A gadget lover's guide to the great outdoors

The Verge's Thomas Ricker joins the show with an update on his question to live the #vanlife. He shares stories about Starlink Mini, the new Peak Design backpack everyone loves, converting a Sprinter van to a mobile apartment, and more. Then, The Verge's Andru Marino takes us through his tests on a bunch of new creator- and social-friendly microphones, which plug into your phone and promise to make everything sound better. Finally, we answer a question about web browsers on the Vergecast Hotline. (Don't forget to send us your questions about The Verge and The Vergecast for next week's episode! Call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected] with all your most meta questions.) Further reading: Starlink Mini review: space internet goes ultraportable Peak Design’s Outdoor Backpack is a more versatile everyday bag Stoke Voltaics’ portable electric cookware review This backpack solar generator can help you ignore nature This little box provides on-demand power when off the grid Living and working from an all-electric VW ID Buzz DJI’s new wireless mics skip a few features to get smaller and lighter 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.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Van Toilets. I'm your friend David Pierce. And can I just complain about something just for one quick second? When did video games become homework? So it was just the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, which means I spent a few days mostly not in front of screens, playing games with my family and reading. It was also my kid's birthday, so we did a lot of birthday stuff. And then I come back and I turn on my switch to play some FIFA or EA Sports FC, whatever you want to call it. And it's like, here's all the limited edition Black Friday stuff that you missed. And now everyone you play against is way ahead of you because they got all these cool upgrades and things that you didn't because you weren't on your console for 12 hours a day all weekend.

• 0:46David Pierce?

  I generally love that video games are more multiplayer than ever and are more sort of global than ever and that there are lots of different modes and ways to compete. And you're kind of doing other things against real people all the time. But that comes now with this idea that you have to be in it all the time or risk being left behind. I get why the game companies do it. I hate it. I hate the feeling like I have to be in a Discord and I have to grind. People call it a grind now. Video games are not supposed to be a grind. I hate it. I'm going to keep doing it and I'm going to keep playing it because ultimately I like the game and the game is fun when you're good at it and it's less fun when you're bad at it. And that is what these companies know and it's how they get you. But it drives me nuts.

• 1:28David Pierce?

  Anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about today. We are here to do two things. We're back from Thanksgiving. We got lots to do. News is still happening, lots to talk about. First, we're going to talk to Thomas Ricker, who is The Verge's, I guess, like unofficial Van Life correspondent. He is going to tell us about his adventures with new outdoor batteries. He's tested a backpack a lot of people are really interested in. He tested Starlink Mini, which I have lots of questions about. He's going to give us the rundown on all the new stuff for kind of outdoor adventurous living. Then we're going to talk to Andru Marino about microphones. We've done a lot of these tests with Andrew and I'm actually really excited about this one. He's been testing some of the new Creator mics, the DJI ones and the Rode ones, the ones that you can just kind of clip to a collar and connect to your phone or your camera

• 2:12David Pierce?

  that make it really easy to get good audio almost anywhere. He has some really fun takeaways and I'm going to quiz him and we're going to hear on some of how these actually sound. The answer, spoiler alert, is don't use that stupid one that everybody uses on TikTok. The like lapel mic that people just hold like this. Drives me nuts. As you're gonna hear, it sounds awful. Don't use it. We also have a hotline about web browsers that I'm very excited about because as you know, web browsers are near and dear to my heart. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, even as I'm saying this, I realize I have to go play FIFA now because there's like some stuff I need to get and some XP I gotta get in order to catch up. So I'm gonna go finish that, get caught up, and then we're gonna get into it. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and control. Amex Corporate connects cards with flexible spending controls and real-time visibility to help teams adapt faster. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane. We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, taking his dog to therapy, and winning an Emmy for Only Murders in the Building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 3:59David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, I have played some EA Sports FC. I've done my best. I still missed a bunch of stuff, but I'm slightly caught up. I am doing my best to not spend a lot of money inside of this game, so help me stay strong, and we will aggressively lose to very good players together all the time. All right, let's get into it. First up, Van Life. Thomas Ricker was on the show a while ago to talk about some of the gear that he's been using on his adventures. Thomas is... Potentially the coolest person at The Verge. He's always like on a Friday afternoon, like, oh, I have to leave a few minutes early. I'm going kite surfing for the weekend. Or like, oh, I'm going to be out of touch for nine days because I'm glacier hiking or whatever.

• 4:42David Pierce?

  He is forever on adventures and is forever trying to find the right tech to take on his adventures. It's been a minute since we caught up with him and he's also been reviewing a whole bunch of interesting stuff, whether it's power sources or batteries that go with those power sources. Or he did a really fun review of some cooking gear on the site. He got a new Peak Design backpack people are excited about. So I figured we'd just have him on and run down some of what's new. What's made it into his setup? How he's feeling about his adventures? What works? What doesn't? Where we can go next? And listen, I can't have his adventures. I'm not cool enough, but I can live vicariously through Thomas. So that's what we're going to do here. Let's get into it. Thomas Ricker, hello.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Hello, David Pierce. How are you doing?

• 5:25David Pierce?

  I'm good. You are the only person. I think this is a fun question to ask on a podcast, but where in the world are you right now?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Today, I'm actually at home in Amsterdam. I am arranging to pick up my van hopefully next week. I got a couple of weeks off, had a lot of holiday that accumulated by the end of the year. So hopefully I can maybe disappear into the Black Forest of Germany. I don't know. We'll see what happens.

• 5:50David Pierce?

  Well, okay, I was going to ask, do you have, is the van being worked on? But this is where I actually want to start. You haven't been on the show in a while and the last time you were on, you just kind of gave us a rundown of like your, your van life gear. And I have some stuff I want to talk about. You've been reviewing a lot of gadgets, but mostly I just want to get like a current picture of the setup. What's in your van slash bag slash, I don't know, bike stack these days? What's new to the setup?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  I'm not, man, I'm not even sure that we had bought the van last time we spoke, but at the beginning of the summer, we, um, actually I guess it was in the spring. We pulled the trigger on a kind of a lifelong dream we've been saving for a long time and we bought a Mercedes Benz Sprinter. It sounds fancy because it's Mercedes Benz, but this is basically the delivery truck that DHL uses and everybody else here in Europe. It's a cargo van. So I'm also old now and while it was really interesting, the idea of rebuilding it myself, learning how to do that, I don't have time to make a bunch of mistakes. I also don't have a garage to do that work. So I farmed it out to a local van builder. I've actually written a few stories with this guy.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  That's how I met him. So just decided to hire him to help with the build. But we're doing it in phases. That's why, so we did a first phase. We traveled around Portugal and Northern Spain for the summer. That was like, that took a month or two to do that build and now it's back to get it ready for winter because we want to take it, like park at a ski resort and just go snowboarding for a few weeks. There's a certain amount of freedom and things you can do, hobbies you can pursue if you have your whole home with you. So that's kind of what we're doing.

• 7:36David Pierce?

  Okay. So what's in this current build? Like you said, getting it ready for the winter, what does that actually entail?

• 7:42Speaker 03

  So the big thing is getting the diesel heater set up. Right now, we're just using the standard heater that comes with the Mercedes Benz. It's an optional thing. Van builders, there's a wide variety of heating options. You often do an aftermarket thing that you stick under a seat. Ours comes standard or ours comes from Mercedes. So it's nice because you can use it from an app. You can like turn it on when you're remote, you can have it running and you can monitor the temperature while you're on the ski slopes, for example. But we put a storage bench on top of it and inside that storage bench is our toilet. So we have to properly route that heating so it doesn't heat up our toilet too much.

• 8:26David Pierce?

  Because like a like a warm toilet is a nice thing, a too warm toilet problems.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this is a small space and there are smell issues potentially. So we're trying to, we're trying to do that. So that's what that's what he's doing. And he says he's got it ready for a first test. So I'll hopefully have that ready this weekend.

• 8:46David Pierce?

  Okay, that's really exciting. Is this like, I would imagine the the moment you get the van for the winter is like a like a real sort of sending off on your voyage kind of moment, like setting sail on the ship hundreds of years ago kind of vibe.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and I'm brand new to this. So I've had a lot of questions. I mean, we we we put on these these big rugged four by four off road tires. We have a lift kit on it. But like, certain countries have certain requirements for chains. Like, do I need to put chains when I'm driving through Austria? So there's just a lot of preparation that has to take place to to even get on to the road for the first time. But then there's is also a matter of packing and unpacking because it is a small amount of space for a van. It is a huge, what we call the garage. So all that space for storage in the back. But now we're swapping out like our kite surfing gear for snowboarding stuff. We have to figure out what to do when the boots are wet and icy and snowy and how we can collect that moisture that's gonna develop

• 9:41Speaker 03

  when things melt inside the van. What do we store on the outside of the van? We also have cargo like attached to the back, which looks really, really cool. I'm not sure how functional it's gonna be yet, but we're gonna find out. Like, I don't know if it's like, do I put my boots back there? Are they gonna be frozen when I pick them up in the morning? Do I have to keep those inside? So, yeah, like I said, I'm totally new to this. So it's a big learning curve. But there are so many great forums and in a community as well, that's very willing to help.

• 10:09David Pierce?

  I'm I'm struck by how much more sort of straightforwardly practical a lot of this stuff is than I would think. Like, I think when when you you see, you know, YouTube videos are like, shows that they've made over the years about making this kind of stuff. And it's all like, cool, flashy stuff that you can do and interesting like bells and whistles you can add to these things. But you're talking about like, heating. And I was going back through a bunch of stories you've written through this journey. And you're like, you are obsessed with how to power things. And and it's just, it's such a simple thing. But in the guise of what you're talking about, like, it's it's just so simple and straightforward. And you're thinking a lot less about like, do I use Alexa? Or do I use HomeKit? And you're just like, where does the water go?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Oh, exactly. And like even on the electricity side, you have to decide, are you going to do a 12 volt or 48 volt system? And the pros and cons of that, because there's weight limits. You go with the the higher voltage and you can do smaller gauge wires. Or is it higher gauge? I can never remember. Anyways, the narrower cables. And as a result, you have less weight and there's weight restrictions, at least in Europe. And so if you go over the weight, then suddenly you need a different kind of class of driver's license. So there's a lot of small things you have to consider just to get on the road and then to keep everything powered. But yeah, water for the winter. What do you do so it doesn't freeze? Some some people put these giant water containers below their vans. Or at least it's it's in uninsulated parts of the van.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  And if it's not heated, it's going to freeze and then you don't have any water when you park. But yeah, it's just a tremendous amount you have to think about, but for me, it's fun. It's it's like it's a massive puzzle and it's a big learning curve. But it's all stuff. I mean, it's tech. It's all stuff I like to do anyways.

• 11:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  And the amount of gadgets that I have uncovered through this, like it's just a whole new playground to explore.

• 11:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, I want to talk about all of those, but let's talk about power first. You I know for years have been on this, like, how do I do? Battery, solar power, combinations in a way that is like relatively cheap, relatively light and as effective as possible. Is that is that is that a good summation of of the journey here?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And and stuff that you can reuse as well. Because if you put it in one location, and it's nice to be able to use it somewhere else. Because like, you can have a system installed in your house. And wouldn't it be nice if if you disappear in your RV for the summer? That you can remove that because it's a huge investment and you can put it in the RV and then you can reuse it there. So power is is a big thing that I believe is changing. I think there's a you have these these dedicated. Well, I call them solar generators. But anyways, they're giant batteries and they have solar controllers. So you can attach a system of solar panels onto your roof. You can do folding panels as well that you have out on the side.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  But it's going to collect that and manage the voltage properly. So it charges those batteries at the most optimum way that it can. But these are all self-contained batteries. The other route is to go with something in van world. It's mostly from a company called Victron Systems. And then you have. You need an electrician, or at least that level of knowledge, to figure out Yeah. all the components that you need to hook up, and all the wiring and everything else. Now it's all self-contained in these boxes that are sold by EcoFlow and Blue Eddie and a number of other companies. I mean, the list is growing every day. My problem is all these companies, although some of them have US addresses, every one of them comes out of China because those lithium ion battery packs, that's where everything is produced.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  And that's where all the solar panels are increasingly coming from. The nice thing about that, having all this capacity and all this product, is that the prices have been coming down. But now the tariffs are being applied on top of that, so it's kind of difficult. But at least at the moment, historically, the prices are way cheaper for batteries and solar than ever. Solar is way more efficient. So instead of doing these piecemeal systems, like from the companies like Victron Systems, I think the way to go is to get these self-contained boxes, these solar generators. You can use it at home, like EcoFlow makes a balcony solar system. So when you're home, you can have it charging and pumping energy back into the house. Now, that's a controversial thing.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  It is, at least in most of Europe, it is considered safe, within limits. I think they go up to between 600 and 800 watts. That's legal. Because they just plug right into your electrical socket in your house. So it seems super weird, but it's... That's a bold thing to just plug into the wall. It felt really bad, and I asked lots and lots of questions. I talked to all my engineering friends and my electrician friends, and they said, oh, it should be okay, and it's approved. So I did it slowly, but then, anyways, but then, you know, you can have it charging at home. You have that big battery, because those batteries are like 50 cents, you know, between 50 and 70 cents per watt hour.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  And they're, like, the one that I'm testing right now in the van is eight kilowatt hours. So that's a $5,000 battery.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  You you don't want that just sitting idle. You want to be able to use that as much as you can. So it's here in the house when you know, connected to a balcony system. When you know, when I'm at home and then when I'm in the van, I could just wheel it out of the house. It's not light. It's like a hundred pounds or more, but then I can put it in the van and continue to use it then. If you get one of these Victron systems, it's just stuck in the van all the time. And yeah, that's not ideal.

• 15:43David Pierce?

  And that does seem like a good outcome, actually, to have something that is sort of scalable in the way that you're describing. Like, I feel like for you, the white whale is then to be able to take sort of one part out of that system and put it in a backpack for your weekend. And I feel like all of the stories about this stuff that I see you you writing are like, that's the one piece that's missing where you're like, they've done this thing that I can, it can, it can heat a room. It works on electricity. It's great. It is too damn big to carry with you anywhere. And it's like that, that is the one sort of magical piece of this system that still seems to be missing.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, the the physics of of needing giant batteries to handle all that capacity that that you need, that that that just can require a giant, heavy block that's going to take up space. But when you mentioned backpacks, I mean, that brings me to Starlink Mini.

• 16:29David Pierce?

  I was just about to ask about this, yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Which I, which I just recently reviewed. I bought my own. I've been testing or I've been using the Starlink. It's called a standard actuated dish. It's the kind of the the dish that you think about when you think of Starlink. Been using that for two years. That was a review unit that The Verge bought, but then we didn't have an option to send it back. So I just took over the monthly payment. The Starlink Mini I purchased on my own because I I knew immediately, once I saw it, it was going to be something that I could use. It's just, oh, I don't even know where to begin.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  It is my favorite, absolute favorite piece of technology. And it just blows me away that there's like these, you know, what is it, four or 5,000 satellites now flying overhead at 17,000 miles per hour. You have a little laptop sized dish, which is now the Starlink Mini. It has the Wi-Fi router built into it. It's about the size of a thick laptop. Um, I can pop it in my backpack and I can connect. I can walk around with, you know, satellite space internet. It's just, it blows my mind every time I do it. Now, that, that is not a common usage scenario. In fact, I can't imagine. There's not often that I need to do that. In fact, I've never needed to do that. I just did it for the, for the review to see if you can.

• 17:45David Pierce?

  But you can now, Thomas, and that's the point. You can.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. Well, what I did do is I did put it in a backpack with a, with a small battery. It's um, like a USB CPD. God, I gotta get all my acronyms right. USB CPD 3.0. So it has to be capable of 100 watts output. And then the largest battery that you can carry on to an airplane, I think it's 99 watt hours. Uh, so it's not very big, but that battery connected to the Starlink Mini will power that thing for three hours. Um, you bring a solar panel and connect it a little portable folding solar panel, connect it to that battery and you have a sunny day and you can probably get maybe five, six, seven hours out of it, maybe, under

• 18:30Speaker 03

  the ideal conditions and you're constantly readjusting to the angle of the sun. But I put all that into a, into a backpack. Um, and you know, I, I took the van to the end of the road and the rest of it was a walking trail and I continued walking on and, uh, and I, and I set it up and I sat there with some food, lunch, worked for a couple hours just to see if I could. And it was, it was like, it was like a, I don't know, this epiphany moment, like, you know, we talk about work from home. That's a, that's even a, a label that we have at The Verge, but if you have a job that allows you to work from home, then you can really work from anywhere if you can get away. Um, and I've been working from home for 20 years now, um, going back to when, when I started at Engadget to co-founding

• 19:13Speaker 03

  The Verge. It's so the advent of, of, of space internet and cheap solar and cheap batteries has just really made it possible to work from anywhere.

• 19:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's pretty awesome. And I think the thing that surprised me the most about the Starlink Mini was that it feels like, in theory, it would be huge increase in portability, big decrease in performance, right? Like, that's what you get from all of these things. They make it smaller and it gets a little worse, but it's a lot smaller. And that's like a trade you have to decide how to make. It seems like you barely had to make that trade at all.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  There was, there was hardly any downside to adopting the Starlink Mini. I had, when I did the speed tests, like side by side with the actuated dish, the one that's motorized and it's like four times the size. And the wifi router is a separate box.

• 20:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  For my needs, like, like using it in a van, even testing it at home, there was hardly any performance degradation. Sometimes it would be due to like being too far away from the wifi dish. Sometimes it would just be due to the antenna not being able to connect to enough satellites or not being able to pull down enough data, but it wasn't noticeable, right? It was only noticeable when I was like doing the, the speed test, but day to day, like when I'm on a Zoom conference or when I'm like streaming 4K video, it doesn't make any difference and gaming already sucks on, well, it doesn't suck. You, you can't do anything that requires like

• 20:39Speaker 03

  really light latency because your, the latency is, I don't know, 30 milliseconds up to 100.

• 20:44David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  But for everything else, for working remotely, if you're a digital nomad or, or van lifer, there's just, there's, there's hardly any downside. And it sets up really fast because it's just, you plug in the USB C cable. You can even set it on your dashboard and if you have a big enough window, which most vans and RVs do, and you can use it just like that. You don't have to mount it on your roof or anything and you can use it while you're driving if you're an idiot.

• 21:08David Pierce?

  I have to say, well, yeah, don't do that, but you can, because again, now you can. The, the dashboard picture was the thing that caught me though. You had a picture in your interview where you basically took the mini and just sort of slotted it into that space between the dashboard and the windshield.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 21:23David Pierce?

  And it sounds like that worked really well. And for me, it's like, oh, this is now just a thing I can just pop out of the backpack, press a button and use in a way that feels like magical and is, is not, even with Starlink, has not been my experience. And I confess I have, I'm a little out of the loop on Starlink. So maybe in general, it's much more reliable than it once was. But the thing where you can just pull over to the side of the road, stick the thing in the dashboard and be online is like, like you're saying that, that feeling of I can now do this anywhere is very powerful and super exciting.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think, well, it probably is more reliable than at the beginning. And the big thing that that sets off many users from everybody else is that if there's a tree, we can move because trees will defeat a Starlink every day. But you can always pick it up and move it. You can change your location. That could be a problem if you know you're charging your solar panels or whatever. But if you're charging your solar panels, you should have complete, you know, clear view of the sky. So then Starlink should work as well if the angle is correct. It is an unbelievable device and a game changer if you're, if you want to live and work remotely.

• 22:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's the it's the first thing I've seen where I'm like, yeah, I could just screw off to the woods and maybe nobody would notice for a long time. It's like, it's pretty, it's pretty compelling.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  And the other thing, the other thing about it, like we, we kind of, or maybe it's different in the US because you have broad sections of the US that are just isolated. And so you're not going to have a big cellphone tower or, you know, 4G, 5G coverage. Europe is much more densely populated. But I find just driving around in places I want to be, like on, you know, abandoned ski resorts on the tops of mountains or the beach, you know, on some lonely stretch in in northern Spain. You just, you also don't have coverage there. And when you do, it's really light. And just for the peace of mind and security that I know when I, you know, log in at 8:30 in the morning, I'm going to have coverage from one of three, you know, because I also have two phones with two plans that I carry with me just as backups.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  But I was driving around for, I think it was eight weeks this summer, and it was, it was just bulletproof everywhere. And I visited like eight countries, all the way from Denmark to the tip of Portugal. So it was, yeah, just incredibly reliable.

• 23:37David Pierce?

  It's funny that you say that because that's actually been the thing for me where like, we had a pretty good run of just going to like, I don't know, Airbnb's for long weekends, right? Just sort of small getaways. And we did a lot of those. And I came to this place where I was like, oh, I can count on there being. Connection almost anywhere, but it sucks a lot of like the the US not only has lots of spaces with no connection. It has huge rural swaths of just awful connection, like really old copper DSL lines are what people are passing off as like, quote unquote broadband internet. And like for me, that's just, it's unworkable, right? Like, I can't, I can't sit on a zoom call for an hour if I need to on that connection.

• 24:21David Pierce?

  And so that that thing you're describing, that peace of mind of like, okay, worst case, I'm just gonna have to drive down the street away from this tree. Best case, I'm just gonna sit here and have great internet all day is like, there is freedom in that that is is extremely, extremely exciting.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And I should mention that I'm not paying for like priority access because those are, you know, there are different fee tiers that you could pay for with Starlink. I'm just using the regular metered connection with a lot where they give you lots of warnings that, you know, if it's a, if it's, if the system is overtaxed, you'll be deprioritized. It's no, I never had any problems, but you know, your mileage may vary.

• 24:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think there's still the thing where like, it's useless to me at home. So it becomes, it's an extra big purchase to do just for the kind of trips that I take. So that that cost benefit analysis, I think for you is like a person who is going to throw it all away and live in a Sprinter van easier. And I think the the Starlink challenge is going to be like, how do we get the sort of occasional traveler to think this makes sense for them? And I don't know if there is an answer there, but I suspect things like the Mini seem like it starts to get closer to that.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And and the thing that really helps is the way that the subscription works, you can cancel it for the months you're not using it. It's not a day to day or by hour cancel is a cancellation. So like, I'm not using it for the for the month of November. So I put a cancel on it. So I at least saved, I think my my subscription costs 70 euro per month, but it's much more expensive in the US. Yeah. Just for a variety of reasons. They're trying, yeah, they're, they would rather people in the US use a residential dish. If you go to Guatemala, for example, you look at, you go to the website, I think it's a, it's like 20 euro a month.

• 26:00David Pierce?

  Really?

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, it's by region. And, you know, everybody said, you know, it's now now available in the US. Those are the news, those are the headlines, but it's already been in South American countries. I think there were five countries before the US because that's their primary market for the Mini.

• 26:14David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  So it's priced accordingly.

• 26:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay. All right. Two more things I want to ask you about, and then I'm gonna let you go here. The first is the Peak Design Backpack that you and for years, like years, every bag nerd I knew talked about the Peak Design 25-liter backpack. It was like just enough of a camera-first bag that I never bought one, but I feel like I should have. And now there's a new one. Everybody seems to love it. Tell me about it. Why is this thing so great?

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Oh, I ran into the problem of going back to my review from eight years ago, and I called it perfect. Right? And eight years ago, it was perfect for me. It was perfect for my needs. But as we've been talking about, I like to go remote now. And I can't carry two or three different bags with me. I need one bag that can do everything. The Peak Design, the new bag, the old bag is a camera bag. So it's heavy, it's durable, it has all the camera, the flexible inserts already built into it, right? The new bag, which, by the way, the review unit they sent me is in white, Arctic white, and it looks like I'm walking through, I don't know, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  It's this sci-fi white color. It's just fantastic, totally impractical. It's, I would never, maybe I would buy it. Veron bought it, our video producer, he bought it. I don't know if I would.

• 27:38David Pierce?

  The fact that even the company is like, eh, it's gonna turn yellow over time, is a real turnoff for me. I'm not gonna lie. It looks great when you first get it, though. It looks so good.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  It looks fantastic. But, okay, so first impressions, it lacks that structure of the old bag. So it took me a while to get to figure out what this thing was, because it's basically a lightweight nylon bag with a laptop sleeve. And it's not until you delve into the ecosystem of Peak Design products that this thing becomes really good. Because sometimes you only want that lightweight nylon bag. Like, if you're going to the gym, you stuff some things in there. You have maybe a day trip, day hike, you're only bringing maybe a drone. It already has its own protective case, so you can use that. But if you're really a camera nerd, or you've got lots of gadgets, you've got all the, maybe you're carrying a drone, action cam, and some other stuff.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  They have the camera insert, camera cubes is what they call them. But that's another, like the S medium, as they call it, it's not quite small, not quite medium, but the S medium, and it fits perfect in the 25 liter Peak Design outdoor bag. That is another 70 euro on top of the, I forget what it was, 230 something, so.

• 28:52David Pierce?

  I think it's 250, yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  So you're already up to 300, and then if you start adding a couple more accessories, you can easily push this thing up to 400 euro. So it's not cheap, but camera bags are not cheap.

• 29:03David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, it's the, in the scheme of really good camera bags, that's like upper middle class. I've seen much crazier.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. And they do have a lifetime warranty, so if anything breaks, any of the straps, any of those things, the yellowing is not covered. If you get the white one, unfortunately it comes in black and some kind of purplish color. But using it for, God, I had it for two months because there were some complications in receiving it and whatnot. And I also wanted to wait before posting it until it got off the Kickstarter campaign because I hate sending people to Kickstarter for a purchase.

• 29:32David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  But the day that it went live on the Peak Design website is when we posted a review. And I had been using it for, I don't know, yeah, two months at that point. And I absolutely love it, absolutely love it. So I feel really bad about like,

• 29:50Speaker 03

  I can't totally trigger myself because I feel like I'm betraying my old Peak Design bag that I bought.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  So I put it on my Christmas list and then I'll let, hopefully my wife do it for me.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  That's fair. So the modular thing is the thing I was most torn on reading your review. Because on the one hand, the thing you're describing sort of makes sense, right? You can, it can be a bunch of different things depending on what you need. On the other hand, that just sounds like a lot of work. And I feel like what I don't want to do is like manage my cargo day in and day out. Like the thing I have loved about bags that I've had is the ones that I find that on purpose or by accident, just already have the pouches for everything I need. Where they're like, oh, David, you need a place to put your gross sneakers? Here's a place that we made for you. Like, those are the things that I love. And I can see the appeal of sort of building that yourself, but it also just feels like it might be a lot of work. And like you said, a lot of additional things to buy on top of the expensive thing that I've already bought.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good point, but I what I what I settled on is like, I don't always need all my camera stuff. I don't need all my drones. So if I can have a container for that, a soft shell container, put everything in, it's already organized for me. And I just remove that in and out, and I always know where all my tech gear, and this is really important when you're in a van because you have to know where all that stuff is. So for me, I can just take that cube out, I can put it aside, I then take the bag and I can just load it up with with all my day hiking material. Or I can put it back in if I'm doing like a verge review or something, I'll put that in with all my other stuff. So for me, that modularity was was a key selling point.

• 31:26David Pierce?

  So you you think of it like the the camera lives in the cube all the time. And then you just sort of stack whatever cubes you need for that day into the bag.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Exactly, and you can get multiple cubes, it actually fits two different cubes and they also have soft shell bags that you can store gear in if you want, if you want to do that. But again, if you're if you're, yeah, if you're if you're living in a van, you want to, everything is kind of modular anyway, so. It's a it's a it's a nice extension for the bag. But for for my needs, this is now a better bag. I felt bad calling it perfect because it's I got a lot of, I'm always gonna have lots of complaints, like I the the drawstring that that pulls the top pouch closes. I think it's a bit inelegant, the cord get in the way when you're pulling a jacket in and out or whatever. But you know, you're looking for perfection when you're spending three hundred euro or three hundred dollars on a bag.

• 32:13David Pierce?

  Totally, yeah, that's fair. All right, and you you mentioned the last thing I want to talk about, which is that you've become a drone guy.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  I am not a drone guy, I am a selfie drone guy.

• 32:24David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting, okay.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  I tried drones in the past and I, nobody seems to talk about how bad DJI software is. I think it's atrocious, I think the user experience is just terrible. But drone people have been living with these drones for a long time, they understand how the software works.

• 32:41David Pierce?

  I think it's like Photoshop now, where it's like if you don't, if you've never seen it before, it is literally borderline unusable. But there are people now who have spent a long time trying to figure it out. But also, one of my theories is that DJI figured out a long time ago that it was easy. Easier to teach the drones to fly themselves than it was to make better software. So they've just done that. So they're like, their hope is that you just don't even have to use the app because the drone is fine. Don't even worry about it.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Man, I mean, that's the thing. So I um, I went, I did a bike packing trick, trip um, the summer with a friend of mine and you know, I don't want to, I see DC Rainmaker and people, they've got the controller mounted on their handlebars and they're, you know, they're, they're talking to, they're doing all this stuff all the time. But he's, he's been doing this stuff for, I don't know, a decade. I just want something super simple. I push a button, set it up to fly and then it'll film me, right? And this also works for gadgets. Like if I have to do a backpack, some of my backpack photos are, are taken by drones because you know, I can either ask my wife to do it. She does, she's not a huge fan of that, or a friend, or I just do it myself and I'd rather just be self-sufficient and do it, do it myself.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  But no controller required. It just select between one of six modes. Um, if I want to, I can tweak it in the, in the, in the app, but it's very rare that I have to do that. And now we have two of these really great selfie drones. There's uh, the, the original Hover Air, I guess it's not even the original, it's like second generation Hover Air X1. They just came out with two new ones, Max and Pro, I think they are, but now they're really expensive. The nice thing about the old ones, I think they were two ninety-nine, three, three forty-nine or something, depending upon the sales. But this DJI Neo that just came out, now it was a little undercooked when they launched it, like you couldn't do vertical video, it wasn't fast enough to chase you on a bike, for example. But they've recently, just in the two or three months since it launched, they've already updated the firmware to do all those things.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  And it only costs a hundred and ninety-nine dollars, which is insane. And you can buy a controller if you want, and you can buy goggles if you want to do, um, what is it, first FPV, first person viewing? I don't know what that's called. I don't care about that. I have no interest in doing that. I just want something that's gonna, you know, follow me, take pictures, upload it to Instagram or whatever. You know, maybe I'm gonna have a Van Life influencer account at some point, who knows? But it's just dumb. It's so dumb. It's so easy. It just makes me love it. But as soon as you have to use a controller, I'm out. I'm done.

• 35:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, I have landed in the same place and I actually, I sort of turned out of drones for a long time because it was just more complicated than it was fun for me. And it was like, I didn't have a purpose for it. I even, even the photography of it was just purely sort of fun. I wasn't doing anything with any of it. And it got to the point where I was like, this is so fiddly and so

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:26David Pierce?

  just annoying that even the fun stuff I get out of it is not, the juice is not worth the squeeze, you know? And then

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  this is why I'm so interested in the Neo, because like you said, $200 and does a bunch of cool stuff without any worries or requiring any work on your part. That to me is like when drones start to get really interesting.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do worry. I think, I think the headline on the, on the news article was basically, oh God, these things are going to be everywhere. I do think that there's this, there's this risk that we're just going to pollute national parks and whatever with these selfie drones. And they are noisy, right? You can't get away from it. And they're going to bump into people. If you pass somebody on a trail, like I've, I've come close to passing somebody on a trail on a bike. I had to stop, pull over. But then the drone's just hovering there right above the, right above the trail. I had to run over and grab it and flip it over. And I'm just one guy at the beginning, but what's going to happen when after Christmas, you know, everybody's got a 199 Neo and they're flooding the parks and the ski slopes and whatever. And

• 36:27Speaker 03

  there, this weird gray area of regulation, they're probably illegal. But it doesn't feel like it's illegal. Like I'm not, dude, I'm just pushing a button. I set it aloft, right? It doesn't feel like a huge risk, but and then, yeah, I mean, well, in Europe, it's complicated as you're traveling between countries. Do you, do I have to register? Do I not? Um, but yeah, it's sometimes the technology comes along before the regulation is ready. Um, and then this is definitely going to be one of those cases.

• 36:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it is, it is both more and less complicated than like the bigger drones that you can fly further, right? Where like those. We should have lots of rules about those. Like, I can fly this drone theoretically miles away from me. Like, we should have lots of rules about those drones. But this thing that is just circling my head as I go on a bike path, you're right, it doesn't feel, that just feels like a thing that I have. That doesn't feel like a thing anyone else even needs to be worried about. But you add one of those to every person you see on the path, and suddenly we have a whole new set of problems. And I do agree, it does feel like that's coming.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they do go fast now. The once, now that the Neo software has been updated, it'll go like 32 kilometers per hour. I figured that is in, that's like over 20 miles per hour, I believe.

• 37:37David Pierce?

  That's bike fast, for sure.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if that's following you and slams into somebody that you're passing, that is a collision, that's gonna hurt. Even though the props are covered with guards, it's gonna hurt. So yeah, there's a risk here.

• 37:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, fair enough. All right, well, I should let you go. But once you've, once you've done this winter tour with the Sprinter, you gotta, you gotta come back and give us a, give us a Sprinter review.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  God, if I survive, I absolutely will.

• 38:00David Pierce?

  Maybe we'll do it from the top of a ski slope, and you can just, you can just write off that whole trip as a work expense. It'll be amazing.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  I'll have a Starlink Mini and a backpack and the drone hovering overhead.

• 38:10David Pierce?

  It's the life, man. All right, Thomas, thank you, as always.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Take care, bye.

• 38:15David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back and talk about microphones. We'll be right back.

• 38:23Speaker 04

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

• 38:32Speaker 05

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

• 38:40Speaker 04

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

• 38:55David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So Andrew Marino, former Vergecast producer, is now working with our video team. And for his latest video, he made a really great comparison of a bunch of different microphones, portable microphones, the kinds you can clip onto your jacket or your hat or your lapel that make it easy to connect to your phone or your camera and get good audio just about anywhere. These are things you see everywhere. They're the kind of things that are so ubiquitous now that you don't even really notice them, even though it's like a giant square, plastic brick on someone's chest as they talk to you. But these things are also really useful. We use them for Vergecast things all the time. We use them for our video team all the time. So Andrew put all these to the test, and I figured now would be a good time to have him come on and both play a little bit for us and we can see how it all sounds

• 39:40David Pierce?

  and decide which one of these is actually worth, you know, sticking onto your chest when you two are making videos. Let's get into it. Andru Marino, welcome back to the show. Hey, David. It's been a minute. It's nice to have you back on the Vergecast.

• 39:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, what's up?

• 39:54David Pierce?

  You left us rudely to go make videos about microphones. And now I've brought you back because this is what happens to you. You can't avoid us forever.

• 40:03Speaker 06

  It's a full circle.

• 40:04David Pierce?

  Exactly. So, okay, I realized in just recording the intro for this that I don't even know what to call this like class of microphones that you've been testing here. So like, what are these things? How do you think about these mics?

• 40:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're like wireless microphone systems for your phone. It's like consumer-grade wireless microphone systems.

• 40:24David Pierce?

  That's pretty good.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  We've had wireless microphone systems in broadcasting and video production. Now it's a lot easier to just use it plugging into your phone or whatever your little computers are.

• 40:34David Pierce?

  Okay. Do you remember years ago when I think it was Shure made that thing that actually plugged into the lightning port and had that little like flippy microphone that you could... I loved that thing. I used that thing every day.

• 40:45Speaker 06

  I still have it.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  I still have it.

• 40:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love it. It sounded great. Yeah.

• 40:48David Pierce?

  It really did. And it was like as a like voice memo thing. It was, it was great. I remember I did a thing with NPR one time on the phone and they were so excited about how good I sounded. And I was like, it was like the great reveal of my life that I got to tell a public radio producer that I was on this incredible Shure microphone. But anyway, so... What I see these microphones mostly used for is like social clips, right? These are like the like little plastic squares you see on everyone's shirt and sweater and hat all over social. Is that the main use case for these?

• 41:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Like, we wouldn't, these companies wouldn't be making all these if it weren't for TikTok and Instagram and all that.

• 41:26David Pierce?

  And they've gotten better pretty fast, it seems to me.

• 41:30Speaker 06

  Yes. With even just within the year, these companies like Rode and DJI are just upgrading these models to be lighter or like have more features, have better charging cases. It's all very exciting, like this past two years of of audio devices.

• 41:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's cool. So yeah, what is kind of the state of the art right now? Like, you you got five or six of them in. What do they have in common? Like, what's the good stuff you can get now?

• 41:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the big ones are like, these are coming in like AirPod cases, basically. You have these little transmitters that have mics on them. You pop them in a little case and then you have a little receiver that you pop right into your phone. So Rode just came out with a Rode Wireless Micro. That is just a, it's like a little bigger than AirPods case and it plugs right into your phone. I really like that one. Shure also makes one that's a little case that you can just pair via Bluetooth to your phone. And DJI, of course, has the Mic 2 and the Mic Mini, which are these little microphones that you can plug into basically anything.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  So it's all like very versatile and pretty well made versus what we are having to deal with before with Bluetooth headphones and stuff.

• 42:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I have a set here that is like a a thing that plugs into a headphone jack that my phone doesn't have anymore. And then a whole receiver and it's like, there's like four cables associated with it. It's just a bad time. It sounds good, but it is like I had to carry a bag of gear just to get this thing.

• 43:08Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, it's a lot, it was a lot clunkier before. And it's getting more easier to just like not have to tie a rubber band around your phone to keep all this gear attached to your stuff.

• 43:20David Pierce?

  What about on the phone side? Are, do these all have like companion apps? Or are they just supposed to be better microphones? I've always been torn about like, do I want a bunch of fancy features? Or do I just want this thing to pretend to be my microphone on my phone and just sound better?

• 43:35Speaker 06

  Yes, this is where the differences come in here. DJI has all their wireless microphones. You can do a lot of the customization, like gain and turning on noise cancellation through just the hardware receiver. Rode, their little micro wireless microphone, you can only control the gain and all that stuff through the app. They also have like a video app that they want you to use when you're making video with these things. The video doesn't look as good as the native iPhone app when I was trying it, which was concerning.

• 44:14David Pierce?

  That also just seems instinctively kind of weird. The idea that I'm gonna make videos in an app based on which microphone I'm using just feels like the wrong order of operations of how I'm gonna do stuff.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  Totally, and also if you're making this stuff within these video creation apps like TikTok and Instagram, like you don't wanna go back and forth between apps to like adjust the gain and all that.

• 44:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, the thing you describe about having some of the controls on the case itself feels like the right one, right?

• 44:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, if the receiver that you just plug in the bottom of your phone, you can adjust the gain on this little knob on the DJI Mic Mini. And so when you're recording, say, within the TikTok app, you can adjust the gain from there and you don't have to switch apps or anything like that.

• 44:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is really handy. So let's just, let's just cut right to the chase here. Which one's the best? You've tested them all.

• 45:06David Pierce?

  Everybody expected you to not pick one in the video. This is, this is my favorite thing about the video you made is you just ruthlessly trolled everyone on the internet who refuses to just pick winners. Who won?

• 45:16Speaker 06

  Yes, so when we factor in price and audio quality and functionality, state that there, I went with the DJI Mic Mini, which has this nice carrying case and the mics are really tiny now. So when you clip them on your shirt, they're not as noticeable as those big squares you notice on, on all these videos. So I really like that, the compactness, and it is $170, which is, you know, compared to a lot of these, they go up to in the 350 range.

• 45:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  I think Shure's, the whole package is $500, so.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  Price, audio quality and functionality like DJI McMini was really impressive.

• 46:01David Pierce?

  How small is it? Like you've mentioned, you mentioned that it's small. It's that matters more to me than I expected. Having now used these a lot. I notice every like percentage of an ounce because it just, it just like pulls on your shirt and they seem huge. Like how small are we talking that this thing has actually gotten?

• 46:22Speaker 06

  Yes. So it's about half the size as they were before. And the thing also is like, a lot of these, you could just tuck underneath your shirt and then use the magnet without a clip to just hold on to your shirt that way. I never really liked doing that because you have to deal with your clothes rustling and all that. And it gets a little muffled. So I always like keeping them outside of the clothes, like in the open air. So, which is why I don't usually like the bigger ones. I usually would like to prefer to plug in an external wireless lavvier. Sometimes it gets a little annoying. We did a whole video shoot in, we went from San Francisco to LA in our hydrogen car.

• 47:03Speaker 06

  If Verge listeners may remember, we talked to a lot of car drivers that were like going in to pump their gas and we wanted to talk to them really quickly. And I just wanted like, here, put, I need to put this on your shirt really quickly. And like a lot of, if you look at the video, a lot of them have these big chunky squares on their shirt. And now that the DJI ones are a lot smaller, it's less noticeable. You know, it's just a little, it's not distracting in the video.

• 47:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it is, I will say, all a huge improvement over what it was before, which is snaking a wire up someone's back and you as the producer having to say, sorry, I just have to reach up your shirt for a second here. And I'm going to touch your butt while I clip this thing to it. And it is very good that we seem to be leaving those days behind.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  Yes, I have done that in a traditional broadcast setting and it is very awkward experience.

• 47:58David Pierce?

  It's not a good

• 48:00David Pierce?

  So you mentioned that the DJI is kind of the best combination of things. Are there, does it have competitors that beat it in one way or another? Like if all I care about is pure, raw, best sound, don't care what else. Is it somebody other than DJI who wins?

• 48:15Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:16David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  I would like to just mention now, I'm currently recording with the DJI mic mini. For this whole recording.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  So the one that I really like, and it's a company that is known for its audio quality is Sennheiser.

• 48:32Speaker 06

  They just came out with this thing called the Profile Wireless. It's, it is just a big, like, stick audio thing. But you can just press this little, there's a little button. Has all these little receivers in here that you can just clip on.

• 48:50David Pierce?

  Oh, clever. So the, the thing you're holding looks like a sort of chunky handheld microphone.

• 48:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:56David Pierce?

  And you can use it as that. It sounds like if you want to, but then you can also just pull the little receiver out and clip it on.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  Yep. And then you can, yeah, the transmitter.

• 49:05David Pierce?

  The transmitter, yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 06

  And then you can pop the receiver out too. Plug that right into your phone. And Sennheiser, that one was the best audio quality to me. It also has, one of my favorite features on these is a backup recording button. So you can just press this little red button on the device, on the transmitter, and it will record the audio locally onto the mic.

• 49:31David Pierce?

  Oh, that's helpful.

• 49:31Speaker 06

  So you don't have to go through wireless, you know, run into any issues with signal to noise ratios and all that. And it's perfectly there. If you, something happens on your recorder, you have this backup recording. That's actually helped me so many times in, in these kinds of situations.

• 49:50David Pierce?

  I was just about to say, I had not thought about this until you just mentioned that. But the problem I've had with these microphones over the years, including all the way back to that, that Shure one that I could plug into my phone, was sometimes. My phone just wouldn't use it. I would, I would press record on something and it would just pick a different microphone to record from and, and I wouldn't notice until afterwards because the thing was connected. It all seemed to be working, but then it was like I opened voice memos and hit record and the wrong mic picks up and you're just sort of hosed because phones are not very good at like giving you a, a menu to tell you when it's switching from microphone to microphone. Has that gotten better in general? Like are phones better at this game than they used to be?

• 50:29Speaker 06

  I think so. Um, I was very skeptical of this. It's like the iPhone is like, it's hard to, when you're in the phone app or the camera app, it's hard to like know what audio source you're using.

• 50:44David Pierce?

  Right.

• 50:44Speaker 06

  So you kind of just have to trust it recognized it. Android is a little better at this. You can actually like choose the audio source. Um, but I was always scared of that. So I would always use an external, like another app to confirm because you know, the Rhodes app will tell you what specifically the interface you're using is. But it has, phones have gotten a lot better at this. Um, that being said, phones, microphones have gotten a lot better that, uh, in general. So there's that too.

• 51:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's actually a good question. How do you feel like these compare? Obviously there's a usability difference where you don't have to hold your phone up to your face, which goes a really long way. But in terms of audio quality, you're right that the internal microphone on your phone, if you have a recent high-end phone is probably very good. Are these still kind of like a, like a full level or two up from that even as they get smaller and cheaper and easier to use?

• 51:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. I think so. Um, there's, there's some plus and minuses. Like in smartphones, you get stereo recording a lot. So if you really want like an ambient track, uh, when you're like recording a scene with your phone, um, that I like using that stereo recording sometimes. But there is some, a lot of color, especially the iPhone is a lot like brighter sounding. Like it's a lot of high end in their recordings. It's a little less controllable. So I, in general, like especially Sennheiser and Shure, like they've been developing this technology for so long. So they do sound a lot better than the traditional, just holding your phone up to your face, especially in post-production.

• 52:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. Are these companies doing something different with these mics because of the way that they're going to be used? I mean, you know, Sennheiser and Rode and all these other companies make other microphones. I'm on a, I'm on a Shure mic on a Rode stand right now, recording this. So they all know how to make like a high-end microphone, but these are, like you're saying at the beginning, sort of a very specific thing for a very specific use case. As you test them, can you tell these are like designs to be used on TikTok in some meaningful way?

• 52:49Speaker 06

  Not, not really. I mean, more when you're looking at the, uh, the app side of it. But these are all like omnidirectional microphones that, you know, lavaliers on like any, you know, live set have been using for, for decades. So there's not much different for that. It is like, because you're moving around and you're outside and you want to make sure it's, you know, it's on your shirt. It's getting you when you're turning your head and all that. So it's more like the performance side of it.

• 53:19David Pierce?

  That makes sense. Yeah, I, I do wonder how much they're learning to do to compensate for people who don't have a ton of experience using mics, who are suddenly clipping mics to themselves. And like the thing you just said about being able to sort of swivel your head is like, that's a big one, right? You, most people have terrible mic technique and understanding how to talk into a microphone is a thing that takes real practice. And so for something like this, like I would assume a lot of these companies are spending time trying to think about, okay, what weird places are people going to stick this and how are they going to use it? And how can we account for that? And, and again, I think it makes sense that a lot of that is going into the software and stuff that's actually being built into phones.

• 53:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Like, there's 32-bit float, which is like, recording at a bitrate that is gonna prevent you from clipping audio, which is a big problem in like, any microphone where you're not, you're not monitoring the levels of these microphones with your headphones, or even seeing levels on any of these. There's that. And then there's also the noise cancellation. So I should have mentioned that. Like, DJI has a noise softener, basically. Will take a lot of the background noise out, which, you know, is something you're not gonna be going in your computer and trying to dial down if you're just going into TikTok most of the time.

• 54:38David Pierce?

  Right. Not everybody has a you to make everything sound incredible all the time. I highly recommend it, by the way. If you can have an Andrew to do it, I recommend having an Andrew. Let's, I want to hear a couple of these and test them a little bit, but I am curious to have, are there any other sort of standout features from some of the ones that you tested that you're like, oh, if only I could borrow this and stick it on the DJI, it would be even better?

• 55:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, so what DJI Mic 2 has is like, audio levels. You can see the audio levels on the receiver. That's a really nifty one. Also, being able to plug in an external lavalier, which a lot, some of the higher end of these do, the Rode Wireless models do. And of course, the backup feature, like, that like onboard recording is so, it's just like, once you have that, you don't want to not use it anymore.

• 55:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes total sense. Alright, so you're on the DJI, which sounds very good. I'm super impressed. I wanted, I want to try the worst one you tried, but before we do that, what, can we try just like one of the others? I'm curious to see kind of the range of quality we're looking at here. So let's, let's just switch to one of the other ones you liked like slightly less. And I'm just curious if I can even tell the difference in the audio.

• 55:53Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah. Let's use the Rode Wireless Micro, which is just plugs right into with USB-C.

• 55:59David Pierce?

  Alright, so now you're on, you're on the Rode, the Rode Micro, is that what you called it?

• 56:03Speaker 06

  Yes, the Rode Wireless Micro just came out last month.

• 56:07David Pierce?

  Okay. I would say it's, we're like, kind of in range. This feels, I mean, you're in a pretty quiet room, but this, this sounds...

• 56:16David Pierce?

  I don't know, like maybe slightly more compressed, but I also think I'm probably listening for it.

• 56:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, I doubt you'll hear much of a difference like if like listeners are listening on their phone or Bluetooth speaker or something like that.

• 56:28David Pierce?

  Whenever we do these, I think about my wife who listens to podcasts just out the speaker of her four-year-old phone.

• 56:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:33David Pierce?

  And I'm like, this must sound like nothing to you, Anna. Like, she's just like, what do you mean? These all sound terrible.

• 56:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's really nifty, but I like it because it's super compact. I can just keep it in my pocket like all the time. And like I plugged in my laptop, which is cool, which I didn't get to in the video. But yeah, you plug it in via USB C. You can also plug it into your laptop if you have that, so.

• 56:56David Pierce?

  That is actually pretty handy, being able to like, yay for universal charging ports, right? But being able to just kind of have a plug and play mic into any device that you have goes a surprising long way. Like I've, I give a lot of people the same speech about how important it is to sound good on video calls. And this is the kind of thing that you might even like if you're giving a presentation or at work, this might be useful in that same way.

• 57:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, people have told me that they want something like that for home, for their like Zoom calls. I'm like, oh, it's, it's interesting. You're gonna like walk around your kitchen while you're on the call. Just have it clipped to your, to your shirt. So yeah, that's cool.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  It's kind of a good idea. You could sound like you're sitting right at your computer, but just be like aimlessly wandering around your house with AirPods and a fancy microphone.

• 57:42Speaker 06

  The mic doesn't move, you do.

• 57:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's pretty good. We should start a company and that's the tagline. It's gonna be incredible. All right, let's try one more. And the one I want to try is the, like the TikTok microphone. I think everybody knows the one I'm talking about, but you got the one.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 58:01David Pierce?

  That is the one. And I would like to hear how it sounds.

• 58:04Speaker 06

  Okay, let's do it.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  All right, you're now in the software that I'm seeing as USB Audio 1.0, which already feels alarming. How are we doing?

• 58:13Speaker 06

  Okay, can you hear me now?

• 58:15David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:17David Pierce?

  This is what I knew this was gonna, it's bad. It's like, it's just, it's just bad. It's, uh, you sound like someone who put their AirPods in wrong. Uh, I've been noticing a lot that people wear their AirPods wrong. Have you ever noticed this? The people who wear them so that they're sort of sticking directly out of their head. It's like they've screwed them in too far into their ear canals and they just, it's like, it's like you have antenna coming out of your ears. That's what you sound like.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, I have seen someone in the office, not gonna lie, with AirPods like that.

• 58:48David Pierce?

  Send name and shame, Andrew.

• 58:52David Pierce?

  Uh, so first of all, what is this, Mike?

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Uh, it's a good question because I don't really know. Uh, the box that came in says the K8 wireless microphone.

• 59:02David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 59:04Speaker 06

  I've seen this on TikTok without that branding, the same box without that branding. Um, it is just kind of this generic wireless microphone that you plug into your phone has, and then one little other thing that you clip on your shirt with the mic. And, uh, I've, like, people are like hawking these on TikTok for five bucks.

• 59:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's the one you can find a million identical looking ones on like AliExpress and the TikTok shop and Amazon and like, I assume they're all the same thing from like a giant bin in a factory somewhere in China. That's what it seems to be.

• 59:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I went, I bought another one, uh, recently just to see if it was the same and it was exactly the same.

• 59:46David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. And this is, this has become the TikTok microphone. Is it just because it's cheap? Like everybody's just like, oh, this sounds better than my phone and it's cheap, even though I would say it demonstrably does not sound better than your phone.

• 59:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. It, it's like, uh, because it was, you know, sold on one of these like bulk shops where you can get a whole bunch and, and, and drop ship them. But, you know, it isolates your voice more. It does. This is like, the phone is gonna be like, it's gonna pick up a lot of other things in the room. A lot of people record in their car. So this, if you hold this up to your, your mouth in the car, maybe you won't get as like a boxier sound than usual.

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. And there is something to that, that at least you have something sort of close and directional. And that's helpful. Like that is the basic mic technique we give most people. But I still feel like this is much worse than holding up the, the white ear pod microphone to your mouth. Like if you're going to hold a microphone, that one sounds much better than this one does.

• 1:00:47Speaker 06

  Totally. Yeah.

• 1:00:48David Pierce?

  I guess it is $20 versus $5, but like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and say that's worth a $15 investment.

• 1:00:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. And who knows how long these are gonna be for that price. Like I, I've seen them on Amazon for like $30.

• 1:01:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. Um, all right. Switch back to the good mic. So I don't have to listen to this anymore. And then I have a couple more questions and we'll let you go.

• 1:01:07Speaker 06

  Okay, great.

• 1:01:08David Pierce?

  All right. Are we back to a good mic?

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 1:01:11David Pierce?

  How do I sound? This sounds good. Is this the DJI again?

• 1:01:14Speaker 06

  This is the Sennheiser Profile Wireless. I figured since we, I mentioned it, I wanted to demonstrate how it sounded.

• 1:01:22David Pierce?

  It does sound good. I, yeah, they're all kind of right in range.

• 1:01:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26David Pierce?

  That this is, which is good news, honestly. Uh, especially, I feel like DJI's thing is just as good, a little wacky to figure out and cheaper. It's like, keeps working for it.

• 1:01:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was skeptical of their mics because they're not a microphone company, but yeah, they, they're pretty good.

• 1:01:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's super exciting. So, okay. You think if I'm, if I'm like a creator starting a TikTok channel, DJI into my phone into the TikTok app is like a perfectly viable mic video strategy. We feel good about that?

• 1:02:00Speaker 06

  Yes, totally.

• 1:02:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's awesome. That feels like a win. This is like, that is, that's a big level up for a lot of people pretty fast.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. And also if you end up like getting a better camera and you're not using just your phone, you can still use this with another camera, which is, is really what. Is a big difference between that and the Rode Mini or the Rode Micro because you can only use this with the US, like something with the USB port, taking audio in. Yeah.

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's very cool. So are you, are you using these mics in your own gear now? What's your new setup?

• 1:02:32Speaker 06

  Yes, this past year or two, we've kind of like stopped carrying around the bulky professional wireless microphone systems. When we're like running around, I remember at CES last year, we didn't really use those. We use the Rode, the wireless go to for most of our stuff we were doing out in the field. And yeah, and for CES, I would love to carry around this Sennheiser kit because it's super compact. It's got this neat carrying case. Yeah.

• 1:03:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, that, I mean, it goes a really long way. And I think to me, the next step then, it kind of feels like getting much smaller is maybe not super useful. It feels like the next step is starting to solve some of the UI stuff, right? Cause I feel like especially the things that are connected to the phone, there's just not great, sort of really fine-grained manual control in the way that you can do like pretty professional stuff with your video camera at this point. It feels like audio still has a little bit of catching up there, but maybe that's the next thing.

• 1:03:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think you're sacrificing a lot of stuff by making them smaller. So there's going to be some happy medium there where like, maybe the receiver's a little bigger that you can adjust some settings, but the mics are still kind of tiny. So they don't show up on screen, you know?

• 1:03:47David Pierce?

  That is fair. Okay. Last thing, and then you're gonna go. You have, you are the person who knows the answer to this question. Where is the correct place on your person to put the mic to do this?

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  So I always like going like two buttons down on, on like a dress shirt. Okay. It's a very specific type of way to dress. So it's not accurate for everyone.

• 1:04:10David Pierce?

  But you're kind of like right at like mid chest height. It seems like at that.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Like if you just, you put it where you're, you know, where your heart is, is like a good.

• 1:04:19David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. Okay. Right in the middle.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:04:22David Pierce?

  Okay. So not on the brim of my hat, which is a thing that I saw somebody do and thought that was very cool and wanted to steal.

• 1:04:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's an interesting idea. They're omnidirectional, so it's not, it's not going to not pick up your voice, but it'll. It's a little silly. It's obviously for aesthetic purposes.

• 1:04:41David Pierce?

  Okay. All right. All right. Well, this is, as someone who ends up always putting it on my collar and then it like droops all weird, this is good advice.

• 1:04:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:50David Pierce?

  Like wherever your hand goes when you say the pledge of allegiance, that's where you put the mic.

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. And now these have little magnets on them. You can really just, you can clip them on anywhere on your clothing.

• 1:05:00David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. The magnet over the clip thing is a huge upgrade.

• 1:05:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03David Pierce?

  Cannot recommend that enough. All right. Andrew, thank you for coming back. It's nice to see you.

• 1:05:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:05:09David Pierce?

  All right. We gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and do a segment on the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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• 1:05:53David Pierce?

  Okay, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866 VERGE11. The email is [email protected]. We love all of your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. A reminder, next week, we are doing a full meta episode about the Vergecast and The Verge. So if you have questions, we've gotten a bunch of really fun ones already, but if there's ever something you've wanted to know about how the Vergecast works, how we make the show, how we decide what goes on in the show, what we're doing when we're not recording the show, how The Verge works, the future of media, all kinds of stuff, anything you want to know, call us 866 VERGE11, email us [email protected]. We love hearing all of your questions. And we're gonna do as many of the meta ones as we can next week. This week, we have a question about web browsers.

• 1:06:40Speaker 07

  Hi, this is Joey from Portland, Oregon. And I have a question about web browsers. Uh, just watching your latest, or listening to your latest broadcast about, uh, you know, Chrome and, and I was just thinking, just recently, I, I started switching from using, uh, Chrome to Safari on my MacBook Air. And, you know, just heard that like it's more efficient and, you know, it's a little faster, but definitely mostly uses less battery. And I haven't really noticed that. Um, I mean, I haven't done extensive testing, but I, like most people, I live in a browser for the most part. And, uh, I use, at the far extent that I use Chrome extensions. And it seems like it's about the same battery life, doesn't seem to seem any faster.

• 1:07:24Speaker 07

  Um, so is that really true? Is Safari really noticeably like more efficient? Uh, be curious to hear your thoughts. Uh, thanks. Bye.

• 1:07:35David Pierce?

  One of the reasons I really like this question is that it's really hard to test this question. Browsers are complicated because they're so much more than just one individual thing. Like the way that you use your browser is so personal and so unique to you, maybe even in ways that you don't understand, right? Think about the number of tabs that you have open, whether you tend to use multiple windows with tabs or just have one window with a thousand tabs in it. Are you a bookmarks person? Do you have lots of extensions? Are you constantly running like really intense web apps like Gmail or Figma or Canva or things like that?

• 1:08:16David Pierce?

  Or are you the kind of person who is just like opening a web browser, going to CNN.com, looking at some news and then moving on into the day? Maybe no other piece of software is so varied in its use that way than a web browser. So it's very hard for anyone to say. Here is the best web browser for X, Y, or Z reason, right? I think one reason people think Safari is the best Mac browser is just that it's so well-integrated with all of Apple's other products and its operating systems. There's actually not real evidence anywhere that I can find that Safari is faster or more performant or better for battery life in any meaningful way.

• 1:08:56David Pierce?

  It's just that it is so deeply integrated inside of the system that it feels better. The share sheet works better. You can open things and move them around more quickly. It feels the Maciest of the Mac browsers and it feels the iPhoneiest of the iPhone browsers. The same way that Chrome does on Android. Like you can run other browsers on a Chromebook than Chrome, but it's going to feel worse, even if it's just as fast. So, all of that is to say, I think figuring out which browser is for you, you should think much more about UI and which services you use than really throwing your lot behind one product or another. Like I said, there aren't a lot of ways to kind of apples-to-apples compare one browser

• 1:09:40David Pierce?

  to the other, but there is one benchmark that I like. It's called Speedometer 3.0 from Browser Bench, and it tries to mimic using a web app. It's like a to-do list thing that is trying to move stuff around, so it executes JavaScript and tries to run stuff in the background and also loads news pages. And the idea is just a sort of normal web usage. It's not a perfect benchmark. I don't think any benchmark of anything is perfect, but at least you get some kind of apples-to-apples rough performance metric for how a browser works. I tested it on seven browsers on my Mac Mini, and let me just read you the scores. So, higher is better. Chrome came in first with 48.2. Safari got 47.4, not super far down. Then there was Brave, 44.7.

• 1:10:25David Pierce?

  Edge, 44.5, so basically the same between those two. Firefox, 41.4. Arc, 38.3. And DuckDuckGo, 38.1. Reasonable range, top to bottom there, but they all have a bit of a margin of error in them, and realistically...

• 1:10:43David Pierce?

  You might notice a performance difference between like Chrome at the very top and DuckDuckGo at the very bottom, but like, should you use Chrome or Safari based on the point eight points between them? No, there are other reasons that that browser will feel better or worse to you than the raw performance score of how it does on this one benchmark. All of this is to say, I think browsers are fascinating for this exact reason, right? It's not a question of optimizing ruthlessly for one specific use case. Browsers are all things to all people. And what I would do is basically try to figure out the UI that works for you, whether you want Chrome, which has more sort of accessibility to extensions and does a better job, I think,

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  with some bookmarklets, or you want Safari, which is simple to a fault and just keeps everything very straightforward, or you want something like Arc, which has really weird ideas about UI, or you want Brave, which has a lot of additional features and stuff built into the browser. You kind of can't pick wrong, right? There are a lot of browsers out there, a bunch of them are really good. None of them have any sort of obviously huge increase in killer app over any of the others. So ultimately, what I would say is try a bunch of different browsers and just see what works for you and don't really worry about spending a ton of time trying to optimize for performance. I will say, if you open a lot of tabs, it will crush your memory and it will crush your battery life.

• 1:12:11David Pierce?

  And anecdotally, I cannot prove this, but anecdotally Chrome seems to be the worst at that, that when I have 100 Chrome tabs open, it just destroys every computer I've ever used in a way that no other browser does. I can't prove that, but that is how it feels to me. But in general, the best thing you can do for your performance and your battery life is manage your tabs slightly better so that you're not running so many different versions of any of these browsers at a time. But beyond that, just pick the browser you like the best and use it and don't worry about the rest. And that is actually a pretty good place to be. Lots of different ideas about browsers out there. Give them all a try. I have seven on my computer now because I downloaded them all and I'm going to keep them and I'm going to try them because this is the life I've chosen for myself.

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  Anyway, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. All of Thomas Ricker's reviews, Andru Marino's great videos, lots of stuff that we've done on browsers. All of that I'll put in the show notes, but as always, read the website. It's December, but the news keeps happening. We have tons of great gift guides. Some of the like Cyber Monday, Black Friday deals are still kicking around. So keep it locked on the website. Lots of good stuff going on. And like I said before, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other browsers I should download, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Like I said, we're doing a meta-episode about all things Verge and Vergecast and the future of media and podcasts and whatever else you want to talk about next Tuesday.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  So get in your questions as soon as you can and we will answer as many of them on the show as we possibly can. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the news, the Intel CEO stuff, some crazy stuff going on in the streaming world, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:14:12Speaker 08

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