Pixel, Nintendo Switch, and new MacBook Pros

This week at The Verge has been a busy one! Reviews for Google’s Pixel phone are out, Chinese tech firm LeEco just announced a plethora of new products coming to the US, Nintendo finally showed us new hardware for their games, and Apple is teasing a new Mac event for next week. Even Tesla had a few things to say. Nilay, Dieter, Paul, and Jordan cover it all on this week’s Vergecast. 02:27 - Google Pixel review 24:06 - Masterclass ad 27:24 - Tesla 39:27 - Hello Fresh ad 41:26 - LeEco 54:21 - Nintendo Switch 59:27 - Apple’s upcoming Mac event Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  You're my guy. What am I doing? I'm 28. Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast. Ah, trolled on my own show. What?

• 0:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Oh, it's hello, not hey. It's hello, it's not.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Sup?

• 0:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. Here we go. Just another episode of the Vergecast has stumbled to a beginning. Yeah. But this is it. This is the show. It's the Vergecast. We talk about technology. We talk about culture. We talk about Chinese companies launching 10,000 products in one Mm-hmm. fateful day. Mm-hmm. Pretty good, pretty good product announcement. We're gonna get into all of it. But anyway, I'm Neelai Patel. I'm here. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bohn, San Francisco. How's it going, Dieter?

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Hey, it's going well. I'm, uh, I'm there.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  I didn't mean to imply that your name was fully Dieter Bohn, San Francisco.

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, anyway, Dieter's here, and Jordan Golson is here, live in New York.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I had so much fun last week doing it remotely, I decided to come here and see what it's all about.

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but we're actually gonna talk about cars with you this time.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Not just burning Galaxy Notes, although

• 0:58Speaker 01

  We could talk about them, too.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  President Obama, just as we went to air, was giving a speech about Obamacare, and he's like, "You know, something's broken. You don't just throw it away. Like a cellphone, when it comes out and it's broken, you know, they fix it if it has bugs. Unless it's on fire, then they have to take it off the market."

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what, what are you saying is the problem with Obamacare, dude?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Even the president of the free world is burning Samsung for their Note disaster.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  It was like an incredible moment. He was like smiling. You know, there's, there's like sassy Obamas out now, because it's over. Hmm. He's just in a good mood. Hmm. He's like doing finger guns all the time. All finger guns. All finger guns. That was like the look on his face. He was like, because he's given the Obamacare is like a broken cellphone speech like 100 times. Okay. Like, this is, this has always been his thing. He's like, "It's a tech product." Go get it fixed. When you roll out a tech product, what you do, you upgrade it, you fix it, data, like, this is his, like, line. Okay. Right? And then this time, he, he got the big Obama smile, and he's like, "Unless it's on fire!" Ah!

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  It was good. Anyway, we're not sadly here to talk about Obamacare and metaphors. I mean, maybe we are. Do you want to just do 90 hot minutes on Obamacare?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Please, no.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Can we?

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, I will tell you, if that is the thing you're interested in, listen to The Weeds with Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias and Sarah Cliffe, because they do that basically every week, but don't, we're not going to do that here. What we are going to talk about here is a bunch of tech news.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  It was actually a busy week.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it kicked off with something we should just immediately get into. Dieter, you reviewed the Pixel.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Home run.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  Home run, says Dieter Bohn.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Home run. That was the 11th hour metaphor that we came up with after many, many, many other bad metaphors.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, my suggested headline was no more excuses, which Dieter and Dan thought was too negative.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Huh. Well, on our, on our beautiful homepage, which you can find on www.theverge.com, we are able to put up multiple headlines, whichever ones we sort of feel like. And no more excuses was 0.05% less clicked than home run. It was neck and neck.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  Positivity wins.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  That's right. So it's a phone that's made by Google. And there's a whole lot of people coming at me saying, no, it's made by HTC. Yes, HTC owns the factory that made it, I guess. But like, Google says they designed it and they came up with all the ideas behind it. And I don't know, I think it's good. The camera is, that's like the sign. It's like the canary in the phone mine. And it's really good.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  The software is fast for Android, but it doesn't quite, it's hard for me to like compare it to the iPhone. Like, there's this whole thing where like, the iPhone just like kicks the shit out of Android in every single benchmark. But does that really matter or not?

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Thing. It's funny how iPhone people three years ago tell you, or Apple people anyway, would tell you that benchmarks don't matter and specs don't matter. But now the Pixels come out, all I'm hearing is a lot of, but it's not waterproof. And it doesn't have two speakers and doesn't have optical image stabilization. And it doesn't do as well on Geekbench. So clearly it sucks.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  These are all things that you like told me not to worry about three years ago.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  We should go back and find the number of people who commented in reviews of like old HTC phones that had Boom Sound. Remember Boom Sound?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Boom Sound.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  Boom Sound is what really sold a lot of phones for HTC.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  But the Apple, the Apple people would be like, who needs stereo speakers when you're just going to plug in headphones? And now they're like, we have stereo speakers. It's slightly more inconvenient.

• 4:33Nilay Patel?

  By the way, both Jordan and Paul have their iPhone 7s on the table here. Both with permanently attached. Both permanently attached iPhone dongles.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Dita, can I ask you like a maybe kind of a wonky, hard to answer question about the camera?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Cause I always felt like Apple kind of won a lot of camera tests just because it just kind of put a little more saturation in there. Like a great, great cameras and then their default settings were pretty saturated. I've seen a lot of comparisons that have the iPhone pictures much less saturated than the pixel. So are the pixel photos just absurdly saturated or just like actually true to life?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Uh, so I would say they're a little bit more saturated, but it's actually like really complicated. So the, the thing that you look at most of your photos on are on the screen that you took them with and the pixel has a very nice OLED screen and so colors just look more saturated on it, period. And so when you, you know, offload them and look them on a screen, they seem a little more saturated on the screen itself, they seem way more saturated. And then Sam Byford actually talked to the camera engineers about what decisions they made when they were, you know, deciding how this camera was going to interpret stuff. And one of the ways that this thing works, especially since it doesn't have optical image stabilization is whenever the camera app is open, the thing is just taking photos just all the time.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  It's all it does is just taking photo after photo. And when you hit the shutter button, all that does is mark a moment in time and tell the phone, hey, take the last four photos that you just took, or six, or eight, or however many, and compile them together and make an image out of them. Uh, and just do that. And because they are automatically compiling together a handful of photos, you know, basically in HDR, but it's not just straight up bracketed like HDR. They argue that they don't need, they are able to in low light, accept more color and be a little bit more daring about allowing color in low light situations where other cameras that don't do that, uh, need to be a little bit more cautious about putting color in low light.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  All of which you add together and the Pixel, I think, is in fact, a little bit more aggressive at showing colors than an iPhone. And some of that is just like preference of what they think people will like to look at better. And some of it is sort of like, I don't know, look at how good we are at coming up with innovative ways to make a camera work.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the way I see it, I think there's like a, there's kind of a moment in time with photography now where it is so subjective and about taste and what's pleasing. And Apple, when they did the 6S and we were doing briefings, review briefing for the 6S, they sat me and Walt down at one infinite loop with one of their camera engineers and they showed us at length, in detail, on like huge displays, here are iPhone photos and here are photos from an Asian manufacturer we will not name. And Walt was like, is it Samsung? And they were like, we don't know. And we're like, it's Samsung. And what they were really into showing us was that the iPhone is tuned, this is their claim,

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  it's tuned to be biased towards reality, right? It's going to capture real things. And if you want to filter reality afterwards, you know, there's a wide variety of tools in the iPhone. Whereas Samsung phones, when we're like 100% sure it was Samsung phones, they do so much more processing, they smooth out skin tones, they will do more, they will pull, they will artificially pull light out of shadows. And you can see it, right? And I think what's really interesting now is people like that, right? Like consumers really like that. And the idea that what you want, and this is what I think, what I want is a camera that produces the most natural image it can, and then I'll make a bunch of decisions. But what a lot of people want is a camera that already made those decisions for them. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna edit this.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  They just want good pictures.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  They just want good pictures. And so like, I keep thinking, I had a bunch of friends visiting a few weeks ago and it was like raining outside and we couldn't go anywhere. And I had two friends and they just sat on the couch for like, you know, 40 minutes while we waited for it to stop raining so we could go outside. And they were just, they had the, basically playing with Snapchat filters. And they got to the one that likes the beauty filter and like both of them were like, why don't, why don't all my photos look like this? Like, why, why doesn't my phone aggressively filter my photos from the jump to be like this Snapchat filter? And I was like aghast, right? Like, no, what you want to capture is reality.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Someone was telling me that-

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm not, I'm not any fun at parties.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Let me get really high minded here. Cameras don't capture reality, right? Like, it's not- This is why Teeter's on the show. Apple is making a decision. It's not like the iPhone like literally captures your soul and any other phone that is like doing more aggressive processing on the thing is like affects making a, you know, a cyborg version of it. They're all artificial like visions of what the thing was and they make decisions. Like, if you look at the literal, literal raw sensor input from an iPhone, it is just as bonkers as any other thing because these sensors are fundamentally tiny. And so Apple's, you know, saying we're biased towards reality. It, to me, it's like, yes, it is slightly more accurate on like whatever scale we're going to talk about.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  But like, so what? Yeah. I kind of don't care. Like, I'm not out there making documentary films about the precise color temperature of the bar that I'm in. I'm taking pictures of my friends and I want them to look good.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I think that's just a question. When I say we're in a moment of time, it's like, it's an inflection point where what we think camera, like all the cameras are just as good now. I mean, that's the big takeaway here. The Pixel camera, the S7 camera and the iPhone camera, they're better and worse on like a different set of metrics. But like you average it out and they're pretty much just as good as one another.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  And it only took Android five years to get there.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  But I'm saying unless you have a seven plus where you can like do the zooming and like the port, like, but that stuff is the next turn. Right? Like portrait mode is in beta. Maybe it'll work great. Maybe they're going to do some other stuff with it. But that's the next turn. Like the baseline now is pretty equivalent. And I think the big question is what do we want these cameras to capture by default? And Apple's answer right now is a set of decisions that we believe is as close to true life as possible. Other people's, like Google's decisions are basically like real plus, like we'll make a bunch, we'll do, we'll pre-edit the photo for you.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:53Nilay Patel?

  Like the thing that you would do to your photo if you edit it well is kind of where the pixel lands. And Samsung is like, do you like filters?

• 11:01Speaker 03

  I mean, you could almost argue that humans see in HDR kind of by default because we're kind of compositing a bunch of samples that we take

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  of small sections of our field of view. Like what Dieter said, what is reality?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  That's where you want to smartphone your new conversation.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  I remember what Dieter said, are we here right now for sure?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I'm not. I'm telling you right now, I'm not.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Once you post the photos on Facebook, can you tell the difference between an iPhone or a Samsung or a Pixel, the way most people are going to use their phones and share their images?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  I sincerely doubt it.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Never notice.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  One of my favorite like things over the weekend was I know a bunch of reviewers who had the Pixel and their reviews posted and then they started reviewing which photos over the weekend they had taken with the Pixel.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  And it was like, you can't, you just can't tell.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you, if you go to theverge.com again, Sean O'Kane did a comparison between the Pixel, the S7 and the iPhone 7. And the small versions of these photos, you really almost, I definitely couldn't, I can pick with each one, I can typically pick which one I like the best, but I couldn't tell you if I didn't have the labels which was which.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Was it the same phone every time?

• 12:10Speaker 03

  No, it's not. It's usually the Pixel.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  It's usually the Pixel.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Interesting thing about Sean O'Kane and that, those articles, Sean actually really hates the HDR on the Pixel. He much prefers the standard mode, which Google doesn't give you by default every time you open the camera app, it goes to the HDR auto mode. So there's a lot of, like, he was getting better, more quote unquote pleasing results by turning it off than leaving it on, but that's also, I think, in part because Sean's a really good photographer and knows what to do to get good photos, whereas I'm a really shitty photographer and I want the camera to figure it out for me. I do want to say though, that like, I don't fully buy this whole argument that it doesn't need OIS because the software is magic, like. Yo, when I'm in low light, I'm getting pretty blurry photos from time to time if I'm not like

• 12:59Speaker 02

  holding it super steady.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, so that's, that zooms out to like the broader question I think I have with the Pixel. So I have one, I've been playing with it, I don't have it here for some reason, but it's, this is the first one, and it's just my question, I think it's the hardest question, and no other Android manufacturer, save Samsung, has done a good job with this, ever, is, is this the base they're gonna iterate on, or is this, next year, they're gonna come out with some totally other product, right? Because if you take the base of the Pixel and you say it's almost as good as the iPhone, you really are just a few iterations away from being better along some other axis, right? Like, if you add OIS to the phone, Dieter, I know you like the, Dieter was pointing out that the polarization on the screen is like diagonal,

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  so it like works well, but I, so like, that's like, to me, it's, I can see it in a different way, like if you tweet, you know, you make the screen, like you just make it better.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Right, well, you have like an engine, like, for Google to next year this time, come out with a substantially better phone, they need to be almost done with that phone right now.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right, and so like, Dieter, do you think this is like the foundation, or is this just a product, and next year it'll be like another product? Because I can't, we don't know yet with Google, and only Samsung has done that.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so, Google, first of all, hasn't committed to saying that next year it's gonna be a Pixel again, they might call it something else, so that's one indication. And the second indication is, they have a hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, who, you know, came over, he was at Motorola for a super long time, and I'm sure he has his own opinions about what the phones ought to be, I know he wants to stay at the high end, but, you know, we were saying, like, he started, what, like, March, April, somewhere in there?

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  So like, they were definitely working on this phone before he came in, so whatever they do next year, like, if he, maybe he actually hates the Pixel, I doubt it, but maybe he wants to go in a slightly different direction. My sense is, like, they'll build on this baseline, like, I think they like the basic hardware ideas, and I know they like the basic software ideas. For me, the big question isn't, will they be able to keep up or surpass the iPhone in terms of like raw hardware quality? As long as they're like, in the same time zone, it'll be fine, as long as it like feels like a decent, well-built phone and like... Matches most of the specs, it'll be fine.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  The big question is, what can they do on the software side to convince you that living in Google world is better than living in Apple world or in Samsung world? With Samsung world, I think that like, yeah, nobody wants to live in Samsung.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  Samsung world is on fire.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  So, so, so one thing, one, one thing about that I noticed was I tested it out with like the verge test account. So like, you know, it didn't have anything on it. It was just the most, it just looked so boring and barren. And I pulled up in the assistant and the assistant, you can get to the assistant settings from inside of assistant, but they're not part of the main Android settings. So that even felt a little tacked on to me like.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  I do not understand, and Dieter, you talk about this at length in the review, and we were screwing around with it in my house, like the assistant is on the screen and you have to hold down the button to get it, but then there's the Google search logo at the top and you just tap on it and it opens and you can just talk to it. Those things are just wildly disconnected and they have different capability sets. So like you can ask the assistant what song is playing and it's like, I don't, I can't do that. And then you click on the Google button and you're like, what song is playing? And it like opens its Zerzan clone and like just tells you. That makes zero sense to me. Oh, Google Now is still floating around in there. Like, that's what I mean by like, it's a couple of steps away. But like, is Google committed to, you know, is Sundar gonna sit in a room with like a whiteboard and be like, okay, we have Google, we have Google Assistant and we have Google Now.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Which one's gonna be like, are we gonna kill Google Now? Like, someone has to do that and I just don't know who it is or when it's gonna happen.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  I mean, right now, I would tell you that everything's gonna get folded into the assistant. They just, um, they haven't done it yet. I think that the way that the assistant is probably architected at a relatively deep level, they can't just tack on every single feature, they need, just need to make it work. It's sort of like the Tesla stuff that happened yesterday, like the, they put in all new, well, we'll get into Tesla later, but like, I think the assistant fundamentally works a little bit different than like that other Google stuff. And so they couldn't just put the features in. That's a really charitable read. The less charitable read is like, this is, this feels like typical Google, like, hey, we made a new thing, it's sort of like the old thing. Well, but we can't kill the old thing yet because the new thing doesn't do what the old thing does. So we're going to ship both things.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  You look at, you look at the four, there's four different ways to get to Google. There's ALO, Assistant, the search button, Google Now. There's Maps, if you want to search Maps, you know, other searches, whatever. And then you look on the Verizon phone, if you want to send somebody a text message, there's messaging, there's Verizon, whatever the hell it's called. There's Hangouts and there's ALO. And in fact, in some Verizon phones, they actually like have Hangouts there, but disabled by default to like, I don't know, make you use, yeah, I'm serious.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  There's also Go90, let's not forget Go90, the best preload of all time.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  But like, Google,

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  Shout out to Go90.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  It's supposed to be their opinionated phone and they do not know what their opinion is on messaging. So they just have four different messaging apps on the thing, four. Like, that's, that's insane. And like, whatever, it's like they're shipping their org structure. And the org structure with Google Search is like not clear. And so there's four different ways to get to Google Search on this thing. And they don't know what the hell, you know, they, they are afraid of pissing off the carriers. And so there's four different messaging apps on this thing.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Well, my ideal would be is that they would use the Pixel as a prism and look through it to see what their org should be.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Soon our standing at the all hands meeting, the Pixel, 100,000 Google employees.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  I heard this great podcast, you guys gotta check it out. The Pixel is, is a prism.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm doing it like an AR mime.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  Like Soonar is like looking through the screen of the phone in AR. And it's like, your division has been canned.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Hey, Paul, do you, do you like the like, the heft, like the weight of the Pixel?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm trying to,

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so are you like a really big fan of like, of like how, how it feels like, like in your hand in terms of weight?

• 19:35Speaker 03

  I want to make a noise for you real quick.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Would you say that you're a Pixel density enthusiast?

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  Nailed it, home run.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  I knew you were walking me down a road and I just didn't know where I was headed. That was great. No, listen to this.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  Can you hear that?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Hear that?

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  You just gotta put a case.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I hear something.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  That's the camera bump noise.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's a phone.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  The phone that should theoretically, it's not hard to make a flat object. It's like, that's like day one of wood shop.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  Paul, it's everything it has to be and nothing more.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  It's, a phone does not sit flat on the, on the thing. If they just made it thicker, they could add

• 20:15Speaker 01

  A little more battery.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  So much battery.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  Paul's talking about his iPhone, by the way.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm talking about the iPhone seven. They made it thicker to match the camera bump.

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  The design reveals itself to you.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  It can have so much battery. And you said you got wonderful battery life with the Pixel.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I got it on the Pixel XL. I, I'm getting really good on the Pixel, but not like holy crap good. But Walt did not get great battery life on the regular Pixel. He got like fine.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  I also think, yeah, just a slightly thicker phone than the iPhone seven is just a little easier to hold. It's just more comfortable. It's just.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  It's so obvious. It's boring.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  It just makes sense. Jordan and I are just hanging out with our.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  That's ridiculous.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Can't do this with a Pixel.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  What do you guys think of the, what do you guys think of the price?

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  It's fine. I mean, like, my takeaway is there's only two phones worth buying right now. There's the iPhone and the Pixel. They should probably, that's fine for them to be the same price. I do not think that you should buy anything else. Unless you need to buy one.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Unless you can't afford it, right? Unless you need a cheaper phone.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but I'm saying like, at that point in the market, those are the only two choices and fine. If you need to buy a cheaper phone, there are several good cheaper phones to buy.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Buy an older Samsung or iPhone.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or, I mean, all the other manufacturers get heavily discounted by the carrier.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  There's almost a statement to the price where if they made it cheaper, like they'd still be in this, like the age of, well, yeah, but at least it's cheaper or something like that.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  But here it's like.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  They're head to head.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  To Neil's headline, no, no more excuses.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  No more excuses. You're in the game. I'm excited. I think this is good. It's good for the whole industry. I think if they get it right, and this thing is indeed just the foundation, then their foundation is arguably as good as the iPhone. Where Google will go is they build on that foundation is very different than what Apple, than where Apple will go. Apple have some real competition that will make them improve things. You know, Walt went on like an hour long tirade, two episodes of his podcast to go about how bad Siri is. Like if Assistant gets good and it's the future of Google and they put all that effort into it, Apple has no choice but to improve Siri because they'll get.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  Compared one to one. The camera competition is cool. I, it's just in general, like, I'm happier having Google one to, in one to one competition with Apple than Google mediated through Samsung. I honestly, I do not know what Samsung's next move is. I couldn't tell you. What do you think?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I mean, they gotta, it's still, they have to tell us what the heck happened and they haven't done it and maybe they'll never know. They'll be like, I don't know, our phones keep catching fire. We can't figure it out. Sorry.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  But until they do that.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  The next, the next round of Samsung phones, it's the only question anyone's gonna ask.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Or they'll just pretend it never happened.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  It's gone from Note to Samsung and like, it's creeping into Android in general a little bit, the fear about this exploding. Like, I don't know that there were the single review of this phone that didn't make a joke about exploding phones.

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, not a single one.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Well, and Samsung is like nickel and diming people on refund. So yeah, they're, they've definitely not contained this to the Note. They've made it about their whole company.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  President Obama, sometimes the phones explode. It's like, it's out there.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  I mean, they're, they're, it's gonna cost them billions and billions of dollars to recall this phone and refund people and everything and they're nickel and diming over people whose phones actually caught fire. And being like, well, we'll give you replacement cost on your carpet, not cost to buy new carpet.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And it's like, guys, it's like a couple thousand dollars. They're shooting, you know.

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, there must, there's somebody, there's like a, there's, what is it? Like an insurance person? Actuary? Is that who that is? Or is that just a calculator dying?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  The.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  An adjuster. That's what I'm thinking of.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. The person who comes out and looks at your stuff.

• 23:43Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, you know, he's in the office and he's, you know, got the spreadsheet.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Just doing his job.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, I bet that person's just like, well, they already hate us. What's the value in them hating?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  You know, they're not gonna buy our phone again, so forget it.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. Here's your burned carpet swatch. Get out of here. All right. That's terrible. I'm sure the Samsung insurance adjuster's a nice guy.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  His name's Tom. You're doing good, Tom.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Thanks, Tom.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Let me tell you about MasterClass. MasterClass makes the world's greatest courses by bringing you the world's greatest instructors. They're dedicated to finding the best in the world, the visionaries, rule breakers, leaders, and champions, and turning their wisdom into a legacy that the entire world can share. To do that, they brought together a team of world-class educators, engineers, and artists, and they're crafting innovative online courses that connect instructors to students and students to each other in a community of devoted learners. Let me tell you about these instructors. You've got Aaron Sorkin, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Serena Williams, Warner Herzog, Usher. Usher, man. Yeah, man. That's my Usher impression. James Patterson, Christina Aguilera, Annie Leibowitz. Here's how Aaron worked on his class. They brought in Aaron Sorkin. He created his first-ever online screenwriting class. It contains 35 lessons spanning six hours of video, a downloadable workbook, the full

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  screenplay to A Few Good Men, class events like screenwriting intensives, and three interactive rate and review assignments where you upload your work and get feedback.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  I was not aware of this Usher aspect, by the way.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, man. Sorkin's course helps students learn all about the craft of screenwriting and write their own screenplays. Aaron covers his rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell. He also analyzes scenes from The West Wing and leads a group of students in rewriting the opening of episode 501 of The West Wing.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  It's a great episode.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Great, finest episode. So when you purchase MasterClass, you own it. You get lifetime access to all the course content, plus access to community events and student groups where you can collaborate and share your ideas with classmates. The classes are on-demand, so you can take them whenever you want, at your own pace, and you can re-watch as many times as you like on any device for life. For an exclusive clip of Aaron Sorkin discussing how he writes dialogue, go to masterclass.com/theverge. That's masterclass.com/theverge. We've also got some very complicated codes for you to apply on a cart page. If you choose to buy any of these things, which I encourage you to do, just enter neely_everge or friends_of_everge_1 or friends_of_everge_2.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I like that last one.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  Get a free class code. Yeah. Underscore two.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the one.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Tweet me which one you pick.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  I'm curious to know which code is your favorite.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but MasterClass, Aaron Sorkin, you're all doing it together. We're all friends. You're gonna rewrite the intro of episode 501.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was immediately following Zoe's kidnapping and Bartley evoking the 25th Amendment, temporarily giving up the presidency.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  It's a big cliffhanger. Did you call him Bartley?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Bartlet.

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  Bartlet.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Bartlet.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Charles Barkley invokes the 25th Amendment.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Seen half of one episode of West Wing.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say this.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  I'm really not the target.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Also, thanks for the spoilers. I'm rewatching.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  No, episode 51, this is why he's doing it with the students, is this huge mistake that he made where Charles Barkley invoked the 25th Amendment.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  President Barkley.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  That's why you gotta pay attention to your scripts, because the typos, they go all the way to the screen.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  President Barkley's like, "Charles Barkley, why are you here?" He's like, "I'm invoking the 25th Amendment."

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Terrible. This joke is terrible.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, MasterClass, you know, a number of words underscore the verge underscore one. Anyway, we're back to our show.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Thanks for sponsoring.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  This is what they buy.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Your money's worth.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  What they buy is the chaos. People listen to it because they know we're gonna screw it up, I think. MasterClass, you're great. I'm taking your, I heartily endorse your product. Anyway, let's talk about Tesla. Jordan, you're here. A bunch of Tesla news last night. Let's get into it.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Um, so Tesla did a delayed announcement that finally came out yesterday. Elon had promised it earlier in the week and then delayed it because I think he's, he needs like 19 days in the week and only has seven to work at his three companies. Um, so what Tesla did is they have announced that all the cars that they've built since last week, um, are including new, uh, advanced, um, autonomous drive capabilities. And basically, uh, Elon says they have all the hardware required for the car to completely drive itself in any situation.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And. Which is full level five autonomy, right?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yes, level, level five autonomy according to one scale, which is level four autonomy according to the SAE scale, which is all very confusing. Um, but basically the car should be able to, once the software is done, drive itself in any situation. Now, it can't do that yet. We're, we're, you know, two, three, five, 10 years away, depending on who you ask. But he says, if you buy this car today. In three years or five years, when the software comes out, it will be able to drive itself. You will not need to upgrade anything.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  So that's cameras, sensors. What's the hardware package?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  So it includes a number of things. There are eight cameras for 360-degree viewing at up to 820 feet of distance. So basically, it can see in every direction for a long way, just like your eyes would. There's also 12 ultrasonic sensors, which are looking for objects in the environment around you. And what it does is the camera sees something, and then the ultrasonic sensor will verify that it's a thing, like perhaps a truck in front of you.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  One hopes.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yes. They say it will. And then there's also a forward-facing radar that can see through things like rain and fog and dust that maybe the visual cameras can't see. And they also say it can bounce radar underneath the car in front of you to see what's in front of it.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So...

• 29:15Speaker 02

  That's really awesome. How does that work?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Basically, the radar shoots radio waves forward, and they reflect off things. And so what it's doing is it's shooting radar underneath the car that bounces off whatever the object is in front of it and comes back to you.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  It's a bounce shot.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  That's classic radar bounce shot.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And so what they say is that the radar could notice the car in front of the car in front of you braking before the car in front of you even reacts to it.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Hmm. Wow.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  So the car in front of you might rear-end someone, but your car won't, because the Tesla will know that it's stopping.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  That's pretty awesome.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Is what they say.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  My favorite part of what he announced yesterday is all this stuff is coming, and they'll turn it on when it's safer than a human driver. But the way that it knows if it's safer than a human driver is all Teslas are going to be running this autonomous self-driving software in shadow mode.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yes. It's a very good Elon Musk code name for something.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  So basically, what it's doing is the car is going to be recording everything that's going on around it. All the video camera stuff is going to be recording all the time. And what'll happen is that if you get into a car accident, Tesla can recreate, well, what would the autonomous mode have done if it was in control? Would it have avoided the accident? And I bet a lot of the time, the answer's going to be yes, because a lot of accidents are caused by human error or distraction or whatever. And the goal is that they can take that data and take it to regulators and legislators and, in effect, elected officials and say, "Look, our autonomous is safer than human drivers, so make it legal for us to use it."

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  I have to say, one, it's brilliant. Two, that is ice cold.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Right, like, like, we're gonna put software in this car that would prevent a crash. We're gonna go ahead and let you crash, so we get what we want from the government. That's nuts to me.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  And I asked him about this. I said, you know, the whole argument is that he's saving lives. Autonomous cars literally save lives, so we need to do everything we can to get them in the hands of everyone. And so I said, well, you know, if you're doing that, are you gonna enact these technologies? Whether the government says it's okay or not. He's like, well, no, we can't do that because it would be illegal. He has to convince the government, and not just the US government, but the EU and everybody. Look, you are literally killing people by not letting us put this software in our cars.

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  And he's saying this on the call to media. Jordan was on this call.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and well, that quote-

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a whole different thing.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  This is a whole nother quote.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well, this is where he's at.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  So we'll get to that.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So, so what this quote you're talking about is that he's talking about negative stories about autopilot.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And how the evil media-

• 31:49Nilay Patel?

  So you're, yeah, there's media.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  It's us.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  It's rigged.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Sorry, Elon.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  Here's the Elon quote. He's saying this to a group of reporters. "You really need to think carefully about this, because if, in writing some article that's negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people."

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  Next question.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  By the way, the pause between "you're killing people" and "next question" was like four hours. Just like, just like stone cold.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Well, I had to recover from what he just said.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of reporters was like, do, do we-

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Do we quote this?

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  Am I murdering someone now? What am I doing? Uh, I mean, I get it.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got a point.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's no doubt that having a robot drive a car is, the robot's not gonna get sleepy, or be drunk, or the, the, the whole list. Not distracted.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  The next time the Tesla software fails, instead of like, Elon Musk has like, more fanatical Twitter fans than any other executive on the face of the earth.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  And so the next time that- We write about something failing with Tesla's software because we're gonna do it. Instead of, hey, you don't believe in the future, we're just gonna have everybody on Twitter literally calling us murderers.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a move.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Well, it's gonna be that, but it's two things. One, it's, you know, for a long time, you couldn't prove a negative.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  You know, all you knew is the accidents that happened. You couldn't talk about, well, think of all the accidents that didn't happen and it was all anecdotal. Except now, he's literally going to have evidence that says, we could have saved 500 lives last year.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I guarantee you, this is some, this shadow mode is like an Elon Musk, like, hot tub innovation. Where it's like Elon and Kimball Musk. So at Code Conference, you know, he went on this extended riff about how we live in an alternate reality. And he had this line, where he's like, I think about this so much, my brother and I, my brother and I had to ban it from, as a hot tub conversation topic. Which is an amazing list of things.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  What else is on that list?

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  To create a list of banned hot tub topics.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Does he have it on the wall and they like fill out a new thing?

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  It just implies a level of success that like, no human will ever achieve. Like, you are not, not in my.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  I aspire to have a list of banned hot tub topics.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  I started working on one immediately. I stopped covering the event, I opened SimpleNote, I was like, here we go! Fake it till you make it! But you know that he's like, sitting in the hot tub with like, Kimball, his brother. He's like, how do you prove a negative?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Record everything that happened.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  Then he took a long toke of his perfect Tesla vape. And he was like, shadow mode.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  This makes sense right now.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Aren't all vapes Tesla vapes?

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  Tesla coil vapes.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Attempt to get this legalized and, and acceptable and mainstream. I understand this, but is there going to be a point where people are like, you know what? I don't really like that every time I do something bad with my car, or good with my car, and Tesla disagrees with me.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It tells the government.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Elon Musk goes to the logs and shows everybody a recording of what I did.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Like, like, there's, there's gotta be a point, like, if you walked into the Apple store and was like, no, I totally didn't drop it in water. And then Apple's like, well, actually, we have a video of you in your kitchen dropping it into your sink. Yeah, they do it with a little sensor.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  But it's just a little.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  Series of dark.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  It's not like thousands of eight cameras.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  It's not like your phone is constantly recording what you're doing through the front-facing camera. So you can be like.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  That we know of.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Where did you drop your phone? It wasn't in the pool.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Like, there's gotta be at some point where we don't want Tesla to replay everything that happens in and around its cars.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. Well, that, well, the information that Tesla collects from Shadow Mode be something that the government can subpoena?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Because they can already do that with the crash mode. A lot of cars now, well, when you get into a crash, it knows, did you apply the brake pedal? It knows how fast you were going. It knows if you were, had your seatbelt on, and they can already subpoena all that info.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I would, I would go back to Dieter's point, which is people who buy Teslas are like fanatic about Tesla.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? He's not rolling, he's not running around to every car on the road installing eight cameras, right? It's just his products. If you're buying the Tesla, you're like opting into this choice.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  And I bet those people are as excited about self-driving cars as anybody.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  So I think it's the same as Apple, right? He's counting on a really devoted customer base to help him make this decision. And that's fine.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Which will be fine until next year, when the Model 3 comes out and they're trying to sell 500,000 a year. Because right now, you have all your early adopters and, okay, they know what they're getting.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  But the next group of folks, you know, if my mom tries to buy one.

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Is she gonna be excited about the car recording everything going on around it at all times?

• 36:35Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's just like a world in which maybe.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  And they don't, maybe they don't care.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  I was thinking about this a lot with the Pixel, right? Like, the thing that we didn't talk about at all with the Pixel that Apple bring up is like Google collects more information from you.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  And like, that's a privacy concern. I think Joanna's review in the Journal pointed out, like, if you don't want iMessage and you don't care about these privacy issues, like, the Pixel's a great phone.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  That was basically your conclusion. Dieter's conclusion was much the same. Like, if you have iMessage, you're gonna be annoyed.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  But nothing is real.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, I also say that, like, it, Google's not doing quite enough with that information to justify it. They need to do more. The assistant needs to be a little bit better to justify how much stuff they're taking.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  I've been thinking a lot about this information collection, and I was kind of hit the point where I'm like, I don't, I don't.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  I've definitely been of the-

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  You have nothing to hide. It's, I mean, maybe I do, maybe, I mean, I always say, Google and Facebook, really good at surfacing photos I wish I'd hidden. Right? Like, man, I had some bad hair 2001 to 2005.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  If I have an opportunity to opt in or opt out of your data collection, and I trust you as a company to be good at keeping it private-

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  Then, then I am totally fine with it. What I don't like, the way Tesla does it, it's like, let's go to the tapes. Like, remember when we were driving, we were testing a Tesla, ran out of battery? I don't know all the details of the story, but-

• 37:57Nilay Patel?

  They got mad at us and they ran back the logs.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  They ran back the logs. Like, anytime Tesla disagrees with you, are they gonna run your logs and call you out? Like, I feel like Google's not gonna do that. Like, Dieter, like, could say, like, "I asked Google's assistant to do this, and I phrased it like this, and Google's assistant was like, 'I don't know.'" And then Google's like-

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  Playing the tape.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  "Let's go to the logs. Oh, you actually said this, and you said it wrong, so it's your fault."

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I mean, currently, people are already perfectly happy to trade privacy for convenience-

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  If, you know, Google or whoever. Think about what people will trade. "We're gonna trade privacy for your life."

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  And that's basically what Musk is arguing.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think, I think people who buy Teslas are like, excited about the cameras, they're excited about giving, handing over control to Elon. Like, he's got that in his brand. If Chevy was doing this, I think we'd be having a much different conversation. Right? And like, the question is, is this gonna spur the rest of the industry to do it? And it's already happening in some ways, right? Like, every insurance company will sell you an ODB adapter that like, plugs in and like, monitors you and keeps your insurance rates low if you don't drive like a jerk.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  What if a company called Le Echo-

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Would do it?

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  Are we transitioning?

• 39:12Speaker 03

  I don't know. I just thought I'd try that. Le Echo.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Let me read this, this next ad.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Is it a lay ad?

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  And then, we should talk about Le Echo. We should talk about Nintendo NX. We should do a little bit of MacBook preview, because it's all happening.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  What a week.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  At HelloFresh, they want to change the way people eat forever.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  They believe everyone deserves honest, natural, delicious, healthy food. They celebrate fresh ingredients in making magic in the kitchen. They know there's a chef in everyone. They think food brings people together, good food allows you to live long, and great food lets you enjoy every bite of life. They're learning and growing every day. They never give up, and they strive to make people happy. That's why they started the HelloFresh movement. So whether you're a busy professional couple, a large family that runs at breakneck pace, or someone who simply wants to start cooking more, HelloFresh makes it easier, faster, and healthier than ever to enjoy the experience of cooking new recipes and eating together at home. From creating the recipes and planning the meals, grocery shopping in the evening, delivering all of the pre-measured ingredients, HelloFresh delivers right to your door so you can skip the trip. HelloFresh currently offers customers a classic box or veggie box, and it'll be launching a family box soon.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  Customers can order three, four, or five different meals per week for either two or four people. New recipes are created every week. They source the freshest ingredients, measure to exact quantities needed, so there's no food waste, and they employ a full-time registered dietitian on staff who reviews each recipe to ensure it's nutritionally balanced. And it's all delivered to your doorstep in a specially insulated box for free.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  I'm looking at some of these meals. It looks pretty good.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Phantom pork tenderloin.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  It's a ghost.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yogurt marinated chicken.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  Flies itself. Anyway, for $35 off your first week deliveries, visit hellofresh.com and enter code VERGE when you subscribe. That's hellofresh.com. That's the code VERGE.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  I wish we cooked together more.

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  We should. I love cooking. It's my favorite thing. I cooked for Dieter this weekend.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Let's do it on the podcast.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Huh?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Just have a little hot plate in the middle.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  I smoked ribs for like eight hours. It was great.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  They were phenomenal. Or apparently my new favorite word, they were stupendous.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  Stupendous. Yeah, Neil's stupendous ribs. Your next HelloFresh recipe. It doesn't take 30 minutes.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  Buy a smoker. They ship a smoker to you, especially insulated box. Anyway, Laco.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Lei Eko.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Lei Eko.

• 41:30Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you went to this event.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  It stands for ecosystem.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  I would say.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Lei stands for the.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  Normally, we would not cover many of these products, just to be clear. But the spectacle and hype with which they were introduced at this event was something to behold. So do you want to walk us through it?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we had to like, start it off. Lauren wrote a really good, what, who the hell is the Eko? Piece. And then they got on stage and they're like, who the hell is the Eko? This is a company, they're a Chinese company. They make a bunch of TVs and phones and like

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  They bought Vizio.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Stuff that you'd expect. They bought Vizio and now they're saying, hey, we're coming to the US in a big, big way.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  It started out, started out as kind of like a Netflix of China.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Right. And so they announced.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  They were Lei TV.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. They announced like a streaming service, but it's only in their products, but it's not really clear. And they've got a bunch of partners, but they wouldn't tell us who the main partner was. And then they told some other stories. They like showed all these like weird charts and graphs of how they interact with their customers. They have this thing that they call UP to you, up to you, where they like collect customer feedback. Just like this.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  What does UP to you stand for?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Up to you.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  No.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  It's up to you, what we make.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  It actually stands for something.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it stands for something. They're like, but I like to think of it as up to you.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like user, man, I don't even remember.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  There were so many acronyms. There's EIO, they've got their own.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, EUI.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  EUI. Yeah, EIO was from the song.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  There's EI, EIO.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Old McDonald was on stage.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  It was like a really like, it wasn't like Samsung weird. It was just like, I don't know. It was just weird. But like, they wanted to like convince Americans, Americans.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  La Eko, that they were a big deal and that they were going to like be in our lives real. And so they announced a bunch of stuff that like you could theoretically go buy, but and we could talk about every single one of them. There's a phone that's like a cheap version of a Pixel.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  It's called.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Snapdragon 821.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  The La Pro 3. Which.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  There's, yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Where's the two and the one?

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say the. The phone runs a super custom Android skin, the EUI.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  Which has a persistent button on the screen at all times.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Where your home button should be, except that there's like a physical home button or anything anyway.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  That launches their video service.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  So like, just always, you're just one click away from watching Leaco Vision or whatever it's called.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  I don't know what it's called. I was there at the event. I have no idea. Anyway, so there's a phone. They launched some TVs, you know, a big ass TV that's got HDR, Dolby Vision and.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  A great line, a great line when they watch the TV, when they watch TV with it, it's 84, 85.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  85 inch.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  85.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  85 inch TV that like, your games will be bigger than ever before. It's like, that's true of every TV. It's bigger than the one I have. It was incredible.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  It also has the new streaming service. There's electric bikes, the superbike.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Up to you is user planning to user.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  What does that mean? Okay.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, there's a bike with an Android phone built into it.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yep. And lasers and speakers and just stuff.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  100% buying that bike.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  I would say, I would say my big takeaway from this is that you could get possibly very astonishing TV for $4,000 after rebate.

• 44:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  That's kind of.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Well, is it a rebate or is it like a credit to buy stuff from their streaming service?

• 45:04Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  I think it's a credit to buy stuff or to buy a superbike. If you bought a TV.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Or to buy stuff at lemall.com because they're not actually, they don't have carrier partners. They don't, on Amazon. They want everybody to go to lemall.com to buy their shit, which is like, okay, but why?

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  You gotta sign up for like their customer affinity thing to get the discounts.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  So they also announced a VR headset that they explore, whatever.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  We're all burying the lead right now. We're all like, trying to work, we're trying to get all the garbage out of the way so we can talk about the really exciting part right now.

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  The car, the Lassie?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  The car and the, the car and then what happened with the car. That had a great headline.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you were there. I just, there was like a

• 45:49Speaker 02

  So the CEO finally comes on stage and we all put on our translation headsets.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Who, who, who, the prior executives are almost like mythologizing in the run up to him.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yes. He run, he, you know, jogs up the, the, you know, the ramp, uh, gets on stage and starts basically apologizing for 20 minutes about how he wanted the car to show up on stage and drive up the thing he just ran up, but it couldn't happen and he's very sorry, but there was an accident on its way here from LA and it like broke the car and, uh, it wasn't the car's fault. He really wants it to be here, but he couldn't. And then we were going to try and get this other car that we showed off in Beijing, but we couldn't get that. But we do have another version of the car we actually wanted to show, but it turns out that it's in London because Michael Bay has it. And then he, we cut to a video of Michael Bay, like saying, "I got the car. It's going to be in another

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Transformers movie. Sorry about that. Uh, see ya." And then he like talked for another 10 minutes about how, oh wait, just kidding. It's actually here. Here's a plane. I'm going to just show you a weird video of a plane landing. Um, and like they got some version, I guess the Bay version of the car, but like he literally had to go on stage and delay us for like a half an hour so that they could get the car into their like showroom outside in their little hands on area.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  I mean, he had a whole thing. He's like, you can see, we really wanted to have the car. We built this driveway. There's a garage, but Michael Bay broke it. It was just chaos. Anyway, they have a car. It's a silver car. Jordan, you're, you're a transportation reporter. What do you, what do you think of the Lacy?

• 47:28Speaker 03

  What kind of car is it?

• 47:29Nilay Patel?

  I believe it's called the Lacy Pro.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  The Lacy Pro?

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Are they aware of the hard drive company? Cause I feel like the hard drive company, which by the way, often makes This is Lacy. Oh, it's a lot. Well, I mean,

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Lacy?

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  It's Lacy. I always pronounce it Lacy.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Is it Lacy? The hard drive company often has hard drives designed by Porsche Design. There's a lot of confusion in the air. Anyway.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  So my big question about this car is how real is it? Because like I saw it and I'm like, yeah, you, you made a really cool, big concept.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  It kind of looks like an Aston.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Am I crazy for thinking it kinda looks like an Aston?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  No, if you look at it from the back, like this, this picture, it's very Astony there. Which is interesting because Laico has a strategic partnership with Aston.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Oh, there you go.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Which it may be or may not be related, I don't know.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Well, there's that and there's also Faraday. So like, explain all of this to us.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  So, as best we can understand, so there's Laico, which is attempting to come out with its own cars. And then Faraday has taken investments and has a strategic partnership as well, but is a separate company entirely. They're doing their own thing, creating cars, reinventing how we own cars, whatever is they're doing. And then Aston Martin has a partnership with them to basically take over their infotainment system eventually. And, and you know, their screen will be in Aston Martin cars starting in a few years, something like that. And so this, it seems like they're saying, we're going to launch a new car company and come sell cars in America. And this is their first foray. Here's what it's gonna look like. You know, it's going to be autonomous.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  They say it's going to have lights on the outside that will tell pedestrians what mode the car is in, if it's being driven manually or autonomously or whatever.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's got some like insane, like Knight Rider style stuff on the grill of the front of the car that runs across the whole car that like tells you, like, it's like, it's blue, so it's in automatic mode.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we've heard similar ideas before for autonomous cars for sort of how they communicate to pedestrians. Because you know, if a person's driving a car and you're a pedestrian, you can look at the person and make eye contact and know that they saw you and probably aren't gonna run you over. But you can't do that with an autonomous car. So that's something interesting that we've been looking at. But, you know, it's a concept car. And as far as we know, Dieter, did they give any indication of when it's coming?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  So, it's a concept and they say they wanna come sell it to us and maybe they will someday, or maybe not.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So my read on this, and Dieter, you were there, and Paul, you were watching and covering a lot more closely than I was, but...

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  This is a company that has been very successful in China. They have a ton of money.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  And they rolled into the US. They spent a ton of money lining up partners, paying for their car to be in Transformers 5.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Flying in journalists.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  Some journalists presumably.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Not us. We paid our own way to be there.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  Like we always do, much to our own detriment.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  The other journalists are eating free steak all day.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  I'm not saying all of them, but there was definitely some.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  They had really good food at this event that I did not eat, but it looked delicious.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  You know what's delicious, Dieter? Ethics.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  Produced fresh by a registered dietitian every day.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  I walked into the press room, like fighting through just insane crowds. It was so crowded. Walk into the press room and there's literally, I'm like going down to do work at like, you know, one in the afternoon to like start putting up pictures of cars. And I sit down and a waiter like tried to force a Budweiser on me. He's like, here's a Bud. I'm like, I don't, I don't want.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  It wasn't in America?

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was very weird.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  He's like, you Americans like Budweiser, right? But anyway, they have, they have a partnership with like Lionsgate. They showed a Matt Damon movie for some reason that I don't understand.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  They produced it.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  They have a ton of money, right? Like just, and they're spending all this money to.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  On the wrong things.

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  To make this like beachhead into the, the US market. And that's great and fun. And like, you know, their press events are like huge events and that's always fun because weird things happen. But like, is this gonna work?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Well, no, they're, they're, they're buying all the wrong things. Like ZTE, Huawei, and now Laico are all trying to break into the US market. And all of them are just like, look at what Samsung did. They got super tight with the carriers. They like paid their dues with the carriers for a few years. And then they went big. They kowtowed to the carriers and they spent a buttload of money on TV advertising. That's how they did it. And none of these other companies that are like trying to follow what Samsung did in the US, like are reading that playbook at all. And it's baffling to me because it's really obvious what to do. And nobody's doing it because they think that you're going to go to buy it on Amazon or you're going to go to lamal.com.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Isn't this the company that just acquired Vizio?

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  But none of their products are Vizio products.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I do think they should have used the Vizio brand and that would have made this a little simpler because all the. Or Lay.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It'd be easier to say.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  But, okay, but there is an aspect, though, that we all dock companies like Huawei and even Samsung for having insufficient ecosystem.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  To have like a really strong, like have muscle in the market. And so I feel like from this company's perspective, from Layco's perspective, it's like, well, we gotta do, you can't just come to America with one great product and get people to be into you. You have to have everything. So we need to bring our Netflix. We have to have our phone. We have to have our bike. We have to have our VR headset. They have music. They have Lay app. They have Lay Viddy, which I watched the whole thing. I don't know what Lay Viddy is. There's Lay View, which I don't.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  There's Lay, of any conceivable noun, there's a Lay.

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  Damn it, Samsung had this, right? They had milk everything, like milk music. And they had to shut it all down. Milk music just shut down.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  It's like crying in the streets, hundreds of people across the world.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  I don't think it could possibly work.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  But I don't know how else you, I mean, you do like the OnePlus thing, just have a cheap super phone.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  And this company could obviously do that, but they just clearly don't think that's sufficient.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm, I'm excited to see them, you know, I just like spectacle. I'm excited to see them just burn money and crazy things for a while.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  It's some good spectacle.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  And like Samsung can't do that right now.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  And look.

• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  That's why we counted on Samsung. They burn other things, not money.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  I do think it's important.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  Heyo.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  It's important to note that this company is bringing us a movie where Matt Damon defends the Great Wall of China from dragons.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Okay? So let's not forget that.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready. I just, a Chinese company showing up in America with a French name.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Gratitude.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just, maybe they should have changed the name of the company before they rolled into America.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause you know what Americans love?

• 54:17Speaker 03

  The French.

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's move on. Couple more things to talk about Nintendo and X.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:23Nilay Patel?

  Or the Switch. Which I have to say, it looks crazy. It looks like something I doodled in a notebook in middle school. As a dream of what I wanted.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  I'm so hyped for this thing. I'm buying the hell out of it.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm definitely buying one.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  I want one.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  But so, let me just be clear. It's a tablet. It's running a Tegra processor.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  What is it running?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  But as far as we know, we haven't seen any touchscreen interaction. We didn't see any apps. We didn't see Netflix on it. On a 2017 game console. We haven't even seen Netflix.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Well, we've only seen like two minutes of it, right? Like, we asked Nintendo, like, "Hey, does it have a touchscreen?" And they're like, "We'll tell you more later."

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  It seems pretty likely that it could have a touchscreen, but it's... What I'm happy about is Nintendo is emphasizing games right now.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  And games that you control with buttons and sticks, not with touch.

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  And local multiplayer, like, playing along with friends.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  I do... So, watching the video, everyone, you should go watch the video. By the way, the video, when you watch it, it's a really well-made video. But the first part, it's like just a person playing a Zelda game. And you're like, "This seems pretty boring. Why is this video happening?" And then he gets up and like, takes the thing out and puts in the thing. And then it cuts to a red screen with the Switch logo. And it's like Nintendo Switch, and the logo clicks in. But instead of making a clicking sound, it makes like a huge dramatic dungeon door sound. It's like, "Guh, guh." It's... It's intense. And then...

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Well, the other thing about this video is it's actually shot... It was shot in a dystopian hellscape future, where all the children are dead and the only people left alive are, uh, cool hip, uh, professional millennials. Only millennials.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  Which is basically the world we live in, as far as I can tell. What I didn't get is, they showed like 10 different controller configurations. There's like the standard one, then there's the two side ones clipped in.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Then there's those things clipped into like another thing.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  And then those things independently turn sideways.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  I don't think it's too many.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  It's just a lot.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  I think the way to think about it, there's a, uh, like a wee Classic Controller Pro, or whatever they call it right now. They're like an Xbox 360 controller.

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  There's one of those. And then, there are these two little controller lits called Joy-Cons.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  There's Joy-Con L and Joy-Con R.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Right?

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  They're best friends.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Joy-Con L and R. Can clip into the side of the tablet.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  So you could use it like that. Or they can be used independently. I could hand you Joy-Con R.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  I'll hold Joy-Con L. I will beat you at Mario Kart.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes, you will. Cause I'm terrible at Mario Kart.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Or I can take Joy-Con L and R and plug them into Joy-Con.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 57:05Speaker 03

  The base that turns them into an Xbox controller. Right?

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Or you can just buy the Xbox controller, the thing that looks like an Xbox controller and just use that. So I like the little things because it it makes like video games feel. I don't know, like this whole thing is about Nintendo is all about nostalgia, but like back in the day you had like you had an NES and you had two controllers. Right? And like you're gonna, you're gonna take this thing and you're gonna go over to your buddy's house and then you're gonna be playing it. And then you're gonna hand her the controller and you're gonna have a controller and then you're gonna be playing together. It's just like it, it makes the thing feel a little bit more social. Uh, than, uh, I think most video game consoles feel these days and definitely than VR feels. Uh, and that's kind of cool.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Think it's just, it's just great. And then of course it all will come down to execution, it'll come down to price.

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  It's just a thing like, we just don't know, it could just be like an Android tablet.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it, it, it sure feel, I mean, it's running a Tegra. Tegra's got a gaming tablet called the Shield, like if darkest timeline, they like rebranded the Shield and added some controllers to it. I'm sure it's more than that. I pray to God it's more than that, but like theoretically, that's like, that would, they could do that. That could be what this is.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would be sad if it's running Android just because I, I don't think Android is a good operating system.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 58:23Nilay Patel?

  Paul burns the Vergecast to the ground.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  I mean, here's the thing, if you're making a video game, you're compiling C and C++ code down to machine code for the, the, the, the thing that you're targeting. When you make a high-performance Android game, you dodge all Java and you get out of the operating system as quickly as possible. So that you can get down to the bare metal.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  And, uh, so obviously it could, it'd be totally fine and work if it was Android.

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  I doubt it. I, I, if it is, I bet it's so custom, you'll never even see it.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Nintendo should announce a partnership with Apple. They're not about to ship an Android tablet.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Oh, that's fair. If they made it Android though, then they would have an easier time getting Hulu and Netflix and HBO now on it.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Those guys are so thirsty.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  Netflix is showing up.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't matter.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  They're just walking over to your house with the binaries under the arm. Hey.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  We're here. Our app is built in HTML5. Anything that renders it will work.

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Let's talk. We're running out of time. Next week, October 27th, well rumored, Apple event is real. It's coming. We're expecting a MacBook Pro.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  Here's the only question I have. Oh, it's gonna have, we're told, also well rumored, it will have an OLED function strip. Where the function keys are.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Also a shady rumor they'll have e-ink keys.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that won't happen next year.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  That's a dumb, that's a dumb one.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, so you're assuming they're gonna redesign. I think that's cool. The real question, the other rumor that I'm interested in is saying they're gonna dump all the ports in favor of USB-C. Now, I am, I think I'm on record as saying I think USB-C is the best.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  I love.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Except when it destroys your device.

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  Because you use the shady cable.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Did you say it's better than all of the rest?

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's simply the best.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  No, I think it's like the, I can charge everything with like one set of cords.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  That's the future I want to live in. How many USB-C ports is this thing gonna have?

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Two.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  You think it's just two?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  It's gotta be at least two.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it has to be at least two.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  That's the, that's the pro. It's got two.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  The big question for me is, are they gonna fully support?

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  Jordan's literally just waving his headphone dongler.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Will it have a lightning port to plug in your lightning headphone jacks?

• 1:00:33Nilay Patel?

  No, that makes no sense. None at all.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  It's probably gonna have a lightning port.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  What, and then what happens with your lightning port?

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  What you think?

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  Just for headphones? Then all Apple has accomplished in this world is they made a crappier headphone jack?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  What if it, what if it uses lightning for charging?

• 1:00:50Nilay Patel?

  Can they put enough power through? What if everyone's house burns down? I'm, so look, I'm looking at my MacBook Pro. It's got like eight ports.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's got like two Thunderbolt. They can't drop Thunderbolt?

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  Well, the US, the other thing, like, we don't know if US, if the USB-C can support Thunderbolt, but Apple hasn't done it yet. And if the Pro doesn't, then what are they doing?

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  The modern, like, Intel chipsets support Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  See, it's okay. So I got two Thunderbolt, I got HDMI, I got two USB C, or two USB, I got power.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  You gotta have at least three, because you gotta have power and two USB jacks.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  No, no, not, not, you don't need three.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  For a pro?

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  For a pro.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  For a pro.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  You gotta have power.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  You'd have two on, on the left side and one on the right.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I like that. And do you still have HDMI?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Oh, look.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  So now we're, now we're, it's a crazy town.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Wildest, in our wildest dreams, like you just run your hand down the side, it's all USBs.

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, this thing has eight ports on it.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  In a real world where Apple exists.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  Literally the only question that is interesting about it.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Two USB C ports, ports, that's it.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  On the air. I'm with you on the air, or, or the, the regular MacBook, but not the pro.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  Lightning is crazy. I, I do not accept.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Just for the epic rant that you're gonna go on.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  You can plug into it, it's headphones.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  You mean like a headphone jack?

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  It's so wrong.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  No, but like, Arthur, there, there are lightning accessories. You can buy like, microphones.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  You plug your pencil into it.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  That'll be the, that'll be the pro play. It's like, look at all these use, like, like lightning audio interfaces that exist. Like, we wanted those to flourish on our pro laptops, too.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Why did Apple bother with USB C at all?

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  What else can you plug in?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  There's no way.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  You can plug in your Apple pencil.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Well, here, here's my question. If you do USB C, will it still be magnetic? Because I think the best feature of Apple laptops is the MagSafe.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Well, it's not, no.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  And it can't be, right?

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  It's not on the MacBook.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  I think they're gonna say, this thing gets such great battery life, you just start, plug it in at night, and you plug, take out the plug, and just run pro level software.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  That's why I'm saying.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  At full speed for 12 hours.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  There will only be two plugs.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm hoping for eight.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would love eight. That'd be great.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  That'd be so awesome.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  But there's gonna be two, and you need to start to come to terms with it right now, is what I'm saying.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  That would be user hostile.

• 1:03:06Nilay Patel?

  No. I just, stop it.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  I plug shit into my things. I do it all the time.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  We have three computers sitting on this table. Nothing is plugged into any of them.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  But I got power?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got USB C for that.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  You know the best part about USB C?

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Used to charge my Pixel and my laptop.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  And they can charge each other.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  That's very confusing.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  They can transfer power from one to the other.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  When you plug two USB C devices into each other, by the way, it's like a total crap shoot of which one's gonna charge.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  It's all the dice.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  No, like the Pixels come with this like transfer cable that you can use to like dump information off of an iPhone or an Android phone. So I went like USB C to USB C on two Pixels and it was just like a joy to watch which one decided it was gonna charge off the other one. Just like, eh, how about me? And then next time it's eh, how about me?

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  Dieter doesn't flip a coin. He plugs two phones with each other with on USB C. He's like, the left one is you live.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  Can we agree that it will have either a headphone jack or a lightning port?

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Not both?

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  It will, it will have a headphone jack.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  I, I'm almost certain it'll have a headphone jack.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a caveat.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  You're not sure.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I just, Apple knows what people do with these computers.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're not gonna tell a thousand pros to throw out their monitor headphones.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  This is the laptop of the future, though.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  People make videos and they make audio. They have to put a headphone jack in it.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  Like, they're not completely insane, right?

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Listen to yourself. You don't know. That's, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  That's the craziest part of this whole thing is that we can't say for sure.

• 1:04:49Nilay Patel?

  Eight USB C jacks. Come on. Get to me. And then they'll ship a USB C to headphone dongle to go along with your lightning to headphone dongle.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. That would be great. If there's a USB C to headphone dongle.

• 1:05:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst. This is the worst of all possible timelines.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  I don't know why I find it so much fun because I have to live it.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  But I really.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Apple has it. My money right now cinema display.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Coming back.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Stop it with the dongle.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  It's good. It's gonna happen.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  A new USB C cinema display.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  USB C powered cinema display.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  I want that so bad.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. 5K. Like it's gonna have a million ports on the back of it. It's gonna be great.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you don't need port. You can get the headphone jack off your.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Laptop, you should obviously be wearing wireless headphones.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  AirPods.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  To think, anyway, we'll be there. It's October 27.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm going out there. There's big Microsoft Surface event. Tom's gonna be, Tom Warren's gonna be here for that. I'm going to California for the Apple thing. It's gonna be a party.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  There's a Tesla event on Friday.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  There's a Tesla event on Friday. Just more. The Tesla's putting out a laptop.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  I might go to a party this weekend.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's gonna be great. We're having a good time.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Next week is gonna be bonkers.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's gonna be nuts. And then you're gonna read it on The Verge. It's gonna be great.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I want to thank MasterClass one more time for sponsoring today's episode of The Verge Cast. MasterClass, as you may have heard earlier, makes the world's greatest courses by bringing the world's greatest instructors, including one Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who's teaching MasterClass in screenwriting. Sorkin's MasterClass contains 35 lessons, over six hours of video, interactive assignments. He helps students learn about the craft of screenwriting and write their own screenplays. Aaron covers the rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell, which is fast-paced talking while walking. For an exclusive clip of Aaron discussing how he writes dialogue, go to masterclass.com/theverge. That is masterclass.com/theverge. Also, there's a bunch of other stuff to listen to. Chris Plant, who you heard earlier on the show, does a great show called What's Tech? It's every Tuesday. This week's episode is about web security with Russell Brandim. I also host Control Alt Delete with one Mr. Walt Mossberg. We talked about the pixel on that show too.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Good, who's off on the show, hosts a show called Too Embarrassed to Ask over on the Recode side. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode and Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is one of my very favorites. Anyway, that's all on iTunes. Go on it. Find those shows. Give them five stars. Listen to them or not. Just hit us with stars. That's what we want. And you can also tweet at us. I'm at RecklessPauls, at FuturePaul, Dieters, at Backlon, Jordan.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  JL Golson.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  JL Golson. Find us, rate us, review us. That's it. Cisavaca, cut through the night. Rock and roll. Paul?

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:07:26Nilay Patel?

  Hello.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Jordan's peeking out from behind the big purple mountain.