Magic Leap, iPhones slow down, and Microsoft removes Chrome installer from Windows Store

Hello! And happy holidays. This is the last Vergecast of 2017! But we go out with a bang (At least two computers broke down during this recording). The two big things that happened this week was the unveiling of the mysterious Magic Leap augmented reality goggles and Apple confirming they slow down older iPhones. So Nilay, Dieter, and Paul welcome senior reporter Adi Robertson back to the show, who has been reporting on Magic Leap for the past few years. There’s a whole lot more in between that, like Paul’s weekly segment “Robots teach me how to breathe?” so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 01:41 - Magic Leap finally unveils augmented reality goggles 31:39 - Apple confirms iPhones with older batteries will take hits in performance 50:13 - Paul’s weekly segment “Robots teach me how to breathe?” 52:45 - Google brings Chrome to the Windows Store as just a download link 57:29 - Caavo, the universal remote control that uses machine vision, will ship on February 14th 1:02:50 - Amazon Echo Spot review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Eight Mattresses. Eight is smart. Wait, how many of them? Eight. Okay. Eight, eight-hole mattresses. No, the company's called Eight Mattresses. Oh. Eight is smart. It's the iPhone compared to the flip phone of mattresses. Unlike foam counterparts, the Eight Smart mattress is an innovative bed that uses real technology to help people sleep better and live healthier. Sleeping on Eight, you can discover how many hours of sleep you need each night to feel energized. You can optimize your day and night by connecting it to other Wi-Fi-enabled products in your home. If you need coffee in the morning to function, you can program your Smart mattress to start brewing your coffee the minute you get out of bed and just live in that reality and with yourself at that time. The Eight Smart mattress has everything you need to meet your individual needs. Visit eightsleep.com/verge and then use code VERGE to get $125 off all mattresses, plus

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  free shipping and free returns. That's eight, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/verge and use that offer code VERGE to redeem this offer.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge situation and our larger Vox Media situation. The Vox Media Podcast Network, of which you are to be made aware of so that you might listen to all of the podcasts in the Vox Media. And if you're an ad buyer, email somebody. It's like a web ring. You remember web rings? Yeah, it's like that. Click to the next one. Yeah. Welcome to GeoCities.com. Anyway, I'm Eli Patel. I'm here. Paul Miller's here. Hey, Paul. Hello. Dieter Bones on the phone. Hey, it rhymes. Hello. Hi. And Addie Robertson is joining us today. Hey, Addie. Hey. How are things?

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so, Addie, we should just start. Yeah. Which, with something that is supposed to be like the biggest news in the history of technology, but is actually just a website. Just a motorized scooter. It's just a scooter. That's all it is. Magic Leap published their website.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  This week with some photos of their their VR goggles. Addy, you want to walk us through that whole situation?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Magic Leap, if you've been around reading the internet for the past few years, it's gotten like $2 billion from Google and a bunch of investment banks and a bunch of other tech investors. Like, it's gotten a ridiculous amount of money. And yesterday, it finally showed something for literally the first time ever. And it's a pair of glasses that look kind of like Riddick's goggles. And they're supposedly shipping in 2018. And we don't know exactly what specs are. We don't really know how much it's going to cost, but we know it exists.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, do we?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Okay, well, so they invited Rolling Stone and Rolling Stone was like, hey, we tried this thing. Actually, it's good.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  Not just Rolling Stone, a person we know, Brian Crescinte, who used to work at Polygon.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Who is, it's like the most, if you wore fedora with the little press tag, you want to be surprised because he's so old school journalist.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but he went there and he tried the thing on and he said it was good. It was a long article. At the same time, they also went to Pitchfork. Addy, you wrote about this and had, was it Segura Ross, like, talk about how they were gonna, like, pull fish out of the sky. It was very esoteric.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. They did like a music visualization tool. That does sound neat. It just is something that I feel like I've seen a bunch of in VR. And I'm like, oh, yeah, it's one of those.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  There's the headset, which looks insane. And it's got all kinds of cameras on the front. It's called, it's, it's, once again, it's for creators.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  It's Creator Edition.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  It's a real Microsoft move.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  The product is called the Magic Leap One.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Creator Edition.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  There were not enough things called the one yet.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's not enough things called the one, and there's not enough things called Creator Edition.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Creator Edition is like the world's biggest cop out, I've decided. We, we made a bunch of stuff. We don't know what they're actually for, but we think they're kind of cool. So we're just going to say it's for creators and hope.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  I think it's the new developer kit.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  I like it better than Innovator Edition.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  That's true. I think this is gonna cost like $1,000 or maybe even $2,000.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  I think it's gonna be $5,000.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Well, the whole lens costs like $3,000.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this thing, this is gonna be

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Wouldn't surprise me too much.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  $4,000.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I feel like in, from reading the Rolling Stone piece, they're trying to let people know this is gonna be a real premium rare type of

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Like a bespoke computer that you buy.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So anyway, so there's the headset.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  And then that connects to like a, Adida, I think you called it a Discman.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  I did.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that you wear on your belt called the light pack. Uh, that thing is very mysterious. So all the photos are of people wearing a headset, all the descriptions of using it are of light field images that are indistinguishable from reality. And then there's like one line in, in the Rolling Stone piece where the CEO of the company is like, it's as powerful as an Alienware gaming PC. And I, I just, there's not a world in which I want to put that much power at, on my waist.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  I'm fine with it. Addy, maybe you, you can help describe this, but as far as I understand, there's two main things that the, the computing power of this has to do. It has to render whatever 3D graphics it's going to inject into this very mysterious light technology that they have that has sea monkeys in it, apparently. Oh my god. But it also has to do inside out tracking. Like, you know, to a slightly more advanced degree than like AR kit does. Is that correct, Addy?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  So I have to hedge all of this a bunch because it's all secondhand. But there is a computer in the headset itself that it sounds like does basically the inside out tracking. And then the computer on your waist has to analyze, I guess, any of the information it's taking in, connect to like the cloud database that will tell you how to annotate this plant you're looking at. Um, and it will render all the stuff. So it seems like the headset senses the world and then the computer produces everything else.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  And did, did you understand this description of how this, because it's, it's almost, it's almost philosophical how they're talking about how they're making things render. In your eyes.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  It's a trick.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  I am aware of their bullshit.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  The only real world is in our minds. We construct it.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  The problem is that everything their CEO says could either be some kind of science fiction tech that we'll never understand, or he could just literally be describing a computer.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  It's like he took a.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Pitchfork did its piece, he was like, well, you'll be able to talk and opera music will come out. Yes, you can, you can do that with a lot of things already.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that we're in this moment, and this happens a lot. This happened on a smaller scale with like the iPhone X. We're in a moment when the company gets to drive its entire narrative. And then there's the moment when like now everyone has one and I can just confidently tell you Face ID kind of sucks every morning because it doesn't look at my face right. Right? Like, the reality of the thing is that it's just a bunch of like, plastic and chips. And you'll get it and it's going to work or not work. But they're in the moment where they can be like, light field technology hacks the GPU of the brain.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  I, I am under the impression. So something that always bothered me in the Silicon Valley TV show, is that something that's actually very rare in Silicon Valley is like a true technology breakthrough. I think the reason that Magic Leap, despite every appearance of a scam, has raised this many billions of dollars, and is going to be just fine if they release something that's not at all for the market for years, is that they have something that's truly very different.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so, so this is the question, because Addie, you've been like, covering them for a long time. And so the way that they start, the reason people are like, this is kind of scammy, is the core tech breakthrough, if they have one, and it seems like they have one, because lots of people have seen it, including people like, I know, we just can't write about because everyone has to sign an NDA, except for apparently Brian Chrysante and Sigur Ross. They've got this light field, display technology, where you put the, the plastic chips in front of your eyes, and then instead of projecting the image that reflects off the plastic into your eyes, which is the way everything else

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  works, it sends light field information into your retina and presents true depth.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is fundamentally what we understand their technology to be. Everything else they say is insane, right? It's what you make, what you put on that display actually has nothing to do with the breakthrough of the display.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And I think they're very bad at figuring out what to do with it.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  And all of their patent applications, and Addie, you've covered these, this is a question, all their patent applications have nothing to do as near as we can tell with like the display. It's more like if you add the word AR to any idea, like dinosaur, AR, we have a patent. Addie, is that kind of your understanding?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  So I've read a bunch of these and a bunch of them are actually about just how to create a waveguide, how to develop like depth. And then there are all the ones you're talking about, which are basically ridiculous. Like I have an alert and I just got one this morning and its title is augmented reality display system for evaluation and modification of neurological conditions, including visual processing and perception conditions. I've been reading it and I think the idea is that if you have some kind of neurological like blind spot or something, it'll have sensors that look into your eyes and detect that and then compensate for it.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, that sounds cool.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  So yeah, a bunch of really weird patents.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  It has a bunch of things that sound neat.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  Like what do you think sounds the neatest?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  I think stuff like this sounds interesting. Um, I think the idea that it has all of this biometric data and then it's going to try to use that to basically make glasses that genuinely just sort of help you behind the scenes is really cool. The problem is that everything they talk about is so weird and lofty that they never are actually engaging in the conversations that they raise with like their patent applications.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it's, so I agree with you completely. I just, at this point, first of all, the thing obviously is for developers and it looks very technical, right? Like it's not a consumer product. It's, it looks crazy actually and it's like got lots of cameras and sensors across the front, you know, like.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  So if that's your audience and or and it's people like us in the tech press and our audience that cares about this stuff, the first set of questions is actually really obvious. What operating system does it run? Right? Like, that's, I would, I would love to know the answer to that question. Did they write their own?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  It's been driving me crazy, yeah.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, did they write their own? Is it, is it just Android? Is it, is it Windows Mobile? Like, it could be anything. Is it just Windows? Because they, you know, they keep showing like web browsers.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, what, what makes that work? Like, when they put out their SDK, like, do you have to learn a new programming language?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Well, I think one nice thing is that so much of game development now is done in Unity and Unreal that they'll have to create a platform that is easy to target from Unity Unreal. But Unity Unreal target, target the Switch, which runs FreeBSD. So probably anything that is Linux-like.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they're not just talking about games here.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Is, is, is basically good.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Well, Unity Unreal is being used for a bunch of stuff beyond games now. This is, this is what I learned at the iMac Pro briefing is, like, a bunch of medical software, a bunch of other VR applications, all the 3D modeling stuff, the architecture, like, thing. A bunch of stuff in VR and AR is getting driven by these games engines. And so they, Paul's right, they have to do something that supports these games engines because otherwise, that's like, that's like the actual foundation of a bunch of stuff that involves 3D rendering.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  But let me read this paragraph to you, and you try to map this paragraph to the reality of having to make something.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  Here's this paragraph. Next, it's titled "Next Generation Interfaces," on the Magically website. Magically.com, in case you're curious. "We live and think in a 3D world, not a flat screen. Our spatial interface includes multiple input modes, including voice, gesture, head pose, and eye tracking. This collective input system provides the tools needed to break free from outdated conventions of point-and-click interfaces, delivering a more natural and intuitive way to interact with technology." There's also a little controller. It looks, I don't know.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  It looks like a Gear VR controller.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a Gear VR controller. More or less. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Yeah, it's like, what does that mean?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Whatever you want.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  It means HoloLens. HoloLens has all those things. It means you can talk to a thing, you can look at a thing, you can move your head and it looks like you're moving it around it. He is just, that's the problem. Everything they describe, you can also apply to a bunch of other things. And their selling point is it's better, but they never actually show us any of that, so we can't tell.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what's so frustrating is, is what's, what's magic about Magic Leap is this vision technology. And all the things that they seem to want to do are, are somewhat unsolved problems in, in UI design. Like, we, we haven't ever had a computer that we'd want to wear on our face that would beam light into our eyes all day, but we'd still be able to look through, through the lens to the real world and, and live like that. So, nobody has, has had to or managed to solve what UI is like and what sort of valid experiences are. But I, I think, you know, HoloLens demonstrated, one of my favorite things i- in this realm is,

• 14:12Speaker 02

  one of the early demos of HoloLens is there was like a, a kitchen and it had different app icons that were kind of distributed around the kitchen. And I really like this idea of going over to the wall next to the fridge where the Skype icon was. Cause that's, growing up, my phone was always next to the fridge. So, I like this idea of being able to move around in the world to go to launch a quote unquote app. I think that's really interesting and there's gonna be tons of interesting experiments like that.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, that's actually, Matt, sorry, go ahead, finish, Paul.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  I just feel like Magic Leap is trying to sell itself as the company that will deliver us all the implications of the technology it's developed.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  And we just want to see the technology.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  One of the, their big points from the, the Rolling Stone thing is that they, they, their virtual objects persist in time and space. So, if you set up a bunch of screens and then go to bed and then wake up the next morning, the screens are supposed to still be there. Again, like Addie's been saying, that's, that's nothing that nobody else hasn't thought of or is trying to do. But they're trying to say that they're... Their implementation of all of these things is somehow better. And they're also, they're better at the lofty talk. And so a bunch of stuff that everybody else has been sort of talking about and showing little hacky demos of and blah, blah, blah, blah. Magic Leap, instead of actually showing the things, has been giving behind closed doors NDA previews and using super flowery language.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  And I don't know, like, reading up on their Kant and the way, the way that, and like, that's how they talk.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just, I mean, it's very exciting. I love a new company. I love crazy people. I love it all. That's why, that's why we're in the business, right? But this, to me, it's just, you know who else is working on AR? Apple and Google and Microsoft.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Facebook.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  Facebook. Well, let's leave Facebook aside, right? Because Facebook doesn't have like app developers. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have this like army of app developers who have a business relationship with the company, who understand how to make money. Apple has stores. All the stuff you need to get the light field chip in front of your eye. They haven't shown that. Like, where are they going to sell it? Are they just going to ship boxes out of their factory? Like.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a Q and A they, they put out today on like 10 things, 10 more things you didn't know. And one of them is, we're not going to, this requires a special retail experience. And that is what the term magic leap, your first use is going to involve a magic leap. And so I just bet Addy a hundred bucks that it's going to be like the, like jump over a cliff demo. You'll put them on in the store.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  You did?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  I did. You didn't accept it, but I tried to get you to take it. You'll put them on the store and then you're like, you'll see a cliff and then you're supposed to step over the cliff. I bet you that's what they do.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  I wouldn't take that bet. I think you're right.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  I think the only, only valuable thing from, don't even go to the website. Just read the Rolling Stone article. It has not nearly as many details as I wish it had. But it is a, another actual user experience from a relatively objective source. Someone describing what it felt like, what it looked like. He, he mentioned that it had a much better field of view than Hololens, which everybody who's tried Hololens knows how limiting that feels. But, but also said it wasn't a perfect field view. He said he. Still unclear about how depth works, whether it's actually working with being able to focus on

• 17:45Speaker 02

  using your eyes' actual ability to focus, um, near and far. I don't know. Did you, did you figure that weird statement out, Addy, that they had? He like, Brian asked them, he like realized he didn't know for sure what it was doing as far as depth. So he asked them and they gave him this weird vague statement that made it kinda sound like it was real depth. Like, but I, I don't know. Cause I think that's a very important thing. I mean, their magic leap is criticizing the age-old stereoscopic version of, of 3D, which is it's two, two flat planes that fool you into seeing 3D, but you realize as soon as you try to refocus your eyes on something, it kinda breaks that

• 18:30Speaker 02

  and can also be disorienting. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why this looks and feels so good, is that it, it, it feels a lot more like looking at real 3D objects in space.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what they've promised. And if that works, that's gonna be really cool.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think the problem is we invented a great display technology and we invented a great product and we invented a real company are all very different projects. Right? And all they, they keep trying to distract from the reality of the technology that they've invented.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Which is a very expensive, hard to manufacture, but sounds like a complete breakthrough in vision.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. But

• 19:14Speaker 01

  To play devil's advocate, they do keep hiring people who are genuinely talented. Like they just pulled John Gata away from ILMX Lab.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Theoretically possible, they are building like a super group and that they're just getting a bunch of money from Google. They quietly steal everybody from all these other companies and they build this great powerhouse trifecta of hardware, entertainment, software.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  That is gonna be really hard, if that's what they're doing.

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  And they're still pretty far away from, you know, the mass market product that makes that valuable.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And there's also a huge like barrier there, which is the creepiness factor.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  What's creepy?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Um, the creepiness factor being stuff like Google Glass, the idea that when you cover your eyes in public, people find it really unsettling. People don't know what like if you're doing something that they've seen in a million augmented reality movies where AI glasses are generally incredibly scary. Like they created something that looks really awkward to wear and can do really cool entertainment things. I don't think they've passed that barrier after which you're comfortable wearing something in public.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  And that's on top of the other thing where they they map your entire room in 3D space, whatever room you're in, so that it can have those persistent objects. And then I, my understanding is like that map gets stored in the cloud and that's like one of the roots of the privacy issue that Addie's been asking about.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yes, they will also analyze everything all the time.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. They need a map of your house because they need to know where you are in the house to like. Well, now I'm just terrified.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  The patents also talk a lot about object recognition. So it's not just like, oh, you have a shelf there. It's that, oh, your house has like five paintings from these artists and it has these cups from this company.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is this all just like an elaborate Ocean's Eleven plot to steal five paintings?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  I, I, I just remembered like the craziest demo in, in Brian's account was the, there was like an avatar, like a 3D avatar floating in space. And then the guy who's giving the, the demo sort of walked into it and merged. And he became enveloped in the 3D avatar.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  And then he stole five paintings.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  No, you could, you, you could erase somebody in vision.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, that's the, the reason that I'm like willing to believe that this is some kind of breakthrough display technology is that when someone walked into the hologram, the thing, Chrysanthemum said that his eye saw the hologram as more real than the person who just disappeared into it.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  To be fair, I feel like HoloLens can do that to some extent. Like you can put something on top of an object and like with HoloLens and you'll see the hologram.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  But can it track like a, a body and, and put an avatar on top of that body? Because that's, I mean, I hate to go back to the well I've gone to so many times.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Rainbow Zen. Vernovige. Read the book. You need to know what's happening to you.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Wake up, sheeple.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Addy, here's my question for you. What are the things you need to know the most? And what are the things where you're like? This is the most exciting. What are the things that make you the most excited? And what are the things that make you the most skeptical?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  The thing that makes me most excited is genuinely just this display technology. The idea of something that doesn't feel limited, that looks realistic, that has depth, that is

• 22:43Speaker 01

  complex. Like, that's incredibly exciting to me. I would need to know firsthand whether this actually is comfortable and whether the field of view is actually good. I think a lot of AR companies that I've seen really neglect industrial design and make something that like fits one head shape and is miserable for everyone else. And you can't even see the hologram. Um, there's that. I would, I guess technically need to know the specs, although really I just need to know whether it's powerful enough that the things that you'd want to do there don't stutter. Um, and I was, I don't know, I don't care that much about price because it's so far in the future. Um, I also want to hear about hand tracking, because that controller kind of looks like it sucks.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it really does.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  You've mentioned hand tracking a bunch, and I want to know how complex that is.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  Here, my biggest question, the more I think about it and the more I look at this photo, is the light pack. What's in there? The Discman? What, what's in there? Is it battery powered? It actually has two parts, and most of the photos hide the other part. There's a big rectangle and then a circle. And the big rectangle is supposed to like go into your pocket and the circle sticks out in front. Is the battery in the rectangular part? Is all the processing in the circle? What happens when the battery dies? What happens when the battery gets a little bit old?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Like.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I want to know whether I can clip that on, I don't know, my boot or my neck or something if I'm wearing a dress. Which is one of the things that actually worries me about Magic Leap is that they had a literal lawsuit that's like this company cannot design for women at all.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Wait, what? They have a design-based lawsuit?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  No, there was that sexual harassment suit and one of the things that it alleged in terms of creating the hostile work environment was that they hired these people and they had female employees. And they would hold focus groups and they would come up with ideas and then Magic Leap would completely ignore them. That they had this belt pack that was really difficult to put on if you weren't wearing like traditional jeans. Um, that their only idea for making something fit women like was making it pink. That they didn't listen to criticism about how it was hard to wear if you had a ponytail or hairstyles. Like just all of these little design things that I really hope that they're actually making work. Because I literally can't wear a bunch of AR headsets because they're made for men and they just fall off my face.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I saw something about this pack that something to do with a guitar strap. I think this is in the crescent piece.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  But I don't, what does that mean?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  That works.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like I said, the pack is really the.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  So like, there's all the, I just keep coming back to this fundamental idea. There's the dream that they have and that they're trying to sell. And then there's like the messy physical reality of our bodies and like our bodies in space. And those things are really, you're like, they're very difficult to bring together in a way that makes any sense. And Paul, when you're like, that world in which you walk up to the fridge and like hit the Skype icon.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  Like a really good solution to that is to actually remove your brain from your body, put it into a vat and then construct a virtual reality, uh, in which your brain believes it lives. Like.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  It's the philosophical endpoint of this whole thing.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  I am under the impression that that was Magic Leap, Magic Leap's first idea was to tap straight into your visual cortex. And they couldn't quite figure that out. So they're settling for beamings or not, I don't know how a light field works. Sea monkeys.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Somehow interacting with light and you see things and they look real to you.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  But, but obviously the, the, the next step is to tap directly into the visual cortex. And then, once we have a high bandwidth, commu- bi-directional communication with our brain and a computer, the, the brain in a vat is just, is the next step.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  Can't wait.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  So we're sprained.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Totally, totally on the way. Touch is a thing that's really important and we can't do it.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so touching what?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  The brain in the vat, you can't, you can't touch things, you can't feel things and it's like tasting things kind of sucks. Like artificial sense and taste, they're miserable.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just saying.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And haptics are still really primitive. Just like, touch is important.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  But if you, if you could tap directly into the visual cortex, couldn't you tap directly into the nerve endings that would, and therefore stimulate touch as well?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  That's like an insanely complex neurological discussion about embodiment and whether we actually have like, a center in our brain that handles that or whether our physical parts are inextricable from the way that we feel? And whether like all of the nerves in our body actually produce something that you couldn't handle and replicate just by tapping into something? People have written a lot about this and it's very complicated.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Oh man, I'm very much under the impression it's in the brain. Because you, you get the, you know, phantom limbs? What's it called?

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's the whole thing. All, and what I'd like to-

• 27:45Speaker 01

  It's probably partly in the brain.

• 27:46Nilay Patel?

  What I'd like to circle back to is that the way Magic Leap talks about itself, leads us down the hole of wondering whether our nervous system is important or whether we can take our brains out of our skulls and put them in vats.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Where did you want to go? Where did you want to go? Oh, what's the skew? Oh, well, this is a cost.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I understand it's the verge. I understand what we're here to do. I'm just saying, there is like other fundamental questions. And like Magic Leap is like, here's a circle. And we're like, what if we took our brains out of our skulls?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Okay, I want to see the UI. That's actually the thing I didn't mention that's basically central to me. I want to see how you interact with it.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think all of that stuff, if you're listening to the show, you know how it goes, right? Like, is it laggy? Does it get laggier over time? How much bandwidth does it need to pull all the stuff off? Like, there are these fundamental questions that are just reflections of actual reality that they have not begun to address.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Well, one interesting thing about augmented reality is that you don't have, unlike VR, where you have to render an entire world, you can get away, you can create very valuable applications that render something very minimal. Like, I have a dream that high school students had to have so many tools to cheat at math. And so you just wear your AR goggles, and the math solves itself right in front of you, and you just write, you know, you just take notes. But that's like, very minimal rendering, you know? There's some, a little bit of machine vision to like, for recognizing handwriting and stuff like that. But like, I mean, that's relatively minimal. But that's enabled by having something that's just overlaid

• 29:25Speaker 02

  across your regular senses, instead of having to render all of, you know, Wolfenstein.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, we have to stop talking about that.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna read this ad, and then we should, I tried to segue into the Apple battery theme, but we'll come back and talk about that. So Addy, we're gonna let you go. Thank you so much for joining us and talking about whatever it is we just talked about with Magic Leap. Thanks for joining us.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Always happy.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

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• 30:17Speaker 02

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• 30:20Nilay Patel?

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• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  For your dad.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Oud suede?

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  No. Better for Citron.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Really was not tracking where that was going.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  So, all I'm saying is, the Art of Shaving, thank you for continuing to sponsor The Vergecast. Thank you for naming one of your products oud suede. If you're listening to this, you need some gifts to give. I think it should be oud suede. I think everyone else agrees. So get a head start on the holidays now. Listeners, you get 15% off your first order and free shipping when you use promo code VERGE. To get the offer, visit artofshaving.com, use that promo code VERGE. You get 15% off your first order of oud suede. And oud suede comes to you with free shipping. Or there's retail locations, you can get a consultation from Art of Shaving's own master barbers. They can tell you if oud suede is right for you. That has been the Art of Shaving advertisement for this episode of The Vergecast.

• 31:39Nilay Patel?

  Paul, let's talk about this battery. This arguably was the biggest news of the week. Certainly the most controversial.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Can I say my first thought when I heard this? I was like, oh, that's smart.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  It is clever, okay.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  How clever of them.

• 31:54Nilay Patel?

  Let's walk through.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we actually gotta tell people we're talking about.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  They all know, but we'll walk through it anyway. Four years.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  We know, starting with the six, six S, that kind of stuff.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but legitimately four years.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  I guess that does make for years.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  A conspiracy theory has loomed in the world that Apple artificially slows down your iPhone so that you will buy a new iPhone.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  Ever, like people, you can't make them not believe this.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  And like rubes, we thought it happened when they pushed a new software update.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Right, we were like, yes, the new version of the OS comes out, it's a little bit heavier, your phone, stuff is bad. The people at Geekbench, another developer, they did a bunch of tests and they found that iPhone 6S and 7, the peaks of performance that they were measuring when people ran Geekbench were split. There's the highest performance and then there's other little peaks of performance down the line. And they were like, Apple's actually slowing down these phones. So conspiracy theory, full overdrive.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  Apple came out, they issued statements to us, to TechCrunch.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Yes, we are doing this, which was right. And then there's like this enormously important caveat, which is the iPhone 6S in particular had an issue where the current draw off an older battery would be such that the phone would just immediately shut down. So we had to smooth out the instantaneous peaks of performance and they did it by varying the performance of the phone, of the processor. So the battery is old, it cannot deliver the full current needed to power the processor, its full capability. Apple did this by ramping the processor down and like rethinking how it works. So the battery would be smoothed out, your phone doesn't shut down. Like Paul said, that is

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  very smart. That is clever as hell. Let's, Apple gets full credit for like thinking it through and making the phone last longer on a degraded battery. What they did not do.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Let's tell it to anybody.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  And like, so if you live in a world where there are this conspiracy theory that your phone is slowing down, you know, after a year or two, so that Apple will force you to buy a new phone, and then people are out there doing these measurements and like, hey, these phones are slowing down after a year or two, and you've provided no information. All you've done is reinforce the conspiracy theory. And there's this other thing that you're doing, which is trying to maximize the life of a battery or maximize, their intentions, I think, are good. But the, if they hadn't gotten caught, they would have never told anybody. Dieter, what do you think about that?

• 34:42Speaker 03

  I think that's exactly right. I mean, my very first hot take was like, this is good. Apple should, like, it's smart for an operating system to see that older batteries have different performance and for the operating system to be aware of that performance and to like change to adjust for it. But yeah, just stupid to not say something to the users in some way, either like via a press release, or just like another pop-up on iOS 11, because it's not like iOS 11 has a shortage of those, right?

• 35:10Nilay Patel?

  No, so I think Matthew Panzerino at TechCrunch, who's been doing a lot of good reporting on this, he like tweeted like a mock-up that he made, some like long dialogue blocks. I think that is not the right move, because people see weird boxes pop up on their phone, they hit OK, they learn nothing. Right?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  That's, you'd have to pop up that box like literally every morning like, hey, your battery got a little crappier today. Just letting you know, like, you, you have to hammer that message in. I think they need, I mean, Android does a reasonably good job of this, like, um, they need to tell, the settings screen needs to tell you the health of the battery. The maximum performance of your phone on battery power as related to the health of the ba, like, they, what apps are using lots of your batter, like, charge cycles, all this stuff, all the technical stuff that Apple wants to hide from you is actually the stuff that lets people expl, understand what's going on.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Well, Ashley did that, that, uh, piece for Circuit Breaker on, you know, should you, uh, let your phone charge all the way up? Should you let your phone charge all the way down? And it's something that we don't really know a lot about. She went to the experts and got some slightly conflicting, but, you know, consistent, if you parse it, opinions, but what she couldn't get was a really strong official statement from Apple of how you're actually supposed to treat your battery.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think, cause they have multiple suppliers, they have multiple, like, there are multiple models of phones.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Sure. I think Jake made the best point is that, so I have an iPhone seven. The battery is, I would say, half of what it was when I bought the phone. And, um, and it's been about a year and that's too soon.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's too soon. That was Jake's point.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  And so, especially, and he also mentions, you know, there are a lot of barriers, you know, you can't live without your phone, basically. And so, to get your phone replaced, you go to Apple Store, if you're that lucky. Um, or you lose your phone for days, or you go to the shady guy down the street that does it.

• 37:15Nilay Patel?

  I went to a shady guy downstairs in our building. That was a huge mistake.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  They're like mess.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  Giant mistake.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Like.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  Not only did it ruin your phone, but also, uh, someone's been recording your every move ever since. Because he put a spy chip in your phone at the same time he put it out of him.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Damn it. Well, good news for me. That battery was a piece of shit. Oh, you got a bad battery? Very well. But like, so this is Go ahead. This is my thing is this gets into like the iFixit realm, right? Like, should these phones be a little bit more repairable? Should replacing, if the battery degrades that much after a year and a half, two years, should it be part of Apple Care? Should normal use be covered under Apple Care? It costs 80 bucks to get your battery replaced. Should we just be changing our norms and telling people, don't go get a new iPhone, go in and get your battery replaced much more often. There should be a more general awareness Right.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  of your battery's performance over time. And there should be a better system for replacing the battery in current gadgets. And the reason I say this gets into iFixit territory is we've moved very far away from that world. And there it's very hard, especially for end users, to do something about battery problems anymore. Because all that shit is just sealed up super tight. The Surface Laptop is a very good example of this. You it's impossible for the end user to do anything with that thing. And it's suddenly like, everyone's like, just make the phone thicker, just make the battery bigger, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know what? Screw it. Give me removable batteries again. Yeah. I I forgot how much I enjoyed and how superior I used to feel

• 38:55Speaker 03

  at CES when everyone else was running around with iPhones and they had crazy battery packs and USB cables hanging in another pocket and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just using me a Galaxy S5 or whatever it was, or back in the day, like a Moto Q9. And I would just have another battery or two, very slim, no problem in my back, literally my back pocket and metaphorically in my back pocket. And I would just swap the battery out, reboot the phone, and I would have a fresh battery and I wouldn't have to be carrying around eight honking things. If there was a version of a phone that was a little bit less like elegant in its design, but it had a removable battery, but was still good. I would probably buy that phone.

• 39:37Nilay Patel?

  Or, or design the current.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  The last one we had was the, yeah, the last one we had was an LG G, I think it was a G5 had that modular thing and you could pull the battery out and that was terrible because it was LG phone. But that, I would, I would do that. If I could buy the same iPhone, but it like was like a little bit jankier looking, or the same Pixel or the same Galaxy phone, but it was just a little bit jankier looking, but it, I could just swap the battery and buy a spare battery and recycle the one when it started to run out of juice. I would do that. I would be very happy with that.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  I was, what I.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  I would love to go back.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  What I was saying is, or you design the phone to accept an external battery better. Like, I, like, the iPhone X.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Motorola does that.

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone X has actually two batteries inside of it. Like, it's beyond the realm of like, I'm just gonna swap a battery. Like, the way it's designed, there are two independent battery cells in here. And Apple's like managing that. Like, there are benefits to sealing the batteries in because you can, you can just do different things with them. You can design the phone around however you want the batteries to work. But you could also just make it so that external batteries communicate better with this phone, that it fits into a battery case better.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Are you saying we need a standard?

• 40:52Speaker 03

  A W1 chip, a proprietary standard that Apple can create?

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure. The B1 chip is here.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  The B1.

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, there, there are solutions to this problem. Like, Apple designs its phone to be.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  It's not just like plugging in, uh, uh, it's, it's not indistinguishable from plugging into a wall when you plug into an external battery.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. So it, it knows that, so that the physical design of the thing is designed to like, fit into a case. Like, Apple's own battery case for the 7 was like tremendously ugly because the 7 itself was not designed. If to make this real like.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Do we know if.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  The iPad Pro is designed to work with keyboard accessories. So they're like pretty elegant keyboard accessories, regardless of how the actual keyboard feels. Like it has a connector, it's aware, like it all works together. The surfaces are designed to work with keyboards that has a connector, it all works together.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  You're just describing Moto Mods. How many times can I say Moto Mods before you acknowledge that this thing exists in the world?

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Moto Mods are like a, they're a full on accessory. They're not like narrowly designed to just do batteries. That's all Apple needs to do, right? They don't need a full on modular interface and serial but like. They just need to send some power and data back and forth, right? But it's a weird moment. Like I tweeted yesterday, I can't wait for everyone's AirPods to just die. And then like millions of AirPods to be in a landfill. Like the reality of us wanting to be wireless and the industry pushing us towards wireless and the battery technology that enables that are very different realities. And batteries are just a hard limit on everything we can do and they don't last very long.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  A year and a half.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  And like, what are we gonna do two years from now when all of our Bluetooth headphones kind of don't work anymore? Are we gonna demand repairable AirPods? Like what?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, Dieter.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just like, we have to decide.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  Like is is consume like we're the market force, right? We have to decide if that's okay. It seems like we're all gonna decide it's okay, but there's a clear outcome where the AirPod recycling program needs to exist. Or whatever, or we're just gonna throw more shit away.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna end up sending more money, right? Like I have headphones that I've had for 15 years. They're fine. They sound really good.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  But like my AirPods are gonna last two.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  If you're lucky.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  That's what it's all about.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Dieter, do you have any other thoughts on this?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  No, uh, just like a bunch of this stuff is, um, it's gonna take, I think, more, uh, consumer demand for any of this stuff to change. Otherwise, we just, we just sound like, I don't know, Stallman-esque. Like when, when Richard Stallman, you know, freaks out about like, he only uses software that's open source and screw everything else. And everybody thinks he sounds like a crazy person. I worry that when we talk about repairability and like replaceable batteries and all that stuff, we end up sounding like crazy people because at the same time, we're saying, wouldn't it be nice if we're going out and buying another iPhone with like, you know, a battery that lasts two years? We're going out and buying AirPods again with a battery that only lasts two years. And we keep talking about Apple products, but this applies to literally everything else. And Apple is actually theoretically

• 44:14Speaker 03

  in a better place morally on this stuff and works harder to create programs to recycle its stuff than other companies because they make so much of them. They've got, you know, they've got the crazy robot that takes phones apart and like.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  They have one of those parts. It is unclear whether that robot is, does anything else.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  They have committed themselves to the goal of, of basically being zero impact. And like, they will, they want to make future iPhones 100% off of the parts and the, you know, precious metals and rare metals off of old iPhones. That's, that's their goal. They've committed themselves to doing it. Who knows if they'll get there, but they're at least further along in acknowledging this is a thing to address than other companies. But that's the left hand. The right hand is designing iPhones that, uh, exacerbate the problem.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  And I, I do think Apple's farther, like, if you buy a really cheap, mid-range, random, no-name Android phone, your battery degrades and the phone turns into a piece of garbage and then just starts shutting off. Like, the work of let's balance out processor usage against battery power has not been done for you. So, again, Apple gets a lot of credit for doing that work on the technical side. I think they had it. They created a PR disaster for themselves by not being way more upfront about it in the software, by not communicating to actual users, like. Apparently, you know, they're like, other journalists are like, you know, Apple said this. We had some briefings about how they were fixing the power problem.

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  It's like, yeah, that's not, they sell a billion of these devices, right? Like, you have to tell all of those people in every language they speak, not just some journalists. But at the same time, Apple does make the most phones, right? Like, they bear this, and they're the ones pushing towards this wireless future faster than anybody else. So they bear some of this responsibility because these are problems that they have themselves created because of their vision of how the technology should work. They should have just told people. Yeah, they should have just told.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, in a perfect world, what they would have done is they would have, like, held a special environmental day, and maybe even a press conference, or maybe like, you know, a little event, or like, had to be a portion of some event, be like, you know what? We're not going to talk about a product for a half an hour. We're going to talk about batteries and recyclability and the problems there. You know that we've done these things, we're going to do some more of these things. Here's what we're going to do to help make people be able to get new batteries in their phones so their phones last longer, and here's how our recycling programs work. And oh, by the way, you should know that when your battery degrades, it will slow down a little bit in these certain situations. And we're doing that to extend the longevity of your phone. If they had done literally any kind of rollout from just like, hey, by the way,

• 47:01Speaker 03

  something more than just telling a couple of journalists in a random press briefing, anything more than that, all the way up to like, a single bespoke event for this thing, they would have picked up, just, they would have started a conversation, people would have thanked them. People would have been happy that they've done this, they would have explained away the conspiracy theory, and

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, the fan army.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Instead, they've come out looking awful.

• 47:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the fan army goes to bat for them over and over and over again, right? Apple actually prolongs the life of your phone.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  It is very clever. It's a very clever. It is like a very clever solution.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Ingenious.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't wanna, I don't wanna distract from like the core thing that's happening. It's just all this. It's the, the media criticism that you do around it that's interesting. The thing they're doing is actually quite, it's fine. Cause you, your phone lasts longer. But that actually brings me back to this year and a half idea. Like every year, I actually asked them during the iPhone X review. Every year they're like, the phone is faster than ever. Right? Like this phone is faster than any laptop you can buy. It's this thing that they say. But that headroom doesn't get you anything. Right? If two-year-old phones feel slow, like what does it matter that it was the fastest phone ever when it came out? And like this battery issue is clearly tied to it.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  I will say in my personal experience, my iPhone 7 does not feel slow and the battery is definitely degraded. But the things that I attempted, I mean, I don't do like crazy 3D gaming because I don't want 30 minutes of battery life. I need my phone to last all day. But I, it doesn't feel like super sluggish to me.

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting is they didn't have to do this with Macs. Like my Mac, I have a 2013 MacBook Pro and the battery doesn't last very long. But like it doesn't, you know, like I, it does at the very end of its life get slower. But like in extremely obvious ways and it's obvious that it's, there's a battery indicator that like that relationship is very clear. But they didn't have a problem where it's like, it just starts shutting off halfway through because it can't handle the current draw of the processor. Like this is an interrelated set of problems that I think they need to communicate about better.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay. We're gonna read one more ad. We're gonna come back. We gotta talk about Google and Amazon and Microsoft all trolling each other this week. Cause that was pretty good. We gotta talk about some smart speakers. Might ramble about Kavo.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  We don't gotta.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  I know. I'll read this ad, we'll come right back.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

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• 50:10Nilay Patel?

  code VERGE to redeem your special offer.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  Paul, every week,

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  You do a segment. It's got the same name.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  And never forget it.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  It's called, "Robots Teach Me How to Breathe."

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Uh, so there's this, it's called Sominox. It's a $500 sleep robot breathing pillow. It's called the world's first sleep robot. Here, let me just read you some from Alessandra's wonderful post about this. "The robot has soft actuators that inflate and deflate, essentially mimicking breathing."

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 50:59Speaker 02

  It teaches you how to breathe somehow. I don't understand it at all.

• 51:03Nilay Patel?

  No, it's comforting. Like, I don't know. Do you ever spoon? Like, to feel something breathing that you're spooning is like a comforting thing. And like, your breath, it relaxes you. If you're up at night, you can't sleep, you can't, your mind is going a mile a minute, and then you've just got this thing that you can kind of cuddle and you can focus on, it's like in and out breathing and without, you don't even have to focus on it. Your breathing will naturally match the in-out pattern of this thing. And then you calm down and you go to sleep.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  How?

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  It's nice.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Hugging this-

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  If you don't, instead of spooning a, you know, a human, you can spoon a robot.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  "Hugging the sleep robot while trying to fell asleep, my hand on its belly so I could feel it inflate and deflate, definitely focused my attention on breathing, the robots, if not my own." So Dieter, I see what you're saying. Here's my fear. I've always wanted a robot as a friend. Like since I was a child, like something that was very important to me is that I'd have a robot be a friend. Right?

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Do you not want a robot as an intimate lover? And I feel like this is all a slippery slope.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Cause you spoon your intimate lover, you do not spoon a friend.

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  I feel like some people spoon a friend.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Okay. A large, a large.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  We're not, we're not talking about cuddle parties. We are not talking about cuddle parties on the Vergecast.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Very, very many people. Very many people never spoon a friend. I'll say that.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Okay, fair.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. This segment is over.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  That's, and that is the end of that line of thinking.

• 52:44Nilay Patel?

  For today. Uh, Dieter, do you want to talk about what's going on with Chrome in the Windows Store? Because it, I just, I just LOL'd a bunch.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  That's very good. Yeah. That's basically where I was at. So the backstory is Windows 10S doesn't run full, um, like, you know, classic x86 Windows apps. It runs, it does, but they've got to be designed for the Windows Store. And the other thing is like, um, iOS, hell, like Chrome OS, uh, you can't, well, Chrome OS, you can run Android apps. Anyway, you can't run other browsing engines on Windows 10S. And so, uh, you, and the only way to get apps on Windows 10S is to go into the Windows App Store. And Microsoft's trying to make a big push to get everybody to get all their apps through the Windows App Store. One, because it'll help Windows 10S and two, you know, then they'll have an app store. Uh, and that's important for everybody because that seeds, that takes control away from the web, uh, which everybody wants to do.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  And so, Google recognizing that this was a push and, uh, just decided to troll the hell out of Microsoft and put Chrome in the Windows App Store. But all it is, is a link to go download it, uh, via the normal method of, you know, typing Chrome into the Google and then finding the Chrome website and downloading it. And so Microsoft, this happened and everyone's like, okay. And you know, maybe it makes it more discoverable. People look for apps in app stores and so it makes sense to put your app in an app store, even though your app is not in the app store or whatever. Microsoft just yanked it. They're like, nope, you, nope, it's out. And yeah, that's, that's the state of that.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Just, just great. Yeah. Meanwhile, you may recall, Google is blocking YouTube on the Amazon Echo via several methods. The end of which was blocking the Amazon Echo, basically web browser from accessing YouTube on the web, which is terrible. And it's also, they're going to block it on the Fire TV. And then Amazon started selling Chromecast again. So maybe they're going to make nice before this deadline of January 1st, when they're going to yank YouTube off the Fire TV. And then Firefox, some, you know, engineer at Mozilla was like, huh.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Fire TV, Firefox, spent a weekend, ported Firefox over to the Fire TV, put it on the Fire TV. So you now can use the Firefox web browser on the Fire TV. And the very first thing in the description of Firefox on Fire TV is you can use this to access YouTube. So would you say, and so now the move is if Google blocks this, if Google blocks this, then Google is officially 100% hostile to the web. Screw that. If they don't, then fine, whatever. You're gonna switch to. They're not great for the web right now anyway. DuckDuckGo, they block it?

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Google blocks this. First of all, they secretly love Firefox, right? Like.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  It's not a secret.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  They, they love Firefox in the way that Bill Gates loved the Mac when Apple was about to go under. They need Firefox there so that they can be like, no, it's not just Google that does stuff that, that, look, we're, there's another web browser, see?

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Just one more. But they also like pay the Mozilla Foundation a lot of money because Firefox defaults to Google, so it's like a whole thing. So they've got it, they're fine, they're not going to, but also what they want to do is make it harder for Amazon to access YouTube and to keep YouTube from being a selling point of the Amazon devices. If, I don't think they give a shit about the one person who's like, I'm going to put Firefox on my TV streaming stick.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, that's, I think that's fine.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Cause you can't really control Firefox with Alexa, probably.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Probably not, no. Well, you can like voice-

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Unless you get a Kavo.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, "Why Alexa? Y-O-U-T."

• 56:46Speaker 02

  No, but that wouldn't be hard for Alexa. If Alexa just deep, if you said, "I wanna watch this on YouTube," Alexa would just search YouTube for that and then on Firefox just load up a page of YouTube search results.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  This is great.

• 57:02Nilay Patel?

  What if-

• 57:02Speaker 02

  It's all crazy. What if this is what makes the open web win, Dieter? What if, what if these, what if these companies trying to kill the open web is what made it live? It's not how it works. It's, it's like when- It's just- Harry Potter's trying to kill the basilisk.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, everyone blocks one another and they realize the only answer is open web browsers.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  And in his, in his moment of greatest need, he pulls the sword out of the hat.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Can I say my favorite silly web browser story this week, which is Kavo? So, I wrote about the Kavo, the, the, the new universal remote that like watches your TV. So they came, they showed it to me. You plug all the boxes into this huge Kavo box. The Kavo box is hacks on hacks on hacks. It's $400. It's super expensive for a universal remote, but the thing it does is like fascinating, which is it literally operates your devices for you because it watches the screen. So like you plug your Apple TV into it and you can watch it like clicking around, picking your Netflix profile for you, opening the search box, typing into the search fea- it's just like, it's just using it for you. It's cool.

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  The other thing it does is it has a virtual web browser that it, it just like puts in space. You can't see it, but it's, it just opens a web browser window. And it will like open Hulu, log into Hulu for you, check out your watch list on Hulu, scrape all the playback states off of the Hulu watch list, all on the web in the background. If you open a cable app on your Apple TV, if you're like- Watch this on HBO Go and you haven't logged into HBO Go on your Apple TV and it pops up that screen. It's like, put this code in the web. It'll open the web browser. You will never see it. It'll open a web browser virtually, read the screen, go to HBOGo.com/activate or whatever

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  the hell it is. Type in your, it has your password. You give it your cable username and password. It will log in, read the Apple TV screen to get the activation code, type it into the web browser for you and then activate the HBO Go app.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  This is like having a nerdy son.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like you have a little robot.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  This is your

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  Using your

• 59:14Speaker 02

  This is your child who's grown up smart enough to program your VCR for you.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, only it's a $400 universal remote. I think it's the coolest. It doesn't have HCR and like, they know that most people won't buy it. They're only trying to sell 5,000. But like, how

• 59:29Speaker 03

  I just want to point out that Neelai went through this incredible description of like 15 different hacks of the Kavo.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  So many hacks.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Has not mentioned IR blasters because it pains him so deeply that it has IR blasters.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm having like a moral dilemma with this IR blaster. Cause the IR blasters in the Kavo is not the problem. It's just a control. It's just an input method. Because it can read the screen, it's, it's, it doesn't matter because you don't have to deal with it.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Oh, so this is a good IR blaster. Your problem with IR blasters isn't IR. It's that the IR isn't aware of the state of the thing that it's controlling and therefore it often fails.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  But the Kavo is aware of the state of the thing that it's controlling. Therefore, in, in certain situations, you are pro IR blaster.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if the Kavo, if it's, if its solution was like a little robot that sat on top of the Apple TV remote and like pushed the buttons, it doesn't matter because you don't have to deal with it. Like if IR fails out, the Kavo knows it fails out. It's not, it's just not your problem. You're still operating a Kavo remote. I just think the fact that they went so far as to build a web browser that just does stuff for you in the background. At night, the, if you have a DVR, like a crappy cable company DVR, the Kavo, like will just open the DVR and it'll scroll through your DVR list of shows and scrape, and scrape it to index all the shows in your DVR.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  At night when you're not around?

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like when you're asleep. It's like, it's got to rebuild the index.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Kavo scraping.

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, it's a little TV robot. I love it.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  So on the street today in my neighborhood.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  I saw an amazing ad.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  It's kind of like, um, like a man with a van ad, like it's an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, printed in black and white, all just text. It's in like, it starts on the top, it's all keywords, free cable, PPV movies, PPV events, sports, adult channels, new and old movies, kids movies, all TV shows, music and much, much more. All you need is internet plug and play. Then in italics, I am a programmer selling brand new Android boxes, which are streaming boxes. Then a new sentence, new line, underlined and italics, all caps, better than a fire stick.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  It says, I install everything and anything. Want just movies? Got you. Want TV shows? Got you. Want kids movies? Got you. Want adult movies? Got you. PPV and live events? Got you. List goes on and on. That's, that's literally the text. List, list goes on and on. Brand new streaming boxes, fully loaded, very affordable.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  My company is called Android, na, na, na, na, na, na, Ask for Steve.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  Did you ask for Steve?

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Company is called, set up your pirate, pirate box for you.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My name is Androidplexsteve.com.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Then written in pen, written in pen, no gimmicks, no more bills. But then in other handwriting, written in pen, it says 3,500 cable channels, any language for $7 a month, no gimmicks. So.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's just Plex. He's just gonna come set up Plex at your house. That's, that's fine. That's a good business if you're, you know, that's for a person.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  I was very excited about Steve.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  All right. We gotta wrap this up. Is there anything else we need to talk about? But Google Home Max came out, Echo Spot came out. You reviewed both of them. Dan reviewed both of them. They seem fine.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  I got an Echo Dot for myself for Christmas.

• 1:02:59Nilay Patel?

  There you go. So you've just got yourself an Echo Dot.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  I canceled my Echo Spot preorder.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Why do you think Amazon is so insistent on putting cameras on stuff?

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  Because they really think that video calling between kids and grandkids is, or grandparents and grandkids is a thing. I think, I think they're.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Maybe they're right? You think they're right?

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if you are, you know, if you are just like a student of history, you know that network effects, like if you build a communications platform for people and you get enough people in that network, the network effect is a huge moat.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  You really think it's communication?

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. You don't, what, like it's just straight up surveillance?

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  I, I mean.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Amazon's trying to steal five paintings.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Amazon, Amazon wants to steal five paintings. They know they have a long ways to go, so they need to like slow roll this. But I think Amazon wants to say, hey, I see that your favorite pajamas have become threadbare. I found some very similar that are supposed to be even more comfortable. I'm sure you'll love them.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they make that product.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  That's, that's Amazon's dream.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  I, I think first, you have to light up the camera all the time. Like the number of steps. The first step is the camera's lit up all the time.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  Which is not currently true so far as we know, but Amazon, that's what Amazon says. So until they take the step of saying, we're lighting up the camera all the time, please continue to trust us.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't, that's a, that's a big hurdle.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  That's too much of a jump.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  I think their first jump is just getting people to want to buy Alexa devices instead of Google Home devices, instead of Home Pods, instead of Cortana devices.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  I don't see how they can have any fundamental footprint in communication without having a phone.

• 1:04:39Nilay Patel?

  But no, but that's it.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Or a well-known messaging platform on a phone.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  If you're, so I think that's why everything has a camera. I think if you get people addicted to the idea of, hey, drop in on mom, and it lights up in your video chatting, like now you're definitely not going to buy a Home Pod. And then when they do put out a phone, it's like seamlessly connected. So you can just drop in on mom again. That's a huge moat.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  And it's all in 3D.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  So, and then it's like, your clothes are shitty. Do you want to buy some new clothes?

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  Prime is already sending you new clothes, you slob. You work for us now.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Why do you say clothes?

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  Clothes.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Clothes?

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Clothes.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  Clothes.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Clothes. What's that from?

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  Clothes. Clothing. Clothes.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  No, but you're so good.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  Clothes.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Andrew just shut us out. Alright, that is, this, I will say, this has been one of our slothiest Vergecasts in a long time. But a good one. I'm glad you guys all listened. I think we had a good year. I mean, outside of the year that we had. It was good. Don't you think? I had a good year. Alright. Dieter? Pretty good year. Yeah. Good Tori Amos song. Alright, so here's the deal. We're gonna, we're off for the rest of the year. We'll come back in the new year, and then we're going to CES. And we're doing four live Circuit Breaker shows at CES. That's gonna be bonkers. Dieter's gonna be on, Lauren's gonna be on, Ashley's gonna be on, Paul's gonna be on. Lots of CES coming your way. We're gonna be using this feed for, I think Andrew has some wild ideas about behind the scenes Vergecast content, which I think will be fun. And then we're right back in it.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  So we're off for the rest of the year, we're back, then at CES time, it's gonna be wild. You can also listen to the Why'd You Push That Button Holiday Spectacular, which I'm told is coming out. Why'd You Push That Button, I just keep boosting the show. Spotify, put them in there, Best of the Year. Which is pretty cool. You can also listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask with Lauren Good and Kara Switzer, which is wonderful. Kara hosts Recode Decode, and Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. All wonderful shows, all on iTunes, rate and review them. If you are listening to this, you haven't bought your holiday gifts, you can read our gift guide, and then click the links and buy things. But it's probably a little late for you. It's a little late. It's probably a little too late for you. Anyway, that was it for us 2017. We'll

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  see you again next year, and at CES. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  Promo code.