CES 2022: all the TVs, concept cars, laptops, and gadgets announced this week

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz run through the huge amount of products announced at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022 this week — from QD-OLED TVs, to EVs, to a hair-coloring gadget. All the stories discussed: CES 2022 will close a day early because of COVID concerns CES 2022 will introduce HDMI 2.1a, another confusing new spec Sony announces the world’s first QD-OLED 4K TV, coming later this year Sony is joining the Mini LED TV bandwagon in 2022 Samsung promises ‘groundbreaking’ new TV feature: NFT support Samsung’s latest Frame TVs have a matte screen that looks and feels more like real art Samsung’s new 2022 TVs bring Nvidia GeForce Now and Google Stadia gaming Samsung’s new TV remote uses radio waves from your router to stay charged LG announces its largest and smallest OLED TVs ever as part of 2022 lineup LG TVs now have a built-in health platform The Samsung Odyssey Ark is its largest curved monitor yet Chevy Silverado EV revealed: GM’s best-selling truck goes electric General Motors announces electric versions of the Chevy Equinox and Blazer SUVs BMW’s IX M60 is a dual-motor performance EV with 280 miles of range BMW debuts its new color-changing paint technology at CES: E Ink Sony pivots into cars with Sony Mobility and a Vision-S SUV prototype at CES 2022 Dell XPS 13 Plus hands-on: is that... a touch bar? Asus will release a 17-inch foldable OLED laptop this year Lenovo’s new ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has an eight-inch secondary screen Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake chips arrive at CES 2022 for its most powerful laptops ever Intel’s upcoming Arc GPUs inch closer to their debut with latest OEM update Intel announces 5.5GHz capable 12th Gen CPU Nvidia still has no idea how to pronounce the name of its best gaming GPU Google will spend 2022 trying to match Apple’s ecosystem integrations The OnePlus 10 Pro’s official specs are not the least bit surprising The Galaxy S21 FE officially joins Samsung's crowded mirage lineup Why AT&T and Verizon are feuding with the US Government over a last-minute delay to 5G L’Oreal’s newest gadget takes the mess out of coloring your hair Sony confirms PlayStation VR2 name and Horizon game Samsung’s tiny Freestyle projector is fun so get over it Anker’s new Nano II 100W USB-C charger is the smallest 100W GaN charger yet The Motorola MA1 is a dongle for wireless Android Auto Razer’s new Zephyr Pro mask has the voice amp feature we wanted all along Black + Decker’s $300 Bev vacuums up a Keurig-shaped hole in the robot bartender space Are we ready for the smart front door? Masonite thinks so This breathing PC case looks like it’s alive Podcasters are letting software pick their ads — it’s already going awry Pete Buttigieg is racing to keep up with self-driving cars 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 Krantz joins the show. We talk about CES 2022. It's here. There's new TVs from LG and Sony and Samsung and everybody else. There's wacky products. There's exciting products. It's CES coming up now.

• 0:13Speaker 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.

• 0:58Speaker 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.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of virtual CES attendance. Because it's CES. We're back. Hello, we're back. Welcome to 2022. I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bonus here.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I'm a quantum dot. Oh, wait, no, I'm not a quantum dot. I'm a quantum dot. Oh, wait, no, I'm not a quantum dot. You won't know until you observe me.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  But then we'll forever change you. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:11Alex Cranz?

  I am. I can't top that.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  There's layers, layers of nerdy and etc. Like I was saying, it's 2022. Welcome. We're back. I hope you had a good break. It was very restful. We missed you. And the verge year doesn't begin until after CES. That's how I always think about it. Cause you can't be like, Happy New Year, a fresh start. And then be like CES. You gotta be like, we're gonna just get through this and then we're gonna start 2022.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Although 2021 is still with us. How many weeks has it been, Eli?

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Since 2021.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Since we were promised on the website.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Joe Biden, 16 days ago, Joe Biden promised to, well, 17 by the time this is, he promised a website that you could get a free test kit from. I have been assured that such a website will be delivered in January. This administration, I will say, much more willing to talk about their plans than the previous one. Pete Buttigieg was on Decoder this week, actually, talking about EV infrastructure. So, you know, they still have to put out a website. I don't know if they have a Squarespace account yet.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  They gotta do it.

• 3:13Alex Cranz?

  Get on WordPress.

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  I will invite in yesterday, gave an address about COVID and he was like, we've lit up so many more testing sites and to find them, just Google it. And I get what he was doing.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? He was like, use the tool you're familiar with. The hard part is the testing sites. We did that. Just use it. But everyone's like, so your solution to COVID is Googling it? That's where we are. So we're gonna just set that aside. We're gonna keep counting the days until there's a testing website. Cause I can't help it. But it's CES. Like it hap- it's happening.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  It is ending a day early because of COVID concerns. We didn't go in person. Most media outlets didn't go in person. Lots of companies pulled out, but it's still happening. There are people in Vegas right now. I will admit, there's a part of me that's very jealous of them. Because there's a lot of photos of cool stuff like I could talk about this HP Dragonfly Chromebook for the next hour.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, it's so good. Can I just tell you my favorite thing about the in-person CES experience is there are people who are taking the underground tunnel and the Teslas that they built between the areas. Yeah, they're getting trapped. And there's traffic. There's like literally less than a 10th of the planned attendees showed up and there's traffic in the tunnel. It's just like, have you heard of trains?

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, it's very good. Dieter, but you've been saying even that's smaller. And I will say, it feels like a lot of companies that had CES announcements decided that, you know, if you're not going to get all the reporters in the room, you might as well just take all the attention for yourself on an otherwise slow week. So there's a sense that a bunch of stuff got held back. There was a lot of last minute scramble.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  Even so, it's like, pretty good.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I, my first thought was, you know what, this is better than I expected, but I wasn't expecting much. But as the week has gone on, I'm like, this is a better than average CES, both in terms of like, stuff I think is actually going to ship, and in terms of cool concepts. I think maybe we could have seen some more wacky concepts and maybe some of that got held back because we can't go there and look at it. But if, you know, I don't know, this would have been my 13th or 14th Consumer Electronics Show in my life, which is a lot of those. I would have put this in the top five.

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  I will say that the lack of wacky concepts is due to what I have been calling the local news product effect. Like, a lot of companies show up at CES with products designed only to hook the local news producer of your local news station into being like, in the future, your bathtub will sing to you, right? And that's like local news bait.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Actually, that is that we do have that.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  We have. But there used to be more of it and there's maybe less this year because there's not as many local news producers on the ground. But let's get into it. CES the TV show, my heart's with TVs. If you're a Virchass listener, you know that we're, I could, we're going to try to go through this quickly. But, you know, the heart of CES is living room stuff, TVs and soundbars. And so you got, we got to start TVs. So Sony beat LG to an OLED technology punch, which is pretty remarkable.

• 6:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, Samsung.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And Samsung, yeah.

• 6:18Alex Cranz?

  So Sony's the first one to do it, like, release it or show it off. But Samsung's panel is what's in there.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we've been expecting, we were expecting Samsung to announce a new kind of OLED panel. Uh, and then they didn't. And then Sony announced it, but it's using a Samsung display. And if you're not familiar, or you don't remember, when, when people say Samsung, they need to really distinguish between like this consumer electronics company and like Samsung that makes boats and ship.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And there's another one of those that Samsung display, which provides the displays for many, many devices, your phones and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so Samsung is providing the display for Sony's new OLED TV. And the point of this OLED TV is that it's a quantum dot OLED TV.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Which means more colors, more brightness.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  More brightness. So typically when you have an OLED, it has, the colors get created by a filter, color filter. And that sucks up a lot of the light and quantum dots don't suck up as much light as a filter. They let more light through. So you can get a much brighter OLED picture than you could with a standard OLED. We've had quantum dots on LCDs for quite a while now, but it's a new thing for OLEDs.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  And this is the traditional, the traditional knock on OLEDs is you get the perfect black levels, but you don't get the searing brightness of HDR.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  This is at least the conventional wisdom.

• 7:40Alex Cranz?

  So like OLEDs traditionally crush the blacks. Like, like if you, if you wear a dark shirt, I think everybody on this call, on the Zoom right now is wearing a dark shirt. And we would all look like we're just wearing like black cardboard on an LG OLED that's properly calibrated. And this is supposed to be able to actually pull those colors out and show them more. So you're not going to crush your blacks. You're, you're going to get more detail instead of getting blown out with all your whites because it's not using like. A big white flashlight on top of the OLED like LG's technology kind of does. So like it's a tweak. I don't know for most people, I don't know if it's going to be a huge difference visually.

• 8:22Alex Cranz?

  For like Dieter and I and the other like, you know, everybody on this call, a lot of people listening, it's probably going to be massive because we're gonna be like, oh my God, you can just barely see this one shade of red.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, if you wanna, if you wanna have a good time, just talk to Chris Welch, our TV reporter this week. He's, he will, he will talk to you about QD OLED just all day long. He's very excited.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. Because fundamentally, and I, I'm the sort of person who always has picked OLED because I like the black levels.

• 8:49Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  But the trade off is you don't get the brightness. You lose a little tiny bit of that subtle color gradation that Alice is talking about. And most people are like, yeah, but it's, there's not gray bars above my movie.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:01Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  And so now maybe you've solved this trade off. What's fascinating about this is it's a Samsung display panel, but it's in a Sony TV. Sony, well, we'll get to the Samsung TVs. Samsung just refuses to acknowledge that like Dolby Vision exists. Like in their TVs, like it just doesn't, it's not real for them. Sony is all in on it. So now Samsung Display is making panels for Sony TVs that support Dolby Vision, but Samsung still isn't. It is just a wild mess of corporate politics there. Sony TVs are also very expensive and I'm assuming that one of the reasons they were able to move faster to the new panel technology is because they're, they're just like, whatever, we're just paying $800 more for our TVs.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they're gonna sell like, you know, 15 of them, right? At the prices these will be, so.

• 9:49Alex Cranz?

  I wonder though, how, how expensive they'll be like, because the Sony, because Sony's still doing its regular OLEDs with the LG panels in them. So we're still going to get those. And then we're getting like this step up. Is it going to be like a grand more, like three grand more? Would somebody really pay three grand more for like slightly better colors?

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, Sony kind of just banks on it.

• 10:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  At the end of the day, I think.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  They're aspirational.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The top of their line is always like, well, it's the most expensive. And I think there's a market of people who are like, just give me the most expensive one and they're going to be fine. The flip side of this, which I think is really interesting, so that we're pushing on the OLED stuff and then we'll see this across the other companies too. Mini LED is kind of showing up. Is that middle ground between full array local dimming LCDs, which is basically the whole market and OLED, which is kind of encroaching more on the top. So now you've got mini LEDs, which give you some of that black level. It's basically, I mean, we're familiar with this now because it's in the MacBook Pro. It's in the iPad Pro. Some TVs have had it, but now it's hitting that sort of mainstream price point is like the middle ground.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm I need to buy a gaming TV or TV for the basement that I would play video games on, watch some movies sometime in the next year and a half. And I'm having a super hard time deciding.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 11:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We bought a the TCL series six or class six, whatever they call it. That's that's submitting LED for my mom. And I've been like calibrating it and stuff. And like the difference between it and regular LED is not as big as I'd hoped.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:23Alex Cranz?

  Like the blacks are still there, but the haloing is the thing that always gets me on LED TVs where you have that just like gray halo around bright spot stuff. And it's still there. Like it's still very, very present. We're watching for all mankind and everybody's a little gray blob still.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yes. Gray blobs on the moon.

• 11:40Alex Cranz?

  Awesome.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, with this this blooming that we pointed out in the, um, in our iPad Pro and MacBook Pro, like if you go looking for it on those devices, you'll find it.

• 11:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  On a TV, there's like often oceans of black.

• 11:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  In a way that, I don't know, like Mac OS is not designed to give you oceans of black.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  I think, Dieter, why are you, why are you torn?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Oh, uh, cause I it's the it's a basement. So it's dark enough where I could definitely do OLED and be perfectly happy. Uh, but I don't know if I want to spend the money or take the risk on first gen of QD OLED. Uh, and not to put too fine a point on it, uh, but I'm in my 40s and my eyes aren't that great anyway. So, you know, do I really need the absolute best thing? Or do I need an extra $1,000?

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, here's what I'll tell you. Uh, Sony's new mini LED backlight technology is called XR backlight master drive.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  And that's what you need. That's the other thing I'm missing from CS is like just being in like having the marketing term, just like it's like in giant signs thrown at you.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  And be like, what is the XR backlight master drive? And there's no way of knowing.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure that's something for Metal Gear, uh, four.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is kind of the other piece of the puzzle. We don't think about like the panels are made by a handful of companies, LG, Samsung, the software controllers. That's actually the the money for these manufacturers. So Sony runs its LG panels way differently than LG. Yeah. I imagine they're going to run their Samsung panels way differently than Samsung, most notably in supporting Dolby Vision.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  And so I think with mini LED, right? That is a complicated backlight, timing algorithm that you have to develop. So that's, it's one of those things you kind of see it with full array, local dimming, the standard technology, although everyone, it's, we're several generations into it. So all kind of same now. This early mini LED moment, we'll see.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's also like LG is jumping in a micro LED, which is like the ones where you can make, you know, build a giant panel. Samsung has been talking about that for a long time. I was actually not expecting LG to hop on that bandwagon, but they're doing it. I have no idea if this stuff is ever going to reach the point that mini LED is at now, where like, is like creeping into the mainstream. I kind of think no, but they're still making the, the concept TVs that use it.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  One wall of the basement. Yes. Micro LED display for gaming.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  So what I would say is Sony, you will know, we have not talked for one second about Sony software, because they're just like, Google will do it. And then we'll put ads in it. And that's fine.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  That's truly how the Sony TV software experience. I say this as a person who owns a Sony TV. That's very much how it works. Samsung and LG. Yep. They've got some hardware pieces of the puzzle. They've got some cool stuff to talk about. Lots more software shenanigans. So much more. Sony did make a camera that will yell at you if you sit too close to the TV.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  It's perfect.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  Which is very funny.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  But Samsung is like, I don't know. They, they made some new TVs. They put a matte display on the frame, which I think is way overdue, actually.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a matte display on the 2021, the frame. I know this because I own it. And when I look at it, I see that it's matte and I feel happy. And then the overhead lights come on and then I see the overhead lights in the TV. And I'm just going to spend the next two years being angry that I didn't wait.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh no. That's the real bummer with TVs.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  It's like, once it's on the wall, you're like, well, I'm stuck with you.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  With a phone, I'm like, I don't know, I'll trade it. Okay, so they added a better matte display. They added the new remote that harvests RF frequencies from your wifi and stuff to charge in addition to solar. Love it. They add some curvy gaming monitor, whatever. That's the hardware. The real stuff is like, now it has NFT support. Now it's got more smart home stuff. Now it's got Stadia and GeForce Now. Like, they're all in on this is a software platform for us. Way more than any of the display stuff.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  So I actually think the gaming bar could potentially be cool. I mean, they redesigned the home screen for Tizen, whatever. But it's not just.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere the Tizen team is like, god damn it.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  The gaming bar isn't just to like stream games. It's also there to like configure settings for your local console. I think Samsung TV is 2022, but a lot of them are going to support VRR up to 144. So when that starts to happen for consoles, like getting that stuff configured and getting your settings right, if there's a dedicated game bar on the TV for that, that is potentially like a selling point.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see how it goes. The reason I think streaming boxes still sell is the they every processor and every TV is underpowered. And then over time, they just get choked out, right? So I don't know how much Stadia needs local processing support. I don't know how much GeForce Now needs it. The whole point of it is you don't need a lot.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  But I would still be like, you definitely need more than a TV vendor is inclined to give you.

• 16:31Alex Cranz?

  Well, and app makers aren't inclined to update those, right? Like, they're not updating those apps as much as they are for Android, for for Apple and Roku and Amazon. Like Samsung and LG WebOS, they kind of live in a sad space where sometimes you get the update. It looks really, really cool. But a lot of times you wait a lot longer than everybody else for the cool stuff, or you just never get it at all. And it's like, okay, well, I have this TV. I spent $2,000 on. And I have to immediately go spend a hundred bucks or 50 bucks or whatever on a dongle to make it work properly.

• 17:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but the dongle will have a processor that's sometimes faster.

• 17:10Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  Samsung used to do, remember they had those like boxes you could plug in?

• 17:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  They made one, uh, one update of the box, I think. Like someone actually went back and looked and they like one or two like update boxes were ever released in the history of Samsung doing that.

• 17:26Alex Cranz?

  It's interesting because Samsung is thinking about the processors. Like, I mean, it was two years ago, the last time we did an in-person CES, but I remember going to like their big black box room where they show you everything in super detail and say, never report on this ever again. But then like we all report on it a week later. It's great. And they, they are caring about the processors, but they're, but it's weird because they're not caring about that part of it. They're just only focused on like how it can upscale and how it can like fix signals and make it look better. And they're not caring about the fact that they also have to run all of Tizen on it and make it not run like slow garbage.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Alex Cranz?

  And it will run like slow garbage. I mean, it might not.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you know, the, the idea with all these, all the platforms apart from Apple is that they, they're fundamentally HTML5 apps.

• 18:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, Dieter. So you've got WebOS. I'm just like pre apologizing.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  You've got WebOS running on the LG TV and it's supposed to run HTML5, HTML5 app that can move very easily to Tizen or Android or whatever. And in practice, it just doesn't happen.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. I, it is exciting to see the gaming, the, the cloud gaming stuff come directly to the TV closes a very important loop.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  But we just don't know how any of it's going to actually work.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  I hope that this NFT thing is a one and done. We don't see that on many, many more TVs to come. Just that's, that's all I have to say about that because I don't want to.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's just an app. It's not like, it's not, the thing isn't like mining.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't want, I don't want the, the, the bandwagon effects just that. Uh, but back to hardware, guess what?

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, that's the start.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Guess.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  So wait, hold on. Samsung makes the frame. Of course, they're going to make the NFT viewer app for their TV.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  I think you can like, you can browse and maybe potentially buy. I have to double check this. I could be wrong, but I, I don't know, man. If you can explain to me why the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Dragon was worth four times, 10 times as much as the other balloons, then I will accept that there's an NFT app for the Samsung TV.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's either money laundering, which, you know, or they marked it as more rare than the other one. But I'm rare on what? Like, I, I'll tell you, I made it slightly rest rare with one click of a mouse button.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Verge staff favorite TV of the show. Guess what it is?

• 19:46Alex Cranz?

  I know.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  You have to guess.

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  What is it? Is it? Well, it's not the Odyssey Ark.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  No, we're going to come to that in a minute.

• 19:54Nilay Patel?

  Favorite TV of the show, the tiny little LG OLED.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  That's right. The 42 inch OLED. Everyone's favorite TV is the smallest one. Because it's a proper LG quality OLED that maybe could work as a gaming monitor, but will actually be a good TV in a small space, which has been surprisingly hard to come by.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm super into it. I thought I use my horrible Samsung curved TV as a zoom monitor. And I was like, I should get this to replace my zoom. And then I was like, why am I spending money on zoom? And I had like a, like a, the walls closed in on me for one hot second. So LG is like another kind of same idea, right? They biggest and smallest, but they're like, here's our new health platform.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  And now you can do health stuff in the pandemic on our TVs. And it's kind of an old idea, like maybe one of the oldest ideas for TVs is like interactive doctor conversations. Like, I'm sure we could dig up AT&T marketing from the 80s.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  That was this idea. But it's also like, okay, maybe we're there now.

• 20:54Alex Cranz?

  Or I could just like, open my laptop. Get on a call.

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  But this is like the dream of convergence, right? Like, the idea was that you would turn the living room into a computer space with your Microsoft Windows Media Center Tower.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  With your cable card in it. It was gonna be great, Alex.

• 21:11Alex Cranz?

  I wanted that so bad.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  And then we entered into this moment where it's like, okay, the TVs are giant iPads. And we're still like, I don't know, I'm gonna plug this Roku into it just because all I want, but we're like back there.

• 21:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 21:25Alex Cranz?

  I'm always fascinated by kind of the TV space at CES because a lot like we get the QD OLED and we get these like really big technological leaps. And then we get stuff like this and 8K where it's like TV companies looking for a reason. And not really like kind of coming up short. They're like, yeah, this is really cool. And we're like, why? And they're like, it's cool. But why? But it's cool. And then we just don't talk about it the next CES. Like there was no, no real talk of 8K. This time around, there was, there was all these conversations that just didn't happen. Yeah. All these things that just kind of like they let, I'm about to get really debater-y here. When you're a debater and you have to like maintain, you know, your flow, you can't drop any of your cases.

• 22:09Alex Cranz?

  And they're just dropping all of them like constantly. And are they going to pick them up in a couple of years? And we're going to be like, no, you dropped it on your last rebuttal. You're over here.

• 22:19Alex Cranz?

  I don't know, but it's, yeah, it just, the LG thing felt very like looking for a reason to exist.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, there's so many like cameras on top of TVs this year at CES.

• 22:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's the Sony one, the LG health platform has a little webcam so you can like talk. It's like, dude, just put zoom on the TV, right? Like Skype on the TV. Like there's a lot of grandparents out there who are like, I just want to do this on my TV.

• 22:45Alex Cranz?

  Google Duo.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  And there's a Facebook portal or I'm sorry, a meta portal. And that, that's it. That's your choice. And it's we, it's like, you just don't, they haven't quite seen the real opportunity.

• 22:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Nilay Patel?

  And they haven't opened the app platforms enough to enable that thing.

• 22:59Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  So, yeah, I, I'm with you. I always think of the, my CS test is like, is this the first generation of your bonkers idea? Or are you showing me like the sixth generation gigantic Sony party speaker? And it's like, I know you are super committed to this idea that makes no sense. There's a team somewhere that's like, this year, the RGB LEDs in our party speaker can produce more colors than ever before. And it's like, you've been thinking about this for six years. This is the six, I love you. That's my test.

• 23:27Alex Cranz?

  Never stops sending us that press release.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Did you, did you iterate so slowly on the most ridiculous idea anyone's ever had? Before we go to the Odyssey arc, we should talk about HDMI 2.1A. Do we have to?

• 23:40Alex Cranz?

  It's so confusing. I'll talk about it when they they make it understandable to my mother.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  Thanks for saying that. That will not happen.

• 23:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it will never happen. But like, if they if they can, or my brother, he likes TVs. And if I said, if I started talking to him about 2.1A, he would like punch me in the boob and walk away. He'd be like, this is very upsetting. I don't care anymore. I'm tired. Stop talking to me. And it's just like, it's so purposely baffling. And I understand they're trying to make it easy, right? HDMI 2.1A is supposed to be like, everything that's already there, but better. But they're not thinking about how people actually live and use these devices. They're not thinking about how everybody's selling it, markets it, like, they're just living in a very-

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think they are. This is what I've come to. I'm I'm just embracing the dark here.

• 24:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  I think they're 100% thinking about that stuff. And like, what we have come to learn is we, through Dieter's standards episodes of the show, over the past year that we've spent more time paying attention to them. These standards organizations are not, they're, they have no authority, right? They're not in charge of shit. They're just like, they're the student council for tech companies. Right? They're inherently political organizations that they only exist because the companies know they have like, a collective action problem of plugging things into each other and making sure they work. The engineers at the companies are like, yeah, PlugFest are a fun idea.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  We'll just like, right? Like, there's like an end, there's a idealistic engineering component to it. But they're run by business people who are like, we need to sell stuff. And if you make the label require all the features, that'll cost too much money. And they're the people on the standards committee, right? It's, I've just given up hope that the standards committee is an idealistic organization with our best interests in heart. I'm like, no, it's more like a necessary political evil that everyone hates. And that it will always be captured and horrible. And all we can do about it is yell. So here's what I think we should do.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Are you ready?

• 25:55Alex Cranz?

  I'm ready.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  We should just give up on numbering systems because like the problem with 2.1A is you can, you can still pick and choose which parts of the spec you support, right? That's fundamentally the problem. You can't just get the highest number and trust you get everything, right?

• 26:09Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  We live in the digital age. We, we can make anything display on a screen or print on a box we want to. Why are we using numbers? We should just use emoji. We should, or a grid. And so it's HDMI clown face. And then you just, you go shoot a chart and then clown face just lists the things that are supported by clown face. And that's it. That's the whole game. And so you just know that if you have a PlayStation, you definitely need to get crying emoji HDMI and then it'll work.

• 26:40Alex Cranz?

  It's like on the little cable.

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  No, but then you can't do a lockdown PlayStation compatible logo that you sell for money.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  But you can print the emoji on the cables and on the port itself. And so you will just be able to look and see what the compatibility is every time. This is perfect.

• 26:57Nilay Patel?

  We, there was an, uh, what I would call a nerd race moment in our newsroom the other day where I think, was it Heim? Heim discovered a USB C cable with an LCD monitor in it.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  It tells you the charging speed, but then Mark has tweeted it first and sold out before we could write about it.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  It's like, we lost the nerd race. Uh, it was very entertaining, but you get right. Like we could make everything smarter. I'm just telling you the incentives are like, that's how you end up with Firewire and iLink. And it's like Sony make you, but why don't you just use the same? No, it's because, anyway, there's a report this week, uh, in what Hi-Fi that Apple's gonna ditch Bluetooth.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying.

• 27:41Alex Cranz?

  Speaking of.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  Like Gary Graves, who I've met, he's a, uh, excellent audio engineer. I, I got to meet him at the, like the home pod when they did the launch. He's very clever. Love talking to him, but he gave this quote to what Hi-Fi that's like, yeah, we would like more bandwidth. That's all I will say about Bluetooth at this time. They definitely, they definitely did the thing where they embraced Bluetooth. They extended it with the H1 chip in their extensions. And now they're like, and now we will continue to hug you to death.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  That's what Microsoft did with the web. I'm just putting it out there. That strategy had a name, embrace, extend, extinguish. The end. Did you see there is, sorry, I'm way off topic now.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  We were gonna do TV's fast, by the way. That was the plan.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  It was the plan. There's that great Twitter account, internal tech company emails.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  And there is one this week where Bill Gates is emailing Nathan Mervold about Java. And he's like, I'm losing, I'm losing sleep over Java.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  It's so good. He's losing sleep that Java will become the operating system, which is.

• 28:40Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  It's so good.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  But Nathan Mervold replies, he's like, I don't think we need to embrace and extend Java at this time.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  No, but, but the best part was Bill Gates is like, it's affecting my creativity.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  I need to start writing more deeply emotional Java emails. Dieter, it's affecting my creativity.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  And then their reply, Mervold is like, you need not lose sleep over Java.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  All right. We gotta end this very linear conversation about televisions. Best in show at CS 2022 from The Verge is

• 29:19Nilay Patel?

  the Samsung Odyssey Arc.

• 29:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  You gotta tell them what that means.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  As you all are aware, as everyone far and wide knows, the Samsung Odyssey Arc, it's a 55 inch 4K curved gaming monitor that you can use in portrait. So it just lofts over you. You should just, the pictures are incredible.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  It's OmniMax, but for your desk.

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  But vertically, I just, you've never seen anything like it.

• 29:49Alex Cranz?

  I have to say, we dunked on this when, when we were working, writing it up originally. Sean was writing it. We, we kind of dunked on it. And then it came out and I've never seen Sean more upset. He was like, it's so cool. Why? He's just so upset. He's like, it's just giant screens.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, you just gotta see the picture. Like, there's a picture of like an executive at a gaming desk or a gaming chair. And this thing is just, it's got.

• 30:16Alex Cranz?

  I just want three of them, a globe of displays around me.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. No one knows how much it's going to cost, of course. Uh, but I'm, I'm definitely going to buy one at the end.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, just, uh, to point out, curved monitors, awesome. Curved TVs, terrible.

• 30:34Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  And curved monitors that you can put into portrait mode so they go over your head. Double awesome.

• 30:39Alex Cranz?

  The best.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  It's just a picture of this dude, just like, he's leaning back and sure, just like staring up.

• 30:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited to watch you do like a zoom call with that, with your, your camera on the top of it, like just looming over your head. You always have to like lean all the way back at your chair.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't want, look, the, the, I'm, I'm getting up in the ears. I gotta, I gotta fill in the top before I let people see.

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  Samsung curved gaming monitor leads to rise in hair replacement sales across America.

• 31:08Alex Cranz?

  Everyone's buying hats for some reason.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it comes with a free beanie for you older gentlemen out there.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, this thing is great. It's exactly like to Dieter's point. It's going to come out. Yeah. We know they're going to ship this thing, but it's also just an absurd idea. It is kind of like the best kind of CS thing. It is ludicrous. It is fun to look at. It's fun to talk about and it's going to ship.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  It's not just total fake. Like, for example, all of the cars at CS.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Good transition.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  So I'm playing this game, uh, called vaporware cars. In my head, there's an orchestra that sings vaporware cars. Every time I see one of these cars. Vaporware cars. So there's a couple we should talk about because they're fun. There's the BMW IX concept with the E Ink sides. They'll bring it first just because it, I mean, this is a car made for Alex.

• 32:05Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's all I want in life.

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  Literally people are tagging her on Twitter being like, Alex, they made a car for you.

• 32:10Alex Cranz?

  I'm just so happy. I've never been happier.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Can you describe the, describe what it is really quick though? Just like the full concept of it?

• 32:17Alex Cranz?

  Okay, okay. So, so e-ink, as, as you may or may not know, is, is actual like ink and it's suspended in, there's like white and black pigments and they're suspended in a fluid and you run electricity through them and they go black or white. And this is just that fluid suspended all over a car. So you can just have a giant e-ink, you know, Kindle display is your entire car.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  But it's not squares. It's the body panels of the car.

• 32:44Alex Cranz?

  It's a body panels and like.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a normal car, not a car with like Kindles glued to it.

• 32:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that would be incredible.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Which we would also accept.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 32:55Alex Cranz?

  Just glue them on with some super glue. But, but yeah, so it's, it's actually, it's like, it's because it's, you know, it's pigment. The same thing is like paint fundamentally, similar things. It's kind of similar, but it's like an actual liquid and it's so it's in motion, whereas, you know, paint and pigment is not. And it's just neat.

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  It's really cool looking.

• 33:15Alex Cranz?

  And you can control it with a button, I guess. And theoretically.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a button. The, the panels are on the wheels too. So the wheels are constantly changing, which is very trippy when you see them move.

• 33:23Alex Cranz?

  But it wasn't on the gas cap, it looked like from the footage we saw. So like everything changes in the gas cap.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's an electric car. So I think the charging port moves.

• 33:32Alex Cranz?

  It's like, no, you just stay the same color all the time.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's you. That's how you know. This is where the electron goes. I mean, the thing looks cool. I have like the usual concerns, like what if it gets rained on?

• 33:42Alex Cranz?

  What if there's a hailstorm? What if like you drive to Walmart and you park anywhere?

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  What if someone keys your car full of electrically activated fluid? It's a great concept. Total vapor, right? Like the IX underneath it also might be, is like vapor. My definition of vaporware, by the way, is vapor till it ships. You can announce anything you want. Until the day people can just go out and buy it, it's vapor.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Now, you mean go out and buy it like beyond chip shortage? Like I want to go and buy a Maki right now and I cannot.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  No, that car, that car is shipped.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  You can, under some duress, you could acquire yourself a Maki.

• 34:18Alex Cranz?

  Some, a person that is not the maker can own the car. That means it's not vapor.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  But like this, this, um, this BMW, it's, you know, it's an M60. It's supposed to go 063.6. It's got a long range. It's like, it looks like a dope, you know,

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  fast crossover. And I trust BMW to ship something.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Vapor.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  But until they do, you're saying it doesn't count.

• 34:42Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't count. You gotta ship the car.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  And do you accept that there's levels of vapor? There's like,

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  kind of thick vapor that's probably likely to ship. And then there's super thin vapor. Like, like, what's the difference between this and like, I don't know, uh, Faraday future?

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  So I, I, under most circumstances, I would grant you that there are levels of vapor.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Then I, we're going to end with the Silverado, which I think is the hardest questionable. The car industry has taken such advantage of people's excitement about EVs and delivered so few EVs, I'm going to be extra harsh on them. That's, that's my personal, that's where I'm at. Is you, we, you have to stop asking people for a hundred dollar deposit on cars that aren't shipping or that have slipping ship dates. The Cybertruck this week, ship date delayed.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like we got it, we got, and Tesla ships cars, right? Like they're in the same boat as BMW. Eventually they will probably ship that car. When? The IX, same deal, right? When? Like, and they, you know, the car industry is also really good at being like winter 2022, which is when like April 1st or whatever the last day is. So I'm just being extra harsh. So the IX, double vapor, right? A paint job you will never be able to buy, although Alex will probably steal that car. If she was in Vegas, we'd be like, Alex is in jail.

• 35:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Hundred percent arrested.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  IX, same deal. Mercedes announced the vision EQXX.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  This is a concept through and through.

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  Concept through and through.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:09Alex Cranz?

  It has like crazy, crazy like battery life too, right?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  So there's two things to know about this car. It's someone opened up Photoshop and used the skew function on an Aston Martin DB5. And that's what this car looks like. That's all they, they just like stretched it out and they're like, okay, it's a concept car. Uh, and they're claiming it's important because it's got 680 miles of range.

• 36:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  So.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yes, it's important to make EVs with longer range to deal with range anxiety. Does this actually do anything there for that? I don't know.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  But can I tell you why I think it's the most vapor of all?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  Like the most vapor. And I agree, it's a concept car. Because Aston Martin will be litigious. No, because the Mercedes logo on the picture is an obvious like Photoshop stamp and it's not centered on the hood.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if even the concept car exists. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. Like, is this just a render that they blew it at the end? Like, the last minute, they're like, Tim, the intern, get the Mercedes logo on there.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  They were.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  So, okay, hang on. That is the, like, the most vapor, but it's not the, there's like a poison vapor car, like a, actually offensive vapor car. S E S and, and I'm, I'm sorry, it's the Sony Vision S.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  You don't believe it's real?

• 37:27Speaker 02

  I am very, I'm just livid at Sony for this thing.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why are you livid?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  So they had a Vision S a couple of years ago and they said, this is, we're just playing around with some ideas. And then this year, they, they rolled out an SUV version and they're like, you know, last time we said we're just playing around with ideas, but this year we're founding a brand new company called Sony Mobility and we're going to explore making this real. And it's just like, why? Are you actually going to make a car, Sony? Do you actually have the abilities? Do you have any started building a supply chain? Do you like, can you do it? Like, at best, you're like, what, three, four years away from pulling that off? Unless you've been doing it in secret and nobody knew about it, which I doubt.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say, uh, there's a video where they show off a remote driving via 5G linking Tokyo in Germany in real time. It's like, no, no, you didn't.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  You can't do that. Have you used a 5G network? Are you aware of what that's like?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I don't like, I don't think so.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  What if there are any airports between those two cities?

• 38:25Alex Cranz?

  Just a quick counterpoint, though. What if there is actually out there a secret supply chain and both Sony and Apple are using it?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Like we live in the wizarding world, like it's in between.

• 38:37Alex Cranz?

  Like their subterranean, like village where they're building all of the cars. I could be just throwing it out there.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  I would say that these cars, the thing that really gets around these cars is like, they don't look good.

• 38:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're so ugly.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  They're, they just, I don't, they look like, um, you know, when you buy like kid toys and it's like car. It's like, that's what they are. Like here's a car and on the inside you're full of Sony user interface. Like when I think the future of mobility, I think Sony software.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:13Nilay Patel?

  And that's really the promise of all this stuff is like, you're going to recreate a software environment inside the car. The cars will eventually drive themselves and then you'll get all this user attention back and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You'll play Spider-Man inside your car.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. Thus bringing the Sony circle of life together.

• 39:28Alex Cranz?

  What kind of storage is this car gonna have?

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  It's definitely going to be a memory stick of some kind. My belief, uh, and after asking the people on Twitter, I believe the wheels will be a new kind of proprietary Sony memory.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Oh, I like it. Yeah.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  Sony, the Sony memory wagon. Yeah, I agree. Total vapor. We'll just go through the other ones. Cadillac announced a vaporware autonomous car. Uh, it's just like, of course it did. Chrysler previewed their airflow concept, total vapor. Uh, the screens and that they announced a partnership with Amazon.

• 40:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, boy.

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't quite understand why Amazon is saying this to me, but Amazon emailed me today and said, the tweets you shared of the interface of the screens is not accurate and they have not followed. I was like, what's inaccurate from your press release? There's an Alexa logo at the top and then what looks, I will tell you, like Android 3.1. Like, I'm not saying it is Android 3.1. I'm sure it's like a riff on FireOS, but the design sensibility of early 2000s Android tablet is alive and well in Chrysler's vaporware car.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're just really into hollow, man. What do you want?

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, Amazon told me it's inaccurate, so I will update the tweet if they show me a real design vaporware car. Volvo said it will have unsupervised highway driving approved vaporware promise.

• 40:45Alex Cranz?

  It's confident it can get it.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  GM announced basically the same thing. VW is gonna make an electric microbus vaporware car. Like just on and on and on. Like all this stuff. Like just let me buy a car. Do you know what I want to do? I want to buy a car with a battery in it. Yeah, there's four of them. Yeah. Do you know how expensive a RAV4 Prime is right now? Because it's the only car available with a battery in it. Dear dealer selling RAV4s, RAV4s for $100,000.

• 41:10Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Because there's so much demand for EVs and no actual EVs.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  I'll be so harsh as to say Ford this week announced it was doubling F-150 Lightning production again to 150,000 units. This is a car we have seen. I've seen them move.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Vaporware car until it ships. Like that's where I'm at with every EV company. So now here's the hardest one. Chevy announces Silverado EV. It's ES.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  This is important because Americans buy trucks.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  They do.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Right?

• 41:43Alex Cranz?

  But it looks like an avalanche, right?

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  It does look like an avalanche.

• 41:46Alex Cranz?

  And do people buy the avalanche?

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, uh, there was, there were some, there was a small but ferocious band of avalanche hunters. It does not look like the regular Silverado.

• 41:58Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  Which is what you would expect. F-150 Lightning looks just like the F-150. They just did some light stuff on the front, basically, right? This new Silverado EV looks totally different than the currently shipping brand new Silverado, which is fascinating decision. Big screen on the inside, 17-inch LCD infotainment, 11-inch driver view, supercruise, all the four-wheel steering, right?

• 42:20Alex Cranz?

  It's like somebody took the Avalanche and they really like smushed it with the Rivian together.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I could see that. No Rivian, another vaporware car.

• 42:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Like they've sold 500 to Rivian employees.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, this car is based on the Hummer EV.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Which is that a vaporware car?

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like there's like they've sold like four of them.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  So it's technically shipping. Okay, but this one isn't and it's ship date is not until late 23.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  Which is probably 24. And the car it's based on is only barely shipping. Is this a vaporware car? I say yes.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  I mean, sure. I mean, by your definition, yeah.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  It has a date and a price. By the way, the price starts at 39.9 and goes up to like $100,000.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's, that's how it goes with trucks. I mean, that doesn't surprise me at all.

• 43:12Alex Cranz?

  Can my vote be it's ugly enough that I want it to be vaporware?

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  It is not a beautiful truck.

• 43:17Alex Cranz?

  It's not.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  It is very confusing. I, I, is it just the diagonal pillars over the bed that make you think avalanche?

• 43:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, they did that for aerodynamics. Yeah, it's a weird looking truck, but I'm just saying, I'm at, even though I believe that Chevy will ship this product, even though they've done the things that we demand of every company at CS, give us a ship date and a price, right? So I always joke about no price, no, no release date. I'm still like, yeah, it's not out yet. It doesn't count. So that's where I'm at. I'm sorry. I'm being harsh. You know, and you can make it up to me Chevy, but shipping the truck.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm just, I'm being harsh about this all year. Like they got, we, we need to put batteries in people's driveways, not gas engines.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  I say this as a person who owns a ridiculous, extremely inefficient gas. And I'm like, need to get rid of this thing. So.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  But like at our current rate of replacement, when people, you know, the average rate of replacement of cars in the US, we're looking at, you know, 15 to 20 years to like get gas engines off the road. Like at least, and like, we need to move way faster than that. We can't do that unless the cars are.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  There are cars.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Lots.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  Or everyone gets $100,000 RAV4 Prime.

• 44:30Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  I mean, you want, you want to talk economic stimulus?

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  I tried to get Andy to ask Pete Buttigieg, if you would, but this question was rejected. Uh, but anyway, Andy did talk to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Decoder, about charging networks, about EV safety, all this stuff. You should go listen to that. That was another bit of a CS thing. This was supposed to be the fast segment and it was absolutely was not. I hope you're ready for like what promises to be a 19 hour virgess. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about everything else that happened at CS. We'll be right back.

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• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. This is the non-vaporware segment.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  This is the nuts and bolts of computing segment.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  And we're going to start with stuff that hasn't shipped yet.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  Folding OLED laptop.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Actually, I want to do this a little bit out of order from what we have. We should start with the chips and then move to the laptops that, you know, may have some of these chips, right? What do you want to do, Intel or AMD? Intel. Intel, all right. So 12th gen Alder Lake chips. These are important, I think, because, you know, most people assume they want to get an Intel laptop, even though AMD is hard charging. And Intel is making gigantic claims for these, that they are more powerful than the M1 Max on the MacBook Pros, which maybe they are. If you have a nuclear power plant nearby. They didn't say much about battery life is what I'm getting at. And they're a power draw. But, you know, like the story with Intel, and it has been for a while now, was when are they back?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  What are they, what are they going to start really, really, you know, getting back in the game and push it? And maybe this is like. The possible start of that? I don't know. What do you think?

• 47:14Alex Cranz?

  I feel like no, because the only ones they announced, they announced laptop processors, but it's only the 45 watts, right? I think 45 watts, the H series processors. And that's usually the stuff you find in like workstations and gaming laptops. That's not like the nuts.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  The giant gaming laptops.

• 47:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. When we start seeing the Y series and U series and all of the other like stuff that actually appears in laptops that most people buy, then I'll be like, okay, they're serious. And when it's as good as the M1.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the other thing that Intel talked about was the, our GPUs, but no, no actual updates there. So like Intel getting into GPU game, here we go. Well, let's just keep waiting for that, I guess. They just, I think they announced more OEMs. We're gonna use them. Was that the plan?

• 48:00Alex Cranz?

  This is like the third CES in a row where they're like, don't know, yeah, GPUs, GPUs, GPUs. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Not happening today. Sorry.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Although, to be fair, that's not too far from what Nvidia is doing with its GPUs in terms of your ability to get one.

• 48:15Alex Cranz?

  It is probably easier to get an Intel GPU right now than a 3080 Ti or T, depending on how you want to pronounce it.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:24Alex Cranz?

  Nvidia has no official recommendation.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  It's supposed to be titanium, right?

• 48:29Alex Cranz?

  No, they, they officially said this week, there is no official pronunciation. Say it however you want.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  That's good. I like that.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  You don't even have to use the letters T or I. It could be, you know, Nvidia 3080 Moo.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Did you see that with the Alder Lake stuff? They put out an apple graph of performance.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  Per watt. I don't love the bad graphs are taking over our industry.

• 48:57Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they did say what tests they were using in tiny print at the bottom, but it was still just like random relative scales of like, I think the Y axis was from 0 to 100%.

• 49:09Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  It was just like, I don't know what this means at all.

• 49:12Alex Cranz?

  I don't like, I don't think it's fair to say they're taking over because I think Intel was one of the people that invented the bad performance graph that doesn't actually mean anything. Like they're very good at making these and you're always like, oh, wow. Wait, wait. You're comparing it to a laptop from six years ago? Yes, of course it's gonna be better.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's Intel. We'll see. They're still in the

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  transition with a new CEO.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:39Alex Cranz?

  They could surprise us.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  Kind of a little more confident, a little more, a little more planted, more iterative.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's a Ryzen 6000 laptop chips. They're iterative improvement. They're claiming double the graphics performance, but it's the same Zen 3 architecture. I think it's 6 nanometer process on these. So it's like, it's not a huge jump, but it's like they're continuing to make good laptop chips. And I don't know, we'll see what these alter lakes are. But if I were to buy a gaming laptop this year, I think it would probably be a Ryzen 6000.

• 50:08Alex Cranz?

  Well, and they actually announced CPUs for laptops that everybody can buy. So they they announced kind of their their Y series, or I think equivalent. So, thank you. I appreciate it.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  They did announce their next desktop chips for the second half of 2022, the Ryzen 7000. These are on a new architectures at four, and they're on the 5 nanometer process. So I will see, like, step change, maybe? Don't know.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  I think the step change is, do they, we've been assuming that AMD will overtake Intel, because the chips are on path to overtake Intel's chips.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  But Intel is still a force.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  And it's the standard. Do you think this is the year?

• 50:52Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's the year, just in terms of raw volume, but in terms of, you know, people in the know, making a choice, I think that this could be the year. Yeah. I mean, again, second half 2022 is a hazy

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Vaporous.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:07Alex Cranz?

  I think we're seeing a lot more for years and years. If you wanted to review a laptop that was made in AMD and Intel variants, you could only get Intel, like, the companies just wouldn't send you AMD. And we're starting to see it more. And I think this year, we're gonna like, almost constantly see AMD laptops being handed out to reviewers instead of Intel. And for me, that feels like the big change. Because, you know, Intel still has, like, what, 95% of the server market? Like, it's not going away. But I think for personal computing, this might be the year for AMD. Maybe. We'll see.

• 51:41Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 51:42Alex Cranz?

  I don't want to say confidently, because then I'll be wrong and everybody will yell at me. But it feels pretty good.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what I'm asking. It feels like

• 51:50Alex Cranz?

  It feels like maybe, yeah.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  Especially, I think especially with Apple being like, our computers don't need power.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I would say the Nvidia CES keynote experience has always been an impressionistic sort of hour or two of my life.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  Right. You never really know what they're announcing, but it seems it's kind of the same here, right?

• 52:13Alex Cranz?

  With the 30, they did one year with like, was it the 2060 or the 3060? They announced it CES and that was like, kind of a surprise and kind of a delight. But this year was like, very just bread and butter Nvidia being like, yep, here's some, some iterative updates. Surprise, we're doing 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti laptop GPUs. Like, yes, I could have predicted that. I could have written that story before you announced.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. So let's talk about the laptops. This Dell XPS 13 plus.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  You gotta read Monica's piece on it.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Man, like Kool-Aid man. Oh, yeah.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a, well, here's what I'll say. First, I'm going to start by giving Dell a compliment. Most companies, when they have a hit product, just ride that product with no changes for as long as they can.

• 53:01Alex Cranz?

  Into the ground.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  The, and the XPS 13 is a hit product. The XPS 13 plus is the opposite of riding a successful design into the ground. It is more like, uh, I don't, it's like, it's like, it's like, honestly, Dell was like, someone will disrupt us if we don't make an invisible trackpad first. And they like alone, you know, like they're down in Austin, like just running around in circles like, ah.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  Like they've convinced themselves that this problem exists. It is nuts. This is one of the most nuts looking laptops I've ever seen. Totally flat keyboard deck. The trackpad is just, it's not there. Like the whole bottom deck is trackpad.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Well, no, not the whole bottom deck is trackpad, but it's a flat deck and then the trackpad is under one section of it. But there's no demarcation of where the trackpad is.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  So it's worse than I thought. And then it has a touch bar, like a thing that can only be described is a touch bar, not an LCD screen.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Unless you're in the room with somebody who works for Dell, in which case they will punch you in the face.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  But all the function keys are a capacitive touch function row.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 54:08Alex Cranz?

  This feels like-

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna read the Monica quote. Uh, a capacitive touch function row, which refers to little LED buttons on a flat bar that you can tap to fiddle with things like brightness and volume. Dell insists this is not a touch bar, parentheses, but it is, I mean, a bar that you touch to toggle things. So anyone who else, anyone else whose brain immediately jumped to that conclusion, you are valid and I see you. Like, that's where Monica got to.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We're not done with the weird, weird thing in this laptop.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  Continue, by all means.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  The keyboard is also completely flat to the rest of the deck. The flat keys always a risk when you see a brand new keyboard design. Hopefully, it's okay. Monica is like, you know, she's like, she's not going to make a judgment yet. And then, last but not least, guess what it lacks?

• 54:54Alex Cranz?

  This is the best part.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  A headphone jack.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 55:02Alex Cranz?

  Johnny Ive made this. This is his laptop.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is Ive's revenge.

• 55:07Alex Cranz?

  He went over to Dell and made this. It's incredible.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  He like whispered to Tim Cook, he's like, I'm going to Texas.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  I won't tell you what I'm working on, but you'll know.

• 55:20Alex Cranz?

  And then we got the XPS 13 Plus.

• 55:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming it's Dell. I'm assuming they're going to keep the standard XPS 13 design around forever because that's what Dell does. But I will say, it is rare to see a company mess with its hit product this dramatically.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, if they were like, this is our design laptop, we'd be like, oh, yeah, it's weird. You've made some weird choices.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  You think this is a Mustang Mach-E situation where they, they made the crazy laptop? And then someone said, actually, we should call that an XPS. It's pretty good.

• 55:51Alex Cranz?

  But why did they follow that person's advice?

• 55:56Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. One of the strangest products at CES this year. All right, then there's the Rog Zephyrus G14, which white laptops are a theme.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, we're just excited for this laptop because like, the Zephyrus G14, you know, G13 are consistently our favorite gaming laptops in terms of like price per performance and just overall usability. And we're very excited about these ones because they have webcams.

• 56:21Alex Cranz?

  Yay. Will it be good?

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  And they look like laptops, not like something you would take to a LARP.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  Very good. And then, all right, Dieter, your tweet about this, I think summed it up. This Asus foldable OLED, where I think your tweet was, I wish I could tell you it's gonna be good. But I cannot.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it is, if you remember, Lenovo made one of these. It's a full screen that folds in half. So it's a foldable thing. And then there's a keyboard that can sit inside the sandwich when it's fully folded. So there's, there's several points of possible failure here.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  There's the physical failure of the screen itself. There's like the failure of ergonomics of like, will this, you know, actually be comfortable to use? Will they get the keyboard right? Will the keyboard sit the thing correctly? Whatever. There is the software potential failures of like, does Windows do what you want it to do in these different, you know, form factors when it folds and unfolds and does stuff? You know, there's price, it'll probably be super expensive. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of ways this could go sideways. But I will say,

• 57:30Speaker 02

  not to put too fine a point on it. I trust Asus to make a wacky experimental device that could actually be decent, more than I trust Lenovo's wacky experimental devices.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Lenovo ThinkPad, Lenovo ThinkBook, go to town. I believe you. That thing is rock solid. I will buy the hell out of that thing and trust it. Lenovo, we're trying out a new form factor. How many times did they screw that up over the past few years? How many times? Should we talk about the one that had the Ian keyboard? No, we will not.

• 58:01Nilay Patel?

  But that, the ThinkPad is like the definition of don't mess with the hit product.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, although they kind of did this year a little bit. There's a Z series now.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's like, there's like the cool one. Yeah.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  But you're right. When Lenovo is like, we're gonna go beyond the ThinkPad DNA. It's like,

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Don't do it.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Actually, speaking of which, we should talk about this ThinkBook Plus, which, okay, every time, I love the idea of a big screen in the laptop tech. It's one of those like super futuristic concepts, right?

• 58:30Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  And I think the giveaway for whatever you see one of these products in real life is what the manufacturer has chosen to put on that display. And it's usually just like statistics about the computer itself. So Lenovo has put a battery meter, like a giant eight inch battery history graph. It's like, yo, I don't need that at all. Right, like, a lot of times you'll see like bandwidth, or you'll see like processor graphs. And it's like, I don't truly if I needed this information, I could get it. I do not need it at all times. And I think this is why they haven't taken off. No one knows what to do with these displays. Your idea was watching TikTok while.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would have TikTok on my keyboard deck all day long. That'd be great.

• 59:15Alex Cranz?

  Is it touch? Like, can you touch the display and like do stuff with it? Or do you have to use the mouse?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Not only is it touch, you can write notes on it with a stylus, which is why our reviews editor, Dan Seifert, is livid about this thing.

• 59:28Alex Cranz?

  So mad.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  He's left-handed and he loves to take notes next to his computer. And so this would be perfect for him, except he can't because the one note is on the other side. And he'd have to take his left hand over the keyboard.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God. I'm also left-handed. I'm also livid now, although.

• 59:42Alex Cranz?

  Maybe they'll make a ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 L.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Hmm, yeah.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  That would be actually amazing if they had to make right and left-handed versions of this thing. I don't.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  It's another great CS product. It's gonna ship. It's really silly. And at the end of the day, what are you gonna put on this thing? And will Microsoft OneNote support it for five years? And the answer is absolutely not.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  The end. So that is laptops. Again, Monica is doing a great job just trying to put all this stuff on the site. There's photos everywhere. There's a bunch of phone stuff. Google traditionally has a huge presence at CES.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  So the, the interesting thing about Google is Google's traditional huge presence that started four or five years ago has always been Google Assistant. And this year it was supposed to be Android and better together. They're like their brand for all these devices working together. And they announced like over a dozen ways that they're gonna try and make a ecosystem of like integrations and things working together to try and compete with Apple. So they're gonna do auto switching for headphones. They're gonna put your text messages on a Chromebook. They're gonna let you use nearby shared a Windows PCs, although only HP and Asus, I think. They didn't actually make it work with Windows. They actually had to work with the OEM. So there's some, some Google, Microsoft fight happening there that I don't understand. What else? Like fast pairing will also work with like your Google TV.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  And so you pair it to your Android phone and then you, you know, what bring your headphones over to Google TV? And they're just there through your Google account. Like all the stuff that Apple users get, they're trying to bring as much as they can to Android users.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the question is, you have to conceive of Android. Is not Samsung's Android.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Right. Samsung has got a bunch of this stuff already in the Samsung world. Yeah.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  So like, are they going to be able to push it out to Samsung phones and then to Windows? Or is this you have a Pixel and one model of a Asus laptop?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's an excellent question. I asked and they said that a lot of this stuff isn't going to require like a point update to the OS. They could push it out through Google mobile services. So at least there's that. But what do you think the launch dates are? Coming months.

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  There's a couple of coming weeks and there's one second half of the year, I think.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  Early days, Dieter.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  Remember, I mean, Google is like the all time leader in vaporware announcements, so I won't ding them too hard.

• 1:02:04Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to order from a restaurant later with Google Assistant via AI. It's gonna happen.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  It's definitely gonna happen. They announced a Dolby Surround audio for YouTube TV on some devices. Just doesn't shift.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  But that's like, Google's shipping cadence has, since Google has existed, been like, I don't know, whenever.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  And so it's actually fun, like events like CS are, I think, difficult for Google. Because they have to line up, they have to like walk around the kindergarten that is Google engineering and like get them all together.

• 1:02:43Nilay Patel?

  I look, I think this stuff is great. I, you know, the integrations are great. I just think fundamentally, they've got to get it onto the phones people have to make the case that the integration is valuable. Because in the Apple ecosystem, the integration is the reason you buy all the stuff.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. The thing that I don't understand is why they haven't figured out how to get this to work with Chrome. And I'm talking about nearby share in particular. The fact that there's not a decent airdrop alternative for Android users is wild to me.

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, just write a helper app for Windows.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  That might be what they're doing, but they're just shipping it on HP devices first.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  That's hilarious. Okay, new OnePlus 10 Pro specs.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  So they they announced Chinese availability and then they teased a picture and then they've announced specs. And we're just like, they're just like, there's like five announcements for this phone. I still don't know what it's going to cost when it's to come to the US, at least as of this recording, they could tweet it out right now and I wouldn't be surprised. It looks good. You know, the the concern here is can OnePlus recover from the garbage 2021 it had with Oxygen OS? And just like, they've had all sorts of problems and they've definitely lost the fans, right? They like, the shine is completely off of them now that they're basically, you know, integrated with Oppo and, you know, I mean, they've always been there, but now they're running Oxygen and they were supposed to be new OS and like,

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  it's very, very messy and there's very little trust for them right now.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And honestly, their opportunity was this last year because Samsung had so many problems delivering.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  And they missed the window.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Samsung, new S21 FE and then there were some leaks today of the S22.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, which should be very soon.

• 1:04:26Nilay Patel?

  But the I don't know, what's going on with Samsung?

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  So the S21 FE is, it's it's like a low cost S21 with like, I don't know, slightly worse cameras maybe, but like same processor, slightly worse build quality. It's a phone that should not exist if you're like, if you like pay attention to the phone that you buy. It's like more expensive than last time's SFE. So it's like, it makes sense for Samsung because like they can make more profit off it, I guess, but it makes zero sense for a consumer. Go buy an S21 used or refurbished or, you know, on discount. If this thing gets discounted to the wazoo, then maybe. But it's also weird that like, we know the S22 is right on the corner. They could have just called this in the S22 FE and it would have been fine.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Honestly.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  The S22, these leaks look, I don't know. The design is all over the place now.

• 1:05:15Alex Cranz?

  Every single one looks different.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  The Ultra is like separating itself out because the Ultra is going to have an onboard stylus, we're expecting. So it has a complete, it's basically a note.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  And it has the worst looking camera bumps ever.

• 1:05:29Nilay Patel?

  Is that a bump or is it the whole thing just thicker? It's hard to tell in this.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  There's a tiny, there's like, there's, there's a little bit of a bump of, you know, metal around the, the camera lenses. So it's sort of like, I don't know, iPhone six style bump. You know what I mean? They're probably, they're probably going to do the thing where they take the picture at just a certain angle to make you think there's that camera bumps there, but there actually are. So, I don't know. I, I actually love the S21 design language and the way that the, the rail like merged into the camera bump. I thought that looked great. It seems like they're doing something similar-ish with the regular S22. But I, I don't know. We'll see. I don't want to, I don't want to completely prejudge it. I want to see it in person, but in photos, it just looks dopey.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll see. Uh, and we got to end with phones. It's CS. We got, we got to do some 5G news. That's just, that's the law. It's the iron law. CS is 5G hype news. I'll just point to Russell's explainer. AT&T and Verizon have still not lit up their mid-band 5G special, which they spent billions of dollars on, in fairness, because the FCC and the FAA are fighting. And the, now that like the airline flight attendants union is in the mix because there's some worries that radar, uh, radar altimeters in planes will be affected by mid-band 5G usage and the mitigation strategies.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  It's a mess. It's a mess. And it like, the CEOs of AT&T and Verizon are like writing fiery letters to, to Mayor Pete, you know? It's very good, but it's a mess. And I think it, it's funny. Like after all this time, we still don't have the 5G networks. We have lost the race, my friends.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, well lost. Uh, in this particular bureaucratic infighting, we've been talking about it for a few weeks on the show. It's very strange how things are lining up like you don't usually see the FCC like pull rank.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  You know, but like the Democrats and Republicans, the FCC are all just like shocked and horrified.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  They're like, this is what we do. Frequency stuff.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Well, Verizon canceled an event or delayed an event. It'll come later. They did announce, um, you know, that it's coming in a couple of weeks. There's, I think they're calling their mid C-band stuff ultra wide band, uh, UWB or something. They're like giving it the same branding that they give to the millimeter wave stuff. So that's going to be exciting and confusing. It might not have exactly, but there's definitely some like confusion there with the way they're branding it. They also revamped all of their plans. So there's like get more, do more, something, something. It's truly unlimited now, but they don't call them limited anymore. It's a lot, but theoretically you can get an unlimited plan without a data cap from Verizon.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  Do you know this is so stressful? It's affecting my creativity.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Me, I, I bet you that in order to sign up for get more, you probably need to sign up for their new like, you know, affiliate super cookie thing that they do where they track you more. I bet.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm a hundred percent certain.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  I bet it's called track more is what they should call it.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Every time a carrier changes its pricing schemes, it's to get you to sign up for something dumb. That's my theory. Okay. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back and do some. I mean, literally we have it listed here as MISC and that what better way to end your CS experience than MISC? We'll be right back.

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• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Okay, we just got to pick some of these.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  I am going to start by picking the Samsung Freestyle projector. So Samsung announced a tiny little can projector. It runs Tizen. It has a cool little mount. You can like rotate it 180 degrees. You can set it up anywhere. You can run it off a USB C battery pack. You like point, it has color correction built into it. So you can point it at a wall that isn't white and it will figure out the colors and make it look good.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  You can screw it into a light bulb socket.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  You can screw it. There's a, it's an optional adapter that lets you screw it into a light bulb socket and point it down at a table, which is incredible. It implies so much about the homes that Samsung thinks this is going to go into. Like everyone just has like chandeliers over their tables, like hanging pendant lights. It's amazing. The thing is, looks cool. I like am a smart projector addict. I like bought in an arms race with only myself last year, started with an Anchor Nebula.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  And then ended up at like a dead ahead 4K projector.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  Very stupid, like six models in between. So I think this is really smart. I think smart projectors are really cool. One, run size in. Two, it is $900.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  It's so expensive. It solves all the problems you have with a little portable projector. Like, you can keystone it, you can have it like, not take up the full, you can have it have the picture not be the full size of the screen. So you can like shrink it down and put it over to where your wall actually is without moving the projector around, which is smart. The color, like, all the stuff that I've been trying to get, like, not be horrible with my little anchor portable projector, this thing solves for $900.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Nine hundred. And it, I think it's only, uh, what, 500 lumens? Yep, 550 lumens.

• 1:11:48Alex Cranz?

  So it sounds like you wait a year and a half to when it's marked down to 350?

• 1:11:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is definitely gonna be a Black Friday.

• 1:11:55Alex Cranz?

  This is gonna be a deal, guys. Just, just wait.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Pre-ordered one.

• 1:11:58Nilay Patel?

  You did?

• 1:11:59Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  See, once you get in the game, you're like, ooh, another projector. And then you have like a room full of projectors that you forgot to send back to Amazon.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  You're just like a motion artist now.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  I will say, before it got too cold, I watched almost three football games outside. And I was like, I did it. And then I got too cold and I was like, why do I own this thing? Gosh, I spent a lot of money on this.

• 1:12:23Alex Cranz?

  You gotta get the fire pit now.

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know. Uh, all right. Alex, what's yours?

• 1:12:27Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, that's a tough one. Cause I really like that Sony confirmed that the PlayStation VR2 name is PlayStation VR2. Cause it's just, thank you Sony. Really appreciate that. But I also, I really dig the, uh, the L'Oréal, the new hair dye.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  This is super cool.

• 1:12:46Alex Cranz?

  I've only, I don't know if you guys have ever dyed your hair. I've only done it twice. The second time was to repair the first time.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the high school years.

• 1:12:53Alex Cranz?

  It's college, it's college. Oh, it's bad.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  My friend.

• 1:12:57Alex Cranz?

  It was, it was rough. But this is, this is the Color Sonic. And the idea is there's like a cartridge. Cause you know, they had to get it in on the cartridge thing. The cartridge, you put it in and you just brush it through your hair and it will, it will change your hair color. I think it's gonna be a lot more involved than, than they're currently selling it. Like, and then there's still things like you still have to bleach your hair if you want to change colors and you've got dark hair.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  There's a person with black hair. Like, I was like, no.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  It's very light tint.

• 1:13:25Alex Cranz?

  But I like, you know, L'Oréal, they got their start making hair color and they're really, really good at it. They've actually kind of shipped some of their, their previous products like this that they announced at CES and we all forget about. They ship it. Nobody buys it because it's super expensive, but they're saying that this is going to be like something you could buy in a Target, I assume for $600. And so, yeah, there's, there's potential here. It's very vapory, but, but I like the idea. I like the idea and I like that it looks like a finished product. Like it really does look like a cheap thing I would buy at Target to do my hair. So I'm like, okay, you got the look down. This, this feels like bad ideas and cold duck on a Friday night, some break, baked cookies. Let's go.

• 1:14:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was good at bleaching my hair, actually than dying it to a correct shade of blonde. Often the step I missed. So I'm into it. I, what I actually appreciate about it the most is like, it's not like a dumb wifi gadget.

• 1:14:25Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, it's a mechanical technology engineering gadget.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. There's nothing smart about it. There's no like, we're going to change your color hair. They, they also announced like a big, a big, like, I don't know, facility booth that they're gonna have at, at hair salons. I struggle to think of a single hair salon I've ever been to that would have this booth where you can like get the color done and like test out different colors. Cause you know, everybody has a phone now. So why would I go to this booth? But, but great. Cool.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  Look, it's a Saturday night. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go to the hair color booth, the local salon.

• 1:15:02Alex Cranz?

  Pay $400 while somebody makes fun of you. It'll be fun.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  I do appreciate that this whole, this whole thing implies that there's a market of people who bleach and dye their hair and not, well, I see saying bleaches. I'm aware of what I need to do, but there's a market of people who dye their hair often enough that you can sell hair dye pods to them.

• 1:15:20Alex Cranz?

  No, I, you know, I know a lot of women in particular who, who do dye their hair and they're dying it every, you know, especially people who grow gray early and want to keep the color in. This would be like a huge, huge deal for them. So, so I think like, If it works and they do it well, it really is just as simple as, I don't know, washing your hair, having it wet and running this through, game changer, like massive, massive change, if it's affordable.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  Curing pods for hair, I love it.

• 1:15:47Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  Pod, by the way, the pod revenue model alive and well at this year's CES. All right, Dieter, what's yours?

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  You both took my favorites. So I am going to pick the most CES thing. This, we're not going to give this our most CES award, I don't think. But to me, if you want to talk about things that just are CES, what if your front door was smart?

• 1:16:11Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, this is like every company is like, what if you're, what if the front door was a different experience?

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  So it's the Masonite M Power, no vowels there, by the way, M dash T W R, smart door. So here's the idea, and I hate this so much that when I first saw it, I was like, this is stupid. And then Jennifer wrote the post, talked to me about it, and now I love it and I want one because it's CES. So it's a front door that has spots for a Yale lock, a Ring people camera, lights, you know, just like everything you would want to like power in your, at your front door, like the doorbell, the light, the camera, like that stuff, the smart lock is built into the door. But theoretically, it's modular, so you could like switch from something to something

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  else when it eventually.

• 1:17:04Nilay Patel?

  Like a door.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, like when the wifi goes out on your smart lock, you'll be able to get another smart lock and not replace your entire door.

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  But that is also currently a feature of my existing door.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  But so like the, the, the thing that's smart about it, in theory, is the door has power and it routes power to these parts of the door where you are inevitably going to want smart things. So you could just like have a door with electricity and then you can put in the smart gadgets that you want instead of a wire to the doorbell and a wire to the light and a wire to the other things. It's just like run one wire to your door and then you have your smart gadgets there. But like. It's so, yes, like they, it works with the Amazon key because of course it does. Right? Just like everything.

• 1:17:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  The Matter is like the big story and we don't need to talk about it too much here, but like all this stuff is going to be, you know, supporting Matter, I'm sure. So your front door will support Thread pretty soon, which is very exciting.

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  It's perfect.

• 1:18:07Nilay Patel?

  Can I just read this paragraph from Jen's post? And I, if we, we haven't had Jen on the show yet. Jen two is our new smart home reviewer. The thing that Dieter just described, where you're like,

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  Empower, empower.

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  Where you're like, huh, that smart home thing sounds dumb. And then you talk to Jen and you're like, oh, that sounds pretty good. That's Jen's vibe.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? So for Jen to produce the following paragraph. Currently, you do need three apps to use your door.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  This is the most disappointing aspect of the door from a user perspective.

• 1:18:45Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, oh, boy. So it's a door, it's a door with power cables routed into it. That's what I'm getting out of this, right?

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Finish the paragraph.

• 1:18:52Nilay Patel?

  But for

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  the included Yale door lock doesn't work with Ring, although Yale makes a Z-Wave lock that does. I mean, all right, I don't know, man. But I will say, okay, a, a door with pre-built power cables in it is smart.

• 1:19:11Alex Cranz?

  Yes. So you can buy this and just rip everything out. Just put what you want in it.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  It's modularity. It's the dream of every CES gadget.

• 1:19:18Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't they just sell it without all the stuff in it?

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes, because then it would be a door.

• 1:19:27Alex Cranz?

  Just sell it at Home Depot.

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. I do, I do appreciate that it, okay, you picked the door. Well, I was going to pick the, the Black and Decker bev thing you mentioned.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  That's my next one. So every year at CES, there's a robot bartender. And for many years in a row, I would make Casey Newton get drunk with me at various CES events, trying out various robot bartenders. There's a very famous ice luge that pour a syrupy concoction down it. And I would make Casey drink that ice luge with me. So every year, there's a robot bartender. This year, Black and Decker, Power Tool Company, uh, released, uh, I don't think it's vapor. I think they're actually going to ship it because it's so simple. No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no app.

• 1:20:09Alex Cranz?

  Good.

• 1:20:09Nilay Patel?

  You put in a DRM pod of mixers.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  So the pods have barcodes on them. So you gotta buy the pods. You buy your Keurig pods. And then there's just a bunch of like stainless steel straws and you just go buy whatever hooch you want. And like, put it in there and they're regular old bottles.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  Is one of them for like seltzer? So you can?

• 1:20:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a water tank. I don't know. I don't know if they've, I don't know if seltzer is in the mix, but there's a water tank.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Okay, it's gotta be seltzer. That'd be insane if it wasn't.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  And then you like push the button for strength and then it reads the barcode on your like old fashioned pod. And then it just sucks up the, the, the bourbon and spits it in the cup with the rest of the pot. And it's mixed you a drink. And it's like, I definitely could have done that on my own.

• 1:20:56Nilay Patel?

  You know how would you say it was like, you could just squeeze the bag. It's like, couldn't I just peel open the pot?

• 1:21:03Nilay Patel?

  It's a very good, I appreciate it. Um, I've graduated to the old man level of drinking.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  Where I no longer require mixers for ice.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:21:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Just like, whatever. Time for this. I see the dull the pain I need to happen right away. But there was a time when I would have been super into this, but it's very silly and it's a very hilarious. It's from Black and Decker.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Nilay Patel?

  And also the underlying technology is from a startup that wanted to do all the wifi stuff. But I think they found in Black and Decker a partner that was like, what if we take all the smart stuff off it? And just dump the pods in the glass. Done. It's very good. Uh, the, by the way, startup is called a Bartesian.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Eli, you, you missed the best part. It does have a party mode where it has LEDs to light up the bottles.

• 1:21:52Nilay Patel?

  Yes. If you walk into somebody's party and they brought up bartenders in like party mode, you're like, oh, this is gonna be a good party. Like, there's a commitment here that I can see.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Version two of this thing is built into a Sony party speaker.

• 1:22:06Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Just mounted right on top of it.

• 1:22:08Nilay Patel?

  Look, the market for that thing is frat parties through and through.

• 1:22:12Alex Cranz?

  This too.

• 1:22:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, Alex, you got one more?

• 1:22:15Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, I don't know. Probably the breathing, the breathing power case, the PC case.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's really good.

• 1:22:21Alex Cranz?

  The cyber power PC case that looks kind of like it's breathing. And it's, I'm trying to think of how to describe it. For most angles, it looks like a normal PC case. And then the front has all these little triangles that open up to like suck air in. And they look kind of alive and alien and neat.

• 1:22:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like little, they're little flappy triangle flaps.

• 1:22:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Nilay Patel?

  And they're just kind of like doing the thing.

• 1:22:47Alex Cranz?

  They're doing their thing. Yeah, it's just like, nice. And it's, it's really going to exist. It's really shipping. And Cyber Power, you know, makes good products. This will probably be pretty good. And it may sell for like 250, I think.

• 1:23:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, these adjustments are out limited to simple open and close. Rather, opening and closing and adjusting in real time to every degree of temperature change.

• 1:23:09Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:23:10Nilay Patel?

  That's the quote. I've always wanted a PC that sounds like the departure sign at the Frankfurt Airport.

• 1:23:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's one of those big, I don't know if they still have it. It's one of the big flappy clickers, you know?

• 1:23:21Alex Cranz?

  I love the idea that like you turn on any video game and the flaps will all just open. And that's it.

• 1:23:28Nilay Patel?

  It's like, well, we've detected several degrees of temperature change. It's good. All right, Dieter.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  And there's a lot of stuff, there's the robot shelf, which is great. There's actually, we didn't get it in the shout outs, but EarGo has some new hearing aids that automatically adjust their volume based on ambient noise. And hearing aids are going to be a big product category for 2022. But you know what? We started making a joke about at the beginning of the show. I gotta go with the HP Dragonfly Chromebook. I don't even know if this is technically CES, but it just got announced. It is the Pixelbook that I have been waiting for. It has a three by two screen. You can get it at a pretty high resolution if you want to. The touchscreen, it flips all the way around in 360 mode. There's magnets on the back, so when you flip it around, it actually holds together. It's got 32 gigs of RAM. It's got 12 gen Intel processor. It has a big enough battery. It looks like it's well made.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  I have no idea what it's going to cost. I'm sure it's going to be way too much. But all of the crap that I have wanted out of a Chromebook that's like actually premium that I've been, that you haven't had since the Pixelbook 2 is this thing.

• 1:24:31Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't even say the Pixel Book 2. I would say the Chromebook Pixel.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Oh, so I think the Pixel Book 2, the Pixel Book managed it more. The Chromebook Pixel was great. This, the Pixel Book did okay, but this thing, this Dragonfly man, huh, it's everything. It's like, oh yeah, like stop compromising and making a Chromebook that's like, oh God, 16 by 9. Oh God, it's not powerful enough. Oh God. It doesn't make sense to spend a thousand bucks on a Chromebook for anybody. I mean, the answer is no, I'm sorry. But if, if, if you like Chrome OS and you have a thousand dollars to spend on a Chromebook, this is finally the Chromebook that should have existed for the past two years. It finally exists.

• 1:25:11Nilay Patel?

  The Chromebook Pixel occupies a special place in my heart because I bought one for my mom, which is an insane thing. Like I wandered around the streets of New York City, like asking strangers, like, I'm going to buy my mom a thousand dollar Chromebook. And they'd all be like, who are you?

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  And she uses this today and she loves it because she doesn't have to think about it. It just does web stuff and then she closes it and goes away. And I'm going to upgrade her to this Dragonfly.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Oh, it has a fingerprint sensor too. Yes. And a privacy screen, just like.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  It has a webcam cover. Like, it's just a very.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  It has a, it has a mute button for the microphone on the keyboard. So you can just hit it and the mic is off.

• 1:25:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  It's like, again, I, I only love this because I've been waiting for, like Samsung promised like that they were going to make one, like that. We thought that was it. It was going to be the next high-end Chromebook, wasn't it? We had like, nothing great for like the perfect Chromebook last year. And so now we've got it. And I, I will probably buy it.

• 1:26:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm definitely going to buy it. I'm going to end by saying PlayStation VR 2 confirming the name is no. I think my last one is this Motorola MA1 dongle for wireless Android.

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:26:17Nilay Patel?

  Cause there's a huge market of wackadoo wireless carplay adapters.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  They're very wackadoo for carplay.

• 1:26:23Nilay Patel?

  And they're not great, but there's a lot of them.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Nilay Patel?

  And many of them are actually the same, like Chinese sourced guts, just in different cases by different flyby head startups, whatever. Not so many Android Auto ones. There's one that's like an Indiegogo one.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a handful. Like it's not, it's not like unheard of, but we haven't had one from a trusted brand like Motorola. Oh wait.

• 1:26:46Nilay Patel?

  It's, whoops.

• 1:26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so this is like a Motorola brand licensing deal from what's the name of this company? Oh, SGW Global.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Nilay Patel?

  Which describes itself as a Motorola strategic brand partner. Yeah, that's how that's how I describe that relationship.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  I need a module that does both CarPlay and Android Auto because we're a cross-platform family.

• 1:27:09Alex Cranz?

  But you so you have to.

• 1:27:10Nilay Patel?

  You need is a new head unit because that's all that's the only way.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:27:13Alex Cranz?

  You have to plug your your phone into it then?

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Nilay Patel?

  Which is no, you plug the dongle into the your car.

• 1:27:19Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:20Nilay Patel?

  And the dongle is the wireless huh?

• 1:27:23Alex Cranz?

  Do you have to plug your phone into anything?

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  No, no, this is the whole point like new cars have wireless charging pads and wireless CarPlay and Android Auto.

• 1:27:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Nilay Patel?

  So like the dream is you get in the car, you're like fling the phone onto the wireless pad. It starts charging and then CarPlay lights up and you're like into gear and you're off.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but so actually, the most important thing about this is how quickly does it boot up and get the Wi-Fi going and get the connection going? Because like, it could take a minute.

• 1:27:50Nilay Patel?

  And the wireless CarPlay ones are notoriously bad and they introduce like, so we'll see. I'm just saying on the CarPlay side, it's been messy. On the Android side, it's been not so many like ones to buy. We'll see, I think ultimately, this isn't going to happen until the car is directly supported. But it's my last CES gadget like, that's fun. All right, anything else we missed? I mean, obviously it's CS, there's a ton of stuff. There's the new Zephyr Pro mask, which has a voice amp in it and probably still isn't good at actually filtering anything.

• 1:28:20Alex Cranz?

  Makes it still makes you look terrifying when you wear it.

• 1:28:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's yet more door locks. By the way, the door lock and camera doorbell situation in CS is out of control.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:28:31Nilay Patel?

  Like the tech companies have realized that entering a home can be made more complicated. And they are in it. The the Matter stuff, like there's a lot of Matter-ish action at CS. There's a lot of smart home.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  Matter promises Matter hasn't launched yet.

• 1:28:47Nilay Patel?

  That's true. There's a lot of Matter promises. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff in CS. It's good. There's a giant LG OLED gaming throne.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is also vertical, which is my favorite work from home gadget.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  There's a new anchor charger that is very, very small and you can plug two or three things into it. I'm pretty excited to have another tiny GAN charger because I never stopped buying them apparently.

• 1:29:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's yes, there's all kinds of stuff. It's all on the site. There's vaporware cars for days.

• 1:29:15Alex Cranz?

  Weeks.

• 1:29:15Nilay Patel?

  At this point, if you can draw a car.

• 1:29:19Nilay Patel?

  You can probably get someone to give you a hundred dollar deposit for it. It's all good. All right, we're gonna wrap it up. We had Pete Buttigieg on Decoder. We've got Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Aman on Decoder next Tuesday, so it's been pretty good. We'll have more from CS on the site. I'm sure the news is gonna lead into next week. When we're back, the Vergecast, 2022, the Vergecast is back. You can tweet at us. I'm Matt Reckless, Deidre's at Backlawn, Alex is Alex H. Krantz. It's a podcast. I gotta leave you with a podcast note. Ashley Carmen wrote a great piece today about programmatic podcast advertising and how it's going real sideways. Go check that out. It's part of Hot Pod, our new newsletter about podcasts that Ashley runs. Very good. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  Wear a mask.

• 1:30:24Speaker 06

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