Android 10 official release, IFA 2019 dispatch, and Facebook Dating launches

This week on The Vergecast, there's a new "portable" Sonos speaker, Android 10 is now available on all Pixel phones, our reporters at IFA 2019 run through the announcements from the field, and Facebook brings their dating feature to the United States. Discussed this week: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence: “There’s no category of audio that I don’t think we want to explore”Sonos’ first portable speaker is the $399 MoveAndroid 10 officially released for Google Pixel phonesAndroid 10 review: permanent betaGoogle Assistant’s Ambient Mode turns Android devices into smart displaysGoogle can’t fix the Android update problemPhilips Hue gets Edison-style light bulbs, a smart plug, and updated Hue Go lampAmazon, Roku, and the battle for your TVAnker is putting Fire TV in a soundbar for the first timeAmazon announces new Fire TV Cube with Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and ‘Local Voice Control’LG’s new G8X ThinQ bets that two screens are better than a foldable oneHow Samsung fixed the Galaxy FoldFacebook Dating launches in the United States todayNike’s Adapt Huaraches will let you ask Siri to unlace your shoesApple iPhone 11 event rumors ranked from mind-blowing to no wayApple Music launches on the webTouch ID and Face ID could coexist in 2020 iPhones, says reportApple may release a new Apple TV with an A12 chipThe New York MTA would like you to stop dropping your AirPods onto the tracks 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, Android 10, a bunch of news from IFA. In fact, we have a field report from the crew at IFA. Get into Facebook Dating and we do a little preview of the Apple event next week. That's coming up on the Vergecast.

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• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Universe. It's good, it's a universe. Dieter Bohn is off. He's at the EXO EXO Festival in Portland, so if you're there, just wander up behind him and say, "USBC." And then he'll just start talking. And then say, "Gossip Girl." Weird. It's a weird thing to say. "I'm Neila, I'm your friend." That was Paul Miller. Hi, Paul. Hello. In Dieter's stead, we've had to replace him with two people. Dan Seifert is here. Hello. Ashley Carmen is here. Hi. How's it going? Good. All right. It's here, it happened. Technically, summer is not over, but I've ominously been saying to our editors, "Summer is over," in an effort to get everybody back to work.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  It's true. It's, I just wander the hallways saying, "Summer is over," ominously. But like gadget season is here. It's IFA in Berlin. We've got a crew out in IFA. The show's gonna be a little bit different. John Porter, Tom Warren, Chris Welch are in Berlin. This is true, they just sat down and recorded some Vergecast in Berlin while we were sleeping. So we're gonna run that in the middle of the show, a little field dispatch. I'm hoping that it's actually, they're talking about tech news and they're not just going to clubs in Berlin as a field dispatch. You never know with them. But they were there. There was an Amazon event. There's all kinds of gadgets coming out there. Then we got to talk about Facebook Dating with Ashley. Obviously. And there's an Apple event next week. Like, there's just so much going on. But let's

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  start with, I think, some news that's like a personal importance to me and to Dan, which is that Sonos put out a speaker. Obviously, you're listening to the Vergecast. If you're in the feed, you know, we interviewed Patrick Spence, who's the CEO of Sonos this week, talked a lot about the move. If you want a deep dive into Sonos speakers and literally how to run a company, that's a good thing to go listen to. But let's quickly go over the news. So talk about the move, Dan.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  So the move is like a big deal for Sonos. It is the company's first, quote, portable speaker. It's got a battery in it. It works on Sonos' like Wi-Fi system and AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect and all that stuff that all the other Sonos speakers do. But it also, for the first time, has like functional Bluetooth that you can pair your device to and use like a Bluetooth speaker. So you could, in theory, take this thing out to the beach or the park with you instead of a UE Boom or whatever Bluetooth speaker you happen to own already and be using a Sonos speaker out there. It's 400 bucks and it's huge.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  It is very large.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Like, if you haven't seen our article, go pull over on the side of the road, look up the article, and check out the picture. There's a picture of the Sonos Move next to the Sonos One, and it's like the Sonos Move could eat the Sonos One. And it's like six and a half pounds or something.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  How would you describe this size? Is this like two pineapples stacked on each other sideways?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  It's like a healthy watermelon.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so we're going fruits. We're just fully in the produce section.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  27 kiwis carefully arranged.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  But the point is, it's not the type of thing that you could just be like walking out the door, throw in your bag, and like, go. Like, like, this is like, if you are taking it with you, it is like a pack that you are taking.

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  Unless you are the sort of person who regularly runs out the door with two pineapples. I don't know what your life is like. If you are like, it's pretty normal for me to leave the house with a medium watermelon. Maybe, you never know. And this will be helpful because you got it. It has a handle.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  It does have a handle. It doesn't have a strap and it doesn't have like a place to bolt a strap to it, but it does have like a molded handle in the back so you could pick it up.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  And they're very proud of the handle. They're actually very proud of the design of this thing overall. So two little notes, like the tweeters, because they know people are going to be sitting around it. The tweeters actually fired down into this extremely custom waveguide channel, which is neat. It's like some Sonos stuff. It is not black. It is shadow black, which is a color they tested a lot.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  It's black.

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like a very dark. I'm someone who like really cares about matching blacks.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  It's a black that shows fingerprints very easily, as you can see in the pictures in the article.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  But like, it's supposed to not be all the way black, so it doesn't absorb too much heat and not fade. It's not white because I get super dirty. It's like, they're very thoughtful about these kinds of details. They talked about them with us a lot. And then it sits on a little base with pogo pins to charge.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, like I said at the beginning that this is like, quote, portable speaker. I think real, the use case for this is you are a Sonos customer or you want Sonos in your house and you want a speaker that basically lives in your home and like your living room or your kitchen or wherever it is that you want to put it. And like 95% of the time, it just sits there on the base and you use it like you would any other Sonos speaker. And then like that five or 10% of the time, you want music out on your patio. Cause you're like barbecuing or it's a nice weather or whatever. You just like pick the thing up and move it to the patio. And it doesn't even probably need to switch to Bluetooth at that point. It can just run on the battery for 10 hours and you're outside all day and you don't have to worry about it. And then when you're done, you just kind of put it back in the house. Like, I don't really see people traveling with this kind of speaker.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I, there's a guy in my neighborhood who has like a crazy, like $100,000 jacked up Jeep Wrangler. I bet, like, I wanted to ask him. It was like still under embargo, so I couldn't. I was like, would you be interested in a $400 Bluetooth speaker? And I, I think the answer is yes. I'm going to find out. I'm going to do some reporting this week. I'm going to exclusively talk to people with like six-figure Jeeps.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not the only one, but it's like, when most people hear Bluetooth speaker, they think of a Uwe Boom that costs them like 80 bucks or something like that. And it's like the size of two soda cans on top of each other. This is like not that product at all. It's very different.

• 6:45Nilay Patel?

  It was interesting. So I have a Sonos setup and we had some friends over for Labor Day and. We were like running around the house and I had never thought about it before, but I instantly came up with like six different ways this thing would have been useful. Right? Like we were outside in the yard, we were out by the grill, we were like, I don't know, just running around being idiots. It would have been like, it would have been useful in a way that my Bluetooth speaker is annoying. And then if we were actually, I think the Bluetooth part of it is actually like, if you're gonna make one that moves, you have to have some facility to take it away from your house. But I agree with you. I think mostly this is about, you want a Sonos experience somewhere near your house, in range of your Wi-Fi, and this makes it much easier to do that.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, most of the time you'll, you'll use it on Wi-Fi. It has the same voice control features as the Sonos ones. So you couldn't like yell at it to, you know, tell Alexa or Google Assistant to do something. Uh, and, and that will all function wirelessly even on battery, as long as it's on the Wi-Fi network. When you do go over to Bluetooth, you kind of lose all of those features. So you don't have the ability to Bluetooth or stereo pair, if you really wanted stereo pair to Bluetooth speakers like these. Uh, you don't have the voice controls. You don't have the TruePlay tuning that, um, uh, we haven't talked about yet, but, but the new thing with this is that it automatically uses Sonos' TruePlay tuning. So it's like, uh, older Sonos speakers, you had to wave an iPhone around a room for 30 to 60 seconds to map the room and then the speaker would adjust

• 8:07Speaker 03

  itself. This is smart enough to use its own microphones to adjust itself to the environment, which is great because it's something that you're moving all the time. It seems to be a lot like, uh, the HomePod where you're like, as soon as you turn it on, within 30 seconds, it's adapted itself to the room, uh, and adjusted its sound as, as well. But like, a lot of those cool, nifty, smart features, you really aren't going to benefit a lot from when you're on Bluetooth. It's just a Bluetooth speaker.

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  So my favorite little bit, and we should talk about the other two ones. And again, there's an entire podcast of Patrick's once that you can listen to. My favorite little bit, the battery is removable, because it's supposed to, like, Sonos is like, these things should last for like a decade. The battery's gonna last three years. Eventually, we're just gonna sell or replace some batteries.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  It's not removable in the sense that like, you're out and about and you like keep a second one charged so that you can keep the party going for 20 hours instead of 10. It's removable in the sense that like, after three years of use, or I think Sonos estimates like 900 charges, it's not gonna hold its charge anymore. So you can like take the bottom apart with a couple of screws and swap out the cell. There, there's like a handy little plug or whatever. And they say that they will be selling more or replacement battery packs, but we don't know how much they're gonna cost yet, but they'll, they'll be available at some point.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  350.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  No, I love that. And like, they actually didn't take as much credit for it as like I wanted to give them. Like Spence was like, well, it's not a phone. It's like easy to do, right? Like.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  They're like, it's big. We had the room.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  But so many products have sealed in batteries and they just expect them to be disposable. And here they actually like, thought about it.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Every other Bluetooth speaker on the market is falls into that. Like, can you change the battery on a UE Boom? I don't think so.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  I bet Heim can. I'm just putting it out there. I bet Heim Gartenberg can change the battery on a UE Boom.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  I mean, this is also interesting though, because it is in a certain way a recurring revenue model. Like, not in this exact moment, but in a few years, it does generate some cash for them if this becomes a popular product.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  You mean the battery swaps?

• 9:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Like every three years, everybody swaps batteries.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  It guarantees as opposed to just buying, like, yes, you could buy a new speaker, but like, it's expensive. I think this had to happen.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  Battery pods.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  This, I don't own a Sonos. Obviously, everyone at The Verge like has Sonos, loves Sonos, but I've been waiting and this actually almost might be the one. I think this might be it.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Is it the one at $400?

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Well, that's, first of all, $400 is obscene for me. Second of all, this thing is fricking huge. When I saw that photo, I was like, wait, what?

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  I have to put that on my shelf over my bed? No way.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  I, I, I think like the price and the size for like the nine million existing Sonos people that have like, Sonos systems already and they're like, oh, it'd be great. I can take it out of my house. Like Neelai said earlier, that's not going to be a hurdle for them. They'll pay the $400. They'll, you know, be happy with the size. I think it might be a hurdle for non-Sonos customers. Like, $400 is a huge layout for a single speaker.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  So I think that's why they made the, the one I saw.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Maybe. Wildly different product, but yeah.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  This kind of seems like a portable home pod though, right?

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  It's kinda, yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  Like, what if you could have a home pod that was portable?

• 11:00Speaker 03

  I mean, nobody bought the home pod as it is.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  What is the argument you're making?

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  What if you could have an unpopular product made by a different company running a different operating system?

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, so that's why they made the cheaper one. So I mean, I'm curious at 179.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  No, that's, that's a nice price.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  And it'll probably get discounted way cheaper.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  At 179, however, it is not portable, has no battery, does not do Bluetooth.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, the thing is the portable, the portable is what was attractive to me because I have a deck. I mean, my speaker can be, I have a speaker in my room right now and it's fine.

• 11:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  But like, I need something, I love that sits on a base already, so it's charged. I don't have to worry about micro USB or whatever.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  USB.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. See, this, no, yeah, and this is fine. But like, now I can take it outside. I need a portable speaker.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  My life is portable, you guys.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  You gotta, you gotta be in the move.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, always.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  You're the person with like the watermelon bag that's just waiting.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Dude, I have two bags at all times. It's actually a problem.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dan, the other big news this week, Android 10 hit, Dieter reviewed it, was not necessarily impressed. Right? He called it, he called it a permanent beta. He talked, he talked a lot about the gestures, which are the iPhone set of gestures.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  If you talk to Dieter, he is actually surprised at how much backlash there is on the gestures. He actually likes the gestures a lot. And I think he says this in the review as well, that he, after using them for a while, he, he prefers the gestures over the button system. However, there is, it is a huge change. It does affect things like app drawers and things like that, hamburger menus and what have you. And maybe there's a lot of people that are resistant to change, probably out there, and they might not like it. But Google gives you the option to go back to buttons if you want.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So it's out. You can get it on Pixel phones and a handful of other phones. The other thing Dieter wrote this week is that you are probably not going to get it. Because the Android ecosystem is very, very bad at updates.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  And I will stick this in like the show notes or the post on the side or something, but he made a graph of like the chart, the upgrade curve. And he put a vertical line at six months and a horizontal line at 50% and literally nobody hit the center of the graph. Where at six months, more than 50% of their phones have been updated, except for Nokia, which is shocking.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  If you want updates and you don't want a Pixel phone, I guess Nokia is the way to go.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's it's just a very strange situation. Dieter wrote a great piece, actually sat at the top of the site all week, right? Just pulling apart why Google has so many problems updating these phones. It's like a huge mixture of things, including the fact that Android is fundamentally an open source project. But Android 10 is out. You got a Pixel phone? You're using it. What do you think, Dan?

• 13:35Speaker 03

  It's fine. I don't mind. I like the gestures too. Like, like I've got it installed on a Pixel 3 here and like, I wish I had these gestures on other Android phones. So in a year when Android 10 actually arrives on other phones, I'll have them, which is cool. But like, it's it's really not fundamentally different. And Dieter says this in the piece, like, aside from the gestures and maybe some new permissions for privacy things, like, day-to-day use case scenarios are not that much different than it was on Android 9. So like, so much is happening with Android within the Play Store and with Google Play Services, that like the actual platform updates are becoming less and less like impactful every time.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Here's a problem I'm having with the gestures. Maybe, Dan, you can solve this for me. All right. I've got an app. It's buggy. It crashes or it's doing something bad. I want to

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Did you, did you write that app?

• 14:24Speaker 04

  No. My apps are always excellent.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Void of bugs. So I want to get to the multitasker so that I can swipe it away, right? And I feel like maybe it's just a bad habit. I typically I would go home and then I go to the multitasker and then I pull. I don't know. For some reason, right now, if you're on the home screen and you swipe up, right? You don't get multitasking. You get the app drawer, right? You need to swipe over to be in an app and then you swipe up to be in the multitasker and then you swipe back to the app that you want to get rid of, because it's the most recent one. It's like the hardest. App to have pulled up in the multitasker is the one that you were just in. And that's the one I want to force close because that's the one that's buggy.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  I think you've just got to swipe up and hold and then you get to the multit. Like if I'm on the home screen and I swipe up and hold, then I get to the multitasking screen. And then the app's there and I can, I can.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Am I just bad at swiping?

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  Nothing makes for more compelling radio than two people discussing and swiping.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  So, I mean, but this, this talks to like the, the fundamental problem with gestures is discoverability. And like, you really do have to relearn how to use your phone and, and all the muscle memory you have from tapping buttons and placement and things like that is going out the window. And like, it's going to hurt for a week or two weeks or whatever, however long it takes for you to get used to it. Once you're past that hurdle, then like, you're probably fine and, and you might like the gestures, you might not. I think most people do like the gestures once they're past that, but those first week or two are probably painful.

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  Ultimately, I think that that's the strongest argument in favor of Google changing these gestures. Like, yes, they copied Apple. Yes, they look and feel a lot like the iOS gestures. But if they are to stand any hope of converting people from the iPhone, they cannot expect everyone to relearn those gestures. Right. And like, once there's a market leader, like if I was to make a new car and I was like, it doesn't have a steering wheel. It has a series of tubes that you blow into and they're located strategically around your head. Like, figure it out. What, like, you're doomed.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  That was definitely like the first three versions of Android.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  But like you have, all the pedals are in the same place. The steering wheel is the same place. The horn is the same place. Like, most cars, like the wipers and the transmission are all in the same place. Although I will say that transmissions are getting increased in the esoteric, which I love.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Like now there's like a series of buttons and knobs, like randomly located throughout a car. But like, all that stuff is standardized and no one yells at Ford when they put out a new car and they're like, you copied the steering wheel from BMW. Like, it just doesn't happen. And I think you're seeing that a lot here with these.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  Sort of navigation systems. They're copying from each other and eventually they're just landing in the same place. Because it's, it's kind of rude to your users.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  They are landing where WebOS was.

• 17:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, look, the

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Peter's not here, somebody's got to say it.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  Someone's got to say it.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Doesn't copying stuff like this, like, there was a lot of copying in the early days, and I remember there being lawsuits over, I'm sure that was kind of, that was mostly like the Apple Samsung stuff was, was, was look, but not feel, can, is feel not copyrightable or patentable?

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Are you killing me?

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Like, remember, like, pull to refresh?

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I wrote about all these patents. I made a great video. Remember, uh, Creighton, our old producer? He and I ran around, I believe it was Mobile World Congress, looking at all of the ways people designed around Apple's slide to unlock patent. And it was,

• 17:42Speaker 04

  Oh, right.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  It was like crazy town, right? And Apple's slide to unlock patent was extremely specific. It was like, this icon moves from here to here in a, in a channel. It, it's like, it has to move along one axis, not multiple axes. So then like Sony had one that like, went up and down. It was so crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's, I think those days are over. I don't think anybody, uh, you know, like Apple and Google, like, they're frenemies. Android exists, you know, it's like, I don't think that Apple has a lot of call to go and sue over this stuff in the way they did at the very beginning, when they were morally upset with Samsung. Like, that whole market has settled down. And Samsung, their, you know, number one rival

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  is also one of their biggest suppliers. So I think that, that stuff is just like wound itself to a close. But ultimately, like, Apple pulls from Android just as much. It's just a little quieter, I think.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Android users are pretty vocal about it when, when Apple copies.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  We're all just borrowing from WebOS. We're all just slowly retracing the footprints. Soon, apps will just be websites.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the goal. I mean, they already, they already kind of are, but like, Dieter and I were talking about the fact that, um, there's a bunch of TV news at IFA this week. Tom and Chris and John are going to talk about it in their IFA segment, so we won't overdo it. But there's like new Amazon Fire TV soundbars, there's a new Roku soundbar, there's like OnePlus is making a TV, like, there's all this like TV action out in the world, right? And it's wild because everybody has their own TV operating system in a way that no other kind of computing supports. Like, there are but two smartphone operating systems, there are but two major desktop operating systems, and there's Paul running Linux this year.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Servers have a little bit more diversity, because you've got Windows, Linux, and Unix.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's like, in like, the consumer world, most things are this kind of like duopoly, right?

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, on TVs, it's Samsung has Tizen, and Vizio has like, Vizio World, I don't know what their OS is called. LG's running WebOS, Sony runs Android, like, Roku runs Roku, Amazon runs Fire, which is like a variant of Android. And it's because all of the apps are just HTML5 apps. Because you don't have to like, do any computer stuff. Like, the only thing you ever do with a TV app is like, get a video stream and play it. So they've all moved to HTML5 as their like, app vehicle, and they like, wrap it in different ways. Which means the operating system layer is where all the action is, which is completely upside down.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  I, I really hope we move past this HTML5 app era, because they're not, they're not fast.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  They're not, like, waiting five seconds after every button press on my Vizio is not ideal. And I know there's some serious hardware in this thing. This is a 4K 65-inch television, you know, it's powerful, it can do HDR, you know, like, it has, it does upscale, like, it obviously has hardware inside it that can do stuff that's kind of like a GPU. But, it's, it's, it seems like just a really bad software renderer doing the worst job at HTML5.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Vizio World OS. Turns out, there's only so many like, OS performance engineers in the world, and they work at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. And like, but it's wild, because all these companies have their own OS, but really, it's because they can, they can basically just like, get their own, not pay licensing fees, and then Netflix will ship them an HTML5 app that's like, lightly tweaked to run on their platform, and that's fine.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  And they can put in all the data collection software they want.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone wants to own their own platform, and the nightmare of that reality playing out is that Tizen runs on your TV. And like, that's the way it goes. Anyway, we'll let the IFA crew actually talk about IFA TV news, but it's, there's a lot going on. Last little thing I want to talk about before we take a break, there's other Google stuff going on. And it's Google Assistant and smart displays. And Dan, I kind of don't understand what is happening.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Neither do I. I'm so confused. Something happened with Android Auto this week and like, so now there's like three or there'll be three or four different ways to access Android Auto in your car, which is super confusing. And then like Google's Nest Hub Max is coming out really soon. And so like, that's a assistant display. But Lenovo was like, wait, we've got a tablet that becomes an assistant display in a dock now. And like, so it low, it's like an Android tablet, but when you put in the dock, it loads this like assistant dashboard interface.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  But it's not like the hub interface.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  No, it's a totally different interface.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  Which would have made perfect sense.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  It's called ambient mode. Yeah.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  But why wouldn't that just be the thing that the Home Hub does?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  I, it actually looks more useful than what the Home Hub does on like the ambient stuff. Like the Home Hub is like, if all you want to do is look at photos and like see pictures of your kids and family and travel and what have you. Uh, the Home Hub is great, but like, if you look at a Home Hub hoping to get some information, it's actually pretty bad. Like it'll tell you the time and the weather and that's about it. Whereas like this one on Lenovo's um, tablet, this ambient mode, you could get it to show like upcoming calendar appointments and other information.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I mean, conceptually, I'm really into this because I like the idea that you have like a smart display with mics in like a trimmed down interface sitting in a dock. So you make turn on the lights and like turns on the lights and you stab at it. And you don't have to like monkey with an app to like turn off the lights. You can just, right? You have this like controller. And then when you need to like inevitably reset your wifi lights, you can like pull it off the dock and the Android app is right there. You're right. It's like very smart for a smart home controller to have that sort of backup interface.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  I have an iPad mounted in my kitchen as a smart home hub controller or whatever. And I would love to have an interface like this on my iPad that just displays all the time.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Apple, Apple will never give that to you.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Widgets? I know.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's widgets. You're never get, you can get like kiosk mode and you can run one app.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I've run the home app, which tells me nothing.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Doesn't, doesn't Google's Home, speaking of weird operating systems, doesn't Google's Home Hub run a weird operating system? Like, like, it's like, it's a stripped down thing, reaching up to be as functional as, as this, where this is using basically Android. So obviously they have unlimited functionality that they could put in.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we had Rishi Chandra on the show, who's the product manager in charge of all this stuff, or the VP, I don't know, type, he's the.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  He's the Home Hub honcho.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that's right. The Triple H of Google in charge of home products. Fancy title. And he, like, basically laughed at me directly when I tried to ask him what operating systems all these use. He's like, why do you care? Who gives a shit? Like, consumers don't care. And I was like, but I don't understand. This one runs Super Cast, the Lenovo one runs like some weird Lenovo one, and this is stripped down Android.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  The Lenovo runs Android Things.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  And then the Home Hub runs something built on Cast. And then this thing runs on top of Android. Like, yes, it is all over the place.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  On the same theme with Google, Google now has three driving apps for Android, and Dieter knows what's going on with them. And the answer is, who knows?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Why do you care, Eli?

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  I just said, like, Google, I think with the deck for the, this Android thing was, why does Google do everything twice? Which I think is like a deep, like a deep call from Dieter's soul. Like, if you like, if you see him at XOXO, just walk up to him, make, what's in your soul? And he'll be like, why does Google do everything twice?

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's, it's such a fundamental, why does Google, why can't Google focus and just move, move products iteratively forward? Instead of always starting over, I think is a fair question to ask at this time. But there are driving apps. I am very excited for Google Maps to just sort of slowly turn into Android Auto, which it should just do.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  It kind of does. If you're using the latest version of Android Auto on, on the car display side of things, you plug in your phone, Maps loads up immediately. Like, you are thrown right into Google Maps.

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I don't have Android Auto in my car. And so I mount my phone, my gigantic phone with a display that is almost as big as the display in my car.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  And I just like load Google Maps. And that's great, because I don't mind. And I should, that should just turn into Android Auto. Like, why do they have a separate Android Auto app?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Well, so that's like, the whole story here is that they were getting rid of the separate Android Auto app with Android 10. But because some people don't have a display in their car, or they use the Android Auto interface on their phone like you're just described, they want it back. So Google said that they were going to launch a Google Assistant Driving Mode, which turns the assistant into some sort of driving interface. But that's not ready yet. It's taking too long to develop. So Google's like, okay, we'll bring back the Android Auto app for now, until we're done with the Assistant Driving Mode, and then it's goodbye to the Android Auto App again.

• 26:29Nilay Patel?

  You know, one of those runs on Casio and runs on Android things. Anyway, all right, that's all the Google stuff. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back. We're gonna find out what's going on with Facebook dating.

• 26:43Speaker 06

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• 27:12Speaker 07

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• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  Are we back?

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have a question.

• 27:46Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  How do you guys feel about the Philips Hue Edison-style light bulbs? I don't necessarily expect you to have feelings. When I saw this, I was like, what is going on here?

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  I have a lot of feelings about this.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  It's really weird.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  I have a home full of LED Edison bulbs, so I'm already cheating.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's no, like, crackling warmth coming off my old style light bulbs.

• 28:06Speaker 05

  You're doing good for the environment.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  But they look cool.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  My, my take on them is hue bulbs in general, like the normal LED ones are pretty dim. Like they're not very bright bulbs. Edison bulbs or Edison designed bulbs are also very dim. So like, we're putting these like two things that are dimmed together and they're just gonna be like terrible light bulbs.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  No, the dimness isn't gonna like multiply.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  No, no, it gets worse. Believe me.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  There's like a frost on the glass or something.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Thirty-three for two of these?

• 28:36Speaker 03

  That's hue, baby.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  They're like the cheapest ones. All right.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  They're just really late to the trend is the thing.

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, think of all of the restaurants in Brooklyn.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  I know. I was like, great. Every Williams or restaurant.

• 28:48Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, Ashley, there's a big announcement in kind of your zone of the world this week. Well, you know, like Instagram, dating apps.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  Oh, no, for sure. Yeah. So we have two married people on this show. You guys aren't hyped on this.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  I quit Facebook.

• 29:04Speaker 05

  All right. The audience will love this announcement.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  Facebook Dating is coming to the United States. And this is a big deal because honestly, I didn't think it would reach this point. I did not think Facebook Dating would ever make it. No, I did not. And so it's exactly what it sounds like. Facebook Dating, the whole selling point is that you can, you don't match with anyone you're mutually friends with. So you're not gonna find like your aunt or your cousin or whatever. You're only going to see strangers and you can match based around events and groups. So you can go, if you RSVP to a concert and the other people have opted into Facebook Dating, you can look at the RSVP list and it'll tell you like who's single, who's available, and you can kind of like match to meet up at this event. So that's like the big selling point around Facebook Dating.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Wasn't sold on this. Haven't been sold on this. It's been around. It's been in a bunch of countries except for the United States. Until today, I went to their launch event and they added a new integration. So they have this feature called quote unquote, secret crush, which I have some ethical issues with. But secret crush lets you pick, I think it's up to nine or something, a, a group of people of your Facebook friends and now your Instagram followers that you can see.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  Instagram followers?

• 30:14Speaker 05

  Yes, this is why.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  Not the people you follow. Oh, because that would like reveal it.

• 30:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, because the thing is if I follow like Ariana Grande and I have a crush on Ariana Grande, like, why would I pick her as my secret crush? It has to be people who are following you already. You know what I mean?

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  Because they're invested in you. So the

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  I would have picked Ariana Grande. Flat out.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Everyone would. So that's why they didn't do that. But the secret crush feature, which is totally a growth hack and wrong, now applies to Instagram. And this is when I was like, whoa, I'm on Facebook dating.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  This reminds me of the top eight on MySpace.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  It's exactly like that.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  Why do you think it's morally dubious?

• 30:52Speaker 05

  Okay, so basically how this works is that once you pick your secret crushes, they have to be opted in as well to Facebook dating and it will tell them they have a secret crush. The only way to find out who their secret crush is, is to pick their own secret crushes. And once they pick their own secret crushes, if they mutually pick the same person, you get a match and you find out that you guys both had a secret crush on each other. This is so dumb, as I've even saying it out loud. But it's like

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  It's like it's gonna get everybody to do it.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's going to get everybody to do it. I mean, if you find out someone has a secret crush on you, oh my God, I'm totally picking my secret crushes.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  Unless you're Ariana Grande and you're like, yes, it's everyone.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Do you think there's like a, like a pent up, like, let's say there's 500,000 existing IRL secret crushes that convert into about 250,000 Facebook matches, right?

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  Paul's straight doing like romance math right now.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Could you have like a, like the, the Facebook dating marriage apocalypse where like everybody like two years from now is all getting married because they all suddenly discovered their secret crush?

• 32:00Speaker 05

  No.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  That's a good dream, right? Like, like whoever, like the product manager of secret crushes is like, you know, it's not morally dubious. In exactly 48 months, we're gonna, we're gonna see our first secret crush babies.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  Oh, they already brought it up.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 32:18Speaker 05

  At the launch day, they were like, we can't wait for our first Facebook dating wedding.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow, I was just saying the craziest idea that I had.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, it came up today. That's like a point of pride for all dating apps. They brag about how many New York Times wedding announcements mention their app.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  So, so I have a question for you, Ashley, since you cover this beat and, and know this far better than I do. It seems to me, someone who never uses dating apps, that there are already a lot of dating apps out there and this market is pretty well saturated. Uh, so why is Facebook doing this? Aside from like, it got bored copying Snapchat features, so now it's just copying dating app features.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Honestly, I don't fully understand why Facebook wants to be in the dating app market. I think they, it is a behavior that's already existed on the platform. So that's kind of what they point to, like, oh, people have been meeting in groups and through, you know, their old high school sweethearts or whatever, on the app already, so we might as well make a dating feature. But I genuinely don't really understand. I don't. And they talked a lot today about how Instagram DM sliding, obviously is like the culture. And so if you have a crush, you just slide into the DMs and you hope it works out. This is kind of like getting rid of DM slides, I think.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's not on Instagram, right? It's in Facebook.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  Right. But that's why the Instagram integration is so interesting to me because now that you can identify your secret crush from Instagram, I don't have to DM slide. It brings you, it brings the Instagram people over to Facebook, which is so smart because when it was only Facebook friends, I was, or just Facebook in general, I was like, I don't care. Like, I'm not re-downloading Facebook. There's no way. But as soon as they were like, oh, you can tell your Instagram followers who you have a crush on.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  Did you re-download Facebook? This is where I think it's morally dubious. Like, just some like gamification, like find your secret crush. Yeah, it's sketchy.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  It's on the order of like candy crush, sketchiness, right? Like, the next step of this is like, find out your secret crush if you do all of yours and pay us $3.99.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  Or like, we'll show them to you faster if you pay $3.99. Like,

• 34:16Speaker 05

  They say they're not going to do paid, but I mean, this, this is,

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna make you pay in Libra. Like, that's what they're gonna do.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  But like the more, the dubious part of this is, hey, we lost all these people to Instagram. Now we're gonna make them come back to Facebook.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  It's brilliant adding the Instagram integration. That's the only way you're gonna get young people to use Facebook Dating.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Like, I'm intrigued now, because I'm like, oh, I like Instagram. Maybe I have a secret crush on Instagram. I don't. I have no crushes. My life is so lame, you guys.

• 34:47Nilay Patel?

  So, kinda like building on what Dan was asking. You cover the, the only company in the dating app world. Right? I mean, like, there's but one company. It's IAC. They own Match Group. They own Tinder. I mean, they own all of them.

• 35:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  Except for...

• 35:02Speaker 05

  Bumble.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Bumble, which they are suing.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the whole thing.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  So, one day, eventually, they're gonna own each other. That's, that's the end of that lawsuit. But, there is no other competition, really.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  And so, this is like, the first big competition for Match Group.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  Match always says, they're like, well, people use more than one dating app. We don't see it as, like, you win them all or not. And, that's true. Like, people use multiple dating apps. So, I do think Facebook Dating doesn't necessarily spell doom for Match Group.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 35:31Speaker 05

  I don't. I think people are gonna go... Facebook Dating might become the hot thing, because it's like, oh, who's on here? I'm curious. But, at the end of the day, it's all just a dating app. Like, you'll go on all of them. I don't, because I, I'm above that.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, Tinder mince money for Match Group, right? I mean, like...

• 35:49Speaker 05

  Tinder is the moneymaker for Match Group.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  So, if this cuts into any Tinder usage at all, doesn't that hurt Match?

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Oh, for sure. Yeah.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  That's like, the danger.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  But I do think people, people will pay for Tinder, and they'll still use other dating apps, too, I think. So, I don't know. Match could be in trouble.

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, it's just, we are constantly talking about competition, and like, this is one area where it's just a monopoly.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. But you can also use the dating apps for free. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I, I honestly don't necessarily think it's gonna take down Tinder. I just don't. I think, I monitored a little bit of Facebook Dating while I was abroad. Because I was like, okay, how's this experiment going? This is why I did not think it was gonna come to the US. Because everything I saw online was negative. All the users I saw abroad who were using it, never said anything nice about Facebook Dating, and it all sounded like terrible experiences. So... I think Facebook's, I think Facebook's user base is gonna be bad. And I think people are going to need to go to Tinder and Hinge to find good people.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, even with the Instagram integration.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Even with that, because once you do the secret crush thing, it's like, okay, done.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm out.

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe you're done then. That's the only thing I'm interested in.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  We'll never know, but I would love to know, like you have, I don't have Facebook on my phone anymore.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  Me neither.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  You don't, but you might reinstall it for the secret crush thing. Like, how long that app stays on your phone?

• 37:07Speaker 05

  No, I would delete it immediately after.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  Woof. Alright, here's my other question. It seems like the way easier money for Instagram is to just take my credit card.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  I know, you really want them to.

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  I just, I bought another car charger.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  No, Neel has a problem.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Where is my piece? Neel, I signed, I'm gonna make it public now, so you shamed into writing it. I found heaven, or whatever, through car chargers on Instagram, or like finding the greatest car charger ever made on Instagram.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Here's, here's why you should buy car chargers on Instagram. First of all, you're supporting the American dream, right? Like, two kids in a garage, they found some Alibaba listing, they took some photos, they made a way over the top video, and all the videos are like people throwing phones in their cars. Like, check it out, bang, and like magnets, and like, that's just the dream. Like, you wanna support those kids, right? You're, you're learning how to start a business. Then the thing comes and it really is some like Alibaba repurposed garbage, and like, that's reality and that's just who you are, but you helped. It's like the lemonade stand of Instagram. Second, if it does work, you're like, oh, that was a nice upgrade. See, and it's like, there's no stakes here.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Are you, are you willing to say how much money you've spent on Instagram car chargers?

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  It is, it is clearly over $200, and I'm now getting targeted for just bizarre shit. Like, Moen made a device called the Flow, which just turns the water off in your house? And like, there's a whole ad, it's $400. And the ad is like some father knocking on the door to get his kid out of the bathroom to go to school, and he like pulls out his phone, like hits the button and the shower turns off. It's like, this is horrible. Like, why would you cut all of the water in your house?

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Who is this for?

• 38:50Speaker 05

  It's for you. They've targeted you.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, they know. But it's like, I'm getting those ads now. And it's like, I don't want this.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I got the real, like, there's the goods wrote a whole piece. It's like, why are Instagram ads all so hot? I think it was Rebecca. And I was like, my Instagram ads are not like this.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're like, wait. Did I go wrong?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Mine are all socks. And I've never bought socks on Instagram. But I get a lot of Instagram ads for socks.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  There you go. And then there's all the news that the Instagram started hiding like counts. And this is actually quite controversial because everyone got it wrong. Because you can, in fact, still see your likes. Like, you can see your own metrics, but the world can't.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Everyone took Instagram hiding likes. It's like, oh, no, the influencer economy is going to tank. Not, that is not true. If anyone says that to you, just like, no. Because that's not true. And you can still see your own likes. And also, influencers have crazy metrics that they have behind the scenes about like, how many people follow them per day, how many stopped following them per day, what posts they engage with, which they didn't, click through rates, all sorts of things. They're beyond the likes.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  They're fine. So why would Facebook hold them down, too? Because there's not like, the Facebook influencer world in that way.

• 40:01Speaker 05

  Right. So this has nothing to do with influencers. So Facebook now is thinking about hiding likes on posts. And really, I think it comes down to just relieving some of the pressure to post. Because you're aware of how well your photo is going to do.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  I mean, if you post permanently. That's why Stories is so popular. It's because you're like, oh, no one knows how many people are viewing this. And if they viewed it, enjoy. Like, it doesn't matter what it is. But when it's permanently on your grid or permanently on your Facebook page, you're like, I want to make sure it gets good engagement so that everyone thinks I'm cool and popular. So if you hide that pressure, people are more willing to post.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  I see.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  Possibly whatever they want. Like, I know that if you post a photo with your face in it or something, you're going to get more likes versus if you post a photo of like, a waterfall.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  Just facts.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  I gotta start posting waterfalls.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  We should all aspire to post more waterfall pics.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  But...

• 40:52Speaker 03

  I like the photos I take of waterfalls.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  And that's perfectly fine. But are you aware of how many people like those photos?

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Not many.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Okay, this is gonna turn into a therapy session pretty soon.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  Everyone, everyone tell us your Instagram strat. All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back, John and Tom and Chris, and do the EFA roundtable. I think that they did this late at night, so you just roll with it, because I think it's a little, a little wild. We'll do that, we're gonna come back, and then we're gonna wrap up with some iPhone news. Check it out.

• 41:26Speaker 07

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• 41:58Speaker 08

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026, and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 42:27Speaker 09

  So we're here in Berlin for EFA 2019. We've got three of our biggest announcements from the show that we just want to talk through and get a bigger, better insight into. So I'm joined by Chris Welch, who's the news editor here, and Tom Warren, who's our Microsoft editor, and I'm John Porter, I'm the international news writer at The Verge. So Chris, you were at Amazon's event last night, where they showed off a couple of new products. What, what have they got for us?

• 42:52Speaker 10

  There's a new second-generation Amazon Fire TV Cube, which now has Dolby Vision, which is the big addition there. So that was missing from the first model. And that's there. We saw a bunch of new Fire TV additions, which are TVs made by other companies that run the Fire TV software. And one of those is the first OLED TVs, which looks really nice. And it also has built-in microphones for Alexa, which might raise some privacy concerns, but some people might want that, so. Then there was a soundbar that also has the Fire TV stuff built in. It's just Fire TV and all the things was the theme of the night.

• 43:25Speaker 09

  So like talking about the the the TV, the Fire TV additions. Like, have you ever tried out one for yourself? Because they've been North America exclusive until now. So this is like their big international rollout to the UK and Germany.

• 43:36Speaker 10

  Right, right, yeah, I think somewhere in Canada as well. But, I mean, they're fine. They run Fire TV software. The TVs themselves are OK quality. So I think Amazon's trying to step that up with the OLED model, which is made by a company called Grundig.

• 43:48Speaker 09

  Which, great name.

• 43:49Speaker 10

  Has some history here in Germany, apparently, but is not going to be too recognizable to other folks. But but it looked nice. And what's nice about the Fire TV additions is you can plug in the antenna that you might have in your house. So you can just stream channels through there and watch those as part of the whole thing. There's a guy that pops up. So it's a nice, like, fully integrated situation.

• 44:08Speaker 09

  So like, what do you think of Alexa as a means of controlling a TV? So I've tried out the Fire TV stick with the Alexa remote in the past. I found that, you know, it's Alexa works OK, but it seemed to be really selective with what it like could and could not do. So like, when you have these Fire TV additions and you're actually building Alexa more more closely into like all the operation of the TVs, do you think that kind of helps Alexa actually be a viable way of controlling these TVs? Or is it kind of like a weird outside?

• 44:40Speaker 10

  I think it does. I mean, there are always stumbles. You were there last night and they tried some demos that didn't work out too well. So they always have some mistakes. But now they have this new local voice mode, where it makes some commands faster. If you want to scroll to the right or left or just basic commands are much faster. They don't have to ping a server and get help anymore. So that element, just like basic navigation, should be a lot faster. But as far as like opening apps, Netflix, they'll do all that stuff just fine. Play songs. So all the basics, I think it works pretty well.

• 45:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, the Fire TV Cube, I think, is interesting. That's that's something that, again, hasn't like all of these things are like, at least the two that already exist have kind of been North America only. So like, the big things seem to be that they're actually becoming international. So of course, the other one is the Fire TV Cube, which I don't know, it seemed to have these grand ambitions of controlling your home, your whole home media centre. And I feel like that never really came together. But it wasn't ever really Amazon's fault, right? It was just because the ecosystem of IR blasters and HDMI CEC just like isn't, isn't really equipped to be able to deal with these things.

• 45:41Speaker 10

  Right, they're saying that there's a team that's based here in Berlin that actually does all the IR commands and all of those device support. They work on all of those devices and they're trying to add more and more every month, it seems like. But you're always going to have things that just don't work perfectly or one command works and one doesn't and things just don't turn on at the same time. It's the world of IR blasters, it's just.

• 46:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think I've kind of, I think everyone at some point has really optimistically bought like a universal remote and they're like, finally, this will work. But then, yeah, like all of these devices seem to work in slightly different ways. They go to sleep at different times and then the remote just doesn't quite, doesn't quite work in the same way.

• 46:19Speaker 10

  There's no one perfect solution, but when it works, fine, and it does most of the time, it's, it's pretty nice. It's a nice thing to just say, watch this show and all of it just lights up all at once and starts playing and so when it works, it works and most of the time it does.

• 46:32Speaker 09

  Cool, fair enough. You also get a chance to check out LG's, it's LG's foldable, but it's not quite a foldable.

• 46:39Speaker 10

  Foldable in that it's a case that has a second screen on it, so you can fold it open and you get two 6.4 inch displays to work with.

• 46:46Speaker 09

  What is LG doing?

• 46:48Speaker 10

  It's called the LG G8X. It's got the usual specs for 2019 Snapdragon 855, all the usual RAM and storage options, good cameras, there are some fun camera modes. There's an ASMR mode for the video camera, which.

• 47:04Speaker 09

  What does that do?

• 47:04Speaker 10

  Just makes the microphone a lot more sensitive, so you can whisper to it and unwrap things and just, you know, make a bunch of weird YouTube content, I think, is what they're going for. But the big story is that second screen, so you just plop the phone into a case and then it just lights up and you can move apps across, you can watch a. Youtube or Netflix video on one screen and just browse the web on the other, write emails. So it's.

• 47:27Speaker 09

  So is that gonna, can that scale one app across two screens? Or are you always limited to having two, two apps across the two different screens?

• 47:35Speaker 10

  So LG's first party apps can scale across and also Chrome, they showed a demo of that. Chrome is the one app that they're using that can actually span the width of both displays. If you wanna have like just a super wide web browser, which has a break in the middle. So I'm not sure how often you would wanna use a web browser in that way. But you can like, you know, like the LG gallery, you can like choose a thumbnail on the left side and it pops up on the right and things like that. But as far as like third party apps like Google Photos or Netflix or things like that, really on them to kinda add support for it, which I can't imagine is gonna be too like.

• 48:03Speaker 09

  Well, it feels like LG's in this unfortunate position of they built a thing that seems like it could be okay with the right amount of app support. But unless you're kind of sitting there going, oh, I can't wait to use LG's own like photo viewer. Right? Then you like, it, there's, there's just that limitation of the Android platform that is just not set up for devices with two screens.

• 48:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's nice in the way that you can just kinda take off the case and just have your standard phone when you want that, just nice and thin in your pocket. And then when you need that enhanced larger screen, you can just take that with you. So I think there's something to that idea, but it'll be interesting to see how much support this gets, if people really buy it. And like, will it cost money or will the carriers just sell it for free with a phone? That's a big question too, because if you have to pay for it separately, I think it's gonna face pretty far odds to.

• 48:51Speaker 09

  And then can we talk about notches?

• 48:53Speaker 10

  Notches?

• 48:54Speaker 09

  Can we? So like.

• 48:56Speaker 10

  So the phone has a teardrop notch and so does the second screen for no obvious reason. I mean, LG says they wanted to do symmetry, so it looks the same. And also I think it was cheaper for them to buy the parts from their supplier.

• 49:08Speaker 09

  Just like a bulk order.

• 49:09Speaker 10

  Right, exactly, put in the bulk order. So you've got a real notch with a camera in it and a fake notch on the other side.

• 49:15Speaker 09

  And there's just no camera in that notch?

• 49:17Speaker 10

  No camera.

• 49:17Speaker 09

  Just a little, little cut out of the screen.

• 49:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, little slope notch. It's not that offensive, it's just really bizarre, but that's the way it is.

• 49:26Speaker 09

  I feel for LG. I feel like LG tries so hard and every single LG phone, it has, it has a thing, you know, whether it's like, was it the Quad DAC they had?

• 49:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, their phone still has that, most of their phones have that. I mean, their hardware is great and the software, they showed off some new software UI that's gonna come soon that makes their software a bit better. It's still LG software, so it's not the best around, but. The hardware's great, the cameras are there as always. You've got the little camera. Cameras.

• 49:55Speaker 09

  I think that's really damning by omission, right?

• 49:56Speaker 10

  They give you like more of the, more manual control over video and stills and things like that than, than a lot of other phone makers do. So I think, you know, the hardware's there, they just can't seem to really stand out from, Samsung just seems to always overshadow them. And it's happened here too with the Galaxy Fold.

• 50:11Speaker 09

  But then, so if it's got that quad DAC, then does that mean it still has a headphone jack?

• 50:16Speaker 10

  Does.

• 50:16Speaker 09

  So is that the only flagship in 2019 that has managed to hold on to that?

• 50:22Speaker 10

  It's one of the few remaining, if not the only. So, yeah, that's still.

• 50:26Speaker 09

  It'll be interesting to see. If people can put their money where their mouth is, all those people that complain about headphone jack disappearing, and if they really care, if they really can't live without it, then LG sails theoretically, right?

• 50:39Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 09

  Through the roof. All right. So from like LG's weird, foldable slash not foldable accessory, Tom, you've actually tried out an actual, honest to God, foldable device.

• 50:49Speaker 11

  I have, yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 09

  The Samsung Galaxy Fold.

• 50:51Speaker 11

  The Galaxy Fold.

• 50:52Speaker 09

  Is it, okay. Did you manage to break it? I suppose.

• 50:56Speaker 11

  I tried, I tried super hard. I was like, I'm gonna get my damn nail underneath that bezel and rip this screen off. Um, but it didn't work.

• 51:04Speaker 09

  Didn't work?

• 51:04Speaker 11

  No, they seem to have fixed that part of it. Whether they fixed the rest is, you know.

• 51:10Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, so like when you're holding it, could you kind of, could you tell that this was a device that had been ruined? Like, did it look like they've kind of gone too far in the opposite, in the opposite direction or anything?

• 51:18Speaker 11

  I think it feels like a little less, and it looks and feels a little less like prototyp-y, I guess.

• 51:24Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 51:24Speaker 11

  Like it feels a little bit more polished.

• 51:26Speaker 09

  Oh, sure. Okay.

• 51:27Speaker 11

  It just felt like the hinge was a little bit more sturdy than.

• 51:32Speaker 09

  Exactly. How many months has it been? Cause it must have been, was it back in?

• 51:35Speaker 11

  April.

• 51:36Speaker 09

  April.

• 51:36Speaker 11

  So yeah, it's been like five months. It's a long time.

• 51:39Speaker 09

  It is a long time. So, so you got to hold, did you get to hold it? Did you get to fold it yourself?

• 51:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. They, we literally went into a room, they were like, here's your fold, go wild for like 45 minutes.

• 51:47Speaker 09

  Really? So they were not, cause the, the video I saw on Twitter was a Samsung rep like handling it. And the joke I made was that like Samsung wants everyone to know how resilient its fold is. And then it has like this spokesperson halt handling it with literally a white kid glove. Yeah. Like that's, that does not suggest that this thing is resilient, but, but you guys would just, you got your dirty grubby hands on it.

• 52:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, no, we went, well, we sat there playing around with it. I was folding and unfolding it like crazy. Like some of the stuff they've done to like the hinge, so the gap between the hinge and like the displays has been reduced.

• 52:21Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 52:22Speaker 11

  We should effectively stop dirt from getting underneath it.

• 52:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's the problem with ours, right? That like a bit of dirt got underneath and just seemed to like wedge itself in the crease underneath the screen.

• 52:31Speaker 11

  We think, we think there was like a bit of debris underneath the screen that basically just made it go haywire. We didn't peel off the screen protector, not screen protector, but you know.

• 52:42Speaker 09

  The actual screen.

• 52:43Speaker 11

  Protective film as it's called. Um, yeah, the actual screen. We didn't do that, um, although many others did. But yeah, like, so they, the hinge work is like the main stuff and that, and putting that screen film underneath the bezels like a, a, you know, a big improvement. Cause I think if people pulled that out of the box and started peeling that off, it would have been a disaster. But yeah, so that, that's one part of the hinge. And also when you, you know, when you fold it in like flat.

• 53:09Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 11

  Into, into the candy bar sort of phone. The, the actual gap in between has been reduced as well.

• 53:17Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 53:17Speaker 11

  So you know, like, there's like a, um, like a little wedge almost, yeah, in, in the middle. That, that's been reduced slightly as well. So that should mean when it's in your pocket, um, less like lint and stuff and fluff and that's should get in between hopefully. And then the other big thing is at the top and the bottom, they've got these like plastic caps now.

• 53:37Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 53:38Speaker 11

  Um, they look a little strange. I, I guess if you, if you open it up and you're like staring at them, then it's like, okay, it looks strange, but like, you're not really gonna notice them.

• 53:46Speaker 09

  It's like looking at someone's ear for too long.

• 53:48Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 09

  Like, anything looks weird if you kind of over examine it, right?

• 53:51Speaker 11

  And my ears look super weird if you stare at them.

• 53:53Speaker 09

  I, please, please don't tell me that while I'm trying to have a more conversation.

• 53:57Speaker 11

  Yeah, so they put these caps on and they're supposed to, I think, they're kind of like there to protect the hinge, reinforce it a bit more, and also, I think, like to stop the the protective film from like, you know, coming off in that point, so.

• 54:13Speaker 09

  And then in terms of like software and stuff, I mean, I remember from our review, we didn't really have, well, I mean, obviously, it's a first generation device, so the software is never going to be like 100% perfect, but have they made any, have they taken any R and D time and kind of put that into making the software scale better or anything?

• 54:27Speaker 11

  They've done sweet FA.

• 54:29Speaker 09

  Really?

• 54:29Speaker 11

  Yeah, literally, yeah, like, I asked them, like, what have you done, um, software wise, and they were like, not a lot. Um, the only thing they've done, or like they told me about, um, was the navigation bar. Um, so you can have it on the Android navigation bar, if you pick the navigation bar, not like the gesture stuff that Samsung has. You can have it on the right of the display.

• 54:49Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 54:50Speaker 11

  You can have it basically across the center, like across both, I don't want to say both the displays, but you know what I mean. Um, or you can have it on the left hand side.

• 54:58Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 54:59Speaker 11

  Um, that's, that's pretty much the only software improvement.

• 55:02Speaker 09

  That, that's a real like point one software update, isn't it?

• 55:05Speaker 11

  Strange, like, yeah, you'd think within five months that they, like, if they're serious about this thing, they would rev the software a little bit and found different ways. I'm curious to see how they can make the interaction between the cover display and the main tablet displays, shall we, shall we say, um, a little bit more, you know, a little better.

• 55:23Speaker 09

  That's cool. Thanks so much, Tom. Thank you, Chris. Uh, back to you, Neil.

• 55:29Speaker 09

  Back to you in the States.

• 55:30Speaker 11

  Back to you in the studio, on VT.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it was late at night. That's my guess, that it was very late at night there in Berlin. All right, Paul.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  What is it?

• 55:42Speaker 04

  I do a segment all constantly, every week. It's called, If My Shoes Turn Green, It's Time For Crime. Nike, um, Nike has got this new Adapt Hora, Hora Chays, I don't know how to say it. It's a shoe that they make, and it's got powered laces, right? But importantly, also it has LED lights, but importantly, the laces and the LED lights, which can change colors, uh, can be controlled by Siri.

• 56:15Speaker 04

  Specifically Siri shortcuts. So what I'm conceiving of a situation, we all know that teenagers love to go skip school and do crimes. So you're in class and you're like, yo, teach, I gotta open up my calculator app on my phone. And they, so you do that, but it's actually a Siri shortcut and it changes the color of your shoes to green automatically, very secretively. And now all your friends who can see your shoes know it's time for crime. What do you think? What, what kind of crime are we talking about here? Oh, just the, you know, you've seen television.

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Does it have to be a running based crime?

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Teens are always, always doing crimes. No. Do you jump, jump really high? No, it's a cool crime that doesn't really hurt anybody, you know?

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  I see. One of those friendly crimes.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  It's like lighting up fireworks.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Something like that. Or like writing like hate the principal, but with chalk. So it's easy to wash off.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  Don't do any of these crimes. Also, don't create a code where your shoes change color before you deface the school. Paul was not good at crimes. That's what I've learned. This conversation. Like, ah, I wonder who did this. It's the kid with the yellow shoes.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Green, green shoes. Adapt, Haraches will be released on September 13th.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, enjoy your criminal shoes. All right. There's an iPhone event next week. Dieter and I are going. I think Veron's coming with us. There was like some drama, right? There was like a thing that leaked and then the person who leaked it retracted it and said it was fake, had a bunch of iOS 13 dates in it. But I think we know, just based on the rumors, that there's an iPhone 11, which replaces the 10R, an iPhone 11 Pro, which replaces the 10S.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  And then an iPhone 11 Pro Max. Which is

• 58:19Speaker 03

  4G LTE.

• 58:20Nilay Patel?

  One of the worst. Yeah, we used to make so much fun of HTC for their names. The Droid Incredible 4G LTE. The HTC Touch Pro 4G LTE. These are real phone names. But anyway, the iPhone 11 Pro Max. I was hoping that stealing my daughter's name would only last for one year. I was wrong.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  It's forever now.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  She's gonna outlive these phones. I'm just putting it out there. It's just a fact. She will never know. Like, there's a world in which she will never know that her name was popular is like streaming service garbage in Apple phones. But we'll see. But I think we know that's gonna happen. There's a bunch of rumors about these phones. I think we know that there's gonna be a time of flight camera, perhaps a wide-angle lens in the back. I think the big news is that the XR is just becoming the phone, right? The iPhone 11 is now sort of the, not the highest-end phone, right? It's like the go-to, here's the one. And then there's a tier of phones above it. And that, to me, is like a real interesting shift for Apple, right?

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  They're probably gonna sell a lot of iPhone 11 Pros. I don't think that's gonna be any weirdness there. But it does seem like that's a big shift for them that they made with the XR. That they're mid, I don't know if you can call it the mid-range phone, but sort of the middle phone, because they're gonna be expensive. But the middle phone is the main phone and not the best phone.

• 59:43Speaker 05

  I'm still upset they're doing the thing where the smaller phone is more expensive.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the small, yeah, yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  Because now I'm like, oh, I really need to upgrade this year and I just don't want to have a big phone. I don't.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 05

  So I have to go for the middle phone.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  Do you have a XR or XR?

• 59:59Speaker 05

  Oh, no. I still have a 6S.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're done. You're out. What are you doing?

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  I've held out.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  Did you get like a battery upgrade?

• 1:00:05Speaker 05

  Oh, this is a Frankenstein. Yeah. All sorts of weird things happening.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  You've got like a sci-fi phone. It's got like other people's parts in it.

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  New home button, new screen, new battery.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  But you know what, you know what Ashley has.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  A headphone jack.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  This I do. I do, I do.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's they're hard to let. I'm just gonna tell you, it's hard to let go of the headphone jack once they're gone.

• 1:00:23Speaker 05

  I know. I've held on to this phone for so long, but I've told myself this was the year.

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my favorite story of this week, by the way, is the New York MTA telling people to stop using their AirPods in the subway. Cause they have to stop and go get them.

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  Tell the story, cause it really is the best story.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, it's just like 20, 20, so over 20. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is considering issuing a PSA to ask commuters to not take their AirPods on or off while entering or exiting trains. The number of lost AirPods first spiked in March after Apple released AirPods 2. There's been a considerable uptick this past summer. Due to the heat and humidity on subway platforms, it makes the ears and hands of New Yorkers pretty sweaty.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Do we think this is how Gene Munster lost all of his?

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, his number is like crazy, right? He's like.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, he says he's lost 10 pairs of AirPods.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  MTA workers use an eight foot pole with two rubber claws at the end to grab items, but the retrieval can take a while. It's just really good.

• 1:01:18Speaker 05

  Maybe they should just have like DIY retrieval, like leave the claw.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  What if your headphones were connected to your phone?

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  I, I know AirPods are expensive, but like, I just feel like if an AirPod falls out of my ear between the subway car and the platform, like that is just a lost. Like I, I'm not expecting to ever get that AirPod back.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, many New Yorkers are, Dan.

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, that was the most shocking to me is all these people who are that dedicated that they're like, I will wait hours to get my one.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  AirPods are expensive.

• 1:01:45Speaker 05

  I know they're expensive, but I would be the same as Dan. I'd be like, eh, it's over now.

• 1:01:50Speaker 05

  I don't want to wear that thing. Ew.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, if you're like sweating an AirPod off your face and it falls to the ground, you can't be like, I've got sanitation problems.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, okay. So let's just go through some of these rumors. You have a big list. Big new camera square in the back of the Pro. We think there's a wide angle lens. There's some action about maybe better low light photography by combining more of these lenses. Multi-angle Face ID, which is just a wider field of view for Face ID. Slow motion selfies seem quite strange. Uh, it's just a thing like they're gonna make the video camera on the front better. Um, this one is weird where they. They might move your eyes when you use FaceTime to make it look like you're looking at the camera.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  I think that's brilliant.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  I also think it's brilliant, but it's nuts. Reverse wireless charging, they can charge AirPods. No one thinks, no one thinks there's gonna be a 5G iPhone this year. That will come next year with the iPhone 11S Pro Max 5G. Just putting that name out there now. Better water resistance. 3D Touch is going away. The 6S had 3D Touch, right? Do you ever use it?

• 1:02:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, sometimes.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  To open notifications for my lock screen.

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  It's that and previewing links. But every link that I preview is an ad.

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, and also, this is not real Apple screen, so it's crap.

• 1:03:06Nilay Patel?

  Dan, do you ever use 3D Touch?

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  I haven't had 3D Touch for a while, because I bought a 10R last year. So like, I've largely forgotten about 3D Touch.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I think it's fine. I will miss certain things. It might take a minute to get used to, but I think it's fine. And the new colors, no USB C, which we all expected. And then, there's this rumor that came out today that next generation of iPhones will actually have Touch ID in the display, over a large portion of the display, and it will work in combination with Face ID, which, that's a lot of biometric authentication, but there's rumors about the next generation of iPhones coming out today, which is interesting. So I think, I think we're, I would expect to see most of these things happen on the iPhone. I think the big questions are, are they gonna do a watch? Probably, it seems likely. What will they add to that? There's some rumors of sleep tracking, which could be interesting. But other than that, they're so far ahead. And then I think we're gonna see another event in October.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, you know, the rumors all year have been that there's gonna be a 16-inch MacBook Pro some point this year. I would not expect to see it next week.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  And like, whatever iPad refresh they do, will probably not happen next week.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, there's been a lot of rumors about an updated Apple TV. I strongly suspect they will make no mention of it. They will just quietly update the Apple TV with a new processor in the background. Because they've got a whole streaming service to launch. They're not gonna put out a new Apple TV and then be like, "And it has all the same content as before." Right, like they've got to show you the Oprah show or the, you know, the, the morning show or whatever they're doing. The boring company.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  I, I feel like, you know, the current Apple TV is pretty powerful and like, I don't know what adding more power to a current Apple TV does. I think what a lot of people would like Apple to do, and they probably won't do it, but is come out with something that's cheaper that is competitive with the Fire TV sticks and the Roku sticks and stuff like that. Because right now, the Apple TV is like four times the cost of those things.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I literally think it's, the oldest chip that they're manufacturing is in the Apple TV, right? It's the A10. So I literally think they're just gonna move it along and be like, okay, you've got the one that the iPads use. Good on you. And like, get out. Like, that's all they need to do.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  And then they can put out the cheaper one in the future. But there's no way they're gonna make any announcement about updated Apple TV when they, their big announcement is actually the streaming service. It's like the day they launched the actual Apple TV Plus streaming service and have, you know, pricing and you can.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Do, do we think we're gonna get an actual date for that, uh, this week or next week?

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  I doubt it. I think all that will come later. I mean, it's supposed to come, right? I think we'll, we're gonna see some service-y stuff because they made such a big deal out of it. And like, the phone is the home of the services. And the iPhone is a story of services now, or recurring revenue bundle. Multiple concurrent confusing recurring revenue bundles at home on your iPhone. Um, so they gotta say something. But I don't think they're, I don't think they're gonna go all the way with the TV one. That's just my guess. Especially if the only bump to the hardware is an A12. And then I, I think that's it. Like, I think this is a very focused, here are these phones. I think these phones have leaked a lot. I'm, I'm always excited to go. Like, who doesn't want to go to a spaceship? It's iPhone week.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  Summer's over. Begin where we ended. But, uh, one last thing, Apple related. They put Apple Music on the web today, which is just a wild, who was asking for that? And the only answer I can come up with is like, Windows users.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's enough Apple Music Windows users that they had to make a website.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  Well, think about it like, you know, you're at work, you're an Apple Music subscriber, you're stuck with a Windows PC at work, and like, you can now listen to it on your PC at work.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  But why wouldn't they make a, a Windows app?

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Uh, do anyone make Windows apps?

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  A rough chuckle from Dan to end the Vergecast.

• 1:06:50Speaker 05

  Also, just to point out, since we brought up recurring revenue for the last time.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  Tile sent out a really sad.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right. This is the thing we're expecting.

• 1:06:57Speaker 05

  PR package today, related to the Apple event. So, Apple's rumored to be making a Tile competitor, a Bluetooth tracker, so you can put it on a big thing. You can put it on like your backpack, your wallet, whatever, and you can track your stuff. And today, Tile, I think I have this package upstairs, I haven't picked it up yet, but I saw online that they sent out Bose headphones to reporters with a note saying, "If you're headed to Cupertino, like, basically, don't forget about us, because we also have..." They literally mentioned Cupertino, and they are, it sounds like, very afraid.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  They, they should.

• 1:07:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 05

  Indie hardware.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  That's where your roots.

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  Like, Apple has, has, has done plenty, I feel like, to make Tile's life, like, difficult already. Like, it's not like it's the most elegant integration with the phone.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, the phone actively fights what Tile is trying to do.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's like, "Oh, you would like to maintain a persistent Bluetooth connection that tracks our location? Have you heard of us? We're Apple. No, thank you, sir."

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  But if they make, uh, look, there's, Apple's gotta face all the same questions about privacy and location tracking with this stuff, too.

• 1:08:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  But, at the end of the day.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, because Tile's literally created an entire mesh network of people's things.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  It's terrifying.

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's the Vergecast. Uh, Dieter and I will be at Apple on Tuesday next week. That event starts at 10 a.m. Pacific. Saturation coverage on The Verge, as you would expect. Interview episode next week, by the way, is Mike Isaac, who just wrote "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber." That was a really fun conversation. Check that out next week. We'll be back with a chat show. Tech season is underway. Reviews, events, the whole thing is happening. It's gonna be wild. You can listen to Ashley's show, why'd you push that button? The whole third season is out.

• 1:08:35Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  Just binge it. Binge it over the weekend.

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  Bing, binge it.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Go nuts.

• 1:08:39Speaker 05

  Please.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  You can watch The Future of Music with Danny Deal on our YouTube channel. That show is super fun. You can check out Rico Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. Ashley and I are both Galloway fans. It's, it's happened to me.

• 1:08:53Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  It happened to me.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, I met him.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  I never thought, I never thought the day would come. You used the word "rundle," so I was like, "Somebody's been listening."

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  It's fun. It's like a-

• 1:09:04Speaker 05

  I love Scott.

• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  He's a real, I would say he's an influencer of business.

• 1:09:08Speaker 05

  That's a good way to put it.

• 1:09:11Nilay Patel?

  You can also listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka and Land of the Giants, Rise of Amazon, hosted by Recode's Jason Del Rey. That's all, wherever you get your podcasts, which is actually a fight between Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Ashley, which one's better? You're a podcast reporter.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  I use Spotify.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  There it is. The upstart coming in. And you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Ashley, what's yours?

• 1:09:31Speaker 05

  Ashley R. Carmen.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  Paul? Future Paul. Dan?

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  D.C. Seifert.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  And if you're at XOXO in Portland, please just walk up to Dieter and say USBC. Just see what happens. I would like to know. Do that and tweet at me. It'd be great. All right. We'll see you next week. From Apple, Rock and Roll. Paul. You've got to say whatever Dieter says. It's promo code. Promo code.

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