Echo Spot, Fire TV 4K, and Pixel 2 event preview

Amazon announced a few more Echo devices this week, and The Vergecast is here to recap it all. Nilay, Dan, Dieter, and Paul discuss Amazon’s strategy with these new products, as well rumors of stuff that will be announced at Google’s event next week. There’s a whole lot of stuff in between that — like Twitter’s new 280 character limit — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 02:22 - Twitter just doubled the character limit for tweets to 280 06:08 - The 5 biggest announcements from Amazon’s surprise hardware event 09:23 - Amazon’s Echo and Echo Plus are hiding a lot of new tech 16:41 - Amazon's Echo Spot is a sneaky way to get a camera into your bedroom 24:31 - Google pulls YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show 41:16 - This week in TV stuff 46:52 - Amazon announces new Fire TV with 4K and HDR for only $70 52:33 - Paul’s weekly segment “Kitsch in the Kloud” 54:14 - Google Pixel 2 event: what to expect Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Qualcomm Snapdragon Gigabit LTE. With download speeds up to seven times faster than typical home Wi-Fi, Snapdragon Gigabit LTE can turbocharge all your connected apps. You can stream 360 degree video at 4K resolution with minimal buffering. You can access your files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they were stored on your phone. And you can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds. To learn more, visit www dot snapdragon dot com slash gigabit today.

• 0:31Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge media empire. And also a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which I maintain we are the best podcast, although my friend Andrew Golis, the general manager of Vox.com, recently slacked me to say that he challenges this assertion. And to you, Andrew, I say, that's what losers would say.

• 1:03Nilay Patel?

  That's what you say when you're in second place, Andrew. No, whatever. Vox Media Podcast Network, it's great. Listen to all the podcasts, but then mostly listen to ours, again and again and again. By the way, we have another new podcast coming. Ashley Carmen, Caitlin Tiffany, Why Did You Push That Button? October, I'm told, it will roll out, which is coming right up. I listened to one of the episodes and it is, if I say so myself, fantastique. Also, I say it with a slight French accent. Would you say it's so choice?

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Ashley and Caitlin are like really cool. Like, they're a lot cooler than me. And if I was like it, they would just make fun of me. Let's be honest, that's just what would happen. Anyway, by the way, that was Dieter Bohn's voice. Hey, Dieter. Hey, I'm back. He's back after his week away, in what I might call the abyss. Yeah. Paul Miller is in Washington State. Paul?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing over there, man?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I'm babysitting my little brother.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  So my parents could go on vacation.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  I like it. And Dan Seifert is here with me in New York. I'm here in New York, yes. It's good, good stuff. Dan's back, basically. Yes. You know, one taste of glory. And she's in the room now. Uh, no, Dan's here. There's a ton of, there's a ton of news to talk about. Oh, by the way, I'm, I'm Neely. I'm your friend. It's good to see you again. But we should just get into it. Ton of news this week, just in non-stop flood. And I think we have to start with the most earth-shattering news of all.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  This is the most important news.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  The single most important thing to happen this week, which is Twitter doubled its character limit from 140 to 280. Jack Dorsey, it's over. Twitter's done.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  I just want to say that this news kicked off what I call the worst Twitter, which is Twitter Twitter. When people just tweet about Twitter.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they dealt lots of jokes. I want to read this announcement tweet where Dorsey thinks.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Are you looking for this is a small change, but a big move for us?

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that one.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time, maintaining our brevity, speed and essence.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  This is true. So this is what Jack Dorsey tweeted. Thank you, Paul. And I just want to just comment on the fact that he's like, our team had to thoughtfully consider this change. You know, it's a big problem. I would have loved to be in that room where they're just throwing out other numbers. 305.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Well, I think the best part is that it's a, the first 280 character tweet, and it still includes a link to the full announcement.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I just.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  They should have used like a power of two, like 256 or something.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that would have been nerdy and cool.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Or they should just give up.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  They should just give up. They could have kept 140 and done text attachments. So people want to screenshot notes. That would have been cool. I mean, literally this seems like the easiest choice.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Here's an idea. Here's an idea. Make the second 140 characters editable.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Oh, I like that. I like that a lot.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. You're screwed on the first. Yeah, they didn't add editing, which is, I think, all everybody should know is Casey Newton's particular line of attack into Twitter. They didn't, um, uh, just a small thing, get rid of Nazis.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, minor thing.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  On their platform.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I, I'm just surprised, like, I, we know for a long time that they were testing 10,000 characters and considering that. And now how do they shave off 9,000?

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  They're also rolling it out slowly.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, not everybody has it.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  But you can hack it. There's like user scripts. Uh, I saw somebody today, uh, Casey had retweeted it, an engineer who is like, literally like hacking the Twitter app at the code level to get it. What, what data are they collecting? They're like, yes, people indeed are telling bad jokes longer. Confirmed. Anyway, that's not really the most important.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Has anybody seen any Android users get 280? Dan, did you get it on your Android phone? Uh, I did not. I posted one 280 count tweet and I used the, the Chrome hack. Uh, but I've been literally checking my phone every five minutes.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  The Chrome hack is ridiculous. It literally just like changes a number. It, it just changes the limit. Like you could just tweet 280 right now if you wanted to, but it's, I don't know. This whole thing is nonsense. Twitter.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  I, I feel like I'm going to be part of a movement that, of people who only ever tweet 140 characters, like never, never go over.

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, oh geez.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Hashtag never go over.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  Hashtag never go over.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  I mean, it totally changes the thing, like the concept of the golden tweet where you hit that 140 character limit perfectly, like, I don't know. All these silly Twitterisms.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  What if, what if we, uh, shut it down? How about that?

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Uh, also, his justification that different languages, uh, can express thoughts in different character lengths is kind of interesting. Like add some parody.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting. But you know what is not at all true about Twitter? That it's interesting. Uh, that joke, it's many minutes on a silly joke about what the most important news is. The most important news is Amazon, who had an event that I think surprised everybody. So they invited people to Seattle for an event. They wouldn't tell anybody what it was about. They wouldn't even, if I'm, correct me if I'm wrong, they weren't even exactly clear on when it would start, like until the day before, basically. They were just like, just show up in Seattle, have a good time, check out the fish market. We'll let you know.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  And I believe we couldn't tell people we were going to Seattle.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  And we couldn't tell people we were going.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  So Casey and Lauren went to Seattle.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Oh, and a little, one more little piece of inside baseball. They're also like, you probably just need to send one person.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Nilay Patel?

  So we successfully argued that we should try to send some more. So we thought it was going to be small. I think our expectation was a couple of Fire TV devices had already been leaked. You know, it's funny, the one thing that was leaked the most didn't get announced, which was a Fire TV with an Echo Dot on the top.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  So we thought it was going to be small, and then they just went crazy.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, they basically dumped their entire holiday portfolio within an hour and a half or two hours.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  You want to go through it?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So for starters, they, basically everything except for the Fire TV dongle that they released, which we'll talk about in a minute, because Neel I loves to talk about TV hardware, so save that for him. But everything else was Echo products, which we didn't expect. Nothing had leaked. They announced a revised version of the Echo, which is now just called the Echo. It's not called second generation or anything, but it's shorter. It has a fabric cover or a wood cover, so it's kind of like more decorative than the original, but it's still a cylinder. It's got a dedicated tweeter, a dedicated woofer, so Amazon promises this sounds better than the original Echo, which is kind of a small accomplishment.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And then the controls on the top are the same as the Echo Dot. So instead of the spinny circular control for the volume, you've got up and down buttons for the volume and stuff like that. Then they announced something called the Echo Plus, which is basically the first generation Echo, but it has a smart home radio inside of it, which controls Zigbee devices. So you can use this as like a smart home hub instead of SmartThings or whatever other smart home hub you want. And then they kept going. The least interesting thing is the Echo Connect, which turns your Echo, connects your Echo to a landline, so you can make speakerphone calls on your Echo through a landline, if you still have a landline.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  And then the most interesting thing is the Echo Spot, which is basically a shrunk down version of the Echo Show that was released earlier this year. It's this tiny little, I guess there's a couple of ways you could describe it. It's an Echo Dot with a screen, or it's an Echo Show that's smaller.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  Or it's a chumbi.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Chumby.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  It's a chumby.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  It's a chumby.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  It's like a little chumby.

• 8:52Nilay Patel?

  It's a webcam with aspirations.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  I made the Twitter jokes about Chumby, uh, cause I love dead technology. And I decided that the best thing to call it is Chumby colon resurrection.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, like that, that, that would be a movie I would go watch.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  Chumby resurrection. Chumby 2049.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  And then there's the chumbing.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  You got him, you got him.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Oh, God. We gotta talk, we should just start with the regular Echo though, right? Like, like it's 99 bucks, it looks nice. Why would anybody, uh, in order to buy a Google Home now, you have to be like a Google, like deep in the Google ecosystem, super Google fan. You can make all the arguments you want that like the Google Assistant is better. It supports multi-user. It, uh, you know, whatever other arguments you want to make, uh, that it's like more natural to talk to, et cetera, et cetera. But it's 180 bucks. Is that, that's what they're charging for?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  I think they're 130.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  130, okay, it's 30 bucks more. But like, this is like the same thing. It's 30 bucks cheaper and like, there's just more support for Alexa stuff.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're actually selling a multi-pack of these. So you can connect multiple one units together and multiple room audio.

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  It's a three pack and you get 50 bucks off the total, right? But the main thing is a, the Echo has, the, the big Echo has always sounded a bit bad. It's just, it's not a good sounding speaker and they've, and we'll have to try it out. But the $99 new Echo, they paid some money, got some Dolby branding. They added a bigger bass driver in there, like, they've actually made it sound better.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, if any, if there's any promise to that, like, like any hope there is that the Echo Show, which came out earlier this year, does sound a lot better than the original Echo. So if they're able to take what they did with the Echo Show and put it in an Echo form factor, then cool beans.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Wait, is it, is it the regular Echo that's getting Dolby? I thought that was just the Plus.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  No, I believe the regular Echo is.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, powerful speakers with Dolby processing. I'm sure that's nonsense.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just software. It's software processing.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure, I'm sure it just scoops the frequency curve, which is all Dolby ever does. But it's fine, like, that's fine. If it sounds better than not good, it's a big upgrade.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  And then the Echo Plus, that smart home stuff is really interesting. So the, it looks just like the old Echo. Comes in three finishes. There's like a silver, a black, and a white. I don't know why it still has to be so huge. Like the Z-Wave hub, they're not huge.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's, it's funny, as a side tangent, today Nvidia announced an update for its Shield TV box. And part of the announcement was that they are releasing this dongle, which is literally the size of a USB stick, that adds Smart Things hub functionality and includes a Z-Wave and Zigbee radio inside of it. So like, they fit it in the size of a USB stick. There's no reason that Amazon needed to keep this, like, the taller Echo.

• 11:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's Plus. It's Plus sized. Anyway, but it's.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Well, to me, the interesting thing is that Amazon is weighing in on the smart home standards battle in some way, right?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Everything going over Wi-Fi, but they, they built with Zigbee instead of Smart Things or Z-Wave or whatever else.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, Smart, which one is Smart?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dan.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Buckle up, everybody. So Smart Things is a very common hub that a lot of people use. And it actually supports basically most all of the protocols. Like, if you want a universal thing that's going to plug into a lot of different things, Smart Things is the way to go. It supports Z-Wave, it supports Zigbee.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  This is Samsung's, right?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  This is the one Samsung owns, correct, yep. And it also supports Wi-Fi connected devices. The.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  What is the difference between Z-Wave and Zigbee?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  They're basically just different protocols. There is some, like, really low-level technical stuff. Like, one of them will, has like a mesh function that, like, if you have multiple Zigbee devices in your house, they can bounce the signal from one to another. So if you've got far distant devices, they can extend the signal further. But like. Those kind of things are very minor. The actual practical difference between them is like there's none to the end user.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  They both go over 2.4 gigahertz, right?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure exactly off the top of my head what the spectrum is that they use, but they they they function very similarly. They're just two competing standards that have been around for got forever, like at least a decade.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  A billion years.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And they've neither one of them has kind of like edged ahead of the other one in the smart home world. And so smart things approach back in like 2014 when they launched was like, well, screw it. We're just gonna support both of them. And that way, if you buy a light bulb, it more than likely will work with this. Whether it's Zigbee or Z-Wave or whatever. So like Dieter said, Amazon's kind of putting a foot in the ground and saying like, we're only supporting Zigbee on this.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Um, which

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  FU Z-Wave.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  FU Z-Wave, which I think honestly, like Z-Wave is the one that's gotten more updates recently, like there's been updates to the protocol. There's Z-Wave Plus devices now that have longer range. Yeah, I mean.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  That was a crazy day at Z-Wave headquarters.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, I it's kind of funny to me that they picked Zigbee instead of Z-Wave as like a deep nerd in all this. Uh, but the the concern there obviously is that like you can't just buy any device and work with this.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm surprised they're only picking one. And I don't think they've really said why they've only picked one.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I know. I haven't seen why either. Uh, I can speculate. Um, I know Philips Hue lights are based off of Zigbee. They do a proprietary thing on top of Zigbee.

• 14:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Um, so they use that as their base. And when you buy the Echo Plus, I believe it comes bundled with a Hue bulb.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, one bulb.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  One, one bulb.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Um, and then they've changed the setup. So you don't need to download all these apps. You just plug in your smart Zigbee stuff, or it can work over wifi as well. And you just say, Alexa, discover my stuff. And it goes through the setup and sets it all for you, which is a big deal, right? So far, setting up all this stuff has required multiple trips to multiple apps. It's just been a pain.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Multiple trips to the store to buy more stuff.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  God, I need another Zigbee adapter.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  All right, it looks like, it looks like Z-Wave is 900 megahertz and has larger range than Zigbee, which is 2.4 gigahertz.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  Nailed it.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  Um, man, just can you imagine the tears that were shed at the Z-Wave headquarters? It's a building shaped like a Z, by the way. It absolutely is. In the tall central control room, the president of Z-Wave was like, Bezos!

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  The building isn't shaped like a Z, it's shaped like an undulating Z. Oh yeah. It's a wave of a Z. It's a Z wave. Phasers!

• 15:29Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  The point I was gonna make is that it probably really doesn't matter which one they pick because it seems like, based on everything that we've seen, that the smart home accessory world is actually moving closer towards wifi. So you see more wifi devices and stuff like that, which Alexa has always, or the Echo has always kinda worked with, a lot of them, and this kind of probably just.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's the, it's funny you say that, cuz Eero just came out with their second gen Eero stuff. And they have Thread radios.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Ha, Thread!

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  It's like, another thing, uh, and I, I talked to Nick Weaver, the CEO, you know, there's a whole piece you can read on the site. And he's like, "All these other protocols are old and stupid, Thread's the future." And no one's ever been able to figure out, so like, you know, "We're gonna put Eero routers around your house and create this Thread mesh network, and you're gonna see a flood of Thread stuff on the market any minute now." And then Amazon's like, "Have you heard of Zigbee?"

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Because we've got a whole store full of Zigbee online.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  You know what nerds in their cars looking for a podcaster into? Some Zigbee talk. That's, that's what we're doing today. Zigbee talking. Okay, so that's.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  So, so which, which one are you supposed to buy? You're supposed to buy ones? One of the spots?

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh wait, wait, we didn't get entirely through the spot. So the Echo spot is, we've been saying it looks like a chumby, but I think it looks like a webcam. It's like a circle, it's got that kinda round form factor. It does have a camera at the top, it's got a circular screen, it's got buttons on the top. It's a hundred and thirty bucks, and it's, to me, it's like the most adorable thing in the world. Tom Warren wrote a piece for us today that's like, "This is the sneakiest way to get a camera into your bedroom, ever." Right? They put out the Echo Look, which was the fashion cam, and everyone's like, "Creepy, I don't want a camera in my bedroom." They put out this thing, which is adorable, and everyone's like, "I want four of those in every room in the house, one pointing right at the toilet." Yeah.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  No one else had that?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and I think it's because this one is useful, whereas the look not so much.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  I, I got really excited when this product came out because I went to my nightstand and I looked at it. And I've got an old school Sony clock radio there with like big digit numbers on it. And I only use it as a clock so that I roll over and look at the clock when I'm sleeping or awake or whatever. Then next to it, I've got an Echo Dot and that I use as my alarm clock. Cause every night I go to bed, I'm like Alexa, wake me up at 6 a.m. And so like this thing, which has a display, so it can show the time, also has Alexa built into it. So it can set my voice alarms, kind of takes the place of both of those. So like, that got me really excited that like, I can like clear off those things off my nightstand.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  And put tape over the camera?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  And put tape over the camera. Or like, just make sure I disable the do not disturb or the drop in.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they have to just, you could, they, they'll just let you disable do not disturb device by device and you'll disable that thing.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  I do have tape over the camera on my, um, my Echo show, uh, which sort of fusses with the, uh, you know, the presence detection. Like it doesn't light up when I walk in the room now, um, but I kind of don't care.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I only need that thing to light up. Yeah. I mean, the last thing I want on that is a camera. Like I, I will never take a video call from my bed with this thing next to it.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  It's never gonna happen.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  But I do want the screen to show me the weather and the time.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  But they want you to have a bunch of these in your house and you can be like, show me the baby's room. And like, lights up the camera in the baby's room.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Or like, you can be like, in your mansion of like 75 rooms, be like, when is dinner?

• 18:48Nilay Patel?

  Just like, literally echoes throughout the house.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  And it turns on a camera in the kitchen.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the butler is butling. Uh, by the way, I, I just looked this up. The executive director of the Z-Wave Alliance, which is actually what it's called, is a man named Mitchell Klein. Mitchell, I'm, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna come back Mitch. You're gonna get there. Talk to, talk to Apple. They love, they love.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, they love protocols. That they didn't even.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So Paul, to your question, what do you buy? Oh, and there's the Echo Connect, which is a box that literally lets you make landline calls from all these Echoes.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  Which I think is. Clever because it it solves the thing people want, but they need a landline, which is insane. But I think some people have landlines and echos and, you know, it's like, put this in, it's gonna work.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Does Am- Amazon know more about how people have have struggled to talk to each other or less? Like, are they on to something with like, ooh, video calling service, finally, I can make video calls? Or are they just like, like, I really, I really don't get it. Like, if it integrated with some service like, like Facebook Messenger or something like that, that would be fun. Or, or one of Google's five different video chat services.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, they got their own.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  But yeah, I, who, oh, man, all my friends on my Amazon video call list.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's for that. I think it's for like you, like your kids.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, I, I wrote this piece when the show came out that like, it's basically what was really interesting when the show was announced. And it didn't quite pan out in reality, but I had hoped that it'd be really interesting as a dead simple FaceTime device. So that my kids can be like, call daddy. And if I'm like on a work trip or something, I can, they can like easily call me and I can call them. And they don't have to go get my wife's iPad and set that up and like fight over who's, you know, holding the iPad while they talk to me and stuff like that. It's a very dead, simple, peer-to-peer, direct, uh, video call device.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  And I was hoping that would be the case. I don't think we've actually ever used it for that, outside of the testing period when we were reviewing it. But like, that's a really compelling idea, especially for a lot of parents that travel and, and use FaceTime, uh, to call back home and talk to their families. You know, I, I have always felt that like video calling is one of those major transformative technologies of the past decade. Uh, in allowing people to stay connected, uh, especially if you're a parent with kids that's traveling a lot. So, um, that this kind of, the idea of this furthers that along. The execution's not quite there yet, but.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Paul, we still haven't answered your question. Which you posed 10 minutes ago. Which one do you buy? Cause you still have the $49 dot. You've got the Amazon tap Bluetooth speaker.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  You can almost guarantee the dot's gonna be like $35 most of the time.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Then you've got the $99 Echo. The $130 Echo Plus. Hundred and something dollar.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  I think it's $150.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Hundred, we really should have put the prices in the rundown. $150 Echo Plus and the $130 Echo Spot. So that's a lot of choices. Oh, and the Echo Show is in there too at like $179. So.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  And there's that little button that you can press to play game shows.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, the game shows. Yeah, which is hilarious. They should have called it game shows. Uh, but that's like, that's an accessory, right? But like, I want to buy an Amazon Echo thing. I want to talk, I want to set timers with the greatest of ease. Which one do I buy? And I think the answer is gonna be, I, they're gonna sell a lot of dots because it's the cheap one. But I think a lot of people are gonna get upsold right 50 bucks into like the fabric covered, pretty one with the decent sound.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  I think all the other ones are kinda like. Yeah, I think all the other ones are like. You buy the Echo Dot when you already have an Echo and you're like, this is nice. I want one in another room.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  No, I think a lot of people.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Plus specifically for Zigbee. I don't think the plus, I don't think a lot of people are gonna be jumping on the plus. Just personally.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the people who.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  It's kind of a vague.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  The people who know what Zigbee is already have a smart home hub.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  There's no reason, except for the poor people, again, trapped in their commute. And I apologize to you. You turned on a podcast today and you learned about Zigbee. But before this moment in time, no one who didn't own a Zigbee device knew what Zigbee was. And so like, I don't underst- like, maybe you just want to simplify. You want to get rid of your SmartThings hub or you think it's flaky. You're trusting that the Amazon Echo Plus is gonna do all the work for you. I mean, I understand it. Like, I don't want that hub sitting in my house. It's like a big silly product to have. Um, but maybe you're like me, you're all in on Thread. You've just been totally convinced that Thread is the way future, the way forward.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  You're just waiting for that first Thread product to launch that you can use it with.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Fingers crossed. It's gonna happen. Uh, yeah, that's, look, you gotta, you gotta take some bets. You want to bet on the upswing of technology, not on the Zigbee looking down swing. I don't know. Skate, skate where the smart light bulb is going. That's where I was.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  But you know, I think Casey was like extraordinarily taken by the spot.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  The spot is definitely-

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  I would say he was smitten.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it definitely seems like something that will, when people see it in person, it'll be one of those things like, oh, wow, I want that.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Whereas like, the Echo is kind of a known quantity now. So many people have had them for a few years. Like, this is a cheaper Echo and people are gonna latch on to that really easily because they know what it is and what it does.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just think, you're right. People are gonna see the spot in stores and they're like, oh, that's interesting. It actually looks nice.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  The Echo Show does not look nice.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  No, the Echo Show is...

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  And I think that leads me to kind of the next big story here, which like Dieter broke, so you should talk about it, which is Google and Amazon appear to be in some sort of fight and definitely one of them is lying and I cannot tell who.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so-

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  We got a beef!

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Oh, man. It's such a terrible beef. Basically, we discovered that if you ask the Echo Show to play a YouTube video, it tells you that it can't. I think that the specific language is something that, you know, like, Google is not allowing YouTube on the Echo Show. Yes, they specifically call out Google, yep. So, we asked Amazon, and Amazon's like, like, let me just read this quote. "Google has chosen to no longer make YouTube available on Echo Show without explanation and without notification to customers. There is no technical reason for that decision, which is disappointing and hurts both our customers." It's like, okay, you're mad.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  So we're like, hey, Google, Amazon's real mad. Are you mad? And they're like, uh, "Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our Terms of Service, creating a broken user experience. We hope to reach out in agreement and resolve these issues soon." So we have seen this sort of thing happen with YouTube before. They, they like took down the YouTube app on Windows Phone. And it's gotta be, like, when Google says it's about our Terms of Service, it's gotta be about stuff like showing ads, showing recommendations, having autoplay work, showing, I don't know, the subscription button. YouTube really wants those like extra YouTube features, in addition to the ads,

• 26:05Speaker 03

  visible to its users. And so it probably demands that people have access to its API.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Use those things. But like, the, the fact that both of these companies are stridently saying, "They're the asshole, not me," is just bonkers. And then on top of that, at the, the actual event, they asked Amazon's, you know, head of hardware, Dave Limb about it, and he's like, "They won't tell us what the problem is. If they just tell us what the problem is, we'd fly out some engineers tonight and go solve it."

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why do they have to go to Google headquarters to solve it?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  I mean, he was, I think he was making a point.

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  The, what the point is, like, the plug fell on the ground, like, the team of engineers needs to go plug it back in? Like, I get the API, it's like, is, is, is Google's stance basically like, Amazon, when you, when you say, "Alexa, show me a cooking video," instead of calling the YouTube API and showing the YouTube user interface, they're like scraping the video and playing it in a custom player?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sympathetic to both sides on this.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  Reading between the lines, that's the sense I get of it, yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you, when you use the Echo Show, and back when YouTube videos were working, and you'd call up a video on YouTube, you could specifically say, "Search for this on YouTube." It would give you a search, a horizontal scrolling list of tiles of videos that have come up, and you could say, "Play number five," or you could scroll through them with your finger, and then it plays in a player that does not look like you went to youtube.com. You can't access the comments, you can't like, I can't remember if you could like things or not, but you couldn't access comments, you probably couldn't subscribe to it, or do all those things.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Couldn't smash that like button.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  You couldn't smash that like button because you couldn't sign into your YouTube account. So like, they were definitely, like you said, scraping it and presenting it in a different UI than what Google designed for its YouTube experience. So I'm kind of sympathetic to Google on, on that side of things. But like, I'm also sympathetic to Amazon, Amazon's complaint, and like, I totally get why they're so pissed off because they have zero recourse here, like, what are they gonna do?

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna build a YouTube player that conforms to the API?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  But like, I don't, I don't know if, like, when, when we say like this API, like, does Google have a public YouTube API?

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there are other, I have, I don't remember what it's called, I have other YouTube players on my phone.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Right, like.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  But they're also small.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, but maybe, maybe, maybe Google would go after them if they got big enough.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  I mean, the, the other thing to, to like, be aware of in this situation is, uh, they pulled the Chromecast from the Amazon store. Chromecast competes directly with, uh, Amazon's own products. You, it's hard to get Amazon on Chromecast. Uh, you know, they had also pulled the Apple stuff, but that got resolved. And so the fight moved from like, Amazon and Apple to now, Amazon and Google. Uh, and so, is this thing just about, like, they violated the terms of service on the API? Or is this actually about, let us get stuff in the store? And who knows? Maybe it's about, you know, the fight for search, because you search for stuff on Google and it, you know, it's much more likely, and especially in Google Shop, to point you to a store that isn't Amazon. Right?

• 29:10Speaker 03

  And, so like, these companies are battling each other on multiple fronts, and you can see pretty clearly that they're both willing to like, pull a lever. So like, this is a little bit about YouTube and it being persnickety about how YouTube gets displayed. It's a little bit about Amazon seeing, uh, that Alexa could be like, a genuine, real future computing platform, and maybe that's threatening to everybody else. Um, I don't know. Casey Colerup, uh, had the best tweet about this, and he said, "The, the future of the internet is mommy and daddy fighting, and we don't even get two Christmases."

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  That's right. By the way, I would, I would reframe that Apple, Amazon thing. It was a war. It didn't get resolved. Amazon won, running away. Right? Like, Apple does not have the leverage in terms of sales. So the, the war was, there was no Amazon app on the Apple TV, and Amazon wouldn't sell the Apple TV in the store. And Amazon, the Fire TV, way outsells the Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video is full of great stuff that wins awards, like prestige TV. Apple didn't have it, they can't sell the boxes if they don't have that stuff, if it's gonna keep being good and interesting. And they eventually relented, and Amazon's gonna put the app on the Apple TV. It's still not out.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  And they're gonna put the thing in the store. But like, that is a case of, Amazon bided its time until Apple had no more leverage left. And it's clever. I think it's real smart.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  I see, yeah, and I see how Amazon won that battle. I think with this battle with Google, if it specifically wants to get YouTube back on the show, I think Google is in the power position here. Because YouTube has all the leverage, that has all the content that people want. Especially when they're asking for short byte videos.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  Is the lesson here that whoever has the premium content has all the leverage? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't think it's about premium content. I think video search on the internet, YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the internet. Right? So if you make a device with a screen and part of your value proposition is that you can ask it to play you video, and you can't play YouTube, you're screwed. Right? So like, I don't think it's about like the premium content library, or like having the one show people want. It's literally having access to the database of information. And like, Google owns that everywhere else, except for shopping. Anyway, I just think it's fascinating. Dieter's been writing about this stuff forever.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  And it's just sort of coming true. Like, they're gonna fight and you can't just like install another app on your...

• 31:42Speaker 02

  And yeah, because your Echo Show does not have an app platform.

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Can't install Vimeo. Doesn't have a web browser. Yeah.

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  A web! Remember the web!

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Doesn't have a web browser that could access YouTube.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  Worked all goddamn time.

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  Somebody wrote a really good post about, like, "The web is my API." I'll try and find it and tweet it, about how, you know, APIs being limited. And, I don't know, man. All of this assistant stuff, all of these new computing platforms, all of these services communicating to each other. It all goes back to this fight that Twitter had years ago about third-party Twitter clients and limiting their access to it. And it turned out to like not be a complete catastrophe. You could still download and install a third-party Twitter app if you want. But whoever makes the API can set the rules of that API. And that's their right, but it means that...

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Like our expectations that these new things, these new assistants, these new computing platforms that we're using are going to be as open and free as the web are just wrong. And so when I call internet assistants like bundles, like cable bundles, I really mean it. Because now, if you go with Alexa, you get Amazon's bundle of services, but you don't get all of Google's bundle of services. And vice versa, presumably with Googles, you buy one at Google's assistants and who knows where, you know, Apple is here. So far, they're playing pretty nice with everybody, but it's, it's just a mess. And it's, it's a mess that means your access to the thing you want.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  If you're using one of these new computer platforms, happens through the lens of deals between these companies. Not through the lens of who's able to get their link to show up in a web search on Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Apple, by the way, switched Siri and Spotlight on the Mac to search Google on the web instead of Bing. Which is like tiny news, but in the context of what you're talking about, like actually huge news. They were like, hey, you know, it's better, better user experience than Bing.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Anything.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Well, if you conceptualize an assistant as like your, your buddy who's helping you out, like, like if you asked a friend to like, hey, could you Google something for me? And then they did it, like theoretically, an assistant should have similar powers as that person. Like it should be as powerful as someone sitting down at a web browser and doing things.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. That assistant should be able to tell you to screw off and do it yourself too.

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  Or be like, or you ask your assistant to Google something, they're like, well, I like Bing.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  Hi, as your butler, I've signed an exclusive deal. You're like, Alexa, when is dinner ready? And it shows you your butler using Bing. It's like, I don't like that at all. I want to just do two more minutes on kind of big picture with this stuff. And then we got to read an ad. I think Farhad Manjri from the Times tweeted this yesterday, like, the big takeaway from this event is that Alexa is Amazon's iPhone. They're like, all in on this platform. They're just going for it. They're rapidly iterating on features and specs, which is true. I mean, they have more of these products and more shapes and sizes than anybody. All the way from like, you know, the cheap dot to their most expensive show. And every little permutation between. Apple's like, here's a $350 HomePod. That's what we made.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  We made the Death Star. Google stuff, they've got one. It's rumored they're going to have some more in the future. We've seen some pictures. My read on that is that, that's right. They are all in, they're going for it. But actually, Alexa is much more like a platform like Windows. Right? They want it everywhere. You can put Alexa, Heim made a video for us. He put Alexa on like a Raspberry Pi.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  There's Alexa in my thermostat on the wall.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  There's Alexa in the EcoB thermostat. Like, it is their computing platform. And they want it in as many places. And they're making, obviously, their own great first-party products. But they're also in BMWs now. We, Nat did a screen drive of Ford Focus that has Alexa in it, which...

• 35:55Speaker 02

  It's really, really bad.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  A little shaky. But, you know, like, a company like BMW or Ford, you know, we've reviewed so many cars now, just in terms of their user interface and the screen drive series. All of them have terrible integrated voice assistants. And then you can kick them over to CarPlay or Android Auto, which have pluses and minuses of their own. But the carmakers don't like that because they want you in their UI. So something like Alexa comes in, it has no pretension of graphical user interface. Has no pretension of like doing your nav for you.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Which is like the one thing you want to do in a car when you use your voice commands, but.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  But you can just glue Alexa into that system. You get a huge upgrade on your built-in voice commands. And you still get to do like, it's a genius move for Amazon to go after car makers.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  I, I, I get it's a genius move. I think they need a lot of work in all of these. Instances where they're taking Alexa out of the home, Alexa becomes significantly less useful than you might think. Like I've used, I've reviewed phones with Alexa. I use a smart watch with Alexa. We've reviewed the cars with Alexa. And every time that you take Alexa out of the home and you think about what you want a quickly and easily do with a voice assistant. It's get directions. It's send a text message. It's call somebody and Alexa can't do any of that stuff. You still have to bounce to your other voice assistant or use your in cars. Voice control, which is not powered by Alexa and stuff like that. So like the only thing Alexa's good for. In your car right now as it stands is like playing music.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Or like, you know, if you have a smart home garage, opening your garage door.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Um, which is like severely limiting. So like, it's very exciting because. People really like Alexa in their home and they're asking it questions and they're. Playing music and they're sending timers and sending alarms and stuff like that. But like, you don't do that stuff when you're driving a car. So like, uh, people are excited to have it in their car, but I think at least from what we've seen so far, unless it changes by 2018 when BMW gets it. Uh, it's, it's a kind of a disappointing experience.

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  The, the, can, can someone fill in my ignorance? Why, why don't Amazon and Facebook collaborate a lot? They, they have so little overlap as far as what they are like really competing on. And Facebook could, could provide Amazon so much value with like WhatsApp. And Facebook Messenger as far as like having a communication platform that people actually use. For Alexa.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think if you're Jeff Bezos, I run Amazon, a trusted, beloved brand. And that is Facebook.

• 38:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, I wouldn't let the stain of Facebook, any, if I had a brand as powerful and as beloved as Amazon's, I'm not letting, like, Russian hackers near my shit.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Mark Zuckerberg, this week, was like, "I'm really sorry I dismissed the whole fake news election tampering thing. That was a mistake."

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's kind of funny that you mentioned that, like, Amazon is a beloved brand, because, like, people do really like Amazon, and they use Amazon a lot. And I don't know that people really like Facebook. They use Facebook almost as of a necessity.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we were talking about this on the show all day.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, like, they don't, they don't like it, but they do like it.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  They should collaborate with Instagram. If Amazon's gonna do anything, it's like, "We made Instagram easier to look at on the Echo Show."

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Hey, they collaborate with Microsoft. Cortana and Alexa are, like, buddies now.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  I think that's just because they're, like, next door to each other.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, "There's nothing else to do here in Seattle. It's raining again."

• 39:14Speaker 03

  "My neighbor's here. Just moved in. Gotta hang out with her. Really annoying. She never understands me, but whatever. Fine. I'll go to the barbecue."

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I'm gonna read this ad, and then we're gonna talk about some other stuff. We're gonna talk about TV stuff. Everyone's favorite.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Transferwise. Do you ever need to send money internationally? Maybe you're an engineer who moved to the US, or a business owner paying suppliers in another country, or a freelancer getting paid by a client in a foreign country. You should use Transferwise, the cheaper, easier way to send money. Because when it comes to sending money, it's banks are stuck in the past. Transferwise is the future. It is a peer-to-peer network that trims the fat off of international payments. You pay into a local account, and Transferwise pays your recipient from an account in their country. Currencies don't need to cross borders. Why does that matter to you? Because it lets Transferwise do things that your bank can't. Your bank might charge expensive fees, give you a poor exchange rate, and often it just takes way too long to use. So you can save time and money with Transferwise. Transferwise payments take seconds to set up. They charge one tiny fixed fee, and give you an exchange rate that would make your cheap Uncle Larry

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  proud. See how much money you can save by going to Transferwise.com, or download the app from the iPhone App Store or Google Play. Once again, that's Transferwise.com. Transfer is in, "I need to transfer money to another country." Wise is in, "Hey, that Confucius guy sure was wise."

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Can I just, can I read my ad now, guys? I'm gonna.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Verge Cast is brought to us by our own store, store.theverge.com. Go to store.theverge.com and enter promo code, promo code, to get some amount of money off.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  This is the true thing. Go to our store and enter promo code. The promo code is promo code. And, uh, Michael Moore, who runs our store for us, great guy, set it up for me, because he heard me say it on the last episode. Buy, buy some stuff. The promo code, uh, again, is, uh, promo code. Store.theverge.com, promo code, promo code. One promo code. Promo code, promo code, promo code. Alright, I'm gonna read a bunch of TV headlines. And we're gonna talk about some TV. Ready, ready for this? Amazon announced a new Fire TV with 4K HDR for 70 bucks. Also has Atmos support. Roku is IPO-ing. Their IPO values Roku at $2 billion. The Google Assistant has come to the Nvidia Shield TV. The Shield people are freaking out. Finally been noticed. We turned the light on them.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  And then LG's 2017 TVs are getting a Comcast Xfinity app. So you don't even need a cable box, you just push the button, you light up your Comcast. That's a lot of TV news. And I gotta say, TV news has been doing crazy well for us lately.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  It's so hot right now.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  It's, uh, the, uh, the moment to upgrade your TV to 4K HDR is, like, clearly here. The content's everywhere. The price war is in full swing. Apple lowered its prices. Amazon lowered its prices. Vudu lowered its prices. Everyone's going crazy. In, in the midst of all that, Apple's still like, $180. Hooray.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's what a Shield TV costs, just saying.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  We, we're gonna re-review the Shield TV.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  I will let you re-review.

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna re-review. I'm gonna review all these, all these new TV boxes. They're coming to me.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Your Atmos groove on.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Neil, I want you to review the Shield TV, and then I'm going to review the angry comments, uh, on your Shield TV review from the true, true fans of the Shield TV.

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I know about my review of the Shield TV. I haven't done it yet, haven't gotten it. I don't think I have a library of pirated content deep enough to make full use of that product. I know that's what it's for, guys. It's a little muscle car of a computer under your TV that can decode whatever weird Chinese surround sound format you're getting at your Telecity transfer. And that's cool, and I'm with you. I just, I don't have the depth. I don't have the raid array of like BitTorrent content.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  I've been using the Shield TV for months, and every time it gets an update, I pull it out, because I did our original review, which people don't like to call a review, but whatever.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  It's not categorized in the reviews, Dan. It doesn't show up on the page. How can it possibly be a review?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  It was January. And like, I've been using it as a normal person who's not going to Plex and not pirating things. And it's fine. It's a good TV box. I said it was a good TV box. And like, it has most of the services. It doesn't have all of the cord-cutting services, so I just signed up for Hulu Live TV, and I plugged the Shield back in to test this update this week and cover it, and Hulu Live TV is not there. YouTube TV is not there on the Shield TV, which is mind-blowing. But like, you know, it's fine if you live in Google's ecosystem and you do everything with Google, and even if you do Amazon, because Shield TV is one of the few Android TV devices that supports Amazon's Prime Video. It's just fine. It's just not worth $180 or $200, because it's not any better for me than the

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Roku Premiere I have, or the Amazon Fire TV I have in the other room.

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  It's the best product ever made. If only we would talk about it more, then everyone would have one and they would understand how good it is.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  I think you gotta check your bias, Dan.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying. Look, if anybody wants to just casually ship me a hard drive full of weird pirated stuff.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Oh, you're asking for a real Pandora's box there. Take it back.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I want you to ship it to Dan's house first. He's gonna check it out for me and bring it my way. No, we're gonna re-review the Shield TV. It's gonna be great. We're gonna love it.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Have you guys ever used Plex, though?

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Like, I was at a friend's house.

• 44:42Nilay Patel?

  Sure you were, Paul. I've got this friend, see?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  She turns on her TV, goes over to Plex, and she's like, "This guy's Plex server is amazing." I don't remember how I met him, but I have... So, it's like a friend of a friend's Plex, and all of a sudden, you have every movie.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  It's like better than popcorn talk.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  I also have a friend.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  This guy's great.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  Who's living that Plex life. I actually have a... We have a... There's more people on the Verge staff living the Plex life than I think we're giving credit to. But Plex, oh my god, now the Plex people are gonna mad at us. I will clarify Plex is a great app. It does not.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Please don't.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  It does not let you pirate anything. It's just a playback system. And then if you happen to live a certain piracy oriented life. If you are a pirate, you're a buccaneer of some kind. Plex makes that life easier.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  You have an eye patch.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  The Shield people and the Plex people are gonna be so mad at us.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  We need to get a Plex promo code. So I was really close to like helping my parents get like some sort of popcorn time situation. Cause all they do is watch Hallmark movies.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And so they're just, they just surf, they surf through YouTube. And there's just illegal uploads of Hallmark movies all over the place. Uh, but there was this one specific one they wanted to watch that we couldn't find. So we had to buy it for $13 on iTunes. And everything else is free. They're living a pretty good life.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  The Hallmark lawyers are on it.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why do you need popcorn time? Cause you wanted to rip them off of YouTube and index them?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  No popcorn time, just, I guess, you know, that's the problem with popcorn time is they wouldn't have something like Hallmark. It only has, if, it only has movies with guns in them.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  That's true. Is popcorn time like Plex without the pretense that it's not a pirated?

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, yeah, it's, it's basically an interface for BitTorrent sites.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 46:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyway, look Plex is great. The Shield is great. You can use them legally. And that's what we're gonna do.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  But most people should probably buy Amazon's new Fire Dongle. Let's talk about the Dongle.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about a Dongle. So here, people ask me on Twitter, does not have all the lights? It does not have all the lights. I don't know what's going on here. So it, uh, it supports Dolby Atmos. Everything supports Atmos. The Apple TV is actually a weird outlier in that it doesn't support Atmos. I think what's gonna be interesting, the reason Apple doesn't do it, I strongly suspect in, again, this is an Adobe white paper. So there's some evidence here. Apple wants to mix the Siri voice and the Apple TV system sounds and all that stuff into the audio mix. So they do all the conversion and just output linear PCM audio, uh, instead of having your receiver decode it. Well, the Fire TV has Alexa, so how are they gonna handle the voice? It's like, super unclear how they're gonna solve this problem.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  So if you're watching a movie in Atmos, you know, like Alexa, it has to speak to you. So it's either gonna not speak-

• 47:47Speaker 02

  I guaran- I mean, it's gonna solve the problem by not being, uh, tight asses about it. And just let Alexa speak with whatever audio codec Alexa speaks in.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  No, but you can't mix into Atmos. Like, I- I think that's gonna be the problem. You can send the audio stream of the movie, straight through to the receiver, which is what every device does. So that's why the $35 Roku can do it.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  The way it's gonna work is, when- when you use Alexa on the Fire TV now, if it gives you a response back, it pauses your content.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so- so it'll switch modes on your receiver?

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm almost guaranteed it's gonna switch modes on your TV, or output the sound through your TV speakers.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  So like, I- I'm very curious how they solved it, because Apple wants to solve it the right way, and they're- that means they don't have support at all.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Also, Apple is very against switching modes on your TV.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  Apple hates any mode switching. You're gonna pick one mode, and you will live in that mode for the rest of your life. And that mode will make The Dark Knight look bad.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  So, I'm curious about that, but it doesn't have Dolby Vision, and literally the only device, uh, that can give you both things is the Chromecast Ultra. Which, in my experience, is pretty flaky with its Wi-Fi. So, we're still waiting. Everyone's still waiting.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  You can plug an ethernet cable into the power brick-

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Then I gotta run an ethernet cable.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  So, but the- but if you are worried about-

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  If only it's supported thread.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Listen, if you aren't worried about lighting up all of Neelai's lights-

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  It seems like the Fire TV dongle is a pretty attractive deal. You get 4K, you get HDR, it's 70 bucks, it plugs into the side of your TV, so you don't need something on your console. Like, why would you buy an Apple TV over this?

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the Apple TV question, I think, is, John Gruber today wrote a whole thing, he's like, "The Apple TV is- seems like Apple doesn't know what it's doing." Like, you just read it. That's not me. I wrote the thing that's like, "Apple, please make me a TV." So I really want to buy a TV from Apple.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  That lights up all the lights.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  All the lights. Um, no, I think you're right, but you know, the Roku, Roku has a product, same price point. Sits right there, 4K HDR Atmos, no voice assistant, obviously. So like, you have to really like Amazon's interface. I think it's a, it's a, it's gonna be a good time. There's a lot of rumors about new Roku's coming. It's, when that happens, I think it's a good time for us to just sit down and review all the stuff again. And tell people.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  As we did, yes.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  The, the thing that you, in fact, do most of the time here, Dan.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Uh, Lauren Good's done a lot of work on the TV box reviewing as well. I believe she did, or last, this is my next.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  Um, but I'm really into it. I think it's also a good time. I really, a lot of people ask me like, how you can get Vision and Atmos together. And you can get it for about 1,100 bucks. You buy the TCL Roku TV that has Vision, and you can buy, uh, there's, I think there's an Onkyo Home Theater box that does Atmos, an LG Soundbar that does it. So I think it's, I think it's a big upgrade inflection point. Uh, and I'm just actually surprised. Uh, Yanko at Variety wrote 1,100 words about the Nvidia Shield in Variety this week. I mean, it's, I think it's just a time of in, like, super intense interest in TV.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  I just want to state for the record that if you count both the article I wrote today on the Nvidia Shield, and what I wrote in January, it's more than 1,100 words.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  You didn't categorize it right, Dan, and I think that means you didn't review the Nvidia Shield. This is super obvious to me. It doesn't matter if the words, "This is a review of the Nvidia Shield," appear in the copy. If you don't have the right tag on the website, it's obvious that what you've done is ignore and diminish Shield owners. And if only you would pay attention to them and the quality of their product, they would be at the top of the charts. Uh, instead of being, uh, just steadfastly ignored by The Verge and also the entire world. There.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  I'm looking at it right now. It has reviews label right on there.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  I know, man. Seem real confused. Uh, but anyway, I think it's like, it's, it, this is like the time I love the most. It's TV, TV time in America. Like, it's the time 4K HDR, like, the content's there, the products are there. The products are really cheap and good. Uh, if you're gonna upgrade, I think this is the time to upgrade. And I think we're gonna, I'm interested in making sure we do a lot of coverage around it. Okay, I'm gonna read one more ad, then we're gonna talk about some other stuff, and then we're gonna go.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast brought to you by Parachute. Parachute makes the world's softest and most comfortable sheets. Parachute's website has thousands of positive reviews. Their MyParachuteHome hashtag has developed a cult following with thousands of submissions from happy customers who are sleeping better and want to share their experience with the world. Find them on Instagram for tons of cool design inspiration. To get your own set of comfy parachute sheets, visit parachutehome.com/verge for free shipping and returns. Plus, Parachute offers a 60-night trial, so if you don't love it, just send it back, no questions asked. That's parachutehome.com/verge for free shipping and returns. I'll send you a store dot verge.com, the promo code is promo code. Paul.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  My man.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Do a segment.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  It's called Kitch in the Cloud, and cloud is spelled with a K.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, that's pretty good.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. It's, uh, so, underreported at the Amazon event, they announced Big Mouth Billy Bass integration with Echo.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  What? What?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  So that fish that, it looks like a mounted fish on the wall, but all of a sudden, surprise, it sings songs and wiggles its tail. Now, they're gonna make somehow like Bluetooth connect to your Echo, and then you play a song on your Echo and the bass will sing the song, like lip sync to the song and the audio, I get, I didn't know.

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  Wasn't this a hack that existed already? Didn't somebody make this?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody did a hack that did this.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Were you switching from a Google Home now?

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, I currently don't use a Google Home because saying Google out loud sucks.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  They got, they got the marine life in their ecosystem. I don't know, I just thought it was...

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. I mean, but this is what I mean by Alexa everywhere. Like, this is some, so, this is some stuff Microsoft would do, right? Like, just go have fun, have a good time, it's a Windows computer. Like, it's, of course they did it. It's probably a Raspberry Pi. It's probably that they just hired the guy who did this as a hack on YouTube. And just like, can you figure this out for us?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  That would be great. That'd be a great story.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  We should find that story. Alright.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's very underreported. There's like a lot of like subtle, it's like, it's like there wasn't even official press release. They just like mentioned it. It was weird.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  But I'm very excited.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think we should get it. Good segment, Paul.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  I remembered, by the way, because I wrote it down.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Kitchen the cloud.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Kitchen the cloud.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Cloud with a K.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Kitchen cloud. So I just want to do a little preview. Next week, big Google event. There's been a lot of leaks already, although it's not clear what's real and what's not. So like, a high-end Max.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  There was a leak today that there was gonna be like an ultra pixel, which like, no, super not. And like, it was a lowercase p. It was really fake, very strange.

• 54:31Nilay Patel?

  I guarantee you that is a troll from the HTC people. Right? Because their cameras used to be the ultra pixel camera, and now they're all working at Google, and they're like, we can troll the people. Like, repping that HTC pride. Anyway, so yeah, there was a leak. There's something happening with Pixel phones. We've seen a bunch of renders. They look really cool, if they're real. There was a leak today about a high-end Max smart speaker. It's like a bigger Google Home. So you see where they're all going. Amazon's taken the entire bottom and middle of the market, and Apple and Google are like, giant smart speakers to replace your stereo. And it just doesn't seem to be what Amazon's interested in all. I don't know, it just seems like Google's doing a lot of stuff. What have you been seeing, Dan?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, it seems like the leaks are happening left and right, I believe. But at the same time, didn't a smaller Google Home leak?

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  So, so I mean, Google's playing both ends, right? And maybe, you know, if they're smart, they will drop the price of the regular Google Home. Because now Amazon's undercutting them by a bunch and doing more interesting stuff. But I think everybody's gonna care about the Pixel phones.

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  That's, I mean, this event is probably gonna be really busy based on all the stuff that's leaked. And who knows if that's even everything that Google's gonna announce? But like, the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL have been pretty leaked extensively. And last year's Pixel phones were great, so I think people are gonna be pretty stoked for...

• 55:57Nilay Patel?

  We talked about this last week. The Pixel camera has been basically unchallenged for a year. It's kind of amazing.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Well, the HTC U11 is really, has a really good camera.

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm with you on that, but it...

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Do you think...

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead, Paul.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  There's a lot of people waiting for the Pixel 2?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Pixel nerds are.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  I am, even though, but I'm.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  I just get, I get the, I don't know where I get the vibe from. I get the vibe that like, like, Google made enough of a statement with its first Pixel phone that it wasn't perfect, but like, Google's, Google's for serious now.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  But I think if you're waiting for the Pixel 2, you're also probably waiting for the iPhone 10 to drop too, right? Like, there's that waiting period that a lot of iPhone customers are having right now. And the Pixel just kind of sits in the middle, in between the two iPhone releases this year.

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the iPhone 10 stuff.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  I'm excited.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  If you're excited about a Pixel 2 and you're like, ah, maybe we should buy an iPhone 10, like, I don't, who, who is that person? That, to me, seems strange.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  I think that's a lot of our audience, man.

• 56:58Nilay Patel?

  No one is sitting here deciding, like, you're either on, if you're listening to this show, you have already decided if you're an iPhone person or an Android person.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm a wild card, man.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  But you're a professional tech reviewer.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  No, but like, I buy stuff for my personal use. And I haven't bought an iPhone with my own cash money for my own personal use since the iPhone 6.

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  That was the last iPhone I bought.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And I've bought Android phones since then. But I'm looking at the iPhone 10 and I'm like, really interested in the iPhone 10 because it gives me the hardware that I've been enjoying on Android without the Android headaches.

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  That come along with that hardware. So like.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  You gotta turn on iMessage, Dan?

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yes, because it's actually easy to turn off now.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  Dieter doesn't need.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  You think it's, it's gotta be easier to go from Android to iPhone?

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  It's not really easy.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  It, it basically doesn't matter to me because all of my stuff is in Google's cloud and Google's cloud syncs with both of them. So like, it, it really doesn't matter to me. I can, you know, as a reviewer, I switch devices all the time and I have, you know, reviewed iPhones and, and tested iPhones. So I've used them more recently than the iPhone 6 that I bought. And I can switch between the devices and Dieter does this like literally every 10 minutes. You, you can switch between the devices very easily now more than ever before because so much of your stuff is in the cloud.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  I just, I don't know. I, I don't think people are waiting for the Pixel 2. I think Google has to make a big splash with it. They also have to make enough of them, which was just a huge problem with the first Pixel.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 58:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe they, that's why they bought a bunch of HTC engineers. Like, do you, do you guys know how to make phones?

• 58:36Speaker 03

  They bought them, they bought them last month and they just, they've just got, they just sent them straight to the factory.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Welcome to Google. Go make phones right now.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  One of you go to Qualcomm and secure all the processors we need. One of you go to whoever they're sourcing displays from, it's gonna be Amoled, right? So, one of you go talk to LG, make sure we got all the screens.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  My god. Well, the baby, isn't there a rumor of a baby Pixel that's based on the HTC?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Well, the rumor has been forever that HTC is building the small Pixel.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  And LG is building the big Pixel.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Uh, which comes with a kind of interesting dynamic there. But then there's that rumor that one of them or both of them will have the squeezy things that HTC does.

• 59:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  So, that'll be interesting.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  That'll be great. Apple's like, this is the most revolutionary, advanced iPhone, and sets the tone, and Google's like, you can squeeze this one. You squeeze the hell out of it. It's great.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I have a fairly unrelated dongle life update.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes, hit me.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  I've, I've been testing the Essential Phone and, uh, flying with it. And so I've listed a lot of audio over that, um, USB-C headphone adapter. And it freaked out on me. And now, in like, the high, high range or something, it put, make, it adds this really weird robot fuzz to audio.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  That's, that's the Android.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  That's the Android. You're just listening to the heart of the phone.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Well, it's weird because I really, I thought that dongle, I kinda like the Essential Phone's dongle, like, for audio quality. I thought maybe it's even better than the iPhone one, but now it's busted on me and my, my technology curse continues.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, iOS 11, uh, will only play Apple Music through my Bluetooth headphones and not audio from any other app. It doesn't even show up on the list. Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  I've got Bose QC35s, they worked great with this phone before. Outdated iOS 11, I was trying to, I was saying, I was listening to the first episode, or one of the episodes of Why'd You Push That Button? Andrew, our producer, sent it to me in Slack, hit the button, wanted to listen to it. A phone came out, the audio came out of the phone. So I slid up the Control Center, pushed the button. Where is it? Every Apple TV in all of Vox Media showed the hell up.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Repair the headphones.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  I repaired, of course I repaired the headphones. I also turned it off and on again. Then I cursed it and did a voodoo chant. Like, I mean, I did all the things.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  iOS 11 is a perfect operating system.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  No, the iOS 11.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Not talk back.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  I literally sat there being like, why can't I just plug in my stupid headphones? Anyway. It's fine. Everything's fine.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Well, I think one of the other rumors with the Pixels is that they're not gonna have headphone jacks. So, pretty much everyone loses.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  This is gonna be.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  You have to, it's gonna get to the point where you have to buy a Samsung phone to keep it headphone jacked.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  Samsung's gonna keep headphone jacks in those phones forever.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Hopefully.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  Um, just forever. You can just tell. They're like, yeah, we got specs. You like specs? Here's all the specs. Dieter was at my house. We were playing with my LG TV and I was like, it has some weird cast to screen functionality. He was like, I can do that. I'm like, what? He's like, it's a Samsung phone. And I see him streaming his phone to my TV. It's like, whatever standard in the world is out there, Samsung's got you covered. Yeah, I'm super pumped for the new Pixel. I'm like, I don't know, I'm, I say this every time, I'm gonna buy it on the show.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  And then you're not gonna use it because of iMessage.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  Because of iMessage. We gotta, we gotta write the how to quit iMessage. Just how to let it go.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Hmm. Like a 12-step program?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  I think the key is to not be like me, not have any friends that you actually message ever, not be in any group messages.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Force your family to use Amazon voice video calling.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  The only person you message is your spouse.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  And they don't care whether you're a blue bubble or a green bubble. And you turn it off.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Force your children to use Alexa video calling.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  This is why I'm on, I'm on Facebook. I've, I've got on the, the push in Facebook a little bit, not for the, the feed, but for the messaging, because they have group video calling. Like, Apple doesn't have that on iMessage. And it's a real chance to get my, my family to pivot to Facebook, so we got like a Facebook group.

• 1:02:59Nilay Patel?

  But you wanna pivot your family to Facebook video?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Nilay Patel?

  Are you firing all your print reporters?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, absolutely.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Print is dead. We gotta go where we can monetize. Like, they're just not interested in long form content anymore.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  These millennials.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  These long form calls. It has, it has to be shareable.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  Stackable.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  So get, get, get them on to, to Facebook Messenger, like you can create a group on Facebook, right? That we can message each other back and forth about the Seahawks or whatever we want to talk about. But then if we want to do video calls, well, really it goes in reverse. You get the group to do group video calls, but then you already have the, the group created, get people messaging on there, get them off of iMessage, and then I'm free and I can switch phones whenever I want to. But I can't leave iMessage in, as long as my family has a group chat on iMessage.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  I feel the same way.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  I mean, does your family love you?

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Just ask them to switch.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  That's the Vergecast, everyone.

• 1:04:06Nilay Patel?

  It's just, please, please ask yourself, does your family love you?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  We'll be back next week with Paul's answer.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. Paul, take your best guess. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking yes.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  I think they like me at least. Definitely like.

• 1:04:23Nilay Patel?

  I've met some of your family. They seem very fond of you.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  But do they like you as much as they like group messaging and iMessage? That's really, it's not, it's not whether they love you or not. It's whether they love you as much as they love the group messaging.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  The answer for my family is they love group iMessages more than me.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Just so everybody knows.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  I feel very, I feel very strongly that my family will pick iMessage over me. It's, it's been proven out multiple times. All right. That is the show. Kind of, kind of a down note. Kind of an ecosystem lock in. All of us are alone in this world.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Listen, it's, it's hardware season. It's exciting. There's lots of hardware.

• 1:04:58Nilay Patel?

  There's all kinds of stuff going on. We got pixels. We got dynamic range for days. High, high dynamic range even.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  TVs are so hot right now.

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  TV, I'm so, I love, there's nothing I love more than crazy TV stuff. So we're just, we know. Keep it, everyone knows. All the lights.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. Uh, let's wrap this thing up. So you can follow us on Twitter. We're at Verge everywhere. Dan is D C Seifert.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  Paul's Future Paul. Dieter's Backlon. I'm Reckless. You can find us on the podcast app. You can leave us a review right there. I want to tell you, we're going to be running some promos for Why'd You Push That Button? On the show, pretty soon. And we might even stick an episode in the feed. Let me know if you think that's a good idea or not. I'm just toying with it, but it's a killer show. Yeah, I think you're gonna love it. That's coming up soon. But in the meantime, great other podcasts to listen to. Lauren Good, our very favorite, hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is, if you're a media nerd, just the best. Um, and there's all kinds of other Vox Media podcasts out there in this world, including some at our great rival Vox.com.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  I keep trying to start this beef and just utterly failing because we're all friends. But you can listen to our great rivals, Vox.com, The Ezra Klein Show, The Weeds, all good stuff in the Vox Media Podcast Network. And lest we forget, store.theverge.com.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  Promo code.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  The promo code is promo code.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Let's just, let's just stay for the record that, uh, the promo code only works at store.theverge.com.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  So that's why we're the best.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  Not everywhere else on the internet. You can't just walk into a Crate and Barrel and be like, promo code!

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Or, or even Vox's. I don't know if they sell merch like we do, but if they did, they don't have promo code.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  They're not a flagship. Ain't got no t-shirts. It's gonna happen. I'm gonna start this rivalry. Store.theverge.com, the promo code is promo code. That's it. That's our show. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Paul. Paul.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  A little Oregon outro?

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  Yes, please.

• 1:07:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah!

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  It's a foot pumper.