AirPods, exploding batteries, and yeah Apple

After a week of swimming in Apple news, the classic cast of Nilay, Lauren, Dieter, and Paul get together via the internet to get deeper into their reviews of the new products and talk a little bit about their effect on the near future of consumer tech. 01:38 – Galaxy Note 7 recall 13:01 – Apple Watch 20:13 – AirPods / Bluetooth 32:44 – Autodesk Graphic ad 33:43 – watchOS 3 39:03 – iPhone 7 53:00 – Wealthfront ad 53:37 – Paul's weekly segment "Costco Cool" 57:11 – Lightning audio round Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. Today's episode is very special because literally everyone is remote. So I am here, I'm Neel Patel, I'm in upstate New York. Paul Miller is here, where are you, Paul? I'm in the studio, where are you guys? Paul's all alone. Ready to do a Vergecast. Lauren Good is here, Lauren, where are you?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I am in Palo Alto.

• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  And Dieter Bohn is here, Dieter seems very angry, where are you, Dieter?

• 0:34Speaker 02

  I'm just angry in general, no, I'm in our San Francisco office, I'm only technically remote.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Okay, okay, so we're here.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  It's good, we're good.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  It's been, I will say, it has been an absolutely bonkers week at The Verge. We've done so much stuff. I want to shout out like our other sections, so the science section this week has been incredible. You should go read Alessandro Petenza's piece on kava, which is a bitter root that you mash into water and then drink, and it's a muscle relaxant, but it might also destroy your liver. So you gotta really balance that one out. Go read that. The transportation section this week, just out of control. All the self-driving cars. They literally just found all the self-driving cars in America and then had them drive them around. So Andy Hawkins went to Pittsburgh, drove an Uber self-driving car.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Tamara Warren went and rode around in Ford self-driving car and actually spoke to the CEO of Ford, Mark Field. So just a big week around the site, entertainment section, cranking away as always. But I just want to call them out because this podcast, what we have been working on for the past week, people on the show, is obviously a flood of Apple news and a little bit of exploding Samsung news. Just a little smidge. And right as we actually went on air here, Samsung has officially recalled the Note 7. I think you should say finally, officially. Finally, that's true. Finally, after way too long, they have recalled the Note 7.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  So if you have a Note 7, this is like a public safety announcement. Go to Samsung.com, there's a banner at the top of the screen, or go back to where you bought it. Trade it in, you can get a new one with a new battery, you can get an S7 or an S7 Edge for free. Samsung now, literally this is breaking minutes ago, Samsung has 92 reports of the battery overheating in the United States, including 26 reports of burns, 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage. But just stop using your Note 7. And there's stats out there in the world that people are just still using them at the same rate as before, which is a story we ran today as well. So if you're listening to this, you have a Note 7, you've been very brave. We commend you. Go get a different phone. If you know somebody with a Note 7, go get a different phone. So I

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  just want to talk about that for five minutes and we can do all the Apple stuff. Is it, this is, the Note 7 is no longer a viable device, right? Is anyone gonna buy a Note 7 after this?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  No. It is remarkable how quickly a phone that's on fire can burn down your brand. They're gonna have a hard time recovering, I think. Right?

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Samsung have a Note. I think my big question is-

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Is it the Note?

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  Samsung had a big opportunity in this cycle with the Note, which we reviewed very highly. Dan thought it's a great phone. It is a beautiful piece of hardware, except for the exploding, you know, and Apple took this year off in terms of design. They iterated the iPhone 6 design. They could, they could have come, and they have, you know, I know everyone's laughing at me with the headphone jack, but they have a headphone. Like, there's things to market about their phone that are clearly differentiated from Apple's phones, except it blows up.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  I think the danger for Samsung here, and I really, I don't know how badly this will affect, but you know how people still sometimes, sometimes call their phone a droid?

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  It's not called the Note 7. It's the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. And I really, I really feel like a lot of people call them Galaxy, or my Galaxy phone.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  And you know, it's got that curved edge screen. It's got a lot of Galaxy style features. It really hurts. I think the whole Galaxy brand at least.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because as far as we can tell, the S7 has not been exploding. It's just the Note. Yeah, it just seems like Samsung had this opportunity and whether or not they could have capitalized in the opportunity, who knows? And whether or not their attempt to capitalize in the opportunity would have been successful, who knows? But they certainly do not have the opportunity anymore, right? Like, it's gone. And the question is like, is it?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  They had, they responded, I think, basically within 24 hours, saying, oh, yeah, no, we're gonna do a sort of a thing. You can go trade it in, sort of a soft recall. And it took them a really long time to get to this, like, formal, official, start turning the wheels of the consumer government to like, do a full-on formal recall. We actually ran a story earlier today, before they went formal with this full recall of saying, people are being dumb and still using their Note phones. The other thing that they have been, I think remarkably slow on, is how widespread this is. Now, you could say the difference between like, 30 out of however many million they sold,

• 5:32Speaker 02

  or 92 over out of however many million they sold, is like, a tiny percentage. But once you've got numbers creeping up to 100, and you've got like, Jeeps and garages burning down, like, that's a thing that you should not have messed around with. And I think in retrospect, they're really gonna regret not having moved more decisively right away.

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the question is like, compared to previous battery incidents, the one I keep thinking about is 2006, when Sony made lithium ion batteries, were exploding, Apple laptops, Dell laptops, Sony laptops. It took months for the Sony battery recall to happen. And eventually, it became like Dell recalled 4.1 million batteries, which at the time was the biggest consumer recall ever. So. This is definitely a tighter timeline, but Samsung definitely like dilly-dallyed for a minute. They they didn't quite fess up to the seriousness of having phones in people's pockets and everywhere with them. And like going like lighting up like they they went through the process, but it didn't seem like they had the urgency.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  And now it finally seems like they do.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  This is a sad story. Look, if you have a note.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Don't use it.

• 6:45Nilay Patel?

  Stop using it. Like trade it in.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Don't use it.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  Corey Seika in the New York office, if anyone's listening to this, find Corey, take his phone, throw it away. Um, because he refuses.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Why is he still using it? Oh, my goodness.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  Convenient. I mean, this is like the problem, right? You totally depend on your phone and you never believe that anything bad is going to happen to you. So.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  What are you gonna use a Note five? Like people in the olden times?

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, what am I gonna do? Wear a seatbelt? Like, come on.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  You guys see a tweet that went viral yesterday where someone someone said, uh, we have an exploding galaxy and we have an iPhone without a headphone jack. That is basically the perfect metaphor for this year's election.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  I think you often figure out who is who in that scenario.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Don't don't say it. Exercise for the listener. Please don't tweet it else.

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just said, I, you know, the, the, the S seven is only about six months old. So Samsung has six months presumably before they put another S series Galaxy phone. And they're just gonna have to deal with it.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Which, by the way, is going to be the Galaxy Samsung Galaxy S eight comma, the successor to the phone that exploded in every single news article about it.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, they're just gonna it's someone in every piece. We're gonna write it. Hopefully they don't explode because that's what people think about Samsung phones, but we'll see if it fades over over the next six months. Um, it is, I will say, it's just a shame because the Note seven is a good phone, except for the exploding.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  It's just.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Except for the exploding and their lack of transparency because that really the exploding battery enough creates a sense of distrust among consumers, but then just feeling like you don't really know what's going on with it. Or whether it's officially recalled for an extended period of time is not good either.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Meanwhile, the other thing to compare to. Go ahead, Dieter. No, as I say, meanwhile, the other top two stories on our website right now are T-Mobile is telling iPhone six, six plus and SE users that if you update to iOS 10, you're not going to be able to connect to their network. So don't. And if you use the gift search in iOS 10 iMessage, there's a, you know, halfway decent chance you're just going to get some hardcore porn showing up. It's a bad day for phones. Today is a very bad day for phones.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  The T-Mobile thing is ridiculous, just flat out ridiculous. And I actually, I don't remember who was in the office yesterday, told me that they had updated their phone to iOS 10 and now their T-Mobile sucked. So it's real.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  So, so here's the thing though, I'm having the T-Mobile problem. It was dropping before I updated iOS 10.

• 9:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so they gave everybody unlimited data and then, no, I don't know.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  I don't, it goes to like no network and you like, you have to like restart your phone and that sometimes that works. Well, every once in a while turning it like airplane mode on and off works, but it's typically you have to restart your phone to get back on the network.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Wait, but Paul, I have a bigger question, which is, so you still use your phone as a phone?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I'm just kidding. That was a really bad joke. Nobody laughed.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  You're talking about, obviously you're talking about cellular data, but also decide, I'm going to stop.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  I have not failed, to your point, I have not failed to make a phone call or receive a phone call because I have not tried to make a phone call and nobody's tried to call me. Okay, don't, don't think I'm some funny dudgy making phone calls.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  I love phone calls.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  But, but definitely.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  To be very clear, we're all on phone calls right now.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Well.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  No, we're on Skype.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  I've definitely missed some text messages and it's kind of, it kind of sucks. Cause you don't, your phone doesn't like alert you when you have no service.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  It's pretty, it's a pretty, it's a pretty sad scenario. Actually, as I think about it, I'm pretty mad and I'm having a bad time and I thought it was just me. And now that I read about this T-Mobile problem, I'm angry and I want a bit of a rebate. Also, can I talk more about T-Mobile? Went in to trade in my phone, get that free quote unquote iPhone seven. And they, you gotta get on that new unlimited plan.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Yep. That's how they get you.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  So they got me. So I'm going from $60 a month to $75 a month. But unlimited, guys, imagine it.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Can't wait till you try and tether on that thing. That's going to be a blast for you.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  But guess what? Unlimited.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  Except with limits.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Very specific limits.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  And also, also, and also no service.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  It's not unlimited. It's uncarrier unlimited and the double on creates a negative.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  And unservice.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Actually limited.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a carrier limited.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, can I tell you a secret? When, when Dieter, when Dieter moved to San Francisco, both of us were like, because we, we sat next to each other in New York and we talked all day. Uh, so when he moved to San Francisco, we practiced making phone calls so that we would know how.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  Because we hadn't done it. We had to like practice hanging up and like ending the phone call at the appropriate time.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness. You know, it's kind of crazy.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  This and I was.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And the crazy thing about this is that both of you guys are married. So at some point, I imagine you had to like maintain a relationship involving phone calls to a point where, you know, you were able to keep things going.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Now, man, I courted, I courted Becky over G chat. Long distance relationship for the first year that I dated, uh, my wife. We just didn't, we just didn't talk on the phone for that year because talking on the phone is too freaking hard.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Now Becky and I both lived in Chicago when we were dating and we definitely, uh, dated over G chat.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  So maybe phone calls really was like a new thing.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  Blue messaging so bad. G chat is like a very warm, romantic spot in my heart and it's gone. Nobody uses it anymore. Every now and again, Becky hits me in the G chat. I'm like, oh, the fire's back.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Well, now, you really, you, you, well, now, you guys got, have an abundance of phone calls because there's so much going on that you basically can't get off the phone with each other.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we've been on the phone a lot. So, okay, let's get off the sad stuff, the exploding phones, the carriers that don't work. Let's get on the fun stuff. Um, and Lauren, I know you, you might have to go a little bit early. So I want to start with the watch. Cause you have the new, uh, Apple watch series two. You've reviewed it. I'm going to throw this out there. I think Lauren's review and video of the series two, one of the best videos we have ever made. It's so good. So go watch that. Um, I've been running watch OS three. I love watch OS three. I think it's great. It's, I was saying to Dan Seifert earlier. It's still like a little useless to have a smart watch. Like it's fine, but it's now it's like a fun useless. It's like a fun gadget useless, you know? And I, I'm into it. It's not fighting me anymore. But what, what, what, what did you think?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So first off, thank you. Those are super kind words. And, um, this, I'm not just saying this, but I also think while you're looking at videos, you should go check out Neil's iPhone seven video because that is flipping fantastic. And clearly I have picked the wrong category of things to review in my life because you're like, I have to go to bars and like eat these awesome burgers. And like, I'm like, I'm trying to swim by honey yards in a pool and not die.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Do you, do you think you burned as many calories in your video as Neel I consumed in his video?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it's quite possible because I'm still recovering.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  That was the same beer in all the shots. I carried that high life for like an hour and a half.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  That burger looked delicious though. It really did.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  I never ate it. We took so many pictures of it. It got cold and gross. Oh.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, the point of the the watch was to work out with it because Apple has is officially positioning it as a health and fitness tracker. When it first came out, it was like, look, we made a smart watch. And by the way, you can track your activity with it because that's become very popular now. And this time they were like, oh, new one has built in GPS. You don't need to do your phone with you anymore for GPS. We've improved the water resistance. We added swim workout options. Now, when you go into like the other workout options, you can name it something specific. And here are like a list of 26 exercises you could possibly ever want to do. And like they just, and then they did like social sharing in the activity app now, which they hadn't done before.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  But I wrote in the review, it's kind of a testament to what other activity tracking companies have been doing. Like follow your friends and support your friends and all that stuff. So it's a fitness tracker. But interestingly, since that review came out, a lot of people have written into us or tweeted at us and said, are you guys going to review the version one watch with the updated processor? Because Apple is also still doing the first Apple Watch that they announced in 2015. And it's a little bit less expensive. It's $269, but they updated the processor. So hopefully it's not as slow. So there are still people out there that are like, hey, that's great. There's this GPS Apple Watch now, but I'm still interested in the $269 one with the supposedly faster processor.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And how does that work? So I think at some point, we're gonna have to take another look at that.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  It's a hundred dollars less, right?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  It is a hundred dollars less. Yeah, and by the way, that is still, if you're just looking for a basic activity tracker or wrist wearable, $269 is still more expensive than like almost everything we looked at. Like Dieter and Dan and I went through the edits and we were like, oh, okay. You know, it's more expensive than Pebble. It's more expensive than the Samsung Gear Fit 2. It's more expensive than the Microsoft Band, which we don't even know if that still exists in its current form. Or will continue to exist. It's more expensive than like a bunch of Android watches and like, and all that stuff. So it's still pricey, but I mean, Apple's always gonna charge a premium. And I think some people are still gonna be willing to pay that just to say they have an Apple Watch.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Here, here's my question. This is maybe a little tangential. I felt like the most Apple-like moment in the keynote, other than the word courage, which is great, was when they demonstrated the speaker ejecting the water.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  And I see that you've noticed, you noted this in your review. Does anything else do that? Is that just Apple being absolutely brilliant, or am I just unaware of how, how things are waterproof? Because that just, I just got like little tingles. I was like, oh, yes, we, we solved water ejection.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it is kind of cool when you think about.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Other waterproof gadgets don't need to eject the water because it could just flow out because their speaker holes aren't like small and weird. But I guess I haven't seen other smartwatches that would also have small speaker holes that are also fully waterproof that like, I don't know what else would even need to do that at this point.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, Lauren was saying something. What were you saying, Lauren?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's okay. So that's exactly, Theodore's exactly right, which is part of the, the, the value proposition of the Apple Watch is, well, you can use Siri with it, right? And you can speak into it if you get a phone call. Not that anyone wants to make an entire phone call through their wrist, but you know, you have these options of voice control and listening to things through it. So they had to leave the speakers in, whereas with something like a waterproof Garmin, like they're, they don't put microphones and speakers in their watches for the most part. Possibly all, I'm not quite sure. So you're right in that, like, Apple had to keep the ports. They couldn't just say, well, let's get rid of the ports. They could have, of course, but they opted not like, they didn't want to get rid of all the ports to fully waterproof it in that way.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  They had to leave the ports as part of the smartwatch experience. So it is kind of brilliant. They were just, their next line of thinking was obviously, well, then how do we just push the water out? And I, I personally have never seen any other watch or wearable that says, we're going to create a mechanism built inside of it, along with all the other components we have to fit into this tiny little thing that basically dumps the water out.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can't wait for the, like, iFixit teardown, where they run that mechanism in like, ultra slow motion, so we can see how it works. Because I was expecting it to like, try and thump, like make a bass sound, but it, it's more of like a mid-range tone. It's a really weird sound.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  It's kind of tinny. It sounds a little bit like a mosquito.

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a tiny speaker.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, maybe I can do it right now. I don't know if I can do it. Let me, let me.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll do the big reveal.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so I just water locked it. I'm gonna take it off and hold it up next to my ear. It is water locked at the moment. Let's see, let me know if you guys, uh. Wait, this is a silly question. I'm wearing the AirPods.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  There's the reveal. Oh, my God, this whole time.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but wait, which side is the, uh, I don't even know. Hold on one second. I have time. What side the microphone is on. Is microphone on both sides?

• 19:58Nilay Patel?

  Lauren is doing this.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Okay, I got it. I got it. Ready? Ready? I'm gonna, I'm gonna do the water thing.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Do you hear that?

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it sounds like a dot. Yeah, wow. It's just, it's like one of those, it's a weird technology sound that hasn't existed in a long time. It's neat. Uh, but for the listener, there's the big reveal. Lauren has been talking to you through her AirPods this whole time. I bet you didn't even notice, or you did notice. Whichever one it is, you were right.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Lauren, you're wearing the AirPods and you wore them with the watch. I wore them a bunch of the phone. We'll talk about it later, but you wore them with the watch specifically for like running around and stuff. Uh, how, how they do?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they did surprisingly well. So we, Neil and I both have a pair. Walt Mossberg has a pair. And we are not going to be reviewing them until we get full ready production units, because right now we have pre-production units. Uh, some people have put up reviews already. My advice would be, I mean, you can read them if you want, but wait for ours, right? And I think our, our audio guys are gonna be really, they're gonna get really into this too. That said, my overall experience so far has been surprisingly positive. I, when Apple first announced them, I thought this is ridiculous. They, Apple has come up with a hundred and sixty dollar solution that, for their removal of the headphone jack that, um, look like you have like mini cigarettes hanging out of your ears.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  And, and then I put them in and I paired them with the iPhone. And then once I paired them with the iPhone, they automatically paired with watch. And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. And then I, they, it's a little bit of a struggle to pair them with my old 2012 MacBook Pro, but that's a whole other story. And then I, now I've been switching between the watch and the phone. And like, it's crazy. Like you just take them out of the little case, little dental floss case, and you pop them in your ears and they're just paired. There, I have not had to repair them. Um, when I take them out of the case, I get a little pop up on the iPhone that shows me how much battery life is left. The case charges them, so you throw them in the case. You don't think about it that they're charging.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Um, obviously they're Bluetooth, so they're working over Bluetooth and they will work with other things. But this W1 chip that Apple has created and the whole sort of, the, the like, passivity, is that the right word? The passiveness of the experience of them has been, has impressed me quite a bit so far. Yeah. What did you think? Did people notice when you wore them, by the way? Were people like stopping you on the street and asking you, you know, are those, no, really?

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  No, a, a, a man in New York City walking down the street wearing giant white earrings. Surprisingly, no one, no one pays attention. Um, it's just, it's just like a thing. Uh, the one person, when I was writing, um, I was writing the iPhone review. I was sitting in a coffee shop for a long time writing it. And the only person who noticed was the barista. Um, and I think it's because I kept buying coffee and they, I like rolling up with these things in my ears. Um, but then they were very excited. Uh, but, uh, no, no, no one really paid attention. But I think that might just be a New York thing. Um, I, they're fine. I don't think they sound great. I think they sound just like the ear pods and the ear pods to me have never sounded great.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  Um, I also find the ear pod shape to be tiring in my ears. So I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm actually wearing the wired ear pods right now to do this podcast. Um, and like, I can just, I, it's just the shape of my ears, right? Like, they don't fit well. So, um, after a while, I think they, they kind of get a little tiring. But that's me. I think there are people out there who like love them. And they're really interesting. They're among the most interesting products Apple's ever put out. They're really forward thinking. I think that Bluetooth W1 stuff, it's worth, I think we'll probably, when we get to the phone, I really want to talk about it in detail. Like, the fact that Apple is like extending Bluetooth in this way is fascinating and it's great that they did it. Um, but I, I think it's just-

• 23:51Speaker 02

  You might, you might say they also embraced Bluetooth, uh, by sticking with it and now they're-

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then soon they'll extinguish it, you might say.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's a little, it's, it's not a problem with the watch, you know, it doesn't bother me. The watch is like a small thing, but with the phone, if you're gonna take away the open audio connector, the headphone jack, and then you're gonna also own the biggest headphone company in the, in the, in the game, in Beats, and then you're gonna say, our products are gonna work best and everyone else gets the old experience. Like, I don't know, I just don't know if that's like particularly, it's totally within Apple's product.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  It would have been nice if they'd said, and we will be licensing the W1, just like.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Art, screw it. I mean, you could say, look, if you can build, if you yourself can build a chip that can talk to our APIs. This is like down a total wormhole. I actually, I want to finish talking about the watch and we can, we can come back to this. I have many, many.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  I like this conversation a lot because I hadn't really thought about that idea of them licensing the W1 and saying, here, have at it, make some stuff, we're still gonna make it better.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's, that's fine. Apple's got its own silicon team, like, that's fine. They built their own chip. But if you look at the other half of the equation, right, there's the, there's the chip in the headphones. And then in iOS 10, my 6S now has that new experience with the N E W1 headphones. Uh, Macs running Sierra have that experience, Watches updated to WatchOS 3 have that experience. So there's an enormous platform software side component to this as well. And they could just say to everyone else, like, here are, here's the API to connect to the better pairing experience. If you can build a chip that competes with ours, have at it. Um, and maybe they'll say that, and I pushed the company very hard on that.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  And they were really receptive to being pushed. It's Apple, so they said nothing in return. But they weren't surprised that I was asking those questions. And maybe they weren't surprised because they know that I'm on this tear about open audio interconnect standards. Because, you know, sometimes you gotta get on a tear about open audio interconnect standards. But, but they weren't surprised and they said, look, you know, we're Apple, we do everything in secret. We haven't had, we didn't, the stuff wasn't out, so we can talk about it. And now the partners are gonna come talk to us and we'll have those serious conversations when we have them. And we're not making any promises, but we'll have, you know, it's like, they know, they know that that's a thing. If you're, if you're gonna exist in the, in the wireless world, they keep calling it the wireless world, by the way.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  The world by nature is wireless, so it's kind of like a metaphysical issue.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  But, uh, you know, they know that like Bluetooth is bad and they built an extension of Bluetooth to make it better. The AirPods are very impressive. There's, I didn't notice like any latency issues. I think if you play games, there's like latency issues, but whatever. I mean, they're wireless, they'll get better. So it's, they, they took the big jump and the question is whether them taking the jump as the big important platform vendor, if they're gonna bring the rest of the world with them, or if they're just gonna keep preferencing themselves.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Can, can I tell you guys a couple of stories from, from the other side?

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yes.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  How us people who don't review Apple products live? So literally the day of the Apple announcement onward, I've started walking away from my computer or phone while I still have my headphones plugged in. So the other day, like, I like, um, knocked a Diet Coke off my desk, um, almost, my laptop almost fell off a table. So it's been really dangerous and it's a weird subconscious thing to pushing me toward, you know, I was programmed probably like Mantrian candidates. I'll buy the keynote to want wireless headphones. So today in the mail, I get some wireless headphones from a company for, for, for review.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  And I won't say, it's not under embargo, but I'm not gonna say the name of the company because I, I need to talk to them and, and figure out what's going on. Cause it didn't come with like a manual or anything. I'm like, this is great. They're wireless, but they also come with a cable. I could get best of both worlds. There's like four cables in the box. I have no, I plug one of them into my computer and it's only in mono for some reason. I don't know what's happening. And so I pushed the Bluetooth button. I guess, I guess I'll just go wireless, push the Bluetooth button. It's like, please install our app.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  And so you've gotta like install an app and I can't, and then, and then when you have the app open, if you try to push the connect button in the app, nothing happens. They're not showing up on my iPhone.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Was it Jabra?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  No, I'm not gonna name names, but it's, um, it's just like, I, I have not. I it's it's bad. It's bad, especially especially because we're seeing this wave. And if you look at Circuit Breaker lately, it's like every other post is a new headphone. Like, like a bunch of headphone companies have have seen this as their moment to announce a weird new kind of headphone. And so there's a lot of headphone companies trying to add a bunch of crazy features, but a lot of them end up needing some sort of app. And that that doesn't make the Bluetooth process better. It makes it even worse.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  I mean, here's the thing about what you just said, that's that stood out to me. Everything you said was very intelligent, a very intelligent observation. But what jumped out at me is they didn't come with a manual. Headphones should not come with a manual. They shouldn't need a manual. You should just take them out and be like, you plug them in and you pop them in your ears. Or if they're wireless, you look at them and you go, oh, OK. There's the three button mic, mic and remote. And here's where I plug in a little micro USB to charge them. And and you go on with your life. You know what I mean? Like, should be, there should be an L and an R. And you're like, great.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting is the, you know, the iPhone has Apple Pay. It has an NFC chip in it. And a bunch of Android manufacturers do NFC Bluetooth pairing, which generally, in my experience, has worked, I wouldn't say great, but it's worked well enough that I don't think it's going to fail, which is like a big victory. And they they're not doing that. They're they built this other thing. So there's just like, it's the beginning. That's what I think of it with the AirPods. It's the beginning. And there's going to be, it's cool. It's a cool beginning. But, you know, the design is crazy to me. I I don't, I just think they look good. And the the fact that the rest of the ecosystem doesn't get the benefit of the software update on the platform is

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  I suspect it will change. I think there's going to be enough pressure on Apple to change. Just as, you know, the comparison to me is they opened up iMessage, they opened up Maps, they opened up Siri. They, you know, they're in this mode of letting other vendors into their platform at a deeper level. And you can buy, you can go out and buy a pair of great headphones and like, push the button on them and the screen will pop up and show you the battery life and it'll be automatically paired to all your devices. That's a net benefit to Apple platform customers. I don't know why they're going to be like, you know, we have to protect Beats, which is already the best selling brand. I think, I think they'll be fine, but we'll see. But overall, AirPods are cool. They're one of those Apple products where there's, they have so little, because they're not gadgety, there's no like buttons

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  or settings. There's not much to say. It's like, you take, yeah, you put them in your ear, they work. Lauren sounds fine. Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  No manual.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  No man, no manual. You look at them and you're like, or it looks like dental floss. You open it. It's not dental floss. They're little earbuds. One says, one says L, one says R. And then there's like a little LED light and it flashes a color. That lets you know stuff.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  What if it was dental floss, though?

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  That'd be incredible. So much to make in AirPods. By the way, the AirPods accessories that we've been hitting on Circuit Breaker are hilarious. Like the cords that wrap around your neck and like, the, the loops that go around your ear to make them fit better as sport headphones. All of that is bonkers.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  I think I want ones that aren't white.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  If, yeah, do you see the render of the black ones? Some guy made a render of black AirPods and they look wild.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  It's a pretty good idea.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  That's a good idea.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  I don't even know, to your point, Neil, like, like, I don't think your, your pods sound very good. So I don't think I want AirPods, but man, I want that wireless life.

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm, I'm going to end up buying Beats Solo 3s. I can, I can feel it coming. I don't want it to come. Dieter, that solves the plane problem because they have a 3.5mm jack and a cable.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I, I use the, the Beats on air headphones and it solves a plane problem. But I don't know what the Solo 3s do. I know, so I have the Bose one. Bose uses a 2.5 to 3.5, which is hilarious.

• 32:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  2.5 on the headphones.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  Uh, everything is terrible. Yeah.

• 32:32Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so I'm going to take a quick break here. We're going to read an ad and we'll come back. We got to talk about the phone. We got to get deep in the phone. I actually want to talk about the watch just a little bit more because I think that what Lauren was talking about with the first model getting the upgrade is really interesting. We should talk about WatchOS 3 for just half a second, but let me read this ad.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Autodesk Graphic. If you're looking for a professional vector design app, you should take a look at Autodesk Graphic. Graphic is a full-featured app for making icons, illustrations, UI and UX design, everything else you'd expect in a professional vector design app. Open, edit, and save raster or vector images, layered Photoshop or Illustrator files, CSS, SVG, PDF, just about any other file format you can think of. You can open an AI file and export it to clean CSS code or a web-ready SVG with just a few clicks. It's available on your Mac, on your phone, and even on your iPad, so you can design without compromise anywhere you go. This iPad app isn't a companion app for the desktop version. It's fully-featured design software that pros use to hand-draw vector illustrations, create gorgeous logos, and mock-up websites on the fly. If you have an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, it's the vector design app you've

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  been looking for to make your iPad Pro the device you use for design work you normally leave to your desktop. This is the last 2D design app you'll ever need, and it's available for the price of a few decent stock photos. Visit graphic.com to learn more about Autodesk Graphic or check it out on the App Store. All right. So Lauren, real quick, I want to just wrap up the watch real fast and then go on to the phone. I think the naming of the watch right now is a little confusing. So there's the Series 2, which is the new one, the Series 1, which is the old one with a new processor. What is the first one called? Apple Watch. I've heard people call it the Series 0, which I don't think is the official name. Then also, that one was named like Apple Watch Sport, Apple Watch, Apple Watch Edition, and all that is like, oh, now they're just Apple Watch and Edition.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Isn't it, isn't it named, "Let's Pretend It Never Happened"?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Seriously, they blew up the software. They put a new processor in it, like, sorry Lauren.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  You just gave me an idea. No, you just gave me an idea. That's what we should name our new conference room in our new office.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  Let's pretend this didn't happen. That's actually a great name for a conference room.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  It's so great.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  No, we're having a, we're having a competition to name like the six conference rooms that we have in our new San Francisco office and we're all trying to come up with the best theme for the conference rooms.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suggested La Croix water names.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Is that how you say that? La Croix, La Croix, La Croix? La Croix? I don't even know.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  I believe it's La Croix.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  In case they have some crazy flavors, so I suggested La Croix.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  I have to say, let's pretend this didn't happen is maybe the best name for a conference room.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  It's fantastic. Yeah, we're all right. Peter are gonna submit that.

• 35:10Nilay Patel?

  But so, but I'll say this, so I have a Series Zero, if that's what we're gonna call it. I'm not sold on that name. I updated to watch OS 3. It took hours and hours. The longest update process in years. Like, at one point, my phone told me it would take 15 hours. And then it went to two hours and then it took about two hours. It's great. It, this watch is so much faster with OS 3 and they cleared off all the junk that like the dock of apps is great. I mean, like, it's great. And I, again, I have to spend so much time figuring out what notifications come to the watch and what should go to my phone because I get so many that I have to do all that. And so right now, it's like crazy town. But it, I think it's, they, it's such a substantially good up, I think it's the best update of the bunch

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  of iOS 10, Sierra, tvOS, whatever. The watch OS 3 is the best update of the whole bunch, in my opinion.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  I agree. I think it's really good. I think watch OS 2, they were obviously trying to address some of the speed issues and they had moved some of the app logic from the phone over to the micro apps on the watch in the hopes that that would do the trick. But it turned out that like even just making that little incremental change with watch OS 2 wasn't enough. So they went and they sort of redid, not the whole. UI, but a lot of the interactions that you have on the watch and I don't know if you you agree with this, but it felt to me like with the first watch, they were really trying to push this idea of like, you can do stuff on this watch, like you will want to look at your Instagram photos on the watch,

• 36:40Speaker 01

  or you will want to request an Uber from the watch rather than just getting an Uber notification on the watch and like, I think, you know, like I would get the New York Times notifications and then you sort of get the headline and scroll down and it's this like wholly unsatisfying experience because you're not getting full content, even if there is, you're not going to want to read the full content on this tiny display. So now it seems like it really is just, okay, here's here's a doc for the apps you use the most. You're going to have a very limited amount of interaction like within those applications. And by the way, here are your notifications. And like, that's great. It's sort of all you all you you want it for, plus the health and fitness. And then things like Apple Pay, which are baked into the functionality of the watch.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Um, so it seems to me like it just, it just all makes more sense.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, that that's really what it comes down to. This thing makes sense now in a way that before, when I put it on, I'd be like, I'm just gonna fight it. I'm gonna fight it the whole day that I have it on and try to figure out what's going on with it. So that, yeah, I just wanted to wrap up because we we hadn't really mentioned OS3 and it it's so good, like it's good. And I it I think it speaks to something on Apple that they they took it on the chin with that first watch. Um, and then they just rebooted the entire entire idea of the interface. Um, so that's good. Good on them.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Have you have you tried out any of the third-party apps yet, by the way? Like the new watch OS3 optimized ones? Yeah, I haven't really. I need to do that.

• 38:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like their watch apps, they, I don't know, I I I don't. The one that I love, the one watch app that I love, it's so nerdy and so stupid. But I have to two-factor into things so many times a day. Uh, that having offy, which is the two-factor cloud thing that I that Dieter made me use, basically. Um, you're welcome. Having that on my wrist and I have it set, so I just have to click the button and it shows me and shows me the account I want. Uh, that's amazing. And I know there's like one pastor does it and Android Wear watches do it, but the Apple Watch was just not able to do it before and now it does. And it's like, this is pretty great. This is legitimately a good reason to have this thing on my wrist all the time.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  That is such a good idea. I'm adding that right now.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's cool. I mean, there's better like there's cooler apps out there, but that's the one where it's I have this idea that no wearable can be successful unless it's useful all the time. And, you know, like, you wear a watch as jewelry. So it's like useful. People understand what's on your wrist. And then to be able to make it more and more useful, I think is important. And I don't think Apple really had that killer app outside of fitness before. And then so they've leaned into that. Anyhow, let's talk about the phone. So I reviewed the phone. And I wrote 4,500 words. And then John Gruber picked out all of the times I said the word headphone in their review, which is fine. And I like John, I get the point that he's making because he I think the word headphones was in his review, zero times, because he's bought in, right? He's like,

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  he's gonna do what Apple says, and he's gonna move on. And that's his, his thing. And like, I'm happy to have that argument. But I think this device is really transitional. And I think, Apple knows it's transitional. And, you know, in the process of reviewing, you go and fact check, and you try to do as much reporting as you can. And they, you know, I talked to them a lot about what transitions they were trying to make. And they, they're really aware that they have to sell the reason for the headphone jack going away. And they said to me, look, the leaks helped us and hurt us. Everyone knew it was going away, but we hadn't been able to make our case. And so their presentation, their conversations with me were a lot about making the case. Honestly, I hadn't really

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  thought about this before at any great length. And if you're a listener to this show, I encourage you to think about it, because I think it might be surprising. We have basically given up on wired speaker systems. Like, I don't you, I have a huge stereo at my house. It's like a big Pioneer receiver and big speakers, and it runs the home theater, and the home theater sounds great. But I have not thought about physically plugging in a phone to that thing. In years, and I used to physically plug a phone into it all the time, or an iPod into it all the time, or I'd plug it into a dock or something. Now, that one has AirPlay, and it has an Apple TV with AirPlay, but I don't even use AirPlay anymore. Apple is like, kind of abandoned AirPlay, and it's less competitive than it used to be. I use

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  my Echo, and I yell at it. I use my Amazon Tap, and I yell at it. We have like Boom speakers, which I use over Bluetooth. My car, I run the audio over Bluetooth. We have Sonos. Like, everything, I have wireless speakers everywhere. And that, I think that transition has been well and made, which I think I hadn't really thought about before. But then, all of my headphones are still wired, and I prefer the way they sound, and they're more convenient, I don't have to charge batteries. And so, you know, like Dieter was saying, like, the Bose ones, you can get the cord for the edge cases, the lot of the big cans, you have the cord for the edge cases. So, it's like, okay, I get it. I'll buy that this transition can be made, because we kind of silently already

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  made it. But I don't think the value of the other parts of the phone actually make up for living through the transition. I think, once it, once all the transitions are made, the overall value will be very high. But the dual cameras in the, in the 7 Plus, they only have the zoom feature, they don't have the depth feature yet. It's not clear if they're gonna do all the other crazy shit you can do with dual cameras. The ecosystem of adapters and cables and stuff you need to like, charge the phone and listen at the same time, aren't there. The iOS 10, we're opening it up to the world. You get that experience if you have an iOS 10 phone anyway, so you can like, experience that without

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  having to get a new phone. There's just a lot of unproven platform bets in this phone, that spending money on it right this second, you're not gonna actually see the value over a 6S for another minute. And that's just kind of my general takeaway. And I, you know, Walt did his review too, and he and I were talking, and he, Walt and I are obviously very different writers and reviewers, and we took wildly different paths. And we sort of arrived at the same conclusion, which I thought was interesting. So, when you say that...

• 42:45Speaker 02

  You know, there's just a lot of bets that are being made here, that you don't have, you're not gonna get the value out of it, out of them, you know, the day one or day 30, until the ecosystems build out. Are you, do you have a sense of whether these bets that these ecosystems are going to exist are going to work? Like, especially with the headphones thing, but in general, it seems to me like everybody's just assuming that Apple can make ecosystems happen just because it wants to. And they've got a pretty good track record. But like, are they, do you think they're going to be able to do it again?

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I think there's, there's two, there's two ways to think about it. And I didn't like get deep into it because I don't know which one's right at all. So I didn't feel like comfortable laying it out, but I'll do it here. Because we can argue about it. So one is like, Apple's really good at USB transitions, right? They dropped all their old legacy interfaces and put USB on the Mac and the USB ecosystem exploded. They dropped all the old USB connectors from the MacBook and put out USB C. Now there's a bunch of USB C adapters in the world. It happened. They're good at it. It's done and done. And like, we can see the train coming and things are rolling. They dropped 30 pin for Lightning and now there's a Lightning ecosystem. Fine. But on the other hand, last year, they put 3D Touch in the phone and 3D Touch is like a useless gimmick that nobody

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  uses. And like, some people are going to tweet at me like, I use it all the time. I'm constantly previewing links. But it is so far from a core piece of the interface experience, that it's like, whatever, you put right click on the phone. And most people don't like, like, the reason you didn't have right click on the Mac for years is because it's hard to use and most people don't find it. So which one is it? In which of these bets? You know, like, it's going to take a minute, maybe the hardware ecosystem will develop, but aren't you better off buying into a phone that needs to participate in this hardware ecosystem a year from now, when it's built out? And on the flip side, it's, well, iMessage stickers are really fun. And there's a lot of them already. So like, you got to balance it all out. Oh Dieter, I'm coming for you.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Guys, the battery on my right AirPod just died. Just an FYI.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  I'm only hearing you in my left ear.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Wait, did you put it back on the dental floss?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It's kind of like wearing a jawbone. No, should I?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Can you do them one by one? Can you like charge one and use the other and then flip them?

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, chain them.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone wants to know if you can do this.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  You can be a chain listener.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  So, this is-

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm sorry to interrupt.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  This is slightly- So Neela, I was surprised that you were almost relatively positive about the headphone situation. That was my impression from the review. Because and I realize the way you're saying this is, it makes sense why I was excited about it because I enjoy living through transitions. Like I enjoy, like, man, I was there when we made all these switches and it was crazy, you know? I didn't know where to put my floppy disks. Like I had so many floppy disks and like, had to buy a USB C.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Not USB C, USB floppy drive from MacBall or whatever.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Well, I just think what Neela, like, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I'm getting from what you're saying and from your review is this idea like at a very high level that headphones for a long time were democratic. I mean, what it came down to was how they fit in your ears, like your personal preferences, your price range, and by the way, how good they are. Like, any company could come out of the blue, like, 2006, Jaybird starts and they're like, "We're gonna do wireless Bluetooth headphones and eventually we're gonna make them really good," right? Or a company like Bose is like, "Hey, we're gonna make some of the best headphones you can buy and we can charge $300 for them." Or like, in some cases, you could get like Pilot headphones that are like $900. I mean, you know, you can really like run the range, but it was, it's a democratic thing.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And this essentially undemocratizes that.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the issue. Like, I don't, Bluetooth is not a good experience for most people. And, you know, we played the game where we went into our review closet and paired every Bluetooth speaker we could find to the iPhone 7. And then we just like looked at that screen and we're like, "This is a mess." Like, it's, not everybody has 90 Bluetooth devices, but if you're gonna be in a totally wireless world, you might have a bunch. Um, you might have a Sonos and to use a Sonos- You gotta use another app. You gotta either use the Sonos app right now, or they're rolling it out to Spotify or whatever. And iOS as a platform doesn't know you're doing that. So you're playing music through Spotify through your Sonos.

• 47:22Nilay Patel?

  And then you like open YouTube and now you're like, now everything's crazy and YouTube is never going to come out of your Sonos. Why? I mean, like, those, it's just like the little, it's, they're little edge cases, but they actually crop up. Right? When you don't want them to, and they are terrible. Right? Like, if you're gonna spend money on a bunch of Sonos speakers. Maybe you wanna play your Apple Music. Um, through them without having to like leap into the Sonos app, but Apple and Sonos haven't made the deal to let Apple Music control the Sonos. Like, that wasn't a problem when we just plugged the things in. Uh, so it's like, Dieter always talks about this, like, do we want? The market to be regulated by competition or by deals that we don't have any transparency into?

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, Google Cast. Air slash AirPlay scare me for those reasons, too.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's fine. I mean, look, it's fine. And I think Paul, what you're saying is like, you're surprised at how relatively positive I was. I was too, because I hadn't realized that I completely stopped listening to all speakers. With wires.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  And I think it's interesting, all the ones that you listed are not battery powered.

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  No, they still have wires. I mean, they have AC, they require AC. Power, so you're tethered to something, but you're not, yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've got a Bluetooth speaker at home and I. If that, now when I want to use it with my iPhone, I manually pair it and when I'm done, I unpair it because otherwise every time I come home. It starts sending sound to this Bluetooth speaker and I can't get it to stop. It's just like, it's okay, I'm gonna use it and like, I don't want it to go to that. I only want to go to that speaker when I actually want it to go to that speaker. Um, it's, it's just like. A little bit frustrating that. It's so fiddly, like interacting with all these things. You can, by the way, 3D touch directly into Bluetooth now. So there's that.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  And not as far as like Force us to use 3D touch.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  As far as the proprietary stuff goes, uh, I've, you know, Neil has actually been talking a little bit lately about how it's weird how we haven't seen much innovation in airplay for a while. And I would actually be okay with Apple like trying to innovate on that, even if it's proprietary. Cause at least it would be a step forward into like a more coherent control system for audio devices. The problem with Google Cast, by the way, isn't that it's proprietary because it's actually not. Anybody can make anything on the Cast standard. I think TiVo did it. A bunch of other devices you can just cast to, you don't need Google's permission. It's just that, uh, casting is still kind of buggy.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  And it also is really, really garbage for direct audio. It only works from streaming off the internet. Which of course leads to like the last point that like, we need a higher bandwidth, local networking solution. That's better and stronger than Bluetooth, but is also better than one-to-one communication than Wi-Fi currently is. Which apparently the next version of Bluetooth, uh, is hopefully going to be able to do. So once again, I just want to tell you all that Bluetooth will be better next year.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bluetooth 5, isn't it expected to come out sometime? Well, it's supposed to come out early next year.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, here's a question. Will Apple support it? Right? Like, they're fine. They have Bluetooth 4. They've built W1. They can be like, look, Bluetooth is the underlying protocol and the best experience is on our proprietary headphones. Like, that's how you go from embrace to extend to extinguish. Is by saying, you know what? We're just, we're fine. Like, we're going off in our own direction and

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Forking a wireless standard is terrifying to me because at least with plugs, it's like, oh man, I got the wrong plug. Cause look, see when I try to plug it in, can't.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  The wireless is like, well, I don't know. No, I was using, um, when we were editing the video or shooting the video in the studio for the iPhone. I was like, man, it's quiet in here. We need some music. So I ran upstairs, uh, to review his closet, which Dieter, I'm sorry to say I've been treating like my own personal toy store these past couple of days. Shocked. And I grabbed, I was like, you know what? We gotta, we gotta do it right. And I grabbed the Beats speaker, the pill, like the full size one. And I brought it downstairs and it wasn't charged. And I just sat there like an idiot for five minutes, trying to figure out why the micro USB plug I had wouldn't get into it. And I was like, oh, it's, oh, it's lightning. And like, it was just the saddest thing because there's, you're not very used to anything but an iPhone taking lightning.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  And I'm just sitting there like, I don't, I don't get it. Like I tried like three cables. It was the worst. I didn't tell anybody until now, and now I told everybody.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Neil, I, and that sad, sad story. And Andrew, maybe afterwards you can put like the sound of a little violence in it.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  No, I really though, I, I, I truly enjoy your anecdotes. I think like they, they're such a good, uh, picture into like, what is, I don't know how people are.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  How boring my life is. What'd you do last night? A bunch of Bluetooth speakers to my phone.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  If your life is boring, then all of us have really boring lives. Uh, but, um, I have to go.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  So. Go be free.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, you've had, you had the phones along with the watch. Give me, give me 30 seconds review, lightning review of the phones.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Okay. Camera is great. Headphone jack is not as bad as I thought it was going to be so far. And I am still not used to the home button. And this is an iOS 10 thing specifically. I am, I have swiped to unlock my phone about 1,113 times. Still.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  That, that's gonna take a minute.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  So that's my 30 second review.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, Lauren, thank you for being on.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Bye, guys.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  That's a good time to read and add.

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  I'd like to thank our friends at Wealthfront for sponsoring today's Vergecast. They're a financial advisor that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars. They combine financial experts with Silicon Valley engineers, and they've built a modern financial services company that helps tailor plans specifically to you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront has low fees and no trading commissions. It's financial advice at a fraction of the cost of a traditional advisor, all online. If you sign up using our URL, you get your first $15,000 managed for free. It's a great opportunity. You get the help you need to get where you want to be. You work hard for your money, and it should work for you. So, go to wealthfront.com/vergecast. That's wealthfront.com/vergecast. All right, Paul, we're back. What time is it, buddy?

• 53:46Speaker 03

  It's time for a special segment that I like to do every week called Costco Cool.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  No. I mean, yes. I realize I'm not very good at saying Costco. How do you... Try to say Costco.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Costco.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Costco. So, you just don't say the T?

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Costco's getting a free one here.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  It's implied. Costco Cool.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  I like to say Sam's Club Swag.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Sims. Okay. Okay, so here, and we mentioned this earlier, the Echo Dot.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Right? Okay, but here's the thing. So, there's a new Echo Dot. It's $50. That's great. It's great. And everybody loves Echo Dot. And I'm actually really thinking about getting one of these because I don't want a tall cylinder to play music through, but I do want Alexa. So, they're $50, but the cool thing is that they come in packs. You can get them in multi-packs, like at Costco. So, if you buy, if you buy five Dots for $50 apiece, you get one free. If you buy 10, you get two free.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  In a six pack is $250 and a 12 pack is $500. So

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  That's what you need.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  So I just really, and I love this picture that is literally a 12 pack. It's like a takeaway for like, for like takeout food, but it's

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  I just don't understand why they're all then individually packaged.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  But I bet each one says not for individual resale, just like every Kirkland product.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  They did this with their, their like cheap $50 fire tablets last year.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  So that Amazon just loves making six packs.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Costco cool.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about the doc because they, you know, they, it went away for a while and people thought it just didn't work.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  It was, it was sold out.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  It was sold out in Amazon parlance. Uh, no one ever knows how much they sell. By the way, Apple did the same thing. They announced last night they were sold out of iPhones without releasing any numbers. So maybe they made five. Who knows? They probably made more than that, but it's like the joke with Amazons. They never tell you how many and now Apple's doing the same thing. Either way, the interesting thing to me is it's called echo, echo spatial, something ESP. Echo spatial perception. That's what it is. ESP. So now you get a bunch of echoes in your house and if you talk, you say Alexa, only the one closest to you will light up, which is, it's like, that's the step to having the intelligence in your house everywhere. That's the step to Hal or whatever. Uh, I'm very excited to try that out.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I'm, I'm guessing you could do more, more intelligence based on that. Cause if you had one in each room, it's like, if you say, turn the lights on in here, turn them off elsewhere. I would love to use the word elsewhere in a conversation with Alexa and it knows where you are. So it turns the lights on where you are and turns them off in the other parts of the house. That'd be cool. That really is a dream. I, I remember I read this when I was a kid. It's like Bill Gates's house has this thing. When you walk through the house, it tracks where your body is and it changes the temperature. Like we're, we're pretty close to that.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's also a little crazy, right? Like Amazon is going to be able to know where you are in your house by like listening to you breathing from room to room. But so far, yeah. I mean, look, they had a great product placement with Mr. Robot, which meant the Echo and Mr. Robot didn't get hacked. So if, you know, maybe they'll just product place their way into the rest of the hacking in real life. Okay, so a couple of other bits and bobs, just to wrap up. TVOS also came out, but didn't have the single sign-on feature that I was so excited about that made TVOS like interesting. So there's like, series a little bit better, there's a dark theme now. But the real update to TVOS was you just had to sign in your cable provider once, and it would like, figure out all the apps you were authenticated to, and you wouldn't

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  have to like, sign into them over and over again. That's not out. And Apple just hired Peter Stern from Time Warner Cable to come do cloud services. So, Apple and TV continues to be the dream that will never come true, as far as I can tell. But they have a new guy, so maybe the new guy will do something good.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  I have a, I have a theory. I think that the reason they haven't put the cable single sign-on thing in yet, is they are still working out the quiz that is going to happen when you punch in your cable credentials, that's going to verify your age and determine whether or not you are your parents. They're like, are you really the subscriber for this? Or is this your mom's? Who was, you know, the vice president in 1954? Oh, that's right, you're not.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Identify this object, and it's like, an old fashioned telephone.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Wait, hold on, I'm like, vice president in 1954?

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Do you know how to use a rotary dial?

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Do you know what a rotary dial is?

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the vice president of 54, old Tricky Dick Nixon. And that's the answer.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  You just have to yell Tricky Dick Nixon.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so the reason I brought that up is, we didn't talk a lot about the cameras on the phone. The cameras are a little bit nicer. You can go look at their photo comparisons. They're brighter. I love that the front-facing cameras have seven megapixels. Although, I don't know why they didn't just make it eight, because then it would have been the same as the old back cameras, and that would have been a big move. But whatever. It's seven, it's much nicer, it's brighter. Back camera, faster lens, 1.8, it's better. But the dual camera, the feature isn't shipping. And the TVOS feature isn't shipping. There's like, there's kind of this, AirPods aren't shipping. There's kind of this thing with Apple right now where like a bunch of stuff just didn't hit the deadline. So I thought there was.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Second, we ran this story today. Apple now surveying people about headphone use on MacBook Pros. I will say, fine, you're gonna, you're gonna take the thing away from the phone. It's a wireless world we're out there. The comment reaction to taking away the headphones on laptops? Universally negative. Not one comment on our site that was like, yeah, this is a good idea. It's a wireless world. I think that one's gonna be a little bit harder for them.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  It's hard, it's hard to say that we've put a point zero five percent larger battery in because we, I don't know the exact math on that, but I think I'm pretty close.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  But no, but like the deal with the phone is like you do other things with that lightning port. You charge from it. You can plug in headphones to it. You can, I don't know, plug in a USB adapters or SD card readers or other, you know, other crap can go into that lightning port, at least in theory, even if nobody does it. But it, what, what's the other crap that you'd want to do with a lightning port on a laptop? Charge it? Maybe?

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  You could finally charge your iPad Pro pencil.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like all, all the stuff that you'd want to do, you can just do with USB or USB C.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I have to say, I'm like, Dieter, I have your old MacBook, which I've like just come to adore. Um, even though I don't know what you did to the battery, uh, cause it's not very good. It's, it's slow and underpowered, but it's so small and like great. And traveling with that anchor adapter that has a USB C and four regular USB. I, this is the future. Like this is the thing I've always wanted. Like I'm gonna throw one brick in my bag and a handful of cables to charge stuff and it's gonna be fine and it's great. So like, I'm, I'm, I'm very happy with USB C. But man, if you have to use USB C headphones on a Mac and lightning headphones on a phone, that's, that's like the nightmare scenario and maybe Apple will just ship another dongle. Okay. Uh, last one, this is all Apple lightning round.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  The Mac Pro is now over a thousand days old, which is crazy to me. Do you think we're, you think Macs are coming this year?

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  God, they better. There's so many sad sadnesses.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  I don't know what I'm saying. So Nvidia's graphics cards are out and they're great and they're putting them in laptops. They would be wonderful for MacBook Pro, but maybe a little bigger than Apple typically wants to get. So there's not really the fancy new graphics card for MacBook Pro. Also, Apple likes to use AMD typically. So that's a problem because AMD isn't showing up. Intel still hasn't come out with the MacBook Pro version of the new KB Lake generation. So like, there isn't a monumental leap for Apple to leap to. They could redesign the case with relatively similar internals. But if they want to have like some

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  huge spec bump, I don't feel like the components are there right now.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  As far as what I've seen, which is sad and I really would love for there to be new Apple computers.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Today's episode was also brought to you by Autodesk. Autodesk Graphic is the specific product that's sponsoring today's show. It's not just the whole company, but Autodesk Graphic is a full-featured app for making icons, illustrations, UI and UX, or anything else you'd need out of a professional vector design app. Don't go consumer when it comes to vectors. Go professional. It's available on your Mac, phone, and iPad, so you can design without compromise on the go. It's the vector design app you've been waiting for for your iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Visit graphic.com to learn more about Autodesk Graphic or find it in the App Store.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I would just take a computer with a graphics card that didn't flicker out or a battery that worked, because those are my two choices right now of laptops. But, you know, small, small demands. I think that's it. We've gone a little bit over. It's been a great show. I've got to say, I'm going to do it again. I know this is all Apple. A bunch of other stuff happened on the site this week. Go look at it. Jordan Golson drove the Chevy Bolt, which is GM's electric car that actually came out before the Tesla Model 3. It kind of looks like a nuclear shoe or one of the transformers that you know is going to die. So it's not like a beautiful thing, but it's, it's an important car. So like, go read that. Like, just stuff all over the site. Just a great

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  week on The Verge. We were dominated by Apple reviews, so that's the show this week. But go check out the site. Also, we have tons of other podcasts. Sorry to say, Verge ESP is over. Emily has decided to leave the media industry, achieving everyone's longstanding dream. But, so she's, Emily has gone from The Verge. We thank her for her time. It's been a great two years with her. ESP is over. We're going to come back with a bigger, better science show sometime down the line. But there's other stuff to listen to. Chris Plant does What's Tech, which is amazing. Lauren Good, who is on the show today, does Too Embarrassed to Ask. And then, on the Recode side, Peter Kafka does Recode Media, which is one of my favorite shows, and Kara Swisher does Recode Decode. So tons of stuff to listen to, listen to everything. Go to iTunes, you know, do whatever it is that you do in iTunes,

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  and then give us five stars everywhere, or go to iTunes.com/verge and find all our shows. You can also hit us up on Twitter. I'm Reckless. Paul's future Paul. Dieter's back lawn. Lauren Good. Lauren Good. Is that it? Is there anything else? Oh, yeah. Sizzler Vodka. Cut through the night. Paul.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Rock Scotch.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Thunder before lightning.