Facebook becomes Meta / Pixel 6 review / Macbook Pro review

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Facebook's new name. Dan Seifert joins to discuss the reviews for Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro as well as MacBook Pro. Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook is rebranding to Meta Facebook’s new name is Meta What is the metaverse, and do I have to care? Facebook’s Oculus Quest will soon be called the Meta Quest Oculus users are getting a new metaverse home Facebook is adding a mixed reality platform to Oculus Quest Facebook teases ‘Project Cambria’ high-end VR / AR headset Amid the fluff, Meta showed an impressive demo of its Codec Avatars Eight things we learned from the Facebook Papers Facebook’s lost generation Facebook says it’s refocusing company on ‘serving young adults’ Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro review: finally, more than just good cameras The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro will arrive with a day-one update Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake chips usher in a new generation of … Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021) review: a bigger and better ... Apple AirPods (third-gen) review: new design, same appeal Adobe brings a simplified Photoshop to the web Sony Xperia Pro-I: A camera first, phone second Samsung announces cloud gaming for Tizen TVs, offers no further details Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Alex Heath, Alex Grands and Dan Seaver join the show. We talk about Facebook's rebranding to Meta, what Zuck is doing in the Metaverse, some of Facebook's new hardware ideas. Then we talk about Pixel 6 reviews, the MacBook Pro reviews, a little lightning round. Spoiler, we go over. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:17Speaker 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.

• 1:02Speaker 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.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Metaverse. And if you didn't see that joke coming, I don't know what you've been doing because that was a truck that was coming over the bridge. There you go. I'm Eli. I'm your friend. That's Dieter Bohn. I'm a sentient disclosure machine.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  This one's gonna be a tough one for Dieter. Can I just say before I introduce everybody else, at the end of our event last week. Which was amazing. Thank you to everybody who came. Incredible. Dieter and I were on stage. We were just taking audience questions after Dieter's premiere of Springboard, his documentary. Available on Smart TV apps now. Someone asked a question and it was about Facebook. And so Dieter had to say disclosure, out loud. I literally just said the word disclosure. That's all I just, I just said, so disclosure. And then everyone started clapping. And cheering. The room erupted. And I was just like, I need to send a video of this to like a, like a journalism professor. Like, we did it.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  We have, people are cheering transparency in the press. Like, I don't know how we did it, but we did it. Anyway. It's amazing. That was amazing. Disclosure, I think the next group of people is pretty rad. Alex Cranz is here.

• 3:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm in whatever an emoji is gonna be in Facebook metaverse.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  That's me.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath is here. Two Alexes, once again.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Hi, I am tired.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  You've had a, you've had a run this week. And Dan Seifert's here. So all-star crew.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  Hi. Yes, I am also tired.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  If you really want to know some like inside baseball, our producer Liam is on the call too. Hi Liam.

• 3:34Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  He's, he's just muted. You can't hear him. Um, okay. A lot to talk about this week. Our reviews of the MacBook Pro and the Pixel 6 went up. We'll get to those in a little bit. Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta, a scoop that Alex had last week. Alex talked to Mark Zuckerberg. There's an interview with Boz, Meta's new CTO. That's coming on Decoder next week. There's more Facebook Papers revelations, but we have to start with clearly the most important news. Alex, do you want to take us through it?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  The cloth.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  The cloth.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Guys, the cloth is gonna just become a reoccurring picture, I think, of this show.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  This is your brand.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  It's my brand.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  People are gonna start cheering when you say the cloth. Yeah, when is the review coming Heath? I need the review.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Apparently four months, four to six months.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Apple made a polishing cloth. It costs $19. It is sold out. And the New York Times wrote about it today. Yeah. Just to set the stage for what Alex is gonna do.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  And, you know, I can't wait to just feel the fiber count.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  I just, I'm gonna write like 5,000 words. Like you thought the Zuckerberg transcript was long. Wait until I spend time with this cloth.

• 4:54Speaker 05

  There's some drama about the cloth. Apple is refusing to disclose the specs in a, in a, in a non-attributable statement to the New York Times. An Apple spokesperson said that the cloth was made of non-woven microfiber, but declined to elaborate.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Hmm. So we don't know how many cores.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  We do not know how many cores.

• 5:14Nilay Patel?

  Can I just laser focus?

• 5:16Speaker 05

  Although I will say that it's definitely multi-threaded.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  That's it, everybody. Look, the verge is 10. It's been one decade. We had a good run and now we're gonna shut down the website. That's the end of that. Can I just laser focus on an Apple official said in an interview, based on the condition that the New York Times not quote or identify her, it's a cloth. Like, I realized that I freaked out when it was like on-device local photo scanning, potentially like, they need to be on record for that. And I feel morally convicted of that opinion. Not identify yourself to, to say the cloth. This is what she said. The official said the cloth was very effective.

• 6:00Alex Cranz?

  Like, don't quote me on that.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing?

• 6:02Alex Cranz?

  Paraphrase me, please.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  I know why, because I would have found this person and I would have said, where is my cloth?

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  All right. Enough of that. I, every, by the way, I'm picking on Apple, but every tech company plays these games and it drives me bonkers personally. You make this stuff, just talk it, it's fine. Anyway, on to the actual news, which is that I have a cloth for you, Alex.

• 6:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  The actual news is that the Facebook rebrand to Meta, which I have to say, I think we called last week on the show. I think we were pretty convinced that that's what it would be.

• 6:40Alex Cranz?

  I wasn't. I was convinced it was Horizon. I'm very upset.

• 6:45Nilay Patel?

  Horizon definitely sounds like a health insurance startup. I like, it always has.

• 6:49Alex Cranz?

  I was ready for it.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  It always will.

• 6:51Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna do like a thing with his hands, make a make a sun rising with his hands. It's gonna be great.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  Zuckerberg during this this connect keynote came very close to making a sunrise with his hands.

• 7:02Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  So Alex, there was a keynote and you talked to Zuck and Boz. Walk us through it.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  There was a keynote that was, I think, especially full of vaporware this year. It was mostly a bunch of CGI of Zuck's imagining of what the metaverse could be, playing games with your virtual avatar disembodied friends and a space station, playing with little, you know, virtual animals in AR that run around on the grass. None of it exists. I would say 80% of what we saw in this connect keynote probably will never exist in the form it was shown in. But the name is very real and that logo, that logo is thick.

• 7:46Nilay Patel?

  With two Cs. Can I congratulate one of our senior video folks, Aaron Pavick, raced out to Menlo Park and took a picture of them changing the sign in front of the Facebook headquarters to say Meta. Like they did it. They were ready.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was heroic. That was heroic. So basically, a couple hours before the keynote started, they put a giant cloth, not apples, of course, but a cloth over the like sign by Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park. Then like all of a sudden on Twitter, everyone's like trying to get the angle of like the people painting the new logo on drawing it on the the sign. What is it? It's like this infinity type thing. And yeah, V raced down there, got some great photos. And they really did this, like just orchestrated, like everything changed at once, you know, like all the execs on Twitter are changing their Twitter handles, their bios and.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's meta. It's meta and it's and it is meta in the fact that it is meta. Just a lot of layers to this. But yeah, I talked to Mark Zuckerberg about it and we we covered a bit of ground. He had some things to say about like crypto that I had never heard him talk about and how they're excited about kind of blockchain, smart contracts for the metaverse. We talked about succession, you know, I asked him, are you still going to be CEO and chairman in five years? And he said, probably.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  I was really hoping you meant the TV show. I wanted to hear his thoughts on shit. Disclosure, that's my only joke in this section. My partner works for, I guess, Meta now, so.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Meta. Well, that's the thing. So Oculus, the Oculus name is is going away as part of this. It's now going to be the Meta Quest, the Meta Portal, which is such a horrible.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  It's not great.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Can't wait to edit those reviews.

• 9:37Nilay Patel?

  So yeah, so the reasoning that Zach gave you and the transcript is on the site, you can read it. And then next week, we'll have interview with Andrew Bosworth, the CTO on Decoder that Alex said is great. But the reasoning Zach gave you was this is getting confusing for people. Facebook is a product. People didn't want to log into their Quest for the Facebook account and people really did not want to log into their Oculus Quest for the Facebook account. There was a lot of backlash to that.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  I think this may just kind of surprise people. One of the main reasons that they changed the brand of the company that has been the same for 17 years is one of the most recognizable brands in the world is because Mark got concerned that people hated logging into Quest with their Facebook accounts.

• 10:20Alex Cranz?

  There's another solution to that.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  Make Facebook good?

• 10:24Alex Cranz?

  Like, maybe, maybe don't force people to log into Facebook. Like, he.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  But it's not, it's not.

• 10:30Alex Cranz?

  It's not Meta enough.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Well, no, no, no, like, you would think that it might be, you know, the Facebook name being dragged in the mud constantly by the media for all the problems, all the, you know, hate speech, misinformation, the toxicity of that brand. No, like, the first thing he talked about was like logging into Quest. And I just, I think that's an important, it it shows his frame of mind and like how he is act legitimately obsessed with this stuff and is thinking almost like exclusively about. This this more futuristic like phase of the company and not really at all what people are focused on right now. He's he's thinking about like people's concerns with a product that maybe has 10 million headsets in circulation. Maybe like definitely Facebook's smallest product besides Portal.

• 11:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just but here's like the the good faith pushback on that. I find I buy it. The reason people don't like logging into their Quest headsets with their Facebook accounts is because Facebook is associated with toxicity and sharing things you don't want to share.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Of course, but my point is that the vector of the like concern for him is the Quest. It's not like Blue App, which shows you just how obsessed he is with this stuff.

• 11:42Alex Cranz?

  Is this like the moment that they're unifying all of their hardware under like this new name and stuff, right? Because like the Portal also nobody wants because Facebook and they're going to do these glasses and nobody wants them because of Facebook. And this is kind of their way to be like, yeah, now we're into hardware, fully unified, under this new dumb name. And also Facebook's over there, forget about it. It doesn't exist.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 12:06Alex Cranz?

  You can't see it.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  That is that is definitely part of it. And there's going to be this new unified account system. And the details are very slim, but it's going to include Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, which has been separate this whole time. A meta account system that you can have that will span everything and you can choose if you want to drop it into an app or the Quest or whatever. The Meta Smartwatch, whatever else is coming. It sounds like they haven't ironed that out, though. He was pretty vague about it, but he said part of this is he wants like a brand that supersedes everything that is not one of the apps. And obviously, one of the apps that has the most toxicity tied to its name. But he used the word like iconic, like Facebook is the most iconic social media brand with me like three times, which is like his way of saying like,

• 12:51Speaker 03

  I'm not totally throwing this team under the bus.

• 12:54Alex Cranz?

  Mostly.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  But yeah, it was it was a very interesting interview. I mean, he was pretty blunt and I was like, look, man, like. Everyone's gonna say you're doing this just a distance from all the scandals of the past, you know, few weeks, the whistleblower Francis Haugen, the Facebook papers that we and others reported on. And he was like, that's ridiculous. He was like, we started this over six months ago. He said, I've been thinking about this actually for years, formally kicked off the project six months ago. And he was like, if I didn't think we were running towards something versus running away from something with something this big, changing the name, then I wouldn't, I wouldn't be doing it. Which like, believe that if you want. But it was fascinating. The whole rebrand story is fascinating to me. He made employees

• 13:34Speaker 03

  inside Facebook sign separate NDAs to work on the rebrand because it was so top secret. And, um, yeah, it was, it's been an interesting week.

• 13:44Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of wild to me, though, that he's saying he's not running away from it when he like, very much admitted by saying like, oh, people were horrified to log in to Facebook on their, their quest. Why, Mark? Like, what's, what's the next step to that?

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what I keep coming back to.

• 14:00Alex Cranz?

  You are, you have admitted you're running away. Like, maybe not from this, the papers themselves, the most recent scandal, but like, yeah, you're running away. Like, don't, don't hide behind the portal and, and the quest.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  What's he gonna say, though?

• 14:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, Alex, it's true, I'm running away. Like, that, that's fine, right? I, I spend a lot of time interviewing executives and sometimes you just have to like, psychologically evaluate what's happening to you when you're talking to them. Like, they have to be on message, fine. The thing that gets me is, on the one hand, this might be great for Facebook and its set of problems, because a new person will end up in charge of the blue app, while Mark is dancing in the metaverse. Fine. On the other hand, that new person could be horrible, and do a bad job, and be less accountable, because Congress will still want Mark Zuckerberg to show up. And he will have even less interest in what is going

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  on with Facebook. And say even less interesting, you know, like, there's just a, a problem here where, yeah, I, Casey wrote this in, in Platformer the other night. He was like, the reaction to a lot of this is really boomer, which is very funny. He's like, so many people are just assuming that smartphones are the end of time. And there won't be a next thing. And no one's gonna build it. And that no company should invest in building it. We should only solve the problems we've seen from us today. I'm somewhat of that opinion. There are a lot of problems. We don't know how to solve them. Right? Like, I don't have a plan for social media moderation at scale. No one does. Like, if you go and talk to the experts, they're like, no, this is an intractable, impossible

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  problem that we're just going to be saddled with until we shut them down or agree that the problem looks like this and just solve it every day. Zuckerberg not paying attention to that and then trying to build a virtual world where that problem is everything. Like, you live in a digital world, everything around you is content moderation. You just, it's the matrix of content moderation. Like, what, what gets to be there? Who gets to decide if it's there? What blockchain system transfers ownership from the Roblox metaverse to Facebook's? Do they have the same rules? Like, all that is, is a content moderation problem. The technology is very complicated and

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  worth investing in, but the experience is someone will be in charge of reality. And I just like, and he had Nick Clegg, right? He like, they tried to gesture at it. But it's just weird, like, running away from the blue app moderation problem to the metaverse is like, what if I just upped the difficulty level on this?

• 16:47Speaker 05

  The Matrix movies turned out to actually be really hopeful because it, the Matrix might be controlled by a hyper intelligent AI that wants to destroy humanity, but at least it's like consistent in their rules. And you know what's going to happen there, unlike the metaverse.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And if you ever ask them, they, they put you into a room with a little man and he just puts you to sleep. Like, this plan is evil, but I don't care to understand it. I'm sorry. I'm excited for the fourth movie. It's gonna be great.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  I talked about that actually too with, with Boz on Decoder a bit. And he, I think he has some interesting things to say that's coming out early next week. I do think it's going to be a little different. I'm not sure we're going to get the one to many kind of instantly broadcast, anyone can see public comments type environment in what they're building, like we have in 2D Facebook. It is more kind of people centered and that's like what Mark kept coming back to is that he wants this to be centered around people and not apps. Like he wants the people to be the locus of control and like maybe blockchain somehow helps that, but I don't really know.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  But yeah, no, it's a huge open question. It's like, do we trust this company that obviously can't moderate its current platform? And he told me, he was like, we've just managed to piss off everyone with like, how we've run Facebook today. Just like, kind of implied in that is like, we're doing the best we can if like, we piss off both sides.

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  So they did have Nick Clegg, who's there at a policy and it was very funny, right? So Mark is like in his virtual world and then he looks at what is now a meta portal. And he has this conversation with Nick Clegg and Nick Clegg is on the other side, like talking to a portal on a TV. So like Mark is like safely at home and like Nick is at the office. That's the way it is. It was like, you're at work, Nick. What's up? And he was like, Nick, how are we going to keep the metaverse safe? And Nick was like, we're going to think about it from the beginning.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  And that went on for a while. Did you buy it? What did you think of this little presentation?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  I asked like Boz a question too in Decoder, like, so if I'm using Horizon, which is Facebook's metaverse software, Roblox meets Minecraft. Am I just going to be able to interact with my friends or friends of friends? Or is like a stranger going to be able to just like come up to me in VR? Maybe aided by an algorithm and like start doing who knows what to me. Cause like my very few interactions I've had in VR and I've done a couple of actual Horizon demos. And like they have this venues thing, which is like concerts in VR. The interactions have not been great. Like, like one time a guy came up to me and was like, where are the chicks, man? And like, this was like one of my first times interacting with a stranger in VR.

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  Wow, I'm excited. That's gonna be, that's gonna be great times.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like, it's gonna be a problem. Like, I don't know if they can totally foresee how much of a, yeah, problem this is gonna be. But they are, you know, Boz talks about like principles of like, you know, don't surprise people. And then they surprise people by linking the Facebook account to the quest and pissing everyone off. Right? So like, the track record's not great. I will definitely acknowledge that and I think they do too. But they have gotten spanked quite a bit over the last five years and I think that is informing a bit of how they're approaching this.

• 20:00Alex Cranz?

  I have a question for the room real fast. Is the term metaverse gonna be over now? Because like Facebook has effectively branded it. Like, are other companies gonna continue to use it to describe this Matrix VR space? Or are they gonna have to switch to something else because they wanna pull away from the Facebook branding?

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Has Tim Sweeney angrily tweeted yet? Because it was his word, too.

• 20:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  This word is snow crash. Like, this word predates like, all these people. And it's like a dystopian sci-fi novel from the 90s. And I was like, Mark, did you ever think that you were using a word about like, people escaping a crumbling society?

• 20:41Alex Cranz?

  Did you read the bookmark?

• 20:44Speaker 03

  And he was like, yeah, it's a con.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  This is like when Elon Musk said he was a big fan of Parasite.

• 20:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Get it?

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  That's a great movie. So amid all of this, and the naming, and the branding, and the vapor, they did announce some products, or some things they're gonna do. They've got a new high-end AR/VR headset, which is funny because they said they were never gonna do an Oculus Pro, and that was technically true.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Because it's They're not using the Oculus brand anymore, yeah.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they really lawyered their way through that one. Congratulations to everyone. Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  It's mixed reality, so it's gonna have a full-color, high-res video pass-through and face-body eye-tracking for kind of realistic avatar expression. And

• 21:34Speaker 04

  But will I still look like a Memoji? Like, will I still look like the Nintendo "we-me" aesthetic from 15 years ago?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Like, yes.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  How real are we getting here?

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Um, the higher-res versions of that, but the first versions do look like Nintendo. Nintendo is like so prescient in that design. But they're also working on these Kodak avatars, and they showed a demo of this. And it was just one of their researchers standing, and he's talking to the camera, and he's like, "By the way, I'm not real." And you're like, "Oh, my God." And then they, and then they do the green screen pullback and like he's of Avatar and he looks like skin real. So that's going to be, talk about uncanny valley. But the first version is going to be these kind of memoji we type avatars.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  A tremendous moment during the keynote, by the way, was Zuckerberg was like, let me dress my avatar. He walked over and then he was like, an astronaut. He was wearing a spooky Halloween outfit. And then he picked the exact same outfit he was wearing. And I was like, you really showcased the wealth of identity options. That was very funny. It was droll, I would say.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  But Cambria, interestingly, based on what I know about what Apple's working on, is very similar to the first kind of headset we're going to get from Apple, which is a high end mixed reality. So instead of like full VR, it's showing you a video of the real world through the cameras that can mix graphics by cheating by just using the video feed. So it's going to be pretty interesting. I think we're going to start to get some new experiences there. It's going to be expensive, probably, you know, they're not going to sell that many. That's next year. They also teased, but didn't really show the air glasses. They're calling them Nazare. There's no timing on those, but they're working on some UI stuff. They, they did some more vaporware presentations of someone making a text, you know, with like looking in their living room and there's like a text field above it. And like all these

• 23:27Speaker 03

  demos, why are they still people playing board games on tables?

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. Apple's been doing AR demos for 45 years now. Like Steve Jobs was born, he was like, I've got a vision and it's, it's chess, but the chessboard isn't there. I mean, they have been doing these demos forever. They do not have a killer app. There is one killer app for AR and it is seeing people's names. And Facebook is obviously like uniquely suited to deliver that app to people. And that's fine. But like, apart from that, it's, it's measuring stuff. It's putting couches where they shouldn't be. And it's like playing board games. It's like, no one else has any other ideas for this.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Turn by turn directions would be sick.

• 24:14Alex Cranz?

  Well, you know, building, building like a car or something, being guided by someone else to tighten some pipes.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  That's the enterprise metaphor.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Well, this was buried in their announcement there is that they're working with BMW and they didn't say really what it was for, but this is part of the Nazaray AR glasses.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna, they're gonna AR display that turn signals on BMW.

• 24:37Alex Cranz?

  So we're just getting the Pontiac Aztec again?

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  That'd be great. If you could just like walk the streets and every car looks sick.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Oh, speaking of Grand Theft Auto coming to VR.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  That's bad. That's the snow crash. Steer away from snow crash.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Don't do that. So here's my, here's my question, just on a technical level about these headsets. And I, we, you reported when you were at the information on Apple's. Now we've got the Facebook one, right? It's a full color passer. So you've got an LCD screen or an OLED screen in front of your face. And then you've got a camera shooting out in the world. The camera is going to look at the world for you. It's going to pass through some compute. Some computer is going to do something to that image and then it's going to display it on that screen. That's all just latency to me. That is me just walking, like bumping into things because my body is moving faster than what I can see. And like, I don't, no one's really talked about it yet, but this interim solution of full color pass

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  through video is like where everyone's going. And the first thing I, like, if you do a pass through on the Oculus Quest 2 right now, there's a delay. And if you perceive that delay, like you're like, I, this is super cool, but I don't know where my hands are exactly. And that's really weird. It's fine for like picking up your water bottle, right? It's, but it's, it's, you can't walk around the world that way.

• 26:02Alex Cranz?

  You will trip on a pad.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  You shouldn't. Yeah. You shouldn't. You're going to look like you're from Snow Crash walking around. Yeah. Like the latency thing is going to be solved. And I think it, I wouldn't be surprised if this headset is pretty impressive in terms of that. And they're going to like, they're going to have eye tracking and like, that helps with like the graphics being more focused and low latency where you're looking. So yeah, I'm excited to try this thing. I totally understand the reservations of Facebook having body eye face tracking or meta, excuse me. But God, where this is going to be like the next month of my life is.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  I was, I was reading the transcript of your boss interview. And there's a point where he calls it Facebook and you correct him that it's meta, which is very good. You're like meta. And he just like cruises through. He's like, that didn't happen. It's very good.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be very confusing. I do you think broadly, and we should talk about the Facebook papers quickly because that happened also.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Remember those?

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  Do you think this is gonna distract or otherwise divert attention from the enormous series of leaks about Facebook's internal operations and the dissent within that company?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  I think it already has like, and yeah, I mean, remember the Facebook papers. That was literally like Tuesday.

• 27:25Alex Cranz?

  It was Monday.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Oh, God. Okay, Monday. You're right. Yeah, no, I think it it has for this week. I think we may return to it. But, you know, I can't say that that wasn't part of the plan, right? Because like the consortium, which we were a part of, set the embargo for this week, not knowing at the time what would be happening this week. I reported the week right before that there was a rebrand was coming. And now everyone's like conspiracy theory like Facebook is changing its name to like change the Google search results from the Facebook papers to this because now it's Meta. Just based on my own like personal anecdotes, I get way more normal people like who don't follow tech asking me about the name than anything I've heard from the papers, you know? So.

• 28:08Alex Cranz?

  Well, and the stock looks like a U right now. It just like cratered and just shot straight up when they announced Meta, like.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  The new ticker, MSRV, MSRV. I think we're gonna see more of it. But yeah, I think they think this is gonna help them move away from it. And it definitely gives like everyone a morale boost of like, oh, we're, you know, we're this cool reinventing company that's like focused on the future. And I asked Mark, I was like, look, is this about recruiting? And he was like, took a beat. It was like, that's a good question.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean about the psychology is interviews are like, that pause is the answer. And then there's whatever they say.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So no, it's definitely about that as well. It's about morale and it's about recruiting. Look, if you're like evaluating an offer between Apple's like mixed reality team and Facebook's, and then you're like, well, now I can tell people I work at Meta. Maybe you'll take the job. I don't know. Maybe it'll change your mind. Maybe not, but.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  At least I don't have to like, I don't have to be the answer questions about the Capitol riots when I tell people where I work.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like, look, I work at Meta. But yeah, we did report on the papers and it connects to this because the story I did was about how they're freaking out about losing younger people. The very next day, Mark Zuckerberg comes out on earnings and says, I'm telling all my product teams to focus exclusively on young people. And, you know, all these metrics showing that teens are like not posting on Instagram as much. They're definitely not losing the blue app. Like, this is probably going to be the first time that an entire generation just like skips getting on Facebook, which is like a while to think about.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  So you and I talked about this before your story went out. Yeah, sure. I can see that. The, the thing that confounds me is that young people routinely turn into old people. And old people cannot stay away from Facebook. Like, they're just like, there's a switch in your life. For us, it was, we had a kid. And then all the parent groups and the school group and the, you know, where are the trick or treating events by, like, all that's on Facebook.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Very true.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Get it on TikTok. You want to find a plumber. It's like, you go to, like, all that stuff that makes you old, that just makes you understand in your heart.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  All that responsibility comes crashing onto you and you run to Facebook to resolve it.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Facebook is a utility for old people. That's fine. It's also a utility for extremely disturbed people to spread their views. But there's like enormous amount of just like adult utility that is baked into that app that is unavoidable. And Facebook is like, screw this. Young people.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I think they're saying, we got that. So like, we don't need to do anything else. Like, all their data is like, over 30, we're fine. We're growing like crazy.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  See what I mean? Where is that growth coming from? It's coming from people turning 30.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  No, but like, I see what you're saying, but it's not just, it's not that people are joining and then getting older. That has been happening for 17 years. What is the first, for the first time happening in the last few years is like, people are not joining. So like, young people are just not using the service. And on Instagram, they're using it less for the first time. And so they're going, our population is, is going to die. And also like, they've done re-

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  Huge gap between 30 and 10.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Well, it's like, it's like, well, I'm scheduling a trick or treat run for my four year old.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm dead now.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Tomorrow I die and you're dead.

• 31:33Speaker 05

  I gotta say, the huge gap between 30 and dying, I, now that I'm over 30, I agree. Before I was 30, but yeah, it really is there.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like we're dead.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  When you're like, yeah, when you're like.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  I thought it was 22. Yeah, I will be, I will admit that my 25th birthday party was ridiculous because I was like, it's over tomorrow.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  I didn't win the fields medal, my God. That is a deep cut of a joke. Three of you are going to get that and.

• 31:58Speaker 05

  I got it.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  Pull over and really think about your lives and I apologize for that. But I just, that's, even the young people that aren't using it today are gonna get older and need that set of utilities. They will age into Facebook is what I'm saying. And that just doesn't.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  No, they don't think so because what's happening is a lot of like new platforms are taking the time away from them in a way they've never seen before. And what they've, they've done research and they've shown that Instagram, like teens on Instagram, they influence what their household does. They tell their younger siblings what is cool. So the younger siblings then never get on, they tell their parents what is cool. And yeah, you can't get off Facebook because you're doing your trick or treating marketplace stuff on there. But like, if your teen is constantly telling you, hey, this thing is where I'm on, this is cool. Like, all the old people got on Facebook, I remember, because younger people, college students, were on there. And then all the old people were like, how do you do kids? And they showed up.

• 32:50Alex Cranz?

  And it was the worst day ever.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Like, this is not a phenomenon that like is hard to understand. Like, the young people tell everyone else what is cool. And they're losing young people for Roblox, for Fortnite. And so hence pivot to Meta.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  I, I cannot wait to schedule playdates in Fortnite. Just hop into Fortnite.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  I honestly don't know if that's sincere or not.

• 33:13Alex Cranz?

  30 foot Ariana Grande behind you.

• 33:15Nilay Patel?

  But it also feels like a living nightmare.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  That to me is like, I just, they've got a, any other company and I, I understand what you're saying and I even think it's probably accurate that if you don't start using Facebook, when you get to the point that you need a utility like Facebook, you might choose something else.

• 33:37Alex Cranz?

  Nextdoor.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. So that's like a competitive Facebook, but weirder. Like, yeah, there's all of that, right? But to me, the core of this is if you just open the blue app, it's not well-designed. It is just like chock-full of stuff. It is hard to use. They tried to make it into a super app like WeChat is in China, like, and that strategy kind of backfired and all the problems landed in their lap.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Oh, they're still going that direction. So.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  You think so?

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:12Nilay Patel?

  I just like, what we're here. So here's our plan. We've got some olds. They're stuck with us. We're gonna just try to like, make them live their lives in this app. But young people, our product managers are really thinking about you. I, there's just something there that isn't coherent to me.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  No. And the presentations that we put in the story, Facebook's Lost Generation, you can find it on theverge.com, are so cringe. And there's ones I didn't even include that are like, brain scans of like, a young person's brain and like, bullet points going like, you know, teens are susceptible to social pressure and like, how do we increase engagement with like, their desire to, you know, it's just like, it's total cringe. It sounds like a robot wrote it. And what they're, what they've realized is that for Facebook, they need to be LinkedIn for like, 20 to 30. And so, Facebook is going to literally start looking like LinkedIn. They're gonna let you post your resume, find jobs, and they causes, they want you to find causes, whatever that means. And they want to do mental health.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  It's like, oh my God, like, it's, yeah.

• 35:17Alex Cranz?

  That'll fix it.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  It's bad.

• 35:20Alex Cranz?

  Done.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  They got it.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  That was, that was the big Facebook paper story. I would say, you know, we, we were in that consortium. Alex had to look through all the stuff. Lots of stories came out from it. We did a roundup of kind of the big themes we saw.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  More to come, more to come. There's more documents.

• 35:38Speaker 05

  Alex, are you gonna, are you gonna write like a poem about the, this branding change? And if you do?

• 35:42Speaker 03

  I've seen some limericks on Twitter. I feel like I. I can't really contribute, you know, beyond what I've seen.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  But what does that mean that those limericks are are part of the metaverse?

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my boy, Peter. It's like, well, he's just the man. Man's like, I made it 10 years. How do I ship this thing?

• 36:00Speaker 05

  I've been quiet for the past 15 minutes. That's how long I've been working on this joke.

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  It's good. But I just want to call the other story that you ran with with Casey. Casey wrote it for Pop Warner, he published it with us. Facebook content moderation, right? That's their business, whether they like it or not. They rank countries by amount of resources they put into content moderation. And so the United States and India are tier zero, all the attention. And there's a lot of countries at tier three, which is no attention unless something bad happens.

• 36:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's not good.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  And you can, you can, you know, I didn't have to tell you, you can already guess what countries are in what part of the list, right? Like, the ones where they make money.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  Are at the top of the list and poorer countries are at the bottom. And it's just like, what are we doing, guys?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  It's almost like a for-profit corporation running international discourses.

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  That so I get the part of the metaverse thing for me is like, Mark is like, man, these countries suck. Dealing with actual countries suck. What if I just make my own world?

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  And like, your, your.

• 37:05Alex Cranz?

  And you don't talk about the real world.

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  blockchain into, yeah, we're done. No countries here, just Zuckerberg's world. I don't know. But there's more to come from the papers. It is not, it is, it is still the story. Like, they can do this.

• 37:19Alex Cranz?

  I feel like Congress still thinks it's, I don't think Congress cares as much about the metaverse as the giant.

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  Amy Klobuchar is not out here being like, you, you got me, like.

• 37:28Alex Cranz?

  She's like, they just sent me my headset.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  She's too busy sending me a daily email.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  That's just because you're from Minnesota. That's just Minnesota. Nice, man.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  No, but I, you know, in many ways, I wonder if the reaction from them is like, great, it's easier to break up Facebook now. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right? You've got this holding company, you've got three apps in it, we're just gonna take one away from you.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  It's just a brand. It's not easier. They're all the same tech, the same people, all the founders, the people who actually had a different view of the world have left. Like, there's, there's nothing to strip apart. If you took like Instagram out of Meta, it's literally just a bunch of Facebook product managers. Like, they're gonna, that have all like been getting paid in Facebook and now Meta stock. Like, it, it, the tech is the same. I just don't buy it. It's just a brand.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  I just think that's Facebook. If you take them out, they'd be like, now we can do what we really want. And they're like, they pull out the presentation, it's like, teens love dancing.

• 38:30Nilay Patel?

  Just flopping in the universe. They changed the stock ticker, too. They had a really, they had impressive, it was FB, which was like, pretty good.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, MSRV.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  MSRV.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  And now, you know, Matthew Ball has Meta for his Meta ETF. And, you know, good for him. Good for his SEO.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. That's amazing. All right. Alex, thank you. You're, you've had a long week. I suspect it's only gonna get more complicated from here on out. I just want to say you're officially our Metaverse beat reporter.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  That's your new title. I apologize to you.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  I relinquish, I relinquish. I'm Senior Cloth Reporter.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, go find out. Go find out. Get some cloth scoops, man. Let's even this out.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  What, what freak?

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  Here in the dirty real world, we need cloths.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go drive an hour south to Long Beach, and I'm gonna go look in the containers, and I'm gonna find the cloths, and I'll report back.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  Get out there. Alex is gonna dingy, like, world's best tech reporter.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  Just rowing out. Yeah. Where are they? All right, buddy. Thank you so much. We'll be right back.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  All right.

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• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. That's enough virtual stuff.

• 40:56Alex Cranz?

  Everybody take your glasses off, your AR glasses.

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  Back here in physical reality, there's new hardware to talk about.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Things you can touch.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  And also Dieter can talk now, which is great.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. Let's talk about real things that actually exist and aren't mediated by computers, like the pixels photography. Oh, wait. Oh, boy. Just kidding.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  What is a photo?

• 41:18Speaker 05

  It's the verge of everything.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  Dan, you reviewed the pixels. Tell us, tell us how you feel.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  Ah, they're great. They are very good executions of Google's smartphones, which we've kind of been waiting for for a long time. And my only real knock against them is not a surprise that they are just huge. So like, if you don't want big phones, it's not the phone for you. If you do like big phones, then you're probably going to like these.

• 41:44Alex Cranz?

  Like, how big? I haven't seen one yet.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  These are, they're within like millimeters of the 13 Pro Max. So like the 6 Pro is effectively larger than the 13 Pro Max and the, the regular 6 is like a millimeter or two shy or whatever. So like, they are big phones. They dwarf a 13 Pro, they dwarf a Pixel 5, they dwarf the like Pixel 3 or Pixel 4, if you had those in the past. Like, there's no small option here. It is

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  No fitting in pants.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  A big one or a bigger one.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I mean, here's, here's how I feel about this. I do wish that there was a small version. Google's been making the smaller versions of Android phones for a while. They still have the As, although even the As are pretty big now.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Aren't, aren't that small anymore?

• 42:26Speaker 05

  But like, Android phones are really big news at 11. Like, I kind of feel like Google's tried everything. They might as well just try saying, screw it, let's make giant phones.

• 42:34Speaker 04

  I think it makes sense. Like, just because someone's paying less for a phone, like they might be with the Pixel 6, which has a great price, great value, it doesn't mean they want a smaller screen. Very often, they want a bigger screen. I was at my local Best Buy the other night and they had the Pixels on display among like a whole row of Android unlocked phones. And they had them next to the OnePlus's and there was Motorola's and there was Samsung's on one end. And apart from them all looking identical, like, like they look really similar, they're all have big screens because that's what people are buying. And like, it makes sense. I think, you know, Google's proven many years that it can't actually sell Pixels. So like-

• 43:13Alex Cranz?

  I, I wanna, I wanna push back on the idea that this is what people are buying because I think it's what they're buying because it's the only thing provided. Like, if you want a high-end phone, well, if you want a high-end phone, if you want a high-end

• 43:23Speaker 04

  That's not the case. Nobody bought the small, high-end Pixels in the past. The Pixel 3 was small. Pixel 4 was small. Nobody bought those. Exactly. So if you're gonna sell Pixels, go after the market that buys-

• 43:33Speaker 05

  I mean, I really hate to say it, but like, companies have been making smaller phones from time to time and then they stop. And they don't stop because they're bored. They stop because, no, not the, I, I-

• 43:43Alex Cranz?

  They're half-assed.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  I want it to be true. I want it to be true that there will be lots of small phones out there, but like, capitalism works. The market has sent signals and they just, they don't sell as well. And so, small phones are like doomed forever to be intermittently made and available and interesting, but the new standard is like 6 inches and above.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  I hate it. It's the worst.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  And there are like tangible benefits to having the bigger phone. Both of them have big screens and people love big screens. Both of them have big batteries. In my testing, I know there's been a lot of different testing results out there from different reviewers, but in our testing, which was not just me, but a lot of staff contributed and helped to it, we got excellent battery life. There was like, whether you went with the Pixel 6 or the 6 Pro, the big batteries make big battery life. So like, they lasted all day easily. End of the day, you didn't have to worry about it when you plug it into charger, wireless charger, whatever, you're gonna have 35, 40% left. Like, these are the things that matter to people, is like, battery life, screen size, and camera.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  And so like, it makes sense to me that they're doing it.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  This is a, wait, can I just say the econ word for this is, uh, expressed preference? Like, people lie all the time, but then the money actually tells the truth. And like, an iron law of the tech industry is like, people will tell you anything, but if you put a gigantic, cheap screen in front of them, they're like, that one. I don't want that one. And like, we just keep fighting this reality.

• 45:08Alex Cranz?

  It's just wild. I hear like, constantly from people, "I want small phones." So they're all just like, liars?

• 45:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, next time someone says that to you, just call them a liar to their face and see how that goes.

• 45:20Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to. That's my new, that's my new way of handling this. Just calling people liars.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  That said, I do think-

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Slap them and walk away.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  The 6 Pro is like, it's on the borderline of being too big. And I'm like, I like big phones and like, I have big hands. And like, I'm like, oh, it's pretty big.

• 45:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they're really slippery. The glass backs on these is like, it almost feels like it's greased slick. I've had them fall off of wireless chargers, fall off of my desk. I put it on the arm of my sofa and it slides off of that.

• 45:50Alex Cranz?

  It just like slid off your desk right now, didn't it? Like, you looked at it and it just-

• 45:55Speaker 04

  Literally, I have a wireless charger on the back of my desk. I put it down there. Like, 20 minutes later, it slid off the back of my desk and like, hit the floor. Like, this happens. You're gonna want to put a case on these things. They're big, they're slippery. Google's cases stink. I recommend checking out third parties. I don't have any recommendations other than they can't be worse than Google's. You know, so, put a case on it and you'll probably be happier.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  Okay, so they're big. We also know that the build quality is like, not super ultra Samsung quality premium. We talked about this a bit, Neil and I did, when we did the special edition Vergecast, where we have an interview with Rikant Sadhar. You should listen to that. But the thing we couldn't talk about, the thing we can talk about now, is camera results. So like, where are we landing on camera? Cause this is like, the big question.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's been interesting because like the the big story here this year is that Google finally upgraded the camera hardware. It's got a new sensor, new lenses, had been using the same hardware for like four years in pixels. These new sensors, the main sensor, which is in both phones, and the ultra wide sensor, which is in both phones, are much bigger than they were in the past. Bigger sensor means more light, better image quality. That's kind of just like a known axiom. And they've got, you know, Google's advancements in computational photography. I will say right away, they are very good. The main sensor takes excellent photos. And when we compare them head to head with the 13 Pro, it's often a toss up. Sometimes the iPhone looks better, sometimes the Pixel looks better. I put this in the review. It really comes down to personal preference, which is like, kind of what we've

• 47:22Speaker 04

  been saying for years. At this point, they both take excellent photos.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  We've been saying it for years, but the last two, two to three years, we have been saying that everybody else caught up and in some ways have surpassed the Pixel.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, in in extreme edge cases, they had surpassed. I would say that, you know, those edge cases are much smaller now. And if there are any, it's like, it could go one way or the other. The thing that was most remarkable to me, though, with the especially particularly the main sensor, is you hear about these big hardware advancements and you expect a big noticeable leap forward over say like what the Pixel 5 produced. But in like everyday situations, oftentimes, the Pixel 5 and the Pixel 6 produce very similar results. They're not especially more detailed, they're not especially sharper. Part of that reason is because Google's using a 50 megapixel sensor and it's binning or or shrinking the resolution down to 12 and a half megapixels, which is effectively

• 48:19Speaker 04

  the same as the 12 megapixels on the Pixel 5. So you're not like getting a great leap in detail. There are some areas where like in extreme low light, it will be better thanks to that bigger sensor. There's a little bit better dynamic range. But you really have to be looking for these. And honestly, if you're looking for a huge upgrade going from a Pixel 5 to a Pixel 6, you might not see it. But the one area that I do think is a big upgrade, and it's frustrating because it's only on the Pixel 6 Pro, is in the telephoto camera. The telephoto camera is like the first telephoto camera on a phone that I've actually enjoyed using. All of the other ones I've used, whether it was the iPhone, even the 13 Pros, Samsung's Ultra Zoom or whatever, they're like fun gimmicks, but they're noticeably bad.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  It just produces like bad images. And so when I first started using the six pros camera, I was just like, wow, this is a telephoto that I can actually use. It does the things I want from a telephoto. It gets me closer to the subject. It like does better what we call compression. So when you are using a longer lens, it makes lines straighter and it kind of like compresses your subject in a very flattering way, especially if you're taking photos of people. And it does actual like separation between the subject and the background, which we've had to use software tricks for so many years. And now we're finally getting the hardware that can do it. And it just, to me, it looks so much better.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. So the iPhone 13 Pro is 3X. This is 4X, but it's also like slightly higher quality. So with the iPhone 13 Pro, we're like, this telephoto is good, but we love it for portraits. So we took some amazing portrait photos. The Pixel 6 Pro, it's like, yeah, it's really good for portraits also, but also it's like actually useful for zoom. And they're super res zoom when you get to, I think they let you go to 20x is still, you know, not great, but it's way better than what Samsung does when it starts to throw software at stuff, right?

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Right. And like even, I did some side by sides with the 10x zoom. That's an actual optical 10x on this S21 Ultra. And because that camera isn't good, the 20 or the 10x digital zoom from Google's good 4X optical camera produces sometimes better, more pleasing results. So that's why I say when like, it's the first one I actually want to use, it is reaching that level of quality where it lets me do things with a phone camera that I haven't been able to do in the past. And like, that is an advancement to me. And it's frustrating that it's only available on the six Pro and not on the six, but that's where we're at.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  We got to come back to six Pro versus six. We have, before we leave camera, we got to talk about video. It's been the entire life of the Pixel. We're like amazed, since the Pixel 2, anyway, it's been like, the camera, oh my God. Then that slowly declined. Now it's back. But it's, but too bad about the video. That's a bummer. They are really behind on that. This year, Google promised that they fixed it, that they've applied all of their HDRNet algorithms to frame by frame of the video. And that it's cool now. They've caught up, everybody. It's, it's, Did they do it?

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, too bad about the video.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  You know, it's an improvement. It's definitely better than prior pixels. But that was, as Dieter kind of alluded to, a pretty low bar. It's very interesting how the video is seemingly treated differently by the pixel versus still photos. It processes colors differently in video than it does in still photos. If you have a lot of saturated colors, like reds or oranges or greens, it amps up the saturation of those and it almost turns them like dayglow neon in a video in the same exact scene that you take a photo, a still photo with the pixel and it will produce a more muted, natural, high contrast, but not nearly as extreme kind of look. And it was just fascinating to see that in action. So there's color weirdness.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  Somewhere inside Google, like, you know, people complain a little bit less about Samsung's video. Let's just do that.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  It's like what Samsung did to still photos four years ago. Like Samsung's, you know, come a long way, but this is like, that's what it reminded me of. And then there's like other weird things. There's four different image stabilization modes, supposedly for like, you know, different activities or whatever. None of them are particularly great. They're not as stable as what you get on the iPhone and they produce a lot of weird artifacting and there's jitters and there's like weird exposure shifts. It doesn't handle that smoothly. So like, yes, it's a better video. You can shoot 4K 60 frames per second as long as you want. The phone will not heat up or overheat at least, which was a problem with the Pixel 5A. But.

• 52:50Alex Cranz?

  You should just get a GoPro.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  It's, well, I mean, if you care this much about video, you should get an iPhone.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  And like, you can talk to any number of YouTubers who are like very into the Android ecosystem and they have an iPhone in their back pocket for B-roll because like it's the only thing they use it for. Because the video is actually very good and usable on the iPhone. So Google's still got a ways to go there. I don't know if it's processing tweaks. I don't know if the HDR algorithms just like don't mesh well with video or whatever. But it would have been nice to see more improvement on that front. There.

• 53:23Speaker 05

  All right, last camera thing is another color science thing. So we're just talking about video. Google talked a lot more than we expected about having better photos for darker skin tones. How'd that go? It seems like some of that is not just bluster. They're actually doing stuff, but it's not like it's not gonna be perfect for everybody.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  It goes back to a lot of that personal preferencing. What we saw in our testing, what we saw from other folks' test results was that it does do a better job of lightening darker skin tones so that they're not in a shade or shadow, especially in backlight.

• 53:54Speaker 05

  It's like, it's more like just lightening darker skin tones is a thing that lots of cameras have done, and that's like actually incorrect. What they're doing is they're exposing it more correctly, and they're having like more correct color. And in some cases, they're allowing the skin tone to be more accurately darker, but not have it just be like completely hard to see and like inconsistent with the rest of the photo.

• 54:16Alex Cranz?

  Is it like the dynamic range has improved?

• 54:17Speaker 05

  It's a little bit of dynamic range, but it's also color. One of the things they talked a lot about was making sure the darker skin tones didn't look ashy, especially when there's things like side light or backlight. That happens when you just like turn up the exposure, right? That's one of the things that can happen. They've done a good job solving for that. But there's still pixel photos, which means.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  Which means they are high contrast, they tend to be a bit overexposed, and they are extremely detailed. So I recommend Nicole Nguyen over at WSJ did a really great article where she took photos of a bunch of people with different darker skin tone and complexions. And she used the new Pixel, the iPhone 13 Pro and the S21. And she asked them what they felt about it. And it seemed like universally, they said that the Pixel was more accurate, but also universally, they liked the results from the Samsung better. It was softer, it was nicer for portraits, it wasn't highlighting skin blushes and other things that maybe we don't want to have when we're taking a picture of ourselves. We want to present our best selves.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like the heart of the, I mean.

• 55:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is it. This is.

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. This is like, here we are.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  Pixel is more accurate, but you like the Samsung better?

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's also, but what are you, right? If you. You have a person with darker skin like I am familiar with a history of camera technology that is bad at my skin.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  And so like that familiarity actually plays a role in, oh, this is better. But I like the thing that I am familiar with and that, I don't know, like we could do what is a photo for another five hours right now. Like, yeah, what is your perception of yourself is mediated by another person's imaging this, oh, I think a big part of it, we gotta restart the verge.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  A big part of it, I think, is particularly with the pixel photos is how sharp and detailed they are. And when we worked with some of our staff who have darker skin and had them look at the photos and compare, that was their reaction. They said, it's too detailed. I don't want it to be as sharp when I'm taking a photo of myself or I'm posting a portrait. And that is something that also goes back for a long time with photography. Photographers years ago used to slap vaseline on the front of lenses to hide blemishes because they couldn't do it digitally. Now, you know, there's different levels of processing and I think that the fact that pixel can capture so much detail is really impressive and really cool, but it doesn't work for every situation. It doesn't work necessarily as well for portraits.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  And I think the iPhone or Samsung phones do a good job of presenting the right amount of detail without overdoing it and without it showing too many blemishes and things like that, that, that people don't necessarily want to see.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Well, not too long ago, Google made a big loud blog post about how they are turning off all their face smoothing by default. And the rest of the camera industry should follow because it's causing, you know, issues with self-image to have like aggressive face smoothing on by default. So, yeah, this is a complicated subject.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  All right. It's an absolutely complicated subject. It is not a new problem. To Neelai's point, you know, the film industry has been biased towards lighter skin tones for decades. Since the beginning. Like there's, yeah, since the beginning, film was developed to expose lighter skin tones. That carried right on through to digital cameras. It carries right on through to the phones that we're using today. I applaud Google for approaching it and talking about it and starting to figure out ways to, to address it. And, and hopefully we see more and better improvement going forward across the board, not just from Google.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  So, uh, two things left. We should, I don't know, I want to rush through them, but you have argued that these are the best Android phones available today. And I'm also curious, uh, well, there's two of them. Which one do you prefer? So one, let's back up, let's talk about best Android phone. That's, that's a claim.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a claim and a lot of it is because when you look at the entire package and including price and price is a big factor here, especially with the Pixel 6, but even with the Pixel 6 Pro as well, they are undercutting the competition by a significant margin and still offering this level of performance, this level of features, this level of build quality and and unique for Google, this level of support that you don't necessarily get.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  It's like it's like OnePlus back in the day, right?

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it reminds me a lot of OnePlus. And in fact,

• 58:30Speaker 05

  In terms of build quality, OnePlus back in the day.

• 58:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's funny because like when I was thinking about these, I was like, I don't know why anyone would buy a OnePlus phone at this point. If you're looking at a premium phone, OnePlus is now their phones, if they don't discount them or put them on sale, they're a thousand dollars or they're $800. They are fully up there. And now Google's offering its experience with the Pixels, which is very similar in software, better support, better cameras, you know, arguably different, maybe better designs if your personal taste there for less money. And so why would you, what is, what is the selling point for OnePlus? Again, Samsung, it's a little bit different of a conversation. I think that Samsung definitely make produces better hardware. Samsung's fit and finish is top notch. Like the S21 Ultra

• 59:16Speaker 04

  is is a gorgeous piece of device that seams are perfect. The design is nice. The way that the rail blends into the camera hump is clever and like it feels like jewelry almost, which often is used to describe the iPhones. And it's very up, it's right up there with Samsung. Google's not there yet. Like it is not hard to find sharp edges with these. It is not hard to find gaps between the glass and the metal frame if you're looking for it. So if you're extremely particular about build quality specifically, Samsung definitely has an edge there. Samsung also has an edge in screens because it produces all the screens and it reserves the best screens for its own phones. So like, you know, you can see a difference between the Pixel 6 Pro screen and the S21 Ultra screen.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  The question is, at what point does that difference become worth $300 to $400? And I don't think it's that big of a difference that it's worth $300 to $400.

• 1:00:07Speaker 05

  I went with the Pixel 6, not the Pro, because I didn't think that the Pro's features were quite worth the 300 bucks. I'm really sad about the telephoto, but I feel like the Pixel 6, the regular one is like more honest and appropriate price to like the way it looks and feels. Neelai, you you had feelings about the Pro's screen. Do you? Did it even change since we last spoke?

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  This is the best Android phone. Well, here's what I'll say. It's the best Android phone available because you cannot buy a Samsung phone. That was the argument that Dan hit me with. And I was like, ah, you got me like Samsung can't make enough phones. Like, all right.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  To clarify that, uh, X21 phones have been basically out of stock all year. They're, they're hard to get from carriers. Uh, carriers, it seems like are putting a lot of push behind the pixels. And it's like working in Google's favor because these are what's available to sell. So there, there's that.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, I would just say like the Pixel 6. Great phone. You get what you pay for from the price.

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  You get more than you pay for.

• 1:01:03Nilay Patel?

  You get more than you pay for.

• 1:01:04Speaker 05

  On the Pixel 6.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  And you get the tensor features. It's faster than you'd expect. Like all the stuff is there. The pro is like, I just don't like holding it. And that is. It's because it's too big? The reason I've been quiet this whole time is like, that's what I have to contribute to this conversation. It's icky to hold. And I just think for, once you hit, once you hit like close to a thousand dollars, it's gotta be great. You gotta love holding it. And then Dan's like, no, whatever. Everyone puts them in cases and then the cases Google sent us are even worse to hold. So like I, you know, that it's like the classic Joanna Stern line, like for $200 more. You can get a, like, yeah, for $200, you can get a MacBook Air, first of all.

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 05

  $200 more, you can get an S21 Ultra with one UI 4 or whatever the number is at now.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  If you can find it.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  If you can find it.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  You cannot.

• 1:02:00Speaker 05

  I would, I would much rather have Google software. I'd rather have Google's camera for the most part. And so it's like, it's not, it, we do, we do not live in a perfect world where you can have everything that you want. And you cannot have like, uh, like the best Android phone is like Samsung hardware with Pixel software. And they stopped making Google Play additions.

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  What a time.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  Years ago.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, here, and then here's the other thing I said, this, the team that made these phones is HTC. Like it's easy to forget, but Google bought HTC's phone division for billions of dollars. This is maybe the, the second set of real phones they've, right? It was like the 5A was their first. Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Uh, I believe the five.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  The five?

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it might've been the 4A. Anyway.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  It was the four, it was the 4A.

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  Continue.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  It was their first one. So this is their first shot, that HTC team, first shot at a flagship phone. It's weirder. That it's less nice than their flagship phones from like 2015.

• 1:03:01Alex Cranz?

  That HTC like one, right?

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  The HTC one was an amazing phone.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  Although I gotta tell you, go, go find an HTC one and pull it out and just look at it and look at the seams. Like, oh my God, he's doing it. He's walking off. There he goes.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  This makes me wish I still had my Google Play edition 107.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  Oh, man, he's, he's rooting for the drawer. This is good radio right here.

• 1:03:27Alex Cranz?

  He's coming back.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  He's real mad.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  What he's got, what's he got?

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  He's got something big. What is it?

• 1:03:32Alex Cranz?

  That looks like the red hydrogen.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  He got the HTC tablet out.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  What is that? Forgot what HTC product it had sitting on top. Yeah. No, it's.

• 1:03:41Speaker 04

  I, I don't know if Flyer's gonna make your case there.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  This thing is, it doesn't even turn on anymore.

• 1:03:45Speaker 05

  I'm just telling you, like, the HTC one was incredible, but if you just, if you pick it up and look at it, you're like, oh, there's, there's more, there's like more plastic here in the rails than I thought. And like the seams are like pretty big. Right? Like for the time, it was amazing, but that's, that's the deal with the Pixel 6 Pro is like, oh, this would have been top of the line. Build quality. We're calling it a jewel. We're amazed by it in like 2017, 2018. This year it's like, oh yeah, Samsung and Apple have been refining their ability to like make glass flow into metal for 10 years and they're way better at that than you are.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  So Google's just behind.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, this is like where Samsung was with the S8. And so if this had come out at the same time as the S8, we would be saying they're just as good as Samsung. Both probably in screen quality and in build quality, but the S8 was, I don't know, four or five years ago now. And so to Dieter's point, there's been a lot of refinement there and a lot of tweaks and a lot of adjustment and screens have gotten better.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  Here's, here's where I land with the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, their first generation. And will Google continue to push? Will they continue to invest? Will they sell enough? Can, can they make enough? Apparently they're like, they've got wait lists now. You know, they want to sell 7 million, I think is like the, the number that's been floating around, which is like 1% market share, which for the Pixel would be amazing. So if they have a second generation, there's already rumors about the, the tensor two processor. They're like out there, nine to five, Google's got it. You know, if they continue to work and they don't do what Google does, which is like, oh, we tried really hard. Oh, just kidding. No, we're not. This has the potential and like the, for a first gen thing, it's good. But it's not, um, it's not all the hopes and dreams realized.

• 1:05:20Alex Cranz?

  Pixel 7.

• 1:05:21Speaker 05

  That said.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  If you are in the market for an Android phone this fall, you are going to have a hard time getting something better than the Pixel 6.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  I agree, because literally you will have a hard time.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  Literally, you will have a hard time finding anything in stock, but including the Pixel 6. But even if everything was in stock and, you know, prices aren't discounted weirdly or whatever, the Pixel 6 is an excellent phone. I have no hesitation recommending it to anyone, with the only caveat being you have to deal with a big phone. And but you get big phone benefits, like I said earlier.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Literally, big deal. And I hope next year, maybe the Pixel 7, they'll put that telephoto camera in the 7 and not the 7 Pro, but we'll see.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. I still think, I don't know, just get the 6. Like, just do yourself the favor and don't worry about the Pro, even though you like the telephoto.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. There's one last thing. The fingerprint sensor is slow and dumb and bad. And oh, my God.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the best Android phone you can get because it's the only Android phone you can get.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, the fingerprint sensor is definitely a step backwards, I would say. It's slower than the rear-mounted ones. It's less convenient to use. You know, we always say never buy something with the hope that it gets better through software updates, but it is something that maybe they can tweak with software updates and maybe they can improve it. But it is, it is in terms of like, there was a big concern about the tensor chips having, how is their performance going to be? And in day-to-day, everyday things, everything that I do with a phone, the performance is right up there with the Snapdragon 8. Performance of this fingerprint scanner is not up there. It is noticeably delayed. It does take a few seconds or maybe a few tries to read sometimes. So Google's got some work to do there.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We have to take a break. We can come back. We got MacBooks to talk about still. We got a lightning round. It's gonna be great. We'll be right back.

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• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  We're back. We did it, but we...

• 1:08:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I don't recommend. Don't throw yourself a gigantic party.

• 1:08:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  And then have to publish two gigantic reviews while publishing the Facebook files and then cruising into Facebook renaming itself.

• 1:08:39Speaker 05

  And having one of your editors like out of commission because he got hit by a car.

• 1:08:42Nilay Patel?

  That's bad too. Just don't get hit by a car. Don't recommend that generally. But I'm just saying, if you can just move the news away from your party, you will not, you will, you'll be happier. That's what I... So we, you might have noticed this on the site. We didn't hit the review dates that everyone else hit for the Pixel. We want to take some extra time. And we certainly did not hit the review dates for MacBook Pros. I have never been happier to have missed a review date. Review embargo date. Because what we really wanted to know about these machines was how much GPU do you need? And how, how will the battery life actually be compared to the M1 Air and the M1 Pro that we tested last year? Because those were spectacular computers.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  And the extra time let us actually figure it out. And, you know, we're reasonably good reviewers. Monica is an excellent reviewer.

• 1:09:37Nilay Patel?

  I give you all that, even all that. I don't know that we would have sussed out the battery details if we had, if we had rushed.

• 1:09:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, it takes, it takes a while to do intense workloads and using it. And it takes a while to do like day to day using it. And there were multiple versions of the computer and the, the intense and the day to day stuff, in particular, M1 Pro versus M1 Max turned out to be really fascinating. So like, what, what happened there?

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  So the thing I didn't realize going through Apple's presentation, like early, that there, there's a reason they're all called M1 chips. They're just different collections of the same bits and bobs and some extra stuff. So all the cores are the same, all the GPU cores are the same, whatever.

• 1:10:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, like roll up to Taco Bell and tell them how much, how much cheese you want. Tell them how much GPU you want.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  That's actually really good. They're the Taco Bell chips.

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Only, only it's not, it's not like grade C beef. It's grade A processors.

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  The best Taco Bell in amazing. So the thing I didn't realize was that carrying around all the extra GPUs, they're still on. They don't turn all the way off.

• 1:10:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  And sometimes they get used. Like the computer's like, I got these GPUs. We're just gonna do stuff with them.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  And that just has an impact on battery life. So.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  It feels like we gave ourselves an extra week with the, the laptops, not to take it easy, but to do more stuff. And that took a lot of our own battery.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, especially when the battery lasts 16 hours. It's like, there's only one way to repeat that result.

• 1:11:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  It's to do it again. Another 16 hours.

• 1:11:15Speaker 05

  Well, so actually.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  To be clear, we were using these pretty hard. Entire extra time we took, like, like there was no slacking on any.

• 1:11:21Speaker 05

  I want to say the, the 16 hours was the 16 inch M1 Pro results. You get slightly less, was it like 11 for the M1 Max?

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  So the M1 Pro, 16 inch M1 Pro, ran for 16 hours. Monica was using it for her workday, which looks a lot like mine. Chrome, Slack, Zoom calls, YouTube videos, the whole thing. The 16 inch M1 Pro that we had, 16 GPU cores, 16 hours. Nice tidy set of numbers there. If you're into numerology, this is great for you. I had an M1 Max, 32 GPU cores. Same 100 watt hour battery, 10 hours in the battery.

• 1:11:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  And like, there's some variances there, right? We're not, we're just using the computers. We think that is the most realistic thing you can do. So, yep, I don't know, like, maybe I had more Chrome tabs up, but like, we ran them several times. And these are numbers we got. When you had an external monitor plugged into the M1 Max, and I was like, a lot of people asked me about this. What is it like with a monitor and battery? Battery life fell to seven hours because you let it even more GPUs. And then the 14 inch M1 Pro that we had was about 10 and a half hours. Which more or less matches the 13 inch MacBook Pro.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  But it has a bigger battery.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  So when you hear these hours numbers, you might be tempted to like, just compare them to hours numbers that you hear from actual companies. But when we talk about our workday, like, we consistently get no more than two thirds of what a company claims when they claim battery life in our, like, our workday stuff. So when we say 16 hours and 10 hours, we're like, whoa, this is good. When Apple or Dell or whoever says 16 hours or even 10 hours, we're like, yeah, okay, we'll see. And it ends up being like eight and six or whatever.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  Those, those 16 or 10 hours that someone was using their computer, sitting in front of it, interacting with it, doing, you know, their work.

• 1:13:11Speaker 05

  And we don't let the display turn off.

• 1:13:13Nilay Patel?

  We don't let the display turn off, but they're not like streaming a video and just letting the computer do that on low power for 25 hours.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, and Apple's test is just like ridiculous. It's 21 hours of 1080p Apple TV playback.

• 1:13:26Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's what I'm doing this weekend.

• 1:13:28Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't buy a $4,300 computer to watch 1080p videos a day? So that was just like, the most fascinating thing to me is, I walked away from this being like, unless you know, unless you already know, you're listening to this, and in your mind, you've already identified a hardcore, multi-threaded GPU workload.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  You should buy an M1 Pro because the software ecosystem around these machines is not, we're still in the transition. So you still end up running a bunch of soft and also we're still in the transition, Apple's chips and Apple's, Apple historically has weird ideas about GPUs and everyone else is like, no, no. Right? Like, and so like, that is a big turn that like, the whole industry has to make to light up all these extra GPU cores. When it happens, Final Cut Pro is like 10 minutes faster to export a video than Premiere.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  Well, so this is why I wanted to say is like, you, you may have heard us talk about software needs to catch up to Apple's weird ideas before, like specifically with like the Mac Pro, you know, when we last reviewed that big honker. But here, we're saying it, but we're saying it at a different level because the performance here, even with a lot of the software not being optimized, is legit great, right?

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like your day to day performance is amazing. The thing that really depends on is in your work, are you limited by CPU and memory? Or are you limited by the GPU?

• 1:14:57Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  And if you-

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Which does Chrome use?

• 1:15:00Alex Cranz?

  Everything.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  Chrome is like, it's steam powered. There's, you gotta fire up the old generator. Um, Chrome is actually optimized for M1, right? These battery life numbers are on Chrome. They're not on Safari. So I, that's like, pretty good. I never heard the, I did a Google Meet meeting, the fan didn't turn on. I know everyone's dying to know this information.

• 1:15:18Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:15:19Nilay Patel?

  We had an idea for a battery test where we'd have an Intel machine and one of the M1 Pro machines do a Google Meet meeting at each other.

• 1:15:26Speaker 05

  Oh, this is my idea. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  And see when, that was, that was, we were like, we, this is just a huge waste of time. We know what's gonna happen. Like, the Intel machine caught on fire. What a surprise.

• 1:15:37Alex Cranz?

  I watched the video.

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  The performance disparity with the GPUs is real, but most software isn't going to address that performance disparity. And then on the other-

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  Where did we see it the most? Like, I know that in your review, you have After Effects got updated and we saw, and it got updated, it's still technically not ARM optimized. It's running in Rosetta, but it got updated to use all those extra GPU cores. And it seemed like it was a really good example of like, if you use After Effects, that's one of those things where it's like-

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  It happened for you.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  GPU cores help you-

• 1:16:08Nilay Patel?

  And our Mac Pro got a lot faster and After Effects too, same, almost by the same delta, right? So our Intel based Mac Pro with AMD GPUs got way faster because of this one update from Adobe. Our senior motion director, Grayson, he literally said, I thought I would be dead before Adobe released this multi-core rendering platform. He's like, I just never expected this to happen. And like, the computers got faster, but they're not, they didn't get faster because of Apple silicon. They got faster because Adobe was like, we have released this product. And then our Intel machines got faster too, by the exact same amount. So there's a lot at play here. I, the thing that was just surprising to me is, you're

• 1:16:52Nilay Patel?

  like, oh, you don't think like, oh, I'm carrying around this like heavy extra GPU. But you are. And like, I'm just saying, unless you absolutely know what it's going to be used for, like, it's not, I don't think it's worth it.

• 1:17:05Alex Cranz?

  I just love that, like, I think for years now, even with Macs, which are terrible at gaming, most people, regular people, not pros, use the GPU for gaming and stuff. And in this case, like, I haven't heard a single person, anybody talk about it. Like, this really is for pros. This is not like-

• 1:17:22Nilay Patel?

  So this is like, kind of-

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  It's priced for pros.

• 1:17:26Nilay Patel?

  Monica talked about it in your review, right?

• 1:17:27Alex Cranz?

  I haven't read it yet.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  It's priced for pros. And people are excited with GPUs. The game benchmarks are not there.

• 1:17:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, you talk about unoptimized software and like, Apple's weird GPU ideas and developers being like, like, the game industry has like, long gazed at Apple and been like, nah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  It's not as easy to run boot camp now anymore. Like, all the tricks that you used to use on Intel Macs to run games on them, which never ran great anyways, are like, now harder with the M1 and with Apple silicon. So we did a couple of benchmarks. Tomb Raider in particular runs native on Mac. And if you have the M1 Max- No, no, it's 2018. We did Shadow. We did the newer one. But if you have the M1 Max, you can get 85, 87 at 1080p resolution, frames per second, which is very playable, great result for that game. We did see probably the biggest delta between the Pro and the Max in that test. The Pro got something like 42 or 44. So that is where those extra GPU cores are being leveraged.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Monica's point is you can buy two Zephyrus machines and have money left over.

• 1:18:34Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:18:35Nilay Patel?

  And get a better Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark.

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:18:38Alex Cranz?

  Do not buy these for games.

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  And play other games way easier. Guess what's really hard to play on a Mac? Fortnite.

• 1:18:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Monica actually like looks directly to camera and is like, do not buy these to play games. And they're like, so that was like a big question. I think you're correct. Like, we are really focused on work stuff with these machines. Because that other universe, like even if they were great at games, there are many other hurdles.

• 1:19:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  To get good games on a Mac that are just prevent, it's just like not part of the deal.

• 1:19:11Alex Cranz?

  I just love that. Like, they're like, no, we're done. We're done here.

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, okay, you wrote a lot of words about this. It's a lot of, a lot of MacBook Pros.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  But see what I did there? But, but at the end, you, you didn't give them 10s. So let's hear about this.

• 1:19:29Nilay Patel?

  I did. I was like, very close to giving the 16 inch M1 Pro a 10. The 14 inch M1 Pro, great machine. I just think 10 hours of that, like, it's a great machine with a lot of performance. But when Alex actually edited video on battery, the battery lasted for four hours.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:19:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so like, I just, it's great. It's a great machine. It feels like a 9.5. Because even though the performance is great, I think the combination of performance and battery life is what got us close to a 10 with the Air. The 16 inch.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Well, and price actually with the Air, like, performance, price, battery life, all those together.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  Right. And the 14 is expensive. It's a $2,000 computer.

• 1:20:09Speaker 04

  And if you want to get enough RAM, you have to spend $400.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  It's really a 2500.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  There's a little, there's a little copy of that, but we can talk about it. 16 inch M1 Pro, 16 hours of battery life, fastest performance you've ever seen, beautiful display, great keyboard, although Monica disagrees with me, she prefers more clicky keyboards, ports, like all this stuff, right? It's like, here's this thing. This is, what am I complaining about? Right? And then I'm me, and then we found things to complain about. But we were like, very close to, oh, this is just a 10. And then you start looking and you're like, it's $3,100. The ports are actually not the top spec ports, which just seems like, you know, Apple makes a lot of margin, I get it, but HDMI 2.1 would be like, if you want to plug in a variable refresh rate display to match the laptop's own variable refresh rate display.

• 1:21:01Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  You can't use the HDMI port. You need a dongle because Apple doesn't support G Sync. They support this other standard called adaptives. It's

• 1:21:09Alex Cranz?

  What HDMI did they go with?

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  It's 2.0. It's just for an external display.

• 1:21:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. 2.1 is right there.

• 1:21:16Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like everyone else.

• 1:21:18Alex Cranz?

  Costs you like 30 cents.

• 1:21:19Nilay Patel?

  $500 TV with an HDMI 2.1 port. So that's just weird to me. The RAM situation where the, the base models only have 16 gigs of RAM, which for computers, it's expensive that you might use for a long time, or importantly, might use for work. You are just adding a $400 RAM tax to the price of all these machines.

• 1:21:35Speaker 05

  And I would say, I would say like the fact that it's unified memory across GPU, CPU and whatever is like a concern there, but that's turned out to not be a problem. It's turned out actually pretty great, but still

• 1:21:45Nilay Patel?

  And that is the thing that, that, that people are saying justifies the cost of the RAM. Because you are actually adding RAM to the memory card, which is historically more expensive. I don't know, man. All I know is 16 gigs is not enough for a pro machine.

• 1:21:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  And so every price they're quoting, automatically it's a $400 penalty for the RAM. And then just like dumb stuff, like stuff that, you know, I told Apple about, they're probably going to issue an update to Monterey and fix. Like, I was trying to watch the Facebook presentation yesterday over the HDMI port on my TV. And I sent the audio out over HDMI to the TV and I just did weird stuff. Like the video started glitching, the audio started repeating itself. And I was like, this is even more dystopian than it was before when Mark Zuckerberg was like, that, it just shouldn't happen on a $300 computer. So like, it's just, all that stuff to me is like, you came real close. You bring a lot of this stuff down. To the air or a smaller pro or a cheaper pro like we're gonna end up having this conversation

• 1:22:43Nilay Patel?

  again. I'm sure by that time HDMI 2.2 will be out and Apple will ship a 2.1 port and we'll just be in this stance again. But I just think that the price and some of the little rough edges pushed me out of saying this at 10, but the battery life and the performance made it like we had, we talked about it a lot.

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  Anything else with these things? Display, the blooming is like better. Oh, you said you prefer looking at this than you do Apple's $5,000 Pro Display XDR. Justify that. That is crazy.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  I can't. We spend a lot of time looking at this way. People have that display, right? Like, yeah, it's in reality now. And one of the things about doing a review is like, here's how I feel. And then like, reality gets a hold of it. And you're like, man, I hope I was right. So we gave that display not a great score, if you will remember. And our head of production, Marillo, in the studio who works on like, before us, he worked on the color shot that the game of Thrones, he like, took one look at that thing. He's like, the light falls off in the edges, it vignettes, there's color shot like, bad. And then once you hear, you see it. So that is very true. And other people have noticed that there's just shadowing on the edges of that display. Yeah, that's always been a problem for me. The other thing is

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  that that display is also full rate, local dimming, lots of LEDs, the whole deal, has fewer zones than this display. Ah, so it blooms more on black. Right. And it's a huge display. So when I'm saying it blooms more on black, I'm like, it blooms a lot.

• 1:24:07Alex Cranz?

  You see it.

• 1:24:08Nilay Patel?

  You just see it like you are watching a video, the controls come up over the letterbox, the whole bottom of the display turns gray. You just like, see it. It's like impossible to not see.

• 1:24:17Alex Cranz?

  And how much is the display?

• 1:24:18Nilay Patel?

  $5,000.

• 1:24:19Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:20Nilay Patel?

  $1,000. And we actually, Becca has had it for quite a while, which it's like a real pandemic victory for.

• 1:24:28Nilay Patel?

  She was not supposed to have, but um, uh, she's had it and we brought it back to the office to shoot this video. And I was asking about it. She's like, this color thing is real. When I color on this display, I roll my chair over to where the coloring window is. So I'm head on with it. Wow. Even the slight angle of being in the middle of the display. Yeah. None of that, all the MacBook Pro display is like perfectly even. It is beautiful. The HDR stuff is the technology behind how they're doing HDR is incredible. Right. The, the color management they're doing with the display, the, the fact that they can run the backlight hotter in just like some quadrants. And they're doing it in real time, high refresh rates.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  Like you move the HDR window around the display, you do not see any transition. The content is just bright wherever it goes. At the same, it's, it's like really impressive, like it's impressive because you can't see it. Right. I had to like show to people and be like, this is what's happening. It's like kind of nuts. So it's just like, that is all very good. There's like a tiny bit of blooming, but we showed it to people because they asked us about it in a perfectly dark room. With the brightness turned all the way up. Right. I could not show it to anyone, any normal sort of like, come with me into my lair. And I will show you the blooming.

• 1:25:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just not, it's not there, you know, it's like, if you're off accessing or maybe watching a movie perfectly at night, you'll like see it, but like, whatever, then it goes away.

• 1:25:55Alex Cranz?

  But I think you see that with like every TV that's not an OLED.

• 1:25:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Alex Cranz?

  Blooming is just.

• 1:26:01Nilay Patel?

  It's a very familiar look for a full or a local dimming. Yep. But it means that the black levels are perfectly black. It means that if you hate the notch, you can black out the notch and it's perfectly black. And that to me is like the right trade off. On, on this kind of machine, like I'll take a little blooming because I, I now have a laptop with perfect black levels. And I'm not running an OLED display, which has another set of different kinds of trade offs. Right, right.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  All right. Anything else? Do you want to talk about display profiles? Or do you want to not have this?

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  I do not want to talk about it.

• 1:26:33Alex Cranz?

  I was ready to talk about them. I was here for it.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  The only I'll say is Apple, Apple's marketing on these machines is right. It's a lot of relative specs. It's a lot of saying things that are maybe not what you'd expect. It's weird, right? So the battery life is all relative. It's all relative to some baseline that you don't know what it is. The performance is all relative. It's twice as much performance as a computer you don't own. Battery life, five hours more than a computer you don't own. Like, okay, the display line is the same. It's up to 1600 nits, 1000 nits sustained brightness. You hear 1000 nits sustained brightness. You're like, I can turn this computer up to 1000 nits and sustain the brightness. Absolutely not true. You can turn the computer up to 500 nits.

• 1:27:19Alex Cranz?

  Does it have to be out in the sun?

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  No, you can just like, that's the max brightness of the thing. You get 1000 nits when you're watching HDR content because the whole thing brightens up. And then the peaks of the brightest part of HDR can hit 1600.

• 1:27:31Speaker 05

  Okay, so in order to get HDR, you need to like turn on an HDR video, make the window almost fullscreen, but not go into fullscreen mode and then put it behind.

• 1:27:42Nilay Patel?

  And then, no, it's only the content.

• 1:27:44Alex Cranz?

  That's very, that's actually common for TVs.

• 1:27:47Speaker 05

  Oh, wait, I got it. I got it. You take your computer stuff and you put it into a video that's live streaming in HDR. And then you access that.

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  Right, so like apps can turn on.

• 1:27:59Alex Cranz?

  Chrome HDR mode. There's actually a software called Kalman. And you get Kalman and you do like a little white box. And then you do black and you set it to HDR. You can sometimes get it to pop all the way up to whatever the peak brightness of. Because you have to do it for like, that's how you have to test TVs too. Because this peak brightness thing is the same. So you can technically do it. You have to spend $3,000 on the software. You're gonna have to spend another $30,000 on the colorimeter. But you'll do it.

• 1:28:29Speaker 05

  It's a good thing these MacBook Pros are so affordable.

• 1:28:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, I, right, I'm like going through with Apple because I want to make sure I get it right. And they're like, you know, lots of apps already support EDR, which stands for extreme dynamic range, everyone. Not XDR, which I don't, that's like, whatever, man.

• 1:28:46Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, if Microsoft wants to ship a version of Excel that tells the system that the spreadsheet is requires

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:28:54Nilay Patel?

  HD, like they could do it. Microsoft. I don't know about like, display longevity and all, like, whatever, but, yep, the system is designed to run. The thing that's different from a TV is the display on a TV only has two modes, right? There's no, there's no seamless brightness switching on a TV, really. This thing, when you, we can run it in the mode, in the HDR mode, but the computer is like extremely smart and the display is extremely advanced. So it is indistinguishable color, like the whole thing is indistinguishable from the regular mode. Until you light up the HDR content and then just that part of the window is HDR.

• 1:29:31Nilay Patel?

  And it's, it's just, it's super cool because unless a huge display in there to standing next to you being like, look at how cool this is, you would never know. That's dope.

• 1:29:41Speaker 04

  And that is just You can see, there's a, there's a photo in our review, we tried to demo it as best we could in the video as well, where you can see the YouTube window, which is playing the HDR content is much brighter than the surrounding UI or whatever that is also being shown on the screen. And that was not like Photoshop editing or anything like that. That's what it looks like.

• 1:30:01Nilay Patel?

  And if you have a new iPhone, that's, it's like very familiar, right? You take a picture on your iPhone, you open the photo, the photo gets brighter. It's that, but without any transition, which is super cool.

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think they're great.

• 1:30:13Speaker 04

  We're going, we're going long.

• 1:30:14Nilay Patel?

  Next year, we're, we've, we need to stop. I understand. But we have a lightning round. But I just want to say, I think this chip transition is an unqualified success for Apple. Yep. The thing that is not an unqualified success is convincing their ecosystem of software developers that their ideas about chips are right and worth the development time

• 1:30:33Nilay Patel?

  to specialize as opposed to writing software that works on all the chips. And I don't know how that's going to play out.

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. But like, Apple might, like, their, their ideas are very good. Yeah.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  All right. We don't have time to talk about a ton of this, but I guess Intel announced 12th gen Alder Lake and it seems like they're the chips we've been waiting for sort of from Intel. Like, we gotta see them, but-

• 1:30:55Alex Cranz?

  They're the one they've been promising for-

• 1:30:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're the ones we've been promising for sure. Yeah.

• 1:31:00Nilay Patel?

  We had a very funny moment in the review where we were taking photos and I was looking at the photos. I was like, oh, I really like this photo, but the Intel headline is on the front of the screen. And like, this is the most womp womp headline combo for this. Like, we just got it. Like, try, try today. We have a different headline up there.

• 1:31:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:19Alex Cranz?

  But these are the new seven nanometer chips, finally, that are also called like something else because they can't decide on names. Their naming's all, all wrong now. And it's, it's their whole transition to a different philosophy instead of just like going crazy.

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, like the, the last generation, they, they, a bunch of this architecture stuff, they tried to like back port it to the larger nanometer process and it was kind of a mess. But like, these are the things that Intel has been working towards for quite a while. They're not the same architecture of the, you know, the M1 chips. It's still, that's still is a whole separate thing. So like, you might, we're not going to see M1 style like improvements, but in terms of waiting for Intel to like, do the things that they've been promising, this, these are the chips.

• 1:32:04Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  So I'm really excited to see-

• 1:32:06Alex Cranz?

  These are not seven nanometer. They're Intel seven.

• 1:32:10Speaker 05

  They're Intel seven.

• 1:32:11Alex Cranz?

  10 nanometer.

• 1:32:12Nilay Patel?

  I was just doing the same thing because I was like, somewhere Heim is like losing his mind.

• 1:32:18Alex Cranz?

  He was already slacking me. He could just sense it. Sorry.

• 1:32:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Nilay Patel?

  Intel seven means 10. That's what I mean about a womp womp headline.

• 1:32:30Nilay Patel?

  It's like dog ears.

• 1:32:31Alex Cranz?

  There was a new, there was a new Paperwhite came out, a new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. And if, if all you cared about was USB-C grats, if you wanted like-

• 1:32:41Speaker 05

  And wireless charging?

• 1:32:42Alex Cranz?

  If you wanted like buttons, a proper bezel to hold on to while you're reading, any of that, you, you're, you're out of luck, but-

• 1:32:49Speaker 05

  Incorrect. This is perfect. It has the colors, different color temperature for the screen. It has the bezel on the bottom, which having used an Oasis for the past two years is better than the bezel, than the bezel on the side. This is perfect.

• 1:33:01Alex Cranz?

  Heim, Heim brought it over to me. He's like, look, look, last week. And I was like, all right. Oh. Just like disappointment through my entire body.

• 1:33:11Nilay Patel?

  My wife is a gigantic Kindle reader, so I bought her an Oasis to replace her old Paperwhite. Cause I bought you the nicest one and she, within a week, she's like, I hate this thing.

• 1:33:19Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:33:20Nilay Patel?

  Battery doesn't last long enough.

• 1:33:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Speaker 05

  It's a battery, uh, it's, if, this is so dumb. If you're reading in bed, you have to hold it up. You can't like rest it on like the covers because the bezel's too small on the bottom.

• 1:33:32Nilay Patel?

  So anyway, I'm going to buy this because I now have to like repent for my, what I thought was a nice thing.

• 1:33:37Speaker 05

  It's very.

• 1:33:37Nilay Patel?

  But then I have to be like, welcome. You have to charge this with a different plug then.

• 1:33:43Speaker 05

  Oh, you're doomed.

• 1:33:45Alex Cranz?

  It's got wireless. Just toss it on your phone charger.

• 1:33:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You gotta put more stuff on it. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:33:50Speaker 05

  Speaking of wireless charging, the new, uh, the new AirPods, Chris Welch reviewed them. They've got MagSafe if you want them. They seem great. Uh, maybe, I don't know if I want to spend that much on like the basic AirPods, but like they do all the stuff. They've got 3D TV. I mean, excuse me, spatial audio. They seem really good. Like I would maybe prefer these over the Pros because I don't actually use ANC that much.

• 1:34:09Alex Cranz?

  I was so excited about the MagSafe because I forgot phone MagSafe exists. And in my head, it was just the little, the little plug that's now on the Mac Pro. And I was like, wow, why did they do that? So dumb, but I love it. Just completely forgot.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  There was a couple of interesting, uh, notes with the, the new, uh, AirPods is, uh, obviously they've got that new shape that is more similar to the Pro. So Chris is a very interesting test case because the original AirPods do not fit in his ears. These fit much better and he was able to keep them in his ears longer. They didn't fall out and things like that. However, for people that the original AirPods did fit well, they might've had the opposite experience. Nicole over at the WSJ, she said the opposite reaction. They fell out of her ears. So, uh, one size fits all earbuds.

• 1:34:55Alex Cranz?

  I wish, I wish all of the earbud companies would make little dummy ones that for like $5. So I could just see if there, that's free, free thing. Let's, let's do it, please.

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  All right. Uh.

• 1:35:11Nilay Patel?

  We've now hit a new point of going over, which is our producer is telling us to stop.

• 1:35:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's ever happened before.

• 1:35:25Alex Cranz?

  You're welcome.

• 1:35:25Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say Spatial Audio is dumb and that'll be the end of the show. It's so dumb.

• 1:35:29Alex Cranz?

  Thank you for listening, everyone.

• 1:35:31Nilay Patel?

  Also, iOS 15 has a new Spatialized Audio button, which if you're an old head is like, you might as well put that thing in Stadium Mode. Like, what are you doing, man?

• 1:35:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, it's a scam. I'm telling you, someone's nephew figured out like an accounting gimmick at a record company and that's why Spatial Audio exists.

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Nilay Patel?

  If you're that nephew, call me. Everyone find a nephew. Alright, that's the show. We're ending it with, if you're that nephew, call me. That's a fine place to end.

• 1:35:59Nilay Patel?

  We might just like, you know, take a break. The Verge is over now. It's been a long week. No, we'll be back next week. We got Boz on Decoder. We're actually gonna run that on Monday. That'll be cool. Dieter, you've got Tuesday episode of Vergecast?

• 1:36:13Speaker 05

  I do. Stay tuned. It'll be exciting.

• 1:36:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a secret. And then we'll be back next week of the show. I'll say once again, it was great to see everybody who came to the event. It's like, I've just been, I'm still riding that high, even though we've been... It made it a lot easier to get through this week. I was like, oh, people, people care. Like, that was great. Thank you so much for all the people who came. Thank you to all the people who tweeted us. Amazing. Watch Dieter's documentary, Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone. Now on Apple TV, we figured out the captions issue. It all works. Go download our app, watch our videos. It's great. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless Dieter's, at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. The other Alex, Alex E. Heath. Please tell him he's the new Senior Metaverse Reporter. That'd be great for me. Dan is DCCFert. That's it. We gotta end this thing. That's Vergecast.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  Get a shot.

• 1:37:23Speaker 08

  First Citizens Innovation Banking, formerly Silicon Valley Bank, is the bank of the innovation economy. The name may have changed, but for over 40 years, their commitment to bold ideas, relentless ambition, and delivering what's next is as strong as ever. So if you're wondering where the road to innovation starts, it's here. First Citizens Innovation Banking. Head to firstcitizens.com/innovation to learn more.

• 1:37:54Speaker 09

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.