CES 2025: the biggest stories and best gadgets (Live)

In this special live episode of The Vergecast, from the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas, it's time to talk CES. Nilay and David run through some of the show's biggest stories, plus the Meta news that dominated the conversations all week in Vegas. Then Allison Johnson, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, and Victoria Song join the show to talk about all the newest, best, weirdest, and worst gadgets they've seen this year. AI is everywhere, everyone's making smart glasses, the smart home might be turning a corner, and we've seen it all this week. Thanks to everyone who came out to the live show! And if you couldn't make it, stay tuned — this won't be the last time we all get to hang out. Further reading: Zuckerberg, inspired by Musk, ditches fact checking for Community Notes Zuckerberg says he’s moving Meta moderators to Texas because California seems too ‘biased’ Meta’s fact-checking changes are just what Trump’s FCC head asked for Meta is leaving its users to wade through hate and disinformation Here are some of the horrible things that you can now say on Instagram and Facebook Samsung announces The Frame Pro: could this be the perfect TV? LG’s 2025 OLED TVs are its best yet — but they risk going overboard with AI LG’s StanbyME sequel adds a carrying strap to the portable TV Dell kills the XPS brand: Dell, Pro, Max / Premium, Plus, Base Afeela has a price: 89,000, 102,000 TCL NxtPaper max ink mode Roborock debuts a robot vacuum with a robotic arm at CES This toaster-looking gadget boosts your phone’s battery in seconds A SodaStream for your Hydro Flask! Aqara launches three touchscreen smart home control panels at CES 2025 The Schlage Sense Pro smart lock is one of the first with hands-free unlocking using UWB Bird Buddy’s new camera tracks plants and insects in your garden Mirumi is a furry little companion bot that imitates a shy infant Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Give you and your team more time to focus on the work that matters. This is AMEX Corporate, one intelligent platform for company spending. With smart expense management to help capture details, categorize spend, and streamline expense submission and approval, there's less manual work for your team and greater visibility and control for you. Built to simplify, designed to scale. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of bowling.

• 0:37David Pierce?

  Can we pivot to that? This feels good.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  It does feel good. I'm your friend Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 0:42David Pierce?

  Hello. Do you spin the ball when you bowl? Like, does it go? Does it do the?

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to tell you my moves. We are live at CES. We're at Brooklyn Bowl. We have a live audience. Say hello to the live audience. Live audience, say hello to the listeners.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy in here. Delta has taken over Brooklyn Bowl on our behalf. There's Vergecast logos at the bar and all the screens. This is a super cool room. Thank you all so much for being here with us. If you're listening, we're going to try to keep this on the rails as much as we ever keep a Vergecast on the rails. But I have to be honest with you. Just the presence of this crowd has me knowing that things are going to get super weird on this episode of Vergecast. It's going to be great. Jen, Allison and V are going to join us. We're going to talk about everything that's happening at CES across their beats, across other beats. There's a helicopter that lands in a van that I really, really want to talk about.

• 1:32David Pierce?

  You've brought this up so many times now. And you like, you keep bringing it up in such a way where you're like, you don't think it's cool, but you've now said it so many times that I'm like, Neelai actually thinks this is very cool.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. We're going to get in. I don't want to, I don't want to waste that. We're going to get into it.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  But there's, and we're going to have lightning rounds, obviously. It's Vergecast.

• 1:50David Pierce?

  Sponsored by all these people.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Sponsored by these people. David, tell me, like, what's your vibe on CES this year?

• 1:57David Pierce?

  It's it's been a weird CES. There hasn't been like the thing. Like, I feel like last year, the Rabbit R1, which sucks, was the thing at CES. It was like, it was the gadget that a lot of people were talking about and interested in. And this year, it's like, it's it's almost like too practical. Like, all the stuff I'm excited about and that we're going to talk about is like real things that real people are going to use, which is not what CES is about. CES is about like deranged ideas about technology. And there are lots of those, and we will get to many of them, including helicopters that come out of the back of cars. But it it just doesn't feel like there has been like the the one sort of breakout thing yet, which in terms of like, stuff that regular people will actually buy, it's probably a

• 2:42David Pierce?

  good CES on that front. But it doesn't feel quite CES-y that way. Does that make sense?

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  So I have another theory about what's going on in CES. And I it's like my face hugger theory of technology.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  Or like, what, you know, in Aliens, they burst out of the chest? There's CES, the the show that we all think we're coming to with the gadgets and the TVs and whatever. And then at the ARIA, there's the marketing people.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 3:08Nilay Patel?

  There's some marketing people here. Be careful, they're going to latch on to your face and then burst out your chest.

• 3:12David Pierce?

  It's like, it's literally, it's like much better dressed people walking much more intentionally at the ARIA than at the Venetian.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll get to that in one second. They're definitely better dressed. Intentionally seems maybe. So if you just think about what's going on in technology broadly, right? We all have screens, the screens have apps, they show you video, they show you AI slop, whatever they're showing you. And in the middle, all that's fun about advertising. And sometime over the past decade, the advertising industry realized that they should be here where everyone is going to talk about next year's screens. And then they have the money and like. The car helicopter car guy is like, I'm here too. And so it's just like this other parallel CES is here where if you want to meet 300 meta executives, they're at the ARIA. They're not on the show floor.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  If you want to see the entire Amazon's ads team or all the TikTok people, they're here. Like a lot of the major company executives are here. They're just deal making about ads somewhere else. And the show floor is like, it's not what it used to be. And so I think that's where you get the like, there's not one big thing that everyone's talking about. Cause the one big thing everyone's talking about is like programmatic advertising.

• 4:24David Pierce?

  Well, and the other one is, is AI, which I was talking to one of them, I'm going to steal our thunder from one of our guests here who was saying basically like the strange thing about AI is you can't demo it to anybody. Like it's just, it's, it's just like a thing that happens, but it actually just looks like a television. So you're like, this television has a chat bot. And it's like, well, A, what does that mean? And B, how do you show that on a show floor? So it's like Samsung just had a ship because that's the only thing there is to show is look.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  The Samsung booth has a sign in it. And if you have been to the show floor, the Samsung booth has a sign and it says, smart things for ships. This is real, which seems dangerous to me as a person who runs smart things in his home. We'll have Jen on later. We can ask her if she thinks smart things is appropriate for sea bound navigation.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  You spend a tremendous amount of time talking about how your goal is boat money. And I feel like smart things for ships, boat money. Like there's a straight line in there.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, so right next to smart things for ship is a sign that says society. It's not even like connected society. It's just the word society. And it's like Samsung is announcing society and next to society, their vision for it is that your ship will have smart home technology on it. And you're like, I think, I think this is a dangerous approach to what we're doing. But it's really weird. Like Samsung is showing all these like solutions. There's no products in their booth, which is really weird. There's a model of a ship and the word society. And we're going to talk about the frame TV. I promise you, we're going to talk about frame TV.

• 5:48David Pierce?

  The two wolves inside of each other.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  The frame TV is not even being demoed in that booth. The art gallery of the frame TV is being demoed in that booth. So it's just a very odd moment for I think a lot of these companies where they're over the hardware race.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  And then a bunch of the younger companies, the TCLs are like still super in the hardware race. I will say, and we should talk about this quickly, we're going to talk about this a lot, I suspect, for the next four years, because there are so many marketers here and because there are so many major technology company executives here, Meta announced yesterday that they're getting rid of fact checking, they're going, they're changing their community standards, and we've been able to do a bunch of reporting about that because everyone's here. And then, sort of like, what does it mean to advertise on Meta when their community guidelines are changing, is a thing that I've just had conversations about, because all of those folks are here. And I, that's not usually what you expect from CS. I'm assuming you came here to hear me rant about the Frame TV and not about Meta's community

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  guidelines, although it's the Verchass, so you, I'm hoping that you all understand both things will always happen at the same time. But, that to me, has been the story of the show, just because of the rooms I have happened to be in. Everyone is talking about it.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  Oh, for sure.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  Because it feels like the whole tech industry is now in a much more transactional place, cynically transactional. And that announcement coming on the first day of CS, I think is no accident of timing. Because all of Meta's marketers are here with their clients, explaining what they mean, when they say, you can now refer to women as household objects on Meta, which is a rule that they have changed.

• 7:18David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  That's a rule you can do. And the reason they announced it here, is because their salespeople are sitting with their biggest clients, being like, here's how this is actually going to play out. And I think that has gotten a little bit lost, right? Like, yes, the timing is weird, yes, Mark Zuckerberg made what appears to be like a hostage video. Is anyone here good at makeup? Can someone help him so he's not always blown out in the T-zone? Like, I'm only, I look great in eyeliner, and that's all I know how to do, but my Goth phase did not. He always looks like he just needs to get evened out.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  That's facts.

• 7:50David Pierce?

  But this is also just what he does every four years now, is make one of those videos where he takes the opposite position of the one that he took four years ago.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's super cynical. I think he's gotten a little bit radicalized, right? He gets yelled at a lot. I think none of the big tech companies liked working with the Biden administration, because the Biden administration's approach to the big tech companies were what was effectively, what if you didn't exist? Right. It's true. And they all hated Lena Kahn. They all hated this Department of Justice. Google has two antitrust cases brewing. Meta has a big one coming up in April. That I think the FTC is running about Instagram and WhatsApp and potentially breaking that apart. So I think they all just made their deal with the devil to be like, we give Trump money. Maybe these problems will go away. And I think part of that is Mark literally using a lot of, like, he says, the legacy media is lying to you, like, in that video.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  He says transgenderism, and he says that you can, the rule is now you can refer to being gay or transgender as a mental illness. These are explicit, these are dog whistles to a community that is very, very receptive to them. And all of that is transactional.

• 8:56David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Whether or not he believes it, I don't know. There's a lot of gay and trans people who work at Meta. Like, he has to support his own team in some way, and I think he's gonna have to explain that.

• 9:04David Pierce?

  It also doesn't matter. Like, I think, I think the, the lesson we're learning here really quickly is that what Mark Zuckerberg believes, or what Tim Cook believes, or what any of these folks believe, actually doesn't matter. Like, they, they will run their companies as business people. And I think the, the thing that is happening is we, we either have to decide to stop being surprised or, like, dedicate ourselves to continuing to be angry that this happens. But this is just, everyone has just said what it is now.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  I, I was with another big tech company executive yesterday, and they were just like, we're treating this, this time it's business. And that was, that was just the point of view that they had.

• 9:39David Pierce?

  It's just been business the whole time, but I think that there was, there was a long period of time where there was a sense that, like, okay, maybe we are going to buy into this new world where, like, young people care about values and each other, and we're gonna save the world. And, you know, ESG is gonna be a part, and then everybody has decided, oh, never mind, that's actually not what it is. We're just going to win at capitalism. And that is, that is the game.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we're gonna cover this a lot, I think, over the next four years. We already have some further coverage scheduled for next week on both this site and the podcast. But I just, I wanted to call out at the beginning, one, because when you're like, what's the story of CES? For me, part of the story of CES is the marketing industry is here, like in force. It is driving the show in a way that is basically invisible, even on our site. Like, our site is basically like, "Look at this laptop, it folds in half." And that's really fun, and I love it. But the money here is all in the area. It's all a lot of people talking about how to command attention. And the story of the show over there has been the biggest advertising platform around has made this big capitulation, this very transactional, very cynical capitulation.

• 10:44Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's gonna have repercussions across the tech industry.

• 10:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Because you don't have to spend $270 million in Pennsylvania. You don't, you won't. And I think they're all gonna learn that lesson from Mark. And I think the question is like, is anybody, does anybody here think Mark Zuckerberg is not like a ruthless, transactional businessman? Bowling?

• 11:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  He can give you one of these.

• 11:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, like a half and half. Uh, does anyone think Tim Cook is not a ruthlessly transactional businessman? Like, Tim Cook famously, the "Why are you still here?" story, you guys know the story? Where like, they were talking about some problem with a supplier in China, and his lieutenant was here, and he looked at him and he said, "Why are you still here?" And the guy got up, left the room, and flew to China. Yeah, that guy, he's gonna be able to handle it, right? He handled Trump excellently the first time. Bezos, ruthlessly transactional businessman. And then you've got like Sundar. Like, can he do it? Like, can Evan Spiegel roll up to Mar-a-Lago and be like, "I've redesigned the Snapchat interface again." Like, I think, like, this is gonna have huge repercussions across the tech industry, because you need to be a kind of personality. And so we're gonna cover it, I think, for the next four years.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  But now we should cover gadgets.

• 11:53David Pierce?

  Can we talk about the biggest question of CES? This is the, the, all that stuff is, you know, more important, whatever. The question I have about CES is, is the Frame Pro actually a good television?

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 12:04David Pierce?

  I mean this question sincerely. So, Chris Welch on our team, uh, wrote about the, the Samsung, "The Frame." I've learned that it's not called "The Frame Television," it's called "The Frame," which is ridiculous and I hate it. But the Frame Pro is a new TV, and he started by being like, "Oh, this thing might kick ass, it's very cool, lots of new stuff." And over the course of like 72 hours, has come to, basically, "I have been lied to, this thing might be awful." And so I wanna know, I wanna know how you feel.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  I want, one, I wanna point out, I have not spent any time with Chris. He came to that conclusion independently.

• 12:34David Pierce?

  As America's foremost Frame owner...

• 12:38David Pierce?

  Which is a thing you just have to, you have to wear it.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  I do own one. How many people here have a Frame TV? All right. Bowlers?

• 12:45David Pierce?

  Neel I owes all of you money.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was just a fist in the air. You're just like, yeah, Frame TV. Uh, lots of Frame TVs. I have a Frame TV. Everybody now has a Frame TV. The Frame TV represents the death of Hollywood. I want you to, every time you turn on this TV, I want you to be like, what I'm doing is killing Hollywood. Uh, and I mean that. I mean that in a very real sense. It is also Samsung's biggest success. It is a cultural product, not a tech product. You buy this thing because it looks good when it's off. You buy this thing because it has an art store. How many people are paying the 50 bucks a month for the art store? How many people are, that one person will admit it. How many of you are paying for it and you just don't want to admit it in this room with me? I, I pay the money too, all right? It is a cultural product. It is not a technology product. And that is the thing everybody wants. The iPhone is a cultural product. It's not a technology product.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  It's a very high-end technology product, but inherently it's a cultural product. So Samsung can have influencers and HGTV and interior designers sell the Frame TV is like a statement piece that you put in your living room. I have a Frame TV. Uh, my, I have a new neighbor. They redid their living room and they were like, we bought the Frame TV. And they're like, it's not a real Frame TV. And I was like, why are you bidding this to me? No one like shows me any other product and is like, it's not the real one. That doesn't happen. Um, but the Frame TV has achieved this status and the fact that it is a bad TV is like totally secondary to its status. It is a shit TV. I'm sorry. You don't, you don't have, you don't have, you can just, it's fine that I know it and you know it. You don't have to tell anyone else.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  But it is a seven-year-old edge-lit panel that Samsung has long since made its margin on. And now they're selling them for like three bills. Like a lot of you paid thousands of dollars for your Frame TV when the core component of it is like a $200 Samsung panel from seven years ago. But it's all the stuff they've layered on to it, right? The matte display, they break out the box, they make it flat. You can buy the frames. I have a lot to say about the frames. In the art store. So they're making all of this margin based on a lifestyle value of the product on the product sale. And so the Frame Pro.

• 14:43David Pierce?

  This is such a long way of explaining why you bought a terrible television that has not yet answered my question. So Samsung's thing this time was they were like, what if we made it a good TV? And it sounds like they didn't do that.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  They didn't do that. So they, they got to use some words. So they, so you know, edge lit TV has the lights around the edge of the screen that light up the LCD panel. The new hot tech is mini LED backlight to have lots and lots of small backlight so you can turn on off the zones, you get true blacks, and then you have OLEDs, which are the, that's what I have. That's actually what I have. Our Frame TV is in our bedroom and my daughter watches Moana when she's sick. That's why we own that TV. So Samsung is saying we've made it mini LED, which everyone, you're supposed to think they're on the cutting edge of the technology. Cause they can't use OLED, because if you put art on an OLED picture for days at a time, you'll burn out the OLED. So they can't use the best technology.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  So they say they're using this up and coming disruptive technology called mini LED, where every other mini LED TV has thousands, if not tens of thousands of dimming zones to let them simulate an OLED black level. But Samsung isn't doing that. They just put them around the fucking edge of the TV. So they can crank them really bright. So the TV can get brighter. So they still have an edge lit panel. Like they haven't done anything.

• 15:59David Pierce?

  Well, they did something.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  What did they do?

• 16:01David Pierce?

  But they didn't do the thing that they should have done, which is make it a better television.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it matters. When I say it's the death of Hollywood, what I mean is you all bought this TV. I keep pointing at all of you. It's like.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  How dare you. These monsters bought this television.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Every Hollywood celebrity you know is mad at you. Tom Cruise is going to come in here and turn off motion smoothing, one by one. But you bought a TV that is better when it's off, like substantially better in its off state than its on state. Like the picture quality when the Frame TV is off is better than when it's on. And that's cool. Like that's why we have one in our bedroom, because it's mostly off. It's such a small step from there to just hanging a real picture on your wall. It's such a small step from there to what's the, there's an E Ink, like color E Ink Frame that they're selling here.

• 16:51David Pierce?

  Poster. You have to charge it once a year.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  That has an art store. It's such a small step to that. It's such a small step to not having a TV. Because your, your TV is off showing you $50 a year content from the MoMA while you're on TikTok.

• 17:06David Pierce?

  Can I offer you a different idea? Which is the new LG Standby Me 2, which is just a thing you carry with a strap.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  This is my favorite product.

• 17:12David Pierce?

  Why have a television when you can have a television with you all the time?

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  Um, have you guys seen the Standby Me 2? It has a strap and then it also has a, so it's just a TV with a battery in it. The battery lasts for like four hours. Uh, it's very funny. The, you know, the first one was a suitcase. It came in like a, like a James Bond style suitcase. But then you would play Solitaire on it. So you'd be like, I'm James Bond. And then they'd be like, we're playing Solitaire. Uh, but it, but now it has a strap. It has a giant Surface style kickstand attachment. So you can just make it a giant tablet computer, which is very cool. Uh, everyone I saw encounter this thing in the LG booth was captivated by it.

• 17:45David Pierce?

  It's literally just a huge iPad without a touchscreen, which is both

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:49David Pierce?

  ridiculous and kind of great.

• 17:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:52David Pierce?

  And they're, they're showing it. There's like the, the big idea is like you'll, you'll hang it up at your coffee shop to show the menu or whatever. And that's all fine and good, but I, I want this thing to just like wander around my house with me and just, I just sit it next to me as I watch shows. Like, that's what I do with my phone all the time now.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, it's a hop to not having a TV. What you are describing is a person without a television. And every now and again, you're going to bring out your little shoulder strap TV and you're going to like, watch a show and you're going to put it away. And once that happened, like the culture of the world changes. Once the default is we don't have TVs. And I, I promise you the Samsung Frame TV is the leading indicator of eventually not having TVs. I mean, and the Frame Pro is a con and I just want to be very careful about this. Like who, what professional needs this?

• 18:40David Pierce?

  What are we doing? But we're fully in the light here, by the way. I just want to be clear. Yeah. So can I just burn you through some more news before we bring out our friends to talk about more interesting stuff than your weird ideas about television? Can we talk about Dell just for like, just for like a minute? I just need to be very mad at Dell out loud on this podcast. Yeah. So Dell. That's a CES tradition. Dell, which had a million names of products for its laptops that no one could ever make sense of, now has fewer names for its products that make somehow even less sense. So Dell has completely renamed its whole. They got rid of XPS. Right. Which was a good brand. It was like the best Windows computer and they're like, ah, never mind. So now there is the, there is the Dell. Just Dell. Just Dell. So you, you just like, I'll have a Dell, please. It's like a thing you can do now.

• 19:24David Pierce?

  There's also the Dell Pro and there's the Dell Max. And if you're like, David, that doesn't make sense. I have more for you. Within each of those tiers, there is a premium, a plus and a base tier. So there is, there is now a Dell base, like a Dell base, please. That's sure. That's like a rental car. All the way up to a Dell Max Premium, which is just spectacular. I assume it costs $16 million. Are they, are they different products? I honestly couldn't tell you. I don't think Dell knows. I really don't. I think they just like had a bunch of laptops and they were like, we don't know what any of these are anymore because we just have infinite SKUs of things. And just put a bunch of them in buckets and we're like,

• 20:06David Pierce?

  ship these to Best Buy. And the middle one is plus. The middle one is plus. You can get a Dell Max Plus. You can. That's correct. Or a Dell Pro Plus. I hate this so much. You're so mad. I have always said that my future is to just start a consultancy where I will walk into your boardroom, say, that name is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, leave and you owe me $50,000. Like I'll be the one to say to your CEO, that's the stupidest idea you've ever had. That's why people hire consultants. This is what I'm saying. I will do that for so cheap if it saves us from stupid names like this. But anyway, so that sucks. The computers I'm sure will be fine. Dell has made fine computers for a very long time. Can we talk about the Sony Afila car for just a hot second? Do we think this exists now? We have a price.

• 20:50David Pierce?

  This thing has been at CES in various forms of prototype for three years now? Yeah, they, they over, have you guys seen the Afila? It's just a sedan.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a Lucid Air, but Sony did it, you know? It's $89,000. I was with some people today, like walking around the show floor. And I was like, this is Sony's car. It's a sedan that costs $89,000. And they like, just a group of people guffawed. Like, I feel very bad for Sony and Honda. They announced this thing five years ago at the height of infinite demand for Tesla. Like where Tesla was like, we can't make Model Y's fast enough. And every car company was like, well, what if we announce a car that we're going to ship five years from now to fill some of that Model Y demand?

• 21:35David Pierce?

  And our only idea about it is that it has PlayStation in it somehow.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I mean, Sony's giant worry is that the cars will drive themselves. And then people, you'll, you will have more free time because then you're like living room on wheels, going to wherever you're going in your autonomous car. And Sony should program the content and advertising that you consume during that time. And I've heard this idea from multiple entertainment companies, multiple car companies that once we have autonomous cars, you drive around living room on wheels. Whoever wins that fight to program that screen is the next winner. And I'm just like, you know, the people still have phones. You have to beat my iPhones. Like I get in an Uber all the time. The Uber drives around just fine. I'm not like, I hope somebody like I turn off the screen in the back of the taxi. I want to look at my phone.

• 22:19David Pierce?

  I do play the trivia games back there every once in a while.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 22:22David Pierce?

  They're so fun.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  You're being so ruthlessly tracked.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, it's fine. They know how good I am at trivia.

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  But I, so they have an answer price. And then I think a really funny thing is, you know, the Afila is a Sony Honda Mobility Joint Venture where Honda's doing a car and then Sony's programming the experiences in some of the car. And you can like, you can in fact play PlayStation in the back of the Afila. Great. But at the same time, at this very show, Honda is showing off its own cooler cars. And you're just like, it's an $89,000 sedan that you don't like. Like this thing is doomed. I hope none of you have preordered an Afila. If you, if you, you know, have fun, you know, life is a series of experiences that you're allowed to have. But the actual Honda cars look way cooler, like much more futuristic. There's a, they keep calling it a saloon, which is just what British people say instead of station wagon. And it's like just a long.

• 23:10David Pierce?

  I just learned that this week, by the way, it's awesome. That's such a better name than station wagon.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:14David Pierce?

  Like a saloon car is cool.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  But it does imply that there'll be like swinging doors. And the British have once again lied to us. But it's like, just such a cool looking car. It makes a lot of sense. Like, you can see Honda's really thought about repackaging a car around a battery instead of what most carmakers are doing, which is like putting a battery in existing design and playing it safe. But no price, no ship date. We're like ages away. We're still in vaporware car land. And then the other thing that's really interesting is none of the other carmakers are here. And so for years, you know, Mercedes would be here and be like, this car has LEDs on the outside. And then BMW, like, our car has e-ink on the outside. And it's like, what about the inside of the car? And then they would show you crazy ideas for, you know, interactive cockpits. And they would talk about EVs endlessly and autonomy endlessly. And none of them are here this year.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  We've seen such a trend, like in the last 12 months of all of these companies walking back from these wild ideas. Because there was a minute where it was like, this is, this is the future and it is coming right now. And now everybody's like, this is potentially the future and it's coming in a very long time because we can't figure out how to charge these things.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Right. They were counting on hybrid ships. They're counting on widespread electrification, which they have largely achieved in China, but they can't talk about it here. And they are counting on autonomy. And those things are just not happening at the rate that anyone wants them to. Waymo is here. And they're showing the Hyundai Waymo car that they're going to be doing next year, which is an Ioniq 5. And so to go from a Jaguar to an Ioniq 5, it's like a hard thing to be excited about, but they're trying really hard.

• 24:42David Pierce?

  Listen, everybody's just out here doing their best. All right, we are already threatening to go way over. So let's, let's get to some of our friends who have been doing much better reporting than we have. All right, we gotta take a quick break and we will be right back.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 25:28David Pierce?

  Allison Johnson's over here. Allison, come hang out with us. Let's talk about CES. Welcome Allison, everybody.

• 25:36David Pierce?

  Allison has been talking about a phone toaster nonstop for several days, which I feel like you, bring your mic over.

• 25:45David Pierce?

  There's a bunch of stuff we should talk about, but can we just talk about the phone toaster? I feel like you've like really oversold the phone toaster.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  We're gonna get right into it, okay. Phone toaster. So the story is I got the press release in my inbox and I was so annoyed immediately with phone toaster. I was like, I don't want to hear about this. And then we got here and I was like, well, I should go see the phone toaster.

• 26:08David Pierce?

  Is it actually called the phone toaster?

• 26:09Speaker 05

  No, that's, I called it that once in my head and then it was just phone toaster after that.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  It's what it is, is the whole thing is called Swipit. It's a

• 26:20David Pierce?

  It's called Swipit?

• 26:22Speaker 05

  Swipit, like swipit.

• 26:24David Pierce?

  They had phone toaster in their back pocket and they went with Swipit?

• 26:27Speaker 05

  I know, I, you know.

• 26:29David Pierce?

  All right.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  They went with Swipit.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  It's like a charging system for your phone where you have the phone case. There's a battery packed in it and you use it like you would a phone with a case and a battery. And when it's time to charge, you stick it in the phone toaster and it goes brrrr and it swaps out the battery and you take it out, you're good to go. Two seconds and I was like, I'm still kind of like not understanding this. And they're like, well, you just, you never charge your phone again. You just swipit.

• 27:06David Pierce?

  The truth is you perfectly understand it.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. Don't you need, how much does it cost? Okay, so that's the thing.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  I don't, that's not a good, okay?

• 27:16Speaker 05

  The phone toaster, it's off, the hub is for-

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  The hub?

• 27:21Speaker 05

  It's the hub.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  The phone cases are the link. Yeah, um, phone toaster is $450.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Sure, yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the phone case is $120.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't come with a case?

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Uh, you have to buy, cause you have to buy the one for your phone.

• 27:36David Pierce?

  Can you get the case without getting the toaster?

• 27:39Speaker 05

  You could.

• 27:39David Pierce?

  But why would you?

• 27:40Speaker 05

  Why would you?

• 27:40David Pierce?

  Okay, that's fair.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  You need the toaster.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  And you need multiple, does, how many batteries are in each toaster?

• 27:45Speaker 05

  There's five batteries in the toaster.

• 27:49David Pierce?

  Do you ever say sentences and be like, how did we get here?

• 27:51Speaker 05

  I, oh, I'm like, this is what I'm paid to do.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  And just to remind me, so you would need like two, you need like one at home and one in your office or something?

• 28:00Speaker 05

  That's like-

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  So you're like a thousand dollars deep into phone toaster.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, you gotta invest a thousand dollars in your toasters and, and then you never have to charge your phone again.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I can never charge my phone again for a thousand dollars in a variety of different ways.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  I know, you could have chargers like in every corner of your house. I just think like, there's something I appreciate it where-

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I have two phones.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  You could have a lot of phones.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  I'm sorry, are you, are you telling me you don't find the idea of being able to just like walk into your like living room when you get home and just go like thunk? And if your phone is magically charged again?

• 28:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:34David Pierce?

  That kicks ass.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 28:35David Pierce?

  You know, it's, it makes me think of like in, in action movies when the guy can do like a really cool like hot swap of, of magazines of ammo. And it's like, they like flip their guns around. That's us. That's what we get now with the phone toaster.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  For $450.

• 28:50Nilay Patel?

  Homie, it's called the Swipit.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  Sorry about that. Again, pay my consultancy. I will tell you, it should have been the phone toaster.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  It's a phone toaster. Yeah.

• 29:00David Pierce?

  I'm saying.

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  This does remind me that when I got my first Sony Kli, it had the little flip down microphone. I did practice trying to make that a cool move. Uh, was not successful and remained single throughout high school. Carry on.

• 29:13David Pierce?

  What else have you seen that's cool? You've been, you've been running around.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  I have.

• 29:17David Pierce?

  I feel like you've had less of a like focused goal at CES and you're more just like, what weird things can I encounter? Which is the correct way to do CES.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  I have the best job and it's, I've never had this job at CES before. This is my sixth CES. Yeah.

• 29:32David Pierce?

  Cause you spent a lot of your time not at CES with phones and there are just no phones here.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, no phones.

• 29:37David Pierce?

  Not a phone show.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  I reviewed the OnePlus 13. It's awesome. Um, and then I just left it in my hotel room and I went into the show floor. No, it, it rules cause like I've had the CES experience where you run from meeting to meeting and you're like sweating and you're talking to people and you don't get to see anything. So this year I got to see things and I wandered through the west hall. I was like, I'm just gonna like see what's here and get out real quick. Like an hour and a half later, I was like taking pictures of myself with every like massive tractor I could find. I was like, this is the coolest thing. There's like massive, you know, electric vehicles. And I was like, oh, I, I gotta move on. Like I can't spend my.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  Did you do the demo? I think it's Caterpillar has a great demo where you can sit in a cockpit and remote operate a digger that's like hundreds of miles away.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  No.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  And there's just a line I got and it's like, they have a drone looking at the digger.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, they're 5G.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's all 5G. Finally, the promise of 5G isn't realized. And it's three guys standing in line to operate a digger 500 miles away.

• 30:43Speaker 05

  I knew it.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  It all happened. We've run the race.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  We did it.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  FU China. Remote control digger. There's a long line of people who just like sat in this thing and they like scooped up some dirt and they put the dirt away. And it's like they're watching it on a TV. It's like, this isn't actually cool.

• 31:03Speaker 05

  That's what I'm gonna do tomorrow.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  You should go back tomorrow.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  But it was very fun. One guy ran into like, he couldn't do it. And the guy was like, let me find you some looser soil. And I was like, that is the harshest burn.

• 31:15Speaker 05

  All right. Well, now I'm nervous.

• 31:19David Pierce?

  Let me find you some looser soil is like a motivational poster that I would like to exist.

• 31:23Speaker 05

  Oh no.

• 31:25David Pierce?

  When life gets hard, find looser soil is like, that means something to me. That's powerful.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen in Central Hall, next to the Samsung booth, there's a little booth for just an LED manufacturer? Like, they don't make the displays, really. They make the LED componentry. And they're very proud of, apparently they've invented a million things first, like the first wire-free LED circuitry that can do a thing, like all this stuff, the first heat resistant, whatever. But their tagline, I swear to you, this is the tagline of this company, "Birth is not fair, but opportunity must be fair." And it's like, in huge letters, and then right below it, it's like, "The future of OLED signage."

• 32:07Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, stick to your guns. Like, I go for it. Shout it from the rooftops. "Opportunity must be fair." It's like, right next to the Samsung booth. So, all these people are walking by and like, taking selfies with it, because it's so weird. And I think it's working. Like, I think a lot of people are being radicalized into like, an inherently progressive agenda by this OLED manufacturer.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  They wanted to see the Frame Pro. That's what they...

• 32:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, I feel like that's where your opportunity is to go over and be like, "Actually, OLED isn't really massively available yet. It's still too expensive. If we could just work on OLED becoming more commercially..."

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  Find looser soil. What else have you seen that's great?

• 32:48Speaker 05

  So, I got to wander around the Central Hall. So, I used to cover cameras full-time. I stopped by Nikon, and you might be bummed to hear that there are like, zero cameras at the Nikon booth. I was scandalized. There's like, airplanes, and then someone like, doing a fake weather forecast, for some reason. But I found...

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Nikon.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. I was like, "Sure, but there's a camera they're gonna take to the moon, and it has a little jacket on." I thought that was so sweet.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:22David Pierce?

  You got really excited about the jacket?

• 33:24Speaker 05

  I did. I came back like, three times, and I was like, "I wanna make sure I get all the facts right about the moon camera." No, I got to just like, see the show, from the perspective of someone who's just like, wants to go see cool shit. The LG booth is awesome. They do the, there's a whole thing with the translucent TV panels, where like...

• 33:47Speaker 05

  You know, you stand around, you watch it and it's like jellyfish and then it morphs into other stuff and then they, all the panels kind of come out and it's stained glass and it looks like Jesus is about to like emerge from the TVs.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  I was like, this is a spiritual experience right here for some people. But yeah, like I just, I got to check out Eureka Park. I got to, um, I went to the Sphere.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, for the Delta.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I went for that. I was, uh, never been there before. I wasn't prepared for the smell of vision, like portion of it. They did a thing with Uber Eats where it was like a bit, there was a guy on like a moped, like delivering Uber Eats and then they like pump in this smell of like hazelnut. And everybody's kind of like, do you smell that? It's kind of sweet. And then they were like, oh, a hazelnut coffee, just how I like. I was like.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  It, it was a lot.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  One thing that I've been dying to ask you about is TCL Nex Paper Phone.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I don't know if you've seen it. As you know, David is the number one retail agent for the Buchs Palmer here in America, which by the way, it currently is in some sort of weird Chinese AI data privacy scandal. So well done, David. Thank you. Way to do an op on the people of America with your weirdy paper phone. I believe I advocated for mostly using that thing in airplane mode, so I'm good. I feel fine about it. So we, we've just seen a lot of interest in these like minimal phones and it's a secondary device, right? Like I don't, it doesn't make any sense to me to have a e-ink phone as your primary device. And so TCL, this is like their second or third Nex Paper Phone. Uh, and they're, they have matte displays and then you can switch them to black and white mode, but this year they look almost like e-ink.

• 35:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. They've been doing this Nex Paper thing and it like was in the tablets first and then they brought it to the phones. And the, the thing that I'm most excited about, and I think you are too, is the Nex Paper Key, which is just a little slider button on the side of the phone that puts it into Max Ink Mode. And that just-

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  That's where it looks the most like E Ink mode.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the like E Ink mode. And it's like monochrome-

• 36:03David Pierce?

  David's consultancy approves of that.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. You just like pretend your phone is an E Ink phone for a minute and it's like-

• 36:10David Pierce?

  Does it work? Like, I feel like we've seen a lot of companies do this thing where they're like, it's an LCD, but it's a it's a better one to look at.

• 36:17Nilay Patel?

  What was the little startup just now?

• 36:19David Pierce?

  The Daylight?

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  The Daylight? And they were all in. They were like, this will save you-

• 36:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it was one of those, like, it had some interesting ideas, but it is a little bit like the sort of jack of all trades and master of none thing where it's like, it almost accomplishes all of its goals, but it actually accomplishes none of them. And I feel like this has been true with a lot of these things, which is why I end up going back to E Ink, because it's like, sure, it's slow refresh rate and it's, it doesn't work super well in certain conditions, but like, it does the thing it's supposed to do, which is not Blair Light in your eyes all the time. Does Next Paper, like, can it do the middle thing?

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Kind of. I mean, there's like, they have a matte kind of finish on the screen and they they say all this stuff about it's like, you know, rated to be really easy on your eyes and the blue light and all that. But like, really, it's just about like-

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  But really, the thing that happens is you flip the switch on the side of the screen and like, smoke comes out from the middle of the screen. Like, there's an animation that's like, E Ink is eating your display from the inside out. It's very sci-fi. And then it like, takes over, it shuts down the screen and comes back as an E Ink screen. Also, for some extremely convoluted reason, it quits all of their apps.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  So it's not great in that sense.

• 37:30David Pierce?

  I literally believed you when you said smoke comes out. Like, I was honestly like, that makes sense.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the phone explodes in your left with a Kindle.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  When you flip it back, like a purply smoke emerges from the middle of the screen.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like a ripple.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  And there's a middle one, which is like a desaturated color E Ink. And it's just like the thing, like I've watched people cruise by all kinds of dumb AI ideas all day today, and everyone stopped at the next paper booth. Because the idea that you have a phone where you're reading it looks more like paper is inherently very compelling. And to me, it's like, oh, maybe that's like the most interesting phone we're gonna see for a while, because it's not like AI is gonna do anything.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  I know.

• 38:10David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right, Alison, before we ruthlessly kick you off the stage.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 38:14David Pierce?

  We have to talk about the thing that you and I both got, I would say unnecessarily excited about at CES Unveiled.

• 38:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I scooped you.

• 38:21David Pierce?

  You did, it was honestly, we have a Slack room where we were talking about the stuff we were gonna write about, and I was like, I'm doing this, and Alison was like, I did it already. It's the meanest thing that's ever happened to me. It's a top for your water bottle. What's the whole thing? Explain this to the people. Who should all buy this thing immediately?

• 38:35Speaker 05

  Soda stream, but for a hydro flask. Like, that's it. It's a little top, you screw onto the top of your water bottle. You put the CO2 canister in, and there's like a little plastic lid you put on top, and it does the carbonation thing. And then you have sparkling water, and you can be free and walk with it.

• 38:56David Pierce?

  Honestly, it's all I've ever wanted. I don't know why I got so excited about this, but the idea of like, and they make a like specific water bottle, and they're like, you can have your still water bottle and your sparkling water bottle. You like drop the little capsule in and it's...

• 39:07Speaker 05

  All I want.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  How many uses do you get out of each capsule?

• 39:10David Pierce?

  Who cares? Don't ask questions. Don't worry about it.

• 39:12Speaker 05

  You can feel, it's good.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  $5,000.

• 39:15David Pierce?

  $50 water bottle.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  You never charge your phone.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  It has a subscription, it's tracking you.

• 39:18Speaker 05

  Yes, and you have sparkling water for the rest of your life.

• 39:21David Pierce?

  It's important.

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  You know, sparkling water is freely available.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 39:25David Pierce?

  We don't all have that La Croix money, be like, all right?

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:30David Pierce?

  All right, Alison, thank you. You're gonna come back when we do some Q and A stuff, but for now, go away.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 39:35David Pierce?

  We have to move on. Thank you, Alison. Jen Toohey, come hang out with us. Let's talk smart home things.

• 39:45David Pierce?

  Jen Toohey, everybody should know this, all of our team is wonderful, but no one at CES is a celebrity quite like Jen Toohey is a celebrity.

• 39:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:53David Pierce?

  Anyone who makes a smart home anything, which is everyone at CES, is like largely obsessed with Jen Toohey.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, welcome. We're very excited you're here.

• 40:02Speaker 06

  I was with Owen of A Geographer today, and I had quite a few people, in fact, I see some in the audience who are, yeah, come up to me and was like, said how wonderful they love The Verge, but that I'm their favorite, so, yay. A few also said they were gonna subscribe.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  There you go. That's what we have a subscription fee. But you get sparkling water.

• 40:24David Pierce?

  Can we talk about robot vacuums? All I want to talk about in the whole world is robot vacuums.

• 40:29David Pierce?

  I have become completely sold on all weird robot vacuums ideas this week.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  That's good, because there are a lot of them.

• 40:36David Pierce?

  There's so many of them. I just want to, I want you to explain the ones that you've seen and liked the best. But the one that I got to see that is my favorite was, there's a RoboRock one that is just, it's just a Roomba-looking thing, but it has a robotic arm that comes out, I mean, so slowly, so slowly. It just, it slowly comes out and it kind of goes like this. And then if it like sees a sock next to it, it just sort of gently reaches over and picks up the sock and then just moves with it somewhere and then just puts the sock down in a different place.

• 41:09Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 41:09David Pierce?

  And there was a person at the RoboRocks booth whose job was to reach over and put the sock back in the vacuum's way. And it was the best, I stood there for like much too long watching this person just slowly fight with the vacuum about where the sock should go.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  Did you see them doing their dance?

• 41:27David Pierce?

  No. There's a dance?

• 41:28Speaker 06

  They had, they had a whole row of them stacked right at the front of the booth and they had them dancing and sync the arms.

• 41:35David Pierce?

  Incredible.

• 41:36Speaker 06

  I know, it was, it was pretty great.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say, I'm, everyone wants to talk about humanoid robots. I'm afraid of the vacuums that have limbs. But before we got on stage, Jen was like, one of them has legs. That's just a thing she casually said. I'm gonna find out more soon.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  Legs and arm. That was, that was, you know, we, they elevated throughout the week. So it started, and we actually got to see the RoboRock sneak peek last month. So we were, we were all prepped for the arms. And in fact, when we were all prepped for the arm, the uprising, the robot uprising is coming. And then the other, so there are lots of competitors in the RoboRock, RoboVac space. And RoboRock came out with arm and then Dreamy came out with the legs. And then that was their debut. And these are, these are robots that are coming, you're gonna be able to buy in like the next couple of months. These aren't concept vacuums. And then I went to the Dreamy booth and they're like, oh, but now we have one that has legs and an arm.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  So this is, and they said, actually, that it'll be out by the end of the year.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  How fast can it run?

• 42:40Speaker 06

  So this is, it's, the legs are a little, I mean, it's, they just basically raise the robot up far enough so that it can kind of get over and transition. Like, if you've ever had a robot vacuum that can't get into your bathroom because you've got like a high ledge, and then it kind of, the legs kind of collapse from under it and it goes forward. So it's not like it's going to climb up your staircase to the second floor.

• 43:00David Pierce?

  You can almost like hear it go huh every time. Lunging over.

• 43:06Speaker 06

  Well, and when I was watching the one with the legs and the arm, he said, well, we kind of modeled it after a horse. And you can see the legs go up and then the arm goes up and it's like.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  And this is, I want to be clear, this is a vacuum cleaner.

• 43:23Speaker 06

  So the idea is if anyone's ever used a robot vacuum, they often get stuck. Or if you've left your socks out, they'll suck up your socks. And then there's AI-powered obstacle avoidance, which is supposed to help them get around the sock, but then they haven't cleaned the floor where the sock was. So this idea is it's going to pick up your sock. You can tell it where to put it. And so it'll go put it in a basket, or the dreamy one can pick up shoes, so it can go put.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  It's strong enough to pick up a shoe?

• 43:49Speaker 06

  Five hundred grams.

• 43:51David Pierce?

  It's over now.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  It can hop like a horse and pick up shoes?

• 43:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And this one, actually, the dream, the new dreamy one can, can use tools. So.

• 44:03David Pierce?

  We actually don't like that. I changed my mind. I'm out.

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  They've all seen the movies, right?

• 44:10Speaker 06

  But the ultimate idea is they'll clean everywhere because right now they are kind of spotty. But it'll, and it can, it has, this little arm kind of goes into a toolbox and takes a tool out. But yes, I could, I mean, right now it's a soft brush, but you know, when it's like little chains.

• 44:25David Pierce?

  Uh huh. It's a full like BattleBots situation you're describing.

• 44:28Speaker 06

  Well, I kept saying, you know, can we, you're across the way from each other. Can we just get the two robots together and go for it? But no, they weren't having any.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, are, are, is there a list of acceptable tools?

• 44:39Speaker 06

  It's just little brushes. It's like.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  So mostly brushes?

• 44:42Speaker 06

  Brushes.

• 44:43Nilay Patel?

  Because like you give this robot a hammer, like all kinds of weird shit. Checking, all right.

• 44:48Speaker 06

  But they're everywhere. Robots with arms, legs, all sorts of things.

• 44:51Nilay Patel?

  It does seem like. In terms of just like household robots, it's the vacuums that people are like, these are the ones people actually buy. And then everything else is kind of, and so there's just a tremendous amount of weird vacuum ideas.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  It's where the innovation is definitely in the robot space because, and I've talked about this before, you know, the whole kind of dream is the Rosie, the robot, the humanoid. But that's, you know, if and when that ever comes is going to be, no one's going to be able to afford it. And it's going to be kind of scary. So for me, the idea of like modular, single purpose robots or robots that can do one or two tasks rather than like a big, powerful humanoid robot roaming around your house makes a lot more sense. And in fact, Switchbot, who's kind of known for quite innovative, slightly janky products, came out with a modular robot platform.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  So the little, it has a little robot with something it's calling a fusion platform that goes on top. And then you can put different accessories and it will drive around your house and like bring you things. It has, you can put a fan on it so you can have it like come and keep you cool, purify the air. So this is like, you know,

• 46:05David Pierce?

  Wait, you forgot the one where it'll do a telepresence robot. It's just a big, big ass selfie stick that you can stick your phone on and then it'll just wander around your house.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 46:12David Pierce?

  Sold.

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  All the way back to an iPad on a Segway.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  That's what it is.

• 46:17David Pierce?

  Also cleans your floors.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  At the same time.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Like 10 years ago, I walked around CS and people were like, the future of work is an iPad on a Segway. We actually, we have a great video from ages ago. James Vincent just came to our office from his home in London as an iPod on a stick or an iPad on a stick. And his conclusion was like, no one respects me.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's hard. All right. I'm saying good luck to everyone.

• 46:45Speaker 06

  I know.

• 46:46David Pierce?

  I do like the idea of them though. Like the idea that you have this little tiny thing that A does a thing, it cleans your floors, but it also increasingly like understands and has mapped your house, knows how to move around. The idea that there's more stuff.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  Can use tools and throw shoes.

• 46:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that I'm less excited about. The can you can open a box and use tools could go sideways. But air purifiers and selfie sticks are meant to.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's going to roll up and like a puff of smoke is going to come out and you're going to fall to the ground.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  Wake up without a kidney.

• 47:15David Pierce?

  What is going on?

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  Use tools.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, think about it. I'm just saying.

• 47:22David Pierce?

  I'm fine with this. It doesn't look like a person, so it's less creepy.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Well, actually, the switchbot is they are working on an arm for the switchbot and a little face.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, speaking of horrors, let's talk about Matter. There's a lot of Matter stuff here. There is an entire door lock camera biometric handle.

• 47:42Speaker 06

  It's the year of the door lock. I called it.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, your most the product you listed here is most likely to buy is the new Schleglock that has ultra wideband.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  And I believe I was reading Jen's right up and it's like it calculates your velocity as you approach the door, which is just not a thing that you think a door lock needs to do.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  Well, so the idea is I actually got a demo of it this evening. They're not shown on the show floor. They did. That was all they released, but they did give me a little sneak peek just before I came here. And the idea of the velocity is if you're so UWB is like what we what's in use in cars now for automatic unlocking. So it it's precise positioning, so it knows how you're approaching. So this way, if you're walking sideways across your front lawn, your door's not going to unlock, right? It knows that your your trajectory towards the lock. So as you're walking towards the lock, if you're running, it will unlock faster. Like, so you want to get in your house quick.

• 48:37David Pierce?

  Does it like whip open the door if you really want to surprise somebody?

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like the vacuum is coming. Unlock the door.

• 48:45Speaker 06

  But it's a great. I think the UWB technology is really what's going to push smart locks into the mainstream. Because to date, access control has been kind of fiddly. The fingerprint is my favorite option, but for a lot of people, it's not a great option. Fingerprints can be, you know, don't always get recognized. It's fiddly to set up. And then the keypad, obviously, that's that's almost takes as long time as getting your key out if you're putting there. And then they've had this idea of automatic unlocking for a while, but it's never been very good because it uses wifi and geofencing and a few different radios. So like, there's so many failure points. Whereas this is just point to point, radio to radio. As you approach, the door will unlock and it unlocks before you get there.

• 49:30Speaker 06

  So you're not standing there like a lemon for like 30 seconds waiting for your door to unlock, which has happened to me regularly.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  So. Quick question. How do lemons stand?

• 49:40Speaker 06

  It's an English term.

• 49:43Speaker 06

  Backing up. In their saloon.

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm super fascinated because there's also a new, there's standards on top of standards, right?

• 49:50Speaker 06

  Yes, so this is Alero.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  It's called Alero.

• 49:53Speaker 06

  So this isn't, so Alero is coming this year.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  The classic smart home story.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  Yes. And it's been known, like, so Alero is, like Matter, Alero has been, is like an industry collaboration between Apple, Google, Samsung, and then all the lockmakers. And it's an access control standard to basically make it so that any smartphone can unlock any door lock, obviously authorized, not just, so rather than having to have a specific platform to use your smart lock or a specific smartphone, any UWDB device or NFC, so it's bringing Apple Home Key, the idea of Home Key, to all phones. So right now, if you've ever used Apple Home Key, it's very convenient. Tap your watch to your lock, tap your phone to your lock, unlocks it. But you can't use that if you have an Android phone.

• 50:42Speaker 06

  But now that's with Alero, we're going to get NFC unlocking for all phones and UWDB unlocking for all compatible phones. Obviously, you have to have UWDB and NFC in your phone. But that's, that's been coming for a while. There's a lot of phones and watches that now have that. So I think, I mean, it's going to take a while. The Alero standard is going to be announced, like what it is, the spec, this year. But I think the lock manufacturers are already starting to make the locks to work with it. And Apple announced at WWDC last year, yes, last year, that, that they are supporting the UWDB hands-free unlocking. So it, there's a lot of momentum there. And it is, it's a really seamless experience compared to most of the other ways that you use smart locks.

• 51:27Speaker 06

  So I think we're going to see a real uptick in, do you have a smart lock?

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I've got the ENCODE Plus, which is Home Key.

• 51:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  And then I have the cheap Aquara one, which is also Home Key. And that one, you get what you pay for. It's just like, sort of straightforwardly, you get what you pay for. But it's great, because we just tap the phone on the door and it unlocks. And the problem is, sometimes I have an Android phone, and then I can't do that. And like, it seems like all this is just one turn too late. I know you're calling it the year of the smart lock. But it, and there's a rumor that Apple will make a lock this year, which is very funny. Like, of all the products Apple should make.

• 52:03Speaker 06

  That's the other thing we saw, video doorbells built into smart locks everywhere. And palm unlocking, I'm not so sure about the palm unlocking.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  You just like wave your palm at it?

• 52:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I did it a few times, I think Philips, not Philips you.

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  What does it, like, your palm?

• 52:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, they say it's a lot more secure than a fingerprint. Apparently, your palm has more

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 52:21Speaker 06

  things going on.

• 52:23David Pierce?

  I don't know, what we're beating is like a, like a key in a lock. Like, I think a fingerprint's probably fine. We're, we're still moving in the right direction.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  But then it's the hands-free element, you know, you just, no.

• 52:33Nilay Patel?

  This is not hands-free.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  But it is, because you're not actually touching.

• 52:36David Pierce?

  That's just not touching.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  This is like the most hands.

• 52:39Speaker 06

  There's no, there's no physical contact.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  Very much hand, yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 06

  It's, it's, I'd say it's in between.

• 52:45David Pierce?

  Sure. This is why I want it to just whip open the door when I walk up.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  See, that, it doesn't do yet.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Can you set the velocity? Can you be like, this is how fast I can run?

• 52:56Speaker 06

  You know, it, it, so that's what, I, I hadn't, Schleg, Schleg was the first company I'd heard talk about velocity. So, but I think that's neat, because if you are in a hurry, rather than it, you suddenly have to stop. Um, it's gonna, it, it can anticipate, it's reacting to you. And that's really where the smart home's going, I think. It's like, it anticipates your needs, rather than you needing to tell it what you want to do, or program it, or put buttons in, you know, push buttons, put your fingerprint. And the smart, your home is starting to react to you. And that's kind of where we're moving, I think.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  So, what's really interesting is, you know, Apple, this is kind of the second time they've pulled this move, right? They did HomeKit and then they gave a lot of HomeKit away to become Matter. Then they did HomeKeys and they gave a lot of HomeKey away to be Aliro. And we'll see if that comes to anything, right? But like you can see like they're moving more things into the industry ecosystem because they they just need the ecosystem to exist.

• 53:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Very, very few companies want to make stuff for just one platform, especially at the scale most of these companies operate at. But then the rumors are like, Apple will just make a lock with a like Face ID built into it. And that makes no sense to me. And then the rumor is this year, Apple will do like a smart home iPad situation.

• 54:13Speaker 06

  That we'll get.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  But then I'm just like looking at the other news here, which is Aquara has announced like a wall mountable smart home controller.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, oh, they're just going to kill their this ecosystem of products they need to make this work that they keep giving the standards away to. They're just going to eat them. The Aquara thing is wild. So has anybody ever, Paul is here, I know he has. The CEO of Home Assistant is here, I know this person has done it. But has anybody ever been like, I'm going to put an iPad on my wall to control my smart home stuff? It's this, yes, it's our audience, I know. More of you than subscribe to the art store on the Frame TV is that's what I want to say. And it's like hard, it's just like a fundamentally complicated idea. Cause you got to get power to the iPad, you got to keep the iPad in kiosk mode or you got to run an Android tablet, you end up with a bunch of weird matter.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  Can you tell how much therapy I do with Jen on like a day to day basis about smart home stuff? And so Aquara has these new ones, I think you've actually seen them where they just replace your light switches in the way that. Has anybody ever seen the new like aftermarket screens you can put in cars? Where you just like take out the old radio and they're just like, fuck it, tablet.

• 55:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  Covers up all the vents. And now it's like, what if we do that in your house? It's like, we're going to take out your light switches and we're just going to mount a seven inch display where your light switch was. And guess where the power comes from? The power to your light switch. And then this will be the panel.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  And this feels like the new thing to me.

• 55:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is this smart home control interfaces, which is something I go on about a lot on the site. It's like, because voice and phone control are just not. Compatible in a household where there's more than one person. Like you need ways to control your smart home. And Brilliant was the first sort of company in this space that did replacing the light switch with a touchscreen panel. But what's happened now is that with Matter, you've now got, you're not locking yourself into an ecosystem. And the problem had been, even though Brilliant tried with integrations, is that there just weren't enough things. If you're going to wire something to your house, it needs to control everything. And Akara, right now, it is not quite there, but with Matter, they're saying they're going

• 56:23Speaker 06

  to be able to, you basically eventually be able to control any Matter compatible device straight from the touchscreen. It's wired to lights, so you're solving the problem of your lights. You can, you know, dim, change colors, set scenes, using the touch panel for the light that it's wired to, and then any other lights in your home, or maybe your door lock. It's also a video intercom, so if you have a video doorbell, it'll pull up when someone rings, you can talk to them, it has a little microphone. It's big and chunky, though, and then there's a spousal approval factor when it comes to light switches. So my actual favorite one of the Akara, they showed off three touchscreen panels, and

• 57:06Speaker 06

  one has a little dial, and it has a tiny little screen in it that you can swipe the screen to choose what you want to select. So say I want to turn on the living room lights or dim them, and then it has this lovely tactile dial that you can just turn.

• 57:19David Pierce?

  Your house is like cool and tactile as light switches. They're like, they feel so good. Spousal approval through the roof on light switches.

• 57:27Speaker 06

  Smart home Philistine. But you can't, a light switch turns your light on and off, or maybe dims it. This, I can swipe and touch one button and like all the lights in my house or in my living room will set to a mood, you know, the mood, the movie time, dim to a certain light, maybe throw in a little funky color just for some, you know, fun. No, I'm not selling you on it.

• 57:52David Pierce?

  How many people in your household knows successfully how to operate this thing?

• 57:54Speaker 06

  Well, that's the thing, these, this would be much more intuitive than anything to date that I've had in my, and that's what, you know, because I struggle, my, my family struggles with my smart home a lot, and I've left them for a week, and I'm terrified of what I'm going to find when I get home.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Jen once told me that her teenage children don't know how to use keys because she's had smart locks for so long.

• 58:15Speaker 06

  They've never used.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  And it just seems like a life skill that we should.

• 58:18David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should come back to.

• 58:20David Pierce?

  I don't like that at all.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't think my daughter will notice how to use keys. She doesn't encounter them.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  They're not gonna need a key, but I mean, what's he gonna?

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  You just, you just be like, run faster, the door will open. Just speed it up, kid.

• 58:30David Pierce?

  Just back up and try it again. It'll unlock this time. All right, Jen, you're gonna come back for Q and A because there are, I know for sure, people in this audience who want to yell at us about matter. But for now, thank you.

• 58:40Speaker 06

  It's not allowed to be powerless, then.

• 58:43David Pierce?

  He's here. It's allowed. Thank you, Jen. All right, we gotta take a quick break and we will be right back.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 59:22David Pierce?

  V's job this week was to wear all of the smart glasses and also all of the wearables, which I think means like touching gross things more than most people who go to CES. You've had a lot of like close encounters with gadgets that we don't recommend at this show.

• 59:39Speaker 07

  Thanks for reminding me, David. I actually hadn't thought about that.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  So your job is putting stuff that's been on other people's face in your face. How you feeling?

• 59:47Speaker 07

  I, you know.

• 59:48David Pierce?

  Which violates every rule of CES.

• 59:53David Pierce?

  Can we talk about smart glasses for a minute?

• 59:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, let's talk about smart glasses.

• 59:55David Pierce?

  If there is like a device category that everybody was excited about this week, I feel like it's smart glasses.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  Can I just read you the names of these companies that V typed into the list?

• 1:00:05Speaker 07

  And these are the ones that I was like, okay, in my inbox, there's like at least 500,000 smart glass pitches. These are the ones that I selected as worthy of talking about.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Rocket, that's spelled R-O-K-I-D. Nuance, X-Real, everyone knows Nuance. Vuzix, Camilio.

• 1:00:24Speaker 07

  Camello.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  Camello, Even Realities, and then Halliday.

• 1:00:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  This, these are just, people are just coming up. I'm pretty sure Halliday is a reference to Ready Player One, right? Cause Halliday and Ready Player One.

• 1:00:35David Pierce?

  Seems right.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  But it's just like we're, we're entering a new zone of companies. Like we're like, reality hacker labs. Like it's like, that's what we're gonna do.

• 1:00:44David Pierce?

  Well, it just makes me think like, this stuff must have gotten a lot easier to make in the relatively recent past.

• 1:00:48Speaker 07

  Phenomenally easier to make. This is a thing that, so I've been a smart glasses skeptic for a really long, long time. Because there were just, I mean, we all know what happened with Google Glass, right? Glass holes, like, eh, that's not really a thing. But I think in the last two to three years, the technology has miniaturized and basically expanded to a point where it's like, oh crap. This could actually happen. And that's kind of what we're seeing on the floor. So I think we've gotten to a point where everyone has agreed, oh, smart glasses, they're a thing. This is happening.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can we just put a little definition around smart glasses? Cause it's pretty wide open right now. So the Meta Ray-Bans, I think Meta will call smart glasses.

• 1:01:32Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:01:33Nilay Patel?

  But they have no display component.

• 1:01:35Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? That's a camera and.

• 1:01:37Speaker 07

  There's like categories.

• 1:01:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. Voice assistant. And I think Meta is dramatically overselling. Does anybody here have them?

• 1:01:45Speaker 07

  You see, you see, you see, yeah, yeah. A lot of people have them.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  Substantially more people than pay for the art store. I just want to be clear about that too. You're, is there, you, do you have them because they're a camera or because you're talking to Meta AI all the time? How many of you are talking to Meta AI all the time on your Ray-Bans? No, I would point out, either everyone's embarrassed or no hands have gone up. How many of you are too embarrassed to admit that you're talking to weird Meta AI Ray-Bans all the time? How many of you are using the camera all the time? Cause it's really convenient to have a, that's a lot of hands.

• 1:02:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  Um, and so I think Meta is dramatically overselling the smart glass, the smartness of its smart glasses. Cause it's not a display. It's just a camera on some glasses that look okay.

• 1:02:25David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  But all the ones we're talking about in CS are displays.

• 1:02:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's the new category.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  Well, that everybody, including Meta, agrees that's the next thing.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  So. Yeah. But like Meta is like, this is a surprise hit. Like smart glasses are the future. I'm like, weird little cameras are the future for you.

• 1:02:40Speaker 07

  Well, it's, it's kind of both. It's kind of both. I just think Meta rolled out the AI in such a way that people just don't know how to use it properly. And if they say multimodal one more time, I'm going to lose it. That's just like where I'm at, but. You know, the interesting thing was like, let's talk about Rocket, right? So Rocket, it does everything that the Meta glasses do. They have a camera in it, but there is a display. And it's a pretty cool display, but it's a, I think what they call this type of display is a monocular monochrome display.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  Monocular monochrome display.

• 1:03:17Speaker 07

  Monocular monochrome display with micro etched displays in the lenses. So like you look at them, they look like a normal pair of glasses. They are much lighter than the Meta Ray Bans. Cause we, we've talked about this a lot. The weight is kind of a deal breaker sometimes when you're wearing them. So they're quite light. You can't actually see the display unless you like, the light hits you in a certain way. It's etched into the actual glass. But when you look into it, you can see kind of like, uh, like if you're thinking of a military fighter jet and that type of green laser looking display in there, you can see it. It's an actual display. And then the, um, demo I got, the, the person was speaking to me in Chinese and I could see the translation happening in real time.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:04:00Speaker 07

  And then I could say something to her and she would answer me in Chinese.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  And there was no external commute? Was this going out to a cloud? Was this happening locally?

• 1:04:08Speaker 07

  Uh, well, that, that was a hard question because again, she's speaking to me in Chinese.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was just wondering, like, if you can do that locally on a pair of glasses with a reasonable battery life, that's.

• 1:04:19Speaker 07

  I mean, it is attached to your phone, right?

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:04:22Speaker 07

  So that's, that's basically, we're still at the point where your phone is powering all of this and it's over Bluetooth. It's not like computing everything locally on that particular thing, but it's pretty wild. And as like journalists, you can have a teleprompter on there. You're wearing a pair of glasses. It does not look like you're seeing anything. And, um, this kind of subset of the monocular green laser thing, I saw three of them, at which I was like, oh, that's a mini trend within a big trend. Cool, cool stuff.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  Right, there's a component here that everyone has decided they can use.

• 1:04:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:04:54Speaker 07

  And the reason why is because they have solved in a certain aspects, the ambient light problem. So the ambient light problem with smart glasses is like you walk out into the sun and you can't see shit. Because it's the sun, it like blinds everything out. So there's no point in a smart glass if you can't see the display that you paid a lot of money for. But with the green, it's easier on your eyeballs. So like green light is apparently the healthiest for your eye. It's the easiest to see and it borrows from military technology because the contrast is really great.

• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  I will say what you just said is alarmingly similar to how Humane described the projector on the pin. And that didn't go super great.

• 1:05:29Speaker 07

  No, it didn't.

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  Did Humane ever say they borrowed from military?

• 1:05:35David Pierce?

  No, but they were big on green lasers and how they were going to be useful in sunlight. And then you go outside and it's like, what if it didn't work at all?

• 1:05:40Speaker 07

  Outside in the sunlight, like that's the, so like Halliday's solution to that. And I found Halliday to be the most finicky of the three with the smallest amount. Cause it's like this tiny little dot. It's held in like the bar of it. So like, when you think about wearing smart glasses and where the display appears, it's actually like in the bar itself. So when you're talking to someone, they're just basically doing this the entire time, looking up into the corner. And so it looks like they're rolling your eyes at you the entire time.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I'm curious for this because you got to see them.

• 1:06:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  You know, earlier we were talking about like, is there a product at CES that everyone was talking about? And like the Halliday glasses are the closest to it. And then I think a lot of people got the demo and had that experience and it stopped being the thing that everyone was talking about.

• 1:06:23David Pierce?

  It's, yeah, it seemed much more exciting at the beginning of the week than I think it turned out to be once people started trying it.

• 1:06:27Speaker 07

  So like, here's the thing, smart glasses, yeah, but you, the most annoying thing about XR smart glasses, any of these things is that you have to see it to believe it. And you know, uh, when we're thinking about making videos for these things and trying to like convey to people like, oh, this is actually cool. Literally you're taking these glasses, you're taking your phone and like, if I angle the thing in the right way, I can get a really blurry half portion of the green laser that you're gonna see. So it's really hard to convey to people that. And like the Halliday thing, I think they got in early at the show, which was like good for them, but like you're literally. Like, I don't know. And it's not as discreet because when you talk to someone, you can see a green dot in their eye. Like, just a green dot in their eye. And you're like, that's weird.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  That's my targeting laser for the robot.

• 1:07:12Speaker 07

  That's my target. I'm an android robot with a green dot in my eye.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  So you talked about the demo of the translation. Like, we've always talked about, there's a lot of problems between here and the dream of AR glasses, right? So you need a display, which it seems like some people are getting closer to one display solution that you can put on reasonably lightweight glasses. You need compute, and it sounds like we're offloading that to the phone.

• 1:07:37Speaker 07

  I know, yeah.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  Then you need a battery that is not heavy, but for the rise of battery life.

• 1:07:43Speaker 07

  You need a battery, the more advanced it is, for sure.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  And then you like need stuff to do.

• 1:07:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, you need to like augment reality. Like, the the goal is like, I I say this all the time. If you can just make me a pair of glasses where you can just tell me your name, like, I'll buy them in a heartbeat. The problem is you need to build like a worldwide facial recognition database.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  Just give me like a surveillance state and everything will be fine.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  And it's, you know, we're headed there anyway. So like, let's give me the glasses. But you need to like build all this other stuff.

• 1:08:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  And it seems like the ones here, they're really focused on like, display.

• 1:08:14Speaker 07

  So like, what it is now, and what I've seen on the floor is that we have all agreed that smart glasses, we've agreed on smart glasses with all these companies. What we've not agreed on is how to do them. So what you have at CES is a bunch of people going, smart glasses, and now we're gonna throw so much spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. So they're trying to figure out, and like, Google told me this when I went to see the Android XR demos of their smart glasses prototype, is that you cannot approach it from one way. You have to approach it from all other ways. So the the thing about Meta's glasses that kind of really kicked the door open is it got normal people thinking like, oh, I have a use for this. I'm gonna take a, but for me, I'm gonna take so many videos

• 1:08:57Speaker 07

  of my cats, and they're not gonna be freaked out because I have a phone in their face. And it sounds really stupid, but that actually is a thing that gets people going toward it. And then for some of these people, they're like, oh, you know what? Teleprompters. How many people would, if you have to speak on anything, how many would love to have a little teleprompter in front of your eyes that you can read that no one knows that you're reading? Like, it's great. You could have notes in something. Like, you can travel to a different country, and yeah, your phone's in your pocket, but you can talk to someone and understand what they're saying. Like, that's Pretty cool if you think about that.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 07

  So those are like real life use cases. So you have people approaching from the style first, like the SLR Luxottica people. They're just like, you know, I saw them today. They were very Italian, very stylish. I felt like a schlub next to them. But they were like, we want things that people use. So the Nuance audio ones, they are over the counter hearing aids in a glasses format because it reduces stigma. It can still like noise cancel to a certain is really cool because if I look at David and he's talking, it'll amplify his voice. But then if I turn away from him, it'll cancel him out. So like that's

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  That's the goal. That's the goal you want.

• 1:10:03Speaker 07

  Yeah. So it's pretty cool and it supports all prescriptions and it's like kind of geared towards the elderly who need glasses to see and can't hear. So that's like a real use case that they have. And then you have people on like the other end of the spectrum, like the Vuzixes and the Exreal. And they're like, we are the future. You will be watching movies on your glasses and like everything will be seen. And there will be a little, so they had me like AI prompted fat cat with unicorn wings that I could just like pinch to be large. And I'm like, sure, that's a thing. That's smart.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's a display. Like what they're saying is like, we can put a display in front of your eyes.

• 1:10:40Speaker 07

  But Nuance has no display. Nuance has no display. That's just audio only. So like, I think in the transition, like Bose kind of kicked it off with the glasses with just making them audio. That's cool. Carmelo has no display. The cool thing about Carmelo, and this is the only cool thing, is that you you slide, you press a button and it changes the color of the lens. And I'm like,

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  That's why I thought it was called Camellio. I just want to be very honest.

• 1:11:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  It probably should be.

• 1:11:06Speaker 07

  But you hear that on paper and you're like, that's stupid. Then you go into the thing and you're like, oh, it changes colors. I'm so cool. Or like you have, you change the tint. So it's like, oh, it's really bright out. I need the tint to be full, full of the way. Or if you're like me and you're shady, you're like, oh, I don't like this person. I'm going to pull it all the way to dark so I can make eyes at them and

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  I love the idea that you're wearing your glasses and just ruthlessly like subtweeting people.

• 1:11:31Speaker 07

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Like you're like, goodbye.

• 1:11:33Speaker 07

  Goodbye.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  And then you like turn your head, you're like, I can't hear you anymore.

• 1:11:35Speaker 07

  I can't. It's like, oh, yeah.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  It does seem like all of this. Right, there's some part of it that's like, I think, really fun, right? This is all very innovative, we're all gonna try a bunch of stuff. But it also feels like, well, we can't make a watch. Right, like, no one's gonna buy a smartwatch that isn't an Apple, or a Google, or a Samsung ecosystem device. So, we're gonna mount a computer to your face. Here's a bunch of face stuff.

• 1:12:01Speaker 07

  I mean, the number one problem with the face stuff is that we are so vain as a species. Like, kids cry when they find out they have to wear glasses because, oh my god, they have to wear glasses. If you're David, who teemly tells me has 2020 vision, thanks, David.

• 1:12:15David Pierce?

  People say I have the best vision.

• 1:12:16Speaker 07

  Okay. People say that David has the best.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  Many people have been saying.

• 1:12:20Speaker 07

  Like, why would you wear glasses, right? Unless there's a function for it, you're just...

• 1:12:23David Pierce?

  I would like people to know that I don't need glasses.

• 1:12:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26David Pierce?

  Like, I want the opposite of glasses.

• 1:12:28Speaker 07

  Right. But if you're like me, and you're basically a blind bat, and if you look at my phone, the text is so large, um, you know, you're used to wearing glasses, and so then it becomes more functional, because it's something you're already wearing. But that's, that's a huge problem. Prescriptions are a huge problem. If you're blind like me, negative nine, negative eight, huge astigmatism, some of these glasses can't support my actual thing. So then it's like, eh, you know, and everyone's face is different, everyone's aesthetic is different, mass-producing these things, there's so many different challenges towards smart glasses. So, it's not like we're all gonna be wearing these tomorrow, but I do think they've decided, for whatever reason, yes, this is possible, throw everything at the wall, see what sticks,

• 1:13:10Speaker 07

  see what, what is the way forward, and they all believe that it will converge at this point where we have computers on our faces.

• 1:13:17David Pierce?

  I mean, that's the CES story, right there.

• 1:13:18Speaker 07

  That's the CES story.

• 1:13:19David Pierce?

  Like, just pick a thing that maybe will happen in a decade, and let's try some weird stuff about it.

• 1:13:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:13:23David Pierce?

  I love that.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  That's, that's...

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  I will remind you, of course, of my chart of wearable bullshit. Do you know about the chart? Two axes. One is utility, and one is fiddliness. And you need to have vastly more utility than fiddliness, or you're a failure. And face is like a minus 500.

• 1:13:39Speaker 07

  I, I propose...

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  If you put something on your face, it has to be so useful.

• 1:13:42Speaker 07

  It does, but I also propose that we actually visualize this graph, and every single time I do a wearable review, we have the graph in here.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  We can do this. AI can do this for us.

• 1:13:50Speaker 07

  AI can do this for us, and so...

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  It will be lies, it will not be accurate.

• 1:13:53Speaker 07

  When I take briefings, I can go, okay, here's, here's the Verge-approved graph, please point to where on this graph your product is. That would make my life so much easier. I'm just saying.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm correct about this. I think Joanna stole this in the journal recently, so now we have to take it back. Let's put it out there. Okay, last thing I want to talk to you about.

• 1:14:09Speaker 08

  We have to quit. We've gone way over. We need to let these poor people go.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:14:13Speaker 08

  Yeah, and we can. We'll hang out after, but we gotta let's end the podcast and go hang out with these nice people.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  I just wanted to talk about Marumi for one second.

• 1:14:20Speaker 08

  No, you can't. It's not allowed.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  There's a weird robot that just hugs you. It's like a hugging robot. Go find the hugging robot.

• 1:14:26Speaker 08

  Go find the huggy robot.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:14:28Speaker 08

  There's the title of the episode.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  Thank you all for joining us. We have gone way over. It's wonderful to be here with you. Thank you to Delta for bringing us Brooklyn Bowl, which is amazing. Just like looking at my giant face next to our logos on pulling alley screens this whole time has been delightful for me. My ego is very healthy. I appreciate all of you, Frame TV owners. We can get a drink in the corner and really work through it. That's it. That's where Chas Rock and Roll.

• 1:14:52Speaker 08

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:15:13Speaker 09

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at homedepot.com.