iPhone XS review, Apple Watch 4 review, and Amazon's surprise hardware event

This past week, Nilay reviewed the new iPhone XS and XS Max while Dieter reviewed the Apple Watch series 4. Paul, Dieter, and Nilay dedicate half the show to their review and whether it’s worth upgrading to the new model. Second half of the show, the crew tries to cover all of the insane amount of gadgets that Amazon announced this week, including a DVR for over-the-air channels. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like deputy editor Liz Lopatto’s “This week in Elon” segment — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 01:26 - Apple iPhone XS and XS Max review: smoothed out 32:10 - Apple Watch Series 4 review: the best gets better 54:44 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 59:00 - Paul’s weekly segment “Spin to win” 1:03:46 - The 14 biggest announcements from Amazon’s surprise hardware event 1:33:09 - Sony is launching a PlayStation Classic console this December loaded with 20 games Also, in case you missed it, Nilay along with transportation reporter Sean O’Kane talked to Ford AV CEO Sherif Marakby about self-driving cars and what Ford is doing with them. You can listen to that right in the Vergecast feed. 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?

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• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge. I feel like I didn't go big that time, but it's a big show this week.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  It's a very big show.

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend, Eli. Paul's here. Hi, Paul.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  Dieter is at... Dieter, are you in Seattle right now? Where are you?

• 0:51Speaker 02

  No, I made it home. It's 7:30 in the morning in Oakland and I'm your compatriot today.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, a compatriot. No, it's just a huge week. I was just gonna tell you straight out, there's no grab bag this week. There's no nonsense. It's iPhone review, Apple Watch review, and Amazon's 50,000 products that they announced yesterday. Dieter, you were at that event.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  I was, and let me tell you, it was hard. It was just nonstop. They were announcing products at a cadence of about one every minute and a half for an hour.

• 1:22Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I love it. Okay, we'll get to that later. Let's start with the phone. I have, guys, I have the phone, as you may have deduced by the fact that I wrote 3,000 words and published a video. No, it's iPhone review week. Can I just say something first before we begin? I've been thinking about this like all week. It is, The Verge mafia is like wild. I'm so proud of it. Like Joanna, Lauren, Dave, like The Verge alumni out in the world who are now the top reviewers. It just makes me so happy. So that was like the first thing. It's like, I've just been thinking about it all week. It's incredible because you know, it didn't used to exist. Now it exists and now it has like

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  an alumni class. That's amazing. So that's cool. That made me happy. And then the phone, I would say the phone made me happy with some medium, medium feelings on the side. Is that a phrase?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. The phone is like one of those things where it's like, it's like the restaurant that you know, is capable of blowing your mind with the best steak ever. But like the, that chef had the night off. And so it's a very, it's an incredibly good steak. It's, it's the, it's one of the top five steaks you've ever had. But you just, you just in your heart, you kind of know, like, oh, man, I should have come on Thursday.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like that. Or like, it's the second time you've had it. Do you know?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. There you go.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  You know, like you like had this transcendent experience and then you're like, you go back and you're like telling your friends, like, this was incredible. I've never had anything. And then you're like, yep, it's a steak, actually.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  So, so I have both phones. I have the 10S and the 10S Max. I'll be straight out. I barely use the 10S because it's the same phone as the Max. And obviously the Max is the more interesting phone because it has the bigger screen and it has, you know, the bigger battery. So I really wanted to test bigger battery. I, the battery is incredible. I've been running 12 to 14 hours with this battery, uh, with like eight hours of screen time. Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  The people that don't get to hang out with Neelai, and I suspect that that's probably most of you, uh, hanging out with Neelai is infuriating because we'll be sitting there at the office or, no, no, let me finish. At the office or at his apartment or wherever, and he'll just be banging away on his phone, nonstop, just draining the battery for like three hours straight. And I'll be sitting there watching it. And there will be a power cable, literally half a foot from his phone, the entire time. And he won't touch it. He won't just plug the damn thing in. Like if I'm within 50 feet of a power cable, I'm like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna plug it in over there.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  I carry spare batteries with me everywhere. I have, I have a complex about being max charged all the time. If my phone is below 65%, I start to get really shaky and nervous. And Neil does not care. He's like, I'm just gonna use it. It's fine.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  Conversely, hanging out with Dieter is great because he's always got extra batteries.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Wait, Neil, what's your thought process in this? Do you like to live on the edge? Is it the ergonomics of using a phone while it's plugged in? What's, what's going to your mind?

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm an optimist and I just assumed that like if the battery, like it'll just be fine. Like I'll find a place to plug it in or I'll just, I'll just go home. Or, you know, it's like probably time to stop using Twitter anyway. I will say that the screen time limits on iOS 12 are remarkably ineffective with me. I don't know if they're effective for other people. I hope they are, but I

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Did you set any?

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I set a two and a half hour limit for Twitter, Instagram, and I told it to turn virtually everything off at 10:00 PM. And I am begging my phone for an extra 15 minutes, like 10,000 times a day. Like I basically have like a snooze button for everything and I now live in a constant state of snoozing, which actually makes sense. But I, I like it because it makes me at least, it makes me at least think that I shouldn't, but then I do. I feel like it's more revealing about my personality than I want it to be.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the battery life is great and it's perfect for you because you never plug in. So that's cool.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the, the max is great. Uh, I was talking to Joanna, actually, who was testing the, the 10S. And she was really impressed with the, the little battery life, which is only quoted at half an hour more than the 10. And it actually has a smaller battery. It was like revealed that the, the 10S has a smaller battery than the 10, but it's getting a better battery life. I think that's down basically to a combination of iOS 12 and the seven nanometer A12 chip, which is more efficient. Um, so that, I think just on the first. Cut, right? Is the battery life better? It's the thing everybody cares about. These phones are really impressive. Then the Max, because of the, the sort of full body screen, I've just started becoming accustomed to it.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  At first, I thought it was too big because I've been using a 10 for a while and I thought it was a little silly. And I really do wish Apple would make more use of that screen. Like, I really wish I could watch picture-in-picture video while doing something else on it because it's big enough to support it. But now I'm like, oh, this is my computer. And I remember thinking that when I had a Plus for years. Like, this is basically my computer all day. Like, I'm in meetings, I'm running around, I'm draining that battery. My computer might as well have a big screen so I can do all the stuff I want to do on it. It is not quite at the Note level where the thing actually is a computer and you can just make it a computer if you want. But as, you know, somebody who like spends their day going from conference room to conference room,

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't carry my laptop because I want to pay attention. So having a phone, I'm like, okay, I can, I can review a video and feel confident that I actually saw the thing. The Max is great. So I think I'm a Max person. I think I'm gonna end up, you know, I'm trapped on AT&T Edge forever, for life.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  And so I'm gonna end up upgrading and I think I'm going with a Max. I didn't think so at first, but I think that's where I'm landing.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Can you talk a little bit more about like, because I know it's been a year really since you've used a Plus, but like, does it basically just feel like a really nice Plus that doesn't have big dopey bezels? Or is there some like feeling to it that's different from the Plus that you like or that you don't like? I know that like you have to reach further up to the screen, you have to use two hands to, to hit the notification tray. Is there anything else like compared to the Plus that feels different?

• 7:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Plus, I, I've never liked the design of sort of the iPhone 6 class of phones. I always thought they were kind of ugly. With the iPhone 8, you know, they added the glass back, it kind of refined that design a little bit. It still felt kind of surfboard-y to me. I think honestly, the combination of the rounded edges on the screen and the glass back kind of makes this design way better. It is still pretty surfboard-y and I keep it in a case. But I had it out of the case all yesterday because they were taking photos of it. And just carrying it around without a case, I was like, oh, this is fine. Like, I actually kind of like holding this thing. The one thing I do not like about it. At all is they went to a new antenna configuration to support gigabit LTE.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  And that means they're on the bottom of the phone where the lightning connector is. The holes are asymmetrical. There's like six on one side and four on the other in an antenna line. And it

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  It's it's the least Johnny I thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, like every time Samsung put out a phone for years, there would be just a million blog posts and tweets of like, look at how like the plug and the hole and these speakers are not all on the same line. Look how asymmetrical this is. Ha, ha, ha, Samsung, ha, ha, ha. And I always was like, yeah, I mean, sure. But also, who, who, who, who cares? Does like genuinely, who cares? And I feel the same way about the 10.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Samsung stuff was like, nothing was aligned like vertically. Like the headphone jack would be up here and the USB C jack would be down here. And then like the speaker holes will be somewhere in the middle. Like that was, that's crazy. I get it. This is like, they made a concession to their antenna and it looks, it just looks weird. And I can't imagine they're happy about it, but it's fine. That's like the only true like visual problem with the phone. If even if you could even call it a problem. There's some like discussion over whether the camera bump is a different size than previously. Uh, and we should get into the camera. The camera sensor is like 32% bigger than before.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and there's a lot of just sort of, if you put an iPhone XS in a 10 case, like the case fits a little differently, but I haven't actually had that experience. My case is fit fine. Marques Brownlee made a video and he was like, this case fits differently. So like John Gruber is like, I measured it with precision calipers and it's the same size. Uh, so it's a little unclear to me. What is actually happening there? But for all intents and purposes, it's the same phone, right? And your cases should fit fine, and Apple says they should fit fine. So speaking of the camera, that's like where we spent all of our time and energy outside of, you know, measuring battery life. Like, the screen is the same screen hardware-wise.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  I think they're doing some stuff in software to get more out of it. But it's the same sort of beautiful OLED screen. It's the same 458 pixels per inch on both devices. There's really nothing, apart from the processor and the camera, that's different on these devices than last year.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  So we spent all of our time with the camera because I think I've been saying this on the Vergecast for months now, I think, which is as soon as we had a baby, I became immediately unimpressed with the iPhone X camera. The second you're like, I want these photos to last forever, that camera does not hold up. At least to me. Because it, it, the loss of resolution is really obvious to me when you zoom in. The noise reduction and smoothing is really, really obvious. Portrait mode gets really blocky in low light real fast. So the X has a great camera, like a good camera. Not great, but I just don't think it, it holds up compared to the Pixel compared to my real cameras. So I was really interested in the XS. The XS has a much better camera.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  I think Vlad wrote a piece, there are some, because of that larger sensor in the specs, there's been some triangulating of what sensor they're using now. And it appears they've gone from a Sony sensor to a Samsung sensor, which explains one big thing, which is it looks way more like Samsung's cameras now. Like, color, temperature-wise.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  You think that comes down to the sensor?

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  It's like, hard to say, but like, if you just look, you know, there's gonna be an iFixit teardown, you know, the second these things come out in the world.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Actually, it had, it hit this morning as we're recording. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go read the internet while you continue to talk.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, so Dieter will confirm for us what sensor it is. I didn't realize it hit this morning. Yeah, so there, there's like some triangulation of what sensor it is. Regardless, if you just look at the photos, and we spent, I don't think people know this, like, we, we have a huge team of people that makes the iPhone review with me every year. It's, it's, it's like a weird tradition. We all end up staying up until 3:00 in the morning. We all end up working on the weekend. So there's like, you know, eight of us floating in and out of the review process. And our creative director, James, has a big calibrated professional monitor with a hood. He retouches all of our photos with it. We spent hours arguing about these photos under that hood. And people were walking by and yelling. It's like, it is the most fun, right?

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  Like if you, that's the sort of thing you enjoy. It's the most fun. So my impression in the review is not just me. It's like a lot of people have given me a lot of thoughts and opinions about what these photos look like. As we're making the review, James and I spent a lot of time taking photos and arguing about photos. And so the conclusions we arrived at during the review, you can see them. One, it's a really good camera. I think like most people, especially if you have an iPhone, it's the best iPhone camera ever made by far, which is obvious. It is a substantial upgrade over the 10. The, I think the 10S camera makes the 10 look worse, like way worse than any step function iPhone camera upgrade than before. I think that's, that's to me particularly interesting.

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  But it looks way more like Samsung photos than before in terms of sort of color, temperature, and like processing quality. And it does a lot of smoothing. And that smoothing and noise reduction, you can argue what they're doing. You know, I asked Apple very directly, like, are you attempting to go for this look? They said no, very clearly, like, we're trying to do the best camera we can. We pride ourselves in accuracy. So they, they said no. But then you look at the photos and you're like, what is this closest to? And the answer is Samsung. Samsung is still way aggressive. Like you look at an S9 photo up close and it, it is smooth to all hell. Like they detect faces and they're like, you will now have the best complexion you've ever had. Right? Like they're doing stuff that Apple won't do.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  But you look next to a Pixel and the Pixel just has more detail in the image. And that to me is like, I'd rather have that and edit that photo to make it look more like an iPhone photo than not have the detail to begin with. Dieter, what have you discovered?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Oh, but I fixed it. Oh, they did not say. I could say, I'm looking at a picture of the sensor, but there's no branding on it. So I apologize.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  I see. So the conspiracy theory continues.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yes. And let us, let us add our part to it. So the question is, Does it, do they just need another mode? Should they just like be straight up and say like the default mode is beauty? And they should add like a manual mode to the main camera?

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, you can shoot it in RAW. You can also turn, we didn't, I didn't talk about how the camera works. So there's a whole new image processing chain that's happening on the, on the 10S. And soon the 10R, which is called smart HDR. It's Apple's riff on what Google is doing with the Pixel, basically. It takes four photos in a buffer the second you open the camera app. But it's also unlike Google, which Google combines underexposed frames. Apple is taking matched pairs. One is like the regular exposure and one is a long exposure, which is overexposed to pick up details in the shadows. Right? So they have this like, they basically have eight frames. It's four matched pairs. One is exposed correctly and one is overexposed.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  So then they, they like do a bunch of processing and they combine whatever, they get the detail out. That smart HDR is like the big new thing with the camera combined with a new sensor. So you can turn it off, which is right. Like you can just turn it off in the settings. It's totally normal. I think those photos look way worse, just way worse. You could also keep it on and tell it to keep the normal frame. And the comparison between the two, the smart HDR to me makes a much better photo.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Okay. So the smart HDR is better.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you can open like Hali, which is the pro app I use and shoot in RAW if you feel like it. And then you have a RAW image and then you can like do whatever you want with it. So you have options, right? Oh, that's great. Do I think that there should be a button that's like more pleasing photo, more accurate photo with smart HDR? Yeah. Right? Like that, that's like the oldest debate in the book, like in, in everything. Like you go into Best Buy and the TVs look insane because people buy the brightest TV, whether or not it's accurate. And you bring it home and you set it to like be accurate and like this TV looks really muted and bad. And then your dad shows up and turns on motion smoothing and turns up all the brightness. And that's just life.

• 16:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Like, I don't know what the right answer is because it's entirely subjective, which is the thing I said in the review. I cannot tell you what photos to prefer. Like, absolutely can't. James and I have a strong preference for the pixel photos for different reasons. Actually, James is like, these photos look more like what I would want to make. So they're closer to where I want to be already as a photographer. And he's a professional photographer for 35 years, who's like operated at the highest levels. So like, that's his preference. Like, this is closer to where I want to be. I can get this photo and get it to exactly where I want to be very quickly. My read is actually very different than his, which is, the colors are flatter and more accurate on the pixel.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  And there's more detail. Right? So as a starting edit place, it's not necessarily, is this closer to where I want it to be? It's more, is this more accurate? Right? Can I push this in a wild direction? But am I starting from a place of accuracy? And I think the iPhone photos, a lot of people have been tweeting at us this week, the iPhone photos are really, they just lack contrast, because smart HDR, because of that overexposure, brings up the shadows to be really flat. So iPhone photos are noticeably less contrasty. Now, can you start there and end up at a pixel photo? Yes. How do I know this? Because people keep taking our photos, editing them, and sending them back to us and saying, look, it's just as good as the pixel photo. But what they don't have is detail. Right.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  And to me, like, particularly, like I'm saying, like, we had the kid, and do I want to look at a photo of Max five years from now and be, my child is named Max, but I'm never gonna figure out Apple for this. Do I want to like, look at a photo of the baby five years from now, and be like, man, I wish there was more detail in her face. Right? And the answer for me is, that trade off feels really hard for a picture that might be like brighter or more contrast, or less contrasty. So that's, look, I watched Marquez's video, it's good. He landed basically the same place as me, which is, it's firmly the number two camera behind the pixel. And then he said a thing in his video that I actually cut from our review, which is, if you have an iPhone 10, and you are the sort of person

• 18:58Nilay Patel?

  who just like, wants to spend a thousand dollars, you should just go buy a camera. Right? Like, you should keep your iPhone 10, and you should buy a Sony RX 100, or the new Fujifilm. Uh, XT two or XT three, like just go do that and you'll have a real camera that will take far better photos than any smartphones. You'll like have the best of both worlds, but the, the sort of 10S versus $10,000 spend just for a camera doesn't seem worth it until I think another round of smart HDR optimization.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gotta say, unless you really want the max, the, the camera improvements are, are good from the 10 to the 10S from what I've seen, like actually very, very good. But the idea that you would justify an upgrade based solely on that seems just bonkers to me.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  But there were, there, there have been many iPhone years where that was, I think, the right move, right? The, the jump from the five to the six camera was incredible, right? It was just like a really, it was a really big jump in quality. That's when they started doing the billboard campaign, shot an iPhone. So there, there have been times in the past where you do that. And I think Apple tried to sell it, like it's a much bigger sensor, like et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, yeah, I think Apple wants this to be that kind of jump. And if you just look at it in a vacuum versus the 10, it is. But if you look at it across the industry, it's incredible that Google's year old camera is doing a slightly better job than the 10S still. And the Pixel 3, you know, looks like it's coming out in a matter of weeks. But other than that, I like there, I, I don't think there's much more to review with the phone. I mean, we've been talking about it

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  for a half an hour, but you understand.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I can't stop looking at these sample photos and not being able to decide which is better. I really just haven't, I really can't make a call. Like they're obviously different.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  We, you know, we have like the calls, we talk to Apple as we like go through review and I have questions. And so one of my questions was, you know that no one is doing this, right? Like no one is under a hood, looking at 150% crop of these photos and being like, that one has more detail and this like tiny, and they're like, no, we do that, right? Of course, Apple does it because they want to win. But then they were like, yeah, but we also know that most people look at these on smartphone screens. And I think one of the things that's happening with smartphone cameras, James actually wrote a piece about this for us like five years ago, and I can dig it up and we can put it in the show notes or something. But the revolution with smartphone cameras was that your capture device and your display device are the same device, right? And that

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  means you're going to take a photo, you're going to share it, and then like you have a huge audience of people who are going to look at it on their cameras, basically, right? Their phones.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  And so if your target is basically like Instagram, which already compresses the shit out of your photos, or your target is Twitter, which compresses shit out of your photos, or whatever, Google Photos or iCloud sharing, and you know, in your Apple, and you're like, what kind of photo should we make with this camera? And you know, it's only ever going to be this big, and no one's ever really blowed up. And even when you pinch the zoom, there's like a max pinch to zoom. Well, then of course, you're going to optimize it for that size. And I don't know, I think Apple is an honest broker. Like, I don't want to suggest that they're cheating. But I think they know deep in their hearts that they need to make a photo that looks really good for the iPhone screen.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  To that point, they were saying you get like the, this phone, the XS is supposed to have 60% more dynamic range when it's displaying the photos that you take. Did you notice anything like that?

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  It's so hard to tell.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, what does that mean? First of all?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. Sometimes when you watch HDR things, I'm like, oh, that's pretty HDR. Like, watch an HDR movie on a good HDR set. Sometimes like, hmm, very HDR.

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  I will say that the, the sample photos I've seen of like, full on HDR, backlit with the sun in the background, from the XS to the XS, that improvement has been massive. Like, there is stuff that had, like, a XS would definitely blow out, or definitely screw up, that the XS can capture just full stop now.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  F-stop now.

• 22:55Nilay Patel?

  I keep saying this, like, the XS is a huge step over the XS. Like, don't get me wrong. Like, they don't even sell the XS anymore, so whatever. But the XS, and presumably the XR, are Easily the best iPhone cameras ever made. They're better than most Android phones. I think they're far better than the Galaxy cameras, but are they as good as the Pixel? And like, one thing to note is that no one else in the world has a Pixel. Like, it's, it's me trying to buy one on this show and failing because the eight other nerds have already like bought the whole stock out, right? Like, they don't sell very many of those. So is, is that a fair comparison compared to what most people would buy?

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think if you're writing for a much more mainstream audience, you should only compare it to the Samsung phones because that's what that audience is going to buy. And it's better than those. So it's the best camera. For the Verge audience, for the Vergecast listener, presumably you know that the Pixel exists. Presumably you know that we've been saying for a year, this is the best camera on a phone. So I think it's only fair that we compare it to that, right? And I think there, Google just has a, has an edge.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So I want to go back to this. Most people look at the, their photos on the phone that they took them with thing and then the Instagram thing. I have a solution to this problem and you're going to hate it. Are you ready?

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yes.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  CSS for photos. The revolution in web technology was separating out, the whole point of HTML was you separate out the layout from the content and cascading style sheets were the best because they'd be like, here's the, here's the raw data, here's the content. But, and then the CSS was separate and it said, make it look like this on this type of screen. And so what we need is, we need a new standard, a new web standard that everybody can agree to, a new photo standard. We'll have to form a committee, we'll form a committee.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  We need a committee.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  And they will agree on a format that is Everyone just shares raw photos from now on. And then along with it is another file that says, this is what it should look like on these different screens. Think about it.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay, okay.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Do you guys remember like early days web design where you'd make a JPEG? And like it had a white background and then you try to put it on a white HTML page, but then they'd be different whites?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  We've come a long way is what I'm saying. Also, there is some sort of color. There's a new color standard that's being either proposed or is pretty far along in standardization. It's like a new color space for the web that's about, it's like designers' eyes to designers' monitor to your monitor and whatever your monitor color profile so that you as the consumer end up seeing similar color to what the designer put in. But it's kind of different than what you're saying, Dieter.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, so I think Apple's displays are the most accurate smartphone displays. I think they're very proud of how accurate their displays are. And I think for good reason compared to, so like one thing you cannot do, you cannot take a bunch of phones, take pictures with them, and then like compare the pictures on five different screens. Right? Like the pixel screen makes pixel photos look really good. The iPhone screen makes iPhone photos look really good. Samsung screens look like neon took drugs. Right? Like there's no, right? Like you can't do that. You have to pull them back to at least one screen. So we sent them all to an iPhone screen and we looked at them there. We sent them all to a pixel screen, looked at them there. Then we used James' monitor.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  I think there is, I would love the entire industry to say like, put our screens in reference mode where they're all dead accurate. But like, no, but you know what that would look like? It would look desaturated. It would look flat. It wouldn't be as bright. And people just don't want that. And I, that's like the reality. Like people just don't want to look at accurate displays. They want to look at bright, vibrant, crazy displays. And so again, I, you know, I think that's a push and pull for all these companies. And, you know, I asked Apple and they said, no, we're trying to make an accurate camera. But I think you can just see it. Their, their photos look a little bit more like Samsung's photos this year.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  You know, you can get conspiratorial about that. Like, people might prefer Samsung's photos. Joanna's review, she said, in some shots, I preferred the S9's photos. I think it's because on a small screen, all of that smoothing and beautifying doesn't really matter, right? Especially in other markets around the world where these phones are people's primary computers, primary connected device. And they don't have a laptop or whatever else. Of course, they don't care about some, they can't, there's no way you can see it. So I think there's a little bit of competitive push and pull there. But can I prove out that, you know, some Apple camera engineer is like, looking at a matrix of consumer preferences and was like, guys, we got a, of course, I can't do that. I can just look at the photos and tell you what I see.

• 27:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Is it time to read an ad and move on to the watch? It is. I mean, we could talk about the processor. Here's what I'll say about the processor. It's the only other thing. The neural engine is cool. I think every year, Apple gives itself more headroom, right? They have such a massive advantage in smartphone processors that they're just giving themselves headroom. So the 10 doesn't feel slow a year later. Last year, the A11 in the, in the 10 had a 30% faster GPU than the A10, right? Have we maxed out the processor in the iPhone? We absolutely have not maxed out that processor. So they've got even more headroom this year. They're, another 50% faster than that GPU.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  But the real thing is the neural engine. And I think that, that's a bet that Apple's AR stuff, that their core ML stuff will pay off. But in data use, when you're like, using Slack and Twitter, does neural engine kick in? It does not. So I think there's like, it's there for the next generation of things. And Apple, on stage at their keynote, they're like, we make these products to last a long time. And I think all of that processing headroom they have is part of that strategy. I think that's. That's awesome, right? That they they have way more headroom than they need. So these phones are going to last four, five, six years.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should give Apple a little bit of credit, actually a lot of credit for the iPhone X. It is a way better phone than I think we realized when it first came out. There have been a lot of iPhone generations that a year in were like, oh, well, this is slow. Well, this, this, this, this didn't hold up as well as I hoped. But the combination of the bug fixes in iOS 12 and the speed ups in iOS 12 relative to iOS 11 and the iPhone X having just a better, faster processor and more longevity than like other iPhones is one of the reasons I think that upgrading to the XS, if you have a XS, seems a little weird. Like, because the XS was so good and continues to be good and like continues to not feel slow relative to the XS.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think the XS is gonna last, people are gonna have, we're gonna see iPhone X's for five years, right? The same way that you still see iPhone 6S's floating around.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  We didn't talk about iOS 12 a lot, but we've talked about it a lot already on this show. So go back into the archives.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  That's so rude. Okay, I'm gonna read an ad and then Dieter's gonna take over and talk about the watch.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

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• 31:55Nilay Patel?

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• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  You had the watch. The watch is fundamentally more interesting. I don't know why we spend all that time on the phone.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  It is wildly interesting. I deeply love it. And I do, we should probably point out that like the valence, the like emotional tenor of our phone conversation was like one way and it got an 8.5. And then the emotional tenor of our watch conversation is about to be a very different way, and it also got an 8.5. But to be very clear, like, these are both very, very good products. And I don't know, like, an 8.5 in the smartwatch world means something very, very different because the competition is like a six right now, right? It's like a five. And so an 8.5 smartwatch is like, oh, my God, you did it. Holy crap. Yes, nobody else has figured this out.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  An 8.5 in the phone world is like, yeah, no, it's really, really good. Everybody who buys this will be very, very happy with it. There just happen to be other 8.5 phones.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, to be clear, we've given virtually every flagship phone for the past year an 8.5. The Note, the S9, the Pixel 2, all of them got 8.5s. I have routinely given iPhones 9. The 0.5 deduction was you had a year to beat the Pixel 2 and you didn't in a camera department. That's it. Like, it is on par. It's the same, literally every other phone has gotten 8.5. So I felt confident about that, but it is that like 0.5 ding. And you're saying, I think I gave the first Apple Watch a seven, right? Like, I was like, this is an unfocused mess. This thing needs a purpose. And now you're saying, oh, it has, it has purpose now.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  It has purpose. And like that purpose question, I actually struggled a lot with that. So just real quick, like the, the basics of the watch are it has a bigger screen, which is beautiful and it's got curved corners and you know, faster processor, blah, blah, blah. And then a bunch of health stuff that is supposed to protect your health, not just track your fitness, most of which I really couldn't test all that well. Because I didn't, you know, the irregular heart rate thing isn't out. The EKG thing isn't out yet. ECG, same thing, whatever. And I didn't have a low heart rate and I couldn't get it to trigger the fall detection. We can come back to all that. And then there's new watch faces, which some people love, and I don't. But the, the thing I spent a lot of time thinking about and really had a hard time coming down to a clear answer on, and it's the thing that we always talk about with

• 34:26Speaker 02

  the Apple Watch, which is what is it for? The original Apple Watch, Apple didn't know what it was for. So like, it's the future of all computing on your wrist and it does everything. And it did everything really badly and slowly and with a terrible interface. Right? So they retrenched, they redid the OS and they're like, no, no, no. It's for fitness and also some notification stuff. And then what they've done since then, and what they did especially well with the series four is they're like, we know what the basics are of what this thing does. And now we can add features that build on that foundation. And the thing that I think is like, I didn't write this very well, but the thing that

• 35:08Speaker 02

  is great about the Apple Watch is it now can appeal to like multiple types of people and be good at that thing for that person. So it's not a general purpose computer, but if you just want a watch that will show you notifications, let you reply to text messages, show you the time and the weather and just be like a smart watch, a classic smart watch thing. They've gotten very good at that and it will last a couple of days on that if you don't, you know, go out running. It still doesn't show you the time, which is super frustrating and annoying. And like, that's like the, one of the dings on it, but it's very good at that. If you want a health tracker watch. This thing, the only competition are like those big Garmin smartwatches that last a week

• 35:49Speaker 02

  and have like, you know, pretty ugly interface and isn't well-integrated into Apple world ecosystem. As a like, fitness watch, this thing is incredible. If you, and now they've added this year, like, like health thing. And we need to see like lab tests, we need to see a lot of stuff there. But in theory, if, you know, you are over 65, if you've got some health problems, if you're a little bit worried about, you know, your heart, this thing, it won't actually like definitely protect you and tell you things. But it seems like it's a very nice, like backup insurance policy, not insurance policies, like a monitoring thing that could maybe give you some peace of mind.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  And so the achievement with the Series 4 is they didn't achieve that it can do everything original vision of the first Apple Watch. But they have managed to create a watch that can appeal to different types of people and not suck for any of them. And nobody else is doing that. If you go get one of those crazy Garmin watches, like they're great, don't get me wrong. A lot of people are like, how could you say it has good battery life? The Garmin lasts a week and it does GPS and all that. Like, yes, but using it kind of sucks and like the software is like, ah, right? Uh, yeah, I just go down the line and like in each of the things that it does, it does it very well. So it's not the original vision of the Apple Watch. But it's more than it was for the past couple of years. We're like, the past couple of years, we've been talking, we've been saying like, Apple fixed the Apple Watch. They made it really good.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  And now they've made it really good at multiple things, which is really impressive.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  It feels like they started off that first watch. I remember during the announcement of that watch in 2014, literally thinking, this is a mess, right? And I thought, should I type this in the live blog? And then I thought, well, I haven't used it, I don't know. But I, I like vividly remember that moment being like, I'm just looking at this and this feels like. An LG presentation where it's just like they're all over the place, right?

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:44Nilay Patel?

  And I think the story is they've clawed it back. And I think particularly with WatchOS 3, they just rebooted the interface entirely. And so they've peeled it back. They've removed functionality or hidden functionality. They've redesigned it significantly. And does it feel like they're now at a place where they got that foundation right and they can start adding functionality back?

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like. Here's a fascinating thing that I think is kind of instructive. When we were at the Apple event, we actually mentioned this, I think, in the last Vergecast, the the app screen on the Apple Watch still defaults to the honeycomb weird grid, but they switched it to the list view, right? And I think that was partially so that we could all like, the first thing you do is you want to feel the new haptics on the the digital crown. And so you want to find something that'll make you feel it. So you could just go to the app view and scroll. And so you could feel the haptics. But the digital crown feels faster. And I switched to that list view on my review unit. And I like it way better because it's it's way faster to just scroll through to find like, you know, the alphabetical order to find the thing you want, than it is to remember where you stuck an icon in that weird frickin honeycomb.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Wait, tell me about the crown, because I keep thinking about that first presentation. They made such a big deal out of digital crown. They compared it to the iPod scroll wheel. They compared it to multi-touch.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  That's true. It's not those things. It's a slightly more convenient way to scroll. That's that's it.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  It's a slightly more convenient way to scroll. And it turns out that scrolling is a really effective computer interface. Like scrolling is nice. They're like, we used to have scrollbars. And like, you remember, do you remember, and I'm talking like, 1990 shit here, do you remember when you had scrollbars and you would like, have to go and you'd have to decide whether you wanted the arrows at the top and the bottom, or just two at the bottom? And then you would like, go and like, click your mouse. And then, like, mice with scroll wheels came out, and then trackpads picked up two finger scrolling instead of like scrolling on the right hand side of the, you know, the trackpad for the first time. And I was like, oh, my God, this this computer feels completely different. Like, to me, that's, that's kind of where the digital crown is, is scrolling turns

• 39:52Speaker 02

  out to be a really great way to jam through a ton of information on a small screen really fast. Like, that's, that's what it's for. And the digital crown is very good at scrolling. And so it's it it's easier like cognitively to like get through something by just scrolling up the digital crown than like swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe on a tiny screen.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  But that was the argument for the touch wheel on the iPod.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  Like you're maybe, maybe they were right all along and they just duffed it. Cause like the iPod, the whole thing was they they developed the scroll wheel to get you to scroll through a list faster on the iPod.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Look, all Apple does, the story of Apple is they reinvent scrolling every 10 years in the dark. And then that is a revolution.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're like, look at this phone. You can scroll with your finger.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I mean, it kind of, it kind of makes sense. If you think about it, iPod, you're scrolling with your thumb. iPhone, you're scrolling with your thumb and the information that you're looking at is above your thumb. But with the watch, you are scrolling with you. If you're scrolling on the screen, you're scrolling with your index finger while also covering. I don't know. It makes sense.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  You gotta have a digital crown is what I'm saying. I agree with the the feature inclusion of a scrolling device.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  You got this one right, Apple.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you were really down on the on the default watch face after the hands on. Now that you've used it, are you, do you still think it's insane?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Yes. Aesthetically, I don't love it. That's like, that's it is what it is. I just wish there were more options. There's. And it's weird to say I wish there were more options, but I wish there were more options within the watch face. It's like, if I could get this watch face and just like, choose whether I not want crazy color mode, like that would make me pretty happy, actually. That's the thing that frustrates me is like, you know, you look at the screenshot I put in the review, you look at, you look at the video and it's just like, there are a lot of colors and they, and also they they made a new font. They customized their, whatever Apple calls their font, the San Francisco font. They made it like a little bubblier. So it's, it's just like every, all the, all the letters are a little bit more rounded. And there's just sort of a, there's a bubbly interface to the watch and even the, even the buttons, they changed those to make them a little bubblier

• 42:02Speaker 02

  that I just don't really love. But I think part of that is just a personal aesthetics thing. Like, you know, I, I, I don't mind chunky watches. This, by the way, this does not feel like a chunky watch, even the, the larger one. But I don't know. I, I'm boring. I'm, I want a boring aesthetic. I want something that's a little bit more. I don't know, modernist and a little bit less like happy, I guess. I want a watch face that makes me sad is basically what I'm saying.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  They have these video watch faces that could definitely make you sad, like the the water one. You can remind you of drowning.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  The liquid metal.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  But there's no information on there.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you you can take, they look silly, but you can take those animated watch faces, which, you know, they're just basically like animated photos. And you can make them round. And so all the animation happens inside the circle. And then you can add, I think, three complications around it. So you can get some information on those watch faces. But fundamentally, I think the best one is the the update to the, shoot, I forget what it's called. The watch face that has the three at the bottom and the time that's in digital and then like a main one in the center. Like, that one's really nice and you can get some really cool information in the middle there. Like, you can get a five day forecast like on your main watch face and that's dope. But the other thing that I don't know if people, I didn't realize it at the Apple event.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And I only realized it when I was trying to pick a good watch face in the review. Is if you pick one of the new watch faces, there is a completely different set of complications. The new style of complications that are available to you. And all of the old style of complications that are available on the other watch faces aren't there and vice versa. So, for example, when I wear an Apple Watch, I like to have the home app icon on there. So I can like quickly turn a light on or something. You can't do that on the new watch faces. They didn't make one.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  Wait, really?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yes, really. If you want the weather, it's a completely thing. And if you have a bunch of third party complications, you have to wait for all those developers to update their complications to support the new watch faces. And so now Apple developers have to like make two styles of their complications, one for the new watch faces, one for the old ones.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  This complication fragmentation is what you're saying.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  Complication fragmentation. That's our, that's our new children's show. That's like, it's like, that's literally like a Sesame Street song.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  We should.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  We have to explain to the children how complications work.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  I'm going to do an article that just lists out every single complication and the two different sets of them. And then the headline is going to be complication fragmentation compilation.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you have to do that. I'm officially assigning you that piece.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Damn it.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  We have to put that headline in the world. Are you kidding me? But the new watch faces run on old watches with watch OS 5, right? So basically, there's-

• 44:54Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Like, the best one, like, the best one, the coolest one, the infograph one, requires a bigger screen.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but I know that, like, the Fire one and the Vapor one, they run on the old ones, right?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  But they don't have, do they take the new complications?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I haven't updated my old watch to the new watch, watch OS yet, so I actually don't know for sure off the top of my head.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  Because, I mean, if Apple's saying, like, here's our new watch face style, and here's the future of complications, again, they have so much of a lead that they're, like, they're afforded some sloppiness. Because it's not like, you know, it's not like Google's gonna do anything. You know what I mean? It's not like, it's not like the, the software department at Fossil's like, that's our opening, you know, like, they have so much of a lead that it can be like, okay, everybody, every Apple iOS developer, like, here's the future of complications, just start working on this. By the time you, we have 100% saturation, maybe Google will have released yet another reboot of Android Wear, or whatever it's called now.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's Wear OS, and there is, there's like a weird little reboot where they, they didn't update the version number, but they changed the interface. And the new watch processors for Wear OS devices have been announced. We only know of, like, one insane, expensive, Mont Blanc watch that it's in, but we're expecting more. But there is a new generation of the old processor, but even the new processor is, like, only good for standby time, it doesn't actually make it faster, like, people have been asking me, like, hey, there's a few, there's a new Wear OS processor, there's an update to the Wear OS, OS, a little bit, and there's this new Apple Watch, you know, I made this video last year that's like, Android deserves better smartwatches, just like, looking at the state of smartwatches for Android users and how crappy it is.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  People are like, has your, your calculus changed? And like, I can't fully say no it hasn't yet, because I need to test the new operating system on Wear OS. But honestly, the answer is probably no. Like, it, like, Google hasn't figured it out yet, it's gonna be another year. And so, there was this rumor that they canceled making a Pixel smartwatch at this, you know, upcoming Google hardware event, and- Uh, yes. Good move because there's nothing that I've seen in Wear OS that Google could do that wouldn't look just sloppy and ridiculous and terrible next to this Apple Watch.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:04Nilay Patel?

  It's a big claim.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, unless they, unless they had something that they haven't shown, that is like, they revamped the OS again, and they've done a bunch of really cool stuff, and they've made it thinner. And they have this processor that nobody's ever seen before. And, you know, down the line, all the stuff and, you know, they, they made, they revamped Google Fit, so that's good. And they, they could do a bunch of stuff. But I don't know, man, the, here, like, the execution on this Apple Watch is, like, incredibly good. Like, LTE takes a minute to connect, but once you do, it just feels like you're connected. And if your phone is on somewhere in the world, you get your notifications, full stop, and you can reply to them, full stop, right? Like, that just all just works just fine. That syncs through the cloud. Google does that too, but like, still.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  The phone calls, like, Neela, you talked to me when I was on this watch. Tell me what your experience was talking to me when I was talking to you on the watch.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  I did not believe the dealer was talking to me on a watch.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  I thought he had just called me on a phone.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is so good. Like, the speaker is loud, the screen is beautiful, like, the, my, my biggest complaint is that, like, they, you have to turn your wrist to turn it on. And they, they, I don't know, they pick up an extra eight hours of battery. Maybe they double half, I don't know. Some number of hours they gain from that.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  But isn't it an OLED screen? Can't they just do the thing where it's like always kind of on and then you, it feels like they're so committed to being like, "The screen's on fire!" That they won't just give you this sort of like, you know, Android default, like, the screen's on but not on state? And like, they should just do that.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  I don't know why they don't. I really don't. And I, I told them, like, "Look, I would, I would turn off every single fancy-ass health feature in here if it, it meant I could trade all of that for..."

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  I'd rather die.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'd rather die with a pretty watch face that you, that like, that they, when they, when they find my body, they can be like, "Time of death." And they can look at my wrist and just see it, and that'd be fine.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  This guy probably tripped. If wearing the Apple Watch last gen was like a one in, I feel like I look attractive wearing this watch, how many more is, is the new watch?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I mean, it looks exactly the same. Like, if you don't like the Apple Watch aesthetic, you're not going to like this. It doesn't fundamentally change. They're bigger, they're a little, they're like, they're thinner, but they don't look thinner, but you can kind of feel it. Like, actually, you can really feel it. But like, it's not so, it's not so much thinner that I would actually like make that a point of like, oh yeah, you should get it because it's thinner. Because like, it's like a thing you kind of noticed, kind of thinness. But they're bigger, but they're actually like, they don't feel that much bigger. So like, I had the 42 before, I tested the 44, you could tell it's bigger, the screen looks way bigger, but it doesn't feel huge on your wrist. And I think that, I think, and I can't say for sure because I didn't test it, but I think people who prefer the

• 49:51Speaker 02

  38 are going to feel the same way about the 40, the, the new, the new size there. So in terms of its looks, like, it looks the same. The watch bands fit the same. And that's actually kind of impressive that they managed to do that. But if you didn't like the way it looked before, you're not gonna like the way it looked now, that didn't fundamentally change.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  You gave it 8.5. What is the minus 1.5?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Uh, always on

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  Right now, you're making it sound incredible.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, always on screen and Siri.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  Of course, Siri. What's wrong with Siri?

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Siri, yeah. Siri, it's just like, you don't trust it. When it works, it works like Siri works, and that's fine. And I wish it worked better.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  So you don't trust it?

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  When it works, it works like Siri works, default means you don't trust it.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. But the combination, if you get an LTE one, there's like a lot of like, is it connected or not? I don't know. Let me like, go look at the like swipe up settings to see, okay, wait here. Okay, here we go. Now it works. But, you know, you get a lot of like, hold on, dot, dot, dot. You're like, okay, okay, okay, Siri, let me, let me just, you let me know when you're ready to talk, Siri. I'm, I'll just wait. It's fine. Right? And so that's, that's annoying. And then, yeah, the, like, the always on watch face that I wish that had that. I don't know, walkie talkie mode is like, not great, I guess. I don't like it.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  People were really excited about it.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  People were really excited about it, but the ergonomics of it are weird. And this is, this is another Dieter is an old man thing to say, but it's not true push to talk. It's not true classic next tell Iden, you push a button, you say a thing and it sends it right away. It's you push a button, you say a thing, it gets recorded and then the watch makes a FaceTime audio call to the other watch and then that gets connected and then they send you a recording. So in theory, the, the idea is you do it, you tap the thing, you say, hey Dan, and then you like, wait, right? And you try not to look at it and worry about it. And then like it connects and then he, on the other end, this person hears, hey Dan, or hey Nilay, or whatever. And then you're connected and then it's just a back and forth and that works pretty well.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  So what you save is you don't have to be like, hello, hi, how's it going? You don't, you save that like blah, blah, blah. You can send that initial message right away. And the person who receives it has that immediate experience of I got a message and now we're connected. And now we're just talking, but the mess, the, the experience of sending it is still like basically the experience of making a phone call.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  Huh. Well, I'm going to get one and we're going to try it out.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  But you can like, you could touch your nose to the screen, you know?

• 52:14Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Okay. You can start talking with that preamble, but when you're done talking, do you still have to say like, I love you too?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Well, it's up to you how you want to end it. The way it works is when both of you stop talking for a while, Apple's, you know, the, the call just sort of like, well, it seems like they're done. Are they done? I think they're done. Okay. I'm going to disconnect the call now. Right?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  So Tim Cook just hangs up on you.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like after a minute or so of not sending a message, it eventually is like, okay, they're done now. And then it hangs up and then you'd have to re-initiate a call. But there's no like hang up button. You just sort of stop.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  Huh. Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm going to buy one. I'm just, yeah. That was my question. It was like, is it worth upgrading?

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Man, from the series three cod, man, no, like, like the base model's 400 bucks. You know, you, you get, you get LTE in the bigger size and steel and you could end up spending like 700 bucks. Man, it's such a hard, it's, I don't think it's worth upgrading, but it's going to make you mad that you bought the series three. That's how I feel. I bought the series three and I'm super mad at myself. If you have a series two and you love it and you can afford it, you totally should. If you have a series zero or a series one, oh my God, you are going to be, you're going to love it. It's so much better.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  I feel bad for the person who bought the like addition series zero. He spent like $15,000 on a watch like three and a half years ago and

• 53:32Speaker 02

  I have zero bad feelings for that person. That person deserves what that person got. Cause it was obvious. It was, we all knew what was going to happen. There wasn't going to be a way to upgrade it. There wasn't going to be a way like pull out the internals and replace it. Like, we all knew what was going to happen. And if you had $50,000 to spend, you should have known to.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like those people don't.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to read another ad, then we got to talk about Amazon and then Paul, my man, you're going to do a thing. It's going to be great.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Always.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

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• 54:38Speaker 05

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm your host, Liz Lopato, Deputy Editor at The Verge. It's been a big week.

• 54:50Speaker 05

  Monday morning, I was on my way to Hawthorne, California to attend a press conference at SpaceX. When the news came out that Vernon Unsworth, the cave diver, you may remember him from the Thai caving expedition. He was instrumental in saving those kids. He also made fun of Elon Musk's submarine design, at which point Elon Musk called him a pedo and then doubled down on it a couple of times. Yeah, so he's filed his defamation lawsuit in the US. Now, he's also suggested that he might be filing in the UK. It's not totally clear which country has jurisdiction. The UK has much stricter libel laws. In the US, like, I think probably Elon Musk has a defensible case, right? Like, he's got insult, he's got hyperbole, he's got exaggeration. The only actual statements of fact come in that email to BuzzFeed.

• 55:33Speaker 05

  So that's the US case in a nutshell. I don't know a thing in the world about the UK libel laws, except that. For some reason, truth is in a defense against libel in the UK. Congratulations to you guys. But I would stay tuned because depending on where that jurisdiction is, Elon Musk may be in more or less trouble. It's also possible he'll settle and make it go away. Like, that's always a possibility. Anyway, that evening, I was at a SpaceX press event where Yusaku Mizawa, who is a, I guess, how would I describe him? He's a billionaire Japanese clothes horse who's like obsessed with Basquiat. Anyway, he's gonna be the first person that SpaceX is going to send around the moon, and he's going to bring a bunch of artists with him.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  His whole thing is called hashtag Dear Moon, really. And, you know, that's a thing that they say that they're going to be doing in 2023. Okay. So here's the thing. I'm not gonna go through the entire list of delays that SpaceX has experienced, and I'm not gonna go through the entire list of delays that Tesla has experienced. Let me just say that I think 2023 is optimistic. The other thing that I found out at that press conference is that Musk says that he thinks the development of the BFR, the design has changed, by the way, looks more like a Tintin's rocket, is going to cost about $5 billion. He says $2 billion in the low end, $10 billion on the high end. Okay, well, the Space Launch System, which is NASA's similar rocket,

• 56:58Speaker 05

  has cost about $2 billion a year for the last, like, three years. And I know that SpaceX's whole thing is that it's cheaper and faster than NASA development, but all I'm saying is that $5 billion also feels a little optimistic. Particularly because SpaceX has a bunch of other projects. So, you know, like, there's this satellite constellation they want to send up, and in order to maintain their license, they have to hit a bunch of deadlines. And so that's clearly ahead of the BFR in terms of development, right? Because otherwise, like, you lose your license. That sucks. So, you know, it feels a little squishy. We'll see. One of the things that I found out at that press conference, though,

• 57:39Speaker 05

  is that Yusaku Mizawa was one of the original passengers who was announced to be riding on the, um, the moon trip that you may remember from Falcon Heavy. Uh, there were gonna be two people who were gonna go around the moon. He was one of them. So, okay, he's moved to a different rocket. He still wants to go around the moon. Great. That was Monday. On Tuesday, we found out Bloomberg reported that Tesla is being investigated by the Department of Justice about the go-private tweets. So we already knew he was under SEC, Tesla was under SEC investigation, but the DOJ stuff is new. And the difference between the two is that the SEC is civil and the DOJ is criminal. So the penalties are different, the standard of evidence is different, there's just a lot

• 58:23Speaker 05

  that's different. Doesn't look good, though. It also turns out that the SEC has subpoenaed both Silver Lake and Goldman Sachs for materials on their Tesla encounter. Those two were advisors for the go-private bid. And Tesla says it's been giving information voluntarily to the DOJ. So that is like, dot, dot, dot, to be continued. That's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato, deputy editor at The Verge. This is also available in handy-dandy newsletter form, and you can subscribe at theverge.com.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul, every week, man, blow us away with a segment that is exactly the same. It is called-

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Always called Spin to Win. And yeah, so I remember, once upon a time, I was walking through Costco, and one of the sample sands was a Vitamix demo. And I was not aware up until this point that you could just spin things really fast to make them hot. Are you guys aware of this fact? You could make soup in a blender?

• 59:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I was aware of like, the physics of friction, but I didn't realize it was like, a method of cooking.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you make soup in your blender. But a Vitamix is like, $3 million. And now, Instant Pot, a beloved brand by millennials everywhere, apparently, is coming out with a $100 blender that can also make soup.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Does it have a heating element? Because the Vitamix doesn't heat, you have to like, you pour like, boiling peas into, I don't know, Vitamix soup. And then

• 59:57Speaker 01

  No, the Vitamix, you put cold stuff in it and then you push one of the buttons and it makes it hot. I'm almost 95% sure that that's how it works.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I have a Vitamix and it's never spontaneously produced soup for me.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  Am I using this wrong?

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  So maybe it's like a special combo, like a key command. Yeah, the Instant Pot Ace 60 Cooking Blender.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  $99, eight smart blending programs, a heating blender for soups, milks and more. So you can make your own, like, I don't know, oat milk, nut milk.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  But also soups in a blender.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  Does it have a, a, a smart connection to your smart home?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  No, no, nothing.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Oh, well, screw that.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  I would say that's a plus. No, I just think it's a plus.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna, I'm definitely getting this blender. I'm like, Becky makes a lot of soup. It's like a weird thing. And I don't think, I consistently see her cook the things and then put them in the Vitamix.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  If you understand how physics work, here's, here's your, here is your assignment for the week. I want you to tweet at Paul the name of a car and then a graph of how, of how friction works.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of how fast the Vitamix would have to go to cook vegetables.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  A car that can go fast enough to make soup.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  Paul, last week, we asked everyone to tweet the name of a car at you.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  They did, from what I can tell. What was the most popular car?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a lot of Tesla Model 3, but I feel like, come on, guys, that's pretty obvious. A lot of Mazda 3?

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Which, like, as far as, like, serious suggestions that actually seem like decent cars, that was pretty interesting.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  I used to, I used to own a Mazda 3 hatchback and it was, it was a stick shift and I deeply, deeply loved it. And I don't know if the new ones are any good, but Mazda's on this, this beat now where they're like, we're not putting smart displays on our, on our dashboards. They've got, they've got a couple now where like, nope, we're just, we're, our, our shit is analog now. Um, and that might be interesting to you.

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  You know, the thing about the Mazda 3 is that when you're at like a party and you'd be like, yeah, I gotta, I gotta hop back in my 3 and leave. And everyone will think you have a Tesla Model 3, but you haven't actually lied.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  I got one of those three.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if people call them the three. Be like, yeah, I gotta, I gotta jump in the three and jam out of here. And everyone will be like, oh, Tesla owner. But like, really? That's horrible.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Some of these cars, I wasn't even what are like, is a Honda Jazz, is that a real car?

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what?

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Honda Jazz?

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  That can't be.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yes. Sebring Vanguard City Car.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  The Honda Jazz is a version of the Honda Fit. It's.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, in Australia. I got it. Okay. All right. Well, I, Paul, I think you should buy an Australian Honda Fit called a Honda Jazz. I.

• 1:03:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm. That's like deep from like the HTC playbook of names. Like they just picked another word. They're like, people like jazz, right? Buy a HTC Jazz.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  I have a much better assignment. I take back my friction assignment and I have a new assignment. Tweet at Future Paul, the name of a car that is probably not real, but absolutely could be.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  You mean just like last week?

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Car names. Yeah. At Future Paul, just let him know. And when Paul finally buys a car, we'll let you know which one he buys. Ideally, an Australian Honda Jazz. All right, Dieter, you were at this Amazon event yesterday. It was nuts.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  Try, try, do your best to recap it.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  So, Amazon's VP of something, something Echo products, Dave Lamp, got on stage. He's like, we have 70 products to announce. And we're like, okay, ha, ha, ha. And then they did.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  So, I mean, I've got like, deep analysis here, some, but basically, Amazon has, you know, they're on a, they're basically on a yearly cadence for their main Echo products, right? For most of them. And so they had new Echoes to announce. But the other thing that Amazon is doing is they are looking to do two things. Extend their lead in the smart home and become the default, like ambient computer system, the default thing that all smart home. Devices talked to in a way that's very, very interestingly like not that far from what Andy Rubin was trying to do with his essential home.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  But anyway, the other thing they're trying to do is make sure that Alexa is credible in spaces outside the home. So that it doesn't like people don't just like, well, I can't use it outside the house. So I'm just going to switch to Siri or Google Assistant or something. Right? So they have those two goals and the, the, the home one is the more important one. And so they announced a whole swath of stuff, a giant pile of stuff. That makes it like more obvious that they are just killing it in terms of ecosystem. And so that ranged from a bunch of home audio stuff so that they could be credible for home audio and become like everyone would buy into their room system.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  It meant that there was a clock. Uh, it meant there was a microwave that everybody wanted to talk about. And the microwave wasn't actually about being a microwave. It was about being like a reference design for this new module, this chip that they're selling. To make it easy to add Alexa to anything. Right. And so they just for an hour and a half, they just like went through, I don't even know what order was new echo dot, new echo plus, new echo show, echo auto, echo sub, echo input. Echo, uh, sub. Echo link. Did I say that? The link, the link amp, the clock, the microwave. And then there's a bunch of like Alexa features. So stereo pairing, Alexa guard, Alexa hunches, which are amazing and interesting and fascinating.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  And I can't wait to see what happens with them. And just like. What's an Alexa hunch? Oh, it just went on and on and on. So Alexa hunch is a new Alexa feature where if you say Alexa, ah, sorry. Alexa's talking to me. I'm sorry. All, all Vergecast listeners. Oh my God.

• 1:06:22Speaker 06

  Sorry. I'm not sure about that.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  She's not sure about that. If you say, Alexa, turn off the lights and it's like, you know, 10 at night, it will turn off the lights and then it'll be like, you know, the last time Dieter turned off all the lights at like 10 o'clock, he also turned off the porch light and he usually has the door locked. So instead of saying done or making the little done beep or saying, okay, I did that. Alexa will be like, okay, by the way, your porch light is on and your front door is unlocked. Do you want me to handle that? And you're like, oh yeah, do that. And it will do that. So the hunch thing is it starts to look at a bunch of stuff that you do in your smart home at like a given time or together or whatever. And then if you want it to, when

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  you ask it to do a thing, it'll be like, oh, hey, by the way, this other thing is going on. Do you want me to, do you want me to do something with that? Which is really interesting? So I don't know. What do you, what do you guys want to talk about?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  I have a potential framework for discussing this stuff, right? And I think the microwave is obviously just hilarious and very interesting, right? As far as I understand, it does not have a microphone, right? It's, it's, you talk to your echo device of whatever shape or form that is, and that tells the microwave what to do.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  So I feel like there's this delineation between like, there, there are echo devices, and I guess Amazon's probably going to hopefully use the echo name for things that can actually hear you. And then there's a lot of devices that are going to serve that echo, right? So it's not like exactly a hub and spoke, because you can have lots of different echoes. But there are the command devices and the doing devices, I guess.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  I hate to tell you this, Paul, but there, I asked Dave Lim specifically, what makes an echo device, an echo device, what gets to be an echo? And the answer is very unclear. I thought it was maybe a thing that has a speaker, but the echo tap isn't that it didn't, wasn't, or the Amazon tap wasn't called an echo device. So maybe it's just things that have microphones that Amazon makes, but I don't think that's it either. His answer was basically like, there's a family of echo devices that like, we call echo. And then there are companion devices that like, do stuff with the echo devices. And that's, that's it. And like, the microwave is a companion device. It's not a, it's not, it's an Amazon

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Basics microwave. But I was like, okay, cool. That's all fine. But the wall clock, I believe, is an echo wall clock. So it gets to be called echo. I think.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and the Echo Link and Link Amp do not, as far as I can tell, have microphones. Yep, in the specs sheet, it says, "Voice control, music selection, and playback with your compatible Echo device or the Alexa app." So there's an Echo Link that has no microphones. It's just an output. So this is deeply confusing.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no way to know what, it's whatever, it's like, I think it's whatever gets made in a certain building, right? Because there's also Ring and Blink or whatever. I think if it gets made in this one building, it gets to be called an Echo, otherwise no. It's like.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't understand what Amazon is doing with Ring and Blink. So if you don't know, Amazon bought Ring, the doorbell company that also makes like floodlights with cameras and whatever. And that's rather high end. And then they bought Blink, which is another like connected smart home camera company. I actually have a bunch of Blink cameras. They're great. They like last for two years and two AA batteries. So you can like put them wherever they're whatever, but they're, they're obviously the lower end. So at the event yesterday, they, they were like, we're announcing new Ring products, like Ring is great, integrates everything. And they didn't mention Blink at all.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  At all.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  And it's kind of like, and the two ecosystems are developing in parallel. So there's a Ring doorbell, but now there's like Blink, a whole Blink security line that might include a doorbell. It's the most Amazon thing, like.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Well, no, no, no, it's, it's the most, you buy a smart home gadget company and then don't know what to do with it thing. Because Nest had the same problem at Google.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you know, like Google is disorganized in like a, like a charming way. They're like, oops, we made another messaging app. Like, oh my God, how, we just did it again. Like we, another group of unruly Google teens just made a messaging service like.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  This keeps happening. Amazon is that but cutthroat, right? Like they're like, you're a team and you're a team. And everyone will go in the store and whoever wins will survive, right? And like, I don't quite understand it because if they want this dominance, they should just have one integrated thing and it, they just don't seem to.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  They just haven't gotten there. You know what I mean?

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  To me, this gets to like the like, what is Amazon as a company and what are they good at? Right. And Alexa sort of came out of nowhere, right? It became popular kind of out of nowhere. I don't think Amazon was ready for it. And so they bought these companies. It's taking longer than we'd like for them to integrate it. That's fine. Maybe they'll go that direction. But man, the Sono speaker here, I really should have put it on mute. It's really trying hard to answer me every time I say Alexa.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  But like, one of the things they announced is they have a new R T O S. They have a new real time operating system that some of their stuff, but not all of their stuff is running now. And it's, it's really clear that like, Apple has, everything runs I O S at Apple now, right? And like they're, they, they make an operating system that is a core competency of that company. Right? Google makes Google stuff and like, they have a core competency of like, making operating systems and securing them. And Apple, or sorry, Amazon has like, had to build up a O S company, like an operating system company and like, consumer software company, like they had to do it like, oh my God, we gotta, we gotta do this right now. Like they had no other choice because Alexa became really, really popular.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  And so to me, a lot of these like, what are they doing? What, what's the plan here? Stuff is they're just rushing to keep up with the demand and the popularity of the stuff they've already made. And they're trying to like, as the plane is, is in the air, build the infrastructure of becoming a consumer software company. Cause like their consumer software, their consumer software stuff before was like the Fire Phone and Fire Tablets. And it was like, you're, you're fine. That's fine. That's great, guys. You know, they're getting there, like the, the, the new stuff on the Echo show is like, pretty interesting. And they've definitely, you know, I was really impressed with Google Smart Display and like the, the quality of the visual interactions. And as near as I can tell from my very short time with the Echo show,

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Amazon has caught up and in some ways like done a better job. Like their recipe system seems way smarter, or at least like easier to use, right?

• 1:13:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The most dystopian thing they announced was like, you can buy food from Whole Foods and then your Amazon Smart Display will teach you how to like, make a recipe with it. And then your Amazon microwave will cook it for you. And it's like, okay, that. That is, that's like a hell world. Like, what, it sounds really nice, but that, that's literally the plot of almost every dystopian sci-fi book that has ever been written, which is that a corporation completely runs your life.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  And then you get in your car and talk to your Amazon Echo Auto or like,

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a little too much.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Like, yeah.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  I, I want to peel it back one little bit, but it is a remarkable, like, vision of where it could go. You know what I mean?

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Well, uh, the, the nice thing about, a, a lot of these devices are still smart enough that they can be useful just sort of on your own. It's not necessarily that you have to buy into this whole ecosystem. Obviously, the Alexa-powered microwave doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't have an Echo. But for a lot of this stuff, it can be kind of useful on its own. And in some of this, it seems like Amazon's just like making something for everybody in the sense like I feel personally catered to because they're making devices that don't have speakers that can power good speakers. And so I could use, you know, Echo and Alexa with just regular, uh, good sound. So like, hey, they, they found me where I

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  am, you know? So like, I, but also I'm sure they do want to run my whole life.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the benefit of the doubt argument here is Amazon doesn't itself want to make every single product. They want to make sure that they own the ecosystem, the operating system for your home. Right? And so you could, if you wanted to, make the argument that the most important, most like revealing thing that they announced was the $24.99 smart plug, which is a very hot take. Like, this is a very, very hot take, but let me, let me just like make this argument. It was the most important thing that they announced in terms of their ambition, because here's what it is. It's a smart plug, duh. But it runs their new real-time operating system, uh, that they will maintain and they, you know, I asked like, what about security updates? When are you going to stop? He's like, I don't know. We still issue security updates for the original Kindle. We have no intention

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  of stopping at anything. Well, someday we'll make that decision, but we're not there yet. Um, so it's a reference design because it's a, it's another example of like, here's how to take our chip that will like anybody use and like. Quickly make a smart home product. And I think maybe most importantly, it has this new, I forget what it's called. They they've got a bunch of weird code names, but it has this new Wi-Fi discovery system where you scan the QR code or you buy it direct from Amazon. And so they know that it's yours. And then when as soon as it hooks into the Wi-Fi, it's like, hey, I'm here. I belong to Dieter. And then the echo is like, yeah, you do. We're set up now. Here's the Wi-Fi password. Everything's cool now. And then the echo says, hey, the smart plug is here. What do you want to call it? Room is it in? And then you do it. And so the reason that you could make the case that smart plug is the most important thing

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  is it's the thing that reveals their ambition to own the home ecosystem. It has a chip that anybody can put into anything. It talks to Amazon's like smart home stuff instead of like Z-Wave or Zigbee or trying to figure it out or whatever. They solve like the communication hassle, the setup hassle. It's rock simple. It's pretty cheap. And it makes like, if you're trying to decide what, how am I going to build my smart home ecosystem? What products am I going to choose? What standard am I going to choose? You just choose the stuff that works with Echo. And if you are trying to make one of those products, if you want to make a smart light bulb or you want to make a smart microwave or you want to make a smart whatever the hell.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  You would be crazy not to work with Echo right now. And if you definitely have to work with Echo, why wouldn't you just buy the chip from Amazon and make it? It's a very, very dominant move. It's a very like, almost monopolistic move. It's like, it consolidates power around their ecosystem in a really surprising way. Not surprising, but like forceful.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  First, I would like to commend you for starting to say Echo instead of Alexa. I know you did it on purpose to stop setting up personas. That was, that was, it was a very subtle shift. Two, I think you're right, but I, I, I think they, the breadth of the things they announced to me, it's, it's more to what Paul is saying, which is when you're in the store and you're buying a gift for somebody this holiday season, any single Amazon device that you buy pulls you into the ecosystem. Or now, because there's so much other stuff, further cements you in the ecosystem. Right? So if you buy the Echo Auto and you put it in your car, you are way less likely to say, my next thing is going to be a Google display. Right? You're going to say, well, I'm just going to buy another Amazon one.

• 1:17:54Nilay Patel?

  If you buy an Echo Link, which poor Sonos, right? Like Sonos thought they were going to be this neutral party. Amazon is just there with a full audio system. Is it going to be as good? Nope. The hell knows, right? Like, whatever. But like, here are these products where if you have a bunch of speakers pre-installed in your ceiling or outside or wherever, now you can just buy this box and all those speakers become part of your Alexa system in a way that was a little bit harder before. Yeah. And now it integrates with Tidal, Neil, so that's great. I gotta say, there's, the biggest Amazon flex yesterday was like announcing their new Alexa search features. I mean, like coming at first to Tidal. And it's like,

• 1:18:35Nilay Patel?

  if you announce a feature that you literally know no one will use, but you're proud of it anyway. Like you're, you're just flattered. You're like, no one can have this, but no one else is even close. So like, we're going to start with Tidal.

• 1:18:49Nilay Patel?

  And I think that, I mean, I, you know, two weeks ago, we, we had Tim Wu on the, on the interview episode to talk about monopolies and antitrust. Those network effects in these ecosystems are, I think we're only now like as consumers, as policymakers, as whoever, like realizing how insanely powerful they are. And how if you don't demand somehow, whether it's consumers in a market saying these are preferences or governments, or I don't know. Space aliens coming down and saying, you must interoperate. Who knows how that would work? But if you don't demand interoperability somewhere, the, the pull of let's use our network effects to become the dominant player.

• 1:19:31Nilay Patel?

  And then the, the sort of logarithmic curve of how much better you get, how much faster versus your competition, those things are super real, right? So Amazon now, it's like the classic example is Google search, right? So Google captured the search market, they get more incoming search data, they get more data about what people click on when they actually search for things, like what are the correct results? So their search engine gets better exponentially faster than a search engine with less volume. Right? Like that's the sort of the classic European Union gonna regulate Google argument. Amazon actually being investigated for antitrust violations by the European Union this week for basically the same argument.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  You have a store, you collect purchasing data from the store, then you make products to price out your vendors in the store, you do Amazon basics, that's unfair because no other store or retailer has access to that data. Like these sort of like exponentially growing network effects or data effects, but create and preserve a monopoly. Can you apply that to the smart home right now? Absolutely not, because it's still just a giant mess, right? Like you cannot credibly say that like buying a whole bunch of stuff from one vendor gives you a radically better experience than not, right? Like, if everything is still pretty messy.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  That's why I'm saying the smart plug is the most important product because they are solving that mess by you can either just buy our stuff if we offer it, or if you make the stuff, you should definitely make sure it works with our stuff. And so they, they're solving that problem with a huge flex of like work with Amazon stuff and making it super easy to do for, you know, rando manufacturer 27, right? Or 20,000 actually, like that's how many they've got. So I'm just gonna say some words and then I'm gonna sit back and let Neelai's head explode. Mark Witten went from Sonos to Microsoft and is now running Fire TV at Amazon, created a thing called the Fire TV Recast. Go.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  This thing is so silly.

• 1:21:39Nilay Patel?

  I get it. It's such a hack and I love how much of a hack it is. So here's what this thing is. It is, it's so silly.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 1:21:49Nilay Patel?

  Two, it is two over the air TV tuners in a box with a 500 gigabyte hard drive.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:57Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, it's a TiVo, right? Like that's fundamentally what it is, but without an interface.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  That you cannot, that you cannot plug into your TV.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  You cannot plug it into your TV. It's like a TiVo sling box combination. So it has no interface on it. You can't plug it into your TV. It doesn't come with an antenna. You have to buy your own HD antenna. Okay. So then you set it up wherever that antenna gets a good signal and then you plug it in and then you like leave, you like walk away from it. And then you go to your Fire TV.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Yes, or your phone or your tablet.

• 1:22:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, wherever your, wherever great Fire apps are served. Everyone loves those. And then you're, you get a new tab that's like TV and DVR, right?

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  Just DVR. It just says DVR. It doesn't say TV.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  So do you get live TV off of this thing?

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  Yes, under the DVR tab.

• 1:22:47Nilay Patel?

  That makes no sense at all. Okay, fine. That's fucking crazy.

• 1:22:52Nilay Patel?

  Literally no sense at all. And then you can watch whatever wonderful local channels are available in your area.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:59Nilay Patel?

  I get, I, I, at my core, I understand this thing. If you live in a world of cord cutters, what don't you have? You don't have local news, which some people want. You don't have the broadcast networks and you don't have live sports on the broadcast networks. So those are the things you need. You need ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox. But those are hard to get as a cord cutter. So you can just put up an antenna and get them. Great. Problem solved. So now Amazon has, has an affordance to let you do that. What they, what they, I think what Amazon does not want to do is start like a skinny bundle of streaming services.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  Why not? Like that's actually, that's, that's the, like YouTube made one, Sony made one. Sony's, by the way, the View skinny bundle integrates into this whole recast system, which is

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  This makes no sense.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Fascinating.

• 1:23:48Nilay Patel?

  Also makes no sense.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Right? Like we're assuming Apple's gonna make one, but Amazon chose rather than making a skinny bundle and selling it under Prime, or like having it be an add-on to Prime or part of Prime or whatever, they chose to make a $230 box that you stick in your attic.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  It's very technically advanced. Like it does Wi-Fi Direct. It figures out what you're streaming to. It's like, what's the fastest way I can stream 720p video to this thing? And if it's like an Amazon thing, they've updated all their Amazon things to support Wi-Fi Direct. So it doesn't like, it can do better than, um, you know, just like going through the rest of the crazy traffic on your Wi-Fi network. Um, technically it's very advanced, but they thought it was a better idea to make this crazy sort of hard to understand $230 box that you stick in your attic than to make a skinny bundle. And you just said, of course they would, they're doing that. But actually, the question is, why don't they do the skinny bundle? Are they trying to like avoid competition? Do they not think that they can make the deals? Uh, like what is it?

• 1:24:52Nilay Patel?

  Where does Mark Whitten work at Amazon?

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  He is currently VP and GM, uh, at Amazon. He works like he runs Fire TV.

• 1:25:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So he worked, well, hmm. So the way Amazon works is like they have this famous line, disagree and commit, where if there's not consensus on a thing, Jeff Bezos is like, disagree and commit. And then everyone has to like, admit that they disagree, but then commit to doing the thing. So basically no one can say no. So you can't prove that making a 500 gigabyte dual tuner DVR is a bad idea. Right? Like you, you can't like sit there in the meeting and be like, no, it's definitely, right? So Mark Whitten's like disagree and commit. I don't work in the division that can go make the skinny bundle deal. I'm just going to make this DVR while you figure out how to get good margins from the TV networks. And I'll just get them for free because of they, they broadcast. Like that, I feel like that's the story of Amazon.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. You, the benefits you get from this is like, there's no subscription fee, but like, I don't know, like there, there are things that are just bonkers to me. Like you're Amazon, you run AWS and you didn't put the DVR in the cloud.

• 1:25:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I get it. I absolutely get it. Like,

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. You, you're Amazon, you, you have like, you have wrestled complete control of the smart home, like universe. And you didn't think that you were up to the task of cable card. Right? This thing doesn't work with cable. It's not a cable box.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  What was that company that got shut down that had antennas in a, in a service?

• 1:26:24Nilay Patel?

  Area.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  Area. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  So this is, this is just your own, your own area. But now there's more devices to consume that.

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  It's totally your own personal area. Yes, it is.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  You're just trolling me. This is horrible. No, it's absolutely not that.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 1:26:42Nilay Patel?

  The way Ario worked, and this was a guy named Chet Kinoja was the CEO of Ario. Now he's working on Starry, which is like another, another like wifi thing. But their idea was they had, I went to the warehouse in Brooklyn. They had a warehouse in Brooklyn that was full of TV antennas. And when you signed up for Ario, they virtually assigned one of those antennas to you.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  And then they captured everything and they would restream it to you. Right?

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:09Nilay Patel?

  And they, they were going to have warehouses like around the country to get different, whatever. But they got in trouble because you didn't actually own the antenna. And there were not, they could not prove that every customer had their own dedicated antenna.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. So they cap, they capture everything and this, this thing doesn't capture everything. It only captures what you tell them.

• 1:27:28Nilay Patel?

  And also if you're, if you're a company like, if you're any rational company and everyone in the country wants to record American Idol and everyone who uses, you don't want to make 50,000 copies of American Idol. You want to make one and stream that one 50,000 times.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:45Nilay Patel?

  So there was like a lot there. This device is like, you have your own antenna, your own hard drive. If 50,000 people buy this thing, 50,000 copies of American Idol will be made. And that like gets you out of all the trouble.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  But from a user perspective, you get exactly what you got.

• 1:28:01Nilay Patel?

  No, because Ario was like, it would give you kinda, from a user perspective, you have an antenna on your house and you get whatever your antenna on your house will pick up. Right? You just get a DVR in the mix and it integrates with your Fire TV. Ario was like an app. It held itself out as a full-on streaming service. It promised high qual, it was like a whole thing. This is literally just an antenna on your house and a DVR. Like you can go buy a TiVo like today that will do this thing and offer you substantially the same experience and even have all the apps. Right? So like it's a, I, I saw a lot of people talk about the Ario thing because I think Ario was really high profile and everyone has forgotten that TiVo exists.

• 1:28:41Nilay Patel?

  Except for me, like I have one. But like, it's a TiVo. Like, they just, they just, I don't know, de-aggregated a TiVo into its components. Do you know what I mean? Like, the interface of the TiVo lives over here, and the tuner lives over there.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Like, the Aereo part of it lives over here, is what you're saying.

• 1:28:58Nilay Patel?

  I hate you, Paul. It's like, I love you, but I truly hate you.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Honestly, the thing that makes me sad about this recast box is that doesn't involve any IR blasters.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:29:08Nilay Patel?

  Can't, I can't.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Missed opportunity.

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  Can I say, Amazon, every one of their first-generation products looks like trash.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:29:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, it looks like they were made in project boxes by engineering students. And then, a year later, they're like, "Okay, you like it, we wrapped it in fabric, and now it's nice."

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  And like, that's what they did with the Echo, it's what they did with the Echo Plus.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  It's what the Kindle, the first Kindle looked terrible.

• 1:29:35Nilay Patel?

  The first Kindle was legitimately insane. Like, it was so, it had that vacuum fluorescent display with the scroll bar. That's a scroll innovation.

• 1:29:45Nilay Patel?

  So, bring it back on. That was the truest and insane scroll innovation, was having a custom display with a scroll bar.

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  The first Kindle belongs in the MoMA. Do you disagree?

• 1:29:55Nilay Patel?

  I think it is in the MoMA.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  It must be, anyway.

• 1:29:59Nilay Patel?

  We did a post a few weeks ago about how you can turn a Kindle into a clock, and I definitely fell down an eBay hole looking for a first-gen Kindle to turn into a clock. And then I thought to myself, "Do I want this on my wall as a clock forever?" And I did not.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  The Echo Auto is, looks like your very first, like, 3D-printing project. Like, you're like, "I got a 3D printer, I'm gonna learn how to use it," and that's the first thing you make.

• 1:30:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the Link, and the Link Amp literally look like project boxes with knobs in the front. So, there's a part of me that's like, "These are cool, I'm very interested to see what they do with the Auto in general." Like, there have been car Alexa products before, and they just haven't been useful. Like, can they make this thing useful? Do I want a permanently-mounted, you know, mini USB connector in my life? Like, I do not. Would I rather have Google Maps on CarPlay, which exists now? Yeah, but is it gonna sell well? Will they make it nice? Will be integrated more cars? Like, I'm sort of just jet. It's this is like, how much that thing costs? Like 100 bucks?

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  I don't remember. So here's a, here's a thing. You just said you want Google Play Maps. So the Echo Auto is interesting because like they have to, they have to, they're competing with CarPlay and Android Auto fundamentally. And like, that's a losing proposition.

• 1:31:14Nilay Patel?

  No, Echo Auto is 25 bucks.

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  Right. It's a Bluetooth module with speak with microphones on it. And maybe a tiny speaker. I don't remember. But if you don't have or the ability to get CarPlay or Android Auto, it's interesting. If you ask it for directions on your phone, the Echo app, the Alexa app will like pop up like, is this where you want to go? And then you can hit yes, and then it will deep link send the address to Waze, Apple Maps or Google Maps. So like, the thing works with existing mapping applications by using deep links, which I love.

• 1:31:51Nilay Patel?

  That's wild. Open ecosystems, URLs. They remain the future. URLs. Google wants to change the URL, by the way. I'm just putting that out. You never know what's gonna happen.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 1:32:03Nilay Patel?

  All right. We got it. We got to wrap this up. Speaking of Google and URLs, by the way, interview episode of The Vergecast next Tuesday. This coming Tuesday, I guess, for the people on their cars right now, listening. Malta Ubel, who is Google's engineering lead for AMP. And we spent a lot of time talking about the future of the web. It was pretty good. So that's coming. Yeah. Did we miss anything? I don't think we missed anything. I think we did it all. I promise you, you're gonna be happy to drive on 10S if you pre-ordered. Everyone read my camera criticism is me trashing the phone. It was just a little camera criticism. Do get over it. You'll be happy. You'll talk to Siri. Maybe it'll do some stuff. By the way, Amazon, 100% gendered Alexa.

• 1:32:43Nilay Patel?

  Dave Limp only referred to it as a she, which I think is both very interesting and somewhat troubling.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, Matt actually made a really good point that like, if you're gonna start making kitchen gadgets, the fact that you chose to gender this thing is like, really not good. Like, there were a bunch of super misogynistic stuff about the microwave and the female name there that was like, really unfortunate.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Oh, lighter note.

• 1:33:04Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead, Paul.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  PlayStation Classic.

• 1:33:06Nilay Patel?

  PlayStation Classic. Do you feel like this is gonna be as big as the Nintendo thing?

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  I... Name 20... Name the 20 PlayStation 1 games that you're dying to play. Like, I feel like the... I feel like the SNES had like, a better catalog for this sort of thing. If you're not... And also, Sony's does such a good job at allowing you to buy old games on its newer consoles.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Also, it doesn't have the... It's not DualShock, right? So it doesn't have analog sticks, so feels weird to me. I feel like it's missing some amount of magic that the SNES Classic had. Still fun.

• 1:33:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Does the SNES Classic have NBA Jam? That's like, really what I want out of one of these systems.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  I don't know, but now I really wanna play NBA Jam.

• 1:33:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. Okay. Spacecraft. We haven't talked about it much on the show. Spacecraft, Season 2 is up and running. Lauren, this week, learned to grow plants in space. That's just a thing that she did. So go watch that. That's on the main Verge YouTube channel. Democracy continues to have a troubling relationship with social networks. Casey Newton is writing about that literally every day in the Interface, our new newsletter. This Week in Elon, you heard Liz do it. Now, you can read that on the website as well. So read This Week in Elon. Why'd you push that button? Season 3 is being made right this second, so get ready for that by listening to Seasons 1 and 2 on your favorite podcast app. And you can also follow The Verge on Twitter and Instagram. You can rate us on Apple Podcasts. There's a new show with Kara Swisher from Recode coming this fall, which is basically now.

• 1:34:39Nilay Patel?

  And you can listen to Recode Decode with her and Recode Media with Peter Kafka. They're both all excellent shows. And we will see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  Promo code.

• 1:35:08Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Keeping up with your competition is important. Taking the lead with unmatched innovation, that's impressive. Set yourself up to achieve more by running your apps on Microsoft Azure. Clear the way for unparalleled productivity with end-to-end development management tools. Fearlessly integrate cloud capabilities across your environment with only one consistent hybrid cloud. Fearlessly integrate cloud capabilities across your environment with the only consistent hybrid cloud. Build the next generation of smart apps. Discover transformative insights through artificial intelligence and real-time data and scale across more global regions than you'll get from any other cloud provider. Microsoft believes that every business and every organization, small and large, old and new, has something to gain by reaching beyond the limits of an on-premises data center. That's why Azure is the cloud for all. What will you achieve when you come to the cloud? Start experimenting and find out.

• 1:35:49Nilay Patel?

  Get started with a free account and 12 months of intelligence services at azure.com/trial. That's A-Z-U-R-E.com/trial. Also, I want to tell you about Vox's Netflix show, Explained. The full first season is done. It's awesome. It is such a good show. I love it. Every episode is like 15, 20 minutes on one thing. The one I want to point out to Vergecast listeners in particular is the music episode, which explores questions like how does sound become more than like just sounds? There's actually a really great sequence where they have people listen to like raindrops and over time, they start ranking the raindrops as just random sounds into music. It's wild. And then it also explores things like famous producers who lost their ability to hear after having brain surgery and then regained it.

• 1:36:34Nilay Patel?

  And it's narrated, I swear to God, by Carly Rae Jepsen. So go on Netflix, check out Explained by Vox. You can also just go to Netflix.com/Explain and check it out. It's an awesome show. It's been so much fun to like watch it get made around us in our office in New York and to see like how something becomes a TV show. I love it. Go check it out. Netflix.com/Explain.