Microsoft Surface laptop, Samsung DeX, and Google Doc phishing

This week Microsoft unveiled its new laptops in New York City, and Verge senior editor Tom Warren flew in from London to check it out. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter invite Tom to the show to discuss the new products from Microsoft and the various other news that popped up on the site this week, including Samsung’s new docking station, Apple’s earnings, and the Google Doc you should not have clicked. Will Dieter’s AirPods last throughout the show? Listen to find out. 01:26 - Microsoft Surface Laptop event 36:16 - The Google Docs spam attacks played off Google’s most fundamental weakness 47:33 - Samsung DeX review: the closest thing we have to using our phones as PCs 1:00:04 - Paul’s weekly segment “Four Fours” (previously known as 4444) 1:06:46 - Apple’s earnings show modest growth, but iPhone sales are flat 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge.com. We only have two and one's about to be cancelled, so... Oh. The only ship of The Verge.com. Hmm. Uh, but no, it's true, while the monsters are retiring, so Control Elite's gonna get... We're gonna come up with some stuff. We need this flotilla, but for right now, you're listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge.com, a technology experience that surrounds you, holds you. Like no other. Like no other. Anyway, I'm Neil Patel, I'm here, as you may have noticed, with your ears. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Hi, I'm back. He's back. I want the listeners to know that Dieter...

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  We can see him on Skype, you can't, so the picture in your mind is Dieter wearing the bright pink Verge CES shirt. Oh, you're wearing two AirPods. For a while, I thought you were just solo AirPod. No, I got... He's got them both. It's a beautiful sight. I mean, the man just straight up looks like a Muppet, right? I don't know. That's what the... Uh, but check it out, Tom Warren is here.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  What's up, Tom?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Not a lot. I'm in town for Microsoft and I'm flying back tonight. And I'm flying back to Seattle next week.

• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  You're a maniac, why? Anyway, Tom...

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I just love being in the sky.

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  As you may know, Tom is generally in London.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  I am, yeah.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Also a state of mind.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Hence the accent.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but there's a huge Microsoft event this week, um, and so we wanted Tom on the show. Tom covered it all. We should just get right into it. There's actually a lot of things that happened this week, but Tom, there were... The Microsoft event was called, like, Microsoft EDU, right?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the education event.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  Um, your headline for the piece was Microsoft... All the news from, like, Microsoft's Chromebook event.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  It was great.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Which was just a real little jab, jab in a turn.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  It's to be, like, to make it a little bit more interesting.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  The education event, like...

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Look, there's nothing, there's nothing more interesting. What was the formal name of it?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Um, Mayivan.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. That's good.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Like master of the obvious.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Um.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, but the, the, the, just to set the stage, what's happening right now in education is Apple thought they would do iPads.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  That in, um, but Chromebooks are ascendant.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  And Microsoft, I don't know, they were gonna do something, we thought, but the event turned out to be bigger and much more interesting than just.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was more interesting than we were expecting going into it.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So what happened?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  So, well, they started off, they kicked off, obviously, education, you know, Satya Nadella came on stage, lit by a single light and sort of told his life story and stuff, which was.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Lit by a single light? Was he like doing a, like a cabaret? No, no, whenever Satya. Did he have a stool?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I was basically waiting for him to start dancing around.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Um, so I mean, I like Satya. I interviewed him last year. Um, I'm hoping we're getting him again soon. We're working on it. Um, he's very personal, very chill.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  Very smart.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  But he and Tim Cook both now do the same thing at events, which is like they open and close the events by appealing to your soul. Right? So it's like they come out of the single light and he's like, what?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  He was like, I will teach you the ways.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Of Microsoft.

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  And then, and then they're like, okay, now these nerds are gonna talk about the products. And then like the nerds do the thing. And at the very end, they're like, ah, that was the nerds. But what is the essence of belief? And it's like, dude, all these CEOs have become like, like new age shotters. Anyway.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  That's all about it.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, continue.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so you did that interesting sort of intro, I guess, um, sort of set the stage for things. And then they kind of went into it with, uh, they, they, they kind of talked about office stuff. Microsoft Teams, all that sort of stuff, like, um, whatever. Uh, so a bit of a little, little bit of a sort of dull intro, but then it kind of got into the, the main sort of part of why people were there. Um, which was the Windows 10S stuff, which essentially boiled it down, it's their Chrome OS competitor. Um, so they're expecting OEMs to create devices of this new version of Windows 10. Um, which essentially at the, the, the most fundamental level is essentially a restricted version of Windows 10 that only runs apps from the Windows Store.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  Is it cheaper? I don't understand this.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. It's a, it's not cheaper. Um.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  For the OEMs? But it's not free to OEMs?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I thought that was like half of the point at least.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is what I don't understand. So in the broad sweep of the industry, OEMs can put out Chromebooks. The Chromebooks are all cheap. They obviously run Google services. People are happy with them, but they're cheaper. And Microsoft has done a lot of things with cheap versions of Windows over the years. Windows 7 Starter was free.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they make Windows free. So Windows is free on like phones and small tablets up to I think it's 10.1 inches. So anything above that.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Anything useful sizes.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  You've got to pay Microsoft.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Anyone would actually use Windows 4 on the device, 10.1 inches and above.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's not free. OEMs still have to pay for it.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  But what I recall from the past is that Microsoft has done this before.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've done. This is like, I mean, you could call this Windows 8.1 with Bing. They've done that before. You could call it Windows RT. Like, it's, you know, they've tried to do this sort of thing before. Yeah, it's.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  But this isn't precisely the same thing as Windows RT. This is just, so far as I could tell, this is just straight up regular old Windows.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Where they optimized some login stuff and they've limited to, they've locked it down to Windows Store apps. And they took away some settings that let you customize some other things. It's basically like Windows S and the S stands for Severely limited. Suck it, right? And you have to pay 50 bucks to like make it regular Windows, but there's nothing special or lightweight or different about it other than it's locked down.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, they claim that the login times will be better.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  And like the, just booting up and stuff like that. But I don't really know if I'd buy that.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I mean, that would just be because, I mean like.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  It'd just be because there's no desktop apps running in the background.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Right, every, every, it feels like every single desktop app that I try to install.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Always has some boot.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it adds it to the toolbar and it's crazy. So maybe they, I'm guessing they have a lot of restrictions on what you can do with the Windows Store app.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  That doesn't do all that stuff.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's like when they get, when they get packaged in a special way, it's like. It's called Project Centennial is the way they do it.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  But when they get packaged in that way, I think that allows them to then, you know, analyze how much it deteriorates the battery, performance, and all that sort of stuff. So then they can be like, well, you know, you need to go back and change this to that dev. So it's just basically, I think Windows 10S exists to get more apps in the store, personally. I think that's the only reason it exists.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  So it's a cart to elicit a horse response?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  Cart, cart, cart, cart. Oh my god, a horse.

• 7:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I think the actual cart. Do carts incentivize the spirits of horses? Yeah, I got a cart, I gotta get somewhere. You're just like waiting, you're like, I don't know about this cart. Hope I get a horse.

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  To go with this metaphor, which I don't think is correct.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Why do we have to go with this metaphor?

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Because we're here, man.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell a totally sentimental story? Yesterday I had to admonish Vlad for using the sentence, "It has a lot of base sauce", in a headphones review. And he's like, "No, no, it's continuing the ongoing food metaphor." And I was like, "Wait."

• 7:52Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  It was a very strange moment. Anyway. I think the real cart is the laptop. I think that Windows 10S, fine, it's locked down, it's restricted, it's presumably for schools. So all that store stuff makes it easier to manage.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  It's where they want Windows to be, because then it's more secure, easier to manage.

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  It's more like an iPad.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  They get 30% off of every app subscription.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  But that's the iPad, like, it's a...

• 8:18Speaker 01

  They want Windows to be that way, of course, because they don't want all this cruft and all this this constant crap that they have to support for years to come.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  But, and I think this is like the crazy part. There's not a whole huge gap between an iPad Pro and the new Surface Laptop running Windows 10S.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  Right, there's like, one has a windowing system.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  But there is the aspect that.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  But the desk, but you could package, like Adobe could package a full version of Photoshop and put it in the store and it'll run on this machine.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Google could package Chrome for this.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  You don't need to rewrite.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  But Tom, when you said that Adobe could do that, could they? Because it seems like the, the thing that they're trying to do here is they, they believe that the core, you know, base of Windows, when you don't have any crap on it, is really good, fast and has an insanely long battery life. And when Neil says this is basically an iPad Pro with a windowing system, like, it's kind of right. Like, what if Adobe can't put a full version of Adobe on there?

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  Right, I'm leaving.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  But they can, anyone can package a desktop app.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  They can have.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Oh, they could just package a desktop app and throw it in there.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  Right, I mean, obviously, there's like, I say that it's an extreme statement meant to like, draw the comparison. Obviously, it's.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  It's a cart designed to entice a horse.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Is what your statement was.

• 9:41Nilay Patel?

  A crazy horse, crazy comet horse is coming for us.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  I think the way to figure it is, is at the moment, if you're on a Windows machine, and even on a Mac machine, you'll go, like, you don't necessarily always use the Mac App Store.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  I never use the Mac.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Never use the Mac App Store.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  But you'd go, you'd go and get your DMG on Mac, you'd go and get your EXE on Windows, just install it, blah, blah, blah, that's it, it's done. But that's, that's the traditional way that.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  So casual.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Just get your DMG.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Just.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  Get your EXE. It's done, baby.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  But that's, that's the way it's always been on computers, but on mobile, it's always been App Store.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I definitely think there's something about an App Store and restricting what users can do.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  That improves, it gives you a much more unified experience. I mean, like, the install experience on, even on Mac OS is a little, you know, you, there's either drag and drop, there's Mac App Store, and then there's like several types of installers that reminds you of, of Aqua and 10.0 days.

• 10:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Um, but then, um, yeah.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  I love the, I love those installers. I'm like, take me back.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  Computers are great.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  They literally give me the heebie-jeebies. It's like, I don't know what this is doing.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's ancient.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  I installed.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  But I can't wait to lick these buttons.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  I installed a version of, of the Unreal Engine on Windows. And I was installing it on it onto an M two SSD. And there was something wrong with that SSD and it conked out when I was at like ninety five percent of my install. But then I couldn't install, I couldn't reinstall onto my regular drive. Because the Windows registry was like, I know where Unreal is.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  It's already there.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  It's on this D drive. Like, but no, but the D drive. So I literally had to find and replace through the Windows registry for about an hour.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's that kind of stuff that they want to get rid of, which is, you know, there's always gonna, you're always gonna need that. Not every desktop app's ever gonna be in the store.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  There's also a huge security benefit, right? Because they can push updates out to the, I mean, this is a lot of my phones are good.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a good example is Office is it has this really terrible update system within itself like that just pops up and says, do you want to check monthly and all that? But now it's gonna be the store. It'll just be handled by the store. You won't, you'll know it's updated. It'll just do it.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  They'll find a way.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Way about it.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  They'll find a way to make me quit Chrome to update Excel. So no matter what happens.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  For fifty dollars, you can turn Windows S into real Windows.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. So forty nine bucks. So I think that upgrade does, I I'm not entirely sure, but I think it popped like if you try and run an X, it'll pop up and say, you, if you want to go to pro. So it's also another way.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  You say if you try and run an X C?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm fairly sure.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, E X C. An X C. That's what we call it. Yeah, no, I got it.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  A dot E X C. An executable file.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  It's an executable.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  A binary. So this got me wondering, what if you could pay Apple fifty dollars and then your iPad could run unsigned apps? Would you like that? Would that sound like a good deal?

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  What if, what if you could do that on both of these systems without paying fifty dollars?

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  So there's that's Windows 10s. I yeah, that part of it is interesting in the lockdown in the store.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's Windows 10.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  It's Windows 10 locked to a store.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Do you think that this is actually going to convince the education market to switch from Chrome OS to Windows? Like, are they making it easier to manage? Is it like, like, what is, why would anybody look at this Windows 10s and say, oh, yes? I'm so, I'm so glad now I can finally switch everybody off of Chromebooks onto Windows.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the only people that would think that are the ones that are already in the Microsoft ecosystem anyway. And they're in that like, because they they use in tune, stuff like that for management. But I think ultimately, schools, whether in the US or worldwide, they're budget restricted and they don't care about what system they're going to use. They just care that it works. There's a good browser or that's probably why Chrome OS has done pretty well in the US at least. So yeah, I think it's going to come down to the price of devices rather than rather than ease of management, stuff like that.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  So let's talk about the price of it, because the device that they introduced yesterday.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:54Nilay Patel?

  Was far more interesting than Windows locked to an app store.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  Surface laptop. Thousand bucks to start.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a MacBook Air.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  It just does.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  It does look a MacBook Air.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  It does. Everything looks like a MacBook. Yes, it looks like a MacBook Air that's some.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  It looks like a MacBook.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a carpeted MacBook Air, but the MacBook 12 inch MacBook looks like a MacBook Air. They are everything.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Well, the MacBook Air's got that like curvy bottom.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  No, that was the first one. The new ones are have wedges. It looks like a horse.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Still a little curve.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  That's enticing a cart. Yeah, it looks anyway. Saying come hither, cart. The only reason I say this is Apple and I again, this was just a like a throwaway tweet.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  Joke. It wasn't like a well thought out thing. And it now is like over a thousand retweets and like angry Mac versus PC flammor in my mentions. It's a MacBook Air with a retina display for a thousand, like, that's

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they

• 14:55Nilay Patel?

  Apple doesn't make that. There's nothing in, in their lineup that is that thing.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  There's the 12-inch MacBook. There's, they still sell the old MacBook Air without a retina display, which is crazy to me for a thousand dollars. And the next step up, $1,500 for the MacBook Pro with

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  No touch bar.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Cause Microsoft had before, I can't remember exactly what the Surface book goes for, but I think it's either 12.99 or 14.99. So it's, it's, it's an expensive machine.

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  But it's covered, the palm rest is covered in fabric, all Contara.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they, they had the book at 40.99 and then they had the Surface Pro at 7.99. Now they've got the 9.99 in the middle. So it is like the, the MacBook Air, you know.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  With a retina.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the right, I wouldn't say it's the right price. It could be a little bit cheaper, obviously, but.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  But that's what they have Dell for.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you're the Surface group, you're like, ah, should we make this cheaper? And they're like, Dell, Dell will do it.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  It's fine.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's plenty, I mean.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, Thanos calls Michael Dell on the phone, he's like, Michael.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, just do this.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Do, do exactly this would make it cheaper.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  We'll do an expensive machine with 4GB RAM.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  And Michael Dell's like, this is why I took over my company. Seriously, 4GB's of RAM?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  That's not great. The thousand-dollar configuration is not great.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  No, 4GB RAM.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  No USB-C.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  No USB-C.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  Everyone thinks the thing on the side is an SD card slot, but it's just a weird, wrong magnetic Surface Power Connector. Yeah, so a, a number of.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  But actually, so I, I think they got the mini display port. They should have scrapped that port USB-C.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  But I like, I kinda like that they've still got the Surface Connector.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Because USB-C, yeah, you can, if you can charge from that, that's fine. But I like the Surface Connector cause you just, you just, like, if you use the dock with it or any of the old accessories, you just stick it in and it clicks up your monitor and everything. USB-C can do that, but.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  I wonder if it's that like, I mean, USB C is still the Wild West, right? Like, it's like, I'll buy a USB C adapter and it'll just be shit. And like, things won't work or I'm worried it's going to fry my computer or whatever. Things are better, but it's not great. And I think that Apple going to it, like, if you're buying an Apple laptop, you sort of have an assumption deep in your heart that you're going to get screwed over on the price of accessories. And so you'll just buy the Apple ones. They cost a little bit more, but you know they'll, they'll work. I wonder if Microsoft looked at the USB C ecosystem and looked at its customer base and said, you know what they're going to do? They're going to go out and buy the cheapest USB C adapters they can find.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And these things are just going to get wrecked by badly wired USB C accessories. And so we can't put USB C on it because nobody is going to buy the good stuff.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think it's also USB C at the moment is like, it's a fantasy of the tech press. Like, we all love it. We think it's great, but consumers aren't, you know, they're not flocking to it because the, these devices aren't always shipping with it. And it's just, it's not, it's not perfect.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  What are you talking about? There's a ton of devices with USB C. Every single Android phone is now all, is now charged by USB C. Most like decent PCs now have USB C.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Does USB C. Well, it just doesn't matter in the broader consumer. It sounds stupid, but it's just, I don't think consumers care about USB C at the moment. Like, we're, maybe in four or five years, it might be different, but we're, we're at a point where people are still damn plugging their iPhones into Windows laptops and using iTunes, even though iCloud is a way better solution for that. But it's just, it takes, it's a long tail for that to, to, to matter. And I don't think, I think they should have done USB C, but I think. It's at the point where-

• 18:34Speaker 03

  They'll put out another one next year, it'll have USB-C.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it doesn't necessarily need-

• 18:38Speaker 03

  I think it'll take two years for them to put it on another one of these. We're still waiting on a Surface Pro 5.

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's talk about the laptop itself.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Let's talk about it, yeah.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Not its ports or lack thereof, which is apparently all we talk about now in technology. What ports does it have? What ports do we wish it had? What ports have we made up in our minds that all things should have? Uh, but Ta, you played with it, you were at the event.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  Panos Panay came out, they played a very strange video.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, with-

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  As always, he was pumped.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  And then he was like-

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Did he say he was pumped?

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  He did, he tweeted that he was pumped before.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  He tweeted he was pumped, yeah.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but then at the very end, he's like, "I'm going home to my children who I love more than you, goodbye." Which is always weird. It's like, very charming, it's like-

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And he did the whole running into the audience.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that trick. Um, yeah, no, I tried it. Um, I think it's really nice, like, it's the nicest Surface so far. Um, like, I use the book and it's a bit too top-heavy and it just doesn't feel quite right as a laptop. It's nice enough, like, it's well-built and stuff, but it's just not, you know, it's not a laptop, because it has the detaching screen stuff. Um, and the Surface Pro, like, well, you can't really use it on your lap properly, it's all a bit weirdly balanced. So this, this, this Surface Laptop is like, the laptop that we were all kinda hoping that they'd do at some point. Um, I think, so they've got the Alcantara fabric on, on the front of it. Um, and they did that on the Surface Pro 4, like, one of the, they call it the Signature Edition cover.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Um, and it feels, it feels good, but I think the concern around that is if you spill stuff on it, or if you're using this thing, like, for work every day, I'm gonna imagine you're gonna get some nastiness on it, so.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  They, they said it's warm and inviting, they-

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does actually feel weirdly warm. Like, you said that and it's like, total Margit's people.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  I gotta say-

• 20:24Speaker 01

  And you're like-

• 20:25Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a real-

• 20:26Speaker 01

  It feels warm.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  The summer's coming on, I don't have great AC in my apartment.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  And my laptop's already too hot, like, like, I, I really want, I almost want like a summer laptop.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  That is like, super low-powered.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  Cool.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  It doesn't get hot.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  I would be worried when I'd put my, my hands down on the deck and it feels warm, that, that would just be jarring, like-

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  You know how you, when you go to the bathroom and you sit down on the toilet seat and it's warm?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 20:54Nilay Patel?

  Someone was just sitting here. It doesn't feel good. That's like, that's what I'm worried about with this, the Surface's laptop.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Sweating into the cloth? You get those like sweat stains on it?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  You know what it feels like? It feels like, it feels obviously fabric, but it feels like they've kind of waxed it over the top.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, is that a wear away?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the same stuff they make like Rolls Royce interiors out of. I bet it's, it's, it's perfect for a slow cruise.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  It's gonna be great.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  For tooling around town.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  But it's, it's supposed to be that luxury thing. I think it's just they bunged it on there because they liked using it in the signature, but it's, it's differentiated, like, you know? It's something slightly different. I think that's the only reason they put it on there.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think their, their whole thing is there is a spot in the market for the thing college students buy before their first year of college. In that thing for the longest time was the MacBook Air.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  And if you have a thousand dollars, Apple thinks you should buy an iPad.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. That's the way they position it, yeah.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  I think if you have a thousand dollars and you're going back to school and you look at the MacBook Air, which is ancient.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  And then you look at the next MacBook up, which doesn't have the touch bar. So you're like, everyone will know I don't have the good one.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it's got the two weird ports.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Or, and then Apple's like, but have you thought about this iPad? You charge the pencil by sticking it in. Right? Like, there's just a whole, it's, yes, I get it. Like, some people are just gonna buy Mac because they love Macs.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Apple did a bet on the iPad for, for fulfilling that MacBook Air role.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and, and if you love macOS, so you do. But I know a bunch of college kids, like, they're gonna be like, I want the cool one. And Microsoft is like, well, here's something that's really cool for a thousand bucks.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's literally exactly who they're talking to as well. Because that's what they said, it's like.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that, like, all that fabric keyboard stuff, like, all of that is, for a thousand dollars, you get something that is very different than what everyone else will have. It's all these colors and you can be like, Straight up, you might do, check out this keyboard deck, it's neat.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  I think it was their way of like, making it different, because the Surface stuff is always quite different to what's out there. And that's their, that was their way.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, no, it feels great. Um, it's not as lightweight as some competitors like the Spectre.

• 23:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  X316, it's not as lightweight as that.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  I think-

• 23:25Speaker 01

  It's not as sleek in some respects, but.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but if the battery actually lasts fourteen and a half hours, I will take that extra weight. Cause it, it's not like it's a thick laptop, it's really swell.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, I, I think I've got to the point where that's like, anything under three pounds, like considerably under three pounds is like a, an acceptable weight now, I think. Like, we've got to that point now, it doesn't need to be super thin and like, cause then it becomes a little bit too flimsy.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  And all we've been talking about with phones is like, please make it a little bit heavier so I get more battery and like, alright, there you go. Uh, were we talking about this, like what's happening in the premium laptop world is just super interesting.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  Like HP's, I mean, it was, it was with you, Tom, it was, um, we were just chatting about it yesterday, um, there's the Spectre, there's the XPS that Dell is doing.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  Now there's the Surface Laptop. There's a bunch of really good laptops out there. And then there's like insane gaming laptops.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Which are my favorite.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yes. It's been, it's been a while, because everyone's been trying to catch up to the MacBook Air.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  And I think probably the XPS 13 was like the first one that was like, okay, this is as good, maybe better in some respects than the MacBook Air. And it was like, from that point on, everything else that came after it was like, you know.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  What's an object lesson in not sitting on your lead?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, how many times have we, like, has, some company could basically issued a d- a direct copy of the MacBook Air?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  And like, it got so-

• 24:53Speaker 01

  We just laughed at it.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  We laughed at it and then it got so common that we stopped even pointing out that it was copies of the MacBook, it was just like too tiring.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  Um, but Apple, they stayed still.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  And now they're done with the direct copies and they're starting to like level up and beyond.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They, they were probably waiting for-

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  So I'll say a couple of things, I actually don't think it's fair to say Apple stood still, I think it's fair to say that Apple made some bad bets, right? Like the MacBook is underpowered, the MacBook Pro nobody's happy with, like in my head- Wait, wait, their sales came out, they sold a bunch of MacBook Pros. Okay, that's fine, but like, that's like, they sold a bunch of MacBook Pros, people like, well, I guess I gotta get this, right?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  I'm more curious to see what it's going to look like a year from now.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  They usually are, right? Is that right? Are they about 4% or something?

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's the whole Mac line.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  But here's my question. Why now? Why did Microsoft finally make the laptop we wanted to make for the past five years now? Like, in my head, Panos Panay was sitting at Microsoft. Every year, they develop one of these things and then decide not to release it, because what the hell? And they were just waiting for the moment. And the moment was like, oh, people seem kind of frustrated with Apple laptops right now. Now's our moment.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely opportunity.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  What other thing changed to get them to release a laptop finally now?

• 26:05Speaker 02

  This seems like a full realization that tablets aren't that useful.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Like, the Surface, the Surface, the original Surface was like a proof of concept for Windows 8.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  And Windows 8 was a horrible...

• 26:24Speaker 01

  That's where they went all in on that whole tablet thing.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  And so Windows 10 was them walking back from tabletness, and now they actually sell a thing that's not a tablet.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  I'm just, I'm just remembering our review of Windows 8 in the first Surface devices in the RT. And we gave it a bad review.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  And the feedback.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Like, our lives were hell, and now it's like, Microsoft's like, it's a laptop. Here you go.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  But, you know, on the positive front, I think that speaks to Microsoft.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I think they...

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Aggressively iterating against what their customers are saying to them.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've seen an opportunity, right? Like, you could look at the IDC numbers. Even today, they put out a thing about tablets, and I think IDC mentioned in it that, I was going to put it up, I can't find it now, but they mentioned something about detachables, like detachable tablets are like the ones that are selling, and they're the ones that they see. So like, like your iPad Pros or your Surface and stuff like that, they're the ones that they see being the only successes in the tablet category, not just pure tablets. So I think they've seen that opportunity. They know that as well. Like, Microsoft has all these forecasting metrics, and they have people employed to do all that stuff. So they must have seen your gap in the market, the opportunity, that knowing that the MacBooks aren't...

• 27:41Speaker 01

  That haven't well, what, you know, wowed people. Um, and now's the right time to introduce something that's gonna and I sort of be the MacBook Air replacement, I guess.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  They also on this battery life front, I mean, they're very aggressive with Edge, like

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  It's, I do think it's kind of a dick play that they, apparently you can't change your default browser. So even if

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  In S.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  In S, yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  So even if Google, and you can't change Bing, which they're gonna change that.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  It's funny, the first search result, no matter what you search for.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  No, they're not gonna fix the Bing thing. The Bing thing is done. It's already like that with Cortana on Windows 10.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  No, but I'm saying.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  It's really difficult to get Cortana to go elsewhere.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  So you

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  But the first search result, no matter what you search for in Bing, is how to pay $50 to unlock Windows 10 Pro. It's amazing. I don't know how they've done it.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  That could, that could be like Microsoft, Microsoft's whole plant, the cart behind this cart is not $50 up sells. That's not.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  It's the whole thing. Sacha's like, I got an idea. I'm gonna wow him in Microsoft $50.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  He starts a meeting and he puts just a $50 bill in the middle of the table, like, think about it.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  I'll come back to that later on.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  And he turns it into $5,000.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I, I do think, yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  So you think that's a bad move, not, not, not the default browser, right?

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is my longstanding thing that I've brought up on this podcast multiple times.

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  In the, for years, is that Bing, putting Bing as a default, just in itself, is, is a signal to your customers that you don't actually care about them. It's like, it's a deal that cheap phone companies make to improve their bottom line. They need, they just need some more cash to be able to sell this phone for cheap. So they come to Microsoft, Microsoft gives them some money to put Bing on it. Um, and obviously Microsoft is gonna put Bing on as, as a default, but not being able to change it.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, so if you think that the default browser stuff is understandable in the context that iOS

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  and Chromebooks, they do it that way. So they've kind of set that, that standard. But I think even with that in mind, it's still an expectation when you pick up a Windows machine, that you can change that browser, that you can't, like, that's the expectation.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  There, there is something, I, I feel, you know. We joke a lot about like people who are fanatical Microsoft fan.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  And I think part of that is that they want to distance themselves by identity from a sheeple who will just do exactly what Apple tells them and use exactly the stuff that Apple gives them.

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  But the flip side of that is that there is nothing worse than using someone's Windows, like a normal person's Windows PC after like three years of them using it.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  You're like, this is the worst computing experience that anyone can have.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  And Microsoft, like, the reason the iPhone was successful, the reason Android is successful, the reason that these other platforms have been super successful is because they're locked down. You cannot, you cannot make that mistake.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  So, Microsoft, right, Windows Phone didn't compete in that world. There is this big opportunity for this other computing device that isn't your phone.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  And they're, they're coming at it by saying, what if we just lock down Windows?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Which makes, which makes sense, but the default browser has nothing to do with that.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  Why not?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Nobody's computer gets slower.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  It doesn't, it does in a way because they've, they're saying 14.5 hours battery life on this Surface Laptop.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sorry, not default browser, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think not being able to change the default search is terrible. Like, that's just, that's, yeah, you can't even.

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  You might even say it's user-hostile and stupid.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Does it have a headphone jack?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  Does it have a headphone jack?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does, yeah.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  Heyo!

• 31:35Speaker 02

  So, while we're talking about cool, cool laptops and this, this resurgence, Acer had an event, um, which I think, I guess that was, I think we didn't talk about it because last week was the Net Neutrality Special.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Um, everyone's favorite show.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Everybody's favorite show.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  One of the lowest performing episodes of the podcast you've ever had. Personally, important to me, I had a great time.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I listened to it when I was falling asleep.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  Wow. I was searching for the sweet embrace of death, so I listened to the net neutrality.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Acer put out this Predator laptop, I think it was at CES.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Oh, the giant.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  About to ship this.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  It's like 21 inch widescreen. It's got like 10. It needs two power adapters. It's got a full, literally full.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  It costs like $8,000 or something insane.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  But they, they came out with, like, this is what, where I think, like, I know, I, I think you're right that this $1,000 MacBook Air is, is a super important, probably the most important laptop category. But I'm still mad about the MacBook Pro situation and the, the MacBook Pro, like something that's the size of a 15 inch or 13 inch MacBook Pro. A lot of PC manufacturers are putting like real GPUs in them and putting like really crazy specs. And so this, this new Predator Triton 700 is like 0.74 inches thick. So just a little bit thicker than a MacBook Pro.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  It's got 10 series graphics. It's got like multiple PCIe SSDs, 15.6 inch screen. Also has, has a keyboard in the front.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Oh, and a trackpad above it.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  In the, and then, yeah, above it is a glass, like a Gorilla Glass.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Trackpad.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  It's above the deck.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Wait, this is Acer, right? Acer love doing that.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Do you remember they did that one that like you'd flip it and it looked like you could serve, you know, it was like a serving your dinner on it. And that had a trackpad at the top.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  That was a best seller. Everywhere I go, I see people serving dinner on that weird Acer laptop.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  I see it in bars. I had my beer delivered last night.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Anyways, where, where, where I'm at is I'm, I'm trying to decide if I want to put, turn my desktop PC into a Hack and Tosh, like on a second drive. Or if I just want to put Windows on my MacBook.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Cause Nvidia got the drivers out now as well.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Nvidia's got the drivers. It's like, I'm, I'm on this weird stage where Windows 10 is like increasingly good for like a lot of things, including for develop. Developers and it's always been like the thing for games.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  I feel like, I feel like there's a few things.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  There's a few things they still need to do to like get it, the utility sort of things that from on the Mac OS side and stuff. They should just have a spotlight sort of search or Alfred style search. Stuff like that they need to do, but I feel like it's, they're both apparently like you can basically do what you need to do.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  You just be like, hey Cortana, open that app I want.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  No, but you can type it Cortana. It's actually, it's not bad.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's not, it's not customizable.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  I get a few more false posit, like, like if I'm looking for Steam because I can't find it on my desktop because it's cluttered and I type in Steam, sometimes it will come up with like an A, like a website that's Steam.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes it feels like it hasn't fully indexed or something.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little, it's a little wonky.

• 34:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me read this advertising and then we're going to talk about some other stuff.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Squarespace. I bet you're surprised. Whatever next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life. Whether you need a portfolio to showcase your work, a store to sell your products and services, or a blog to share your ideas, Squarespace gives you everything you need to look like an expert right from the start. You even get a unique domain which strengthens your brand. Hashtag brand strength. It's a hashtag the kids use.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  This sounds good.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but that domain also makes it easier for visitors to find you. You also get award-winning templates so you can create a beautiful website in a simple and intuitive way. You can add and arrange your context, you can add and arrange your content in features of the click of a mouse. There's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. And if you do have a question, there's award-winning 24/7 customer support that can help you with any problem, no matter how technical or trivial. Think of it as your very own IT department. Hashtag brand strength. I'm just going to keep pushing it. Anyway, look, go to Squarespace.com, enter offer code VERGE, you get 10% off your first purchase. That's offer code VERGE, V E R G E, at Squarespace.com. Squarespace. Hashtag brand strength.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  You read that beautifully.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  Did I? I'm getting better, dude.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Reading like bedtime stories about Squarespace.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's my new book. Bedtime with Squarespace.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Bedtime Stories.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  Offer code VERGE. Oh, man. This is like the Tom Warren special episode of the show because I think you know the most about this too.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Oh, the Google phishing stuff. We gotta talk about Google. It felt like a huge deal to me. So there's a big Google scam, phishing scam going on this. Tell us about it. Yeah, so essentially, I don't know exactly how, no one probably knows exactly how it started, but essentially you would get an email and it would have a little blue button and the the subject would be like, your friend, so Neelai Patel has invited you to edit a document, and it's got a little blue button, just like any Google Docs button, and you click it. Now, usually a phishing scam like that, you'd click it, it would take you off to some crazy, you know, Russian site or something. It'd be like G zero zero G L E and you're like, oh, if I look at this URL, I can tell that it's not actually Google. Yeah, and so some of them are good, but some of them aren't.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  But either way, they wouldn't have your like user, your user ID and your, you know, your picture or anything like that. But obviously this was a Google, through Google's own OAuth system. So it had like, so if you were logged in with like four or five accounts, it'd have them all listed. So it looked perfectly normal, you're like, hmm, okay, I need to sign in again. So you click on whatever your account, and then it pops up a permissions thing, which is is a standard dialog box that would come up if you downloaded a third-party app for, you know, a mail app for Windows or Mac, and you wanted to connect it to your Google account, you'd get this permissions box. So that came up saying, allow contacts, allow email. And so if you clicked allow to that, and and I think the important part

• 37:46Speaker 01

  of it is on that dialog box, it came up and it said Google Docs was the, you know, was requesting permission, and it had the Google Docs logo. So if you granted those permissions, then this this third-party app essentially is what it was, would have access to your email and your contacts. Then it took the contact lists out of your Gmail account and then spread that to all of your contacts and made it look like it came from you, because it's taken from your email.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  It seems like a really simple.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing complicated about this.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Well, but it was incredibly well executed, right? Like the Russell wrote a good story, the the the vulnerable, the stack of vulnerabilities here. One, they made an email that looks pretty much like an email that you get from Google Docs. Okay, that's easy. Um, but then they that was really clever of them to use, uh, to make a Google app. Uh, that or that was to make an app that OAuth through Google. So when you click the link, it.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Brought you to a real, genuine, honest to God, Google login. It was just a login to approve this nefarious app, not a login to get into Google Docs. And so unless you're paying really close attention, you could like you'd click it and then it would say Google Docs. And like Tom said, they like matched the icon. So it it's not so much that like this is a, you know, ultra uber elite crazy code hack. This isn't like Stuxnet amazing stuff, but it's a really clever and innovative way to try and do a scheme like this. It's it's sort of taking advantage of a bunch of the stuff that we built to make our internet life a little bit easier

• 39:27Speaker 03

  in a clever way that we hadn't really seen before, at least not at the scale.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  It was essentially taking the system that allows you to log into Facebook or Twitter or any other third party web service with your Google account and authenticate. And, you know, when you go on a website and you try and buy something, they're like, do you want to log in with Facebook or Google? So soon as you click that button, that's using OAuth and it's allowing that access, a part of your access to your Facebook account.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  So it was annoying, Google shut it down relatively quickly.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Almost everyone I know like got this, because just the way it worked.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Just, I think, I think the thing that's different to the regular sort of phishing attacks is obviously it's using Google's own system. But it's also using a style of attack that we would have seen in like the Windows days, like the computer worm days. So it literally spread like a worm. So it was like, if you downloaded an old virus on your computer and it was sitting on a network. Like we've seen it where it would close down news stations.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Um, and it was that kind of thing. But just in the cloud. So it it it got into someone's email address. It stole their contacts, spread it to their contacts, which then stole their contacts. But so it spread around. So that's how it got around to. I mean, Google says 0.1% of the users, but they've got a billion or more. So that's, yeah, that's a million people, which is. A million people is a lot to like spread a a virus around essentially using Google's own tools.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it scared the hell out of people. I'm just gonna tell this story. I won't name names.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Oh, here we go.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  It's not me. There's an email from Vox Media IT went out. So there's a phishing scam. There's all the information.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  And then someone, it was like panic inducing because it was happening. And someone else at Vox Media replied all to the whole company. It just said, I clicked the doc.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  It was just like, it was the funniest thing that happened all day yesterday.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  But but the other thing that happened as well is that like literally, I think 10 minutes after this broke, someone. Shared a Google Doc with the entire Vox Media staff as well.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  It's like badly timed share.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  So everyone was like, I got it. I got the email.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  Here's I here's the real, I mean, yes, I clicked the doc. Like, that was all very funny. Um.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the the danger is that I often tell people like, don't. You're just gonna reuse your passwords. You're all idiots. You won't listen. Use these open logins, like do the login with Google, do the login with Facebook.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  It's a more secure way.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  It's way safer than all this other stuff.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, the chant, Google and Facebook employed. Better security engineers or at least more.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  So the chances of them getting hacked are lower than like login at Macy's dot com or whatever. So like, just do it. But this is a direct attack.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  On that advice.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  It highlights like, that is the perceived more secure way of doing things. Um, which it is and isn't because then you've got a single target, right? So it is, it's does, it's catastrophic if you're, if someone gets into Gmail account.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. But the the thinking is that you have the single target, but it's the best secured target.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  As opposed to multiple targets where you've done like password reuse.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If you've password reused, then sure. Yeah, that's that's that's a bad.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  Then you're dead. You should just stop right now. Pull over here in your car, pull over the side of the road, change all your passwords right now.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  But fundamentally, the best security practice you can have is. There's two parts to logging in.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  To quit the internet for one year.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Just go away.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Did you get hacked during that one year? You wouldn't, you wouldn't even know.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  I wouldn't even know. That was the real frigging part about it.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Someone could have been just taken over your digital life.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  It wouldn't even matter.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  I was Paul Miller for one year on the internet.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  I think somebody was logging into my Verge email and like replying to people.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  It was me. No, it wasn't me.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  He hacked you.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  It was me.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  But yeah, so fundamentally, the most secure way is obviously, you know, complex passwords. Everyone knows that, but the actual user ID is the other part that, you know, that an attacker needs to know. So if you're using the same email address all the time, then that's like 50% of the security for logging into any system.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  So.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  It's stuff like that that just makes me, I was almost like quit the internet.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  There's no easy way to fix it.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  It's like.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Is this my moment to talk about my Gmail hack for, uh, for email addresses? I think it works on Outlook.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  With the plus sign?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  The plus sign?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  That's what I do.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Plus, yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  After, after your regular email, just put plus and then something random and then it's, that's the email address that, but it works the same as a regular email.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Or you can just get a domain.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, but if you're an attacker, you get a database, all you have to do is scan for plus it, I mean. Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no, there's no easy way, like, yeah, if you're on a database.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  I saw this thing, you know, you know, um, Unicode has, there's a hack for, you can make something that looks like apple.com out of Unicode characters that are not the actual A P P L E.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Because the same, they do it for, um, and they are actually like, they're alphanumeric, but then like they're used to represent like, for like Chinese characters or something like that. So you can have Chinese characters in the address bar. Even though that's not an actual like supported in the underlying domain registration. So somebody came up with this thing that they use these Unicode characters and they'd get you get an SSL certificate. So you could look at your address bar. It would say A P P L E dot com. It would have a green lock and it would not be apple.com. And I was like, well, what is true?

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  You know, it's just like

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  What is reality?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  What is reality?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  It's kind of like when people create those fake Twitter accounts. So like they do Donald Trump, but the L would be an I, a capitalized I and stuff like that, like.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  And it's and they get retreated all the time.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  So you've seen my Twitter account.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do reckless with an I.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  It's just like, it's, it's, it's something that makes you just not want to put too much of yourself into the internet. It's just like, at some point, it is exposed.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  I will.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because the, not to bring up net neutrality, everyone's favorite subject, but I was talking to our CEO and I was like, you know, there's, there's an argument against net neutrality, which is that the internet is mostly garbage and we should just lock it down.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  That's actually probably the best argument against net neutrality that I've heard. It's like, it's mostly garbage and dangerous. So stop it.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  I know. If you, if like, if, I suppose if you were targeted by one of these attacks like properly, it's just this scary thing, I guess.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. I'm gonna read one more and we got a little bit of a lightning round. Mr. Miller has his segment. But first, let's talk about shaving your face.

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  What is the secret of well groomed guy? Surprise. It's the art of shaving. That's the whole secret. It's founded in New York in 1996. The art of shaving has been helping guys look their best for over 20 years. The art of shaving has your total routine covered, whether it's shaving, beard maintenance, hair, skin, body, or fragrance. The art of shaving's award-winning products are formulated with the highest quality botanical ingredients, featuring pure essential oils.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  The four elements of the perfect shave created to deliver smooth results every day. You start by prepping your skin with their signature pre-shave oil. Then you create a thick, foamy lather with shaving cream, applied with a shave brush. Then you replenish moisture with the aftershave balm. And you finish it off with one of five fragrances. Zandalwood and Cypress, Oud Suede, which is my favorite, because it sounds cool. Vetiver Cetron, Green Lavender, Coriander and Cardamom. And each cologne has been carefully assembled for a distinctive scent. The Art of Shaving offers convenient replenishment service that allows you to save on all these products while never having to worry about getting more. You get 15% off your first order and free shipping by using promo code VERGE.

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  You go online to theartofshaving.com, use promo code VERGE, you get 15% off your first order and free shipping. So, go to theartofshaving.com for the special offer, or if you want to talk to a grooming expert, go to one of the stores. I don't think you can just yell offer code VERGE at one of the experts. No, try it. You never know. It's an experience and then let us know, guys. Anyway, artofshaving.com, offer code VERGE, check it out.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with reviews. Let's start with Dex. Sure. We're on this whole future of computing kick. Dan Seifert reviewed-

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you used it, right?

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I played with it a little bit. It's really impressive. So, Dieter, you want to tell people what Dex is, what it does, how it works?

• 47:45Speaker 03

  So Dex is a thing with the Galaxy X8. You buy a X8, S8, you buy a box, a hockey puck looking thing with a fan in it.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  It looks like you're putting your phone in a cup. Like, whatever Samsung wants that to look like, it looks like they shipped an ashtray and you put your phone in it. Like, if in, there's a world in which like, you know, like a writer is like- But like a really nice ashtray. Accidentally, like, just ashes on the phone.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  But there's a good reason for that, though, right?

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  For it to be like that.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  It has a little fan.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it also, no, but I mean, the angle, because then it's an angle where it can scan your face while you're logging in.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so which I do, I have the, I actually have the wireless charger for my S8. And when I, it's sitting on there, I like hit the button, I swipe up to do the iris scan. And then I just like, kind of just stare down at it really quick. It's actually super convenient. Also, did you know that on the iris scanner, it actually shows you a picture of your eyeballs? And you can customize what that looks like. So I have like a pair of like ski goggles, or you could put like owl eyes. So every time you unlock your phone, you see a picture of yourself with owl eyes.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Anyway, it makes a desktop environment. You plug a monitor, you attach a keyboard to mouse, or you do Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and you get all your Android apps in a windowed desktop. Samsung did the thing that Google itself has been unable to do, which is make, you know, app windows like, you know, resize it whatever size you want, make it a windowed environment. It uses Samsung's browser, which is Chromium, but I think it's basically a mobile class, what they request the desktop site. So it's not like a full desktop browser, but it's sort of in between a desktop and a mobile browser. I'm not super clear on that.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  The funny thing is, so Dan reviewed it.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Dan, Dan seems to like the browser.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  It's pretty desktopy. It might be.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  It's fine. It choked a little bit on Chorus, our CMS. It choked a little bit on some other things.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  There's no flash and stuff.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's obviously no flash.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Right. So I edited Dan's review of this thing, and we actually went round and round a couple of times because I kept on basically just refusing to believe him when he said it was good. He was like, no, it's really good. I was like, no, there's no way.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  Once I got over the fact that it looks like his phone was in a cup, and it just really does.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  But it's essentially Samsung doing what Microsoft promised to do.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they pulled it off. So that's the impressive thing. So I came across Dan when he was working on his review. He was writing it. He was writing it on his phone, the keyboard. So he had the phone in the cup. He had a big monitor, curved Samsung monitor. The phone was sitting there, and he had Microsoft Word open. He had Google Docs open, full desktop Google Docs in the browser. The Slack Android app, I don't know. I don't know if they cut a deal. I honestly don't know how this works, was displaying the desktop version of Slack.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  It definitely runs better than.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Wait, are you sure it was a desktop version?

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's the tablet version of Slack.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like unclear because it wasn't quite, because it was in a window and like. If you take the tablet version and put it in a window, it kind of looks exactly.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  I asked him, because my biggest problem with Slack is how slow it searches. And I asked him to search and it was like the app experience of searching.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  But it was also a lot faster because it was a real app.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'll be more clear. It's.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Well, of course, Dan did put a screenshot of Slack on our review because that would be. Oh, no, this is, this is definitely the tablet.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  It was the tablet. I'm looking at it right now. But it was windowed, so it looked very much like the desktop Slack experience. A bunch of other apps were windowing fine. It had a bar, he was like switching between apps. And it was like, fine. And you could definitely take it one step where it would slow down.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Because of what it is. Um, because it's just the phone doing it all. But it was just working fine. And he's like, this has been my primary machine for a week. And I've obviously run into some red blocks or on the review. But I was like, we, I sat there like trying to break it for 10 minutes. And like the things I was having to do to break it were not, they weren't normal. Right? I was like, what if I unplug it? Like start 15 apps and plug it back in? He was like, yeah, that's not gonna go.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, if I run three apps on a MacBook, it slows down.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it was really impressive.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Here's the big question, though. Like, it's probably like, in like cheap Chromebook range of like, like, you know, productivity, right? It's way better than Continuum. So like, if you're judging it against Continuum, it blows it out of the water. If you're judging it against a Chromebook, it's like in that zone. Um, but do you, what do you judge it against? Do you judge it against a Windows laptop? Do you like, what, what do you judge it against? And are the conveniences of just buying a Chromebook or buying a cheap Windows laptop greater than the deal of like using this thing? Like, that's how, it's like how he ends his review is like, we're like, this thing is actually way better than you expect. It's like radically better than you expect because we were expecting it to be garbage.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Um, but even as good as it is, like, who's it for?

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  So, uh, so here's the thing. I never, I obviously have laptops at home, right? So I never take my laptop home from the office, my work laptop. It just sits here on my desk all day long. If I could change that out to, and I have to carry it around the office all the time because there's stuff it can do that my phone can't do like. But if I could just have that. Like that setup at my desk at work and I would come in, roll in, set up my phone, like start working and then like grab and go and go to a meeting. That would be awesome. Right? Cause I wouldn't be leaving Windows and ideas behind. That's I think where it falls down. Cause when you pull the phone off the dock, it doesn't click back into being a phone right away. There's like- It takes a minute, like a full minute. Yeah, and sometimes longer. So it, it,

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  you're kind of like losing the ability to just like quickly grab your phone, which to me is, that's a huge trade off because of how many times you need to quickly grab my phone, like do something with it.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  I, I do see, like someone who is like a primarily a phone person and like just sometimes needs to sit down to look at like a full slide deck or use Word or something like that. Like having your notifications on your desktop is like-

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  That's awesome.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Like, that's something that I take for granted on, you know, having Mac and iPhone is like, this is great. And I, I replied more texts from my Mac than I reply from my phone.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  I message lock in. There it is.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  That's where I am.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  Constantly there in my face.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  It, it, whenever you use this stuff, like the continuum stuff is like, it does, it, it's like a nice thing to think that this might be the future eventually. Cause like we're seeing the tablet market now that's, you know, people aren't buying them and they're not refreshing them because, and it's what the market analysts say is, it's a focus on smartphones. People just want those.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And I think that's, that's been hitting the PC market as well.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  I just, I mean, this idea has, it's, this idea has been around forever.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  This is the first time I've seen it work in a way that feels reasonable. And now the hard question is like, wait, what is this for?

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:49Nilay Patel?

  Like it's not dreams anymore. Like, okay, I have it. Like, do I want this?

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Arm, the ARM architecture works, like they already have like the big little and stuff like that. I mean, you can basically run some cores and not run all of the cores. I could conceive of, of a phone that just runs, it just runs the four cores most of the time. And then when you plug in, it like soups them out, it overclocks them.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And-

• 55:12Nilay Patel?

  And the phone melts.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's why the, the, the Astray has a fan in it.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  It's in its fan cup.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  No, it's cool. You could like go turbo mode when you plug it in.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  I gotta tell a story about the S8. I was on a boat in Mexico.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. Every story starts this way.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  I left my phone in the bag, sitting in the sun like an idiot. And then I went out and grabbed my phone to like, take a picture and it was wildly hot. I was like, oh shit. Turn it on and it's like, your phone's too hot. You can't do anything. I like tried to open the Twitter app. It's like, nope, you don't get to do anything till this thing chills out for a minute. You can maybe make a phone call.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  And it like, it handled it really well. And because it was an S8, I literally just like took a wet towel and like cooled it off and like waved it in the air to get the condensation off and then cooled it off again. And then two minutes, like it was cooled down and it worked again. Like

• 56:06Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  They handled the heat issue really well. And because it was waterproof, I could like, cool it off myself with some water. It was great.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone does that temperature shut off thing too. I've had that happen.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  I have not like put wet towels.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Comes up like a warning.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, I don't know, Dieter, you're the one most deeply invested in this like crazy future of computing. It works. Do you want to use it?

• 56:34Speaker 03

  A little bit. Um, I kinda do.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Like, no, like honestly, like syncing my stuff across multiple devices is a pain. There's a tiny little part of me that wants a dumb shell laptop that every like all every, you know, Chinese computer maker has made these at one point, the pad phone, right?

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Like, I don't know if I want this thing in a tablet, but if I had just like a, like basically my MacBook has the essentially the computer bits of my MacBook. It's just like, it's all battery. And then the computer bits basically could fit inside a phone and just like, take that out and just put a USB port there and I can just slide my phone into it. That's actually like. Kind of an interesting idea.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Would your ideal be to have like a Dex dock at your desk so you could have a big screen and a keyboard and stuff? And then like a laptop dock?

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Dex show.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Like, would you have like one Dex dock and a screen at work and one Dex dock and a screen at home? Or would you just want to just use it with a laptop? Or what would your ideal situation to look the most cool?

• 57:42Speaker 03

  To look the most cool?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  None of these things.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  I would want the Dex dock. Um, I, but I would also like, I would want the thing to work without a dock, right? Like, I know there's no actual computing bits in the dock other than, you know, just basic wiring and like enough power to like make a fan run. It needs a fan, which is hilarious. Um, but I don't know, it's like the same thing with like the, I don't know, the Nintendo Switch. Like, I want to plug, I would just want to carry a cable to plug it into a TV, right? I just want to carry a cable to plug it into a monitor.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  USB C.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's not quite there.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  That would be the key to this sort of experience.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  But it's also, I think it's also like what Dan was saying and, and the fundamental problem with it is that, do you, do you want to buy like a, just a cheap laptop that does all that? Or do you want to have to carry around like a keyboard and mouse and stuff like, what's the point of what you're carrying around is worth this investment? Like, I mean, that's going to be the, the problem with these devices going forward.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the dumb shell would need to be like a hundred bucks, right? And that's not going to happen.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Just battery. I, I guess that's what HP did with their lap dock thing.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  That thing, all of these things have been terrible, right? The fact that we know about them all speaks very deeply to how much we are terrible nerds.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  The bad part of, of most of them was the software, right?

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this one, it's weird. We're doing it. We're praising Samsung for their software. It's the, it's the, it's, they solved a thing in software that no one else has been able to do, whoever it is, Microsoft included.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  I, I think it will really come into its own when Google does it.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  You know, like they have to do it. They have to support it on Android across all the devices.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  It's kind of like Samsung is Google's like.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yes, testbed.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Forward R and D lab. Um, they're probably like. They did it with VR. They did it with gear, right? They, I think they've basically done it with Dex. I'm sure you're right that Google's doing a thing. There were some rumors about this a while ago. I gotta look it up. Well, you plug it, you plug a pixel into a dock and it turns into Chrome OS. I mean, you could see. They did it with multi-window.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  Right, multi, multi-screen on a phone, um, multitasking. Uh, there's one other thing that's like, consistently Samsung like does the thing that Google is gonna do the next year, a year ahead of time.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Well, pens.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, pens. Well, there is a stylus on the Chromebook Pro.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Ta- tablets-ish. Nish. Motorola really zoomed out there. All right, Paul, you have a segment every week. It's called the same thing. It's called four, four. Four. Wait, wait, let me start over, cuz I gotta get the right number of four. Four, four, four, four. Oh, yeah. Four fours. Four fours. Yeah. It's called four fours.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm cha- to, I'm changing it. It's gonna be called four fours from now on. Yeah, permanently. Okay, it's an LG display with four HDMI ports. All right. 4K. Yeah. Forty-two point five inches. What? For me.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  So you could plug.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  So it could be like just a 4K display. It's got HDMI 2.0, so that, that'll work. It's also got a display port and stuff. But you could also plug in four different inputs and it displays them in a grid. Uh, which Dell also has a display. Oh, yeah, they're crazy. So it's, it's kinda, it's meant for like invest, like trading, like you always put like cool graphs and charts on screens like this. And the Dow, Joan, Industrial Average is on the, literally on LG's screenshot of this. But it's also like a really good display. It's $700-ish. Mm-hmm. It's got like FreeSync, like, I don't know, there's a lot of good stuff going on here and I don't know. You're, you're like hot on the, on the high-end monitor beat lately.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  I just really, it's because I use, I use this Vizio like 32-inch. Yeah. 1080p, low-end TV as my PC monitor at home and I gotta upgrade. Yeah. I gotta go past that. The best. I want the best. You have the caviar of monitors. Yeah. Is there a monitor? I feel like there should be a monitor called the caviar.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  That Dell monitor is insane.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Dell's come out with an 8K monitor.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  And then Acer and Asus have these sort of like these 4K high refresh rate G-Sync, like HDR, everything's awesome in them.

• 1:02:11Nilay Patel?

  You're definitely buying this.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  I still want.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  They're like $1,500.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  Which one are you gonna buy?

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  I still want Microsoft to sell this Surface Studio monitor.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  No, that'd be cool.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Not even have it go flat and all that sort of stuff. The 3x2 aspect, I don't think there is a, I've looked, I don't think there's a monitor that's 3x2.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  Huh. Yeah, they're getting, they're getting skinny.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Skinnier. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  That's the thing. Um, seeing a Vizio, we should talk about it real quick. They're doing something neat, but Vizio, last year, took all the apps off their TV.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  A tablet in the box. Said everything's Chromecast. Yeah, I bought that TV. Dieter Razz that TV. This year, same TV, you bought the P series, right? They've barely changed the P series. The M series is new. Yep. Put all the apps back on the TV.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  Not all the apps, though. It doesn't have all the apps. It doesn't? It has, yeah. So there's, so there's some really. Missing Netflix. So Chris Welch went to the event, talked to Matt McCray, who's been on the verge a thousand times. Um, the CTO of Vizio.

• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  People were obviously like confused about all the interface being on the tablet.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  But they are really still betting on Chromecast is the main thing that drives their TV. So they're not actually apps. They built an HTML rendering layer so they can serve app interfaces on the TV and you can like click around and do all that. But when you hit play, the app doesn't play the video. It sends a cast URL back to Cast. An internal Chromecast. The internal Chromecast. So it's still Chromecast. So you can, you can still use the Google Home. When you start a thing, if you have an Android phone, it'll, it'll show you the cast notification.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  Um, but because that is all like new, they don't have Netflix, they don't have Amazon. And there's like a lot of theory out there that Netflix is now being super aggressive in what it's demanding from all of its partners. Cause you can't, you can't not have Netflix.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the key.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  I think that's really interesting, actually, that they built this other like system that kind of like goes in a circle.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Well, you could Chromecast Netflix.

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  You can Chromecast Netflix.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Right, but it's not, it's not why they're built in weird HTML apps.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  If you use one of their weird HTML apps, it's like, what's on Crackle tonight? Hooray.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  I've been wondering, what is on Crackle?

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, the fuck is crackle? You know what I've been using a lot lately? Vudu. Yeah, what? Four K? This is, this is, this is such a nightmare. Paul knows this story. So I have a LG OLED TV. It's 4K, Dolby Vision, and the, there's two movie services that stream 4K movies. It's Vudu and Fandango Now.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a real mess. Uh, obviously Netflix and Amazon, but that's mostly their shows.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:57Nilay Patel?

  You know, like rent a movie in 4K. So you're like, yes, I will pay $15 to watch San Andreas on my new TV. Yeah, it's Vudu. Vudu also supports Atmos.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  It's nice, so I have all this stuff, but the LG TV won't send Atmos out through HDMI. So it lights up all the lights. There's literally a fucking change.org petition to have LG support Atmos on HDMI. I'm gonna write about this.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Nilay Patel?

  Paul threatened to make me a Trello card, so I'd write that.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  What's your audio setup?

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  How do you get Atmos out? Do you have to use like optical?

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  No, optical doesn't support it. It's really weird.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  There's, I think there's no way, unless you have a new LG OLED TV, a 2017 one. I think there's no way to get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos at the same time. There's like four TVs in the world that will send it out. And I think, I think they're like, they're like at the bleeding edge of the spec. It's very frustrating. I will tell you that I, I signed the change.org petition.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes that's all you can do. Took out his AirPods.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  No, it's like a very, so it's like the base in my house. So like we have speakers in the ceiling and a receiver and all this stuff. Yeah. Yes, Dieter? Sorry, my AirPods decided to stop working. First the right one went out, and then the left one went out. Man, switching out the dongle life for the wireless life.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  You know, I was on a train at like 10 PM at night, listening to some banging house music with my AirPods. Got a call, and then I got off the call, and I was like, why is the music not resumed? So I kept playing on my phone. It just comes screaming out of my phone. And I'm like standing at the door to get off the train. Everyone's like turned around and looked to me and I was like.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  You should have owned it.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  And I look like, you do look like a dick anyway, weren't you? I didn't know I'd look like an extra dick when I'm playing some screaming house music out my phone.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  They're doing well. You know, we didn't talk about at all is Apple earnings, because oh yeah, Apple made a bunch of money.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were kind of just, yeah.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the interesting part, the phones basically flat, Mac ticked up, iPads crashed, I mean, you're down like thirteen.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was around about that, yeah.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  Some teens percent.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Some of this quarter had the cheap iPad in it too, right?

• 1:07:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's, you know, that's not fair until the full quarter. But the big one they're pushing is the services business. Walt and I talked about this on Control Delete a lot yesterday. The services business is a bunch of like B and C services, but if you bundle them up at Apple's scale, it looks like an A plus business.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's just, there's so many phones.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  It's more revenue than the iPad, right?

• 1:07:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  But it's, but like service by service, it's not, they don't have category leaders, but if you just put them all together and call them services, they're like, this is a huge business.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Wait, what's services?

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  Services is like the iTunes Store.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  iTunes App Store.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  The App Store, uh, iMessage, Apple Music, iCloud. So like all of those individually.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  They all have head on competitors. Anyway, if you are into that conversation.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  I wonder, I wonder how much revenue out of, like, what is the percentage of revenue? Cause it's around about sixty three percent for the iPhone. That's the overall. So I wonder what it is when you combine services as well.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  For Apple, it's gotta be at least.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Also announced they're investing a billion dollars in American workforce.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and they put up a page that it's like creating American jobs. It's actually a really fun page. I don't, I am curious.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  My favorite thing about that page is there are four Apple employees in North Dakota. I desperately want to know what they do.

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  So go to the, it's a cool page. It's like, it's well built. It's like neat and it shows you apps that come from every state and how many Apple employees there are in every state. And then it has this one category that's like app related jobs. And it's like, how did you calculate that? Like jobs created in the app economy is like one of their metrics. It's like an interesting number. And then they show you like the most famous app from every state.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  You could, when you sign up, I'm, I'm thinking, when you sign up for a developer account, you typically list like what company you're with and how big your team is and stuff like that.

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  Might be a way they could.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  It's neat. It's just a neat page, but they're obviously pushing hard into this thing. Tim Cook. I think is hoping that Trump will like ease the tax laws so they can make more cash out from our sees. But the point, the only reason I brought out Apple earnings was that it appears AirPods are doing well, although they're having manufacturing issues.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  So we might think they look silly, but they're doing, I mean, you have them and you think they look silly.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I see them all the time in San Francisco. You live in San Francisco.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  I don't, I haven't seen them.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  I don't see them in New York.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  I've never seen them in London.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't see them in New York. I've seen a handful here and there in New York, but the people who are wearing them. You know what else is doing surprisingly well is the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch, that's what I was trying to get at. The Apple Watch is doing well. They sold more than Fitbit. Fitbit looks like a crazy.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  But like, what was, what was it, those, a couple of big apps just like abandoned Apple Watch?

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Google Maps left the watch. Like, as an app platform, and this is worth checking in on, actually, Dieter, I'm just gonna say this pitch out loud on the air. We're coming up on WWDC, last year WWDC, they, they announced all these new app subscriptions. They have new app stores. There's the iMessage app store, there's the new TV app thing. I don't know how that stuff is doing. And the Apple Watch as an app platform just is, is zero as far as I'm concerned. Like, I don't.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  What's the killer?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Spotify just, just committed to bringing an Apple Watch app. And that's the only thing that interests me because, like, I like wearing, using the Apple Watch with the AirPods, but then I have to rely on iTunes for the music.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think there's reasons to have apps on there, but I think the apps have very clearly turned into controls for things that happen on your phone.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  And not independent experiences.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  Lauren Good wrote a piece, "Now seems like a good time to ask what a smart watch is."

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  How much do third-party apps really matter?

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  So I'd definitely recommend that.

• 1:10:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, read it. Anyway, is that it? Anything else? Tom? I think that's enough. I mean.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  We've done enough.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, you're taking Tom to the bar now.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  I just worked out, though, that, that iPhone and services is 76.8% of Apple's entire revenue.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Services, but I just wish the services were better.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  That's a thing.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  I, I think iTunes on the Mac has gotten a little bit better. Is that just me? Like, like it used to take, it used to take like 45 seconds to launch the app and then like get to somewhere.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm doing this for you because I love you. I'm gonna launch iTunes on my computer.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I, I, I had to use iTunes the other day because of a weird app bug that I had.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Oh, it's pretty fast. I'd say, I'd say it's down to like maybe like 30 seconds.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  It's terrible on Windows.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  It was terrible.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  But it's, uh, it's hell on Windows, yeah.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that's it. There's way more. We, I'm eager to like go out.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  It's party time. Uh, so you get no more Virgcast. Anyway, there's more. Uh, like I said, Walt and I went deep on Apple earnings and control and delete. We also talked a bunch of other stuff. We did talk about neutrality. Walt savaged that Verizon video. That was, it was an incredible moment in control and delete history. So listen to that. That's out. Uh, Lauren Good, we just brought up, uh, she hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask, which is a great show. Listen to that. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media and Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode, all which are fantastic shows. They're all on iTunes. Listen to them, rate them, review them. You can tweet at us. Paul is Future Paul. I'm Reckless. Dieter's Backlon. Tom is?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  It's Tom Warren.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Tom Warren.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  On the Twitter.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  That's me.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  Come find us on Twitter. Please, please stop flaming me about Macs versus PCs. It's like been a defining feature in my life for over 20 years.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  PCs is like, it's never gonna end.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  It's never gonna stop. Uh, but yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Do you wanna, do you wanna have people tweet at Ajit Pai?

• 1:12:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, tweet at Ajit Pai. Oh, you know what? Uh, there's actually a special episode of Recode Decode. Uh, Tony Rom, who is a new reporter at Recode, a fantastic policy reporter. Um, I'm jealous of his skill level because he is really, really good. Uh, he actually got Ajit Pai, um, on the podcast. And you should listen to it. He asked him hard questions. Pai, Pai let some stuff slip on that interview. Basically said, I don't really know if we need bright line rules for net neutrality at all, which is not what the industry thinks. So very interesting. Um, go listen to that. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Hashtag brand strength. Snip, snip.