a lot of room for improvement on that device.

• 47:31David Pierce?

  That's the one. I feel like the Surface Pro is like, great. And we'll just keep getting sort of iterative upgrades forever. Same with the Surface Laptop. Surface Book, you could do some cool stuff with. But I agree. I feel like the Go is the one that is like, just not nearly as good as it ought to be and could be much more interesting.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, the thing I want is a kick ass Surface Studio, the big desktop that folds down.

• 47:50David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  They keep nerfing the processor in that thing.

• 47:53Alex Cranz?

  One with a processor that actually came out this year.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's basically what I'm looking for. Yeah.

• 47:58David Pierce?

  That's a lot to ask for. Okay, next up, we have four more to get through, but I think a couple of these we'll do very quickly. I wrote down, there's a Samsung Developer Conference, the same day as the Surface thing. Does anything ever come out of the Samsung Developer Conference? I have honestly no memory of this.

• 48:12Alex Cranz?

  Bixby.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  This is the year, boys.

• 48:15Alex Cranz?

  This is the year. Come on.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  No, I decline to engage.

• 48:19David Pierce?

  There we go. Okay. And then October 17th, this one only half counts, but we're going to cover it a lot. So we're going to talk about it anyway, is when the Elon Musk Twitter trial, if it's going to happen, starts. And I feel like every day we get closer to it, it seems more likely that it's actually going to happen. We're all moving to Delaware. It's going to be a whole thing.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  Did we redesign our entire site to better cover the Elon Musk Twitter trial? Maybe.

• 48:40David Pierce?

  Not entirely untrue.

• 48:42Alex Cranz?

  Who can say?

• 48:43David Pierce?

  Do we have any inkling that this trial isn't going to happen? I feel like this is, it has slowed down. The last few weeks, it is like, it's sort of the calm before the storm, it feels like.

• 48:51Alex Cranz?

  It's absolutely happening. Like, they want him to buy it. He doesn't want to buy it. Nothing's changed there.

• 48:58David Pierce?

  The economy has not gotten better.

• 48:59Alex Cranz?

  Nothing's going to change there.

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  And the people who run Twitter seem less and less interested in running Twitter by the day.

• 49:05David Pierce?

  That's real.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  It's definitely going to trial. Will they settle after the first day? Right? Like, he's being deposed this week or next, I think. Right? His deposition happens. I mean, I think he's gonna want to fight it. But at some point, money solves this case.

• 49:19David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  And so it's just a question of how much money Elon pays for what.

• 49:23David Pierce?

  My only ask is that if this does settle, it would be a real bummer from like an interesting story perspective if it settles ahead of the trial. But if it does, my only request is that he pay with one of those like big giant novelty checks. Just because that feels.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  That feels like Elon.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  Delivered by a guy in a robot suit.

• 49:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. Delivered by a guy in a robot suit. In a self-driving car that doesn't really self-drive, but just sort of like flings past the Twitter office in San Francisco. This all sounds good. Okay, then there is Adobe Max, which I would not always include on this list because it tends to get very sort of arcane in this stuff. But I feel like after the Figma acquisition, Adobe is probably gonna talk an awful lot about the internet at Adobe Max and all the stuff that they're doing to make their stuff more accessible to more people. And I think this might be a really interesting year for creator tools.

• 50:12Alex Cranz?

  That event is always kind of cool because they'll be like, here's something that will maybe come to Photoshop four years from now. And isn't it incredible? We can replace your grandmother with your grandfather in this photo. All you have to do is click. And I always, like, I love all those demos. They're just wild. And then occasionally they come and they are nothing like what I saw in the demo. And it's much harder to do, but it's great. But if they can start bringing those tools, a lot of it, like, right now, Photoshop, the online kind of versions of Photoshop, the ones on iOS and everything else, still have nowhere near the same amount of features as what you get with the full, the whole shebang. And they need to close that gap.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  This was a thing that Scott Belsky, who's the Chief Product Officer at Adobe, was saying, because people aren't reasonably mad about Photoshop pushing you towards Photoshop cloud files now instead of spitting out PSDs. And like, you can still get the PSDs, but it wants you to do the cloud thing. And he was like, in order to make Photoshop on iPad and the web more powerful, and then compete with things like Figma, you need the files to live in the cloud. And it's just like, that's a big battleship to turn, right? Like, this is the Microsoft Excel tool bar. Like, every button that you might want to remove there is 10 million people who are going to be mad at you.

• 51:27David Pierce?

  And who use your tool literally for a living.

• 51:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you can't, can't mess with it. We'll see if they talk about Figma. I think my prediction for Adobe Max, I agree with you, Alex. Adobe Max and Siggraph are like my two favorite shows of the year. It's like watching what people can do with creative tools. Amazing. They're going to talk a lot about AI art, right? They have to. It's the thing, right? They're going to talk about stable diffusion and Dolly and all the rest of it. I think that's going to be really fun.

• 51:51David Pierce?

  It does seem like at some point, it would be weird for Adobe not to do that, right? Like, that is the next obvious turn for Adobe here. It's like, oh, you don't want to learn how to use Photoshop? No problem. Just type into this prompt in Photoshop, and we will do it.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Be like, family who loves me, push the button, spits it right out, at Niagara Falls, great, done. And then you're like, sell it as an NFT. And like, you're just a one man hype band, all on the comfort of your own home.

• 52:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay. And then last one, and I put this one at the end, because we don't really know when it's happening, or if it's happening, or in what way it's going to happen. But there is a bunch of Apple stuff that we are assuming is yet to launch. Some more iPads, maybe IMAX, maybe some other headphones. I don't know. But then there was the report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, saying that instead of an event in October, Apple might just do a trickle of press releases and stuff. Is there anything exciting left this year that we think we're waiting for?

• 52:46Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's mainly going to be processor upgrades, right? Like, the iPad Pro will go from an M1 to an M2, I would assume. Same with the IMAX. The iPad is do something, but they haven't redesigned it. Like, they seem very content with how the iPad is. So when he wrote that piece, I was like, yeah, that makes sense.

• 53:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, so but there's no Mac Pro with an M series chip in it yet. There's Mac Studio, which is people love, but there's no Mac Pro.

• 53:11David Pierce?

  And they've hinted towards the Mac Pro, which makes us think at some point that is coming.

• 53:14Alex Cranz?

  Aren't we owed the Mac Pro? Didn't they say they were finishing the Switch?

• 53:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, he said like, the only one left is the Mac Pro. And then it was like, but that's for another day or something like that.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  So like, it's coming.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  The fact that you can just like buy an 18 core Xeon Tower from Apple right now is like very funny.

• 53:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, you can definitely just buy, I'm specking one out right now. Yeah, I mean, look, the MacBook Pros, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro is like the best computer I've ever made. There's almost nothing you could add to that machine that would make me upgrade. More battery life, but like, it's great. So I think M2 Pros as an upgrade, or M2 Maxes as an upgrade for those machines, I think, that does seem press release-y, right? Like, that's a benchmark story. Okay, then I think the iMac, you could build a bigger screen iMac that might be an event, but you could also just send those out to a bunch of people.

• 54:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, you just say, look, the iMac we have, it's bigger now. Although I do know a number of people who are anxiously awaiting the return of the 27-inch iMac, which I don't know if it's ever gonna happen, or if it's gonna happen in October, but that would be big news in certain circles.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Again, as the person who's currently recording this on a 2015 27-inch iMac.

• 54:18David Pierce?

  Woof.

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  It's great. It has 32 gigs of RAM. And if you're, I'm just telling you everyone this. If you just shove as much RAM into the computer as you can get at the outset, it will last forever.

• 54:29David Pierce?

  That's basically true.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  You can't kill this machine because it has 32 gigs of RAM. But yeah, I think all this stuff, even an M2 iPad Pro, we're in the heart of that product's design cycle, right? They're not gonna change the way it looks.

• 54:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  So I think fundamentally, you get the new stuff when the way it looks changes.

• 54:45David Pierce?

  All right, out of all of this, is there any one thing you're like most anticipating, curious about, looking forward to, excited about? Alex, do you have anything?

• 54:53Alex Cranz?

  The iPad Pro, because I need to update mine. And I didn't want the first generation, because the first generation always makes me sad.

• 55:00David Pierce?

  You just want Stage Manager so bad.

• 55:01Nilay Patel?

  This is why they're not doing an event. They know they can't demo Stage Manager in person to a group of people. They can't have us in the Steve Jobs Theater trying to use Stage Manager.

• 55:09David Pierce?

  Craig Federighi steadfastly refused to say piles onstage ever again. So they can't do it.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  It's like, we're not doing this. That's a good one. I would say that's exciting. I'm, I would say I'm excited for the Pixel event.

• 55:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  I want, I want to see how they're going to, you know, for the 50th time, how they're going to convince us that they're for real this time.

• 55:27David Pierce?

  This is the year.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  Instead of writing that story for us at The Verge, Dieter is now at Google to preemptively shape that story. So we'll see. But I'm excited. I've been, the watch is a big deal. Like, they bought Fitbit. The promise of this product was an entire acquisition. So I'm curious.

• 55:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's mine, too. The, the watch and specifically the fitness stuff they tried to put into it because like, Fitbit has meant a lot to a lot of people for a really long time. And whether Google, A, can be good stewards of that and B, like, push that along in useful ways is going to be super interesting.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's really what I want to know. It's like, why am I excited?

• 56:01David Pierce?

  If the bezel on the tablet is any indication, the watch is going to be like two-thirds bezel, one-third screen is what seems to be. It seems to be Google's move for a lot of its first-gen stuff. It's really, it's good times.

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  I mean, honestly, like, why am I excited for this event? So I can hear the, from, you know, 100 miles away screaming, "I told you so."

• 56:24David Pierce?

  Okay. As you can tell, there is a lot coming in the next few weeks. But that's it for The Vergecast today. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is a lot more coverage on everything we talked about at our still newly redesigned website, theverge.com. You can follow all of us on Twitter. Tom is Tom Warren. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Neelai is Reckless, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Nori 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, jingles, scooter ideas, you can always email us at [email protected]. Also, we are getting an episode ready all about cybersecurity for later in October.

• 57:06David Pierce?

  And we're going to do a full-on call-in show answering all of your weirdest cybersecurity questions. So if you have something you can't figure out, or better yet, have a crazy internet cybersecurity mystery you can't solve, call us, 866-VERGE11, or send us a voice memo to [email protected] and we'll get back to you if we think we can help. Alex, Neelai, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Google, Amazon, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 57:43Speaker 09

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