iPhone event Sept 10th, Microsoft Surface event Oct 2nd, and the future of Siri

Stories this week: HP has a new CEOApple’s next iPhone event will take place on September 10thApple releases iOS 13.1 beta before iOS 13 is even outApple apologizes for Siri audio recordings, announces privacy changes going forwardApple was a little behind on Siri privacy, now it’s way aheadApple contractors were allegedly listening to 1,000 Siri recordings a day — eachWe’re still not getting voice assistants rightBBC plans ‘Beeb’ voice assistant for its apps and servicesA phone insurance company bought uBreakiFix, the official Pixel and Galaxy phone repairerApple will let more independent repair shops buy ‘genuine’ iPhone partsMicrosoft announces Surface event on October 2nd in New York City ... Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headset goes on sale in SeptemberSamsung announces Galaxy Home Mini public beta before full-size speaker has even shippedFitbit’s new Versa 2 has an OLED screen and Alexa voice supportFossil ‘Gen 5’ smartwatch review: best of a Wear OS situationGarmin’s best GPS sport watches are getting even betterLG’s $4,399.99 fridge makes ‘craft ice’ for cocktail loversGoogle’s been thinking about a watch with a hole-punch cameraNintendo Switch Lite hands-on: a budget handheld with a premium …TV manufacturers unite to tackle the scourge of motion smoothing 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 week on The Vergecast, we talk about the iPhone event invites are out. That's on September 10th. We talk about what's going on in Siri. There's a Surface event. We got a preview. It's on October 2nd. Get into smartwatches a little bit, and we talk about motion smoothing on televisions. Good or bad? Find out. Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.biz, an enterprise podcast about cloud solutions. That sounds good. I feel good about it.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Our retention rate on people staying with us is going to be sky high this week.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  Are you a B2B executive? Well, we will help you be to be all that you can be.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Can I tell a quick funny story about B2B executives? I've written a couple of stories about voice assistants this week, and one of them we'll get into later. I said, there should be more smaller specialized voice assistants, and that would be nice. That was the whole idea of the story. And I have been getting nonstop incoming from people that make like tiny little voice assistants on LinkedIn now, just like I'm now a celebrity amongst the like people that make a voice assistant for B2B cloud services. It's the best.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the dream. By the way, that B2B cloud voice assistant celebrity you've been hearing from is Dieter Bohn. Hi, Dieter.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Hi, everybody. Sorry.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  I am Neelai Patel. I'm your friend. Paul Miller is here. Hi, Paul. Hello. I gotta say, there's a lot of stuff to talk about. It's all like little stuff. It's 100% the week before Labor Day weekend. Like, nothing is happening. It's it's like all very announcements into the future like fall is coming.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  That's happening. The fall hardware season is upon us. We'll talk about that. But it this is definitely it's the week where everyone's like, you know what? I'm just I'm gonna take my foot off the gas, but we're not gonna. We're gonna start with breaking news, the biggest news in tech, which is that HP has a new CEO. And you know, this news is big because we wrote a story on it and I I honestly didn't even read it.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember when HP was a big deal? We used to cover. We used to cover their news like nonstop. They owned Palm.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yep.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and now they don't. It's just wild to me that they can announce this change in nothing.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  And the the photo that they have that like was provided by HP was like a random photo of him hanging out at CES like with his badge.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  HP doesn't care either.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't look happy about it. He's like, I'm definitely at CES. Anyway, his new CEO is Enrique Loris. Uh, this is, I mean, I will say HP has done a good job with their laptops lately, right? Yeah. So they they they broke up, speaking of P two P software, they broke up into HP Enterprise. And then they have this like consumer business, which has actually done a good job. But the real thing I want to talk about here is.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Except for the trackpad.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  Eh, yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Just.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  There's I just want to point out that the person who is in charge of it, the the real point of this was a Quibi joke. Can I be honest with you? The real point was that when they split up, Meg Whitman ran HP Enterprise and then she quit. Yeah. Enterprise biz to go be the CEO of Quibi.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Well, and Quibi, my understanding is there's a rumor that they, uh, they're trying really hard to form a partnership with a cell phone carrier right now.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is the ultimate go 90 move.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  Is like if they sign a deal with Verizon, then they then they're just external go 90.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  That's all I want in this world.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  It's like when you quit and then the company realizes they still need you, but they can't hire you back because it'll screw up your severance. And so they just hire you as a contractor.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  Quibi is contract go 90. Anyway, the whole point of this was to make the Quibi joke and we did. All right. Here's the actual breaking news. This happened, what an hour before we came on the air. Apple invites are here for the iPhone event. It's September 10th. Dieter, Dieter and I will be going to the Apple event. It's Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. It's, it's the iPhone. I think we, we know it's the iPhone, right? Oh, yeah. It's the iPhone.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  It's, it's the iPhone. We, we talked a little bit last week about the, the Mark Gurman, you know, giant pile of stuff. In the intervening days, it seems like people are pretty confident that we're going to have like the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which is just a great series of words. And then there'll be the iPhone 11 something. It might just be the iPhone 11. It might be the iPhone 11R. And we're expecting there to be a green color. So the colors of this invite are like green, blue, yellow, red, purpley, might be the colors that are available for the, whatever the, the main iPhone is, iPhone 11, iPhone 11R, whatever it's, they decide to call it.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  So here, Apple, I think they, they've just decided that they're bad at names.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  Like it's just, they're fine. They're like, whatever, whatever names we're Apple, it's called the 10R, everybody. Just go with it, right? And they're like, official reasoning is like, Phil Schriller likes fast cars and that sounds like a Toyota. I don't know. That's like, what do you want from me? But iPhone 10 was their branding for this design of phone.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Right? So I, my question is whether they actually walk away from that X10 branding, because it, it was the thing. It's like all the phones of the notch are a 10. This is the next generation of iPhone. If they just go to iPhone 11, all of that sort of branding equity just disappears, right?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  This is obvious, this is a naming problem that has come up before. Final Fantasy. 10 hyphen 2.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is, I mean, that is the ultimate.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  It's been solved by some of the greatest minds of our generation.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  iPhone X dash 2, to me, is the ultimate sign that like Lock-in is real, right?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, you are so stuck with us that we didn't even try to solve this problem. We just went with dash 2.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  I actually really hope that Apple follows whatever standards Final Fantasy numbering has set because famously, a bunch of Final Fantasy games didn't make the jump from Japan to America. And so the numbering was off for the different versions of the Final, different, you know, kinds of Final Fantasy games. And so like, when it was released, it was like Final Fantasy, I don't remember the numbers now, 3, but in actuality, it was 7. And so when you refer back to it, since they started saying, oh, yes, Americans also like Final Fantasy, they like retconned all the numbers. So I would like Apple to retcon all of the iPhone numbers in the same way that they retcon the original iPhone to iPhone 2G. I think that the, um, like the iPhone 5 should just become like the iPhone V. Just do it.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  V for Vista.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  What you don't know, and this is, you know, it's a little bit of a conspiracy app, is that Greg Joswiak actually owns the website everymac.com. And he has to make it a compelling and useful resource. So the goal is to make the product names as complicated as possible. So people are constantly visiting this website.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't think that's actually true, but that is just quite a sort of conspiracy theory that I am willing to engage in. Uh, anyhow, so we're expecting, and I think this is true, the 10R was the best selling phone, right? It is the iPhone.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  The 10S and the 10S Max, I think the Max outperforms the 10S. That's the, like, the hints they've given. Uh, but they're obviously the much more expensive phones or the high end of the line. The 10R is a great phone. Um, and we pointed this out in the show, like lots of Apple employees have the 10R. When you go to their events, it's like they're easy to spot. They're extremely colorful. And you just notice everyone has a 10R.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  I have a 10R.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Dieter has a 10R. Joanna Stern has a 10R. She like loves it. Um, it has great battery life. I see 10Rs everywhere. I think that's the main phone. So the, the real question is, in the naming and in the announcement, are they going to focus on the, the pro phones, if they indeed name them pro phones? Or are they going to focus on, this is the iPhone 11, and if you want? You know, one extra camera and a bigger screen, you can go up to this next set of phones. I think that's a really interesting like project for them to rethink which is the main phone. They have not had this problem before in this way.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  My guess is that they will focus on a Pro one and then be like, there's a, there's another one that's just as good. Right? Like,

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  That seems to be it because they, what's the story they have to tell, Dieter? We've been talking about this. They'll tell a story about the camera.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Yep. And the, the big one will have the, the good cameras, the, the big one, the high end one. It's going to have the extra camera. It's wide angle. They're supposedly going to do a bunch of like new kinds of compute computational photography with where they're going to be able to pull data from all three lenses to do interesting things and potentially even fix photos. Uh, so it won't just be that you can take a super wide angle photo, the way that you can in a bunch of like wide angle Android phones, which by the way, might be enough to make me happy because I love me wide angle lenses. They're so much more fun than telephoto lenses.

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I, we, we've already had this conversation. Uh, we'll see. Like I'm so not convinced that buying more lenses on the back of your phone is a good use of money at this point in time.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, at the same time, it is better to have a better camera on your phone, but it's just going to drive an upgrade cycle. I think even Apple knows that it won't at this point.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  I mean, the thing that would drive an upgrade cycle that would make everyone, uh, around the world, uh, immediately throw their current iPhones in the trash. They won't recycle them. They won't do the environmentally friendly thing. They'll just try, they'll immediately light them on fire and go buy the new one is if they actually switch the iPhone Pro to USB C. That's, that's what I believe in my heart, deep down. They won't. The rumors are pointing towards lightning and it's not going to happen. I think it should happen next year. Um, makes sense that they're not doing it, but that's what I believe. I believe that, uh, there's a secret hidden movement, a silent majority of people that just want the iPhone to use USB C. And Apple's problems of people not upgrading their phones would go away if they switched. That's what I, I go to sleep dreaming about.

• 10:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Here's what I'm going to ask you.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  I know that Heim Gartenberg on our, our staff has, has deep emotions about this.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the power brick in the box this year will be USB C?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  I, I'm a hard man. I, I think absolutely.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  You think they're going to go with another USB A five amp little dinky do again? They can't all.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna, they're gonna do that until the end of time.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Man, they. They have to switch it to USB C. They have to.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  It's not gonna happen.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  They gotta up the power, the wattage just a little bit.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  Nope. You can tell me what they have to do. We have lots. I mean, what is the Vergecast but an hour long of what Apple should do? Or what they have to do, or what they're morally, they're gonna put a five watt USB A charger in that box.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  You know what? That's gonna be our review of the iPhone. I'm just, Eli's reviewing it and the entire thing is just gonna be a picture of that power adapter. And just, no, that'll be the whole review. A giant 20 point font, no. A picture of the power adapter, the end.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here are a question I have. If, if Apple knows that they're not getting new customers, which is like a real thing, right? They, they kind of know it, right? They're not grabbing mu- many new customers. The sales are basically flat. Why do they even put this thing in the box anymore?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  It is statistically likely that every person in the world has a USB power brick, right? Like, it is statistically likely that there are like five USB power bricks in, in existence for every human in the world. We should actually do that math. That's like, instead of like GDP, we're gonna measure a USB bricks per capita. So like, why, why, why do they keep manufacturing these? Is, is like a question I have.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  I was looking at my collection. I have a box. I've, I've done some home organization and now have a box of power bricks. And most of them are five watt. And that would be a bad situation for like a modern, fast charging phone, right?

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  So most people, most of the random, if you just, if you just, a, a, a charging brick falls from the sky and hits you in the head, it's probably five watt. And that's probably a subpar experience. So I feel like you, you have to pack in a good one. So that people have a good out of the box experience, right?

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  Again, if that was a winning argument, they would have done it last year, the year before, three years ago. Like Samsung puts like fast charging bricks in the box, right?

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, not like, it's faster. It's not, it's not as fast as their phones can handle in some cases, but yeah, they do put fast charging bricks in the box. Google does. Pretty much everybody else does.

• 13:17Nilay Patel?

  So here's another question. With Johnny Ive gone, do you think this endless sort of rumor that the goal is to have no ports on the iPhone is over? That they're, they're gonna always have a port at the bottom of the iPhone? Does he know, like, Ive was like, there should be no holes, no buttons, no screen. It's just one piece of glass, right? But like dude's gone, like maybe they have some more rational designers who are like, "Yeah, charging with a wire is pretty convenient."

• 13:42Speaker 03

  I think that it was unlikely that they would be able to get rid of the port regardless. There's no way that there's a fast charging solutions for wireless that are fast enough. Even Samsung stuff isn't great relative to what you can get from a wire.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Can you imagine that airport experience where you're like at the weird charging like branded experience and you've like plugged a wireless charging power mat into that and then you're balancing it on your knee and then you've got your iPhone on top of that and that's, that's airport life now.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I see that everywhere.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  But you can't see that? You can't use your phone when it's on the wireless pad. If you're like at the airport, it's over there, right?

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  I see people on planes who have the new fangled, like I think Mophie makes one, Belkin makes one, their batteries with a Qi brick like in it, you know, like integrated. And they're like on the plane with their battery pack, charging the phone on the battery pack. And I'm like, you're not, you're not accomplishing anything. Like you should just, it's right there. Like, you don't, you don't need to, okay.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, I think that's like a big question. Like are they going to move it to USB C? I would guess not at this time. And then are, are they going to, are they going to decide that the ecosystem is ready for a USB C brick? And I would bet no. Like just a flat no. And I think that's, it's one of those things. It's like the USB A port is the most successful power connector in the history of the world.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  And you, like you have to say it's over and I just don't think it's over. It's, it's so everywhere that they have to put that cable in the box.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Here's what I want Apple to do instead of putting the charging brick in, I want them to put a lightning to USB A cable in and then replace the charging brick with a lightning to USB C cable and no charging brick. So you get both cables and you can choose which one you want. And then you've already got a charging brick for either one of them or you can charge it off your MacBook like you actually want to. They should just put a second lightning cable in there instead of the brick.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, and then when the first one inevitably fails.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  So that's a phone. I think we know like iOS 13 is is well and out. It's pretty buggy. It's kind of funny that iOS 13 dot one beta is already out.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  iOS 13 isn't out. So there is some question over whether the software will be ready in time for the phone. I mean, the the phone is not 10 days away, right? Uh, 15 days away. I mean, who who knows? Like, that's an, I think, a huge open question.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  I am nervous. I haven't been running the beta on my phone because I use my phone as my phone and I can't. It's my main computer. I can't trust it to be buggy. I have been running the beta on the iPad and the most most recent developer beta. It's like, OK, I I could see it going with this. Uh, but that wasn't true until the most recent one. But they maybe got a little bit more time with the iPad because we're guessing they're not going to be announcing new iPads at this September 10 event.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think I think a safe bet is the three phones and a watch. We should talk about the watch and then sometime later they'll do Macs and iPads. It seems like now that they they're calling it iPadOS. They can basically do like a mobile event and then like a computer event.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. The Macs and iPads have to go together because of the the Catalina screen doohickey that lets your iPad become a monitor.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well, I mean, not necessarily like.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Well.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  I think it's it's it's more about the, is it Catalina? I was gonna say Marzipan. Is it?

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:06Nilay Patel?

  It's more about the apps, right? They can do an event and they can show you an app running great on an iPad. And then they're like, here's our new MacBook Pro checkout podcasts running just great on this MacBook Pro.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Like, that's what they're gonna do.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Creators love it.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  Everybody loves the home app on their shiny new MacBook Pro. And I think they have to make a big deal out of that MacBook Pro. So I think you get an event where you get like new iPad Pros and new MacBook Pro, iPadOS. You get to put all the focus on that stuff at once. Like, here's the future of this kind of computing. And then on this one, you get you get a phone and a watch. And that's like the big consumer thing. The watch seems like they don't have to do much. Like, they're already the winners. We're gonna talk about watches in a little bit, but.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:49Nilay Patel?

  But like, what the Apple Watch, like, what do they have to do?

• 17:52Speaker 03

  The rumor is they're gonna, they're gonna offer it in, I think, ceramic and like some other material. And there's the new watch OS software with the App Store. And I don't know what else I would want. I mean, I would like the thing to have it always on screen, but that's not likely. But the state of the competition for not just watches for iPhone users, but watches for all smartphone users is so lacking. Apple could coast for like, a couple of years and they would still be, have the best thing on the market.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  It would be great if they added USB C to the watch.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, well before the iPhone. They're like, we actually added a port, you know, here, it's got a headphone jack now. We're just seeing what happens. It's the future. Do you think we're gonna see new AirPods? Because there's rumors of like, pro AirPods in the world.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, like noise cancelling AirPods. I would like to see that. But like, we've seen rumors, but we sure haven't seen much in the way of like, actual like, pictures or supply chain leaks that I've noticed, which is generally a sign that it's not, it's not imminent.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they have to put them out before holiday, right? I mean, it's just like the ultimate holiday present.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's, it's kind of like the, like the cheap iPods used to be like, you're like, I have to buy you a gift. I don't know you very well. It has to look like I love you. Here's an iPod Nano. Right? Like, it's like, it's enough money to indicate that I care.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Not thoughtful enough to indicate that I know anything about you. But it's an iPod. And like, that's like AirPods, like every, you can just like, buy an AirPod, like, you've got like a 35th niece. I have a huge, so like, you're like, I don't know, she'll like AirPods.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  AirPods for everyone. Um, all right. There's other Apple news in the world that we, we should really get into. Dieter, you've been all over this.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  Which is what is going on with Siri?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  So, you may recall that everybody that makes a voice assistant has gotten caught with whatever the metaphorical equivalent of your hand in the cookie jar is for letting third-party contractors listen to recordings of your voice. Because they need humans to like verify that like the thing worked and why did it pick up or whatever. So when this happened, it happened to Amazon first and Amazon was like, "Oh, uh, yeah, that's bad." They changed their policies. They created some opt-ins. They created a whole bunch of pages and they let you go and look at your stuff and you can delete stuff from Alexa. Happened to Google. Google did something very similar. Here's a webpage you can go to to see everything. Here's how you can delete it. Here's how you can opt out of this, that, or the other thing. Apple went, "Oh, uh, yeah, no, we're

• 20:19Speaker 03

  turning off all human listening for now." And the reason was, Apple doesn't have a webpage where you can go and like see all of Siri's recordings of you. One, because they're anonymized for six months and then they get like completely de-anonymized from you. Two, I think Apple just isn't good at making web portals for things. So it's like, well, what are they gonna do? And they have now come back earlier this week and they put up a statement that I think critically said like, "We have not lived up to our own standards and we apologize." Which is super important because Apple having a privacy scandal is worse than everybody else because they've like, they've staked their entire business reputation on "we are more private than everybody else." So it was very, very good that they just straight

• 21:04Speaker 03

  up apologized, no wiggle words, just, "We didn't live up to what we said we would do. We're, we feel bad. We're sorry." And then it said what the new policies for Siri are gonna be this fall. And the most important one, the best one, the one that I want everyone to follow is the default opt-out, which is just fun to say.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  By default, Siri is not saving recordings of your voice on its servers. Full stop. It is still saving transcriptions. And if you don't want them to do that, you have to turn off both Siri and voice dictation. And this is a thing I wrote earlier this month where I'm like actually kind of salty at Apple that they don't have an easier toggle for this. You have to like go turn off Siri and then you have to go turn off voice dictation and then you get a bunch of things and blah, blah, blah. And then that's how you end up deleting that stuff off of their servers. Although after six months, it's like, there's too many like, "Okay, this, but then this, and then you need to know that" in that process, which is worse because you can't just go to web portal and click delete the way you can with Google and Amazon. But because their default is now just, "We're not gonna save your voice unless you like explicitly say, 'Yeah, no, I like you, Apple. You're allowed

• 22:08Speaker 03

  to have my voice.'" I think they're doing better on the privacy front than the other two. They've sort of leapt ahead a little bit.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  What is the value of having the transcription?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Uh, the value of having the transcription, I mean, they get to know what people are asking for and whether or not Siri was able to successfully like respond to that query. Like they are able to learn whether or not people are actually trying to set a second timer in their kitchen.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  You know, and apparently not.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  This is something I thought when voice assistants first came out, it's like, okay, well, I've used this for an hour and I found 20 things it can't do.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  So obviously, Apple, who has several employees, probably knows even more things that it can't do, that it probably should do, right? And sure, it might not have perfect big data omniscience about the statistical likelihood that someone's going to want to set two timers. But it's imaginative, innovative, some say, employees could figure out, well, this is something we can't do, let's add it on our like little Trello board and then we'll add it as a feature. Yeah, so things don't get added. So like, I don't see why these voice assistants need to gather so much information about how we use them, because some of the most obvious improvements are not added.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  You know, if, if, if there was truly a robot in the sky, augmented by contractors, learning how I like to use my voice assistant and improving that, then I'd be like, oh, okay, I get it, that's a trade off. But this doesn't seem like, seem like a trade off, because we don't get those kinds of improvements.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  So a potential pushback is you're assuming that what's obvious to you of what these voice assistants should be able to do and questions they should be able to answer, is obvious to everybody, and that's not necessarily true. So I don't know the stat, but Google likes to talk about how some surprisingly high percentage of Google searches are completely unique things that they have never seen before in the history of Google. People are asking stuff that have never, has never been asked before in that search box all the time. And so it may be that saving at least those transcriptions and then, you know, running some kind of insane anonymized machine learning, what are people asking for thing on it, they can number one, like keep up on trends of like What are the new things people are asking for that we should cover?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  But two, they won't get caught in ethnocentric filter bubble of only assuming the things that the people in Cupertino think to ask the answer is the thing that people worldwide actually want answered.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think it's important to differentiate the three main companies here.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Right? So Google is a search engine. They already take text queries all day long. And we have to just, we have to trust. In my mind, there's a difference between how I use Siri and Google Assistant. And it comes down to the fact that I've already made the decision that Google will know every question I've ever thought of in my life.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, is that cool? It's cool in the sense that it's a monopoly and there are very few other choices. But like, also like, you know, we're in the privileged position of having met many Google executives in our life. Right? Like, I feel like Sundar is a good guy. Like, is he? Maybe. Like, but like, we've met them, we talked to them how they build their products. Part of our job is communicating like our skepticism about their products. There they are. You know, like, I'm sick and I type in like, am I dying because I have a cough? Right? And like, Google knows that information.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  I ask, I ask Google Assistant or my Google Home Hub, like, turn on the TV, whatever. Right? And then the question is like, if it goes on by accident, is somebody listening to it? Which is like the real issue here. If you're a corporate executive and you've got like a Google Assistant random trigger in the middle of your board meeting, is that kept private? That's like, that's a lot. That's, that's a lot of, okay, we flipped on a microphone.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Oh, one thing I didn't mention, I'm sorry, about Apple is the third point is that only Apple employees are going to listen to recordings and they're going to be more proactive about deleting accidental recordings than before, which is a stricter policy than either Google or Amazon. So that executive thing, Apple's actually slightly better for that. Sorry, continue.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I'm saying with Apple to Paul's point, and you know, and like, Google like, does get better in monopolistic ways all the time. Right? Like, you search for a restaurant and you don't see Yelp review. You see like a Google card that scraped some smaller website, now website's out of business. Like, whatever, but they are improving all the time. And you can like, see it because you're in this constant relationship with Google to do that thing.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Apple has been collecting this data. They've had contractors listening to it. And to Paul's point, the perception of whether Siri or not is getting better is basically like Siri is far behind and hasn't improved. To your point, Dieter, like, that might not be fair. I think Siri has improved in some ways, but you're not in this constant relationship of using it. Right. I don't, like, personally, I don't trust it to get it right so often that I just don't use it. Actually, you know, it's really, it was, uh, this is like a hilarious, uh, problem and whatever, but Becky, like, didn't turn on Siri on her phone when she set up her iPhone. She just never uses it. It was like, do you want to use Siri? And she said, no. And it's just off on her phone. Yeah. So when we're in our car. Yup.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  Which has Siri integration, the car's instinct is to like, connect to Siri. You get, she gets a text when it's connected over Bluetooth. Uh, and like Siri will handle it, but because Siri is off on her phone, the car's like built in weird voice assistant lights up and it is so bad. So she gets like lots of texts when we're driving. This is just a fact. And like our car, like literally the computer crashes because it cannot handle the amount, and it's like, you got a text and then like another text comes in before it's slow. Anyway, I gotta turn Siri on her phone. The point of this is she, she hates it. It's, it doesn't even occur to her to turn it on when she was prompted to do it because the, the use case is so bad.

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  Even though they have this data, even though they've had the voice recordings, even though they've had the transcriptions, even though they know people want to set two timers, they have not lived up to the bargain of we're collecting your data. So to me, it makes perfect sense that they're going to say, we're going to stop. Like, we're not using it anyway. Yeah.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  But then you go to Google and Amazon where it does seem like they're using it. They, they need it. They know they need it. They've got to be more transparent about it in, in various ways. And Amazon, the Alexa app just lets you listen to it. Yup. Like, it's very clear, right? If you just open the Alexa app, you can be like, here's all the stuff I've said to my Alexa. Or here's all the times the microphone is, is lit up. You can delete it. And I think it's, they're, they're better at it because they're making better use of the data. So the data seems valuable to them. Whereas I think Apple is just historically so far behind that they would rather say, we don't need it. You can opt in if you need it and then we'll collect some of it. I can't, you know, like, we have to ask them. I think, you know, we're about to go to an event. We'll hopefully see some of their executives. We can ask these questions. But that's my sense

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  of it is they don't need the data because it's less fundamentally less actionable for them than it is for Google or Amazon, which are far more data-driven companies.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Is Alexa getting better?

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I think that Amazon also has the benefit of being able to market Alexa on TV. And like, they're willing to say, go use Alexa, it can do these things. And Google does this to some extent, too. Apple doesn't get on TV and be like, look at all the things that you can ask Siri, because they know that they'll just get dunked on nonstop. But Amazon can go up there and say, like, look at the new thing Alexa can do and like, show a family, blah, blah, blah. And the kid runs in and Alexa reads it a bedtime story. And I just called the kid in it, but that's fine. You know, like, Alexa is getting better, but also, Amazon and Google are both more willing to try to communicate to you

• 30:08Speaker 03

  that it's getting better through various other marketing channels that they have to talk to you. Whereas Apple is not in that business, because I don't think that they believe Siri has gotten good enough where they can like, play that game on that, on that battlefront.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And also, they own the phone.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. Again, this is another case where I think the stakes are higher, in particular for Amazon.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, Amazon wants Alexa to be Windows, more or less, and they have to put it in your face all the time. You should use this instead of your phone.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  This should be the primary computing interface in your car. This should be the primary computing interface in your, your bathroom. Everywhere that you are, like Alexa is to be the thing you think of instead of reaching for your phone. Whereas Apple's just like, you should reach for your phone, which we made. Like, the stakes are lower. And I think Google's in like, a weird middle zone, right? Like, what's a thing that you do with your phone quite often is use a Google service. So I think they're a little bit more chill about it, but.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  You know, to address and I think Google would be very happy if everyone was using assistant all the time.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  Whereas I think Apple's like, yep, it's a thousand dollar phone. You can buy it and then we will upsell our services to you over time.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I mean, they're very chill company in that way. Peter, you wrote a piece about how generally voice assistant ecosystem has not developed as you think it should.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so the BBC announced that they're making a digital assistant called Beeb, although maybe Beeb is not, because you know, it's the Beeb. Baby Beeb is not a great wake word, so they might have to change it. And everyone is just making fun of them. Oh, my God, why is BBC blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my take is like, actually, no, go ahead, BBC. Like, there's, there's lots of things that I would want a voice assistant that interacts with a news service to be able to do that is item number 5,325 on Alexa's list of priorities. It's number one, two, and three in BBC's. And so I would like to see a more generalized way of people to make voice assistants.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Obviously, it needs to be private, so it's really ironic to bring this up right after we've had all of these scandals about contractors listening to voices. But if we can get to a place where like the voice understanding problem is relatively solved, and I think we're not that far off from it, at least at a good enough level, there should be a better way for the main assistant to talk, have another assistant pop in. In the same way that like your computer operating system doesn't do everything, there are third party apps. Right now, the third party apps for assistants are like skills or actions or, you know, whatever the heck they're called. And they're, they're really basic. They're basically just like macros. That's all they are. They're just macros. And you can do a little bit of like call on this, this other service that like has

• 32:53Speaker 03

  a little bit more interaction now, but it's very, very janky. It's very bad. And I would like to see a system, and we should like be trying to develop a system that feels a little bit more open and a little bit less like, well, we just have to wait for Amazon or Apple to make their monolithic, you know, operating system based on voice better. What if, what if they just made it a platform that other things could run on than in a more open way than they currently have?

• 33:20Speaker 04

  I think the operating system analogy in this, as you were explaining, like especially Amazon needs it to be an operating system. And to me, it's really that it's that worst kind of operating system where there are no, there are no apps, you know, there are these skills are not apps that you cannot run software on it. It definitely cannot run whatever software you want on Alexa. Like Alexa is a completely controlled system. Amazon completely controls it. There's a computer in your house that Amazon is a hundred percent in charge of. And they sometimes dispense to you a few privileges of customization, but they really, that's their software. And I would love to see a voice assistant, operating system, or whatever it would be.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't know what it would take for me to actually want a real voice assistant in my house again, but, um, but it's not, it's not something that is as tied down as Alexa is.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Paul, weren't you ages ago talking about some like open decentralized voice assistant project?

• 34:20Speaker 04

  No, I, I was telling you, it was just a few weeks ago, I, I got a Kickstarter update from the Mycroft open source.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Voice assistant. So that's like trying to be like, I don't know, the Linux of voice assistants. I don't know if it will, it will come through. And it's very possible that like, it's very hard to make an open source Lucy goosey version of a useful voice assistant. But I am at a point where I really want to turn off Google Assistant on my phone. I've tried to turn off all the functionality that it does do, except for I want it to be able to set timers. Thinking about, I'm literally, I'm thinking about just turning it off and just using my, because I feel like I'm, I'm opening a pretty huge privacy hole for not a lot of upside, you know?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'll say that of the, of the big three, I think Amazon is the closest to working towards this, like, let's have a, let's have an operating system, voice assistant, and then other voice assistants that like talk to it, that you can talk to, that are more specialized. They've already like gestured in that direction, uh, now that Microsoft has like bailed on making. Cortana a heads up competitor to those three and now Cortana is just going to be like a thing for Windows and enterprise use and who knows and they've made deals with Amazon and Alexa's built into a lot of Windows computers and so I think that there'll be a there'll be the case where like you talk to Alexa but then like you ask Alexa to do some Cortana stuff.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  And I think that that they're more interested in being open and just screw it, everybody makes stuff than either Google or Apple. Google is actually surprisingly precious about how they're working with stuff with the assistant. And it makes sense because I think that they are more sensitive to people accusing them of privacy violations than Amazon is in this moment. And so they have to be more careful. The way that they shut down like works with Nest and you know, all that stuff is like related to that. So they're being much more deliberate and that has resulted in a little bit more of a waltz garden for the Google Assistant than there has been for Alexa.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think Amazon's walking into the privacy conversation in a way that it absolutely does not want to, which is like it owns Ring. Ring often goes to the cops and is like, would you like to surveil the neighborhood? We'll give everyone a free camera. And it's coming for Amazon. It's weird. Most of the coverage is about Ring, which is fine. And like Jamie Simonoff has been on the Verchass, you can go listen. Tech interview. I mean, I was actually just re-listening to it with all this ring coverage. I was like, what is the future of Ring? And he's like, our goal is to stop crime. And it's very few like IOT CEOs like say the same things Batman says.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, that's not a normal like, like the August Smartlock CEO isn't like, I will, I will defeat the Joker. Like it doesn't. Anyway, but Ring is like, that's the mission of the company.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  Is to help the cops. And like now Amazon has this like problem, which I don't think it's ever had to deal with, like the surveillance problem. It's coming at it in a way that I think is wholly unique from the way that Google and Facebook have maybe faced it. Because they're actively trying to like work with the state in that way.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, I don't think they quite realized that when they bought like a security camera company, you know, like that the goal was to build a pervasive private surveillance network that would then deliver video to the cops.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  But here they are like, welcome Jeff Bezos. Your indiscriminate buying of companies has brought you this problem. By the way, last two things on Apple real quick and we were way over in this section. We're going to take a break, but. This is like, Paul, you know, we constantly talk about like, regulation. I think a whole thing that is happening right now is that companies are doing things they should have done ages ago. Because they're afraid of who will win the next election and actual regulation coming for them. So, Apple is like, opening up its repair cadence. Because like, the right to repair movement is like, getting traction. So before, I don't know, Kamala Harris, or like Bernie Sanders, or whoever, like, puts out a right to repair law.

• 38:25Nilay Patel?

  They're like, "Look, we just give, we've announced an extension of our repair capabilities. And now independent contractors can get certified and repair our phones." Which I think is a great outcome, right? Like, just the mere threat of, of the government action has caused them to do the right thing. It's like, working opposite with Facebook, like, the threat of antitrust means like, Instagram is slowly being crushed into the Facebook ball, but like, whatever. I think this is a great outcome, right? Like, independent repair shops can buy genuine parts from Apple, they can get certified to repair the stuff. Hopefully, there'll be some price competition in the market. Like, all of that is great, and I think it neatly threads the needle of, "Hey, there should be more places to get your battery replaced." And, by the way, replacing a battery might cause your phone to explode.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  This, this is a follow-up to that, like, that iOS, like, hating your unofficial battery thing, right?

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Yep. I, I, I do like that, you know, we can, we can credit Elizabeth Warren for this, or we could. I, I, another optimistic version is that, like, privacy and right to repair backlash is effective.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  I mean, we've been talking about how ineffective it is. I mean, obviously, if we gripe about something, doesn't mean anything's gonna happen. So, stuff happening after griping, you don't wanna like, take all the credit. But it's exciting. It's exciting. It's almost intoxicating because if you had these companies that were truly responsive to not just trying to control their customers, but actually help them, you know, that would be a cool, weird world to live in.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I think, you know, I've talked to Apple folks about this in the past. They're like, we're happy to let people repair their phones. The phones are very complicated. They're very small. There's a lot of stuff packed in there and the batteries are dangerous, right? Like, we don't, we don't talk enough in like, how dangerous battery, like if you like poke the battery wrong. David Pierce did this, right? He tried to repair, there's a Wall Street Journal video.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  Where his like battery went on fire. Like, David's like a smart guy. He's not, he wasn't, I mean, he's a little bit clumsy. Sorry, David. But like, he messed up and he's like, he caused a dangerous situation. The idea that now there will be more places that are certified to do it correctly, hopefully means consumers have more choices. And Paul, like, maybe it's griping, but I think there's a lot of, hey, you don't have to pass the rules because we're, we're doing the right thing already. And you see it in kind of like a few different places. I think it's like, great, right? Like, you don't have to go all the way, you don't have to push the pendulum all the way out. But like, just the threat that someone's paying attention and could make a rule means like, oh, we gotta like behave ourselves. That's like the right sort of outcome.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or, or you could, or you could pull Zuckerberg and integrate rapidly all of your divisions.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  There's another, there's another outcome in which you launch like a global currency that threatens to destabilize the world. It's like, which is like six of one, half dozen of the other. You never know. There's another note on this same kind of thread. We had the CEO of Assurion on the show. And I really wanted to talk to him because I think it's wild that Tony Datter, he has 19,000 employees and they like contract to cellphone carriers. And just help people use their stuff.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  Which I, I think is like a massive indictment of how like, how difficult everything is and how like poorly everything works together that you can build a business of that scale, just doing tech support. They bought Ubreak iFix, which is the official shop that repairs Pixel and Galaxy phones for Google and Samsung.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  So I think, right, it's a little bit more consolidation, but you see like, the idea that these things are pervasive, they're going to last a little bit longer than, than anyone ever really expected, and you need a, like a network of repair providers or service providers. That's like a huge business now. I, like, the reckoning is coming for everywhere you go, you should be able to get whatever phone you have fixed, or repaired, or replaced. That's like a very sci-fi thing, by the way, like, like every, every, I don't know, pick one out of a hat, like Blade Runner, like, there's all these little shops that are like tweaking and customizing and modding stuff, like, in the background of every great sci-fi story. It's like, it's like another little baby step to that, like, okay, this stuff is going to get a little more modular, it's going to get a little more hackable, it's going to get a little more fixable.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm into it.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yep. Speaking of modular, last thing, the Fairphone 3 or 2, there, there's a new version of the Fairphone, uh, it's not like a spec monster, of course, but if you want a battery that you can replace yourself, uh, there you go. Just go, go buy a Fairphone.

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  Good luck.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  Enjoy, enjoy your time. All right, we're gonna, we're gonna run some ads, we'll be right back.

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• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Dieter, what is going on with the Surface event?

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Uh, Microsoft did a kindness to all of us and just told us over a month in advance of when they're holding a Surface event. So

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Thank you, Microsoft. I can actually like manage my calendar and not live in suspense. I'm sure that Apple's not going to take advantage of this encounter. Program you. Actually, they probably will.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  They will.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  I'm very excited for the Surface event because there's, there's a bunch of Surface devices that they're not bad. They're not long in the tooth. They still are great, but like they could stand some updates. So like the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop. Uh, I would like to see them switch to USB C. I would like that very dearly. There is potentially a Surface Pro, Surface something, something that could run on this new Qualcomm 8CX processor, which is a thing that there's only a handful of laptops that do now. It's an ARM processor and that could potentially be like good enough. Like my guess is that a Surface running on the Qualcomm 8CX will be faster than my current Surface Go. And I would be very excited to switch because I would get way better battery life, approximately similar performance and access to LTE.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  So that I think is like the flagship, or not the flagship, but the stuff that people actually buy. But the big flashy thing is, uh, this might be the time that when Microsoft is finally ready to reveal the dual screen device that they've been rumored to have been working on for a while now. Not like all the way back since the Courier. Like, we're not going to bring up the Courier because that's too painful. Um, but for a while now, this thing that's been codenamed Centaurus that Tom Warren has been writing about, uh, there's a decent chance that this might be the time for them to, to show it off.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I feel like that's, it's, that is like related to the endless rumors of the phone. You know what I mean? Like

• 45:50Speaker 03

  There's an endless Surface phone rumor and kind of like when we talk to Panos or whatever, like the response is, well, what would the next kind of thing be? And it's, it's very much like your, your professor of innovation, like demands that you answer the question. I love it. It's like very challenging. He's like, well, what do you want? And it's always like, I don't, I don't know, man.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  Haven't we definitively proved that this is bad? Like a true dual screen laptop that doesn't have a, because there's some real exciting stuff happening where like the touchpad is a screen or the, you know, keyboard in the front club and you got a screen above the keyboard.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Are you saying that a folding or a fold and half courier style, like note taking tablet device from Microsoft is a bad idea, but that keyboard in the front is a good idea? I just want to be clear that that's, that's the, the argument you're making.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Yes, okay. As someone who has at times been employed as a professional writer, I find it helpful to have keyboards on my computers.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know who has historically made really, really good Bluetooth keyboards, portable Bluetooth keyboards? Microsoft. Microsoft has made my favorite Bluetooth keyboards over the years.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying it's a two-screen laptop and to use it, great, you gotta buy a Bluetooth keyboard.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's like, think of it like an iPad. Think of it, it's like, they can't make a tablet, they've, they've got the Surface to use it, you gotta buy a keyboard. But nobody thinks of it in the same class as the iPad because it's, you know, it's a Windows machine and blah, blah, blah. So if they want to get people to think of Microsoft making consumer products in a different context than just it's a laptop replacement, they need to do some other form factor. And the ones that are like on the table right now are like tablet, well, they got the Surface, they can't really try it again there. Phone, we know what happened there. They're not going to get that done until they, you know, convince Samsung to let them make a Microsoft version of a Galaxy phone, which they're very close to. And then, or something else.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  And that's something else, I think, is this like dual screen, you know, folding thing.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like the you said laptop replacement and that just started my wheel spinning like that is the entire frame for these devices. It's weird that you'd want to escape it. Even Apple is like inside that frame now, right? They're like, it's called iPad OS, it can do multi Windows. It can, I don't know, the web browser now pretends to be a real web browser. Like, they're like, okay, it's gonna replace the laptop. Like, here's a file system, fine, we give up. And then they've got like, the cheap iPad, which I, like, my dad owns just to play Sudoku on.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, right, there's like the Sudoku machine, there's a laptop replacement, and there's literally nothing in between. And I just don't think Sudoku machine is like a big enough market. But like, that's the, that, there's no middle ground, is there?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  You can make a Nintendo Switch. That is Minecraft, a Minecraft, Microsoft Nintendo Switch.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  Game specific tablets.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  DS, so you can have two screens.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  There is Microsoft X Cloud, just saying, and like, Tom's reported that they have, the Surface team has been showing this off internally, and there have been long lines of employees, like, lining up at Microsoft's campus to go look at this Centaurus thing, so. Maybe they won't release it, maybe this event is not the one where they do it. But, I don't know, you know me, I get really excited about different kinds of computers, so I'm like, really hoping they do something here.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I would love to see some new form factors, like, just in general, it'd be, it's time, right? It's, and the folding phones, I would say, got off to a bumpy start.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  We're sort of a, literally a bumpy start.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  But like, it's obviously time, right? Like, there's a lot of excitement over, is there yet a new form factor?

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of new form factors, we're also expecting, what, Holland's 2 to go officially on sale, like, next month?

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Two days?

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's very much an enterprise product.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very good. You know, I got to try one, but we did a whole thing on it. It's very good. You're not going to go buy one, but if your company goes and buys one, you're going to like it way better than the HoloLens one.

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you're an Audi mechanic, this is true, if you're an Audi mechanic, the HoloLens 2 will be how you receive your trading materials. So get ready, Audi mechanics of the world.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. Two more little announcements, and we should talk about some more watches for a minute. And this is my favorite, that Samsung announced a Galaxy Home Mini, public beta before actually shipping the Galaxy. They've got to be, we just talked about voice assistants, maybe we should have looped this in here. Like, who stood the best opportunity of launching a competitor to Google Assistant and Alexa Siri? It was Samsung, no matter how much crap we gave Bixby.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, they sell a lot of phones, they can get it in front of a lot of people, and it went nowhere.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Samsung's core mistake with Bixby was they launched it, Dan Seifert went and like, talked to the engineering team and did a whole story on it, and they said, "We are not trying to take on Alexa and Google Assistant head-on. We are making a thing that controls the phone. It's a different kind of thing, and we're going to get good at that, and then we'll see what happens." And they stuck to that plan for approximately five minutes. And then they're just like, "Let's just have it try and do everything now." And you're gonna lose. If you try and take those big guys on head-on from the jump, you're just gonna lose. It's like, if you tried to launch a phone operating system head-on right now, you're just gonna lose. You gotta do something that's, you know, lateral.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  And they just didn't. And on top of all this, like, we've been talking about the, you know, the privacy problems and the threat models for these big three assistants. I have literally no idea what happens when you say something to Bixby.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Well, nothing, generally.

• 51:46Nilay Patel?

  I think it's like very clear they're collecting no data because it doesn't work so great.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  It's weird because you know, Apple should do all that phone control. I don't think it does it, right?

• 51:54Speaker 03

  A little bit.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  Turn off wifi.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Oh, it did.

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Now Siri's not available because I'm not connected to the internet.

• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  Nailed it. Uh, okay. I mean, like, it's weird that Apple doesn't talk about that more. That's actually a useful thing for Siri to do. And they haven't, I don't think, they've got like shortcuts and I think iOS 13 is going to let shortcuts in Siri integrate more. But that's still pretty power usery.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Anyway, I'm very happy that Samsung is now announcing like another smart speaker product. That will never ship. I don't think the first one will ever ship. I think it's, it's, it's a dream world. Uh, and then another piece of, I mean, the Pixel 4 has leaked so much. Like they've, they've just up and said, like, here it is.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  But battle of the camera squares is real, right? We think the iPhone 11 Pro will have a camera square. We've seen like leaked case builds or whatever. And now the Pixel 4 is going to have a giant camera square. And is, this is just going to be an ugly cycle of phones is from what I gather.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Yep. It'll be an ugly cycle of phones and like the, the thing that will determine the winner will be what do your, what does your ugly camera square do? And um, how is, how does your face ID slightly better at unlocking when you see me at an angle? Or when I pick it up and saw your radar detects my face? Like, that's where we're at now.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  So this is slight tangent, but so camera squares, right? There's, it's a bump and it's a bump on one side of the phone. And I know the rumors with the, um, the iPhone, the, the new iPhone that it will have a lie flat unlock, right? But that's a bit of a misnomer because there are no phones in the world now that lie flat. Because they all have a bump on one side. And so they're like.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Everybody uses a case. Everybody uses a case. The end.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think Apple just assumes you're going to put their phone in a case now.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Even if you put it in a case, because you're a monster or you value your investment, whatever. Why can't we have a full width bump? Just embrace the bump and go full wide camera bump. I don't care what you put in it, but just go full width so that I don't have a teeter totter of a phone.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that more or less the S10, right? It's like a horizontal bump, like across the back.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  But does it go all the way across?

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Well, no, but it's like, it's big enough where it like lies flat. Well, not flat, but it doesn't wobble. Also, phones are so big now that like the wobble, it's like they form like a triangle, like a tripod from the camera bump on the two sides of the phone because they're so big. And so they're relatively stable.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  Not my experience. I'm sorry.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  Paul, we gotta send you some cases, man. If you're out there, you're a case manufacturer, Paul Segman needs a sponsor. Let's just make this happen. Can we just end this conversation?

• 54:42Speaker 04

  2020 and the wobble. Just sell me a sticker that's the size of the camera bump that is also as thick as the camera bump. And so I can, no wobble, no case.

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  That is the worst outcome. Sell me a foam pad for my phone. Just get a case.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  I hate the wobble.

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, let's talk about Starbuck watches.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  So the big important news is there's a new version of the Fitbit Versa, Versa 2. And they, um, man, they gave it an OLED screen and they removed some buttons. And so it's going to look like a nicer object, but it still looks kinda cheap, I think. I mean, we'll see it in person, see what it looks like in person in photos. It looks like better. Everybody's saying it's just an Apple Watch knockoff and I can't, I can't say they're wrong. But I'm hopeful that it will be a little bit better than it was before. And just the fact that it's a nicer object and has a nicer screen, if the software's a little bit better, it might become a nice de facto alternative for Android users. And if you're really into Fitbit and you have an iPhone, you know, it'll be cheaper than an Apple Watch, I'm sure.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  And so like, you could go do that and fine. But I think that Android users right now have to choose between Samsung Tizen watches, Galaxy watches, which the new one's actually pretty nice, but you have to install a bunch of Samsung crap on your phone to make it work. Or Wear OS watches. I just reviewed the new Gen 5 fossil and it's very nice. It's like- I would be very happy to own it, but no one should spend $300 on a Wear OS watch right now because who knows where that platform is going.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  So it's like, and then there's new Garmin, you know, there's a bunch of stuff, but like this is still Apple's market. Everyone's doing a bunch of little stuff underneath, but nobody has emerged as like, oh yeah, I know this is definitely the alternative to the Apple watch. And Fitbit should have it. They should own it. They bought Pebble, you know, they, they own the market, but you know, like, I just, I don't think they've got the, that much resources.

• 56:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What's the major shortcoming here? Here's a, a watch that $200, has Spotify, has contactless payments, does fitness stuff. And it looks okay. Like what's, what's the big?

• 56:48Speaker 03

  So on Android, like the software quality isn't quite where you want it to be on the watch. It looked bad before, so they've solved that. For iPhone, it's like you can't get iMessage on it. The end. Like it doesn't do the stuff.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's, okay, but let's get rid of that. Okay, let's assume that iPhone users are gonna buy Apple watches.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. The answer is I don't know. Like there, there might not be that many downsides. Like they've, they've added in enough stuff that like, you're annoyed that it's Alexa and not Google Assistant, or it doesn't quite do, you know, integration with other Google stuff as well as you would like. So there might be some of that, but some of that might be relatively minor. That's why I'm excited for this thing is it has the potential to be the like, oh yeah, just get that. That's great. But I, we can't know that till we review it and that's what we're gonna do.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, Dieter, you're always pointing out like more people in the world have Android. So this is a huge addressable market. It's weird that no one has got it right, especially weird that Google has not gotten it right.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, Google doesn't know how to make its own processor chips and Qualcomm is too busy making money hand over fist with the other chips that it makes to think about smartwatches, I guess. And like, because everybody else is like failed so hard to execute, like it's not worth it to Qualcomm to put all of the years of development and R and D into making a really good smartphone or smartwatch chip. So they just like keep on tweaking the one that they've got, is my sense of it. There's like, there's, there's, there's a real chicken and egg problem here.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if there was like another chip manufacturer that saw a huge market and then competed. I got one idea and it's like, there should be more companies doing stuff.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  Or abolish patents is what you're saying.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, I mean, no, the patents are a great incentive, right? Like you, you gotta, you gotta. You gotta have a moat.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  Look, here's the

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  That's like a whole other.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Here's the pro- here's what, here's what we need. What you need is a watch. It should be round. People like round watches. And then in the middle of the face of the watch, there should just be a big ass camera.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  That's right.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  Just smack in the middle of your watch.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely. So here's a thing that remains true at The Verge. Someone in the world sees a patent and then like, I get like an urgent message. It's like, we need you to look at that. Uh, it's, that's my legacy. So Google has, they've received a design patent for a watch with a camera in the middle of, of, of the watch.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  So it's not like a, so you know, there's like different kinds of patents. A utility patent is like what Paul was just saying, right? Like, that's the patent where like Qualcomm has a bunch of patents on like 5G technologies and how they work. And so you can't like build a 5G chip that works in that way. Like, whatever, that's like, a design patent is like, here's how it looks. Like, literally like, here's how it looks. And there's like some, whatever. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's all you need to know. So Google has a design patent for the dumbest looking watch in the world. The end of all of that is, it's not even how it works. It's literally just, what if it was a circle with another circle in the middle?

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  And that circle is a camera. And it's like, why? Like, were your, were your lawyers bored? Like, did, did the intern need a project? Like, why, why did you, why did you fight your way to getting this patent? Who did you think you were gonna block from this idea? Because I assure you, no one else has had it.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, they have it.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  Maybe they're making a first party watch and it will like, every time you look at it, the camera in the middle of the screen will be, will like see your face. And it'll be like, hey buddy, you bought the watch with the camera in the middle of the screen.

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, it's not even a utility pad. It's not even a how it works. It's literally just this. It's so ridiculous. Anyway.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  That's the end of the smart watch segment on the Vergecast this week. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

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• 1:01:13Speaker 07

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• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  Every week, the consistency is astounding. It's the only thing in a turbulent time in American history that we can depend on. What's it called?

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Frige ice is trash ice. Please don't at me.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  Wow. You know, I've been, it's been weeks. It's amazing that you've, for weeks and weeks, you've been able to deliver this.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  And nobody's added me, which is, Bill, thank you for respecting my wishes about adding. Um, okay, LG has made a $4,400 fridge that makes craft ice for cocktails. Craft ice is big ice cubes. Specifically, these ones are round. It's, it's nice. You want, you don't want, if you have a bunch of little cubes, they all melt real quick. But if you have one big cube, it melts slowly, but it still has enough surface area to make your drink cold. I think that's how ice technology works.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  Properly made craft ice doesn't have as much air inside it, so it's clearer, looks better, and that lack of air means that though, like, it may be less likely to affect the taste of your drink.

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  Well, so this is what I'm talking about with trash ice. Because most, what I mean by fridge ice, that is trash ice, is ice that comes out of the door of your fridge. If you push a button and ice comes out, it's probably bad ice. It's typically old. It's, it's full of those air bubbles. Also, often it doesn't seem to be filtered as well as water I know can be filtered. And so it's just, I have had so many nice, delicious water beverages ruined by trash ice from fridge doors. And I'm saying that it is worth it to invest in some nice, whatever those silicone soft ice cube trays are.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Fill them up with some like filtered water, put them in the freezer yourself, pull them out. It's, you know, you get, your fingers get cold, but it's worth it for the flavor. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  So I have several questions about this refrigerator. Okay. First, just on a purely mechanical level. It's delivering giant spheres of ice, right? So you like push a button and it like shoots out a huge.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  No, it drops them into a drawer. Right.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't come out of the door like a, like a carnival prize. It's like you gotta open the drawer.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  It also does have door, it has door ice as well.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It has, it has regular door ice. And then there's like, it is, it's, it's automatically making ice spheres for you.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  Constantly. Okay, that's just fun, the mechanics of that are just like fundamentally ridiculous to me.

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, at some point, it's, it's just like ejecting perfectly, like just imagine you went back in time. Let's pick a historical figure. George Washington, right? You're like, George, how's it going? I hope the revolution's going well. I need to tell you something. In the future, people in their homes will have a $4,400 machine. That keeps the food cold, prevents them from getting sick. That's important to you. But also that they will just eject perfect spheres of frozen water at some time interval. And he'd be like, who are you? Are you, are you British? I have to kill you. It's George. I mean, that's like where he's at.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  He'd also, he'd also say $4,400, I could fund my entire revolution off that.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  What's a dollar?

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Get me out of Valley Forge. Get me that cash.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  But that's just like, that's just like a remarkable future moment, right? Like, everyone has a small machine that produces ice, and now it's like the ice is perfectly round. So that's, let's just admire that. Then I want to point out that LG's fridge marketing is completely out of control. Like, we don't often talk about refrigerators on this, our technology show. I wonder why? But if you just look at what LG is doing to market, like, their high-end appliances, it is the most, like, unconnected from reality marketing I've ever seen for things like refrigerators and washing machines. Like, it's like, all-black, like, images, the, everything's like fading in at you, like,

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  moving slowly, a washing machine coming at you from the mist, and then the word, like, elegant luxury, like, appears, and it's like, it's a, it's a wa, it's a washing machine, right? That's what, you just go, I just encourage everyone to look at these ads. It makes perfect sense that they added a luxury ice machine to their luxury refrigerator, because they've just decided that there's a market for extremely extra appliances. And as somebody who loves that, like, like, markets filling holes that nobody knew existed, it is my favorite thing. Like, every other refrigerator is like, it, it, it gets your food cold, it has a number of doors, it's energy efficient, and LG is like, it will change your life, and it's also like a nightclub. And I just, that's great. I just think we should all be proud of them.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  So Paul, I've hijacked your segment.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  Thank you. And just to put a little button on that, this fridge is called the 30 cubic foot, smart Wi-Fi enabled InstaView trademark, door-in-door, registered trademark, refrigerator with Kraft Ice trademark maker.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  They trademarked Kraft Ice?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. Anyway, I hope someone buys me this fridge at the end. Two other, we should just go through these things real fast. Switch Lite is out. I think Heim got to play with it. Is, is everyone just buying a Switch Lite? I'm assuming Orange is buying a Switch Lite?

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  I have a Switch. I want the Switch with better battery life. You can't have multiple switches on the same account and easily, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You gotta transfer your saved games. Wish Nintendo would figure that out. If Nintendo figured that out, I would have bought a Switch Lite, but they didn't, so I'm not.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  It's like a, you can transfer your stuff, but it's like a one-time deal, kind of.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  It's a whole thing.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  I want the TV Switch.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, you want, you want like a console?

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. Can't you just buy a Switch and leave it plugged into a TV?

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Well.

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  I might

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  Throw that out there for you, buddy.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  It might come to that.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  All right. And then this is obviously my favorite. You might know, we've talked about motion smoothing on this show so many times, but a bunch of directors across the industry, Tom Cruise made a video, Ryan Johnson made a video. Hate motion smoothing being on by default, hate all the processing. They've been fulminating about it for years now. We have been, I mean, I believe that you, if you see a TV with motion smoothing, it is your obligation as a, as a concerned citizen to turn it off, no matter where you are. Just turn it off. It's fine. You can do it. No one will stop you. Unless they do, in which case it's not my fault. The TV manufacturers are going to start a filmmaker mode in response to these concerns. I think it's Vizio said they would, LG, Sony. So you like hit a button and they turn off all their junk.

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  Notable Samsung is like, F that. We're making it crazy as possible all the time.

• 1:08:33Nilay Patel?

  Bixby mode. A small dog will narrate this, the movie for you.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  I hope they make a Bixby mode. That'd be great. This is exciting. I think, are they gonna roll it out to their existing TVs, which they should absolutely be able to do? Because it is just a macro that turns off settings? Or are they gonna market it in their next generation of TVs and force people to upgrade? That's the question I have.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  I just want it so bad. Yeah, because especially, motion smoothing is bad enough, but there are other things that TVs do as well. And this turns off all of them at once. So like now, because now, nowadays, if you're at a friend's house, they've got motion smoothing on. It is your obligation as a citizen to turn it off. But you gotta like go through and like, you gotta turn, really tweak the settings because you want a picture that they're happy with. Like you, the, the hope is that this person will realize, ah, thank you, Paul. Now I'm enjoying movies more. And I think that's just such an easier sell. It's like, Christopher Nolan likes this. And he's just like, here, let me just pull up the menu, turn on filmmaker mode. Seasons is great. This is what a movie looks like.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  So the, there is like a real danger of this. So one time I went to visit Joanna at, at like her parents' house in New Jersey. Like in New Jersey, she was there, we stopped by. Her dad's, this is a true story. I turned off motion smoothing on her like dad's TV. And to this day, he's like, I think that Neil, I ruined my TV.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  So you gotta like be careful.

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  Just like, but filmmaker mode, you're right. It's like an easy sell. You're like, you know, you gotta, you gotta put your TV in filmmaker mode. That's like the, that's the best. It needs like, they're all gonna have hypey names for it. I guarantee it. Yeah. Like Sony is gonna be like cinematic vision plus.

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  That's, that's a very important part of filmmaker mode is that it has a consistent name across brands.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  They've said it's gonna have a consistent name across brands.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  This is at least according to the announcement, like sure, somebody could, Samsung could call this Q, Q filmmaker mode S, but for now, that seems like the plan is a consistent name.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  Is this also gonna affect sound? It says affect multiple settings like framerate, aspect ratio, over scanning and noise reduction. Noise reduction referring to the picture. So yeah, this seems all picture related.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. Cause there's no way, cause every TV is A, different and B, they want you to buy a soundbar and you should buy a soundbar. So, um, the noise reduction thing is really interesting, right? Because there are many cases that you might want some noise reduction on your TV because streaming services are not great.

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  So it, it kinda depends on like whether they're talking about low light noise reduction, cause you can see some of that grain, some ISO noise, or if they're talking about like streaming compression noise.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  The, the, the combination of a TV playing around with noise and also the like, cause there's a film grain noise and then there's, there's compressed film grain noise and then there's compression noise and those are kinda three different things. And I don't think TVs are smart enough to do a good job of differentiating.

• 1:11:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I mean, this is, huh, I'm gonna find myself arguing against Tom Cruise and Ryan Johnson for a minute here. Let's see if I can pull this off. So if you're buying like a Blu-ray, like the way filmmakers deliver a movie is like, they either deliver reels of film, which are hard to screw up in a theater, right? Or they deliver like bits. And so, and then you have to like recompress the bits in however many different ways you want to. If you're playing off like a 4K Blu-ray, like the TV should probably do nothing, right? Those bits are effectively perfect. They've been compressed to a standard. This is assuming that they did a good job, but like those bits are perfect. The reality is no one in the world has a 4K Blu-ray player.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Like even the people who own Xboxes, which are 4K Blu-ray players, probably don't think that they do. You know what I mean? Like they're not using them in that way.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  Streaming services do all kinds of bad compression and there's like this massive variety. I think Vudu and Apple are kind of the best, but like that's it. Like there's no up, upper tier beyond them. And so like you kind of do need your TV or your player to compensate for, okay, I've decided to watch this movie on, on Tubi. Let's pick one. Flickster or whatever. Crackle, I'm watching a movie on Crackle tonight. Like Crackle might deliver you bad bits and there is a world in which the TV could improve that picture, but filmmaker mode would like turn all that off. So it's a real, I think this is a real question of like, who is this targeted to? And whether streaming can be improved or whether they, they're just going to push everyone

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  to like the highest quality streaming services and turn on filmmaker mode and you're done.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  So a couple of things. One, they shouldn't call it filmmaker mode because the, um, you know, the author is an illusion and authorial intent doesn't matter.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  And also frankly, like you don't want it to be exactly what the filmmaker intended because what the filmmaker intended was watching it in a dark room on a $30,000 reference monitor. You don't have that. You have a thousand dollar TV in a bright ass room with the sun shining on it and you can barely hear the dialogue and you're trying to watch the, you know, penultimate episode of Game of Thrones and all you see is black because if you had that perfect thing, you would have the perfect experience, but you don't. So what you see is garbage. They should just, they, they should call it like, I don't know, simple mode or something.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  No, but so that's the perfect example, right? HBO's streaming service, like he delivered bits, like the, the Game of Thrones is edited digitally. That's how you add a dragon to a show.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Like sure.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  Guarantee you it's edited digitally.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Nilay Patel?

  So he delivered some bits.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  He delivered bad bits. He delivered bad bits and HBO made them worse.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. HBO's streaming service made them worse. It made them not what he intended. There's no way for, you could get a TV to fix it.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  What he intended was still wrong in the first place, in my opinion.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I think filmmaker mode should be.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  He should not have killed Danny at the end.

• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  So what here, here's what I believe filmmaker mode does.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:14:43Nilay Patel?

  When a movie is done, when Mission Impossible 12 comes out, Tom Cruise will sit down and write a manifesto of authorial intent. It will be six to 12 pages, single spaced. That will come along with the streaming bits as additional metadata.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  That before you watch a movie, your TV will display this to you.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? And, and then an AI will interpret that. And then you will have a conversation with their TV's voice assistant about what, what authorial intent means to you. And then it will adjust the settings based on what you personally believe.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  This is what should happen. You know how you can like go on Cameo and pay a, a celebrity to record a 30 second clip for you? I should be able to flip on filmmaker mode premium. And then it will personally send 50 bucks to Martin Scorsese, who will then Skype me on a video call and I'll point it around the room and he'll tell me how to adjust the TV based on my room.

• 1:15:42Nilay Patel?

  That's, and he's going to be like, you should buy a better TV.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Nilay Patel?

  By the way, if Cameo offered a service where famous filmmakers just told you to buy a better TV, I would use that shit every day.

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  What if you could have like through the magic of the cloud, like a, a special Logitech remote that is remote controlled by Scorsese? So he's actually blasting the infrared at your television.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  We had this whole privacy conversation. Now we're like, what we need is Martin Scorsese to surveil me as I watch a TV. Like, okay, like there's a yin and a yang to this. Okay. We're just, now we're just, we're just way over. We're done.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  That letter, so there, you know, some films are like, I know famously, uh, Terrence Malick wrote a letter or a notice to projectionists for Tree of Life. So there is that concept. There's so much, there's so many gigabytes of data going over the wire for video. If there were several bits dedicated upfront, when you load the video to, here's some tips on how to, how to display this. And then I don't know. It sounds like there could be a standard there. Who knows?

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but th- those bits are like, here's the frame rate of this video. Please don't interpolate, you know, 200 extra frames along the way. Like, that's like, I think that's like part of the deal here.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, hopefully, you know, when Wonder Woman 2 comes out, Patty Jenkins like issues like a 12-page statement of the whole intent.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Nilay Patel?

  That like is displayed before and after like Apple streams it. That's like my dream. Okay, we gotta wrap this up. We were gonna talk about Disney Plus, but like, whatever. It happened. There's a D23 happened. Julia went. She covered the hell out of it. Go look at it on the site. The, the news I want to talk about was, uh, Dieter, you're on this too. Like, Disney knows they have to win on the technical side.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Nilay Patel?

  So they're, they're doing free 4K. They're in foursome with any streams. They own BAMTech. They're thinking hard about like server load.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  They have a really good kid mode in the app. Yeah.

• 1:17:34Nilay Patel?

  I, I, I'm excited for the stream wars to actually begin, but none of this, like, I don't even think we're gonna see Apple TV Plus at this event. I don't think, I don't think they're ready for it. I think it'll be yet another, right? I think this is a phone. We'll see.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  They're, the stream, the drums are rising in, in volume.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  We're the second Lord of the Rings movie where like the run-up to the battle at Helm's Deep is like half the movie. Like, we're there right now in the streaming wars.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Nilay Patel?

  Which one's Gandalf?

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  Ooh, the one that rolls in at the very end to win?

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Ha, Quibi.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  We begin and end with Quibi. That's a Vergecast for you. All right, that was the show. I gotta say, next week, Vergecast interview is gonna run on Thursday instead of Tuesday. It's, we just gotta hold some news. So look out for that. It's gonna be good. And then we'll have the regular show on Friday. I want you to go watch Future Music with Danny Deal on the YouTube channel. It's so good. Uh, speaking of movies, she, this week's episode was Junkie Excel who scored Mad Max, Deadpool, Blade. Come on. Just go watch it. It's so, in his studio is incredible. Danny's doing a great job with that show. Go check it out on YouTube. You can also check out Rico Decode with Kara Swisher, wherever podcasts happen to you. Uh, Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. I actually went to a live taping of Pivot. Scott is just like hilarious. Go listen to that. And

• 1:18:49Nilay Patel?

  then Rico Media, Peter Kafka, also available to you out in the world. I'm also telling you that Land of the Giants, Rise of Amazon, hosted by Jason Del Rey, is out. It's a whole podcast series about Amazon. And Jason's gonna be on the Vergecast soon. That's gonna be fun. Binge listen to Watch What's Up, but there's a lot of podcasts listening. Just get out there. Do it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  Paul Kesney.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

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