Passkeys might really kill passwords

Today on the flagship podcast of video podcasts: 02:52 - The Verge's David Pierce chats with 1Password's Anna Pobletts about good password hygiene, passkeys, and the upsides of a third-party password manager. Passkeys: all the news and updates around passwordless sign-on support Biometrics? Bring it on: why Okta’s Jameeka Green Aaron wants passwords to go away How to use a passkey to sign in to your Google account 1Password’s passkeys explainer 31:56 - Victoria Song joins the show to discuss the state of wearables and why this may be the year for the smart ring. Fossil is quitting smartwatches This might be the year of the smart ring The best smartwatches for Android The best fitness trackers to buy right now 58:46 -Later, David answers a question from The Vergecast Hotline. Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not Here’s how much the Vision Pro’s accessories cost Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Subscribe to The Verge's YouTube channel for full Vergecast episodes. 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.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of video podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce, and if you're watching this on YouTube, there's a decent chance you're noticing something slightly different for one of our Tuesday episodes, which is my face. So we just finished moving the show from the Vergecast channel to the Verge's channel. And you should stay subscribed on the Vergecast channel, by the way. We're going to do clips there and some extras and maybe even some live stuff over time. We have big plans for that channel. But for the main episodes, Tuesdays and Fridays, stay tuned to the Verge's channel. You can subscribe to the channel, you can subscribe in YouTube Music, you can subscribe to the podcast playlist specifically. The world is your oyster. It should be very easy. I know we had some migration issues the last few days, but I think those are solved now. And if they're not, send us the email, [email protected]. We'll get it fixed.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  Oh, and by the way, if you're like, what are you talking about? I listen to podcasts because people listen to podcasts, and I have a podcast app, and I've never seen David's face, and I don't even want to see David's face. Totally fine. I get that all the time. Nothing should change. Everything will be as normal, so don't worry. All right, that's enough housekeeping for now. Let's just get into the show. We're going to do two things on today's episode. First, we're going to talk about pass keys, which are this supposedly revolutionary technology that is going to make being online easier and simpler and more secure all at the same time. It's very cool, it's growing really fast, and I have realized I don't understand pass keys, like, at all. So we found somebody who does, and we're going to figure it out together. Then we're going to talk about wearables. And the idea that wearables are just smartwatches feels wrong to me.

• 1:32David Pierce?

  Like, I wear an Apple Watch. I love my Apple Watch. But we were promised this big revolution in wearable technology, and I don't think we ever really got it. So we're going to try to figure out why. All that is coming up in just a second. But first, I have to go home and make my face and hair look better before I have to do this again. This is The Vergecast. Let's go.

• 1:52Speaker 01

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• 2:47David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, let's talk about how to have good password hygiene on the internet, which is the least interesting thing I could possibly imagine saying to begin this. But that's actually part of why I want to talk about this. I feel like I've spent most of my life scolding people to have better passwords and use a password manager and get two-factor authentication, but not SMS two-factor authentication. And it turns out most people just don't care. And even I still use the same password across way too many services. It's a real problem. But there's this one new technology called pass keys that in theory might be the solution to all of our problems. It's designed to be more secure than passwords and also simpler than passwords and basically just better in every imaginable way.

• 3:32David Pierce?

  And it's growing really fast. Google supports pass keys now, so does Amazon. iOS and Android both do. You can pass key login to TikTok and WhatsApp and Uber and PayPal and a whole bunch of other services. This tech is very much catching on in a way a lot of the supposed replacements to the password haven't in the past. But I have to confess, I don't really understand pass keys. I mean, I understand the theory. They use an encrypted token on your device to authenticate you rather than a password that you type into a text box. That's about all I understand about it. So I invited onto the show somebody who knows much better.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Anna Poblitz, head of passwordless at OnePassword.

• 4:11David Pierce?

  Anna has been working on passwordless tech for a long time. So I asked her to come on the show and explain to me how pass keys work, why everyone is convinced they're the future, and most of all, how we as normal humans are supposed to use them in our lives. One note before we get into it, she talks a bunch about OnePassword specifically, which makes sense, I mean, that's where she works. But a lot of what she's talking about is true for most password managers and most platforms. That's part of the point of pass keys, is that they are the same everywhere. She also makes a point later on in the interview about the upsides of a third-party cross-platform password manager, rather than using the ones built into your device. And I actually think that argument is pretty compelling. But again, there are a lot of good options there, and you kind of can't go wrong.

• 4:56David Pierce?

  Anyway, let's get into it. The first thing I asked Anna about is basically, why haven't we killed passwords yet? It's been the death of password for forever. Pass keys are supposedly the end of passwords, but I've heard that so, so, so many times before. So what is it about passwords that means they just won't go away?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  We've been talking about how passwords are bad for like 20, 25 years, right?

• 5:19David Pierce?

  Like since passwords?

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly, like over and over again. So why now? Seems like a very reasonable question. And I think the truth is that this is the first time where security and user experience aren't mutually exclusive. If you think about previous attempts to either like improve the security of passwords or replace passwords, they always come at the expense of user experience. So for example, multi-factor authentication. Add security to passwords by, you know, requiring a TTP code or an email or something like that. But that's an extra thing that a user has to do to log in. If you think about certain types of biometrics, like proprietary biometrics, that's some sort of hardware that you need to add into the mix. And so there's always this extra step or extra thing that a user has to think about.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  But with pass keys, the idea is that you don't have to compromise on those things. You're going to get better security, and you'll also get a really smooth, frictionless sign-in process.

• 6:15David Pierce?

  So from a pure user experience perspective, I think it's right to say people will do the simplest thing, right? And even when we know it's bad, even when it's terrible hygiene that everybody agrees is bad, I think most people intellectually know, don't use the same crappy password for every single thing. And yet, most people do because it is just the easiest thing to do and it's very annoying to remember all of your different passwords. In a funny way, it seems like the bar is both very low in that you have to replace people's crummy passwords with something more secure, but also very high because actually remembering one password that is just 1234 and then typing that in everywhere is actually a pretty good user experience?

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Certainly a good user experience, yes, but the bar is so low on the security side.

• 7:00David Pierce?

  It leads to bad things, I suppose.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So when I think about like all the things that are wrong with passwords, for me, it really comes down to the fact that passwords put all of the burden on a user to be secure, right? It's on you as a person to think up good passwords, remember them, not use the same one everywhere, not fall for a phishing attack, all of these things. But with pass keys, the goal is we can actually remove the human error completely from logging into apps. And so if we give you something that's easy and frictionless and the security is actually built into the technology, then there's nothing for you to do wrong, right? Like, it just works. So in the case of pass keys, when you're logging in, all it does, it looks and feels to you like you're just unlocking your device, usually

• 7:45Speaker 03

  something like Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello. And so it looks and feels like something that is familiar to you and that you know how to do. And there's nothing, there's no thought you have to put into it of, did I pick my most secure pass key, right? It's just kind of all happening behind the scenes.

• 8:01David Pierce?

  That's really smart, because I think so much of this stuff, and we talk about this with sort of security and privacy in all forms on the internet, it all ends in scolding, right? You kind of have to make people feel bad and scare them in certain ways in order to just like beat them into having good behavior. And what it actually is, is if you give people a better product that is also safer, they'll do it. And if you make them feel bad, they still won't change their ways. And I think what this whole industry seems to be coming around to in a cool way is like, what if we just built better products? And I think that's very exciting.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. Like, it's not that people don't want to be secure. I think that's not where this is coming from. That's not why passwords have stayed around. It's sort of just like an inertia. Like, it is what people know how to do, and it's there. And there's never really been an option that feels a lot better. Like, I used to do security consulting for a number of years, and we would work with these companies, and they, we'd tell them, like, hey, you have a weak password policy, or you need to add two-factor, all these controls around your account security. And especially for consumer-facing applications, they'd be like, I mean, I could, but that's going to hurt my user conversions. People aren't going to sign up for my application. And so that trade-off was never worth it to them, right?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  But with pass keys, you can actually, we can say, this is actually going to help your conversions. Users will sign up faster for your application. And so all of a sudden, there's also a business reason to use pass keys, not just a security reason.

• 9:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. Where did pass keys come from? I feel like in the time I've been covering this space, there was a minute where it was like, everybody's going to have a YubiKey, and that's the solution. And then we got into two-factor in all of its many different forms. And I think we went from bad two-factor over SMS to like, pretty good two-factor inside of apps like OnePassword and Authy and some of the other stuff around. And pass keys kind of crept up on me a little bit over the last couple of years, but my sense is they've been around longer than most people realize as kind of a possibility and an idea. Like, where did this come from?

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's a technology that kind of underlies pass keys called WebAuthend that's been around for probably about 10 years, I think. And there's a group called the FIDO Alliance. That's like an industry organization. A lot of big companies are a part of it, and they're all focused on, you know, bringing passwordless authentication to the world. And so this protocol was invented, it's the same thing that YubiKeys use, that's used to provide this sort of public key cryptography-based authentication. So it's been around for a really long time, but you usually had to have some sort of hardware key like a YubiKey. And so It might work really well in a workforce or a corporate environment, but could be really challenging for the everyday people who don't just have a YubiKey, right?

• 10:36David Pierce?

  I got a YubiKey. I set up everything on my YubiKey. And then I realized the place I leave my keys is several rooms away from where I sit.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Right. It's not near your computer.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  Like, my keys are upstairs right now with my YubiKey on them, and there is no chance I'm going to use it.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like, the fact that you even have one is really rare. And so, a couple of years ago, there's this big announcement from the major platforms saying, "We're now supporting what we're calling pass keys", which is essentially web auth end credentials that can be synced between your platform account. So now, instead of being tied to hardware, those pass keys are stored in your iCloud account, or your Google, or your Microsoft account. And more recently, maybe your OnePassword account, which we'll obviously get into at some point. But the idea is that now, these credentials are a little bit more accessible. You don't need special hardware. They'll sync between your different devices a little bit better to make it a little bit easier for you to access them. And that's been like the big push that you're hearing about in the last couple of years.

• 11:33David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. Was there a technical development that made that possible? Like, what happened between a decade ago and maybe two years ago when this really started to become a thing that kind of tipped it into, "This is a thing we can do in a real mainstream way now"?

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was really this syncing concept. And so, Apple, Google, Microsoft saying, like, "Yes, instead of storing these credentials in like a secure enclave on a device, we can store them securely in your cloud account, and we can sync them between these different devices." So, you know, in some really, really high assurance environments, that might be a little bit of a security trade-off, right? Because you don't have as much hardware security there. But for most consumer use cases, if you're logging into Home Depot, or Netflix, or things like that, that's actually still a really good security story, and it's way, way better than passwords. So you're still getting all of those sort of unfishable security benefits of pass keys, but with a little bit more user-friendliness.

• 12:30David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. Yeah. So talk to me about the unfishable part of this because I think I was reading through in preparing for this, a bunch of the criticisms people have of kind of all of the password replacing technology. And there are two I want to talk about. One is now everything is on my one device. What happens if I lose my device? We'll get to that in a second because I think that's very interesting. It also just happened to me recently. So we'll talk about that. But the other one is people saying, well, actually, secure passwords are part of the problem. But the bigger problem is phishing and it's people social engineering their way into my accounts. And actually, what we have to solve is that problem and not people having bad passwords. Because if somebody can convince me to type in my password on a fake webpage, we've solved nothing. But the belief with pass keys is that they actually

• 13:13David Pierce?

  solve most, if not all of that problem, too. Right? How does that work?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's a few really big security benefits with pass keys. So there's kind of the obvious of like, you know, there is no user generated secret type of thing that someone could guess, that they could just reuse across a bunch of websites and guess.

• 13:31David Pierce?

  I can't leak you a password if I don't have a password. I guess there's something.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Exactly. If I don't know what it is, you can't guess it. So that's really big, right? There's a lot of attacks that can happen remotely and at scale that things like credential stuffing are really common against websites. So those things kind of all go away because there just isn't a credential in the traditional sense. Now, the other big thing is, of course, resistance to phishing attacks. So pass keys are tied to a specific website or domain. And so if an attacker were to make a lookalike site, Facebook.com with zeros instead of Os, your pass key for Facebook.com like will not be used on Facebook, the lookalike site, right? Like those pass keys simply aren't transferable. They're not the same thing.

• 14:16David Pierce?

  Because the key on your phone and the key on fake Facebook just will literally will not understand each other.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like that key won't be used on that site at sort of at the device level, at the browser levels, like all there's a lot of protections in place to sort of tie these pass keys to a specific domain. And so at least for that specific type of phishing attack where which is really common, you have a lookalike site, they ask you for your password. And then they reuse it on the real site. That just kind of totally goes away. And I think that's really big, especially right now. There's so many news articles around like AI and how AI is making it even easier to make really realistic phishing attacks. This type of prevention of that whole swath of attacks is really, really big and just gives people a little bit more confidence, I think, when using the internet that you don't have to constantly wonder, is this the real site?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Is this a real email? Like, do I need to double check? Like, I think just giving people a little more confidence in that way is helpful.

• 15:13David Pierce?

  Well, and there's a weird tension in that even that it feels too easy, honestly, using pass keys sometimes where it's like, this can't actually be solving my problem. All I did was tap the thing, the pop up on my phone that said, we cool? And I said, yeah, we cool. And then I now I'm logged in like, at least with the password, you kind of understand I am delivering something that is a secret in order to allow me in. And there is something to the fact that this is so simple that it almost feels less secure, even though it's not. I don't know. Part of me wants you to like, make it seem scarier every time I do it because it'll make it feel more secure.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  This is actually a very real thing that I think I've seen that people in the FIDO Alliance have seen when you do research with end users that they're kind of like, oh, okay, I guess I logged in. Like, they maybe don't even recognize that they actually like registered for or logged into an application and they're like, okay, I guess that was okay. How am I going to do that next time? Or they don't totally understand. And so there's been a ton of research done on the best ways to communicate to users what's going on, which I think is so important as websites start to roll out pass keys that the user experience there is just so important to make sure users are like, oh, okay, like, this looks and feels like my touch ID. Like, I understand what I'm doing here and kind of giving them that experience.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  But it is really hard, which is, it's silly, kind of silly that, you know, security has to look hard. Like, people are used to security being hard for it to work. And so it's kind of breaking that stereotype.

• 16:40David Pierce?

  And that kind of goes to the other piece of feedback I've seen a bunch about pass keys, which is that we've all been trained now that you have to have two factors, right? There's, there's the thing you know and the thing you have. And the thing I know is my password and the thing I have is my phone. Great. That is better than just a password. And there's something to kind of compressing all of that back down into a pass key. That like I just, I don't even remember. I like tweeted or something about pass keys in one password being like, this is cool. It's I can now have all of my stuff in both apps and I got a bunch of responses from people being like, that's not two factor security. That's one factor security because it all just lives inside of one password. And I was like, I don't think that's true, but I'm not. But I sort of see the point, right? Where it's now, as long as I'm holding my phone, there's no other jobs to do.

• 17:24David Pierce?

  And I wonder if part of that is again, you're sort of obfuscating the steps in the name of simplicity. That actually makes it feel like I'm not doing the hard work of being secure anymore.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's really fair. And I think, you know, we've talked about these traditional authentication factors, something you know, something you have, something you are or whatever. And talking about peskies in that sense is like a little bit confusing, but I think we kind of do it anyway to help explain to people. I think the easiest way to think about it is it's something that you have. It's whatever device you're currently logged on to, say your Google device or your one password, whatever your one password, your browser extension or your desktop app. And then it's also something you either have or are or know or something like that, depending on, you know, it's either your touch ID, face ID, your PIN, your one password, password and secret key. It can be like whatever that other factor is that you're actually using to log into the account where your pass key is stored.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  But there's always a little bit of a like device ownership aspect to that, which kind of gives you that second factor. And so it's a little bit like square peg, round hole, but I think you can kind of roughly put pass keys into that bucket to help people feel a little bit better about that.

• 18:31David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah. So the, the two factors then, if you were to sort of boil it all the way down, would basically be my phone and the information required to log into my phone.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:40David Pierce?

  Which is two things. And I think ironically, back to the like, this is almost too easy thing. I think if you were forced to type in your passcode every time, it would make more sense. Whereas with the face ID or the Windows hello, it kind of, it almost happens so fast that you lose track of it. And it's like, well, I didn't have to authenticate anything. And I was like, no, you did. It just happened really quickly and automatically, which is a great. Thing, but kind of an alarming one to get used to at first. Like I, it certainly took me a few tries to realize, oh, it's doing face ID every single time my pass key comes up because that's part of the authentication process.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I don't think people think about that when they're just unlocking their phone to use it. Like they don't necessarily think too hard about it. It's just become sort of second nature. But maybe it was like that at the beginning and I was like, oh my gosh, my password, my phone's not locked. But yeah, I think it's like, you almost don't notice because you're so used to using your face ID or your touch ID for all sorts of things, right? Like a lot of apps use that technology just to unlock an app. And so the idea is we are using the thing that's familiar to people. It's just getting people comfortable with that technology in a new context, like a website or an app.

• 19:42David Pierce?

  What do you make of the idea of tying a lot of this stuff to a device? I think on the one hand, phones are sort of inextricable parts of us at this point. Like my phone's right here and my YubiKey is upstairs. Like that is a telling fact, right? But at the same time, I had this moment the other week where I woke up one morning and my phone had updated overnight and was bricked. The touchscreen didn't work. I couldn't do anything. And I had this moment of realizing like, oh, I can't do two factors because I can't get SMSs. I can't see them anymore. I can't get into my one password account because it's Livy. It's just sitting here on my phone. I can't text my wife. And like, I had this crazy moment of being like, oh, I am way too reliant on my phone to work and have a charge and be sitting here nearby me all the time. And otherwise my life kind of falls apart. And I think there is a reflexive worry that people have about that, that it's like,

• 20:27David Pierce?

  the nice thing about having a bunch of insecure passwords stored in my head is the battery doesn't die.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're always there.

• 20:35David Pierce?

  Right. And so like, is it the right path to go down, you think, to tie it to these devices in that way?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  I think it's better to think about it less as tying it to a device and more of tying it to your like platform account. So if you're an Apple user primarily, you know, you have an iPhone and a MacBook and all that, you probably use your iCloud account to store your contacts and to store a lot of stuff. And so when you get a new phone, for example, you log into iCloud and like you recover all of your data in that way, right? And so I think thinking about it that way is a little bit more realistic, to be honest, of sort of the current state of pass keys, where it's challenging. It's the same way, like you lose your phone, it's really annoying to recover all of that data, but pass keys will get recovered. If you think back to like, the old Web auth end days, your pass

• 21:24Speaker 03

  keys were like impossible to recover in that situation. And so that's one of the big problems we were trying to solve is to make account recovery a little bit more possible. I think that's also a really big benefit to using something like OnePassword. So I use a MacBook laptop, but I have an Android phone. And so I have this like cross-platform situation in my life that isn't really ideal for pass keys, to be honest, because a pass key on my Android phone doesn't really naturally translate to my MacBook. It's this really kind of weird QR code experience. But instead, I use OnePassword for everything.

• 21:58David Pierce?

  Okay. And then the idea is that then because OnePassword works across platforms, my pass keys live in my OnePassword account. They don't live on my phone, they don't live on my laptop, they live in my OnePassword account. And as long as I can get into my OnePassword account, which ironically, soon you might do through a pass key, which we should talk about, then I kind of have it wherever I am.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 22:17David Pierce?

  That structure makes sense to me, because then you're on, as long as you can log into something, which I think in the year 2024 is a pretty reasonable assumption to make. But that brings me to the question of logging into all of my pass keys with a pass key. And I just think part of what's really interesting about that is like, OnePassword is very much starting to try to own like the whole security stack, right? Like, I now have two-factor codes in my OnePassword. I have, I have my pass keys in my OnePassword. And I would think that raises the stakes pretty dramatically for OnePassword, that now if something bad happens to my OnePassword stuff, not only are, is someone going to get a control of my passwords, they're going to get control of everything. And like, one piece of security

• 22:59David Pierce?

  advice that I've heard from people over and over and over is, don't store everything in one place, because you should assume everything is insecure, and essentially like, don't let the two sides of the coin talk to each other. And you're kind of saying the opposite, which is like, put everything in this one place because it's simpler and better. And I certainly agree that it's simpler, but like, does it change the way you have to think about even the security of OnePassword itself?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  That's a really interesting question. I actually don't think it does because our whole thing from the beginning has been that we take your security and privacy really seriously. Everything is end to end encrypted, like one password has no access to anyone's actual credentials. And I don't necessarily see a password as being any different from a pass key from like the one password perspective. It's ultimately just a credential material of some sort that we're storing and we're going to protect the same way that we would credit card data or social security numbers or like whatever data you want to store with us, right? I try my best instead of saying password manager to say credential manager or something along those lines because it is so much more than passwords and has been

• 24:06Speaker 03

  for a really long time. And so I actually don't think it changes our security model that much. We're always looking to like upgrade that and like, what can we do to improve, which is where, you know, obviously using a pass key to sign into one password comes in. Right now, we have that password and secret key sort of model. We have like SSO support if you're a business customer, but for the most part, it's kind of that two factor, the secret key is sort of a device key. And so we're always looking for ways to upgrade that, which is why we've been exploring pass key login, which would be really incredible to add to one password.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. Why does that feel like the right way to do the sort of master login? I think part of what I'm getting at here is I think what we're boiling down to is there being one sort of crucial login, right? Whether it's the passcode on my phone or my master password for one password, like there is going to be one thing I have to know and that is the thing that opens up everything else. And I think with phones, one reason people are nervous is like the Wall Street Journal did a bunch of really good reporting about people having their phones stolen and their passcodes read. And that becomes even scarier in this world where my pass keys also live on my phone because now all you need to know is the four digits I use to log into my phone and you can have everything. And with something like one password now, it's like, I don't, I literally don't know

• 25:22David Pierce?

  any of my passwords, except my one password password anymore, which I think in a lot of ways is the intended behavior. And that makes sense to me. I don't reuse that password anywhere. I don't even have that password written down anywhere. It's just, it's the one password I have memorized. But now you're trying to even replace that. Why?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the good news is like in OnePassword's case in particular, so I'll speak really just about that, but you have this password and you have this secret key. And so even in just the state of the world right now with OnePassword, if someone were to get your master password, that really long one, the one that you have to remember, they actually still can't get into your OnePassword account unless they also steal a device that you have OnePassword on already, which is really great, right? That's a good starting point. But now, what if we also make it even harder for someone to steal that password because it's not a password, right? It's not even something you know. Now, yes, that pass key does have to then live somewhere, right? So it has to live in your platform account, or in a UB key, or something along

• 26:19Speaker 03

  those lines. So there is kind of this like vicious cycle of where does the final pass key live? And I don't know that that's like a perfectly solved problem right now, but still a way better experience than right now. So we're working through it.

• 26:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, it is just really interesting. I think you're exactly right that, yeah, at some point, there is the one thing. And the question of what the one thing should be, I don't know that we know yet. I don't know that we've answered it. And I think the idea of it being a hardware thing that lives on my keyring makes a lot of sense, but has downsides. There's like the perfect version of it would be like it lives in a safe somewhere far away where no one can get to it. But that obviously is a disastrous user experience.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  But also somehow you can get to it.

• 27:00David Pierce?

  Right, exactly. I can teleport into it when necessary, but that's it. Yeah, I don't, do you have any sense of what the best available version of that is? Is it your phone at the moment? Like the device you have?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the current state of that is, you know, we recommend that your pass key for OnePassword lives in whatever your platform account is, or UB key, right? In your iCloud, your Google, we typically recommend that you have a backup, because obviously, if you lose it, it's just kind of a pain, to be honest, to recover if you kind of lose that master one. So we recommend you have some backups. And so that's kind of the state of the world right now. I think in an ideal world, it's something much more about your real life identity, like your human identity that can identify you to a computer, right? And like, none of that stuff is real yet, but there's a lot of really exciting things that people think about in the future and are working on of ways to kind of like tie those things together, but in a way that also still is like privacy preserving in some

• 27:55Speaker 03

  way, right? It still protects your identity online, but it makes a stronger sense of who you actually are on the internet.

• 28:02David Pierce?

  And how broad can pass keys be in that sense? I mean, you mentioned wanting to log people in quicker and then making the case that they're more likely to complete transactions that way, right? I just think about the number of carts I have left unpurchased because typing in my address and credit card number is really annoying, like much less setting up an account. Even the like guest flow is a giant pain. Can pass keys be a store of information beyond passwords in that sense? Is that even a thing people are thinking about?

• 28:29Speaker 03

  It definitely is. It's not really inherent in pass keys themselves, but there's a lot of sort of like additional like wallet type of technology or other types of technology that people are talking about and working on that is kind of like that, where it's more about other information that's being stored. It's almost like that password manager experience, right? Where you can store your address and your credit card information to autofill because no one likes that, I don't want to have to make an account. I want to be able to check out as a guest, but I don't want to type all that information. So there is a lot of work to be done on like doing that in a more like cryptographic, secure way like pass keys. But the technology as it exists today doesn't really support that just yet. It's really exciting, though.

• 29:07David Pierce?

  It is really exciting. I mean, and that's the kind of thing, if it goes from I have to type in all of this information about me on the internet over and over ad nauseam to I have a secure version of all the relevant information about me and I can just dole it out in secure ways whenever I need it, like that's just a better internet. That's how, that's how this should all work.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  That's the dream, yes.

• 29:27David Pierce?

  And it does seem like increasingly the companies who are storing things like my home address and my credit card information and my password don't want that anymore because it's a security risk. Like, I can't imagine if I'm Best Buy or Home Depot, I want any of the risk that comes with that anymore. So I would think most of these businesses would be psyched to figure out how to make this stuff work, right?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the same way that companies would want to get rid of passwords or any really like PII they're storing, right? If they can offload any of that risk and not have a giant database table full of something that people are looking for, you know, I think that's obviously a win, right? And so I think pass keys solve that security benefit, the sort of compliance regulations around, like, there's a lot of good reasons. And I think it's the companies who are excited to make a like user and security improvement, like those are the companies that I'm seeing like most excited about pass keys.

• 30:23David Pierce?

  So if you fast forward, I don't know, two, five, 10 years, however long it takes for pass keys to become like truly mainstream, is there any case left for either having a password that I type into a website or the flip side, having like the login with Google, login with Apple stuff? Like as pass keys get really good, does everything else disappear? Or do those things kind of have their place too?

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think passwords are never really going to fully go away, but I would hope that maybe like 90% of passwords can go away, especially for the types of apps that we as people just like use every day, right? Our banks, our Netflix, our online shopping, like those types of things I think are kind of perfect use cases for pass keys. I think there's a lot of good uses for more like social login, like a login with Google or something like that, because maybe they need access to your email. You're sharing other types of information that you get from having that connection. And then there'll probably always be some apps that just use passwords and maybe it's a password and a pass key as a second factor of authentication or something like that. But I would hope

• 31:31Speaker 03

  that, you know, for most of the things you're using every day, we could get to a point where pass keys are working for those types of apps.

• 31:39David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna talk about wearables. We'll be right back.

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• 33:21David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Over the last couple of years, it feels like the wearable industry has boomed. You have the Apple Watch and the Pixel Watch and the Galaxy Watch, all getting pretty popular and pretty good, but it also feels like the wearable industry has kind of died? I don't know, it just feels like a few years ago, there was all this energy to bring tech to our bodies and give us stuff to hold and wear and clip on that would do all kinds of computery things on our bodies in simpler ways. And now there's just smartwatches and they're basically all just health devices. And that's just what there is now. So is this just the way it goes from now on? Is this what the wearables industry has become and will be forever? To help me figure it out, I grabbed V Song, who is the Verge's wearables reviewer and

• 34:04David Pierce?

  the person wearing the most gadgets at any given time that I have ever met in my entire life. Fee Song, welcome back.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 34:11David Pierce?

  How many wearables do you have on you right now?

• 34:13Speaker 06

  Four.

• 34:14David Pierce?

  What are they? Are you allowed to talk about all four of them?

• 34:16Speaker 06

  Yes. I have the Wydings Scan Watch Lite.

• 34:19David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  I have the Apple Watch Ultra 2, the Oura Ring Gen 3, and the EV Ring.

• 34:24David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Two smartwatches, two smartrings.

• 34:27David Pierce?

  Pure redundancy. So many things counting your step and giving you dubious information about your sleep.

• 34:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. It's what we like to call a control device. So I actually use the Oura Ring to test all like sleep tracking.

• 34:40David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 34:41Speaker 06

  Just because they're like, oh, we're a sleep tracker. They're pretty accurate for certain metrics. So I have that. And my bed also tracks sleeping. So there's just a lot of control devices to control for accuracy.

• 34:52David Pierce?

  So do you wake up in the morning and get like six different scores on how you slept?

• 34:55Speaker 06

  Yes, I do.

• 34:56David Pierce?

  That sounds awful. One score stresses me out.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  I get like six different scores and then while I'm brushing my teeth, I compare all of them and I go, you're not accurate, or that sort of stuff. So yeah, that's the behind the scenes of wearables testing.

• 35:12David Pierce?

  It's good stuff. I gave up on sleep tracking like the third day that I woke up feeling like crap. And it was like, congratulations on hitting your sleep goal. It's like, I don't know if I did or didn't, but screw you.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  To be fair, like a lot of sleep tracking is kind of dubious in terms of accuracy. It's not, you know, when you usually take a grain of salt, take two with sleep tracking. So that's just how it is.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. Okay. But I want to talk about like the state of wearables because I feel like there's been a bunch of news about wearables in the last few weeks. There was a bunch of stuff at CES. We're in kind of a weird place right now. And I have a bunch of theories about this, but let's start with Fossil because I feel like Fossil as a company was trying to do something different and interesting and had a really sort of cool idea about what smartwatches could be.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  So, you know, it's really sad that Fossil is now a fossil, but I'm cheap, but like.

• 36:02David Pierce?

  Well, that's Vergecast, everybody.

• 36:03Speaker 06

  I didn't make that joke in the actual headlines, so I had to do it elsewhere because everyone else was making that joke at me. But so Fossil basically kept Wear OS afloat, like almost by itself, because Fossil is not just Fossil. It's Diesel, it's Skagen, it's all these other sub-brands. And for the longest time, if you bought a Wear OS watch, it was a Fossil. So they kind of kept Google going through all of that time. And so for them to actually just like call it quits, to completely exit the smartwatch industry, that's really big. It's kind of just, wow. It says a lot about where smartwatches are at this point in time in that it's like, you know,

• 36:44Speaker 06

  there used to be this notion that Apple was its closed garden and Apple was the main smartwatch of choice for iOS users. But it's sort of happening in the Wear OS space now too for Android, because it used to be that, you know, Android was the Wild West of smartwatches, kind of like phones.

• 36:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 37:00Speaker 06

  But now it's Google and Samsung, also kind of like phones. So that's, that's just kind of where we are and Fossil leaving, it kind of cements that. And I'm actually pretty sad about it.

• 37:10David Pierce?

  I am too, because it seems like, and I'm realizing now how long ago this was. But if you go back to like 2017, maybe, 2016, 17, there was this idea that all watches, or at least many watches of many different styles, many different price points, whatever, were going to become some kind of smart, right? There was going to be this whole interesting spectrum where, I remember I went to, I think it's called Baselworld, this like very fancy watch show in Switzerland one year. And it was, it was like the year everybody was into smartwatches. So I was at Wired at the time and I'm sitting down with all these people as they're explaining like the beautiful history behind this $12,000 watch. And then they'd be like, and also Bluetooth, Wired. And I was like, all right, cool.

• 37:51David Pierce?

  But I liked that idea and it was like, Withings was doing cool stuff with that, this kind of like hybrid smartwatch idea where it looked like a watch, it looked like a piece of jewelry, but also still had some tech in it. And it feels like everything on that spectrum that isn't an Apple watch or something that looks like an Apple watch is just gone. Like, we've just given up on that idea almost entirely.

• 38:09Speaker 06

  It is really weird because for right now and the last couple of years, actually, smartwatches have just like slowly consumed everything. Like where has the budget fitness tracker gone? China, that's it. Like, that's, that's where most of them are at the moment. And it used to be that Fitbit had its own. Fitbit was the word that everyone used. Even though it was a brand, they used it to mean fitness tracker.

• 38:30David Pierce?

  It was Kleenex, like, in a really real way, it was Kleenex.

• 38:33Speaker 06

  That's what Fitbit was. And now, now where's, now where's Fitbit? James Park has left.

• 38:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:37Speaker 06

  Very suddenly during CES, I like woke up and I was like, are, are you kidding me? I'm at CES, please. Are you kidding me right now? Um, but yeah, so that's kind of where Fitbit is. And it is really just the Apple Watch, the Galaxy Watch, or the Pixel Watch at this moment in time. And that's really sad. But to your point, Fossil really embodied that idea of we're gonna have so many different smartwatches and so many different form factors and so many different, like, styles. There was the Kate Spade watch. There was the, they bought Misfit for a while.

• 39:06David Pierce?

  Oh, Misfit.

• 39:07Speaker 06

  Right?

• 39:08David Pierce?

  They had so many cool ideas.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  They did. And like, the, the touch bezel that Samsung basically managed to actually execute and all of that stuff. But there used to be a joke I would tell my editors. It's like, it's a trade show. I'm gonna go to Fossil. But, and I did this at Gizmodo a few times. I was like, I'm not gonna cover every single watch that they release because there's gonna be 20 of them. I'm just going to take a picture and say, look at all the freaking smartwatches that Fossil has brought. And they would come to each trade show with, I want to say, like, 20 to 30 different watches. And I'd be in a room and I'd be like, okay, what's new about this watch? This watch is that watch, but Armani. Or this watch is that watch, but Diesel. And, you know, that kind of gets to the, the problem of the Fossil watches as well.

• 39:49David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, so, but diagnose that for me, because I think you could make the case that that is actually like an awesome outcome. Right? Like, nobody's mad that there are lots of different brands of t-shirt that are all t-shirts. Like, that's how it should work. It's fashion. It lets you make choices. And we were in this moment where technology was just gonna be sort of integrated into that. And I liked the idea of having a watch that seemed like a watch, but would also buzz when I got a phone call and count my steps. Like, that, to me, was almost everything I wanted from a smartwatch. And that has died. And I, what I can't tell is which of the many things that went wrong are the real problem. Like, I think there's a thing where Google neglected Wear OS for a really long time and sort of hung Fossil and a bunch of other companies out to dry. There's a thing where maybe people just didn't want those things and maybe I'm wrong

• 40:33David Pierce?

  and the people who wanted any kind of technology on their wrist wanted all the technology on their wrist. So the Apple Watch and the Pixel Watch became the thing. I don't know. What's your read of like, why that all fell apart?

• 40:41Speaker 06

  It's a lot of of those things in small increments. So it is like a fact that Fossil invested so much into the Google system. And then, you know, a couple of years back, Google took about $40 million worth of Fossil R and D and brought it over into Google. So that was kind of one of the first big signals that Google was going to start taking wearables seriously again. But, you know, it kind of gutted Fossil a little bit. And then another problem with Fossil is that the price for the price that you were getting their watches, you got a software that was kind of not so great.

• 41:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  Is what it was very like jittery, things would work and then they wouldn't. And more often they wouldn't. The battery life was eh. So you were just getting a better experience on other smartwatches, but paying a similar price. So what you really were paying for was the style and the fashion and the fact that it didn't look, you know, like this, this giant slab of phone on your wrist, right? You were, you were paying for a watch that looked like a watch. And then I think another aspect of it is that the people who are going to go for something like Withings and the hybrids is that they are people who are not going to be buying on an upgrade cycle very frequently.

• 41:53David Pierce?

  True. You don't buy a nice watch intending to replace it in two years.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  Exactly. And the battery lasts a long time. Like this has been lasting me for, I want to say, two weeks.

• 42:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 42:02Speaker 06

  Like, I haven't charged it since I've loaded it up. And that is what a lot of people want, but those people aren't the ones going out, buying and upgrading every single year.

• 42:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 42:10Speaker 06

  So that's not making the company a lot of money. So it's one of those paradoxes where planned obsolescence is a shittier product, but it makes, but it makes the company a lot more money.

• 42:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 06

  So that's kind of the conflict that you have there. And I just think the other issue with Wear OS 3 and that transition is that Google clearly put Samsung first because everything comes to a Samsung watch first.

• 42:34David Pierce?

  Right.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  And then it'll come to Google and then everybody who isn't Samsung or Google kind of gets the short end of the stick. Mobvoy was the other really well-known Wear OS watch alternative. And they didn't get Wear OS 3 upgrade until I want to say December.

• 42:50David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Like this past December. It was a thing where Mobboy users were like, hey, you told us that if we were going to buy this particular tick watch with the 4100 chip, we were going to get Wear OS 3. And basically, they waited until December. That's when the rollout happened. And Wear OS 4 is already here.

• 43:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 43:11Speaker 06

  So now they're just like a generation behind. They're barely catching up, and they don't even have Google Assistant on their wrist.

• 43:16David Pierce?

  Oof.

• 43:17Speaker 06

  And Fossil did have Google Assistant, but they also had to wait a really long time to get that rollout out. So I can understand where, from Fossil's perspective, they were just like, OK, we didn't even know Wear OS 3 was happening until you announced it.

• 43:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 43:31Speaker 06

  What the hell?

• 43:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 06

  So, you know, I had a sense something was not kosher, because Fossil had a very, very regular update cadence, and they missed it. Like, 2023 was when the Gen 7, if it was going to come out, was going to come out. Nothing.

• 43:46David Pierce?

  And they really were the one company you could rely on to keep caring about this for a long time.

• 43:51Speaker 06

  Every single year. So CES is up and down with wearables, but every single year, I would reach out to Fossil and be like, hey, guys, what you got going? And they're like, hey, here's what we got going. And this year, I reached out, and they're like, we're not going to be at CES. And I was like, excuse me, hold up. So many just alarm bells were going off. And I think I reached out to them end of November, early December, and we were talking for a while. And it wasn't until after CES even that they got back to me, and they're like, hey, we out.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  So that makes me sad, I have to say. And the other part that makes me sad is I think we skipped past the fitness band thing way too quickly. This is a thing you and I have talked about before, and I still believe this very strongly, that the original Jawbone Up was a perfect gadget, and there should be more of them. And I don't want to watch, but I want something on my wrist that tracks basic things. What it seems to be is that instead of bands, rings are going to be that thing. Like, it seems like the big bet now is that if we're going to do a non-screen, long-lasting, simple kind of wearable, everybody seems to think rings are the thing.

• 44:59Speaker 06

  I mean, rings are big this year. At CES, there were more rings than I could count. I would be like, do, do, do, I've seen all the rings. And then I'd turn and I'd be like, nope, there's more rings. And like, from names that I had never heard of before. So I was like,

• 45:11David Pierce?

  Is it just because Aura worked? Like Aura's been in this for a few years. The product seems to do really well. I feel like the like viral marketing for Aura is very good because you you watch a podcast or you see somebody on TV and it's like a tech CEO in a vest and there's like a one in two chance they have an Aura ring on.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  And it's not just the tech people. It's the celebrities, Jennifer. Aniston has an Aura ring, a bunch of sports stars have it. There was a period of time where I think Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow, maybe, were having a sleep competition with their Aura's. And these people have millions of followers on Instagram. And they were just like, haha, beat you in my Instagram stories. So Aura really had this, like Prince Harry has has an Aura ring. So they had a lot of buzz in that respect, but they weren't the only smart ring around. They just kind of RIP Motive that was a smart ring.

• 45:58David Pierce?

  Right, yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 06

  Had two. There was the Motive and the Motive Ring two. And they just kind of like killed them, so to speak. And it was actually really quiet in the smart ring space for several years. And that's because smart rings compared to fitness bands have a lot of technological challenges because they're so small. They're just so entirely small. But I think we're starting to figure that out. And then there are some health advantages to a smart ring compared to a fitness band that really make them good for sleep tracking.

• 46:29David Pierce?

  And part of that is just like literally where it's placed on your body.

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. So actually, your wrist is terrible for most metrics.

• 46:36David Pierce?

  I just learned this recently, that they're like, oh, let's put all this stuff on your wrist, even though your wrist is the worst.

• 46:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. So like, the way these sensors work is that they're shining light into your skin and it's reflecting off of your blood. And so that's how they read your heart rate. It's it's a proxy for your pulse, blah, yada, yada, yada. I've written about it a ton. Just read my stuff. But the the problem is, is that you have so many tendons. There's so much movement in your wrist that there's so much signal to noise that it's very difficult to get an accurate read, which is why if you have a wrist based wearable and you're like, hmm, this sounds wrong, that plays into it. But the underside of your finger is a lot more ideal. There's a lot less noise. The skin on your palm, no matter what, no matter how much melanin you have, the skin on your palm is a lot lighter. So it kind of removes your skin color a little bit as a barrier to accuracy.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  So there's just a lot of reasons. It's a lot more comfortable to wear. You wear rings anyway. And when you're going to bed, you're not. I have had a lot of watches that are gigantic from Carmen. But you know, in the middle of the night, I'll wake up and I'll rip it off because it's uncomfortable. So sleep tracking has gotten a lot of popularity in the last few years. This is the ideal form factor for it. So that's kind of why.

• 47:48David Pierce?

  I agree with that. I will say the thing that I've had trouble with with rings and the Oura in particular is one that I would say like every three months, I'm like, I'm going to become an Oura person again. And I pull the one out of my drawer, I charge it, I put it on. I like it for the step tracking. I like it because the battery doesn't die all the time. I'm like forever being driven crazy because my Apple Watch battery seems to always be dying. No matter what is happening, it's always dying. And the Oura ring is like a sort of light tracker in a way that I really like. I cannot type with that thing on comfortably.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  Really?

• 48:17David Pierce?

  And part of it is probably just that I'm not used to it yet in the same way that like when I started wearing a wedding ring, it took me a while to get used to it. Now I don't even notice it on my finger. But like, it's a pretty chunky thing.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  And it bangs around on the palm rest of my computer. Like, I grant that I am not used to wearing chunky rings and lots of people are used to wearing chunky rings. But it was harder for me to get used to having on my body than I expected it to be, actually.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, like if you're in fashion, you definitely have a statement ring, right? This is not statement ring size, but it is chunky. Like I have several rings on my finger right now. And like the normal not smart rings are much thinner.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  It actually kind of looks funny when you, because like that's what the smart ring is.

• 48:55David Pierce?

  I mean, it's like you're wearing four rings and two of them look like brass knuckles.

• 48:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's basically, that's basically what it is. And a lot of that is the tech.

• 49:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 06

  There's just like, it's a miracle that they can make it this small. It's actually a miracle that this particular version of the Oura ring is completely round. That was a huge engineering challenge.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  They had the flat tire for a long time, right?

• 49:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, the flat tire is where they put the battery because when you have a flexible battery, it's very difficult to make it round. So there's just all these like technical challenges that come with smart rings that make them big because I'm like, this, this is pretty good. If you think about what. A smart ring is and I always get our readers and some people in my DMs just like I'm not getting it until it's as thin as a regular ring. So, okay, you'll be waiting for a while.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 06

  You'll be waiting for a very long time.

• 49:42David Pierce?

  So, but then in that case, I understand why these things would exist, right? Like the size of Aura's market makes sense to me. There are people who want the things that it offers. What I can't figure out is why somebody like Samsung would make this. Because especially the thing we've learned over the last bunch of years is that like A, you're right, ecosystem is important. But B, the market even for a smartwatch is significantly smaller than the market for a smartphone, at least right now. And then to take away all the computer stuff, even on a smartwatch and say, okay, this thing is just basically a lightweight tracker. It just feels like that, that just seems like a thing that cannot possibly apply to as many people as a company like Samsung is trying to reach. But maybe I'm underestimating how many people want that thing.

• 50:27Speaker 06

  So what I will say, and I think a lot of our readers who have Aura rings will kind of back me up, is that it's not a good primary tracker. It's a very good secondary tracker.

• 50:35David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 50:35Speaker 06

  But having a very good secondary tracker necessitates that you have a primary tracker.

• 50:40David Pierce?

  Right, you've already like, we're way down the funnel of people who care about this stuff at that point.

• 50:45Speaker 06

  But it is a thing where it's like, if I care about sleep tracking, which an increasing number of people do, and especially if you're an athlete and you care about recovery tracking.

• 50:54David Pierce?

  Fair, yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  Like, this is a very small subset of people, but it is a very passionate subset of people. Then a ring that is something that you can have on all the time is not like held to the same battery constraints as a smartwatch. Then it kind of becomes like a nice secondary and like, I know I'm crazy because I have four wearables on right now.

• 51:14David Pierce?

  No, I think you're the average user.

• 51:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm totally the average user. But basically, you know, I will say that I, I definitely am like, oh yeah, if I have an Aura ring and an Apple Watch, that is the perfect health tracking kind of combo. But you have to care about health tracking, which I think the thing that makes wearables, like this subset of wearable is the hardest, is that fitness and health is a very, very hard habit to develop.

• 51:40David Pierce?

  Well, and this is kind of where I've landed with smartwatches, right? I think it's definitely true that the most useful thing the Apple Watch does for the most people is the health and fitness stuff. I totally buy that. I still think that's only one slice of the pie of like reasons to buy an Apple Watch, and there are lots of them. And, right, and I think Apple used to think the like get notifications on your wrist slice was the biggest. It's not. The health and fitness one is clearly the biggest. But it's still, I mean, I'm making up the numbers, but like, that's 40% of the thing. That leaves 50 other things that comprise the other 60%. And as we get to these other things, we're just pulling all of that away. And so what I keep trying to figure out is like, is Samsung gonna try and figure out

• 52:22David Pierce?

  how to put like a microphone and speaker into the Galaxy Ring 2 so that I can talk to my assistant through it? Or are we just gonna get to the point where this stuff matters enough to enough people that it's a real business?

• 52:36Speaker 06

  I think it's gonna be probably the latter, just because, you know, my grandpa, my family's full of doctors, and my grandpa was like Mr. Doctor in our family. He was the most esteemed one, and he would always tell us that your health is the most valuable thing you have. If you don't have health, your life kind of is, it's not what it could be. It's one of those things that I think the longer that we live, the more technology advances, the more that we know about our health. Like, I think that's going to kind of impress upon people that I want to live longer, I want to see my kids, I want to be able to, you know, do things with them. That's gonna become more important to people. And the thing that really stymies that is that health is not built in spurts, it's not in New Year's resolutions, it's in tiny things that you do every day.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  And that's very, very, very difficult for most people to make that behavioral change. It's the number one thing that I think stands in the way of wearable adoption. And battery life.

• 53:28Speaker 06

  Those two things. So, you know, it's just, I really do think the health aspect is big there, but I don't think that Samsung would be smart to put microphones into the Galaxy Ring. I really don't. I think the smartest thing it could do is to bundle it with the Galaxy Watch, so that you're not buying it separately, you're buying it for a discounted price, and then you have the whole picture of the Samsung health experience, and then you're just in their ecosystem. I really think it's an ecosystem play where you get an accessory for your accessory to your phone. And I think if they're smart, they'll do it that way, where you're just like, oh, are you going to upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy 7? Free Galaxy Ring for you.

• 54:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:07Speaker 06

  And then, you know, you do that at first, and then people get on different upgrade cycles, and then they buy in, and that's my insidious capitalism plan for...

• 54:17David Pierce?

  It tracks. No, it does, it does kind of make sense. And it also gets you to the point where now you're literally wearing something from that company 24 hours a day.

• 54:26Speaker 06

  And I think it should be really scary for Aura. Aura, unprompted, sent me a statement when the Galaxy Ring was unveiled, and they're like...

• 54:33David Pierce?

  Oh, that's never a good sign. Did it say, "We're not scared? Everything's fine"?

• 54:35Speaker 06

  Yes. They said, "We're not scared. We have hundreds of patents. We are the leader. This is validation in this space." And I'm like, "Yes, but also, you should be scared, because you charge a $6 monthly subscription on top of a $300 ring." Samsung can go, "Oh, we don't need a, we don't need a subscription for you."

• 54:53David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, here, have some rings.

• 54:54Speaker 06

  Have some rings. Have it with our, with our watch. That also doesn't come with rings. We've also spent two years beefing up our sleep tracking, like, features. So...

• 55:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I think, I think Aura's, I don't think they have to worry now, but they should be a little concerned, is what I think, yeah.

• 55:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, that seems right. That has a lot of the vibes of like when Slack took out that full-page ad, when Microsoft Teams came out, being like, "Everything's fine. We think our product is terrific." And that went super great for Slack. Last thing, then we gotta go. Should I just give up on my idea and dream of the, like, wearable computer as a thing? Like, ever since the beginning of the Apple Watch, I have loved the thesis of the Apple Watch originally, which was basically... Basically, like, we want to build a new, simpler, lower-touch, more personal device for you to use instead of pulling out your phone all the time. And I think, like, if I were to get real Galaxy brain about all of this, right? It's like, you come back to all this AI stuff that's happening and the stuff we're doing with

• 55:54David Pierce?

  voice and with transcription, and you can get to the point where, like, okay, maybe actually talking to my wrist is going to quickly become a thing I can do and it will be good. And at the same time, all of these products are running away from that stuff and toward health and fitness. And so, one of two things is either gonna happen. It's either gonna come back around, or it's just, these are just going to be health and fitness devices, and we're either gonna have to invent something new, or the phone is gonna continue to be the computer. Which one do you think it is?

• 56:20Speaker 06

  I think, in the short term, the latter, but in the long term, the former.

• 56:24David Pierce?

  So you think we might come back around, eventually?

• 56:25Speaker 06

  I think we are gonna come back around, and you can see it with AR glasses. They are real, I just don't necessarily think it's gonna be your wrist, I think it's gonna be your eyes.

• 56:33David Pierce?

  That's, yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 06

  So, like, it's just-

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, those Ray-Ban Meta glasses are like-

• 56:36Speaker 06

  That is pretty wild.

• 56:38David Pierce?

  You put them on, and it's like, oh, I kinda get it now.

• 56:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, like, I get it.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 06

  Once they figure out how to do actual AR and not mixed reality, that's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot. But the thing is, is like, when you wear something on your body, that's health.

• 56:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 56:50Speaker 06

  Uh, that requires the FDA to get involved. Like, we've been talking about smart contacts for a long time, there's various prototypes in that, but when you are shining light into your eye that way, that's a, are you gonna burn your retinas off?

• 57:02David Pierce?

  It's a whole thing, yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 06

  We don't know, right? We don't know. That's why, that's my theory, is that why in the last versions of iOS and WatcherOS, they included vision health for children. Because children's vision health, if you mess up your health as a child, you can't really get into a vision pro, can you?

• 57:17David Pierce?

  Man, speaking of ruthless capitalism, like, we're gonna, we're gonna save children's eyesight so they can use our headset.

• 57:23Speaker 06

  I do, but actually, I really do think that's it. I really do think that's part of the thing, because, you know, smart glasses leave out a lot of people who don't have, like, you know, normal vision, including myself with my terrible astigmatism. But I really do think that we're gonna go all the way around. It's just that we are in the very baby ages of wearables. It might feel like we've gotten really advanced, but we are super early on. The tech is not there yet. It's not miniature enough yet, as we saw with the Vision Pro. It's here to sell you on a future, and that's what smartwatches are here. The Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, that's what they're here. Like, the Oura Ring. These are all selling you on a future that hasn't arrived yet because technologically, it's not possible yet. And like, are we going to get non-invasive blood glucose monitoring?

• 58:06Speaker 06

  Someday, but they've been working on it since 1975. Like, I should do not. They've been working on it since 1975. It's gonna take a long time. There's a lot of advances that have happened in the background, and I talked to all these vendors, and it's really cool what they're doing. They gotta deal with the FDA clearance process, and that will take anywhere between two to four years, depending on how much money and testing capabilities they have and the mountain of paperwork that they want to do. They have to do it in a medical facility. They have to have the security protocols in place. It's a lot of work. So, yeah. Now wellness, future health. That's kind of the trade-off that they're making.

• 58:41David Pierce?

  Okay. And then, long future, David gets his wrist computer.

• 58:44Speaker 06

  Long future, David gets his face computer, his wrist computer, his finger computer, every, all the computers. You will be a computer.

• 58:53David Pierce?

  This is all I've ever wanted. Thank you. All right, we gotta go. The, thank you as always.

• 59:00David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna get to the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

• 59:39Speaker 04

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• 1:00:43David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11 and the email is [email protected]. We love all your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. Please keep calling, keep emailing. I love hearing from you. This week, we have a question about the Vision Pro. If you're tired of hearing about the Vision Pro and Apple and headsets and the whole thing, I'm really sorry, but it's what everyone keeps asking about. This question comes from John.

• 1:01:08Speaker 07

  Hello, Vergecast team. I'm John in West Lafayette, Indiana. Apple priced the first Vision Pro at $3,500. Forgetting Apple's high profit margins for the moment, what would the price need to be for your review to say, "We don't yet know how much consumers will use this, but the price is attractive." $1,500? $2,000? Optional follow-up question. Today, Apple sells iPad models from $329 to $1099. In two or three years, what will be the right price range for two or three Apple Vision models? Thanks, everyone. Love the show.

• 1:01:45David Pierce?

  Okay, I picked this question not because I have a crystal clear answer, but largely because I really want to know what you all think. As you've heard on this show, I have spent a lot of time yelling about how expensive the Vision Pro is. I think the phrase, all caps, $3,500 is like going to be written at the top of my obituary at this point. But I think this is a really interesting and complicated question. And before I give my answer, I do want to know what you think. So call 866-VERGE11, [email protected]. Tell me what price feels like the tipping point where this goes from sort of neat thing that exists, but doesn't make sense for most people to thing you would consider buying for real and telling other people to buy.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  And if you already bought a Vision Pro, I'm curious how much more you would pay. So think about that in both directions and let me know. I have two answers. I think the consumer price to make regular people buy this thing in huge numbers is $999. I think we're a long way away from that. But I think when you can get a $1,000 version of this, that is basically a very good iPad. It's a good entertainment device. It's a thing you don't have to use all the time to feel like you got your money's worth. That's a nice price for that. It's right in that high-end iPad range. It's what you'd pay for a really good computer monitor. It's about the price of a MacBook Air. It just feels like that is kind of the top line. Buy this device, it'll be cool and fun, you'll love it.

• 1:03:12David Pierce?

  In my dreams, we're more in like the $599, $699 kind of game console price. But I think Apple is Apple and at $999, this thing would do just as well. But also, at $1,999, $1,999, I think the Vision Pro as it exists now becomes an order of magnitude more compelling. At that point, you're in nice MacBook Pro range and it's very much still a pro device for pro people who want to use it for pro things. But even still, it becomes hugely more palatable. I mean, think of all the people who spent $1,600 on a studio display or are happy to upgrade their own PC for $1,000.

• 1:03:55David Pierce?

  Just to get a little more performance and a little more memory and all that kind of stuff. Those are the sorts of people who I think a $2,000 price tag feels right. This is a great television. Like you, you could honestly at $2,000 say this is the best TV. It's cool to wear. You'll love it, but it's a television and it'll still be compelling to a lot of people at $2,000. $3,500, you're just out of that range, at least for me. And I would guess that long-term, based on what I've seen so far and the way people are talking about it and the way even Apple talks about the Vision Pro. I think this thing will end up covering that gamut. I think this lands kind of in MacBook range where you can spend $1,000 for the cheapest one. And I think the cheapest one ends up basically just being a screen with apps.

• 1:04:40David Pierce?

  It's an iPad on your face in a very real way. And I think for $1,000, that's going to be compelling to a lot of people. Over and over, the thing that I'm hearing is that people like this most as an entertainment device. It's a way to sit on the couch or lie in bed and watch something. That's what people buy an iPad for. And I think you can get to a point where if you're Apple and you can sell basically an iPad, but it's cooler to use, you don't have to hold it in your hands, which is actually valuable for a lot of things. And it has all this kind of gaming and productivity upside. I think you can sell the base thing for $1,000 and then for more stuff, more power, more productivity tools, more ability to like do cool stuff. I don't know what they would add into these other things other than just better specs. That's how you get up to two grand.

• 1:05:25David Pierce?

  So that's my theory is that this thing wants to land basically on the whole spectrum between $1,000 and $2,000. And when it gets there, that becomes pretty powerful. I think it's going to take a while to get there. I don't think Apple is charging $3,500 for this because it is like a massively greedy company. I think this is a very, very, very, very expensive thing to make. And it's going to take a long time before they can sell it to you for one or even $2,000. But when they do, I will stop yelling about how expensive it is and I'm very much looking forward to that day. But again, tell me what you think. Email us, [email protected], call the hotline 866-verge11. I want to know how you feel about the Vision Pro price. Would you have paid more than you did? Are you waiting for it to be a certain price? Are you like, David, you're insane. I'm only buying this thing if it's 99 bucks.

• 1:06:10David Pierce?

  Tell me everything. I desperately want to know. Hit us up. All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who was on the show. And as always, thank you so much for listening. There's lots more from our conversation at theverge.com. We have now posts on the site with all of our show notes for every episode. So if you want to know more about everything that we did, go check it out. Also, like I mentioned at the top, we are now on The Verge's YouTube channel with all of our full episodes, so go like, subscribe, smash all the buttons, say mean things about us in the comments, hit us up, we love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the Super Bowl streaming

• 1:06:52David Pierce?

  mishaps, more headsets, trillion-dollar AI ideas, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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