Daydream, Playstation Pro, Snapchat, and Instagram

Here we are, a few days after the election. With the world still adjusting to the future, we thought we’d give you a break from it all and briefly talk about what we know best: the future of technology. This week we have reviews for the Playstation 4 Pro and Google Daydream, the continuing saga of adapting to a plug drought, and Snapchat’s new Spectacles that were released to the public this week. So sit back, relax, (unless you are driving... if you’re driving and listening to this please focus on the road), and let us fill you in with the Verge updates you may have missed this week. 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?

  Yeah, everyone ready?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 0:02Speaker 02

  I'm all the way up.

• 0:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:04Speaker 02

  That how this all goes?

• 0:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:06Speaker 02

  I'm all the way up.

• 0:12Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. A site about technology and culture and science and emotions, a top shelf liquor brand called Scissor Vodka.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Is it top shelf?

• 0:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  But.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know.

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  It feels like feels kind of well to me.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Behind like the lockbox thing, or just you just had to reach up really high. You have to be.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just a premium spirit. It's it's.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  See, I don't know.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Lockbox thing is like too much. Like I'm not.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a vodka for the people.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  It should be like premium.

• 0:43Nilay Patel?

  Expensive and for everybody.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, premium, premium, everybody.

• 0:47Nilay Patel?

  Cut through the night.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Cut through the night implies some sort of ease of use and accessibility.

• 0:51Nilay Patel?

  No, it implies like you're dressed up, you're feeling good, you're at the club, cutting through the night.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  You get through, you get you get around the line, you don't wait two minutes for an Uber, not 15.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Hmm. You know how I know that I'm old?

• 1:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  You said clurb and it made me think of Coach Z from Home Star. Unable to say words that end in OB and they always end in RB, job.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Home Star Runner was amazing. The was it the Brothers Chaps, Chapman Brothers?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I saw them live at South by Southwest.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  So this is just a throwback episode. Anyway, look, here is the situation. I'm Neel Patel, Paul Miller's here.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Hello, hello.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  This is just a throwback three person Vergecast episode. I'm writing for it. It's a return.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  You might say we're making it great again.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  You might, but you wouldn't.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, here is the situation. It's obviously the week of the election. There is President-elect Trump is a real thing. If you were interested in talking tech and politics, Walt and I did a whole hour talking about the policy proposals of President-elect Trump, how they might affect the companies he's talked about. You should go listen to Control Alt and Fleet because it was a fun episode and Walt is very smart. He was a DC security reporter for a long time before he became a tech columnist. It's a great episode. He's he has a lot to say. All of it's brilliant. All of us are just kind of exhausted. By the election, by politics. So we're gonna do, in full disclosure, there's a lot to say. And I think for the next four years, we're gonna talk about politics a lot because there's

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  a lot coming down the line. In full disclosure, I voted for Clinton. Dieter, I believe you did too. No, wait, both of you. I'm gonna jacuse.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Damn it.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  Jacuse. Dieter did not vote because he moved recently.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  And I didn't get registered in time and I didn't get my absentee ballot in time.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Jacuse.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  It's a first time since I was 18 and I feel just absolutely awful about it.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then Paul jacuse.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  Was a Trump supporter.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  But you also chose not to vote because you live in New York State.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  And I'm lazy and I didn't, I did, I moved recently too, kind of.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You moved to like a higher spiritual existence.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  I did it, right.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  You like went up a plane. Anyway, jacuse, both of you.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  You are the 46% of Americans who led us to wherever we are now.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  It's our fault.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  But I just want everybody to know that there's, trust me, there's plenty for us to discuss. And I assure you that for the next four years, if you've been listening to the show for any period of time, you know that I'm not shy about politics, you know, Paul isn't, you know, Dieter, like, there is so much to talk about. And if you want to hear it right now, I encourage you to go listen to me and Walt talking about it because I just did that for an hour with him yesterday. But there's also some tech news this week. Just personally, I could use a break. I think all of us could just use a break. So we're just gonna be politics free for this episode and talk about some tech news.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, late night, watching the election returns, I was laying out my PlayStation 4 Pro review to publish on the website.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  There you go. And it did really well. I have to say, that was surprising. People really wanted to read that PlayStation Pro review yesterday. So let's get into it. You reviewed the PlayStation Pro.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, I, it's weird because it's so hard to say what's true 4K and like, basically, you could get a super powerful PC right now and you could take any game that is modern and render it at a relatively high frame rate in 4K and it would look great. But on A home console, you're typically, if you get the Xbox One S, they have like game upscaling, or a lot of TVs do upscaling from 1080p to 4K. And then there's kind of a new middle way, which is the PlayStation 4 Pro, which has more than twice as powerful as the regular PS4 and takes games that run at 1080p on the PS4

• 4:45Speaker 02

  and outputs them at 4K really well.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  With some cheats depending on basically how modern the game is. If it's a pretty old game, it's easier for it to put it out just true 4K. If it's a newer game like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, they do this thing called checkerboard rendering, which you could kind of see where like they kind of, I don't know how it works, but it makes the game look super sharp and it uses all the pixels of a 4K TV. And if you have a 4K TV, like a lot of times you're, the user interface of your 4K TV is not even in 4K. It's so rare to find like really sharp, perfectly sharp content. And I felt like I got a lot of that when I played around with, with the few games that are available for the PS4 Pro.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's the other thing is the developers have to update their games.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And not every game's gonna get updated and maybe your favorite game won't get updated. And so maybe it's not worth it to you.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  What were the best games that you played?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Uh, I think Call of Duty looks great.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Um, I played Last of Us in 4K HDR and it was just wonderful. It's like, um, you can obviously see these old graphics, but they're so sharp. I will say I was really excited for VR being way better. It was not way better.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's like probably the most disappointing thing to me is that I was expecting it to mean VR would be way better. Uh, but I don't know, I bought one. Uh, I've never owned a PlayStation in my entire life. And so I'm actually like kind of ridiculously excited to like, go through a bunch of PS3 games, uh, and download and play them that I never got to play.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  You got Crash Bandicoot.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  You got Spyro the dragon.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was like a huge PS2 nerd and then I made when the Xbox 360 was HD first, you know? And so I made like the platform shift and it was more of a computer and I've just been in the Xbox.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Well, Xbox Live for a long time.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was a big deal.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Network play for PS4, PlayStation.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  I did eventually buy a P. It doesn't matter. I've just been in the Xbox world and the Xbox One for me just has never done it. It's too much of a computer for whatever reason and the TV stuff was a nightmare. They just, they just canceled a bunch of Xbox TV accessories. You see that? So like I'm, this is it. Like I don't have a 4K TV. I suddenly want one and I suddenly want a PS Pro or PS4 Pro and I know that the VR stuff is not better because of the Pro, but I kind of want that too. I kind of just want to spend a bunch of money in my living.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  It's slightly better. It's just not drastically better.

• 7:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  How much heat does it kick out? Cause I want to put this thing in my cabinet and seal it up, hide it away. Cause it's not pretty.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I think it's pretty hot.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  I don't think that's the best idea. I'm sure it will be fine and obviously this is a home console and they make it tolerant of those sorts of. But basically Sony has up the clock speed. Sony kind of, in addition to like doubling the size of the GPU, but it's still kind of the same architecture. They kind of overclock this, the, the CPU and overclock the RAM, kind of. So it's, it's just, it's a hotter console, but I, you know, maybe you'll live, maybe you'll die.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  There was no like warning on the box. Please don't put this in a small space, but I just feel like it's relatively hot for a console.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I can, I can open the doors when I want to play it. That's, that's not the, the end of the world for me.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, my racket's pretty hot, but I feel like my Xbox is pretty hot. Does it get hotter than Xbox?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  I think so because, well, it's also kind of, you're talking about Xbox One.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  The Xbox One is so large.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a massive.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  There's kind of room for that heat to move around. This has a very concentrated heat, right? In blowing out the back and the surface of the top back of the console is very hot.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say it's hotter than Xbox One.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  I watched the election on my friend's LG OLED TV. And like, you know, I was sad, but I was also like dazzled by how beautiful the TV was. Now I really want a new 4K OLED.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  See, an OLED and then you get HDR.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  You're watching like HDR YouTube stuff or play, play The Last of Us.

• 8:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, YouTube supports 4K HDR now.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  This is the moment.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  I am finally happy. I am finally happy with my Vizio P65, by the way.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  You're unhappy.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  It was bad for a while, but I'm happy. I was unhappy for a while because the controller app on Android was garbage, but they've updated a bunch of stuff and it seems to hang on to Wi-Fi better now.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I will say, and this isn't in the review because this did not happen to me while I was reviewing the console. So if you plug the console into the wrong plug on the 4K Vizio that we have to review stuff at the office, it said, and then you boot up Last of Us, it's like, hey, this is, this doesn't support 4K HDR.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So we're going to play this at 2K HDR.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because the Vizio's have like a dedicated gaming HDMI port.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  They've got a better plug for it. And then you also have to go into the settings, which is inside of an app on Vizio and to turn on HDR. So I did that and it worked fine the whole time I was reviewing it. Today, I had it plugged into the correct HDMI port, opened up Last of Us, and I got snow on my TV.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Whoa. It basically kind of crashed the PS4. It started spinning up the fan, getting hotter and hotter, and I just had to like turn it off, turn it back on. Then it worked. And then I like exited Last of Us and then I opened Last of Us and it snow again. So I don't know what's going on with that.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  You know what's great is digital connections.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Really, we should move everything, even commonly used, even commonly used audio signals. Handshaked digital connections.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Having ports that are shaped the exact same way work differently. Having to be able to plug different things into the same plug shape. That's the best.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  HDMI ports on my TV that say best, but then there's another HDMI port that has kind of a green.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  That's the HDR one.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  I know, there's best and then there's the green circle. Yeah. Well, also this Vizio TV, I know I'm not reviewing this 4K Vizio TV.

• 10:53Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  It's one of those ones that comes with like the large fablet.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is their whole thing. This is, Dieter has the same thing, right?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. It needs to update, so I need like a Google account.

• 11:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  To sign in to update the remote software.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  But that's like a problem we have here because we share it with 100 people. If you bought it, you would just sign in.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  I guess I'd be fine with signing in to my Google account. It still seems weird.

• 11:16Nilay Patel?

  So would you, would you tell me to, this is a moment that I should go all in on the 4K life?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Especially if you're at all considering getting a PS4.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  You, for $299, you could get a Slim.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Congratulations, you got a small console.

• 11:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  For $100 more, you can get something that is literally more than twice as powerful as the Slim. And for certain games, they'll look way better, especially once you have a 4K TV. They'll also look better on 1080p, the some, some games. So that just seems like the thing to do. It's $100 more. I, when they, Sony first announced this, I did not think it was, I thought it was gonna be like a $500 console.

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  So I, I just think it's a really good value. If you already have a PS4, I think it's harder to decide, ah, do I upgrade? Do I wait for Scorpio? Do I put this money into like a gaming PC or something like that? But if you don't have a PS4, it seems like an obvious choice to me.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  Would you do this for a gaming PC? This was kind of the conceit of your review.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mentioned in that, like for $400, you can get a really great graphics card.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  I, Paul Miller, recently built a gaming PC.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  And I'm kind of, I realize my favorite game in the world is Overwatch. It's all I care to play. And it's better on PC, it's built for PC and the mouse and keyboard. And so I'm just, I'm becoming a PC gaming person. I also think VR is, is, is just so much better on PC. I know that the PlayStation VR is, is in some ways simpler and it might get some more interesting content or better branded content. And it's very comfortable headset. But the graphics on the Vive and Oculus are so much better than PlayStation, in my opinion, and that's really important to me.

• 12:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a kind of a VR moment, too. I was hoping that we could have Addie on to talk about Daydream VR, because she reviewed it this week. Unfortunately, she's a little sick, so she couldn't make it. But her read on that was, you know, there's two directions it's going in, and Google is getting, the Daydream is a better expression of the mobile-first VR experience. She really likes the headset.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  She thinks it's really comfortable. And then there's obviously like this high-power thing happening on the PC side. And the Oculus today just lowered its requirements for PCs, right?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and Daydream comes with a controller that is not as like accurate, obviously, as like the Vive controller or the new, the upcoming Oculus Touch controllers. But the Oculus Rift, right now, for the PC, ships with an Xbox controller.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  That's like no hand motion. So I think that's pretty cool that the Daydream has some sort of motion tracking.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, how, you know, I still haven't put, moved my SIM from my iPhone 6S to a Pixel.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  True.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  But I think about it every day. I want you to know. I can't order one yet. I'm gonna try to buy a Pixel.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Well, okay. I mean, it is the Vergecast. You really should. So I guess I'll talk about Daydream for a second, although, again, I should disclose that my wife works for Oculus.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  Jacques Uz!

• 14:05Speaker 01

  I've used one for, I've used it for about 10 minutes, and that, that remote is actually, I think, Addie says there's a little bit of drift. I think that's probably true. But they were really smart about, like, giving rules to game designers about what you should and shouldn't try and do with a thing. So, maybe I talked about it in the Vergecast, but like, in the Harry Potter game, it just sort of assumes that like, the thing is always like tethered to your arm, and so you can't swing it around wildly in every single direction, but it just sort of, it's like, you've got it on like a pivot. Like, imagine your elbow never moves, and then the thing moves around. And when you limit it in that way, it actually is like, pretty accurate, and also feels way more immersive than you would expect it

• 14:48Speaker 01

  to, because like, even that little bit of movement is enough. And the fact that you can use it to just point at things instead of the gear's ridiculous, you know,

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  temple-mounted. D-pad.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  Tapping the side of your head.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  It's just great.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  But the big deal with VR is, or what Daydream is, is do they have the content? And the answer seems to be eh, most, eh, little, eh, nobody knows. Although they do have YouTube.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  They have YouTube. So I was talking, so Ben Popper wrote a piece about YouTube VR. And he, I was just talking about it and his read on it was it's the future and it's great. And it's all this streaming VR and it's awesome. And then it clicks over and it's like a giant buffering wheel. And then it like plays an ad and it's like Clockwork Orange because you can't look away from the advertising. You're just like trapped in the world with this ad. And he's like, that part needs to be worked out. But I think the YouTube VR stuff is really, I mean, that is the reason that I would want to get. I mean, I, you know, I can get a Pixel, but I am so ready to switch to the primary thing and have the Pixel be my primary phone and have the iPhone be the secondary phone. And I just, I don't know why, just can't move that SIM card.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  And it's all because of iMessage.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Although Dieter and I have started using WhatsApp.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Hey, Dieter the other day was like, don't iMessage me, it's gonna mess everything up or something.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Or don't try to.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  It'll, something will explode.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  You didn't want to do a FaceTime call.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, Paul wanted a FaceTime and I told him absolutely not. I refuse to sign into FaceTime because once I do, then all of a sudden I stop getting text messages.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  This reminds me, I, I still sometimes, my parents will accidentally text me on my Google Voice number that I signed up for like five or six years ago.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  And then it like adequately transition away from.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  Becky hit me on Hangouts today. My Becky hit me on Hangouts today and it just like, my whole world came to a halt because I was like, what is this? What is this stone tablet that has appeared in the corner of my screen?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Did it like do a push notification?

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  No, I got nothing. I like looked at my personal email just like randomly. And I was like, oh, I'm ignoring my wife. Hello? She's like, where have you been? I was like, what are you using? I don't know, man. Google and messaging.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  Figure it out, man.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, enjoy the Pixel life.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, so WhatsApp, I was all excited about it because I was like, oh, they have a native desktop app.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  But it's a lie. It's such a weird thing. So you log into the native desktop app, but it doesn't sync to the cloud. It syncs to your phone and only one device can sync to your phone at a time.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  So you open your laptop and you click into WhatsApp and it's like, hang on a second and it finds your phone. And then it asks, like, you're using it on another computer. Do you want to use it on this computer?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's how they enable and and it goes through your phone so that they can, they have easier end to end encryption. It's really hard to end and encrypt stuff across multiple devices.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  Apple's doing it.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  So who else? Exactly.

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the Pixel XL is still out of stock.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  By the way, I made a joke about it's going to be RCS. I want to be very, very clear. That was a joke. Uh, Rich Communication Services Next Generation SMS is a dumpster fire.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  We didn't, I didn't put this in our story about Sprint supporting Google's version of it because I, but I should have. Basically, the RCS that you can get on AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, you know, it's like the replacement for MMS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Are like basically incompatible with each other.

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  So they, it's, it's just, it's just a huge flaming pile of incompatible crap.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Wasn't that an SMS, like, early SMS didn't work?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  It was an early SMS problem and it was a, it was a persistent MMS problem.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I was, uh, you know, like a lot of gadget nerds, I was a Sprint fanboy back in the day. Um, I'm talking like Trio 650, Trio 700 days here.

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they had all the HTC stuff and then all the Palm stuff.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, man, like, you just, like, could not send pictures to people. Just didn't work.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Hey, remember?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Except for other, expect other Sprint people, you could.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  If you, here's, if you are a Vergecast listener and you're on Sprint, I want you to tweet at us and tell us why you're still on Sprint. I just wanna know.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  You know, I wanna, I wanna meet a Boost Mobile user. We just got a new-

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  There's tons of them.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Like a Boost Mobile on the corner, like, like, right next to my favorite restaurant in my neighborhood. And I was like, man, they're Boost Mobile. I live, I live-

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  They're cheap.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Pretty blessed life. I've got my T-Mobile store is literally next to my train stop.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  So you just go in there all the time and like hug a standee of John Lesher?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  Why is that blessed your life?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Do you think that teenagers go hang out at like mobile phone stores the way that I used to hang out at Radio Shack? I got so excited earlier this week because they announced some of the casting for the next season of Stranger Things. And it's Paul Reiser is playing the bad guy. Perfect. Perfect.

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  I think I'm mad about you when I think of Paul Reiser. Why is that perfect?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Uh, Alien?

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Okay, sure.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Alien? Yeah, I mean, come on. Sean Astin is playing like the kindly Radio Shack manager. And so these kids are gonna go like hang out at Radio Shack. That is totally what I did when I was a kid. I went and hung on a Radio Shack.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  Did you just look at connectors?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  That's what I did at Radio Shack. You could like, you could like solder shit at Radio Shack back in the day. You could just go and if you were friends with the manager, you'd be like, I wanna build this little radio kit. And you'd be like, sure, there's nothing going on. Go sit in the corner and like make some stuff. And so I would just like buy the stuff that I wanted and like sit there and hang out with the Radio Shack guy.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  I think what we've learned is that the need for a children's museum in Minnesota is very hot.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  I would hang out the Best Buy at the phone, place where they sold phones at Best Buy and try to upsell people.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Just like solo, like rogue upsell?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Telling them that they needed Bluetooth because I was convinced Bluetooth was gonna be the wave of the future.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  And it still is.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  It's gonna, what's going on with your phone? Have you switched to Bluetooth headphones yet?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by MasterClass. Aaron Sorkin, who you've heard me talk about on this show in regards to MasterClass, hope you recall Aaron Sorkin teaching a MasterClass on screenwriting. Aaron Sorkin's MasterClass contains 35 lessons, over six hours of video and interactive assignments. The course helps students learn about the craft of screenwriting and write their own screenplays. Aaron covers his rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell, which is the important part, because you need that money. Aaron analyzes scenes from The West Wing. He leads a group of students in rewriting the opening of episode 501 of The West Wing, the best episode of The West Wing. When you purchase a MasterClass, you own it. You get lifetime access to all the course content, plus access to community events and student groups where you can collaborate and share your ideas with classmates.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  The classes are on-demand, so you can take them whenever you want at your own pace, and you can re-watch as many times as you like on any device for free, assuming you plug it into the correct Black Diamond HDMI port. No, it's not true. You just watch it anywhere you want, free. You don't need no special plugs. Anyway, for an exclusive clip of Aaron Sorkin discussing how he writes dialogue, go to masterclass.com/theverge. That's masterclass.com/theverge.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  So we're back. Dieter's back. I'm back.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Paul's back. Hey. The advertising is over. We did it. We made it through. So Dieter was just complaining about, well, we had the ad break, which you didn't experience because I was reading the ad to you, but I was in a different temporal zone. Does that make any sense? I was in two places at once. That's the power of advertising. Think about it. Anyway, Dieter was just complaining about his MacBook. I was trying to remember the plot of Primer. Oh, yeah. And I got really confused, and then I gave up. So this is a thing that's happening right now. The MacBook is a MacBook Pro. Vlad wrote a piece this week, which alternately correctly synthesized and channeled what a lot of Mac people are feeling about the Pro, and irritated a whole bunch of other people, which is, I think, peak Vlad, right? Saying things that everyone thinks that are very polarizing. Peak Vlad editorial.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  So the MacBook Pro is just a really difficult product to get your head around. It's the same thing I feel about the iPhone. I really like a bunch of new stuff about the iPhone 7. I just don't want to give up the convenience. I'm on planes a lot. I don't want to carry.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the difference between the iPhone 7 and the MacBook Pro is the iPhone 7 has a more powerful processor.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh!

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  So MacBook Pro is causing a lot of consternation out there.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  I think it's really interesting because I was just so fine with the iPhone 7 upgrade. I was like, I'm willing to make these sacrifices.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I want a new phone, looks fast, great camera, whatevs, I've been fine with it. And then all of a sudden, the MacBook Pro comes along, it's like, oh, too many compromises for me. I guess.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  I've never seen anything like it. And, you know, we're still waiting on to review the Touch Bar 1. That will happen very soon, but I have not seen as many people just, just talk about how disappointed they are with the computer. Apple says they're selling them like crazy.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  So it's

• 23:46Speaker 01

  I believe them.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  I totally believe them. People desperately need new MacBooks. It's been a long time. So I'm sure people are just buying them. But I know our, one of our video directors yesterday told me that this feels to her like the upgrade from Final Cut 7 to Final Cut Pro.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Woah.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Everyone in the world use Final Cut 7 and they put out Final Cut Pro 10.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  And everyone in the world stopped because they changed things and made it more inconvenient.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, that was just her metaphor.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  I mean, here's, here's like my overall take on the MacBook Pro. The, a Pro machine from Apple has historically meant like, the masses can still go get it. They go get the basic spec model. It is more powerful than they need. It is beautiful and light and fast and great. And these new machines match that to a T. But the Pro machine has also historically meant that if you are a quote unquote edge case, if you are a superpower user, there is a way for you to spec the thing out, go bonkers and make it a beast. And the combination of like, the, I don't know, the corner that Apple is stuck in

• 24:55Speaker 01

  with regard to what Intel processors, processors are available to them that they trust.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Add that to the, you know, the hassle of dongles and USB C. And that's not even getting into like the problems with USB C as a spec, uh, which we could get into if you wanted to.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  I kinda do.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  But the combination of those two things, uh, is like, it just leads to like, this fundamental feeling that like, the people at those edge cases who used to be served by Apple do not know if they are currently or ever going to be served by Apple. And it's like, cause some stress. And there's been so much pent up desire for new MacBooks for so many, literally years, uh, that

• 25:33Speaker 01

  If the ones that came out like don't perfectly match what it is you need, uh, you're like, well, what, what do I do now? I, I, I don't know.

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And, and then Apple not talking about the rest of the Mac lineup at all, which is equally aging. So I think a lot of people nervous in the context for this is Dan just reviewed the Surface Book, the newest one. And it's like kitted out to the hill, right? It's like the most powerful laptop you can buy. And Apple's thinking that. Well, it's not like, it's not like a, like a gaming laptop, right?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  In it's, in its, in its zone, it's the most powerful thing of its kind that you can buy.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's unapologetically just like, he called it a brute and it really is like brutish. It like after, especially after using a MacBook Pro, like picking it up at the deck is a little bit thicker. Uh, it just, it feels just huge. It just feels like, you know, when you're playing a video game and like you'd love, get to the next level and you're really not ready for it yet. And then there's a big, huge monster and it just destroys you. That's what that laptop is to me.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  It's you, what? You skipped ahead a little bit. You need to go back and grind it out.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I get it. Uh, yeah, I just, I've never, I've been talking to a lot of people. I have never heard so many people just be like, I'm not upgrading. Or a very common refrain, which I think is fascinating is I'm going to go find the top end spec of the last generation. And then that'll, that'll get me out. Like I bought one in 2011 or 12. If I just buy the last one at the top spec, it'll carry me forward for another couple of years. And hopefully, I mean, there's gotta be a, like a mid-cycle KB Lake upgrade coming.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  This machine.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but Apple hardly ever updates these faster than once a year.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, they do early and late, right? So like this is late 2016. They could do a mid 17.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  So almost a year.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  If they, if they do it next year, even late next year, that's still like an admission, right? Like they don't update laptops that often. They had to update the original MacBook because it was like severely underpowered. But if, if they, if they put out KB Lakes next year, that feels like they're like, yeah, we.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, they can't get them right now. I mean, that's the big.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, they're not available in the.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  That's not their fault. And if they can do it.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Then I think that that'll bring a lot of people, that'll satiate a lot of people. But Dieter, I actually want to talk to you about the ports thing. And we talk about ports on the show an awful lot lately, don't we?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  But Dieter is deep in the USB-C spec hole.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  I've definitely hit my limit. Like if any, for me to go any further, I definitely need to like go back to Radio Shack and buy some gear. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna download the entire USB IF like spec for USB-C and like print it out in a nice book for you.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  So there's the basic, I think probably one of the basic issues that is probably confusing people is USB-C is the name of the plug. USB Type-C, just like there's Type-B.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Which is that weird square one for printers. And Type-A, which is the regular plug that you always plug in upside down.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  And then this is Type-

• 28:52Speaker 01

  No, no, yeah, you're right. And then there's the micro, there's the mini and the micro on the other, other side of the thing too. Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Um, this is Type-C, that's just the plug. Then whatever you decide to send over that plug, and people make different choices.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Like a lot of different choices. I think that's really confusing about these two.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  These are Thunderbolt 3, but even on the MacBook Pro, the different sides are different speeds of Thunderbolt 3.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  USB 3.1, you could also put USB 3.0 over Type-C, but I think that's frowned upon, I frowned upon.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Look, I judge you, it's, it's not personal, it's just I think you made the wrong choice.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  And then there's a power delivery spec that's up to, I believe-

• 29:34Speaker 01

  The power delivery spec is where things get just haywire, just crazy bad. Uh, you know, last year I had a MacBook get fried because I had a bad USB cable with a resistor that like allowed it to pull too much power. I still have that cable, Dieter gave it to me. You gotta stop using it, man. Um, Google just put out a like recommended hardware thing for devices that you use USB-C and they're like, they're like yelling at people for like using- There's like pins that, you know, deliver power to other things, but they don't all get used, just like, you know, the old Apple 30 pin connector had like 27 pins that didn't do anything. Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  So like Qualcomm, apparently with Quick Charge is like just straight up just using some of the unused pins in a way that like isn't up to spec. And you know.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Google just put out an advisory that was like, don't do.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, they put out an advisory, you know, the, the cables are just flooding in. And the only way to know if they're safe is to go find reviews of them. There's Google employee and like a, a like friend of Google. Basically using some like, you know, user group that just started like rapidly testing all of these things. On, on the election day, I went and like just dug into, deep into Google plus threads about USB C. Cause that was fun for me. And there's this whole like shaggy dog conspiracy theory about how Apple had these old USB C cables for the MacBook. And then they replaced them with a new version, but kept the same serial number, but it was higher. It was able to deliver higher, you know, amperage and the old ones were actually not good.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  And so if you're going to go buy one, make sure you buy the rectangle box, not the square box, even though they have the same serial number. And there's a voluntary recall, but it's not really a recall. You could just go and like replace your cable if you want. If it doesn't have a serial number on the cable and like just on and on and on and on. And like, Apple doesn't even fully, I think a hundred percent match. Precisely the USB spec because they had to do some weird stuff with like USB C to lightning. Like it just goes like crazy, crazy.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  So here's my counterpoint to all of this. And I actually need to, to write this story and I was going to do it this week. But there was this event that was very distracting. I'm not going to talk about what it was.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  I got a puppy. Look, it's just.

• 31:49Nilay Patel?

  Apple's changing all these ports. That's great. USB, you know, even in Dan's Surface Book review, he was like, look, it's got all these ports. I wish it had USB C. I think all of us agree that USB C is great. It's particularly great when you can charge your laptop and phone with the same plug. That's all amazing. But USB A is not going anywhere, right? I just bought a lamp for my house and it has USB plugs in the base. So it's easier to charge your phone. I replaced a power socket in my kitchen with one of those that has the two USB plugs in it. It's everywhere.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  And the, the strongest argument is that Apple ships the iPhone with a lightning to USB A.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  Plug. Right. So there's just that I had this in my mind, this argument that everyone in the world has built this infrastructure. Where the one end of the cable looks like USB A and the other end of the cable looks like a billion other things. And I just don't know that it's not even so much data transfer as it is power. We've built an alternate power economy around the USBA.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  It's the most successful power delivery standard on the planet. If you want to plug into a, you know, a standard wall plug, America uses different plugs than the UK, than, you know, Germany, you know, blah, blah, blah, all around the world. You can need to bring these crazy ass adapters that not only adapt the plug, but adapt the, the voltage, like, that's wild. But USB CA, or I'm sorry, USB, USBA, it's like, it's the same damn thing, no matter where you go, and it always works.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  At a very low voltage. I mean, remember when the iPad came out, a lot of plugs were not able to charge the iPad. In fact, you'd have to use like one specific plug on your, even on your Mac.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  To charge it.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, I made this really stupid mistake this week. I plugged in my Echo Dot, I like pulled it out of the drawer where it's been sitting and like plugged it in. And it, it's powered over micro USB. So I just grabbed any adapter I had and like plugged it in and lit up. And it just started crashing over and over again. I was like, this garbage Echo Dot on Amazon. And I was like, wait a second. And I went and I just plugged, I plugged it into a phone plug. Cause there's no, I'm used to almost every plug I have being the higher, being the higher amperage.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  And like, I just happened to grab one that wasn't. Cause I always make sure to buy those plugs at the higher amperage. So I just like swapped the plug and now the Echo Dot works. But like, that's, that's a weird, that's, that is like a corner case. Most people just use the plug.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Also, but, but now you're talking like, so you, the original spec was something like five volts? And then the iPad was like 20 volts or watts? Man, I wish I was better. But I've literally had, I sat down with an electrician and he drew me all these pictures about watts and volts.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Plumbing and the size of the pipe and all that stuff.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Still just don't get it.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  But.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  We'll help you through it.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  USB C is a lot more.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot more, and that means more things can break.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Turns out electricity is difficult.

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  No, but like the, the thing I'm saying about USB A is they got away from it on the MacBook because I think Apple looks at that. Is, is data transfer ports and as data transfer ports, they're really cool. Right? Like they are PCI Express. There's four PCI Express ports on this computer.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  But if you want to.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  That is cool. You can.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Charge anything that you've bought.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  At a gift shop in the past 10 years.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just interesting. Like the fact that you can presumably someday buy a external desktop class GPU and plug it in a MacBook and then drive a display and it's all gonna work. That is some far flung future shit. That's really cool. There's nothing wrong with, like, I love it. That whole future is great. The idea that you could get massively powerful raite arrays and they're gonna transfer as fast as the internal drives. Like when I was a kid, like the internal drive versus the external drive, you always wanted the internal drive, but now you could just like do this other thing and the computer's still really portable. That's neat. But USB A, like, you know, it's Edison versus Tesla. Edison wanted, there's like a great, it's like The Atlantic wrote this great piece about it ages ago. It was like Edison wanted AC power delivery and Tesla wanted DC power delivery and like USB is Tesla's revenge.

• 35:49Nilay Patel?

  And all that really happened was we put the transformers at the end of all the AC lines and others DC power to all these devices that we use every day. It's like, there's wild stuff here. And I, I'm, I need to like finish the thought and write this piece, but the, the, I just don't think USB A is ever going anywhere. I think it's the, it's the end of the plug for most people and most things and the other end of the plug looks like something else and that is all about power.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  But I mean, so this is the, the argument that I made in the piece I wrote over the weekend.

• 36:17Nilay Patel?

  Like there's entire McMansions that are getting built with like USB A plugs everywhere. Like you're not gonna tear down the McMansions. Although, you know, whatever.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  But, but those, those plugs in the McMansion aren't gonna quick charge your Samsung.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  And maybe they shouldn't. Samsung's blow up. Burn your mansion down. Sorry, Dina.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  I think that Apple made the right decision on the MacBook Pros not to put USB ports on it. I think it's worth the pain of the transition. I think it's worth the pain of dealing with all of these dongles. I think it's worth the pain of like dealing with bad dongles and bad USB C wires. I think the only way, the only way that amazing neat future you were talking about comes to pass is if we kind of force it a little bit.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  And what's just weird and hilarious and strange to me is to be in this position saying this thing about a port. When I have literally the exact opposite opinion when it comes to the iPhone and the 3.5 millimeter headset jack.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's so weird.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  But if Apple.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  We're like flipsees.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a, it's a strange time. It's because you, you, you carry your laptop in a bag where there's pockets to put the dongles. And the future that's getting enabled by USB C on laptops is so much more exciting than the future that is theoretically getting enabled. By forcing people into the lightning ecosystem.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  I will.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  It's so much better than the lightning ecosystem future and the wireless future that Apple's talking about.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, that's true. I will say, I'm, when I sit down at my desk at work, I plug in power and I plug in a USB hub. And to be honest, some changes at my job have kind of made me want to have an external monitor too. That would be three plugs. And then my USB plug is a hub where I have like multiple keyboards and mice. And my ethernet.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Dongle is, all sorts of stuff is plugged into that USB. So it's true.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the idea of.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  I don't think, I don't think it's the plugs that really get it for.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Thing about this, we're, we're building.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  About this last week.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  We're building a new office, right? We're going to move to a new office in January and they're, they're specing out the conference rooms now for the new office. And a really important thing in conference rooms is people got to be able to plug their laptops into the big display and the speakers and whatever. What plug should they put in there? A minute ago, it was very obvious that they should just have HDMI plugs with the HDMI to Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 2. We have those plugs all over this office.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Now they just need to buy a second set of dongles, but not everybody is moving the new laptop right away. So like, there's a bunch of people with the old laptop.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  I think they should buy everybody new laptops.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, half of you are fired and the other half of you get new laptops. That's how we run this business.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Videoblox. Videoblox is a subscription-based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to premium stock footage everyone can afford. You get great value with an unlimited download model. There's unlimited daily downloads from a library of 115,000-plus HD video clips, After Effects templates, motion backgrounds, and Cinemagraphs. Audioblox has a 130,000-strong library of music tracks, sound effects, and loops. On average, subscribers pay less than a dollar per download over the course of a year. You get the same content you get on more expensive stock sites at a cheaper price. There's a great variety of time-lapse, aerials, US/international locations, slow motion, nature shots, and more. They are continuously adding new content to the library so it stays fresh. Everything is 100% royalty-free, even if your subscription comes to an end, and it's

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  royalty-free for both personal and commercial projects without additional licensing or fees. So Videoblox is offering Vergecast listeners a year subscription to both Videoblox and Audioblox for just $149. That is a $100 discount for Vergecast listeners only. You get that yearly subscription today for only $149 at videoblox.com/vergecast2016. That is videoblox.com/...and it's all one word, vergecast2016 for that exclusive offer. Paul, let's start with Paul.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  You every week.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Hi, Paul. Every week I do a segment. It's called "Plugs for Pros."

• 40:22Speaker 02

  And I feel a little silly doing it this week, even though I do it every week, but I feel because we talked so much about plugs just now.

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Typically like to highlight some sort of dock or hub that we featured on Circuit Breaker this week. And this week it's OWC's USB-C dock. It's called the Thunderbolt 3 dock.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  So confusing.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Five USB 3.1 ports, two of which can charge devices. An SD card reader, analog audio, optical audio, FireWire 800, mini-display port, two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, which like one of them you probably need to plug into your laptop and you can charge your laptop. It's got AC power supply. It's got Ethernet.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  It's anything.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  It's also $279. And so, Neelai, when you buy me my new MacBook Pro that I need to be productive.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  I'll just fire one quarter of somebody else.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Right, right, right. We're on a dock.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, buy a dock.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Thanks. It's a lot.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying budgets are simple. It's either you or new laptops and docs for everyone and we've chosen new laptops and docs.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  That's um.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  My god, Siri just turned on and started yelling at me.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Laptops and docs?

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  She knows. She knows.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  That sounded, that sounded nothing like, "Hey Siri."

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  No, nothing, not a word.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Wow. Wow. Alright, cool.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so let's talk about Instagram and Snapchat for just one minute.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so Snapchat, which is actually called Snap Inc. now, which I think is a terrible decision. Everyone in the world knows what Snap it, Snapchat is.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  And I was, you know, that we have like the, the bad screens in our elevators at work to like, show some syndicated headlines from god knows where. And I was like in the elevator and it was, "Snap to sell spectacles in vending machines." I was like, "No one knows." They literally took all of their brand equity and threw it away to be called Snap.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  No, it's fine.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. I think it's bad. Anyway, they put out spectacles, are rolling out, these are the glasses with the camera.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they're in vending machines right now in one city, right?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  The vending machines look like giant minions.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  But, not vending machines.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  No?

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Vending machine.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. It's currently in Venice Beach, California, our intrepid, uh, entertainment reporter, Brian Bishop, who spent all of October going to like, real live horror experiences, uh, drove out and has been standing in line to, uh, use the vending machine for like six hours as of this recording. Uh, they're like warning him every 20 minutes that he may not get them. They were supposed to be limited to, but they let, let people buy like five. Uh, the eBay market for these things is going bonkers right now. And you know, literally, nobody's like reviewed them or knows exactly, uh, much about them.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  You need to like go hunting, which is like, I don't know, it's kind of an amazing way to release a product, right? Like Snapchat is about ephemeral messaging and this is like ephemeral retail.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, they, they made, uh, a product that is-

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  Truly scarce.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  I mean, Ellen DeGeneres got like a pre-release look at it. And that was about it. So you go to whatever spectacles.com or whatever their website is. And they show you a Google map of where you can find the vending machine. I'm guessing it's like every day there's going to be a new one or maybe in a different location. I hope it's not just one a day. That would be infuriating.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  It'd be hilarious.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  But yeah, like people are just lined up in a parking lot right now, waiting to put money into a vending machine to get a camera for your face. That's kind of like Google Glass. The video, I didn't know this before now, the video that the spectacles record, I knew it was a circle, but the way you, the way you view it depends on how you angle your phone.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  I know.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  So when you angle your phone, you're looking at a different sector of the circle, if that makes sense.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  So they're simultaneously landscape and portrait video because it's a circle. And how you angle your phone depends, it shows how you, but, but the video is so.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  You know what's gonna be great for is Snapchat's notoriously excellent battery life usage. Why don't we kick on the accelerometer and the gyroscope while we use your battery up?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  The vending machine makes R2D2 noises.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  It also looks like a minion. Like they know it, they had to know it looked exactly like a minion, right?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  Uh, anyhow, the other thing about spectacles I thought was really interesting is the battery lasts for 16 minutes.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Are you kidding me?

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  I think while recording, so you can, you can put 16 minutes, but I don't think they're assuming, I don't know.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Wait, 16 minutes of recording space or battery is 16 minutes? Should last you for a day of casual use or about 16 minutes?

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, 16 minutes that like.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Well, that's fine. Do you really have more than 16 minutes of things that are interesting in your life every day? The answer is no.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  But are you gonna wear these glasses all day long?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Anybody has ever had in a single day.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Here, but here's, here's the thing. I'm going to the skate park with my butts and I'm gonna do some cool tricks. And I'm gonna fail for about 15 and a half minutes. And then I'll finally land the cool trick. Oh, shoot, it's 16 minutes and 30 seconds, we're not recording. I mean, I know the way, I don't know. I just feel like the way you get a lot of good footage typically with any like head mounted camera is you record a lot. And then you splice out something good. But I, obviously, that's just not the model that they're going with.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyhow, so that's, that's where they're going.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  I love how Snapchat every day can find a way to make me just feel

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  Super old.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  You don't get it, Paul, you're part of the GoPro generation.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  GoPro not having a good week.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  So that's where Snapchat's going.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  At the same time, Instagram, which just basically put out a copy of Snapchat Stories, is like iterating on the story products. Now you can, you can put links if you're verified, which is mostly so branded.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Which is a revolution for Instagram. Links, they admitted that links at the web exists. Congratulations.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a real thing with Instagram. They added, you can put Boomerangs directly in the thing now. You don't have to open Boomerang as a separate app. And you can like at mention people. And so there, and they rolled it out, you know, their explore tab is, I think, way more successful than Snapchat's discover page. It's, there's a real moment here when Snapchat, Instagram, and Instagram, recall is Facebook.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  They're just head to head in this particular zone of like how you capture things and distribute them to your friends. And maybe it's just because Snapchat makes me feel old. I think Instagram's like doing a way better job.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  See, Snapchat makes me feel old. Instagram makes me feel ugly.

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  I feel like, I don't know, I'm just not super plugged into either, either thing.

• 47:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Um, so I feel a little out of my depth here.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  A thing that happened was I, you know, there's like a bunch of people I followed on Vine, like basically Vine stars. And Vine collapsed, and I'm like, follow me on Instagram. So I started following them on Instagram. And I was like, you guys act way different on Instagram than you do on Vine. It's, it's like a really weird thing. It's like, basically I was watching comedy shorts on Vine from these Vine stars.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  And they were like, produced and thought out. And Instagram was just like, raw partying. Just stray partying all the time. And I, it's, I get it. Like, they're different platforms. You tell different stories, but it's just a weird, it's a weird thing to know that one platform, which felt a certain way, incentivized one kind of thing. Instagram incentivizes a whole other kind of thing.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  But I just, I, I wonder, like, the Snapchat moment, you know, the, it appears are like, headed towards an IPO. They're gonna be the big company. A lot of people think they're like, they're gonna be the future of television, because all the kids are watching it all the time. I just wonder if their moment, if they don't iterate on the core product as fast as Instagram appears to be wanting to iterate on their, frankly, clone of the core product. Like, what's gonna happen there?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  I, I like the, the AR stuff that Snapchat just did, where, like, with the, your rear camera, it kind of turned, like, converts the world into some trippy experience. I feel like there's more that could be done. I mean, that, that could be kind of the gateway to some, like, an augmented reality that's not just siloed, but somehow a shared social augmented reality.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Like, like Snapchat could conceivably, within the next couple of years, have a, an AR party where everybody can point their phone in the same direction and see the same thing from different angles. And it's like some live concert or, you know, something like that, you know? Snapchat, I, I really like that they keep on investing in these weird filters and stuff like that. But, but yeah, maybe that's not as big as putting links in stories.

• 49:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, I don't know. I, Snapchat thinks it's a camera company. That's their conception of their product. We are a camera company. And so now they have a physical camera. I think Snapchat should buy GoPro, speaking of the GoPro generation. GoPro's failing, their drones are literally falling out of the sky.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  That's like the real danger of, like, beta culture, right? Like, we ship most things and they're half complete and they're a little buggy and we gotta wait for that software update. But the Karma drone flies in the air. And like, it should probably be done before you get it.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  That's my theory. I think it's a probably wild and somewhat stupid theory, but I think Snapchat should buy GoPro. And then, you know, do all the

• 49:54Speaker 02

  What if, what if Snapchat made a digital SLR? Or sorry, Snap Inc. No?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think the glasses are more interesting than that. I think that like they're, they're interested in trying to like, take the digital things that we use and change our like real world behavior. And we've talked about the, with the spectacles before that it's so fascinating how we seem to accept the spectacles when we rejected Google Glass, but like everything around that camera on your face is different than Google's camera on your face. From the company that makes it, how much you trust them, to the things that it does. So just like the way they look and the way you like generally feel about the company has like generated like a genuine like interest and enthusiasm for the thing

• 50:42Speaker 01

  that is wildly different than the interest that was generated for glass. And more to the point, like way less likely to have a backlash. By the way, Brian Bishop, as of this recording, like one person away from getting the spectacles.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Whoa. But like, so you don't think there's going to be like a, I don't know, spectaholes or whatever? Like, like especially because they're making, I felt like

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good. It's real good.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Like they're making it scarce and I felt like part of the Google Glass thing was that they were so expensive and rare that there was a bit of a class envy that kind of spilled over into just sort of a hatred of a type of person who would wear Google Glass. Is there going to be some sort of backlash against the type of person? Not you, Brian Bishop, we love you, but who would wait in line to buy this at a vending machine that fell from the sky?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  It doesn't actually, it just looks like it.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  I know.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Cause of the balloons.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of those people. Here's my, my theory on, on why Glass was somewhat unacceptable in Snapchat spectacles. One, Glass looked ridiculous. And all of Google's storytelling about how they'd hired all these fashion people and made, they just looked ridiculous. Snapchat, they just look like sunglasses, maybe a little thicker and people be, it's cool. Second of all, the spectacles are like explicitly designed to be a camera for Snapchat.

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is a neat idea because people love Snapchat. So it's like fashionably cool, single purpose gadget for a thing you love. Google Glass was way too ambitious, right? You're gonna talk to it, it's gonna show you maps, it's gonna... And then, most of the time, you had this huge thing on your face that did nothing. Just flat out, nothing.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  But looked like you were surveilling everybody.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  The day I spent wearing Google Glass at the Indy 500, which was an amazing day, ridiculous day. What most people asked me, I swear to God, can you see through clothes? Straight up, that's what everyone thought. Like, that's the price. Like, if you're gonna pay the price of looking like an absolute nerd in these Google Glasses, the value that you need to get for that price is like naked people all the time. Like, that was the connection people made in their heads. You can see through clothes with that thing? And it was like-

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Brian Bishop got him.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  You got him?

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:07Nilay Patel?

  Can you see through clothes with that thing? I mean, I literally walked around a racetrack. There's like race cars flying around me, and people were tapping me on the shoulder, being like, "Can you see through clothes in that thing?" And I was like, "No, that would be awful." But I can look up a map of where I am, which is the Indy 500. And like, it was just too ambitious of a product. And it couldn't deliver on all that ambition.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of problems.

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  And it looked insane.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  But the-

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  I think spectacles-

• 53:33Speaker 02

  The hatred of other people. It's one thing, like, it was inconvenient to have it on your face, but the way people treated and talked about people who, the other people who had it on their face-

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  Because the way Google talked about it, filtered, you know, Google talked about it with so much ambition, and the way they got filtered down to like, the hype beasts, was like, "This is the future of computing. We will live in an augmented reality where Google will be speaking to me at all times." And like, this is, everything should be this. And you're like tapping the side of your face, and like, there's a bad Bluetooth connection to your phone, which doesn't have service and nothing-

• 54:07Speaker 02

  But-

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  It was not a great product. I think it was that like hype level. I don't think there's any hype levels, it's just camera and glasses. Everybody understands that.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  It's literally a vending machine in a parking lot with balloons above it, a security guard.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a minion.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  It looks like a minion and you had to find out about it through surreptitious internet means.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  I feel, I feel like they're trying for a hype level. Anyways, I'm fine with it, whatever.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  But it's a different kind of hype. It's not Google hype level.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  I want to.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  Google hype level is like, this is the future.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  I hope you're right. I just don't want people to, please, people, just don't be mean to people wearing spectacles. Congratulate them, mug for a photo, then look at their story later.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  However, however it works.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, here, I'll tell the listener. You want some inside baseball and what happened in the Verchassus now?

• 54:56Speaker 02

  I think Neel I can see through my clothes.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  I was charging, my phone was about to die, so I took my Lightning to USB A and I plugged it into my laptop, which quickly drained my laptop battery and then my laptop died, thus grinding this episode to a halt. But we're back, just in time to wrap up. So I'm glad we took a break from politics on this show. Like I said, I, I'm confident many political issues are going to come lofting through the show over the course of the next four years. But I'm glad it took a break. Um, we're back next week. Hopefully by then we'll have MacBook Pro reviews. It's something that I'm, I'm eager to do and talk about in depth. I want to talk about that touch bar in depth. So all kinds of other stuff happened next week. We did a little break from the world this week. Um, there's so much other stuff to listen to.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  Like I said, if you wanted to get deep into politics, you, me and Walt and Ctrl, Alt, Delete, that's out. It's actually a really fun episode with Walt.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  There's also a lot of policy stuff going up on the website.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  There's tons of policy stuff going up on the website. I encourage everybody, I usually don't plug Ezra's show, but Ezra, Klein, Matt Iglesias and Sarah Cliff have a deep politics show called The Weeds. And they recorded an emergency podcast episode yesterday after the election and got deep into the policy specifics of what happened during the election. So check that out if you're all interested.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I'm going to throw in another one. Listen to the On The Media podcast. I know it's not a Vox, uh, Vox Media product, but they recorded an emergency episode where they yelled at each other about the future of media. It was amazing. You should check it out.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So there's like, there's a lot to listen to. I'm glad that we could provide some respite on the show, but there's lots to listen to there. Chris Plant has What's Tech, which is wonderful. On the Recode side, Lauren Good, notable Verger, Lauren Good, has Too Embarrassed to Ask. Kara Swisher has Recode Decode, and Peter Kafka has Recode Media. I'm sure Recode Media is about to get real interesting, too, as they dive into sort of this post-election season. And we'll be back next week. But real quick, I want to thank MasterClass for sponsoring today's episode. Aaron Sorkin, might have heard of him, sponsoring MasterClass episode and screenwriting. He contains 35 lessons, over six hours of video, interactive assignments, he analyzes scenes from The West Wing, he leads a group of students in rewriting the opening of episode 501. Class on demand, you can take on whatever you want, you're in pace, you can re-watch it as many times as you like on any device for life. So for an exclusive clip of Aaron discussing

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  how he writes dialogue, go to masterclass.com/theverge. Got to watch it, it's so great. Masterclass.com/theverge. That's it. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  We didn't talk about Westworld.