Rabbit, Ballie, and the other gadgets of CES 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz follow up on all the rest of the gadgets and tech seen at CES 2024. Further reading: CES 2024: all the TVs, laptops, smart home gear, and more from the show floor The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you Rabbit sells out 10,000 units of its R1 pocket AI companion in one day Samsung’s Ballie robot is now a projector that follows you around Wi-Fi 7 quietly took off while everyone was looking at AI Wi-Fi 7 certification is now underway for new routers and devices Belkin made an iPhone dock that can track you around the room Satechi’s new Qi2 charging stands are stylish and storable Have yourself some more Thunderbolt 5. Behold: the first Thunderbolt 5 port we’ve seen on an actual PC. I just watched the first interactive broadcast TV channel in the US Thread Group is finally fixing Thread border routers The Aqara Hub M3 launches at CES 2024 Google and Samsung team up to simplify Android sharing Intel: ‘We are bringing the AI PC to the car’ Hyundai says hydrogen will play a ‘prominent role’ in going carbon neutral BMW turns inward for CES, announcing new gaming, streaming, AR, and AI features VW’s software division and Bosch are testing robot parking and EV charging Volkswagen says it’s putting ChatGPT in its cars for ‘enriching conversations’ Kia’s ‘Platform Beyond Vehicles’ is a family of modular electric minivans for businesses Mercedes-Benz taps Will.i.am to create an ‘interactive musical experience’ for its cars Mercedes-Benz’s best-in-class voice assistant is getting an AI boost Honda debuts new global EV series, Honda Zero, coming in 2026 Google Chrome is coming to your car Sony’s Afeela needs to be more than a feeling 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of affectionate intelligence.

• 0:45David Pierce?

  Aw, that's so nice.

• 0:47Nilay Patel?

  It's really cute.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  That's how I describe you most of the time.

• 0:50Nilay Patel?

  It's an all-knowing. Kind of cuddly intelligence. The affectionate intelligence is how LG is branding its AI washing machines.

• 0:58Alex Cranz?

  Uh oh.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  So they don't have, you know, you go to the LG booth.

• 1:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  LG makes everything.

• 1:03Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:04Nilay Patel?

  Here's our washing machines. Here's our little robot guy and all the AI stuff is affectionate intelligence.

• 1:11David Pierce?

  Cause it's AI.

• 1:12Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's AI.

• 1:12David Pierce?

  It's also AI.

• 1:14Alex Cranz?

  It's like person, it's in a personal intellect.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  It's not like chat GPT, which will lie to you and then try to bang you. This is much more.

• 1:21Alex Cranz?

  It's just gonna make sure your, your sweaters are dry.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  LG has a little robot, so we should, LG and Samsung both have little robots. We'll talk about Bali because David and I both have to see Bali in action. The LG robot is so silly. Like they're not even pretending that this will be a real product.

• 1:38Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't even have arms.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, it's just like a little thing that walks around and, and makes squeaky noise.

• 1:43Alex Cranz?

  It's cute.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  It is very cute. Uh, so it's day two of Vergecast at CES. We're sitting here at the Kia Connected Home, right in front of the show floor at CES. I'm your friend Neelai, David Pierce is here.

• 1:54David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Alex Franz is here. Hey. The Verge team is everywhere across the show floor. If you are on the R site or you're on Tik Tok or whatever, you've seen, we've got reporters everywhere. They're making themselves sick at laser shows. It has been quite an experience here at CES. I would say it's been a good show.

• 2:10David Pierce?

  It has been a good show. It's been, uh, I would say not as like full of wildness as CES sometimes is like, there are very few sort of. Bonkers, off the wall, new things, as there sometimes are. But in terms of like, actual cool things that might be actually cool in the actual world, like, it's been pretty good. Then there's more here than I expected, actually.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's a lot of iteration has occurred.

• 2:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 2:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  And then you can like, chat GPT on it. And the test I always use at CS is the local news test. Like, how ridiculous is CS by how many things break through the barrier of local news programming? And that one that I always remember, the baseline product for this test is the year there was the Smart Fork. And it would tell you if you were eating too fast.

• 3:03David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  It didn't actually work. But poor Joanna Stern was at ABC at the time.

• 3:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  And so she was just like, on every local news broadcast in America being like, it's a Smart Fork. There's not a lot of Smart Fork at CS.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  There was so much enthusiasm for the Smart Fork.

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  There was.

• 3:20David Pierce?

  Like, it was such earnest belief that this was a good idea, that just, these were simpler times.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  That's how you, that's how I measure CS. Is like, what's, is there garbage that breaks through to the local news? Or is there meaningful technology that is, and like, there's a lot of meaningful technology. There's a little bit of local news garbage.

• 3:40David Pierce?

  This year, it's the, it's the e-ink toilet, right?

• 3:42Alex Cranz?

  I think, I think it's the e-ink toilet.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  The sort of transparent display situation.

• 3:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  But there is, you should watch the video, Jen Toohey went and looked at an e-ink toilet from Kohler. You get the feeling Kohler has maybe more R and D money than it knows what to do with.

• 3:57David Pierce?

  Kohler, have you been to Kohler's booth?

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  I have not yet.

• 4:00David Pierce?

  Kohler's booth has all kinds of stuff, and then, I don't know, 15 just running showers.

• 4:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:07David Pierce?

  All going into like, a pond. There's just a pond.

• 4:10Alex Cranz?

  It's very soothing. Like, you walk into it and you're like, I'm in a little garden.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm from Wisconsin, where Kohler literally owns a company town called Kohler, Wisconsin. I wish Kohler nothing but the best, you know? Pump some of that water back into the local economy, if you know what I'm saying. But every year, Kohler's like, this time the toilet has more technology in it. It's pretty great. Okay, so I think we're gonna break the show up into three segments. If you watched our earlier show this week, David's Gambit was, that was the screens show. And this is meant to be the not screens show.

• 4:41David Pierce?

  In despite the fact that many of the things we're gonna talk about have screens.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  Everything we're gonna talk about has screens here.

• 4:47David Pierce?

  My methodology is not to be questioned.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  But it's products that are screen products.

• 4:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, that are like about the screens.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  And then now, then this show is all the products that are products that have screens.

• 4:58David Pierce?

  We have E Ink toilets now, like everything has screens. There were, we wrote stories about headphone cases that have screens on them now. Like you just cannot avoid screens anymore, but they're like not the point of the thing.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  They're just like, one of the gadgets we're going to talk about.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  They're there to show you ads.

• 5:14David Pierce?

  Literally, the question was, why did you put a screen on this? And his answer was, eh, screens are cheap. That's literally what it was. And so it's like, this just, screens are cheap and they're everywhere.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so we're going to talk about some gadgets. Then we should talk about a bunch of standards that hit pretty important moments at the show.

• 5:31David Pierce?

  Which actually kind of is the story of CES this year. It's like, there are big standards that are going to start to be everywhere. They're like here in a really meaningful way.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like Wi-Fi 7 had a moment, Thunderbolt 5 is here, smart home stuff. Alex had an ATSC 3.0 adventure, which is pretty good.

• 5:49Alex Cranz?

  It's magic.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  And then we should talk about some cars, because there's tons of, CES always has tons and tons of cars at it. And we should just go through all the cars. Well, let's start with gadgets. And I want to start, David, with what is undeniably the breakout gadget hit of the show, which you have seen.

• 6:02David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  And talked to the founder of, the Rabbit R1.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  This thing came out of absolutely nowhere.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:08David Pierce?

  And I think probably has been the most talked about single device.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:13David Pierce?

  Of the show. It's either that or the transparent TVs. But, so this thing is basically, it's just dedicated AI hardware, right? It's like, if you've ever seen the Panic Playdate, that little console with the crank, the crank. It feels just like that. It's like colorful and orange, it has a button on the side and a camera and a scroll wheel. And it was made by Teenage Engineering, and so it's like lovely and all the buttons feel really good. But the shtick is, it's an AI gadget. And this company, Rabbit, which has kind of an interesting history. Its founder has worked on AI stuff for a really long time. He's on the board of Teenage Engineering, so he's like connected to this world. They built this whole big new thing where instead of a large language model like ChatGPT,

• 6:55David Pierce?

  which is fundamentally about like, you input something and you get text back. This is about like doing stuff, right? So their idea is you should be able to say, I want to accomplish. Any goal, I want to listen to music, I need a ride here, order me something, book me flights on something, whatever, and have it all be like accomplishable with all of the services you use, but inside of what amounts to an assistant. One million billion unanswered questions about that. But it's $199, it's like adorable little gadget. And the two reactions that everybody seems to have are either this thing doesn't do anything that my phone doesn't do, why on earth would I want it?

• 7:36David Pierce?

  And this thing doesn't do anything my phone doesn't do, and oh my God, I want it so bad.

• 7:41Alex Cranz?

  That's me.

• 7:43Nilay Patel?

  It is very cute.

• 7:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  I think people are just reacting to the idea that they could purchase a gadget. The questions are just infinite.

• 7:52David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, for example, it's $200.

• 7:55David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  There's no recurring fee, right? There's no subscription service. They, this thing can't be making money. Like, just from the jump, it's like.

• 8:05David Pierce?

  It seems impossible.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  They have to run a cloud service. There's no way that they're making enough money on the upfront sale to run the cloud service.

• 8:12Alex Cranz?

  They had to pay like teenage engineering to do all the design work, like.

• 8:15David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Another question I have, and I encourage everyone to go watch this. They put it out in what is, can only be described as a fake Apple keynote.

• 8:24David Pierce?

  Oh, very much so.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  He's, he's standing there on a stage. I don't know if there's an audience, but it doesn't appear there's an audience.

• 8:31David Pierce?

  Describe the scene to you, because it's very funny. So this wasn't on the show floor, it was kind of a secret thing. Like, I found out about it from like a relatively sketchy email that was just like, we're launching the future of everything. And I was like, well, all right, like, I gotta, we'll just find out. It was deep, I mean, deep, like it, like a mile and a half walk from the front door of The Win to this like tiny little meeting room in the back of The Wind where this keynote was. And it was set up, it was like in a ballroom and, you know, on the one side you have tables for people to stand at and coffee and stuff. And on the other side, maybe four rows of seats. And then this big screen and Jesse Liu, the founder, standing in front of that. And that's where they shot the whole thing.

• 9:15David Pierce?

  And it looks so polished and so professional, and it's literally just him standing in a casino ballroom, talking in front of a screen. It was very impressive.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, you were in that audience.

• 9:25David Pierce?

  I was in that audience.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  So that was live. I thought that was a production. But no, you were there.

• 9:29David Pierce?

  It was live.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so that's the experience you had. The experience I had was what appears to be a pre-produced version of the presentation you were given.

• 9:40David Pierce?

  Which now that I'm looking at it is even more appley than the thing.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, it looks like a fake Apple keynote. That's the introducing our own video on their channel.

• 9:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  And the thing about this that caught me, and I'm wondering if you saw this in action, is in the video, he's like, asks it to do something, and you look at the animation of the rabbit jumping, which is adorable, but you never actually see it do the thing.

• 10:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  He's like, "Success!" And you're like, "What happened?" Uh, but you like, held it and got to use it. Did it, did it work?

• 10:10David Pierce?

  Yes and no.

• 10:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 10:12David Pierce?

  Um, well, I did get to hold it. It did work, but we were on horrible hotel wifi, which I can vouch for being horrible.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:21David Pierce?

  So it kinda came and went in terms of actually being able to do anything at all. And obviously, a device like this can't do much offline, period, because everything it's doing is happening in the cloud. So after about 10 minutes of everybody sort of playing with it, getting to try stuff, he literally like disconnected it and just was handing it around to people. But at one point, it rickrolled somebody, somebody was holding it in their hand, and, and "Never Gonna Give You Up" started playing. And I think that might have been when they took it offline for good.

• 10:47Alex Cranz?

  They're like, "No, we're done."

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  That's how it reacts to losing its connection. It's like, "You're gonna like this."

• 10:51David Pierce?

  So again, like, added to the list of unanswered questions about this thing is like, "Does it actually work?" Because I think you're, you're right, and a bunch of people had this reaction of like, "You see him talk into it, clever cut, you see it work." And it's like, "Well..."

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Alex Cranz?

  And what does it do? Like, like, I keep trying to understand that?

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I have...

• 11:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say my ideas, and then David can tell me if I'm right.

• 11:17David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's how it's structured. Uh, cuz I don't think David actually knows.

• 11:22David Pierce?

  I think I bet I know slightly more than you, but only slightly.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  So my understanding of this is that it is using the apps for you. Right. And this is not a new idea. Yeah. If you are a Decoder listener, we've had like robotic process automation episodes where big enterprises basically bring in computers to use their old computers for them. And like, these are big companies that do this work. And that's at the corporate level, it's enterprise, that this is a known thing. We're going to use some machine learning and some computer vision, and we're going to use Windows 3.1 instead of updating the hospital building system. Right. There's a real thing that happens. There was a company called Kavo that I loved ages ago. Yeah, we talked about it last week. And they were going to do machine vision to like click around in your TV interface for you. Right.

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  They failed. It didn't go well, as we talked about last week. Yeah.

• 12:12David Pierce?

  But not because you can't do it technically. Like, it is a possible thing to do.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  It is a thing you can do.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  So this gadget, the hardware, seems less important than whatever is happening in the cloud.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  Yes, oh, very much so.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  The hardware is just like a little bitty cute thing you can ask questions of.

• 12:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  And then somewhere in the cloud, it appears they're spinning up like Android virtual machines that have your Spotify app or whatever on it. Right. And then it's clicking around on a little Android phone, like a virtual Android phone in the cloud, and then delivering you the result. Onto the little guy. Onto the little thing.

• 12:46David Pierce?

  So that is also, I think, my understanding of like the most likely way for it to work. What that doesn't do is jive at all with what Rabbit says about privacy, which is that it doesn't store your credentials.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  And so there's, there's like a total disconnect there that I just don't understand. And what I do know is they have this training mode where you can like teach Rabbit how to do something for you. Like, one of the examples Jesse, the CEO, gives is how to remove a watermark from Photoshop. And the way that you do it is you literally go into Rabbit Hole, which is like their adorably named portal for getting into all of your apps.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  Really good.

• 13:20David Pierce?

  It's very good. Like, the whole branding of this is excellent. You go into it and you, like you said, you boot up a virtual Windows machine, you load Photoshop, and this is all like Rabbit's computers, not yours, right?

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:33David Pierce?

  So you're, you load up Photoshop and then you narrate aloud what you're doing as you're teaching the model how to do it. So you go through the process and you say, and then you, you go over here and you select the lasso, and then you select, you, you lasso around the watermark, and then you click this and that and that, and you remove the watermark. And that's how you train the model. So in terms of like, How to actually interact with the underlying model. Your metaphor is exactly right. Then what happens after that?

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:00David Pierce?

  I do not know. Because like, once I give it my Spotify credentials, Rabbit says unambiguously that it does not then keep my Spotify credentials. And I have no idea.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:10David Pierce?

  How it cannot do that.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  At some point, it just has to have a token to log into Spotify on your behalf, right?

• 14:16Alex Cranz?

  Are we sure it's absolutely going to be in the cloud? Or is it going to be in the cloud than talking to your phone and in the cloud, talking to your laptop?

• 14:23David Pierce?

  It's not talking to your devices. That I know for sure.

• 14:25Nilay Patel?

  But do they have a rack of like mid-range Android phones? Maybe like hot dog fingers just banging away on them.

• 14:32David Pierce?

  Like Beeper's thing with the Mac minis getting into your iMessages? Yeah.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is just a big question I have about this whole product, right? Which is, it sounds really cool. What if you had an assistant that could use a computer for you?

• 14:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 14:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 14:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  Right, and you don't have to re-architect all these apps and services. You don't need Adobe's permission, maybe. Big question mark there. But you have a computer in the cloud. It's loaded up with legal apps and services. Who knows? It's not Alex's Plex server. It's a computer in the cloud. And a robot's going to click around on it for you and then do the work for you.

• 15:09Alex Cranz?

  And that just means that the, like, that just can't work with the privacy claims.

• 15:14David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's very difficult to swear that with.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  And they're also very clear about the privacy claims. Like, it's, they're either just boldly lying, or there is some clever turn that we don't know yet and they're not really talking about yet.

• 15:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:28David Pierce?

  But it's not, they're not doing the like, you know, sketchy, you know, deflect when you ask questions. Like, no, they're very straightforward about like, we do not store your stuff. And I'm like, how?

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  I'll do the same sort of exercise as we did with the humane AI pin.

• 15:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, you're like, here's the demo. So one of the demos was Spotify Music, right? Okay, to make that work, they need your Spotify credentials. Then they've got to log into Spotify somewhere, somehow.

• 15:55Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  We don't know where, how. We don't know if they have a virtual Android computer or virtual Windows computer. We don't know how your $200 one-time payment is paying for that server cost.

• 16:07Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  That's just the beginning.

• 16:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Then they've logged into Spotify. Their large action model has clicked around Spotify and found the song you want from the artist you want, which even Spotify's search is not great at.

• 16:22Alex Cranz?

  Correct.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  So that's the, there's a whole problem there, right? It's going to navigate the Spotify interface, which is more and more geared towards like, what if you listen to a podcast?

• 16:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  So like two different computers are going to be hostile to each other in that specific way. Then it's going to stream the audio from Spotify. Spotify's audio is DRM to hell and back because it's a streaming service. So now it's accepting a DRM audio stream and then it's gonna send it to your rabbit. It's gonna send it to your headphones. That little transcoding step where it rebroadcast the DRM audio is, I would call it a pickle.

• 17:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you will.

• 17:05Alex Cranz?

  I think there's just like a vague whiff of vapor.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  You think so?

• 17:09Alex Cranz?

  To this, this thing. Like it just, there's, there's too many things where it's like, no, that doesn't compute. That's not how computers.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Alex Cranz?

  This, this is just not how computers work. This is just not how like any of these services work. How? And the fact that they're not saying how, but they do have this really gorgeous hardware.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I do think the how, it's not such a leap, the how.

• 17:32Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because machine vision to operate a computer interface has been deployed in other contexts.

• 17:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  The thing that gets me is the cost.

• 17:41Alex Cranz?

  Right. It's, it's the cost.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Like if you call Microsoft to come do a big RPA integration in your healthcare system, that is millions of dollars.

• 17:49Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  It is not $200.

• 17:52Alex Cranz?

  Yes. One-time payment of $200.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  One-time payment of $200. Like I'm just dying to know. And then they sold, which is to their credit, they sold vastly more than they thought they were going to sell. They sold out of their first run of 10,000 units in a day, maybe hours even.

• 18:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  So they've just signed up to run a pretty large set of, well, 10,000 virtual machines at least.

• 18:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And you know, we used to see that a lot in the Kickstarter days.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Alex Cranz?

  And then eventually you'd get an email saying, my bad.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Alex Cranz?

  And, and, and I, I'd like, this has that kind of feeling to me because the privacy situation and like, and the cost are two things like, you need to explain, there's, there's a big missing piece here and you haven't disclosed it. And I kind of need to understand that, even though I do, I would a hundred percent have spent $200 on it if I'd gotten in, like.

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  They're going to open up another round.

• 18:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like the hardware itself, I was like, I just want to play with that.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  I love a teenage engineering device.

• 18:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, like, that's pretty cheap for a teenage engineering.

• 18:50David Pierce?

  Like to everybody in March, like this is.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 18:53David Pierce?

  By all accounts, their, their version of this thing is like, ready.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And, and again, I think the, to Alex's point, like the how of it, it's not like other people couldn't have come up with this idea. I think their challenges are, can you, because it actually work, is it brittle or is it really flexible? Right. Spotify changes the interface, will it actually survive that? Photoshop moves some buttons around, will it survive that? That's got to run on Windows, by the way. You know, they're running Photoshop on like, an Android phone, like a mid-range Android phone with a hot dog.

• 19:22Alex Cranz?

  Well, I mean, they could be using like Azure, they could be using AWS, right?

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  Just put all just cost after cost after.

• 19:28Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 19:29David Pierce?

  Totally. Yeah, I'm just like, can I just read you a few sentences from their privacy webpage, which is actually like, a useful summary of everything we've been talking about. So it says, when you interact with Rabbit OS, you will be assigned a dedicated and isolated environment on our cloud for your own large action model, which more or less.

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:46David Pierce?

  Jives with what you were talking about. Uh, when our rabbits perform tasks for you, they will use your own accounts that you have securely granted us control over through our rabbit hole web portal. We do not store your passwords for these services. I literally don't see how those two sentences can both be true.

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  Cause you don't need the password persistently.

• 20:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  You need it for like a, a second to get the off, off token.

• 20:07David Pierce?

  True if you're running Spotify's API, not if you're logging in on a new machine that I'm spinning up every single time.

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  No, it says you have access to a machine. They're you, they're giving you a little cloud computer that is yours.

• 20:19David Pierce?

  For these 10,000 people who bought $200 Rabbit R1s, they also bought a computer.

• 20:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, this is what I'm asking.

• 20:28David Pierce?

  That doesn't make any sense.

• 20:29Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's what it sounds like. Like, it sounds like they're saying, we personally aren't gonna have like your code everywhere. Instead, our cloud, like your little cloud computer that we manage is gonna have it.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 20:41Alex Cranz?

  And a little split in cares there.

• 20:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and this is, this is why, if you're a lot of these companies, you try to build a thing where you can tap into APIs. Like, there are lots of ways to interact with Spotify, not through Spotify, right? Because Spotify has open APIs for this stuff, and you can plug in, and they do a good job of the authentication tokens. Rabbit is explicitly going a different direction.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so Spotify is a good example because it is a very simple, you could put the Spotify API on this device, run it.

• 21:10David Pierce?

  Right, Spotify will happily let you do this thing that is described.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  Computer, it's gonna ping Spotify and stream something, maybe, maybe that's what they're doing.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  Every smart speaker is that.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  Right, and they're cheap.

• 21:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you go to the second most complicated example. Like I said, I'm just running this down the way that we ran down Humane. Because obviously Humane is a thing that people are gonna compare this to. Uh, Humane, by the way, which laid off 4% of its staff this week. Uh, and tried to play some games with Alex Heath when he broke that story. Pretty shady, Humane, anyway.

• 21:36David Pierce?

  Not great.

• 21:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so, their other example was booking a flight.

• 21:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is easily the most complicated thing you can do with a computer. Uh, and when I talk about hostile interfaces.

• 21:48David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:49Nilay Patel?

  The interfaces to book a flight are openly hostile to you. Like, all over the place, all the time, prices are changing. It's unclear what you're buying, the door might fall off the plane. It's just a real, the hard time in air travel. This thing has to go, you say like, book me a flight to Seattle. This thing has to. Go find a website to do that on.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  It has to understand a vast amount about your preferences and what you want and what you fly and what seats like the amount it has to know about you before it even starts the rest of this process.

• 22:20Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 22:20David Pierce?

  It's really complicated.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  And if you are a United person and I'm a Delta person and you are.

• 22:24Alex Cranz?

  American.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  American.

• 22:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  It's rough.

• 22:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  That's three entirely different websites for the large action model to understand and be able to navigate. And then it has to condense those into a coherent response that works on the interface of the rabbit.

• 22:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  And the airlines, by the way, hate this and always have.

• 22:46Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, they just don't want there to be a layer of abstraction over their websites. They don't like it. That's and then and then it has to actually do a good job of booking you a flight.

• 22:56Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  It has to have your credit cards so it can pay.

• 22:59Alex Cranz?

  And your frequent flyer miles, your like preferred seat area, like, do you want first class? It's a lot that's gotta do.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I like, I love this thing. I'm, it seems like we're gonna get one soon.

• 23:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think sooner rather than later, we'll start to get a real idea of what this thing actually is.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just like, if you just like run the examples, just how would you do this? Just step by step.

• 23:19David Pierce?

  In a funny way, I would be more bullish on this thing if it was $400 than I am at $200.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  I would be more bullish on it if it was $200 and it was 30 bucks a month.

• 23:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, at least I would understand. Okay, like.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  I understand how this company can persist. The way it's structured now is like, we're gonna make a big splash. There's a part of me believes they started this company, they got all this interest. And then we're right, we're sitting right next to the Google booth here at the Kia Connected Home. They're gonna sell it to Google in a year because there's so much interest in AI and then Google will shut it down in two years.

• 23:47David Pierce?

  This thing running Bard would be so much less exciting.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, I just don't, I don't understand the economics of this service, but it is very exciting. It looks very cool. I understand people are excited.

• 23:56David Pierce?

  And it is like a whole thought about AI, which I appreciate. Like, they, they, they built a thing that is like a full vision. And I think that's cool.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  And it is bringing some tech that we have seen in the enterprise context to consumers. So I have more, I think I have more faith. It's not 100% faith, it's maybe 5% more faith than you, Alex.

• 24:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, like, the hardware is so, and then the, the concept is so, so good. Execution, I'm just like, no.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Alex Cranz?

  And I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I want it to work. I want this all to work. I would love a $200, no additional fees, just like, does everything for me. That's magic. That sounds great, but that's magic, and generally, magic is not real.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, I went to the sphere last night.

• 24:38Alex Cranz?

  Oh, sorry, sorry.

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  David, David and I went to the sphere, uh, boy. I was just, I'm in love with the sphere.

• 24:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  There should be a sphere in every town in America.

• 24:49Alex Cranz?

  We can see it from here. It's beautiful.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  It is, it is better farther away than up close. Yes, oh, absolutely. Uh, and then even inside of the screen, uh, you can see lines and like.

• 24:59Alex Cranz?

  Ah, you're like, eh.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  I was like, there's dead pigs.

• 25:02Alex Cranz?

  It's not IMAX.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then also, we did not see you two. We saw Darren Aronofsky's postcard from Earth, which is just the weirdest thing you can see if you are sober. Mm-hmm.

• 25:13Alex Cranz?

  Oh, you.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  There were people there who were not sober, who were like, yes.

• 25:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that feels like a shrooms event.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's real Adam and Eve allegory. Like, at the end of it, like, they get off, I'm just, I'm gonna spoil postcard from Earth. It's fine. It's mostly a reason to show you, like, videos of elephants. It's gonna be fine. At the end of it, they, the Adam and Eve get off their spaceship, and the voices are like, you are here for a reason. The reason is obviously to bang and populate the planet they're on. It's like, very obvious.

• 25:42Alex Cranz?

  Get to it.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  The reason is. It's good. I, I. It's a love story. You should go to Earth, which humanity has left in this. Okay, Liam is telling me to wrap this up. Uh, I love the sphere. There should, you know, like, the water tower in your town, if you're in a town in America with a water tower, go to your local town meeting and be like, we should turn our water tower into a sphere.

• 26:03Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  Just a huge. It's only gonna cost $2.3 billion, probably.

• 26:08Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry about hail. You'll be fine.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  It was not full last night.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  It was, in fact, mostly empty. Yeah.

• 26:15Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  But is that because, like, I was just, like, magnetically drawn to the screen. Regardless of what was on the screen, I would have been happy. Postcard from Earth, I think, is not drawn a crowd. No. Anyhow, all right, we gotta take a break. Welcome to come back. We're gonna talk about some gadgets, we'll talk about some standards. See you, stay tuned for the broadcast. We'll be right back.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Vergecast, day two at CES. The Kia Connected Home. That's actually like CES day four. It's just the second Vergecast.

• 27:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  I've been doing this for 15 years and I still have no idea how to number any of these things.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  We've been here for eight days. It's CES day three.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  None of it makes any sense.

• 27:27Alex Cranz?

  I spent the whole day thinking it was Friday.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  The only thing that makes sense is the sphere, David. Giant ridiculous. Uh, when you walk into the sphere, we.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  Like the lobby of the sphere is like bathed in blue light. There's like bad robots talking about the future at you. And you're like, oh, you just made like a, like an Epcot center. Like you went to the warehouse of old Epcot technologies.

• 27:52Alex Cranz?

  Do you ride on a little train and get to see like the cavemen?

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  No, they ran out of money well before that happened.

• 27:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's what the, the postcard from Earth is supposed to be, I guess.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. The spaceship Earth where you go up.

• 28:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  No, there's a definite vibe at the sphere where you're like, well, this is where they ran out of money. They built the screen and they're like, hmm, this carpet.

• 28:11Alex Cranz?

  Just poured of potties everywhere.

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  If you're in Vegas, please, if you're listening to this and you ever come to Vegas, you just go look at the screen. It is insane screen. Don't look at postcard from Earth, I think is what I would say.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 28:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:23David Pierce?

  I think Phish is coming like in April. Go see Phish.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's, that's appropriate.

• 28:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's very good.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, actually speaking, we, we gotta talk about standards. There's a bunch of standards news here at CES. But speaking of, uh, just screen, uh, mishaps.

• 28:36David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:36Nilay Patel?

  You and I both saw Samsung Bali demos.

• 28:40David Pierce?

  Poor Bali.

• 28:40Nilay Patel?

  And we saw different mishaps. What was yours? From a first-hand people at Bali.

• 28:45David Pierce?

  So Bali is the sort of little rolling home robot that Samsung is making. We saw it last year and we saw a new version of it this year. And its new thing is basically it's a it's a robot assistant projector.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so last year had no projector.

• 29:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 29:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 29:02David Pierce?

  And this year, the demo is actually sort of convincing. It's like this little thing that will follow you around and you're like, oh, I'm doing a workout and it'll project your workout on the wall. And then he went to do sit-ups and so it started projecting the workout on the ceiling. And I was like, that's awesome. And it's it can make calls for you. It knows your schedule. It's just like it's a little adorable, smart speaker that just kind of like ambles around your house. Like, I'm into it. I love it. The demo I saw, so they were doing these as shows, like, once an hour. It was like Bali will appear. And Bali comes out, they do the first half of the demo, it's going fine. And then Bali is supposed to, I believe the first time it went wrong, Bali was supposed to make a phone call. And what Bali is supposed to do is project the phone call, like, up on the wall, so you can see here, talking to whatever.

• 29:46David Pierce?

  Bali projected it upside down and about three inches off the ground. So all you could see was the word, like, flower shop upside down on the wall. And then Bali went around to try and, you know, help him see his calendar upside down in teeny tiny. And then, for the last part of the demo, rolls it back over to the wall and the guy's like, oh, show me what's in my fridge so I can decide what to make. Leaving aside that his fridge is literally right next to him. Yeah, like, he could have reached out with his left hand and opened the fridge and instead he's like, Bali, what's inside the fridge? Bali projects nothing on the wall. Just nothing. And this poor guy who clearly has a script to follow stands there and he goes, hmm, so I have some apples.

• 30:29David Pierce?

  And that was the moment that, like, the panic level among all the Samsung employees just started to spike and the demo ended very quickly after that.

• 30:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's over. I saw the same Bali show. I thought the call the flower shop demo was very funny. Just in the same way we were talking about the rabbit. He's like, what's on my calendar? And Bali was, shows a calendar. It's like, it's your anniversary. And he's like, okay, call the flower shop. And he just says, call the flower shop.

• 30:54David Pierce?

  You.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  And if you've ever done a search in your life, you know.

• 30:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  That is not a thing. You can just instruct any assistant to do.

• 31:00David Pierce?

  There's not a thing on Google Maps called the flower shop.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, 10,000 sponsored listings later, and then he calls the flower shop. He makes a phone call and like, this is, you know, it's, it's a demo. It's fake, but whatever. But he's like, I need a dozen roses. And like, coming right your way. And they hang up. I was like, that's not how that works at all. And then he's like, I'm gonna make dinner. He does the apple thing. And then in mine, the mishap was, he went to go watch a cooking video. And Bali was.

• 31:26David Pierce?

  I didn't even get that far.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  Shut yours down. Mine, he was like, I'm gonna do some cooking. And they, it was supposed to project it above the kitchen sink. But Bali missed and presented it teeny tiny on the side of the cabinet. And he just kept going as though that wasn't happening.

• 31:42Alex Cranz?

  Just keep like, looking down, double checking all your, your instructions.

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  It's very, it's very good. I love the idea of Bali. I think it's, it would be very fun.

• 31:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  To have a little projector that follows you around, showing you things.

• 31:52David Pierce?

  My favorite thing about it was, every time he would ask it a question, it would project little arrows on the ground.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:57David Pierce?

  As, telling you, like, follow me over to this wall, so I can show you. And it was great. And he's just like, chasing this little ball around the living room. The whole, it was so good.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  The workout demo, this happened, it sounds like your demo was much higher stakes than mine. Mine mostly went fine. The workout demo is like, it's time for my workout. And he's like, stretching. And he's standing in front of a television.

• 32:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  And instead Bali rolled to the left of the television, projected the workout video on the wall next to the TV. Which everyone has, just a wide blank wall next to the TV.

• 32:26Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  And then just insisted on making us watch Meghan Trainor video on the television. I was like, this isn't what I want, at all.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't want the security. Very good. Alright, so that's Bali. It was good.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  It's cute. Yeah, it's cute. Yeah. Alright, we should talk about some standards. So lots of smart home stuff happening at CS. Eing toilets, you know, clumsy projector robots, what have you. Let's start with just some smart home stuff. So Jen Tooey is here, our smart home reviewer. She's killing it as always. Yep. Basic stuff. So Matter and Thread are always a big deal. At CS, we're into, what, year 35 of trying to make Matter a thing. It's gonna happen this year. This year's for sure. The big news around Matter is that Matter is supposed to work with a wireless standard called Thread. Thread is built into all kinds of things now. The iPhone 15 Pro has a Thread radio in it for totally mysterious reasons.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  But the Apple TV has it, Nest Tubs have it. The issue is that Thread is supposed to form a low-power mesh network in your house. So you get an Apple TV, you've got a Thread device, you get a Nest Hub, you get an Eero. They all sort of form one pretty good resilient Thread network. And up until yesterday, the specification did not allow that to happen. Right. So instead they would all create their own... Competing little networks. Yeah. And you would have like this fight. Like my Eero has a different Thread network running in my house than my Apple TV. And I just shut the Thread radios off in my Eero because this is useless. That is bad because there's more Eeros in my house than Apple TVs.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  And so that should just be the good network. Right. But you can't pass the cred... It's like all just a mess. So the news here at CS is that Thread, the Thread Group, which definitely sounds like a consulting company that Jason Bourne works for.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  They've murdered a number of high-value targets and they've also released a specification that lets all of those devices pass credentials to one another, which Jen specifically has been saying is the thing that needs to happen. Yeah. Nothing is shipped with it yet. It's a software update. They're all gonna do it. But this is some like baseline spec news at CS that I think is very important. Because it's gonna get you to the place where you, in your house, you have a Wi-Fi network for high-power usage, high-data usage, and a Thread network for smart locks and light switches. We'll see.

• 34:56Alex Cranz?

  Fingers crossed, as someone who relies on a Thread network.

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  What's that on your Thread network?

• 35:00Alex Cranz?

  Um, the light for the entryway, so I can climb up the stairs at night.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 35:04Alex Cranz?

  At my apartment. I like to be able to see.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:07David Pierce?

  Seems reasonable.

• 35:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, sometimes it doesn't work and I'm like, okay, cool.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  I've got the Schlage door locks on a Thread network with the Apple TV.

• 35:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why. Yeah, I just like knowing it's on a different network than the Wi-Fi. Like, these batteries last 30% longer. Nailed it. These were more expensive than the other smart locks. Then there's a bunch of just sort of like, basic stuff, um, standards-wise as it comes to smart homes. Uh, so with Matter, Matter is extending, it's gonna do robot vacuums this year. It just keeps getting bigger. And then, dear sweet Amazon, announced that instead of using Chromecast or AirPlay, it will now support casting content from Prime Video with Matter, which no one else supports.

• 35:51David Pierce?

  It's one of those things that it's like, if we had all decided to do this a long time ago.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:56David Pierce?

  The world would be a better place. Like, this, it is patently absurd that you have 11 different technologies just to send a thing from your phone to your television. But, like, we're out on that one. And so now we're in the like-

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  People who are like, Dorac keyboards are better than QWERTY. And it's like, that's great for you, man.

• 36:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't care anymore.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should put the accelerator on the left. Yeah, I don't know, maybe, maybe we should have done that in 1915, but we didn't.

• 36:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. And so now you have yet another way to send Prime Video to things.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:29David Pierce?

  Which I'm sure tons of people do all the time.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  So Amazon makes its own TVs.

• 36:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  They can insist on it.

• 36:35Alex Cranz?

  Really popular set-top box, too.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  Really, yeah, the Fire TV is popular.

• 36:38Alex Cranz?

  I wanna joke about this thing a lot, but also, Amazon's like, right behind Roku with one of the most popular,

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Alex Cranz?

  like, set-top situations, so.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for Andy Jassy to have the meeting with Tim Cook, where he's like, "We'd love for you to support Matter Casting on iOS." I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 36:57Alex Cranz?

  I just assume he'll close his laptop.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook just puts on his Vision Pro. He's like, I am on the top of a volcano now, sir.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  He just puts on the screensaver thing on the outside. It's like, I'm done, this meeting's over.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  Just looking at Tim Cook's dead, virtual eyes. While he just disassociates from this conversation.

• 37:15Alex Cranz?

  That's exactly what's gonna happen.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  That sounds about right. So, similar note, LG is supporting Google Cast. This is a big announcement. Samsung is not. Very good.

• 37:25David Pierce?

  This is the silliest thing.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:27David Pierce?

  Like, so, Google has Nearby Share. I'm like, there's a 100% chance I'm gonna get all these names wrong. Google has Nearby Share, Samsung has Quick Share. Google is now renaming Nearby Share to Quick Share and just giving it to Samsung.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they're just gonna put them together.

• 37:42David Pierce?

  And then LG is just off to the side, being like, we don't have any of this anymore.

• 37:46Nilay Patel?

  We don't make phones, but we're gonna use Google Cast on our TVs. Samsung's like, we're partnering with Google on Quick Share, but we're not gonna put Google Cast on. It's just a mess. This whole thing is a mess, which is why, basically, our Play 2 continues to be the thing that people, like, gravitate to, and then Google Cast is the thing that, on Android, thing people gravitate to.

• 38:07David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  Except for Amazon Prime Video. And then lastly, just on, on smart home gadgets. We still live in a world of hubs and bridges. They're inescapable. But the thing that's happening is they're all kinda converging in you, the idea that you will have just one kinda main hub.

• 38:23Alex Cranz?

  Thank God.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  In your house. It's not quite there yet, but Aquara, which is sort of an upstart smart home company. I've got Aquara Smart Locks, in addition to my, my slage. Super expensive Thread ones for no reason. They're very good. They go on sale every constant sale.

• 38:40Alex Cranz?

  They're motion sensors, they're great.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, and they're a really interesting company. They got an interesting proximity sensor, but they've got a new hub, the Hub M3. We've been talking about it for a year or more. It's a Zigbee hub, for all of Aquara Zigbee devices. It's also a Thread border router, and it is a Matter controller, if you wanna be a Matter thing. So this is the thing that should be able to control, like, Hue lights and Eve shades and work with your Nest thermostat.

• 39:05Alex Cranz?

  And not require you to use Home Assistant, because Home Assistant has a similar hub, but it requires you to use Home Assistant, and a lot of people aren't as nerdy as myself.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  A lot of Home Assistant stands are about to get real mad at you.

• 39:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm one of you. I use Home Assistant, I love it. I have the Home Assistant yellow, but like... A lot of people don't want that.

• 39:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is the like

• 39:25Alex Cranz?

  A little more turnkey.

• 39:25David Pierce?

  Non-sick hacker version.

• 39:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  If it works.

• 39:30Alex Cranz?

  If it works.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out.

• 39:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Thread and matter, like every year at TS we track like, okay, there's a bunch of smart home products. The standards are growing. The big companies are still all over the place with things like as simple as like I'm watching a video on my phone. I want it on TV. Still a mess, right? Like still fundamentally a mess unless you are pretty firmly in the Apple ecosystem, which is Apple's argument.

• 39:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  To be fair, this is app like stay in this prison and we will care for you. Three hots are caught in consistent, reliable video casting. That's the Apple way. But it's getting better and some of these products are interesting. Okay, so that's the smart home stuff.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  You want to talk about Wi-Fi 7 or Alex, you want to talk about ATSC?

• 40:10Alex Cranz?

  I will talk about ATSC 3.0 forever.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  This is, I mean, this is Alex's baby.

• 40:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Nilay Patel?

  You saw a pretty cool demo.

• 40:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I saw a really cool demo. ATSC 3.0 famously came out many, many years ago and nothing happened because no one wanted to spend the money to upgrade all of their broadcast towers to ATSC 3.0 because it's expensive. And all you would get was like slightly higher quality. And they're like, well, why would I want to do that? That's dumb.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  And so this company, Roxy, thinks it's figured out a way, which is that

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  It's Roxy with an I, by the way.

• 40:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's Roxy with an I.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Very important, very important.

• 40:44Alex Cranz?

  R O X I, so it's

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 40:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They also do like a music app and so they're bringing that music app as a channel. And so right now as we're recording, if you're in Vegas and you happen to have an ATSC 3.0 tuner on your TV.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  You almost certainly don't.

• 40:58Alex Cranz?

  You could if you recently bought an LG, but not this year's, just last year's.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  If you're one of three people in Vegas to whom this applies.

• 41:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you can go and you can, you can watch this channel and, and then you can pause the music on the channel. You can skip tracks. You can choose other like stations within the channel itself. All in the channel, all broadcast. And I was like, okay, well, do you need Wi-Fi? And they said Wi-Fi will like increase the quality, the visual quality, but other like the interactivity? No, you don't need it.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 41:26Alex Cranz?

  It's all broadcast.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  That is just not how I'd expect that to work.

• 41:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I was like, oh, cool. They're, they're claiming that they basically put, they called it a transitory app.

• 41:35Alex Cranz?

  Just a little tiny app that goes on to the TV and operates on the TV while you're on the channel. And then it, it leaves a short-term memory once you leave the channel.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  So ATSC 3.0 increases the bandwidth?

• 41:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a digital signal.

• 41:47Alex Cranz?

  And part of the spec has the storage in there.

• 41:49Nilay Patel?

  They can send you the bits to run a little baby app.

• 41:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty neat. How does it send a signal back to the TV station if you want to like buy something?

• 41:56Alex Cranz?

  So they're having to use AWS, they're going through servers, so that all is happening. And the money side of it was my other question there. They figured out instead of using broadcast ads, which I guess don't make as much money, they can use streaming TV ads. So they can use a more lucrative ad on it. And they're partnering with Sinclair, who has like 40% of broadcast standard. Like they own 40% of broadcast stations in the United States. They can't own anymore because then they'd be a monopoly. So that's the only reason they haven't purchased more. They're partnering with it, they're super excited about it. And they're insisting that it's going to be on all, in every market that has ATSC 3.0.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 42:36Alex Cranz?

  By the end of this quarter. I'm really curious about that because there's 60% of markets that don't, that aren't completely owned by Sinclair. So, but they're like, no, no, no, we got this. So the guy was like very, very emphatic about that. So we'll see if that actually happens. But like, this is cool. I would love to be able to, you know, you could think about it. Like Max could theoretically, not your child, but...

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I love her dearly and every now and again, I regret naming her Max.

• 43:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. She could become a new broadcast channel. But like theoretically, Max could like be on this. Their examples were QVC or something like that.

• 43:11Nilay Patel?

  Of course.

• 43:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  There's always transactions, buy stuff.

• 43:14Alex Cranz?

  Transaction, buy stuff, choose the weather, skip to your actual weather on the station while still watching the news. That sort of thing. So, so like this has been a promise for a very long time and nobody's actually like shipped it. And so that's why this is really, really exciting.

• 43:30Nilay Patel?

  So this is like over the air interactive television?

• 43:32Alex Cranz?

  Over the air interactive television.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  No internet required?

• 43:34Alex Cranz?

  No internet required. And that's, I think, super crucial because there's so many people in the United States who don't have easy, cheap access to internet. So like, they don't get to go watch all the cool stuff we get to watch. And this would theoretically, if everybody adopted it, would give them more opportunities.

• 43:49David Pierce?

  It is super cool. I think all of the interactive stuff, though, I wonder about because like on the streaming side of it.

• 43:57David Pierce?

  There's no reason that hasn't been possible for forever.

• 44:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:00David Pierce?

  And still, nobody has to like, Amazon cannot figure out how to do a good job of letting you be like, "I would like to buy the chips in this ad, please."

• 44:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:08David Pierce?

  You're showing me a commercial for Fritos, please allow me to buy these Fritos. Amazon doesn't know how to do that yet. And so the idea that they're all gonna figure this out on...

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  They're doing that with Prime Video. They're getting there.

• 44:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:20David Pierce?

  Slowly.

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Alex Cranz?

  I suspect that one, like, like, right now, it's just gonna be this Roxy Music app. That's all we're gonna, or the Roxy Music Channel. That's all we're, we're gonna see.

• 44:32Alex Cranz?

  You know, maybe they could work with QVC and QVC and them could put their heads together and, and, and figure this out.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but here's my question.

• 44:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's always QVC.

• 44:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's always QVC, right?

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  The other thing you could do with ATSC 3.0 is improve the picture quality.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:46David Pierce?

  Well, and that's the part I think is exciting.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  Please, someone improve the picture quality.

• 44:48David Pierce?

  About the broadband stuff, the idea that just, A, you're gonna be able to send what amounts to streaming services over broadband is really exciting, for all the reasons you're talking about. Over broadcast, sorry, yeah. Is super exciting. And then also, the fact that the picture quality could be better. But I just wonder if any of the stakeholders involved in this care enough about ATSC 3 anymore to pick this fight. It's like the matter casting, like, we should have done this a decade ago and everything would be better.

• 45:10Alex Cranz?

  Sinclair needs it, like, if Sinclair doesn't figure this out, broad, like, they're done, you know, 10 years from now, broadcast TV is dead. Like, last year, we, we did a lot of reporting about how people were watching less broadcast TV.

• 45:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 45:23Alex Cranz?

  So, it's, it's on its last legs. It needs something. And if this can, can get those companies, and a lot of these streaming companies own broadcast networks, right? Like, like ABC or Disney does, Paramount does, I think, I believe Max owns a lot of cable channels. Like, there is certainly opportunity for these people. And the fact that this company has figured out this tech.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  This is lucrative spectrum.

• 45:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  You should be able to do something good with it.

• 45:45Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 45:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  Ideally, you increase the picture quality and stop broadcasting football on 720p.

• 45:49Alex Cranz?

  Instead, you're gonna buy...

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  But instead, we're doing QBs.

• 45:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  It's great. All right, let's talk about some other standards. By the way, you should go watch just the glee on Alex's face.

• 45:57David Pierce?

  That is best.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  It's a video, just watch the video. The way that I felt at the Sphere, Alex felt, during the ATSC 3, ATSC 3.0 interactivity.

• 46:07Alex Cranz?

  People like stopped to watch, because I think I was just that excited.

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Alex Cranz?

  People like coming into the booth.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  Later today, I'm gonna go look at some party speakers. And I feel like I'm gonna be the most excited person to go through the party speaker tour.

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna just join you. People are just gonna follow you. Feel your enthusiasm.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, "Why?"

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  Just some other quick standards to talk about. Qi two, it's the magnetic wireless standard that is basically mag safe. It's here, there's some products.

• 46:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a lot of it. It's, it's, the good news is less about like a specific product and more about it. It just feels like everybody has decided to embrace Qi two, which is awesome.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  And it's gonna be good. Including Apple, which is like the big one.

• 46:42David Pierce?

  Right, including Apple, like, we're gonna start to see a lot of Android phones with it this year. Everybody thinks that new Pixel is gonna have it like the, the momentum on this is super real and happening fast to the point where I think like, and we've talked a lot on this show about how cool it will be when we have a bunch of unified systems for accessories. And we're getting it with USB C, we're getting it with Qi two, like, it's, it's gonna be good things.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we've got some photos of docks from Satoshi and other companies. There's a Belkin thing that works with Apple's new Dock Kit.

• 47:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, I absolutely forgot Dock Kit was a thing.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Apple is like, we made an accessory standard and you're so used to being like, and that'll be, one company will try it, but now because of USB C and Qi two, companies are free to try it, it's like less costly in a way.

• 47:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  So Belkin made a dock, a camera dock, you put it on it and Dock Kit motorized is the dock while you're in FaceTime mode, so like follow you around. I don't know, that's cool, I think it's cool that it, that people made a thing.

• 47:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that hurts really cool.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  Is this something that's David?

• 47:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, is this anything? I will say, I hate, I hate the webcams that automatically move to keep you in the center of the frame. It is the worst experience to be on a call with somebody while their camera is constantly moving every time they move their head.

• 47:54Alex Cranz?

  But it's like, it's just pan and zoom.

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, or pan and scan, right?

• 47:59David Pierce?

  Like, if you watch something that is constantly panning and scanning, it sucks.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  Hey, Bella Porch built an entire TikTok career off that effect, man. What are you doing?

• 48:07David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, Alex, what is going on with Wi-Fi 7? It's, it's everywhere, it's like having a moment.

• 48:13Alex Cranz?

  It, it's having a moment, it's, it's faster.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  But like, it's faster because it can like do a thing, right? Like, like it can like use multiple radio channels at the same time.

• 48:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's faster. It can use multiple radio channels. And the big thing is that...

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what you, what other feature you want from Wi-Fi other than faster.

• 48:31Alex Cranz?

  No one wants anything else from Wi-Fi.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  It's also a delivery service.

• 48:35Alex Cranz?

  Go fast. It's now interactive. You can connect to QVC with it and buy all sorts of things.

• 48:41David Pierce?

  You can look at Max on it now. Which one?

• 48:44Alex Cranz?

  All of them. But yeah, I think the big thing is, is that it's gonna be smarter about how it handles your, your traffic. So if you're on the 5 gigahertz and it's, it's getting jammed with stuff, it'll switch you over automatically to 6. And this is just like, like, but the main thing is, it's just, it's faster. It's, it's getting a lot faster. It's getting smarter about how it handles all those packets. And you can prob, like, you're gonna find laptops with it now, because a bunch of the laptops announced it, to the point where I was like, oh, I guess it's just everywhere now. It's only, the cheaper laptops don't have it, but anything like, like the XPS line has it.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Alex Cranz?

  Um, a lot, almost all of the gaming laptops that were announced have it. So...

• 49:23David Pierce?

  Is it just all the stuff with the new Intel?

• 49:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it seems like primarily the new Intel. But you still have to have like the Wi-Fi chip, and, and that's expensive.

• 49:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 49:31Alex Cranz?

  And so like, sometimes they're like, no, we're not gonna put the new Wi-Fi in.

• 49:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 49:34Alex Cranz?

  But, uh, but yeah, so, so it's gonna be available this year. I'm hesitant to tell people to go out and buy those Wi-Fi 7 routers. I think you can still, you can still...

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've only just started certifying.

• 49:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  So you can buy them now, but they're uncertified, and the promise is that a software update will certify them.

• 49:50Alex Cranz?

  Right. We just got, was it Wi-Fi 6E?

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Alex Cranz?

  Like, last year or something. Um, I only know that because I bought a Wi-Fi 6 router, and then it was immediately then out 6E, and I was very bitter about it.

• 50:00David Pierce?

  That's how I feel, too. I just bought new Eros and their Wi-Fi 6, because I was like, who needs 6E? Like, that's barely anything. And I'm looking at 7, I'm like, I'm two generations behind them.

• 50:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Uh, so this is all just, this is like, the Wi-Fi companies are, are doing what the TV companies did, where they just wanna make you jealous every year.

• 50:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Alex Cranz?

  So you're like, okay, I guess I better go spend $3,000 on a new router.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would wait until there's the, the second generation routers, when things calm down. The last thing you want is for there to be software instability in your network infrastructure.

• 50:28David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  So like, unless you need, for some reason, like a 2 gigabit per second Wi-Fi link.

• 50:35Alex Cranz?

  If you live like in an apartment

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Which we all do.

• 50:37Alex Cranz?

  By yourself, really small, your router's old, you see one of these like giant, because it's always gonna be all like the giant gaming routers. You wanna spend five, four or five hundred dollars on that thing? You know, I'm not gonna judge you. I've done that. Not for seven, but I've definitely done that. But otherwise, probably, probably wait.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  No, the Eromax 7 is not four or five hundred dollars. It's like...

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, I'm thinking like the gaming. The gaming ones are also like, they usually start at four or five hundred, but then they immediately go up.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  The, a single Eromax 7 is six hundred dollars and the three pack is seventeen hundred dollars. That's outrageous.

• 51:11Alex Cranz?

  Just, just wait.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Don't spend that much money.

• 51:14Alex Cranz?

  Like, it's fast, but is it that much faster than six? Um, particularly because you're still gonna be like hampered by the fact that you have to pay your ISP, who probably is gonna give you garbage internet. Uh, so unless you're just moving a lot of big files on your Plex server, you're probably fine.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my local network is sick now. I'm pre-ordering a seventeen hundred all around.

• 51:35Alex Cranz?

  I have pre-ordered it, I swear.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  But it's, it's Wi-Fi 7 is here. It seems like it's gonna be the next. Yep. Like, 60 seems very transitory. I also have a 60 network and I feel very annoyed.

• 51:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. Next year.

• 51:46Alex Cranz?

  Next year.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then lastly, on the standards front, uh, I will say the Verge team was the most irrationally excited about this. I don't know why, but Thunderbolt 5 is here. Uh, and we have a lot of pictures of USB-C ports with stickers on them that indicate they support Thunderbolt 5. They're just pictures of USB-C ports. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't run pictures of USB-C ports here at the Verge. I am perhaps the most guilty of publishing photos of ports on our website and excitedly telling people that the future is here. I've done it a lot, but I'm just telling you, it's not even a different shape of port.

• 52:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a USB-C port with a sticker on it. They're Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 offers 240 watt charging, 120 gigabit per second data transfer, and up to, and will support monitors up to 540 hertz refresh rates, uh, on the new version.

• 52:38Alex Cranz?

  Can you bring a 240 watt charger on a plane? That's like past FAA rules, right?

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  No, that's the battery size. You can't bring more than a hundred watt, hundred watt hour battery.

• 52:47Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so this is fine.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, you can put two of those together. But you need it for some of the GPUs that you need to support 540 Hz refresh rates.

• 52:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  This is the next standard. There are some laptops here. Again, you can look at the photos of the ports with stickers on them on the website. But Thunderbolt 5 is here and Sean talked to the person at Intel responsible for Mr. Thunderbolt, who we referred to in print on our website as Mr. Thunderbolt.

• 53:13David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  And I refuse to learn his real name. Intel's Mr. Thunderbolt, when asked if Apple would support Thunderbolt 5, simply said to Sean, well, they support every other one.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  That's all you need to know.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  We also have a photo of our Thunderbolt 5 cable. It looks like a Thunderbolt cable. I'm telling you, like, our whole team is so excited. Like, there was, like, a hunt to get that first picture of a Thunderbolt.

• 53:35David Pierce?

  Look, man, like, two weeks ago, we made a whole Vergecast episode about how stupid USB-C is. This is not stupid USB-C. This is the good USB-C. So, like, we should be excited about it.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited about it. It's very good.

• 53:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. That was the Standards Lightning Round here at the Vergecast, Episode 2, CES Day 4.

• 53:55David Pierce?

  Still unsponsored.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Still unsponsored. Well, no, we're here at the Key of Connection Home.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Very good. We'll be back. We got another Car Lightning Round to come, and David's Rubric of Things That Are Not Screens. Cars is next. We'll be right back.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. CES Vergecast 2, day 4, month 1, hour 12.

• 54:59Alex Cranz?

  Year 2024.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  Last little lightning round of CES coverage. This show, over the years, has become a car show. There's just cars everywhere. We're literally sitting in the Kia Connected home. There's cars all around us. Every kind of car tech that you can think of is being demoed here. I saw a power steering pump on the show floor the other day, the Bosch pump.

• 55:22David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  They're like, here's a thing. And I was like, that's consumer technology, I suppose.

• 55:26David Pierce?

  I guess, yeah.

• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, consumers love steering wheels. Literally every piece of the car is being recontextualized to be connected, to be smart, to be an EV. David, run us through some of the highlights here.

• 55:37David Pierce?

  So that thing you said is actually kind of why I think the car stuff is really interesting, because it feels like we got a bunch of cars. There's like new versions of existing cars, right? There's a lot of that at CES every year. There's a lot of that this year. This year felt unusually also like we got a bunch of things that are shaped like cars that are barely cars.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 55:58Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 55:59David Pierce?

  And I think like the Sony Afeela, which is probably the first one we should talk about, is, to me, the closest version of that thing. This is like borderline not a car. It just looks like a car, but it's like a it's like a lounge area that runs places.

• 56:14Alex Cranz?

  Theoretically.

• 56:15David Pierce?

  The car part seems to be the least important and least fleshed out part of this car. They've spent a lot of time thinking about the seats.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:23David Pierce?

  And that's about it. I just think that's weird. We're in this like strange time with cars, where like Honda has this very cool new concept series called Honda Zero. Hyundai and Kia are doing interesting stuff there all over the place. There's just like a Bugatti chilling on the floor for reasons that I don't totally understand. But it just feels like

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  A lot of the cars here aren't cars.

• 56:44Alex Cranz?

  I saw a tank.

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  My tank.

• 56:46David Pierce?

  You saw a tank?

• 56:47Alex Cranz?

  There's like a little, like tiny tank over.

• 56:50Nilay Patel?

  There's a company here called Dodge Brothers with e-bikes, but they've bought a Dodge Challenger. And everyone's like, what's this for? And they're like, we just brought it to get attention. It's like, it's very good.

• 56:59Alex Cranz?

  It's just a good car.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  So the way I always thought about this for years was at CS, we saw the future of the inside of cars. And then the Detroit Auto Show is in a few weeks here. Well, that's where we'll see the outside of cars.

• 57:08David Pierce?

  Oh, I like that.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  The thing that is, I think, not the case anymore. Cause I think what is happening in a big way is the outside cars are going retro. There's cool design stuff, like these Honda concepts are really cool. The inside of cars, that is what is selling the cars now. So if you just think, like, I love watching car reviews on YouTube. You watch Dr. Demiro, you watch Forrest Auto Reviews. Miles Summerall is on the MKB H team. I saw him the other day. He makes great TikTok car reviews. Everyone's like flipping buttons and counting cup holders and like pushing, right? Like quirks and futures is the thing.

• 57:40Alex Cranz?

  That's where you spend your time.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  Cause you're inside the car.

• 57:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  So that whole thing has moved to the Detroit Auto, because that's how you're going to sell cars now. Right? It's like.

• 57:47David Pierce?

  And is that just because, especially as things go EV, like the, the experience of what it's going to be like to drive this thing just compresses to the point where like, driving an EV is going to be like driving an EV is going to be like driving an EV.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  And you see all the car companies talk about mobility.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Cause they're like, you're going to get the car, it's going to drive you where you want to go. And in the meantime, you'll be awash in a sea of Sony IP. Just transacting, you'll be.

• 58:12Alex Cranz?

  Spider-Man, just flipping across the car.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  On the car and you're going to be watching our streaming shows. If you could put Bravia Core in the Sony Aphila, I'll, I'll buy it. 80 megabits per second in the Sony Aphila.

• 58:23David Pierce?

  I guarantee you that's a thing.

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  Do you think it because I'm at CS? I've been wondering this all week.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  Bravia Core usage has to have dropped by like 200% because I'm not at home.

• 58:34David Pierce?

  Who's watching Spider-Man?

• 58:36Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, so the Aphila is really interesting because I kind of get what Sony needs from Honda. Can you make us a car? And what I've been wondering is like, what does Honda get from Sony? And the answer is a universe of screens and content. But that is, it just doesn't feel like enough to sell me a car.

• 58:52Alex Cranz?

  I mean, but also, most of the carmakers, most, not all, are garbage at like the software side of things, so.

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you see why Honda would turn to noted software experience provider, Sony.

• 59:05Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if you're garbage at it, it makes sense.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine if the, like, the interface of the Sony Afeela is the same menu structure as like any Sony camera?

• 59:15Alex Cranz?

  You just spend 45 minutes every time you get in your car or even go anywhere.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  Terrific image quality.

• 59:20David Pierce?

  You have to format your car before you can go into drive.

• 59:23Alex Cranz?

  You brought the wrong format card. Sorry.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  It's actually memory sticks. We're doing weird Sony memory formats. So that's Afeela, which is interesting. You look at the pictures, but it is very much, it's less about the car and more about will you watch a bunch of Sony content on these Sony screens? And I think the answer is, well, I have a phone. So no. And we'll just, it's not, it's the most vaporware of the vapor cars. Like this year, instead of a picture of it, you can like look at one.

• 59:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, you can, you can sit in the passenger seat now. But it's still, I guess that's part of what is like leaving me cold with a lot of the stuff is it doesn't really feel like any of this is getting more real. Year after year. Like, I think we're in a phase with car design that I think is not going to last forever, where everybody is just designing cars that are like the capital F future. You know what I mean? Like, everything looks like a Blade Runner prop now. And that's fun, but eventually we'll like start making EVs that look like cars again. Like, that will, that will happen. We'll come back to it.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 1:00:25David Pierce?

  You don't think so? You think we're just gonna stay in this like?

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  I think it all depends on autonomy. I think right now, we're, we're on the cusp of what feels like a really fun design renaissance in cars. Cars are real ugly for a long time. Like, the Angry Robot car was just everywhere for a minute. And now there's like some very cool, like, smooth-out retro designs are all over the place. The Honda ones you're talking about, Hyundai and Kia, that was, there's that Hyundai N concept that kind of looks like the Lorraine. Like, that stuff is really cool. You know, that we're sitting above an EV9. People keep coming and looking at the EV9. You can just see like. Car companies are getting the new Prius.

• 1:01:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  It's like a surprisingly cool looking car.

• 1:01:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Alex Cranz?

  Finally.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Dog slow, but surprisingly cool looking car. We're just not accustomed to what I think is a good moment for car design and it's because you can re, the EV stuff lets you repackage cars and think about them in a different way. And they want them to look different from what came before because they want to signal the consumers like these aren't just cars. And then on top of that, you might get to autonomy, which is a real coin flip and one that will happen. And then you get to really repackage the car into the thing that looks nothing like a car.

• 1:01:32David Pierce?

  So I totally agree with that, but like this Honda concept is just the Batmobile. Like they just made the Batmobile.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot of that going on.

• 1:01:42David Pierce?

  I just think we might've swung the pendulum a little far.

• 1:01:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a concept like.

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  But now I'm looking at the picture of this and this thing's hot. So like maybe I'm wrong.

• 1:01:50Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I would have had that on my wall when I was like eight.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:01:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  But those are, these are all concepts are all like out in the world. And you look at what's actually being announced, yes, it's like BMW put an LLM in the voice assistant. Okay, there's a bunch of AR features in the new BMWs. It's like, why?

• 1:02:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? Volkswagen is letting you talk to chat GPT inside the car, which I am told people have just been doing anyway on like the streets of San Francisco.

• 1:02:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna try it on my road trip.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  Like someone told me yesterday, like more people, more tech people in San Francisco are driving around just chatting to chat GPT instead of listening to podcasts than you think.

• 1:02:27Alex Cranz?

  Don't they have like siblings, parents, loved ones?

• 1:02:31David Pierce?

  This makes me think of like every once in a while, there's like an app that comes out that's like, turn all of your emails into a daily podcast. I'm like, who wants that? And then it's these people, it turns out.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just love the idea that people are getting out of their cars just woefully misinformed.

• 1:02:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  Just utterly be like, I know a lot of facts. This is real.

• 1:02:49Alex Cranz?

  A whole list of books that don't exist that they're gonna read.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. They're like ready to read books that have never been written.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  On the flip side of that, there is a lot of just infrastructure here at TS. Intel, I think this can only be read as a threat. Intel had a whole keynote where they announced a bunch of AI stuff. And then the quote is, "We are bringing the AI PC to the car."

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  All right.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  Whether you like it or not. Intel wants this to be a big market for them. You can see that they would like to bring a car makers to use their chips. They're very late, Nvidia is very dominant and all over the cars. But this notion that the car should be one sort of unified computer from the body control module, all the infotainment stack, I think Intel sees as an opportunity. And then let's just end here. We should just talk about Will.i.am and Mercedes.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Do we have to? So I was sent a video by a good friend of the Mercedes event, which I'm told was very expensive to produce. And Will.i.am comes out and he rapped a song about cars.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  He just did it. And the feature they announced is that, this is actually cool. I don't know if you've seen this video or any demos of it. It's an interactive musical experience in the car. So it's like playing a track. And Will.i.am obviously has chosen all the samples. And if you speed up, the track gets more exciting.

• 1:04:15Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I don't want that.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  And it feels like it's just gonna make you drive really fast.

• 1:04:19Alex Cranz?

  I was like, my car just screaming at me as I drive down the road.

• 1:04:23David Pierce?

  Have you ever, have you seen the movie Baby Driver?

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25David Pierce?

  Like the thing in that movie that's so cool is the music is matched up to what's going on. So like he's, he's steering on beat and drifting on beat. And it just, it rips, dude. Like it's so fun the whole time. I'm like, if I could do that.

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  You watch that, you watch Fast and Furious, you get in this car. Immediate accident, like you're going 100 miles per hour. Straight out, you're like, I can drift around this corner in my neighborhood.

• 1:04:49Nilay Patel?

  Will.i.am yelling at you the whole way home. So it's the MBUX Sound Drive or M-Box Sound Drive. It links the music that you're listening to is driving. So it's a bunch of tracks, a bunch of samples. And things like energy recuperation, acceleration, steering, braking and turning, all linked to what is being played. And Will.i.am refers to this as the automotive orchestra. Okay, I love it.

• 1:05:15David Pierce?

  There was a thing a bunch of years ago, and it's possible I'm gonna get all of the details of this wrong, where I think it was Spotify did a thing with Tiesto that had basically like adaptive Tiesto songs to your workout. So that like the faster you were moving, the faster Tiesto would go.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  And I tried it out and it was like, it was pretty cool. Cause it like keeps up with the beat as you're running and you like you get kinda, you fall into the right pace. A hundred percent everyone is gonna crash their cars as soon as they start.

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's, there's other things that happen too. For example, if it's raining and you turn on your windshield wipers, it'll play lo-fi beats at you. So you can drive home sadly in the rain.

• 1:05:52Alex Cranz?

  So you drive slow?

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  I was in love once.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  In my Mercedes Benz.

• 1:05:56David Pierce?

  If you get in the car and you like roll into the McDonald's drive thru, like what does it start playing?

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  Mercedes wants sound drives to be an open music platform. So that any musician create their own auditory soundscape for driving using the M-Bucks operating system.

• 1:06:09Alex Cranz?

  Can you?

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  This is like why I'm at CES. I wanna be very clear. This specific nonsensical idea with Will.i.am just mash it all. I'm surprised they haven't put the words AI in this in any way, shape or form.

• 1:06:22Alex Cranz?

  I'm just imagining being a kid in this car. You know, when you'd sit in the back and you'd like, when it's raining on your car, you're just thinking really heavy thoughts in the back of the car as a little kid. But now you'll have the soundtrack going with it, like the lo-fi soundtrack.

• 1:06:35David Pierce?

  I just wanted to like play me depressing music while I like shove Taco Bell in my face on a long road trip. Like what's, what's the vibe there?

• 1:06:43Alex Cranz?

  One hand on the wheel, tacos in the other hand.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the one where Will.i.am is like, you got broken up with. You can, you can buy a taco and a burrito, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  Like that Crunchwrap alone ain't gonna, ain't gonna take this home.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  We've all been there. All right. That's the Verchass, day two, episode two, day four at CES 2024. Right?

• 1:07:09David Pierce?

  Seems good.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  It was a good CES.

• 1:07:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  I will say it was good and I got to go sit in the sphere. An almost religious experience capped off by an almost religious movie.

• 1:07:21Nilay Patel?

  Thank you for joining us. Thank you to Kia for letting us use their space to do shows. Thank you. The whole Verge team has just been killing it this week. Please read the site. Check out our best of CES stuff. The best of CES. It's coming right now. It's going up. TikTok channel is full of really fun videos. CES is really fun every year. It's like a great way to start the year. There's just a bunch of tech. So it's been really fun. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. See you next week. Bye for all.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  And that's a wrap for 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 Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash applewatchseries12.