Gadget news, FCC's final proposal, and Vlad

Here’s The Vergecast. This week, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul plow through a week of news starting with (no surprise) the FCC’s ongoing mission to destroy net neutrality. This was also a week full of new gadgets — from the new Microsoft Surface Pro, to the Jamboard, to a $9,000 laptop, we walk you through the things we saw and reviewed in the Circuit Breaker world. Also, even though we filled our time, we added a bonus segment in between it all: Vlad Savov, a fan favorite of the show, stops by and quickly breaks down what is on his mind and what gadgets have piqued his interests. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff discussed on the show, (sorry, this show is an hour and a half), so listen through it all for more. 03:27 - Breaking down the FCC’s proposal to destroy net neutrality 32:36 - Inside the mind of Vlad 49:38 - And now, a brief definition of the web 51:03 - Microsoft's new Surface Pro has 13.5 hours of battery life and LTE option 56:22 - Microsoft has created a Surface USB-C dongle for “people who love dongles” 1:00:12 - DJI's $499 Spark is the company's cheapest and tiniest drone yet 1:04:43 - Google made a $5,000 whiteboard — and it’s weirdly fun 1:06:14 - Samsung responds to complaints about HDMI switching, will offer a firmware update 1:10:57 - How Anker is beating Apple and Samsung at their own accessory game 1:11:54 - Acer Predator 21 X review 1:14:14 - Paul’s weekly segment “Vroom Vroom goes the car” 1:17:00 - TV lightning round 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 theverge.com. A multi-channel media experience about technology and emotions. Can I just admit to everyone that I'm having an emotional week? You can. So Paul is here, hi Paul. Hello. Dieter is here.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I'm also having an emotional week, but not as much as you.

• 0:26Nilay Patel?

  It's just the three of us this week, OG crew. But yesterday, I recorded the last episode of Control+Delete with Mr. Walt Mossberg. We put up his last column today. I have some news to share that is much happier than that, which is that on June 9th, Dieter will be in town, here in New York City, and we'll be recording the last special episode of Control+Delete live. Ooh. In New York City, at the School of Visual Arts at 6pm.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  School of Visual Arts, 6pm, New York City. Ticket stuff is coming soon, we'll explain how that works.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just gonna, just full transparency, audience, I've been waiting all day for the link for someone, because I'm not in charge of ticket, I run a lot of things, I don't run ticketing systems. I've been waiting for somebody to give me the link, the buy link, so I can put up the post. I don't have it yet. I'm working on it. They're good people, they're working hard, they're settling out some things.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  So I believe the tentative plan is, I'm not actually gonna be on the live Control+Delete, but I'm gonna be in New York so that every time they say my name on Control+Delete, I'll be in a dunk tank and I'll get dunked.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's just gonna get live Slack notifications that we're talking about him. But no, it's gonna be one last, it's, we did 75, you know, pre-recorded standard episodes of Control+Delete, we're gonna do one last live episode with Dieter. We're gonna have, you can come if you want, June 9th, 6pm, School of Visual Arts. I assure you, there will be a post on the site for that. That is, it takes the bitter and makes it sweet. Is that a thing?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  It's bittersweet. It's sweet and bitter.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Bitter.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  It's both.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  I think there's like a pill now that you can take. That like coats your tongue.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, there's like a weird fruit.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Oh, is there a fruit that does it?

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  There's like a weird fruit that you eat that make, I don't know, it's a whole thing.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  That's what live shows are.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  It's like a weird fruit for your body.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, June 9th, but anyway, today was both the last Control Alt Delete of the regular kind and Walt's last column went up. So I'm in a, I'm in a little bit of a mood. I gotta say, and we're down to one podcast.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  I will say that last week on the show, I asked for more podcast ideas. I specifically said, please don't just say Vlad.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Many of you failed to listen. So we might have something for you a little bit later in the show, but we.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  If you're good.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  We're still, you know, there should not just be one solo flagship. We're not just like a pirate.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  And it's not like we did a bad job with the Armada.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, all the other ships are destroyed.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  The Spanish destroyed our, our flotilla.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  It was a voluntary, amicable.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Well-deserved retirement.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Of a ship.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  He sailed off and literally into the sunset. Anyway. But because we're, we have some fun stuff to talk about in the show, a little surprise for the Vlad people coming up. But I, I want to start heavy. I'm in the, I'm in the emotional place to start heavy. There was heavy news this week. We're going to start heavy. So we're going to start with net neutrality. There's a bunch of other, I promise you, if you, if you don't want to be heavy with us, just skip ahead. And then there's like a good time waiting for you. But if you're, you're in the emotional zone with me, this is where we're starting, net neutrality. So.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  For or against?

• 3:46Nilay Patel?

  Damn it. I actually have a whole thing I'm writing next week. I, I think it's going to publish on Monday that it occurred to me throughout this entire debate that I don't actually care about net neutrality for its own sake.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Neil, I shared his first draft with me of this and I gave him a, a 16 point comment. And then I deleted all the swear words.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  And I don't think he's going to accept any of those.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  There are a bunch of swear words in there. Anyway, so I'm working on it. But I want to start there with the listeners. So I talk about net neutrality a lot. Paul and I debated a lot. Ajit Pai and his army of trolls who work with him at the FCC, who literally troll me on Twitter, so I don't even feel bad about calling them that. It's not really about the policy, right? The thing is, the consumer product that you buy, internet access, is often overpriced and bad. There are lots of reasons for that. You can either try to attack it in saying there should be more options in the market, there should be competition, things will get better. Generally, when there's competition, things get better. Or you can say, wow, this is really hard in the way that the market is structured. Competition doesn't seem likely. We should make it, we should have public policy in place that says,

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  you can't be, they can't do the things that people don't like. That's like the whole, whole structure of the thing, right? If you have an internet service provider, Comcast, I always pick on Comcast. Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. If you have Comcast and they start blocking BitTorrent, which they have done, and you can't reasonably switch to another provider to register your outrage at such behavior, well, you're screwed. We should probably make a rule that says they can't do that. So that's like where I'm at with net neutrality, right? Like, the thing itself, I'm just firmly on the side of, these companies are basically monopolies, there's very little competition. They tend to raise prices and not make the service better over time. We're not going to fix it. I just don't believe it.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  So we should probably have some regulations. That's like a reasonable place to start a policy disagreement. But this is the week that Ajit Pai and the other Republican commissioners of the FCC put out what they call their Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. So they've kicked off the official start of the process by which they roll back net neutrality. So this isn't the plan. That's actually like an important point. This is not their plan. These are like questions. Yeah, it's they're like searching plaintiff questions about the nature of the regulatory state.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  But I mean, how often does this, hey, we want to make some rules. Everybody tell us what you think. Uh, here's what we think. We're gonna make some rules, but tell us what you think. That's basically what this is right now.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  I would describe these as very leading questions. We had Gigi Sohn, who is a very smart person. She used to be uh, counselor to uh, Chairman Wheeler when he was on the FCC. She wrote an analysis of it and was like, basically what this document is, is a series of leading questions that presuppose the answers and use a lot of ISP-funded studies to draw conclusions, but conclusions in the form of a question. So I've I've pulled some out here. So the NPRM is out. It came out this week. We have a bunch of stuff uh, on it to read on the side if you want to get deep into it. Uh, Jake wrote a great piece noting that 2.6 million comments were filed in between the draft and this final version, and they made no changes in responses to those comments, which I think is

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  fascinating. They made some changes in response to like legal posturing. So when the inevitable lawsuit comes, they're in a stronger place. But the the millions of people who have commented, their views are not reflected. But there are some lines here that I think are worth reading, and they're specifically about what we think about as net neutrality. No blocking, uh, no throttling, no paid prioritization, the stuff that people don't like and they don't want their ISPs to do. So here's a line. "We emphasize that we oppose blocking lawful material. The commission has repeatedly found the need for a no-blocking rule on principle, asserting that the freedom to send and receive lawful content to use and provide applications and services without fear of blocking is essential to the internet's openness."

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  That sounds good. But then here's the searching plaintiff question. Do we have reason to think providers would behave differently if the commission were to eliminate the no blocking rule? Is the no blocking rule necessary or burdensome on smaller providers? This is what I mean by like leading questions. They're like, well, they're not doing it now, but if we took the rule away, maybe they just wouldn't do it anyway because everyone agrees. I think that's very strange. Here's the same question for no throttling. Does the no throttling rule prevent providers from offering broadband internet service providers with differentiated prioritization that benefits consumers? Does the no throttling rule harm latency-sensitive applications and content? Does it prevent product differentiation among ISPs? If we eliminate the no blocking rule, should we also eliminate the no throttling rule?

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  It sounds reasonable, but what they're saying is, we might not have any rules at all for the internet.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Well, and they're also like, they're setting up a particular kind of like burden of proof, right? Like, please prove, it's also like asking people to prove a negative. Like, there's a flip side to asking a leading question, which is, if we didn't have this rule, would they do something? Has anybody done something bad that shows that we need this rule? But the flip side of that question is, has this rule actually done anything bad to these people?

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  And like, I think the answer to both of those questions might actually be a little bit fuzzier than partisans on both sides of this issue would want to admit. But like, throwing it into that muddy prove a negative style waters sort of means that no matter how you rhetorically respond to that question, you end up in muddy waters and then they could just say, well, it's muddy, we're going to do what we want.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so, I know you want to say something, Paul, but let me just read the next two. So, paid prioritization. For example, could allowing paid prioritization give internet service providers a supplemental revenue stream that would enable them to offer lower-priced broadband to end users? What would be the impacts on new startups' innovation? Does a no paid prioritization rule harm the development of real-time or interactive services? Should the commission impose restrictions on these business models at all? This makes it seem, and I just want to be really clear on this, that one outcome is that Comcast would start to do paid prioritization, Netflix, pay us, you'll go faster, and then they'll have more money, and then they'll take that money, and instead of just like

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  counting it as profit, they'll use it to make your prices lower. Which is never going to happen. Like, that is not the incentive structure of a publicly traded corporation at all.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Well, it is. Actually, no, that's not true. It is the incentive structure for a publicly traded corporation if they need to compete on that price.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  Right, but if they don't, which they don't. Right, it's sort of like, you're right. So, I think one thing that's really interesting is that there are four national wireless carriers. And just T-Mobile trying to be more competitive has made that market more competitive. One actually competitive company, right? But that is not the case for Spectrum in New York City. There are very few companies that can head up, compete with Spectrum in New York City for wireless.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  I've got an Optimum versus FiOS fight in my neighborhood.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah? What's that like?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  A FiOS, tangentially related person to Verizon. I do not think this is a Verizon employee. But somehow, I believe he receives a commission if I sign up for FiOS.

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  And he's like, he's like into nagging. He's like, basically like, shows up at my door and is like, "Your internet sucks, doesn't it?"

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "I bet you can't do this." I should. And I, I, um... Maybe I'm not the strong, emotionally solid person I like to believe I am. I got like mad, I slammed the door because he called me a liar. I said, "I got a certain amount of speed down and a speed up." And then he's like, "Well, why don't you benchmark it on the phone?" So I did the Google Speed Test on my phone and was slower than what I said. And he was like, "See? It's that slow." I was like, "This is not my typical experience with my service." And he's like, "Well, that's what the phone says." And so I closed the door.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  That is crazy.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  I want to work towards a situation where he gives me a good discount on FiOS and I can move over to FiOS because it would be an upgrade.

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  But I don't have to lose my pride.

• 12:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  And he realizes that I'm a smart man.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Paul, you need to do the reverse neg. You need to neg right back, I think.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  You'd be like, Verizon keeps lessening its investment in fiber internet to the home.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  How do you feel about that?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  I don't believe that Verizon's in this for the long haul.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  Give me FiOS before you lose your job.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  It's terrible. Alright, so here's another one. This is like the least controversial net neutrality rule of all. No one has ever disagreed with this. It's the transparency rule. So if they're gonna do stuff, they have to tell you. I don't know if anybody has ever disagreed with this rule. "We seek comment on whether to keep, modify, or eliminate the transparency rule. When the Commission adopted the transparency rule in 2010 and enhanced it in 2015, it found that effective disclosure of Internet service providers' network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of service promotes competition, innovation, investment, and user choice in broadband adoption." Yeah, that seems true. "We continue to support these objectives and seek comment on whether the existing transparency

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  rule is the best way to accomplish them, or if there are other methods we can employ." I just read that and what I see is what we're looking for is like support in the record for us to not have these rules at all. And then, Dieter, I think this is, to your point, right? This is, in my mind, how they're asking these questions really speaks to something deep. So here's one question about all four rules. "Could the continued existence of these rules, the net neutrality rules, negatively impact future innovative, pro-competitive business deals that would not by themselves run afoul of merger conditions or established antitrust law?" That sounds fine, but it means what Chairman Pai is trying to do is apply the boundaries

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  of antitrust law to what the FCC does. That is not actually the FCC standard. That is the Federal Trade Commission standard. The FCC standard is the public interest. So if he's saying, "I'm trying to go to a different legal methodology for evaluating these things," that is the house, that is inside the house of a different agency. And that's exactly what he did with broadband privacy, right? He said, "The FTC is better at regulating privacy than the FCC. We're gonna roll back this broadband privacy rule." I think this whole document, when I read all these questions together, what you get is the sense that, and this is what Gigi wrote on the site too, that they want to eliminate all the rules, eliminate all of the authority for the FCC to pass new rules, and then change

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  the entire standard by which we evaluate these practices. Not from, are they in the public interest, are they providing consumers with better service at lower prices, but would this run afoul of antitrust? Which is a much radically higher standard for evaluating corporate behavior than the

• 15:15Speaker 01

  And one that's out of the FCC's domain in the first place, it's transferring stuff over to the FTC, right?

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  Right, so a good example here is Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and locking out Netscape, like ran afoul of antitrust law because they were tying things together. Comcast blocking BitTorrent doesn't live in that zone, but I would argue that most consumers who experience that were unhappy about it, right? And that the market of the internet was harmed by it in some way. So if you're going to say, it has to reach that like Microsoft level, that really changed the equation.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  I hear what you're saying, I don't get that exact impression from the language. It sounds like, are there any interesting opportunities on the table that are currently barred by these rules, but that don't go so far as to violate antitrust? Like is there, is there?

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  What's in the gray area?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Is there a zone in there where you feel like you could be more innovative and do more interesting things or make more money if we didn't have this rule? And we want to hear examples?

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  But we're not saying we're going to condone violating antitrust or fight the FTC, we just want to know of examples of business opportunities.

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and so this comes back all the way to the first thing I was saying, which is if What Ajit Pai was proposing to the to the American consumer was that just listen to me. I'm going to get rid of these rules and you are going to end up with 20 broadband internet service providers and they can do whatever they want and you can pick.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  I'd be like, yeah, I'm with you.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  Go crazy. I do not think that that this leads to that. I think that this leads to the existing broadband providers getting richer, potentially building bigger networks, but through that process, actually becoming more powerful and less, less responsive to competition. And I, I just think that this is in a danger zone, right? Where all of, the only measure of success that you have is like how much money AT&T is spending to build out its network, which is his primary measure of success, capital expenditure. All you're measuring is like those companies getting bigger. You're not measuring new entrants into the market. You're not measuring head up competition, Verizon, FiOS versus, what was the other one you have?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I always forget if it's Spectrum or Optimum. I believe it's Optimum.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like that is actually kind of the measure. Like how many choices for wired broadband does the average American have? If, if that was the measure and we were saying, well, we passed the Title II rules and the average number of choices went down to one, I'd be like, ah, that sucks. If we, if we get rid of all these rules and we agree that the measure is going to be, do the average American suddenly get two or three choices for wired broadband? That would be a very interesting promise because like we see in the mobile market, T-Mobile zero rated one service, Verizon zero rated two, T-Mobile zero rated three, and they all ended up at unlimited data plans because that's what consumers want.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  So I don't believe for the most part that the government has the power to effectively give users more choice or better prices. What they do have is the power and, and usually the responsibility to stop consumer abuse from companies. False advertising, like predatory practices, that kind of stuff.

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's this other line here. Everything about these guys, by the way, is like, they all just remind me of like freshman dorm, like smoking. It's just the tone of everything they write. Internet service, they asking if internet service providers should be telecommunications service, which is the heart of the question. Internet service providers do not appear to offer telecommunications defined as "the transmission between or among points specified by the user of information of the user's choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received." That makes no sense. That is exactly what you think the internet does. But their argument is broadband internet users do not typically specify "the points", in quotes, "between and among which information is sent online." Instead, routing decisions are based on the architecture of the network, not consumer instructions.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  That is such a beyond, like, to me, that's beyond the abstraction of how all of us think of the internet. Like, I go to YouTube, I'm like, "I would like YouTube to give me this video, not, 'I want YouTube server 5 located in Mountain View to send me this video.'" I don't think anybody thinks of the internet that way. It, the whole idea of how are we changing the standards by which we judge the conduct? And how are we changing the language by which we describe the network? That, to me, is where I think they're avoiding the issue of, "Does the FCC operate in the public interest?" Like, how should the internet work? How should the average American experience the internet? And if you don't have a lot of choices, then I think we absolutely should make rules about what every internet service provider is required to provide you.

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  Because lots of people only have one choice. And I don't see where that new competition is coming from. Space. Space. We're gonna beam the internet to you. Dieter, I can see Dieter on the camera just staring off into space.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say something controversial.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I actually, I've been thinking about this burden of proof thing.

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  And like, to me, all of these arguments, which get pretty wonky and technical, sort of boil down to, "You know what? If we didn't have the rules, is anything bad gonna happen? Probably not. If something bad happens, we'll deal with it." And we reflexively, or I reflexively, like, "Uh, yeah, no, I don't trust you." One, because I do think something bad will happen. And two, I don't trust you or believe that you'll actually do something about it if something bad does happen. Um, but, the controversial thing is like, you know what? Uh, if... I am perfectly happy to try to have the burden of proof put on us that taking these regulations away could cause something bad to happen. Like, that's fine. I don't, I actually

• 21:11Speaker 01

  don't know rhetorically that it should, because we've already litigated this once, but if he wants to litigate it again and make us prove that if they take these rules away, something bad will happen, um, fine. I mean, we'll do it. I think that that's a perfectly reasonable thing to be expected to do. I think it's not being done in a way that is like adheres to the principle of like charity and honest, you know, discussion and rhetoric. But nevertheless, like, the, I think the thing that is actually like recoil, like makes me recoil about this is that I don't trust that they're asking these questions in good faith. But I like, if someone were asking these questions to good faith, I would very happily like have

• 21:52Speaker 01

  that discussion. And so the, the question is like, do we engage in the discussion about do, if we take away net neutrality rules, will things go bad? Um, do we like, do we want to be like honest, even though it feels like they're asking these questions in a dishonest way? And like, I don't know, I actually am less against being, I don't know, the sucker who like honestly answers a dishonest question. Like, that's fine.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I disagree. I, I, how do I phrase this? All of the big internet companies are now putting out marketing materials that are like, we support the open internet. We believe in net neutrality, just not Title II. Pi has been out there, this thing opens with, we believe in the open internet.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yep. By the way, open internet is an interesting phrase.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a super interesting phrase. It's better than closed internet. Yeah, whatever that means. But you know, they're all out there saying that, right? Like, we know you're worried about these behaviors, and we agree with you, they're not the right behaviors. And then this whole document, this whole, this whole document that seeks to put into the record evidence about what rules we should have, asks questions about whether those rules are needed.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? So the, the starting point of the rhetoric is, we agree that there should be no blocking of content on the internet. Straight up. The carriers have said it, the FCC has said it, this document says it. And then the next question is, that said, do we need, really need a rule that says you shouldn't block things on the internet? You could reverse that and you can say, well, if we all agree, then we're gonna write this rule down and you're not gonna do it and it's not a problem and it's not a cost for you.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Well, I do, I, I don't know.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  Do we need a rule that says we shouldn't murder people in America? Like, we have a lot of those rules. We all know we shouldn't do it.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  I think these are good questions. I really do because, because I think it's important to understand exactly why we have a rule. Cause I, I think to make this a little more concrete and a little, little less theoretical. If you described net neutrality five years ago, it would fairly obviously say that it's bad that T-Mobile makes some videos 480p, but gives you an unlimited amount of them.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Or that some music services are free to stream, but not necessarily all of them. They have to have a, you know, a deal with T-Mobile. And I remember when that came out, it sounded pretty, pretty shady and like, this isn't gonna work out and T-Mobile's probably gonna like pick winners and it's not gonna be good. Instead, what I have now is an un, an quote unquote unlimited mobile internet connection. I haven't thought about my data cap in, ever since I, I switched over to it. Uh, the, the, the, every once in a while, I'm bothered that the video that I'm watching on LTE is not perfectly HD. 99% of the time I'm not and I'm very happy with the situation. And so, you know, going in, in an ideological

• 24:48Speaker 02

  way, this is a thing that a company is doing that sounds against the spirit of a thing that I believe in. And then having experienced it practically, I think I'm fine with the current situation.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  And I, I don't know. I, I think on this show, TC and I have like had the debate. Like I didn't, I don't know how to read T-Mobile's zero rating, right? Like the way that they were doing it was really interesting. The way that AT&T and Verizon do it is not nearly as open, right? They're, they just straight up want cash and everything else is slow and your thing is fast. Right? Like that is how they operate their zero rating schemes. Those are different, right? And like when Tom Wheeler's FCC looked at these things, they explicitly said, "The way T-Mobile's doing it doesn't appear to be a huge problem, but the way these other guys are doing it does appear to be a problem." And you can make that evaluation in the public interest.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  The other thing that I'll note, and I keep coming back to this, the mobile market is not super competitive, but it's way more competitive than the fixed broadband market, right? Like you don't, you haven't had that experience between FiOS and Optimal Spectrum?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  So here, here's a fixed broadband theoretical. Right now, a lot of consumer routers do the throttling and prioritization. They sort of list the ports that they're gonna like, "I'm gonna always keep a little bit of bandwidth for VoIP."

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Um, a little bit of bandwidth for Skype or something like that. Right now, I who configure, no, I don't know. It's my roommate's router. I have my own router and it works fine, but it's, it's leaching off my roommate's router.

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God. Did you double net your roommate's router?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  It's terrible. Um, so like right now-

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  I think I know why your internet sucks.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  In my apartment, if someone starts downloading something on Steam-

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  You can't load a website.

• 26:46Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Like it's, it just sort of, it just breaks because Steam takes all the bandwidth and it's not, you know, our, our traffic isn't shaped and it should be shaped by us with a better router.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Um, but-

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Or just one router that's working, that works properly.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's a long apartment. We need two. You know what? Don't worry about it.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna get you an Eero.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Thank you. Um, but the, uh, an ISP could-

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Offer this service quote unquote like, hey, we'll shape your traffic. We'll prioritize for you.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Uh, and we think you're gonna like it.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  Inside of the old net neutrality rules, that was in there. Reasonable network management practices, as long as they're transparently disclosed. Super okay. Like, there wasn't a, like, the ISPs were like, look, we need to be able to do this. And the rules were, they reflect that. I, I just think the difference is, what if there was a rule saying you couldn't have your own router on that network? What if the ISP said, we'd love to give you a lower price, but you've got to rent this exact router from us? Like, that runs afoul of the no-locking idea. What if they say, we're gonna give you cheap wifi, but you have to buy a, a mobile phone from us? That runs afoul, right? Like, what if they say, only certified, we'll give you the fastest possible bandwidth.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  But only certified devices can connect, can connect to your home network. That is exact, that takes us all the way back to AT&T saying, we're, we're gonna sell you the phones ourselves. And the FCC acted in that case and said, no, people should be able to connect whatever they want to your network. We're just in that zone. And what scares me about these questions, I think, Dieter, this is kind of what you're talking about. Like, these are great questions. They are fantastic thought starters for us to sit around in a coffee shop or bar and talk about. They are not great questions to completely reset the public policy of like billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in America.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And it sounds like the question both of you have is, is FCC abdicating a responsibility to consumer protection?

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Because that is their charter, right? To operate in the public interest. And I, I look at this and, and there's, there's another whole thing here, which we don't have time to do. We got all kinds of other stuff to do. Actually fun things to talk about. But there's a whole other thing here where the FCC is not allowed to like whip saw, right? They have to, regulatory agencies are required to like maintain some stability.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  That would be nice.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  Um, so they're not allowed to just capriciously change their mind when there's Democrats or Republicans. So Pi has to prove to a court, because there's inevitably going to be a legal challenge. It's proved to a court that the market conditions have changed. Such that this policy is, it's required for him to change it. And two, that he went into this rulemaking with that, with an open mind, that his mind wasn't already made up. On the first, it's, you know, hairy, he's, you know, like, people are gonna argue about whether network investment is up or down. There's a lot of evidence on both sides, actually. Um, I think there's more evidence on the, I think the fact that the CEOs of these companies all told their investors that everything was fine and like all full steam ahead, while they all thought Hillary was gonna win is like pretty indicative of the fact that it wasn't a big problem.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  And then he's got to prove that his mind isn't already made up. And he's running around, he, he kicked off this process by saying, this is a fight we're gonna win. And it's like, so you, your mind was made up. So we'll see. Anyway, Dieter, I wanted to talk about your definition of the web, but I think we should probably do some fun stuff.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  It's too late, yeah. You know, you know it's fun.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  How heavy can we go today?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  You know what's fun?

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Vegetables.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  I wanna talk about the web. Alright, well, let's do, let's do this for the, we're gonna go long today. I'm just telling the listener, we're going long today. Wherever you were driving in your car, take the long way. Whatever clothes you're ironing, iron some more. Double irons. Okay, so a lot of you people out there, Vergecast listeners, my favorites, people deepest to my heart, tweeted at me and said what you wanted was Vlad. I did that for you. Vlad was in New York, did not tell me why, but I love seeing him. I know why. Why was he here? He's taking photos of headphones. What else does he do? Anyway, look.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  I mean, you gotta do that in New York. Come on.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  I brought him into the studio yesterday while he was here, and we recorded the Vlad Savov lightning round. So I'm gonna read this ad, then you're gonna get a pure dose of Vlad. Then we're gonna come back, we're talking about some fun stuff. It's gonna be great.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

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• 31:54Nilay Patel?

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• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Vergecast listeners, I have a special alert. Vlad Savov is in the New York office. He's sitting across from me in the podcasting room. Now, as you know, last week I issued a call on the Vergecast for new podcast ideas. I specifically said, "You can't just ask for Vlad. I want show ideas." Many of you failed to heed these instructions and just asked for Vlad. So here he is. He's right in front of me. How's it going Vlad?

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 33:01Nilay Patel?

  So we're just gonna do, we're just gonna do five minutes inside the mind of Vlad Savov. You ready for this?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing in New York? Because I, I don't know. He's just looking at me. He's smiling.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  So my boss doesn't know I'm in New York. This is, this is dangerous. We could tell people that it was fulfilling their request.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  He just showed up.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  And just warm their hearts that will listen. The truth is, I came over to San Francisco, to the Bay Area, to do Google I/O. So I showed our photos for the live blog. I hung out with Dieter and then Dieter said, "Go to New York." I listened.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  And I turned up here. I will describe the trip as a reverse Santa Claus trip, essentially. So, you know how Santa Claus goes around the world and drops off presents for people? I've done exactly the opposite. I've come with no luggage at all, just empty bags, and I'm just picking up gadgets.

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Right? So what I have done is... I've come from California, where you have a ton of really fascinating but small-scale headphone companies. Who, when they ship me stuff, there's all these customs issues that we need to get through. And nobody at customs understands that review unit can go back to the United States. You don't need to pay taxes, whatever. It's a mess. So I just pick things up myself. We, we shot, I don't know, thousands and thousands of photos here in the New York office. We have a professional photo team. So that saves me having to do it myself when I'm back in London. And now I am set with a billion gadgets, mostly headphones, that I have to review over the next couple of months.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, what do you, what do you got?

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Ah, it's fantastic. Um, well, I've got the Biodynamic Xalento, uh, which may be supposed to be pronounced Xalento.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  I would tease them about it, but actually they are really fantastically good in-ear headphones.

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  They cost a thousand dollars. I also have the Fender FX-89, which nobody seems to be aware of. Even Fender have been horrible at publicizing the fact that they exist.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  These are, you showed these to me. They're in-ears, they're like silicon molded, right?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're kind of like custom ones, but not custom. They say that they fit something like ninety-five percent of people's ears. Those cost one thousand two hundred dollars. So, just like Top Gear, I'm giving really hardcore consumer advice, you know? For daily purchases, weekly purchases. Uh, but, but here it is, like a little preview. The Fender's two hundred dollars more than the Biodynamics, but they don't sound anywhere near as good.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  So I could actually make a viable argument for why you would spend a thousand dollars on in-ear headphones with a Biodynamics. And then just say, okay, I'm done spending money on that category of device.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  I would just fall in love with these headphones, because you can do that. The Fender's not so much. They have a very particular tuning, which some people might love, but I feel most people won't.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Uh, so that's in-ears. Uh, I also picked up a pair of Shure SE545 in-ears as well, which are from 2014.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Like, I think the, the pair that, the review pair that I have was made in 2014, and it just kept it in storage.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  That's like Shure's way. They keep one model forever, right?

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you say that, fun enough, but it's called SE because it's a second edition.

• 35:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  And what it did, Shure usually are really purists about their sound. What it did was, people asked them, the same way that our listeners asked for me, and then here I am, uh, people asked them, we need more bass.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Tweet Vlad three times, he shows up in New York.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Exactly. Do it every week.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  So people said we need more bass. So what we did, okay, we'll give you a second edition of the five four fives in ears. And that bass that they have is just gorgeous. Like, it's not too much.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  They didn't like go over the top. They didn't go into beast territory. But it's just to the point where I feel like I love it and I want more.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  And it's because they're not giving it to me that I love them even more.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  I see.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  They tease me.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Okay, this is my relationship with technology.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  Absence makes the heart grow fonder. The absence of the deepest bass.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Right. Well, they go deep. Like, they have extension. It's just the quantity is just right to where I always want more.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  And that that is how a good relationship should go, personal or with technology. And finally, this is the most exciting thing. The Ascent Kern CAN, K A double N.

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  It's another one thousand dollar product. And when I present it to people nowadays, they are like, wh- what is it?

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, you showed it to me yesterday. I freaked out.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. First question is, what is it? Uh, second question is, who is it for? It is a portable media player. They still exist.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Okay, but it it is two inches thick. It has two headphone jacks. It has two S D card slots, two U S B ports. So it has U S B C and micro U S B. Four S D and micro S D. And it has sixty four gigabytes of storage on board. It is a massive, beautiful thing, and it has this volume rocker, which you were even asking me, hang on, is that a fake sound that it's making? But it has a mechanical thing where you you roll it.

• 37:30Nilay Patel?

  It's a loud mechanical click when you twirl it.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  It it's fantastic.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  It's not a rocker. I.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  It's like a it's like a cylinder of ridged metal that is just excellent to touch and hand. It it's good mechanical input devices are league of their own. This is like on a, it's basically the world's ultimate iPod.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Ultimate in every respect. Okay, ultimate in terms of size, ultimate in terms of ergonomics, because it also has physical keys. Um, and that's the other thing, again, purism about this. The, everything else, the back button is a back button. Here is, it's just rewind, okay? You you're trying to tap it.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  I did this.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Because the thing runs Android and you're like, that's a back button. You you're trying to tap it and your and your music changes and you're like, why isn't it going back in the interface? So it has a rewind and a fast forward, hard buttons, play button, home button. That's it. So all physical controls. Okay, first of all, the Android, I think it's something like Android five point something. Yeah. Custom version of it is slow as sin. Yeah. Okay, and the display is not of a high quality. But that's the trouble again with smaller companies, they can't source the high, well, they don't sell as many devices, so they can't source the high cost OLED displays and so on. So that's a shame. I mean, if somebody like Samsung wanted to build a device like this and put an OLED screen on this, I would just gush over it. I mean, I love it as it is.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  And again, when people see it, they're like, but it's so huge and does it even fit in a pocket? It fits in a pocket, yes. The difference with it is when you actually plug in a good pair of headphones. Again, that thing with the biodynamic Zalentos. I I put those on when I was in our San Francisco office. I sat down and I I would just anchor to my seat. It didn't even matter what music I was listening to. I'm listening to MP3s because as far as I'm concerned, if I don't hear the difference just listening to basic MP3s. It isn't that much of an audio upgrade. Yeah. Right? I'm not paying a thousand dollars for something that will make me chase around for flag files and whatever else. I want just the basic. Immediately accessible upgrade for that sort of price. And I'm literally just anchored to my seat. And I'm like, no, I'm not getting up. Like, I've got work to do. I can't. I couldn't. Okay?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  The way to describe it is it's kind of like an accordion with a soundstage. So the way you listen to your music is like right around your nose, let's say, or around your eyes, and then this thing just expands it. And a bit of audio file jargon here is holographic. Where everything is three dimensional around you. So you don't hear just left and right stereo, you hear like a zigzag where the music goes forwards and backwards and so on. I'm just, yeah, it's terrific. It really is terrific. And again, everybody asks me after they find out what it is, they're like, oh, people still make those. Yeah. Uh, the second question is, who is it for? And I can't give you a solid answer other than to say as a gift, this would be terrific. For the person who has everything. You buy them the world's most complicated MP3 player.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Many of us are that person in terms of gadgets. Like, if you bought me a laptop, I'd just shrug and be like, okay, I'll add it to my other ones. Yeah. If you bought me a phone, I'd be like, come on. Come on. It's like buying me socks at this stage.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's switch to phones.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Phones.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  Because you, I mean, again, it's a lightning round. And when I say we are going deep into Vlad's brain, what you just heard was unadulterated feed of headphone information. That's what it's, that's Vlad. That's where he's at.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Nowadays.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  But the other side is phones. You have deep thoughts on phones. You recently wrote a thing called "Google is boring", or "It's time for Google to be boring". What's going on in the Android world? What are your thoughts? You probably use, between you and Dan, you probably switch between more Android phones than any other people I know. Give me, give me your lay of the land on the Android side.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Well, the Android side is the Pixel. I think the Pixel continues to be underrated by most people.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  And I was just having a chat with somebody from Samsung recently, and he asked me, "Why people, why so, why people so religious about the Pixel? What is it about the phone besides the camera?" And I said, "There is nothing besides the camera."

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Nobody's religious about the Pixel as a device. It isn't great in terms of industrial design, its batteries isn't special, its audio, I will tell you, is terrible.

• 41:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  I refuse, like, the Badenomics of Lintos, I do not plug them into the Pixel. It is sacrilege. Right? This is like, the greatest argument for why Apple removed the headphone jack. It's like,

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  I'd rather you just remove the headphone jack instead of giving me this garbage.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Its speaker is bad, audio out of the headphones is bad.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  Is the Bluetooth bad, when you pair Bluetooth headphones to it?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  No, Bluetooth is fine. Oh, oh, good, good example. It's fine unless you cup the glass bit at the back of the Pixel.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  And it just cuts everything off.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Total death grip for connectivity.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  And, and this is-

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  Why isn't that on our website? We got a whole website for stories like that.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Literally the moment this is posted, it will be on our website, okay? So, there you go.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  You're wrong. For once, okay, once, one time, Neil Ipotem is wrong. And we made an achievement.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  I think for your channel, there's others, many other times.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  But I will say, no, you're not giving yourself enough credit. You, you're like me, you're right like 99.9% of the time.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they find that point one.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  And I thank them for it. It gives the rest of us some opportunity to speak.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  The Pixel to me is just a standout smartphone of any kind, okay? iPhone as well. I I could go through iPhone seven today. You know, I have one in my bag as my backup phone is iPhone seven. But the camera of the Pixel is just exceptional. It takes photos I can't take with any other phone. So that's it for me. That is the big decision maker. Then you have the Galaxy S eight, which is for the vast majority of people, the perfect phone. It it is terrific. Like its design is so good, its performance, its display. I I mean, I can't. It's it's camera just isn't as good as the Pixel, but that's it. You have Samsung, you have Google. And I do feel like they have just distinguished themselves on a higher tier than everybody else. Then you have guys like OnePlus who keep doing really good things.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Industrial design wise, they just kicked out this old black version of the OnePlus three T, which is just extremely gorgeous. I mean, uh, massive battery inside as well. I would definitely use that if I wasn't using the Pixel. They just partnered up, I think, with famous camera company to improve their cameras. I think they they partnered up with the XO.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  The the guys who did the benchmark. So that that is again promising for OnePlus. Honestly, Android is kind of a, it's a, it's in a weird situation because the biggest sellers, the what the companies that are growing the most are Chinese and they're firmly focused on the Chinese market. So Vivo and Oppo, the fourth and fifth biggest smartphone manufacturers have doubled their sales over the past year. But almost all of it is either in China or nearby countries in that area. And they just don't make their way out here west where, as I say, it's Samsung, it's Google now with the Pixel. And really, the only other company that I have faith in is LG.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Like around this time last year, I wrote an Android Death Watch and the people, the people, the companies on on the list were HTC, LG and Sony. And just today, we reported that, well, it's gonna be a couple of days ago, once we post this, but whatever. Sony is cutting off its midrange phones.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  To focus on its flagship devices, which, you know, my way of rephrasing the headline is Sony is discontinuing its midrange phones to focus on discontinuing its flagship phones.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  It it it's a dead end with Sony and I I feel like that's the same way with HTC, which is a damn shame because I've loved HTC for the longest time. But they're not showing anything positive. Like, everybody else is moving to no bezels. HTC is like, no, we're fine. We'll have massive bezels on our phones. And you know how the iPhone doesn't have a headphone jack and nobody's in love with that as a feature? We're gonna keep doing that.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know what HCC does except not make enough pixels.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Uh, my, my working theory is that HCC only sells like a dozen phones every month. And then Google said, guys, we're gonna do a phone. Can you cover this for us? And HCC were like, yeah, we got this. But guys, it's gonna be a really popular phone. It's gonna be the first Google phone. Can you cover it for us? It's gonna be a big order. And then HCC thought, oh, so big order, so like 20 phones, Mark? We can cover it. And, and, and nobody like sat down and communicated the whole, we need to produce a ton of these to satisfy demand. Like, the Pixel's biggest problem is that, not being able to produce a problem.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, so, end of lightning round. What is your biggest obsession right now? What, what, what's the next thing that Vlad is obsessed with?

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Well, I'm, I'm still stuck on headphones. I will tell you.

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, actually, let me ask you this. Before, there's a thing, wait, you just talked about headphone jacks. You, amongst our entire staff, were like, this is fine. The future of headphones is digital interconnect. Are you still there?

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I did say the future is digital interconnect. I, I saw the benefits of it.

• 45:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  I saw the potential, but nobody, aside from, like I say, these more niche and boutique companies who are doing their own lightning cables, and sure, the company I mentioned is doing it, Audis led the way last year. A bunch of them are doing lightning cables and when they integrate, uh, the digital to analog converter in the lightning cable, and when they integrate amplifiers into that, they just automatically make the sound better. They don't depend on the iPhone to produce good sound for their headphones. So I see the potential. It would be great if Apple were the ones who are embracing it. It would be great if the hardware manufacturers like Sony, right? Are pushing that, but Sony is actually pushing for better Bluetooth audio, which again, I don't mind, you know? If, if they make Bluetooth audio work brilliantly, the way that Apple makes it with a W1 chip, I'm not going to complain, right?

• 46:32Speaker 03

  I am not somebody who just wants a wire for the sake of a wire. I want it for the sake of the quality. If you can do the quality without the wire, then I'm all thumbs up about it. But I will say, okay, the reason I am stuck on headphones is because unlike phones, there is just an endless diversity with headphones. You know, to me, I have to do this, it's like vegetables.

• 46:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Nobody knows how much diversity there is.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  What is your favorite vegetable?

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Oh, tough, tough question.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  He's really think, I want you to know that he looked down and has lost spinach.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  There we go spinach.

• 47:04Nilay Patel?

  Two years ago it was carrots.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  That's correct. I've moved on.

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, but important Vlad update. We've moved on from carrots to spinach.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  But seriously, with phones, you you see all these lines which are just parallel lines among every company.

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Right? You can't break out of phones like with this Aston Martin can, which is like two and a half inches. I've literally shown it to a phone designer and he's like, dude, I would love to put one of these volume clicky things in my device. But like his device is like tiny.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  It's a piece of paper, so it has no room for it. Right? So phones have a lot of things which just have to be a certain way and you can't break out of it. With audio, with headphones, people are doing these alien designs and every single one of them is slightly different.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  In some particular way. It's almost like a fingerprint. So it's really, really hard for you to just grow bored with headphones.

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Or vegetables.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  Spinach. Have you tried, have you tried the W1 headphones? Are you an AirPods person?

• 47:55Speaker 03

  I have. Um, I am not myself an AirPods person.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  But I totally see the benefit of them and everybody who's using them is just psyched and loves them. So I can see the, I can see the point. Listen, if you're listening to podcasts, if you're listening to radio, meditation, whatever, I'm sure that's great. Me, I'm, I want, like I was saying, the extra bass with the shoes and whatever else. I'm about the music quality. It's perfectly fine for people to prioritize different things. Um, I've used the W1 with the Beats Solar Freeze.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  With an iPhone. And that, that stuff is just stupid how good it is.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Right? Just in terms of range, keeping it always connected, never dropping out. It is super impressive, like every single phone, like if everybody's doing that with Bluetooth, okay? Then we can, you and I can stop whinging about the lack of headphone jacks.

• 48:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  But that's not the case really so far.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. Sony is pushing, right? They're contributing code to Android now to make Bluetooth better. We'll see. All right. This is Vlad free form time. You get to say one thing. Tell the Vergecast audience one thing that they need to know from Vlad.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Low carb diet, out of future.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. That was truly, I want you to know, that was a complete top to bottom Vlad experience. All of it is there. You got it. We'll try to get him to show up in New York randomly and do this more often. That's it. Vlad out. Say Vlad out.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Vlad out.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  There it is. Vlad out.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Vlad out.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  But we're back in.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  That was Vlad. We'll do more Vlad. That was supposed to be five minutes and I'm reliably told that that was in fact 17 minutes.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Also the fact that we covered everything from like Android fragmentation in China to spinach being better than carrots. I don't know that I can give you a more pure Vlad experience every week. I don't know that you can handle it as a listener. But I love that man. Anyway, let's talk about some fun stuff.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Spinach. More spinach.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Well, we're not gonna talk about the web, is what you're saying.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  Dieter did a whole thing on the definition of the web.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  If we're not gonna talk about it, I just think everybody should read it because I feel like it's just, it's just what The Verge was made for.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  It's to draw the sort of person to a place on the internet

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  to have a discussion about something like this that's very important to us.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  I can read this in podcast ad style. Do you care about the future of the web?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  Are you interested in the nerdiest topics about what the web is? Go to my website, theverge.com and enter offer code Dieter.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  For 20% off pure knowledge.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  The title of this article is "And Now: A Brief Definition of the Web", which is a weird way to start a headline, "And Now", but I did it so that anytime anybody from now on needs to complain about the death of the web, or talk about how Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles, or whatever the hell is coming next, is like undercutting the web, we can just end every article with a link that says "And Now: A Brief Definition of the Web".

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  It's great.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm really excited about it.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  We need one of those permanent sidebars that we can do now.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  We could do this. It's a new course feature. We just make a sidebar and you can put it in any post you want forever. Thinking about it. Anyway, fun stuff. Gadgets. Gadgets.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Gadgets.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Paul, you run a gadget blog? I try. All right. Uh, no, some big gadgets. Microsoft had a whole nother Surface event.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Surface Pro.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  The Surface Pro 5. Can I say Panos Panay trolling the entire app by being like, there's no Surface Pro 5? And then putting out new Surface Pro is like, kinda great.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Here's my big question with this. So they're claiming 13 and a half hours of battery life. Partly due to Kaby Lake, also partly due to Windows.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  So how much did they do in hardware versus how much did they do in software? Which is theoretically, I mean, it's good. Every laptop gets benefits of the software improvements.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, are there Kaby Lake chipset features that need to be optimized by Windows?

• 51:53Speaker 02

  No, it's just Windows, not that I know of.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you should also note that they are claiming outsized battery life for the Surface Laptop. In particular, because it's running Windows 10S, which means it's limited to stuff from the Windows Store. Which means that there's a bunch of crap that is like legacy Windows stuff that can like break your battery life. So to me, I mean, I have so many feelings about the Surface Pro. I'm very curious to see how this thing handles Chrome. I'm very curious to see how this thing handles other legacy Windows apps besides Edge. And it's also notable, I think, that Microsoft's battery life claims are based strictly on like streaming video

• 52:39Speaker 01

  or looping video, which is a radically different test than we do. It's a radically different test than a lot of people do. And it could just be that those battery life claims are pegged to optimizations against video. It's not like, it's not dissembling to base a battery test on video. It's a perfectly normal thing to do. But you need to test these batteries up against a multitude of factors, not just something that it happened, Windows happens to have been optimized against.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Cause video has, there's special chips that are only for decoding video.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's interesting, like years and years ago, running video on your laptop was the thing that killed the battery the fastest. And now it is the thing that will make the battery run the longest. Cause they've done so much hardware optimization around it.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  But you wanna talk about trolling from Panos Panay? Let's talk about his comments on USB C.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, before, before we go there.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  They're so good.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  That's great. But also, they're not, they have a whole family of Surface devices now, right? They have a desktop, they have a laptop, they have the Surface Pro. They're not calling the Surface Pro a tablet anymore, they're calling it a laptop.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Well, they're wrong.

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  They're just out there being like, it's a lap- uh, sure, it's a laptop, which I think is fascinating.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  You think they're doing that to screw with like IDC in their like way that they calculate PC sales?

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  That is an interesting conspiracy theory that I now wholeheartedly subscribe to.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Nailed it.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  That is what I think.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  The 12 Surface Pros they sell a year are gonna really bump that number up.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  I wanna, I wanna like create like a special pair of pants with like, with like ridges right above the kneecaps. That's designed to, you know, cause you know that little flap that comes out of a Surface?

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  That is bad for laps. Now it slots into the pants ridges and now it's super great for laps.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Right?

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, you.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Get on that, I could get in the Microsoft Store.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  This really is the complete Verge experience right now. Like 40 minutes on net neutrality and then Paul being like, I want custom tablet pants.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  Laptop pants. Yeah, it's a laptop pants.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  The other thing I'm excited about the Surface Pro is that there's a Core i5 version that is fanless. Um, and the fan on the, I've got a Surface Pro 4 that I, you know, break out every now and then, does spit up more than I'd like. Um, and I love having a fanless computer, so I'm using the, the new MacBook. Uh, the idea that I could have something more like not just a Core M processor, but a proper Core i5 and have it be fanless is very intriguing to me.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  It is definitely the Core i5.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  What's interesting is.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Oh God, what if I'm wrong?

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Because remember when, this is why I was so mad about this, cause I knew it was gonna make our jobs harder.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Oh, that they like, it's, they call it a Core i5.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, Intel rebranded it, some of its Core M processors as.

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, with the Core M wink and nod.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  You know, in the Surface Pro video-

• 55:31Speaker 01

  No, it's Core M3 and Core I. I'm pretty sure it's a proper Core i5.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Okay, cool.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, in the video, they, when they, you know, Microsoft makes these like beautiful videos for all their new products. I love them. I think they're like the most fun to watch. But in the video where they're introducing the new Surface Pro, uh, they like, they're like, no more fan. And they like do like the fade wipe to remove the fan, but then it fade wipes back in and it's like an LTE chipset. And it's like, really? That's where you, that's cool. I'm into that. I love, uh, I, I've never understood why Apple doesn't put wireless chipsets in their computers. And if I have a Surface Pro that has a wireless chipset, beautiful.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Yep. Also, in one of those, either that or the Surface Laptop, I think it's for this one. They use the same B-roll of like diamonds like shooting into the sky in a dome that Movies with Mikey uses in his intros to his YouTube videos.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Fun fact.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay, talk about USB-C. Cause it, like, whatever Microsoft is doing with USB-C right now is very confusing.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  So we know they didn't put it in the Surface Laptop. We now know they haven't put it in the Surface Pro. And I have been pointing out that literally everybody else that matters in the industry is trying to push this future forward. Intel just made licensing for Thunderbolt chips free. They're gonna build it into future versions of their CPUs. Apple's pushing it, Google's pushing it, Samsung is pushing it, Huawei, everybody's pushing it. But Microsoft is like, nope, not for us, it's not ready. And, uh, so Tom Warren, uh, obviously asked Panos Panay about it. And he said, "I love the technology in Type C. I believe in Type C. When Type C is ready for our customers, to make it easy for them, we'll be there." Which, I don't know, that's a little bit mean to your customers. Maybe, like, they got this line that like customers, like, they, they've seen customers with Type C devices, like,

• 57:14Speaker 01

  plug in a phone charger and they think the phone charger should charge their device and it doesn't, and then they're sad. Like, I don't know, man, are your customers that dumb?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  It's a really low opinion of your customers.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but then my favorite, if you love Type C, it means you love dongles.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  We're going to give a dongle to people who love dongles.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Like, the- Like, we're not going to participate in like helping this future happen. We're going to stay with the stuff that people know and understand. But you know what? Screw it. We'll make a dongle because why not?

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't understand.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  He calls it a dongle, not an adapter. It's amazing. I'm so happy that Microsoft is doing this. It's just the best troll.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  How does this thing work?

• 57:53Speaker 01

  It is a, I haven't seen a picture of it, which is super annoying.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  So it's supposed to plug into the Surface connector, right?

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Correct. I think it's a Surface connector and then it's just got like an empty USB port on it.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  An empty USB C port?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  Does it operate at the full bandwidth of C?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't know if it'll support Thunderbolt.

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. So, because the Surface, because otherwise the Surface connector is like the shit.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does a bunch of stuff.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  But I don't, I like, I just don't know how that works. Like I've been.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you can, you can, or you could plug a full hub into a Surface connector, right? Like there, Microsoft is really keen on its Surface hub, which is like, got like crazy display ports and high bandwidth USB C and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you just like plug in the little magnetic wing on the Surface connector and you get all that stuff. So like the connector.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Is that like a PCIe?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Microsoft's proprietary thing is, yeah, it's, I don't know what it is technically, but like it's got the bandwidth and it could do the stuff. And so theoretically, like you should be able to get most of the benefits of USB C through this dongle. The question is like, is the dongle any good? How is it constructed?

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I want. I want a keyboard for the Surface Pro.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  An actual keyboard. Maybe a little battery in it. That's always nice. Some USB C slots.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  So that's.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Logitech, I just gave it to you.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  No, no, but that's a different connector. The Surface connector is the actual fan wing power thing. The keyboard connector is a different thing and I don't know if you can transfer that much data through the keyboard connector.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm saying, whatever, let the keyboard do that. But then you just have a little USB C bus and a little power.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  And click it on the side.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 59:27Nilay Patel?

  Logitech. Belkin.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  How's it going?

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  Bring it, Logi. Logi and Belks.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  No, they're called Logi now. They're, they're a series.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, shoot, they are. Oh, God. I hope Belkin doesn't change its name to Belks.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Belks.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  They have this really bad awkward like hip hop based campaign.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  All right. Yo, yo, DJ Belk.

• 59:53Nilay Patel?

  No, you went there.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  No, Logi and Belks are like, you're like a British thug and those are your two enforcers.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Logi, Belks, get in here.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  Dongles for everyone.

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, uh, Morgan Haggins, this is awesome. I got to see this in action today.

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  DJI put out the Spark drone. It's $500. It's just a little guy. It's like, the center of it is smaller than an iPhone. Obviously a little bit thicker. It's got a camera. It's got four little wings. It folds up. It's real tiny.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  I hear it weighs about same as a can of Coke?

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but no, here's how you control it. Do you see this today when Ben was trying it out?

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't watch it though.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  So you, you don't, you can fly it with an app on the phone. You can buy a controller, but you don't need any of that stuff. You just double click the power button and hold it in your hand and it takes off. And then you take a step back and you hold out your hand and it just, it finds your face and finds your hand. And it just follows your hand around. It's like you're flying the drone with the force.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  It is so cool. Um, and then to have it take a picture, you just put your fingers together and like the classic director framing, like your other hand, you make a little rectangle with your four finger.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Oh, I guess it's audio.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  It's an audio show. So you do that and then you put your hands down and then it takes like four pictures.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  And then if you're outside, you can like fling your hands out and like fly really far away and take a picture.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  You know, this, this made me think, so there's a

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  It's so cool.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  I believe it's an MIT. I should, I'll try to find out for sure, but um, there's a, uh, some college did a, a, like a research project where they, you could program drones to get you a type of shot.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Cause like, there's like storyboarding and there's like the, the language of film. It's like there's closeups. There's like wides and there's like two shots, like where, you know, so like you tell it in advance how you want it to frame people. And it will move around automatically trying to keep that frame even while people are moving. While also not bumping into, and it's just like, because we already have some smarts in our phones that like try to like, you know, like you, you take a bunch of pictures and you get rid of the ones when people are blinking or something like that. And automatic, you know, light detection, but like having, having Intelligence make framing better. As someone who personally cannot frame a photo to save his life is very exciting to me. I like this idea. I'll find out who actually did it.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, I mean, but DJI does a lot. All the drone manufacturers do that now in some way. What's happening with drones is they've got the cameras in the air.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  And now the cameras, and they've added lots of cameras, now the cameras are flying the drone. Right? And they all do like computer vision to do cooler and cooler things. And now they've just gotten to the point where you don't even need a controller of any kind. The drone will just follow you around, but like it literally detects your hand in the air. And when you put your hand down, the lights turn red and just stays where it is. Until you put your hand up again, the lights turn green and it starts following your hand again. Dude, it's wild. I, I, what I think is most interesting about this is like, we just spent the first however long of this show talking about competition. DJI has no competition, but they act like they're hunted. There's like, yeah, there's other companies that like GoPro is like, we have drones. They just fall down like DJI acts like it's hunted.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  They are a company on the run. They're like, whatever. Here's another one. It's smaller. We added more software features. We're doing all this stuff. And unique and, you know, unique has like a big investment from Intel. They got a RealSense camera.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  It's GoPro. They're trying.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  They're trying, right? But like there are other companies out there, but they're DJI is just so far ahead of the market. And they just keep going and going and going, which I think is awesome. Like there are a few companies that I think run that fast and have taken. I think when we first started talking about drones, we all think thought of like the Phantom. Like I have a Phantom four. It is great. I love it. Super fun to use, but it's like huge and bulky and like you gotta manage all kinds of batteries and whatever. Now this thing is literally the size of a phone. The Mavic is basically the Phantom in a much smaller package. They're just making them more and more and more consumer friendly in a way that I think very other few companies are keeping up with.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  It's, I don't know. Like, I think this is the moment when regular people start to have drones in a way that they just start using them all the time. And that like unlocks the next set of things versus. You know, I think we ran that post on like Christmas Day two years ago that was just like dads crashing Phantoms. Cause they're like relatively hard to fly.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  Now it's like, anybody can have this thing and it follows your hand around and takes pictures. That's gonna, it's gonna change stuff. Okay.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  It was MIT, I was right at first.

• 1:04:41Nilay Patel?

  You got it.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Google made the Jamboard. Did you play with the Jamboard?

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  I played with the Jamboard at the Google Next Cloud Conference. Uh, Jake Castronakas went out and played with it in Google's, uh, New York offices slash labs where they intend to develop future products. I, I don't know, it's, it's 5,000 bucks, which seems expensive, but it's still cheaper than a Surface. It basically runs like a big ass Android app and you can do like hangout calls with it. Uh, but you apparently can't send your video and what's on the whiteboard at the same time, which is really dumb. But I don't know, I would love to have one. I, there is no way in hell I'm gonna convince, um, you know, our company to buy a bunch of them.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  I don't know, I, like, we'll see. I think, I think it's cool. I think it looks cute. Uh, I think that, um, it's pretty smart. I think that's gonna take a while to see if anybody really needs it.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm super into it just cause.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  I love, I love dumb silly hardware.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  It's dumb and silly. It looks like a big kid's tablet.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  I think that's the interesting thing, like, the, the collaborative drawing is almost like a tutorial exercise for like web developers learning about web sockets. Like, like, as far as web technologies go, you throw up a canvas and find a way to draw onto it and then you share that with web sockets and all of a sudden everybody's drawing on the same canvas. It's like, it's almost trivial. Obviously it's a lot more work to make it a polished and good experience and to make it look nice and stuff. But like that, that, that software side of this is so trivial and then it's tied to this super expensive hardware. It's interesting.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  You have a victory for consumers.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  What did I do?

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  You got Samsung to issue a firmware.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Oh gosh.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  I haven't issued it yet. You know what, to be honest, like, I feel a little dirty.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  I don't know, like, I don't-

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  Tell the story.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  Then have the emotions about the story.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  So Chris Welch dropped this link in the other week, where he's like, hey, there's like, a bunch of people in this Samsung forum complaining about how their TVs HDMI switching is like, over the top and erratic. And it's kind of hard to tell exactly what's going on, because it's, it's, it's, either the TVs have HDMI CEC features that are, um, like, not possible to disable, even though there are options to disable it. Or there's some other HDMI feature, but basically, when they detect any device waking up, the TVs will switch to that device.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  And certain devices, it's really bad with, um, especially the Nintendo Switch, which somehow is sending this signal to TVs more than it should while it's asleep. It will say, hey, I'm gonna wake up. And so people's TVs will switch to it all the time, and it's really annoying for people. So I just wrote this up, uh, very straightforwardly, and I asked Samsung for a comment. A week later, they got back with me and said, Samsung has been following the comments on our community thread, and we will be issuing a firmware update early this summer that will address this behavior and provide the level of convenience that was intended. So not calling it a bug-

• 1:07:51Nilay Patel?

  A level of convenience that was intended.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Look, that's all anybody's asking for. Because obviously, obviously, this is a good feature. Like, if you turn on a device, a lot of times, that means you want to watch something on that device. But not always, and especially not when it's supposed to be just asleep. Um, so hopefully, this fixes it, and that'll be, uh, that'd be great.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  I think this is like, the parallel of HDMI CEC, right? Like, my Apple TV does this all the time to everything in my stack, to the point where I turned off CEC-

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  -in my house. Yeah.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  So I, I just, I turned on.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  If you breathe on that remote, it's like, what? Me? Here I am.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, it's pretty bad. I've turned on CEC and gotten rid of my Harmony One remote.

• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  At my LG TV that runs WebOS, I actually use that. It's a comedy of errors, but I use that to run everything because it's the best way to get 4K on that TV. And that is CEC controlling everything. But when you have like multiple devices that are all competing for that, it's a nightmare.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  Well, it's weird that CEC is not, as far as I know, on any of the big video cards. Uh, maybe ATI does it, but like none of the good Nvidia cards do it. And I have a 1070, which is plugged into my TV. And what I would love is when I wake up my TV or wake up my computer, it switches over to it. And I've been thinking more about the whole, um, I don't want to rehash last week, but this whole, my whole problem with Google Assistant and it like didn't, I, I just want to have a conversation with Google Assistant. It's like, yo, Google Assistant, I know you know about Chromecast. Tell me how you work with Chromecast and we can Chromecast better together.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  But what I really want is, is, is basically if I could say, hey Siri, or okay, Google, switch. Sorry, sorry.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  Paul just went on his phone.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  If I could say one of those magic words, my, um, TV would switch to what I wanted to watch.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Like if I want to watch Chromecast, I could just talk and I'd start watching something on Chromecast, which is in my TV. And then when I'm done and I wanted to switch back to my PC, I want to have to go find my remote and switch the input. That's literally all I need for my remote. The only thing.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  You can do that if you like live in a CEC world.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  With Chromecast.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you have to, it's another like ecosystem. Look, here's my point. People were mad on the internet.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  Paul, Paul, well, you noticed. The Verge wrote an article. Samsung's engineers have to write it for a month.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  That's all you really need to know.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  I don't like that power because I don't like that responsibility.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  I think we should use that power all the time, like required firmware update of the week. Our new series.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  That's, that's good. That's good.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  The intended level of convenience.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  If we can constrain this to, to, to firmware updates that would provide the level of inconvenience that was intended, then please hit me up on Twitter.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Can we, can we call this series, "The Intended Level of Convenience"?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Okay. Last, well, I'll do this one fast. I want to call out Nick Stat, who wrote, I think we talked about it on this show ages ago. Anker is like this quietly powerhouse company that sells everyone's batteries in Amazon. And I was like, we should promote that Anker. Nick went and did it. Talked to the CEO, talked to a bunch of people who work there. They, that story is great. You should read it. It's basically a bunch of ex-Google engineers who had played around in the Amazon marketplace and their, and their first product was laptop batteries. Second product, a replacement battery for the HTC Sensation. And there's a quote in the piece where they're like, "Yeah, our battery was better than the OEM battery." And he's like,

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  "That got us a lot of attention." And it just took me back to a time when like a replacement battery for the HTC Sensation could like launch your company.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, you should read it. It's a great, super happy Nick got it. It's a great, he did a great job on it. Go read that. Last, I know even around this, Paul, Heim Gartenberg reviewed the Acer Predator 21X, which is a $9,000 laptop.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Which he would bring to meetings.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  He brought to meetings. He took it to a coffee shop.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Like the method version of reviewing.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  Where he would, he'd bring it to meetings and he'd like take notes or be writing posts while we're having a meeting and it'd just drown out everything with his typing on the mechanical keyboard. But yeah, it's a crazy machine.

• 1:12:21Nilay Patel?

  You gotta watch this video. There's a scene where he has it in a coffee shop and the woman behind him doesn't know what's going on, just staring at him.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  He's like drinking coffee and typing and like doing his voiceover and the woman behind him is just like huge eyes, just like, what? What are you doing? Anyway, he said it was unnecessary, but he ended on, I think, an important note. The world needs these things.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  Someone's gotta go over here. All right.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  Totally agree.

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna read another ad. We've gone way over. I just really wanna, quick, Paul, you brought up TVs and how they work. I just wanna point out something carriers are doing. All of them are doing TV things. So I'm gonna read this ad, we'll talk about that real quick, and then we'll wrap this thing up. We've gone way over. It's been great. This really is like an OG Vergecast. When they used to run like two and a half hours for no reason.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  There's no limits.

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  No limits. It's the internet.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  It's only, only the limits we place on ourselves.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  Also, whatever the carriers say that we can and can't do.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  This episode of the Vergecast brought to you by Tile. What if you could find anything in seconds, Paul?

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  Live that life. Now with Tile, the tiny Bluetooth tracker that makes finding your things easier than ever, you can do that. Simply attach Tile to your keys, your wallet, your laptop, even your bike. Anything you don't wanna lose, finding your things is super easy. Just open the free Tile app on your phone to see your lost item on the map. Then quickly find your item by making your Tile ring. It'll be back in your hands in seconds. And if it's your phone that's missing, just double press on the Tile to make it ring, even if your phone's on silent. Every day over 2 million lost items are located with Tile, so join the millions who have used it to help find their lost stuff. And you can get yours today at gettile.com/verge. That's gettile.com, all one thing, slash verge. And save up to 30% per Tile on a multi-pack and you get free shipping.

• 1:14:00Nilay Patel?

  And because Tile makes a perfect gift, for a limited time, you get a free gift box with a multi-pack order. So, go to gettile.com/verge. Check it out. Find your stuff. That's gettile.com/verge. Okay, so Paul.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  Every week?

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Every week. I do a segment. It's called Vroom Vroom Goes the Car.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  And actually, it's two guys this week. I hope that's okay. Sorry to mix it up.

• 1:14:30Nilay Patel?

  The show's just going long today. Just get it.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Vroom vroom goes the car.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Vroom vroom.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yes. Well, so, so there's a Vio Z. It's so hard for me to divorce Vio from Sony because it's like half of what Sony means to me. But anyways, Vio, a random Japanese company, made a Mercedes Benz edition of a laptop with like-

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Did you just call Vio a random Japanese company?

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot behind that.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  I know. I know there's a big story.

• 1:14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  But it's not Sony Vio.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Vio.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  Vio. They made a version of their Z Flip laptop that has all this Mercedes Benz branding, which is egregious and it's gross and then it all-

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Like Porsche made a laptop recently.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. Nobody wants it. But the startup noise is a vroom vroom. It's really a car making-

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  A vroom vroom.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  It makes a, like a vroom, like it's a gear shifting car, which is funny because like their flagship image that they want to put on this laptop is an electric car. But anyways, it's, it's a car, car noise when it boots up. I think that's funny. But also this Sphero Lightning McQueen, have you guys seen this?

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks dope.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  So Sphero did the-

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Even though I hate cars and that whole Pixar property.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  I'm getting this from the whole office. I feel like Cars is at least a mid-tier Pixar movie. But it's like a lot of people's least, I don't know. It's got like words of wisdom from Paul Newman in it. It's a great car. It's a great movie. The first one.

• 1:15:57Nilay Patel?

  I read somewhere recently, I read this long thing about how Pixar's fallen off.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  And one of the lines was Cars is by far the worst Pixar movie.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I don't get.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't understand it.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  What's worse than Cars?

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, to say that Cars-

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  No, like planes. Like they made a fucking movie called planes.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  That was a Disney, that was a Disney movie.

• 1:16:19Nilay Patel?

  That was Disney?

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. My point is that to hate cars, you have to hate the underlying premise, which is that the movie Doc Hollywood is bad. Because it is basically the movie Doc Hollywood. And I refuse to admit that the movie Doc Hollywood is bad. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  Stay strong.

• 1:16:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm here. I'm here for it.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  I like Cars better than Toy Story 3. So, just put that out there.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  I don't know about if I can stay with you on that one.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  But this, this car is real, this, you gotta, you just have to go look at it. Look for Sphero Lightning McQueen. Because it's, you, you think it's gonna be an R C car, but it's like, it's like animated. It's crazy.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it moves around, it does some stuff.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, the mouth moves, the eyes blink with like an LCD. It's great. Check it out.

• 1:17:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, a little bit, a little bit of a TV related lightning round and then Vlad does another forty five minutes. That's not true. Uh, just three headlines. I just want to put them out there. Uh, the Verizon, the CEO of Verizon confirmed the company's plan to launch streaming TV service. Uh, you can now use Alexa to control Dish Hopper DVRs. This one's interesting to me. YouTube TV now supports AirPlay. They still don't have an app on the Apple TV. You can AirPlay the Apple TV. And then the CEO of AT&T, which is buying Time Warner, was like, yeah, when we get done buying Time Warner, uh, you know, we'll like reconfigure things for mobile. Like, maybe we'll just do like twenty minute episodes of Game of Thrones, because that's what the phone people want.

• 1:17:40Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which is like a headline you can read in a couple. We had a big argument about it. Like, he was just offering an example. He wasn't saying, we're going to make twenty minute episodes of Game of Thrones, but he was definitely like, this is the sort of thing I want to do. Uh, and he also said at this investor conference, we're already thinking about how to curate that library and turn it into mobile stuff. So maybe it's not Game of Thrones. It's definitely other Time Warner content. That's a lot of how do we watch TV? Where does it come from? What does it look like? News in one week? And my sense of it, and this relates all the way back to net neutrality, the big mobile carriers are all trying to become TV companies. That's their move. They own these big networks. They want to program TV on it. They want to charge you for it. They want exclusive content.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Funny about this is we spent most of like the late aughts, like oh, five to two thousand and ten, watching a bunch of broadband providers and TV providers, thinking they could get into the mobile space. They still do it from time to time, but like, you know, Dish had all sorts of stuff. They bought a bunch of Spectrum. I think Comcast was buying Spectrum and like, they were trying to get into that and they couldn't. And now the wireless carriers are like so rich. They're like, well, actually, we're gonna go do your stuff now.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Well, and even like rewinding further, the, the, um, this is something Tim Kelly talks about a lot, like, when people first heard of the internet, like, oh, we'll have like newspapers and TV channels on the internet. Yeah, well, that's ridiculous. Like, that's not what the internet is. It's, it's loosely, well, you have to read, um, Deena's piece to know what the web really is.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  You know, it's it's linked information, you know. So the idea of sitting and watching a TV channel is so antithetical. And I hate it personally. I I don't want I don't want TV. If you call your thing TV.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  I thought you meant the internet. I was like, oh, boy.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  No, if you call your thing TV, I'm like, that's immediately like one thumbs down. And maybe you've made such a great thing that the following subsequent thumbs ups.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Bring me to find a way to watch it on my own terms. But like, you've already biased me against it by calling it TV. Because TV to me is you creating a stream of information that you think some generic person will enjoy. And I'm a cool, unique. And I I like, you know, I like some of my favorite stuff right now is basically funded by Patreon.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Like, stuff that is is like, the fact that someone pitched something to a television network and went through that whole process and got a hundred executives to decide that this was a good idea means I probably think it's a bad idea.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  I I don't know. I think this like this TV moment is it's just fascinating to me. The cable companies for so long denied that cord cutting was happening. And now it's definitely happening and impacting their businesses. Like ESPN is going under because fewer and fewer people are paying for ESPN.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  That they're trying to there's something valuable about TV. But they're trying to push it into these other spaces. Or somewhat less interestingly, just deliver TV over the top. Like, download YouTube TV and you can watch just straight up TV with the DVR. I don't know. I think they're just missing something really important about what people want out of the internet. And like, how you can compete with it. And I I the YouTube TV thing to me is fascinating that they didn't just put an app on the App Store.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Nilay Patel?

  I have a I have a lot of guesses as to why, because they have an iOS app. And it's not that hard to take an iOS app for the phone and put it on the Apple TV. But I bet they want people to sign up right from there and Apple wants to take a cut. Or Apple wants to do its own TV service and they're restricting exactly what YouTube TV can do. And so these endpoints of how does a big screen work? It's just, it's getting more and more and more complicated. And then you have the CEO of AT&T being like, but what if we take the stuff for the big screen? And make it for the small screen? And it's just, it's just wide open chaos.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  So here's a funny thing, uh, you know, I, I've used PlayStation View, I've used, um, the DirecTV stuff, whatever it was. And I switched over to YouTube TV because I was like, oh, like they did a DVR properly. It's like up in the cloud where I want it. Uh, and it, you know, works across more devices and like, this sounds great. This is exactly what I wanted out of a TV service. They might not have all the channels I want, but this is what I want. And you know what? I barely use it and I definitely like, every time I think, oh man, I should like get this show in my DVR. I'm like, why the hell would I bother going through all the work of trying to find a show and make sure that it's saved properly in my DVR? When instead what I could do is just get it on demand or get the best parts of it on demand on, you know, YouTube breakout clips.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Like it's all this work to take a bunch of like TV metaphors, especially the DVR metaphor, and convert it to, you know, a 2017 world. Turns out at least for me to be like a, just a total whiff. Like just give it to me on demand like Netflix does, or don't bother me.

• 1:22:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, but then you get run into things like live events, right? Like, where do those go?

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  That's why I'm staying subscribed is so that I can watch like five things a year, which is insane.

• 1:23:03Nilay Patel?

  Basically.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 1:23:05Nilay Patel?

  I will say though, on the flip side, I do sometimes enjoy just sitting down and be like, what's on? And like, that's fine, but it's a pretty minor thing in my life. Anyway, my point is it's chaos, exciting chaos. We should probably do something. I'm just going to pitch more story ideas on the verge.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  We are doing something, we're doing something.

• 1:23:23Nilay Patel?

  We're doing something.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a secret.

• 1:23:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, if you're a competitor to The Verge, you heard nothing.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. My version of what's on now is, is Twitch.com.

• 1:23:32Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  Maybe just do something on Twitch, like just live stream you all day long.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  I would love that.

• 1:23:37Nilay Patel?

  The Paul Show.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've been looking for more time to play Factorio. You need like long interrupted sessions.

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:23:45Nilay Patel?

  The intended level of convenience with Paul Miller. Now streaming on twitch.com. That is The Vergecast. I would like to thank our producer, Andrew Marino, for all that he does. Including editing this nightmare together, which he's gonna have to do. But there's other stuff to listen to. Sadly, none of them are Verge podcasts any longer. There's back episodes of The Vergecast. Listen to those. Those are great. There's back episodes of Control+Delete. Seventy-five of them.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  Listen to all seventy-five. In a row.

• 1:24:13Nilay Patel?

  Do that, and then I would like the listeners to submit me a one-page essay on common themes.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, what would you say the narrative? Like, I like, I've found a couple podcasts in my life where I've like, found them, loved them, and had to listen to the back catalog.

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  What would you say the narrative? Or just one of the themes that someone might get from that story?

• 1:24:36Nilay Patel?

  From the seventy-five episodes of Control+Delete? I actually just went and listened to the first one again, like, we didn't know what we were doing. So, they've gotten much longer. That's one part of the narrative. The other one is Walt's desire to tell stories about what came before. I think it went up as the time went on, because there's so much about what's happening now that's in infancy, that relates to how products we take for granted now were once in their infancy, and Walt saw all of that evolution. So, I love doing that show. Can't thank him enough for doing it with me. Go listen to that. Like I said, we're doing one more live episode of Control+Delete. Dieter's gonna be in town, he's gonna be on it. It's June 9th, New York City.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Dunk Tank.

• 1:25:16Nilay Patel?

  School of Visual Arts. I'm gonna build that dunk tank for you. June 9th, School of Visual Arts, 6pm, live Control+Delete. Soon as I get that ticket link, there'll be a post on the site. We'll tell everybody about it. We'd love to have you to come. Get to hang out with me and Walt and Dieter afterwards, it's gonna be super fun. There's also other podcasts to listen to, they're wonderful. Lauren Good, talented, wonderful senior editor, who's too embarrassed to ask. Walt's gonna be on that one, actually, soon. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode, which is super smart. My favorite, because I'm a media nerd, Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. Go listen to all that, it's all on iTunes. There's a new iTunes Vox Media page that shows all of the Vox Media podcasts. Go check that out, rate them all, review them, get into them. And we, next week, will be at the Code Conference. It's a fact.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Total fact. Big, big names at the Code Conference.

• 1:26:03Nilay Patel?

  Big, big names. Hillary Clinton, first big onstage thing happening at the Code Conference.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  Andy Rubin's gonna be there.

• 1:26:10Nilay Patel?

  Andy Rubin, a lot of rumors, some news from the Rubes.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  They have tweeted that they're gonna make a big announcement on May 30th, which lines up with the Code Conference, which is very interesting.

• 1:26:20Nilay Patel?

  Indeed. Return of the sidekick.

• 1:26:25Nilay Patel?

  But we'll be there, Recode will have all the coverage, of course. We'll have highlights for the consumer audience over on the Verge side. And we'll be doing a podcast from there. Casey, Lauren, Dieter and I will be doing... If you listened to last year's Code Conference Vergecast, it was pure nonsense. We're gonna try to do it a little better this time.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Are we?

• 1:26:43Nilay Patel?

  We'll see what we can do. And then it's WBC, so crazy few weeks ahead of us. But we'll be back next week. Thank you for listening. That is Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:26:52Nilay Patel?

  Snip.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Vroom, vroom.

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  Snip. Goes the night.