Quibi's launch week, Asus laptop reviews, and Sony's PS5 controller

Stories discussed this week: Webcams have become impossible to find, and prices are skyrocketing Why the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories don’t make sense UK mobile carriers politely ask people to stop burning 5G towers No one’s getting new emoji in 2021 because of the pandemic Foxconn will produce ventilators at its controversial Wisconsin plant Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: AMD has rewritten the rules Nvidia’s RTX Super GPUs for laptops have arrived — here’s where you’ll see them first Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is a gaming laptop with two screens MSI announces new laptops with Comet Lake H and new Nvidia GPUs Gigabyte’s latest gaming laptop supports Intel’s most powerful 10th Gen Core i9 processor yet Razer’s new Blade 15 has powerful specs and an improved keyboard Samsung Galaxy Chromebook review Asus Chromebook Flip C436 review Microsoft reportedly delays Surface Neo beyond 2020 Can Meg Whitman outwit a pandemic with Quibi? Quibi app review: shifting landscape Quibi’s shows are fun, familiar, and a little forgettable It’s impossible to screenshot a Quibi show, and that’s detrimental to its success Disney Plus surpasses 50 million subscribers Sony reveals new DualSense controller for the PlayStation 5 Microsoft’s Xbox Game Bar is getting custom widgets and its own store on Windows The OnePlus 8 Pro will have super fast, 30W wireless charging Google’s midrange Pixel 4A could launch soon, and there may not be an XL version Google’s Hangouts Meet is now just Google Meet Google extends free access to advanced teleconferencing features to September 30th Google trademarks 'Google Meet' and 'Google Chat,' support ... 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, a new Verge laptop reviewer Monica Chin joins us to talk about a bunch of laptops, including the Asus Zephyrus G14, Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, the Asus Chromebook Flip, the new one. Julia Alexander joins us to talk about Quibi, that launched this week. And we get into a bunch of stuff, including the new PlayStation 5 controller. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:20Speaker 01

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

• 0:49Speaker 02

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  Serum moisturizer, or moisturizer serum.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse? Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 1:07Speaker 04

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• 1:14Speaker 02

  Hi, I, uh, let's get you a basket.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Stay-at-Home Network.

• 1:29Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  See? It's like a change in reorienting the company a little bit. Hopefully Bank of Hears this. Jim, if you're listening, I didn't mean it. I'm Eli, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your friend, too. Paul Miller is here.

• 1:42Speaker 06

  Hello. I would also like to apply for friendship status.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Good. The website is down, Paul. I'm sorry.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  It runs COBOL. We have a special guest. Monica Chin is here. Hello, Monica.

• 1:55Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Monica is our new laptop reviewer, hallowed position at the verge. How long has it been? You've been with a few months now, right?

• 2:03Speaker 07

  A couple of months, yeah. It started in late January.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  All right, and it's been totally normal ever since.

• 2:09Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Supernormal new job. A bunch of laptop stuff to talk about. A little later on, Julia Alexander is going to join us. We got to talk about that Quibi launch. It happened. It happened this week, so that'll be fun a little bit later. I want to start, as always, just a quick run through of what is happening with the coronavirus. There's a lot of coverage. I've heard from quite a few people that they appreciate that our show is not 100% focused on the virus. It's a balance. We're trying to get it right. Keep giving me notes. I do appreciate it. But I do want to start with just some updates. So first of all, I'm just going to do it because, I mean, they announced it on a Friday, and the show comes out on a Friday. It's just, I'm good at counting, you guys.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  It has been four weeks, by the time you listen to this, it will have been four weeks since Donald Trump had the flow chart that said, "Website, symptom checker, drive-through." You know what I'm talking about. And then Google was going to, well, it was approximately 170,000 Google engineers. We're going to build them a website that let you schedule a test, drive through a test, and get results. That website, four weeks, has not shown up yet.

• 3:21Speaker 08

  That's correct. However, Verily, the sister company to Google underneath parent company Alphabet, has expanded to another testing site in the Bay Area. And I believe I read that they said that they had done as many as 6,000 tests, which is...

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 3:35Speaker 08

  I don't know, 5,600 more than I thought they had. So it's a lot. It's actually like more impressive than I expected.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  The goal is more tests. If Verily can roll that out even farther, we will do nothing but applaud them. I'm just, the idea was that everybody would be able to just like use this website, and that is definitely not true.

• 3:52Speaker 08

  Speaking of counting, you can also now count the number of days since Governor, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, said that Google is going to make him a website for New York State, so.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  I was going to ask how many days, because you're so good at counting, it's been since he held up a printout of Google Tweets and then Mike dropped it, because that's my holiday.

• 4:14Nilay Patel?

  That's the one that you're guiding from? I think that was the following Monday. Yeah, there was no promise associated with that. Days since Donald Trump holds printout of tweets is a good. You mean, I applaud the timeline if someone wants to keep it. I'm more of a the lost promises. So there's that. There's some crazy second order things happening. Chris Welch had a story about webcams just being impossible to find because everyone's working from home. Like a basic Logitech webcam that normally sells for 50 bucks is like $200. Like the C920, the higher end ones like the Brio, which is their 4K webcam, 500 bucks. Oh, my God. There are some in stores. The problem is that the stores are closed. So Best Buy will like happily tell you they have them in stock in your local store,

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  but only certain Best Buy locations have the curbside pickup that you need. So those stocks are down. We actually got a statement from Logitech. They are not happy about the price gouging that's happening. So where they can, where they have the ability, they are actually trying to get some of those listings taken down. But if you just like bought a bunch of webcams and are reselling them, Logitech can't do anything to you. So that's a, it's a weird second order. No one expected it. A bunch of other stuff like Elgato Streamlink boxes. People are using like they're like all sold out everywhere. That's a weird second order one. Addie wrote a great piece about Chloroqueen and sort of the misinformation ecosystem about that. Just check that out. We're trying to write some servicey things so people have, can share reliable information. So that's a good one to share.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  There's the insane 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory out there. I didn't know what to say about it, but Tom Warren wrote a great debunk of that. People in England are lighting 5G towers on fire. And so like the government and English wireless companies are having to beg people to not light cellphone towers on fire because they're. This is Britain, so they're politely asking.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, they use bold in the press. Yeah. Are the fires polite fires?

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is nuts. John Cusack tweeted that 5G would be the root cause of it. And then like everyone dunked on him and he had to delete a tweet like it is a more pervasive conspiracy theory than you would ever expect. So Tom Warren wrote a debunk of that. I encourage you to go find it and share it widely and get some good information on the world. And then this is just my favorite one. Ashley Carmen, the Unicode Consortium has paused emoji development for this year because of the virus. And they're like, they're like, look, everyone's really distracted. We don't, we don't need to do this.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  Do they do in-person meetups to like, make the final decision?

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 06

  It's a completely remote process. You like send like, I think The Verge did a piece on how I got an emoji into the emojis.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  Jay wrote it and there is a meeting that like you, you go and you present or like you send in your thing. And then there's a meeting where they like go through the presentations. Can I just read you this quote? It's just from Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium. And I actually appreciate this quote. So I'm just going to read it to you. It's amazing. Under the current circumstances, we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment. We decided it was in the best interest of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date. People are busy. There's a lot of anxiety in the world. You don't need a, you don't need, but the ones that were already announced, like the Olive, the Beaver and the Plunger, they're still coming.

• 7:31Speaker 06

  Oh, good.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  It's the new ones that aren't coming.

• 7:33Speaker 06

  The controversial ones.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  The controversial ones. Yeah. Emoji drama is gonna have to wait for a year. Speaking of counting, here's the thing I've been counting the most. On Sunday, April 12th, it will have been one year since Foxconn told us that their empty buildings were not empty and that they would send us a correction. Yeah. One year. They have gone one year without sending us that correction. But so we'll, we'll, we'll do something about that. You were listening to us on Friday. Yeah. Yeah. I assure you The Verge will have a post on Sunday to mark this glorious, extremely disappointing anniversary. You know, the buildings are probably empty right now. Foxconn actually still under construction in Wisconsin. They deemed themselves essential.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  To make what? No one knows, but they didn't announce. The CEO of another company, Medtronic, announced that they would be building ventilators at the Foxconn factory in Wisconsin. Foxconn, when reached for comment, declined to comment. So hopefully this factory, which I would remind you is supposed to be making LCDs, will be making ventilators. Medtronic, this is cool. They've, they open sourced their ventilator design.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  I'm so stoked on this.

• 8:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, Medtronic's a really, a serious company.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Medtronic is the real deal. You know, their CEO says, we're going to make them at this factory in Wisconsin. People believe him. He's not screwing around. And they open sourced that ventilator design. So that's really cool. Foxconn has just not committed to doing it. Like you'd think they would just, that's like the easiest one in the world, right?

• 9:06Speaker 06

  Wait, are you saying Foxconn won't do this? Or it hasn't agreed that this is the case?

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  Medtronic CEO went on CNBC and he said, we're going to be making ventilators at the Foxconn factory in Wisconsin. Okay. Reuters, CNBC reached out to Foxconn. Foxconn didn't comment. And I'm saying like, usually like when someone hands you the ball and then picks you up and holds you over the basket, you're like, you just put the ball through the, you know, it's like, it's just like an instinct that companies have and they just didn't do it. So we'll see. They say four to six weeks. Again, that is not what the factory is for though, right? The factory is theoretically for LCDs and it's supposed to open in May. So we're going to, there's, there's a lot coming on the Foxconn story, but if they do make some ventilators there, I think that's a good thing. It's just, you would think the factory that's supposed to start spitting out LCDs in May was kind of like.

• 9:55Speaker 06

  Ready to do that. Yeah.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  It seems, seems unlikely that you can, like the car companies that are making ventilators. Sean O'Kane is actually going to have a big story in this. Hopefully by the time you're listening to this, Sean O'Kane will have a story about why, like the state of the art in ventilator tech and why specifically car companies are, are shifting to ventilator production. It's because they already make HVAC systems. They have a lot of motors. They have huge supply chains, all this stuff. So they can kind of like quickly put one together. There's a really, I don't, do you see the Tesla video? Where Tesla engineers are talking about how they designed a ventilator using mostly Tesla parts. Like, that stuff is cool. You don't normally think, because it's all mechanical. It's basically just a big pump, right? TVs are not big pumps. This is as far as I know.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  If you can think of a TV that's a big pump, you just hit me up. But, uh...

• 10:45Speaker 08

  I mean, they're pushing out pixels, and, you know, light and matter are technically, according to the theory of relativity...

• 10:50Speaker 06

  It looks like there's a screen on the Medtronic, and you gotta build like a shelf for it.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure. Two things you could build. So, we'll see. Anyway, uh, Sunday is one year since they told us the buildings were empty, uh, and then we'll see if this thing... So, that's the Foxconn update. Okay, that is all the more virus news that I got. Just, I want to make sure we keep calling out our coverage, particularly the Verge Science team, which is just cranking away, and then the second-order effects that are happening throughout the whole world, quite frankly. Um, so I don't want to short-change it, but I have heard from quite a few people that everybody needs a break, so we're gonna try to get the balance right. Give me that feedback. All right. Dieter, Monica, Paul, let's talk about some laptops.

• 11:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 08

  The Asus ROG (parentheses, Republic of Gamers) Zephyrus G14 has this hot shit new AMD chip, which we have talked about before. Neelai interviewed CEO last week. Monica, tell us about this laptop.

• 11:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this laptop, uh, was really, really impressive. It's pretty light. It's a lot lighter than most gaming laptops, especially, you know, traditionally gaming laptops have been like five and six-pound things. Um, this just weighs just over three and a half pounds, and, um, for such a light machine, it really can fly. I was able to play Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra, which is just about the, like, most demanding game you can play, and it was able to do it. Like, it wasn't amazing. It was a, like, you know, a console-ish, like, experience, but, you know, you could play it on those settings, but if you play it on high settings, which is just below Ultra, it absolutely was a great experience.

• 12:21Speaker 07

  It was around 50 FPS. Like, it was really, really, it performs very impressively. And I mean, that's not necessarily surprising. It also has a very powerful graphics card, but it's really, it was really impressive to see just the load that it could take on.

• 12:35Speaker 08

  So, put this, put this chip in context, because, uh, this is, like, this is not the sort of chip that I should expect to, like, be in the next MacBook Air, right? Or be in the next, like, Dell XPS. This is, like, specifically designed for, like... High intense, high-end gaming, like really serious sort of processor work?

• 12:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the 4900HS is an eight-core chip. It's comparable to Intel's Core i9. So, you know, most laptop, most like Dell XPSs that you're buying are going to have an i5 or an i7. That's what most people are choosing between. When you get into the i9 and 4900HS territory, that's where stuff starts to get pretty like more expensive, more sort of power user oriented. And the HS, the S at the end indicates like special. It means that it's, you know, the 4900H is like the top of the line. The 4900HS is designated more for thinner laptops that can still deliver on gaming. They call it desktop class gaming. So that, yeah, that's, that's the intent of that chip.

• 13:33Speaker 06

  A lot of the comparisons I saw was this chip at 35 watts versus Intel at 45 watts. So it's like more, it's kind of comparable power, comparable performance with less power draw.

• 13:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, that, that's definitely what they're, that's what they're going for. But it's not, it's obviously not as low powered as the U series, which is that sort of the main like comparable to, to that, that's sort of the kind of ultra portable laptops is the U series. This is the H series, which is for slightly bigger machines that are slightly more powerful.

• 14:05Speaker 06

  Oh, and so my big question is the, the battery life, because I feel like AMD was able to make laptop processors in the 3000 series that were cheap and ran okay. And this is very fast and a little more expensive. So what's the, like the, the battery life, is that, is it a win?

• 14:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, the battery life is definitely a win. That's sort of another thing, like the last Zephyrus we reviewed back in 2017 had like two hours of battery life. Like it was almost comical how not, how irrelevant the battery was. I got eight hours and 50 minutes of browsing. Um, you know, not, not gaming, but you know, on a, on a balanced battery profile. So not even in battery saver mode, it easily made it through a whole work day. And it only took 41 minutes to charge up to 60% on Asus' plug, which is like, that's not terrible. Um, and even gaming on battery, I got about an hour and a half on a charge. It's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty big accomplishment, um, for such a power, for such powerful hardware to last that long.

• 15:03Speaker 08

  Put this thing in context, like this means a lot to gaming laptops. And I'm assuming it's like thinking about gaming laptops. This is not going to be a one-off. This is actually like, gonna be a new thing that continue, like the Intel and AMD continue to fight over. Does this affect anything that's going on with laptop processors outside of that specific domain?

• 15:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I would definitely hope so. I think that, you know, even though this is a machine intended to be for, you know, intended to be for gaming. It's certainly something that works really well as a productivity machine as well. Um, you know, it handled the multitasking just fine. Obviously, you know, the 16 by nine aspect ratio, it isn't like the one that I, that I'm certainly a fan of for productivity. But I certainly would, you know, I would be totally happy having this as my primary device, you know, work device as well. And I think that's sort of, that's one of the things that is really impressive about this chip is it, you know, it's able to provide the battery life necessary that, that most people are looking for in a primary device. Will also really like enable it to run games. And so I feel like I could just have this and I wouldn't need a secondary productivity device.

• 16:04Speaker 07

  If I wanted to use this to play games. I, I would hope that even laptops outside of the gaming space. Um, I think Intel's really been put on notice here. I think not just with gaming laptops, but with, you know, I think this really shows that laptops can be really powerful gaming laptops and really good productivity devices, um, whereas where the battery life and where the power consumption and the design and the weight is concerned. Um, so I hope that Intel is, you know, is making moves to do that and is moving in that direction too.

• 16:30Speaker 08

  So Monica, I mean, that like sets us right up for like the other part of the conversation here, which is AMD has been charging hard. They're doing well. This is a solid machine with a powerful chip in it. That's next to all of the 10th gen stuff we're seeing Intel put out, which seems a lot iftier than I expected. Is that kind of your experience?

• 16:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, definitely compared to the prices that we've seen for Intel stuff so far and the, you know, the battery life and all those things that we've seen for Intel so far, I would say, you know, for comparable gaming machines, the Zephyrus G14 has really rewritten the rules. When I first saw the price, 1449, I was like, I literally emailed the PR guy and asked if that was the right price. That seemed so low to me for the specs that this thing has and the performance it was putting out. I really, I really think they've raised the bar like a ton. And in terms of what, what Intel machines should be able to do at that price point. I mean, that's, that's like unprecedented in terms of what I've seen.

• 17:34Speaker 08

  So, okay, if we're talking 10th gen Intel, we actually, maybe it would be useful to like, do Intel Chips 101, because like, when, it used to be like, if you knew it between Y series and UC series in Intel, you were good. And then like, you kind of needed to know about the gen. And but now, when I hear Intel 10th gen, like, I literally don't know what it means. Like, it could, it could literally mean anything. It's confusing as hell. So like, there's, there's this new XPS you reviewed, you reviewed a couple of Chromebooks. Everything is like, running Intel 10th gen, but it seems like, like, none of this stuff is actually equivalent. So like, can you like, just give me this dummy's version of what's going on with Intel 10th gen right now?

• 18:10Speaker 07

  Yeah. So in terms of the current XPS that I'm reviewing, has the i7 1065 G7. And that is part of the Ice Lake generation. That is a quad, this one is a quad core processor. The XPS 13 that we reviewed the end of last year, has an i7 10710U. That is a, and that's of the Comet Lake generation. And so that one is a six core, that is a six core processor. So I think that's sort of the main, the big distinction that I'm, you know, that our reviews have sort of been looking at. So, you know, something with two extra cores is going to be a better fit for productivity oriented tasks, stuff like crunching numbers.

• 18:52Speaker 07

  Elaborate things in Excel, but we found in, you know, Dan found in his review of the, the one at the end of last year, which has six cores, that it was worse at things like photo and video editing because the update with the Ice Lake processor is it actually has better graphics, better integrated graphics. And so one of the things on the XPS 13 that has come out with the Ice Lake chip is that that is supposed to be a much better one for gaming on integrated graphics.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  So you're, you're currently reviewing the XPS 13. I don't want to spoil your review. I think it'd probably be out after people listen to this, but what is your early impression?

• 19:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it, I mean, my early impression is that it's very good. I mean, the XPS 13, you know, for the past several years has been really the, the Windows laptop to beat. Just, you know, I think that if you took a lot of, a lot of the features that it has, like if you took a keyboard, if you took the touchpad, if you took the design, if you took the performance and you just put that by itself in like another laptop, it would be the standout feature. It, it's a really cool experience to just have all these features be like absolutely the best, basically. I think that over the past couple of years, the XPS 13, it's, it, the progression has really been one of refinement. It's been Del sort of seeing like what, what is like the one or two things here that people really don't like?

• 20:09Speaker 07

  And changing that. So, you know, for a while it was the nose cam and for a while it was the bottom bezel. Um, I think they're really at a point where they've fixed a lot of the things that we didn't like. I think it's probably still the laptop to beat.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That nose cam thing is really funny because there's an argument in my Twitter replies today about webcams. And like, there's just a bunch of older XPS 13 owners being like, I didn't think it would go this bad for me.

• 20:36Speaker 06

  I was on a Zoom call with a guy with a, with a nose cam. It was just hilarious.

• 20:41Speaker 07

  That was always the reason I didn't want to buy it was the nose cam. I mean, that was literally like, it seemed like the one kink in the armor.

• 20:48Speaker 08

  If you don't remember, for the people listening, if you don't remember the two, it was like two years ago, Monica, that the XPS 13, the camera was like in the, in the bottom of the screen, in that corner. And so it just like shot up your nose.

• 20:59Speaker 07

  And I would also say, the other big thing is the design is, has, has changed a lot. There's a, um, the screen is taller, so the 16 by 9 aspect ratio is gone. And I hate the 16 by 9 aspect ratio. The eliminated bottom, you know, the bottom bezel used to have the big Dell logo, in case you forgot that Dell made your computers. So then I think, you know, it really looks different. And I'm really excited for everyone to see, see how it's changed.

• 21:23Speaker 08

  Okay, so we gotta get to Nvidia stuff. But before we get there, I just like, I need to express my, my, my deep heartfelt emotional sadness about the two Chromebooks you just reviewed. So like 10th gen in the XPS, it sounds good. 10th gen in the Samsung Chromebook and the Asus Chromebook Flip, it sounds like not, not, not, not so good. What, what the hell happened with these Chromebooks?

• 21:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think the issue with these Chromebooks is just that they're, they're, they cost too much, you know? And there's, there's, there are lots of debates about, you know, does anyone actually want a $1,000 Chromebook? Why would you pay $1,000 for a Chromebook? And I think there's definitely a market out there. You know, there are people, there are power users of Google. There are people who really like a Chrome OS ecosystem. It's their preferred operating system. And they really want a really, really nice computer. I've been talking to a lot of these people who have been so frustrated that they feel like their best options are like, either you get the Pixelbook, or you just have like, what, what looks like junk. So a lot of people have really been waiting for, you know, something that's comparable to an UltraBook that has Chrome OS. And a lot of them hoped it would

• 22:28Speaker 07

  be the Galaxy Chromebook, or it would be the, the new Asus Chromebook Flip C436. And, you know, the Galaxy Chromebook looks so nice. It's really well designed. And there's a lot of cool things about the design. There's like a stylus, there's like a camera in the keyboard deck. And the screen, you know, it's, it's a, it's a 4K AMOLED screen. It looks absolutely beautiful. And it's a lot of fun to use. And it's super light. But it's just a battery life of four hours is really not useful for most people. You buy a laptop because you want to be able to carry it around. You don't want to have it just like, sitting, plugged in all the time, sitting at your desk, especially when it's so light.

• 23:07Speaker 08

  Well, and it also gets wicked hot, which is incredible.

• 23:09Speaker 07

  And it has no fans, so that's not necessarily surprising. But yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, I think it's, you know, if it's, if it were a $500 device, maybe we'd be more forgiving of a battery life. That's bad, but $1,000, you know, that's when we're getting into like, that's MacBook Air pricing, you know, that's when you really need, you really are looking for something that is pretty good all around. And unfortunately, the Flip C436 sort of fell to a similar issue. The battery life wasn't quite as bad. I got about five hours out of that, but it's an $800 Chromebook and you really need one $800 Chromebook to be like significantly better than ProBooks that are $550 to $650. And I just think, you know, we have the Pixelbook right now, we

• 23:54Speaker 07

  have the Flip C434, we have Windows machines that are, you know, in that price range or a little bit higher as well, but just don't have the same battery life issue, have similarly good performance and much, much better battery life. So I think at this point, it's just, you know, we need to, we need to make these machines better or we need to get the costs down.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  I have a conspiracy theory. I have a correlation, not a conspiracy theory. I have an unfounded correlation. You just reviewed two machines, 10th gen processors, the Galaxy Chromebook, I think you got four hours and change. The Chromebook Flip, you got five hours. I just reviewed a MacBook Air with a 10th gen processor. When I ran Chrome, I got about five hours of battery life. There's a commonality here, which is Google Chrome, which it just destroys battery life. Like, if you make your entire operating system Chrome, you can't be like, the battery's gonna do great.

• 24:47Speaker 07

  So one thing is that with the, with the Chromebook Flip C436, as well as with the Galaxy Chromebook, is other reviewers who did battery tests where they just looped 1080p video, got way better battery. So I actually do think it's probably an issue with the, with webpage optimization or with app optimization. The problem I have is no one is buying Chromebook just to loop 1080p video.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  There is this aspect, it seems like Intel's integrated graphics are getting better faster than their shipping processors are.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  But, but I don't know, like, is it just Chrome?

• 25:23Speaker 08

  See, Chrome actually does okay when it's, um, like, we're just running on Linux. Like, there are Chromebooks with good battery life. They exist. The Pixelbook Go is actually a really good example of a Chromebook with, like, pretty good battery life. When it came out, I was like, nah, this seems fine, but the other Chromebooks are cheaper and better. It's like the, uh, Asus C434, which is still around, like, is just a better all-around computer. But now that I'm seeing this new, you know, Galaxy Chromebook, which is like literally the successor to the Pixelbook, that Google pretty much told me so, it's trash. This 436 is a bummer. Like, I'm actually less worried about Chrome OS in terms of Chrome killing battery than I am about the fact that, um, Android apps are still trash on Chrome OS.

• 26:06Nilay Patel?

  We can't do that. We can't do this. We cannot do this.

• 26:09Speaker 08

  But Monica had so many problems.

• 26:11Speaker 06

  I have another conspiracy theory, and this is more germane. Okay, when the, the Galaxy Book S or whatever, whatever it's called, was announced, it was announced with a Lakefield processor. And now it's shipping with a Comet, like, like, Lakefield is like, like, these, I don't know, maybe, maybe I'm crazy, but these seem like laptops that maybe were designed like they were gonna get a mobile-esque processor from Intel, like a next-gen Qualcomm killer. And then instead, they got, like, Comet Lake 14-nanometer plus plus plus processors.

• 26:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's not unreasonable.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  See, more conspiracy theories. All right, Monica, what's next? Obviously, your XPS review is coming. What's next in the world of laptops for people looking? It seems like this is a big inflection point, right? You got two new classes of chips out. You got many more, obviously, a flood of new products. What are the next big releases people should be looking for?

• 27:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we had the big announcements earlier this month were Comet Lake H coming from Intel and Nvidia's new RTX Super GPUs. And so, you know, alongside those two announcements, we got just a barrage of new laptops that we're being that various manufacturers are announcing that are going to incorporate the two chips. The most exciting one to me is the 2020 Razer Blade 15. That's going to pair the RTX 2070 Super Max Q or the 2080 Super Max Q with a 10th gen i7. So and it's actually going to be the first eight core processor to ever appear in a Razer Blade. So very excited about that. So that's going

• 27:46Speaker 07

  to be that's going to be interesting to compare to to the to the ROG Zephyrus G14. That's, I think, the first time where we're really going to see how these and you know, that's going to be an i7, not an i9, but I think it'll still be interesting to see how these how these systems compare and how well handles the games because it's only it's $15.99. So it's only a little bit more expensive. Acer's Triton 500 is another big one getting the super cards. A couple other big ones from Gigabyte, the Gigabyte Aorus 15G and 17G. And then one that I think is really funny is the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, which is a gaming laptop that has two screens. So there's one like in the keyboard and then

• 28:28Speaker 07

  there's like the main screen and the one on the keyboard like tilts up. I think it's at 13 degrees. So you can have sort of these two screens running at once. So for example, you could be like playing your game and then you could have your Discord chat open on the second screen. You know, we'll see if it actually is practical or useful when we get the device in.

• 28:47Speaker 06

  Is it funny or is it genius?

• 28:49Speaker 08

  Paul's the founding member of the keyboard in the front Club Monica if you were to wear.

• 28:55Speaker 06

  Monica's new. The thing that stands out to me with this Nvidia launch, and I think it's important context with the AMD is that AMD is not getting all these fancy new Nvidia cards. Intel and Nvidia co-announced all these laptops. There's like you can get $1,000 laptop with an RTX 12 2060, which might be comparable or even I don't even possibly even better than the AMD laptop. When it comes to just gaming, anything that's like GPU bottlenecked. The really interesting thing is Nvidia is doing this like that power shifting thing that AMD was talking about.

• 29:35Speaker 06

  If the GPU senses that the CPU is the bottleneck, it will reduce its power consumption. So that the CPU has more room to work to catch back up in a sense, which and Nvidia is claiming like maybe 10 to 20% performance gains from that. So even though these are like kind of minor tweaks to the cards, the the way that they actually work might actually result in some decent gaming results, which is going to be great news for Intel, because they're not helping make these H series laptops that much faster.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, I want to, we last on our list in terms of form factor stuff. Monica, you brought up the dual screen stuff that's happening. Microsoft has reportedly delayed the Surface Neo, which I was very excited about, which was their dual screen. Which means I don't know what that means for Windows 10 X, which was supposed to run all the dual screen stuff. But we will see pandemic. It's just happening. It's all my form factor dreams are going away. Okay, Monica, thank you so much for joining us. We'll have you back very soon. It sounds like there's many, many more laptops for you to review and talk about.

• 30:39Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  That was great. Good talking to you. All right, we're going to take a break. Thanks to Monica. We're going to come back with Julie Alexander, talk about that quippy.

• 30:51Speaker 01

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• 31:45Speaker 09

  Hi, I, uh...

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• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  Julia Alexander, welcome.

• 31:53Speaker 09

  Hello.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  I've been so excited for this day to talk to you about Quibi. It launched, it happened.

• 32:00Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, it's successful in that regard. It's not vaporware.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, we've talked about it in, conceptually, for what appears to be five years. We sat through a CES demo of nothing. We have done all kinds of coverage. I encourage everybody to read Liz Lapata's profile of Meg Whitman. Liz had the great idea to not focus on Katzenberg but Whitman, who is actually the CEO of the company, and had to literally change all of their plans and modeling around the virus. It's like, just a fascinating story. I mean, the one question that I, Liz and I were both like, can we ask this directly? It was like, you were the CEO of HP. You're a billionaire because you're the CEO of eBay. You like, were the Republican nominee to be the governor of California. Why are you running Quibi?

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  We just like, we were like, it's pretty rude to ask. But it's launched. After all of that, after all this conversation, it's here. What do you think, Julia?

• 33:01Speaker 09

  It's an app in that it opens when I want it to open and it plays videos. I mean, Quibi, I mean, Quibi is exactly what they said Quibi would be. It's short shows and movies and chapters and it turns, like, there's the function that when you turn your phone, what you're seeing, the format or the aspect ratio or whatever changes. That, there's nothing else, I think, to say positively about anything on that app. But it works the way we wanted it to, so. Congrats.

• 33:34Speaker 06

  Have you had an exciting portrait to landscape or vice versa moment?

• 33:38Speaker 09

  I genuinely don't use it unless I remind myself that it's a function that I should use, like when writing about it. So that way I can be like, I've used this and it's here's what it is. But everyone I keep talking to, both in media and outside of media, because Quibi is like a very media thing. People in media love Quibi and everyone outside of it is like, what is Quibi? That is the world that I experience. So the random people that I've gotten to download the app, because I'm like, please, you're not in media and I just want to talk to someone who's not in media about it. They haven't used it either. They're like, oh, I don't turn my phone because no one turns their phone when they're watching anything. It's not what humans do.

• 34:19Speaker 08

  The turnstile thing really stresses me out. And I did not expect this, but if I'm watching it in portrait, I'm like, oh, I wonder what I would see if I turned it in landscape. I'm missing something. So then I turn it to landscape and I'm like, but maybe this would be better in portrait. I wanted to see it in portrait. And so like, I always feel like I'm like not getting the right thing all the time because there's two possible options and maybe I've picked the worst one. I don't know. So I always feel like there's a better version of it that I'm just not seeing.

• 34:50Speaker 06

  Have you tried watching it with two phones at one time?

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  Double Quibi.

• 34:55Speaker 08

  I could watch it twice, but there's only so many times I need to see, you know, the reboot of Punked. So.

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  If you haven't 2X Quibbed, I don't know what you're doing.

• 35:05Speaker 09

  Dieter, I feel the same way though. Like Dieter, I've gone back and rewatched something twice just because I'm concerned I've missed something or it's better a certain way. And that's just is.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  Watch it in landscape. That's not. Here's the, here's what I would say. If I had to, like very narrowly pick two criticisms of Quibi at launch. There are more, but if I did narrowly in, in like their strategy, I would say, one, they do not have the one thing everybody should watch.

• 35:35Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? They, they, they just couldn't pick one. They have a lot of things, like just an overwhelming array of things. Oh, I need to disclose, uh, Polygon has a show called Speedrun, which, uh, if you have Quibi on your phone, you should go watch it. There have been some talks about us doing a show. Maybe it'll work out. I don't know. There's your disclosure, but they have a lot of things. None of them are the thing, the way the Mandalorian was the thing. And I know Katzmerga is like, whatever. It's a big hit show. They got all this. You can still just pick one, right? When Netflix was gonna do original content, they just literally like, House of Cards, it's the thing. Everybody go watch the show. They don't have that. So that's like, I, I would issue that criticism of their launch strategy. The second one is, they spent all of this time talking about their technology and what they could do in

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  storytelling on a phone. And literally, none of the launch things take advantage of that stuff. Like 0% of them, as far as I can tell. Like, yes, you can turn it, you can watch it, but I watch everything in landscape, because it is obviously, that is the primary edit of the thing. You think so? In every single thing that I've watched so far. It's obvious that the landscape edit is the first edit. And the portrait is like, it's a long for the ride. It's not, you're looking at, what, Julia, it's like a horror movie, right? Where you like, in landscape, you're watching the, the character and in portrait, you're like watching your screen or something?

• 36:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, they like change the way you, but you're still viewing the same type of content. It's just a different POV.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 09

  Exciting.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  That was like the big promise, right? Of like, you're, you could watch the murderer or you could watch the, the, the person who's gonna get murdered. Quibi, by the way, also obsessed with death. Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 09

  So much. I keep asking them about this and they keep telling me I'm, I'm obsessed with their, like my own obsession with her obsession with that. And I'm like, no.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, so we'll get to that in a second. But the promise was, you could, you, in portrait, you'd watch the murderer and in landscape, you would watch the murdery. That's a, that's a word. And none of their shows right now do that thing. So like, if you add those together, they should have had the one big show that fully took advantage of the technology, right? The Steven Spielberg show that only plays after midnight, wherever you are. That was the promise. They don't have that yet. And I think that's like, they seem to be doing fine, Julia, right? And they have like a bunch of downloads?

• 37:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the third-party apps, so Quibi hasn't announced anything officially. When Disney Plus launched, they came out 24 hours later and said, we hit 10 million, because that's a great number. Quibi did not hit 10 million. They didn't even hit 1 million. So they, so third-party apps came out, like App Annie and Sensor Tower, and they said, estimating about 300,000, which is not terrible for an app that, one, is supposed to be used on the go and no one can go anywhere.

• 38:16Speaker 09

  That doesn't have a strong presence outside of, I would say, like, either very young circles, because their advertisements are like super tied into TikTok and Instagram, or you're in media, which is where the Quibi story, I think, really, truly lies for a lot of people that I know. So 300,000 is not terrible for what Quibi, for what I think Quibi was going to hit. I mean, it's also not a million, and I don't know what internally they wanted to hit day one. But as you said, there's nothing in there that's really, the funny thing about Katzenberg that I think about a lot is that he always says, content is a kingmaker, but platform is king. And it's like, but you didn't get the content right, and you also didn't get the actual usage of the phone

• 38:59Speaker 09

  right. So nothing that you have is king or kingmaker. So I don't know what the business plan is at this point to get to those points.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  In Liz's profile, Whitman, again, just go read it, because it's good. But like, imagine you're the CEO of a new platform. I'm sure many Veritas listeners could imagine themselves as such a thing. I would say pull over in your car, but like, you're at home. So like, just go, I don't know, stand in the bathroom or something. But like, imagine you're the CEO of a platform, and you're like, I gotta launch this platform. And all of your plans, your entire team, your whole company, is like, we're gonna launch with a big fancy party full of celebrities, and then a blitz of ads, expensive ads during March Madness, and the master, and all this

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  And all of it is gone. And Whitman's was Whitman's quote to Liz was like, we're taking those budgets and we're putting them on like Twitch and YouTube. And that's why you just see like, if you're like, the number of Quibi ads on Instagram are like out of control, right? And it's like, yep, because they took their like, broadcast sports ad budget and just fire hosed it at social platforms, which is wild. Like, I don't think it's ever been done before. That level of move. And like, maybe it worked to get to the 300,000. I think the big question is, can it will sustain at that level? Or is it gonna drop? Because it usually drops. And what's it gonna plateau at? And is that gonna be enough to sustain them?

• 40:24Speaker 09

  I mean, that's absolutely the biggest question. And unless they have a show that's gonna bring people in, one that they think unless they have a Game of Thrones or Mandalorian that people are like, okay, I'm gonna sign up for and I'll watch this week weekend or weekend or whatever. People aren't just aren't gonna come to it. And especially after 90 days, they're not gonna sign they're not gonna pay $5 for something for content that they can get elsewhere, really, in terms of quality. But the other thing that could be really missed out on is like, Quibi thinks that it's the reason people will sign up for it are the kind of top high production movies and chapters, big, big actors and TV shows. And it's not people are gonna sign up to watch food explode in people's faces, or watch take on stunt drivers. Like, it's the really funny mid tier reality shows that

• 41:09Speaker 09

  could be like, the basically the 30 Rock fake shows that could be is actually produced. Those are, those are like, the shows that could be will find its audience with. And the there's no way to share any of that. There's absolutely no way to talk about Quibi and the ridiculousness of it in like, a screenshot or anything, because Quibi has disabled any form of sharing, which is absurd.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, actually, could you could you dig into that a little bit more? Yeah, like, because because with Netflix, like, the people I watch on TV, but everybody else seems to watch on the laptop because they're able to put out screenshots, like, really fast with like captions on the bottom. And I can I'm always like, how do they do that? Oh, because they're not watching on TV. But you can't watch Quibi on TV at all. You just watch it on your phone. So what's the problem?

• 41:52Speaker 09

  The greatest series of, so I have like a Slack group and it's people who review stuff. It's a bunch of critics. There are a lot of people who are doing Quibi. And the number one conversation in the Slack was how to get it to like airplay on your TV. Like every single person was trying to find a way to figure out a way to do it. And then I thought, that's what critics do. And then when I was on Twitter, just looking at, I have a bar open for Quibi conversation on TweetDeck. It was just, it was just like Ariana Grande stands being like, I want to watch this on my TV. Is there any way to Chromecast it? And I was like, oh, that's a surprising thing. But yeah, so I know like when I watch Netflix, my thought process is like, I'm watching this and also I want to get some cool social media points. So I'm going to wait for a good screenshot opportunity and then I'm going to screenshot

• 42:37Speaker 09

  something and tweet it out. And that's how Tiger King became what it was. Like Tiger King was just people screenshotting and being like LOL quarantine mood. And that becoming like a viral thing. Same thing with Mandalorian, like people screenshotted and tweeted about Baby Yoda like 2 million times or something in like 2 weeks. It became a viral sensation. And with Quibi, because it's disabled on mobile, which is true for a lot of other streamers, like you also can't screenshot on mobile. Without the desktop component, there's absolutely no way to share any aspect of the shows. You're reliant on Quibi's own social media presence or the Instagram accounts of people in Quibi shows. Like if they upload something, I've seen a lot of people screen record and then tweet those out. And it's like, that is counterintuitive to what your whole thing is.

• 43:21Speaker 09

  If you're designing for mobile and what people do on mobile outside of viewing content is like sharing with people and you can't share, that's the most unfriendly mobile experience I can think of.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, it's wild to me that Netflix seems like fairly enlightened about this, right? Like they know that screenshots are driving, like your story has a chart of Tiger King views over time and it just explodes, right? Like that's the day it went viral and that there it is. Like it seems like Netflix, you would not expect Disney to know it, but it seems like Disney knows it too, that like. We need people to take this stuff, remix it and share it in the ways that they want. That's going to drive a bunch of awareness and be the, the sort of like user marketing campaign that, that makes everything successful now, right? You need to feed the fandom, basically. Quibi is like, it's weird that they don't know that. It's also weird that they didn't, there's like a million product things you could do to even just make that easier for people, or like precede them with clips or screenshots.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  And they, they don't seem to know that they need to do that work either, as far as I can tell.

• 44:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, it was funny. One of the main questions I had before going in, I was just talking to people at Quibi, and I said, can you screen record? And they were like, no, we're disabling it. Like, why is that even a question? And I was like, well, because people watch content to share content. They don't just watch it to watch it. It's become an interactive experience. Like, if I'm, I want to get something out of this, and for me, that's like social clout points for making a really good meme, on top of entertainment. And so, I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about screenshots, and this is something that people have been asking for, for years. Like Netflix years ago was like, we know people are making gifs out of our shows, we know that they're screenshotting and turning them into memes. And by 2018, Ted Strandos, who's their chief content officer, was like, our whole goal is to just meme our shows and movies before they come out.

• 45:05Speaker 09

  And that way, people are, have bought into the meme, and they're going to come check it out because it's a meme. So they did that with everything, and his argument was, which I think is the issue with Quibi's thinking, his argument was, we don't have Disney IP, we don't have Warner IP, and we don't have NBC IP. So we don't have anything that people automatically recognize and are, and are just going to come watch. So we have to create a brand out of thin air, and the only way to do that is social media viral hype. And what Katzenberg seems to think is that if the content is good, people will show up. But the landscape is so oversaturated, everything good is being squished or squashed underneath things that are just viral. Like, you can't, it can't just be good, you have to be shareable. That's, that's the whole way to get people to watch your thing in 2020.

• 45:50Speaker 06

  What about Prince of Egypt 2?

• 45:54Speaker 09

  What?

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  What about Prince of Egypt 2?

• 46:00Speaker 06

  Throwing out ideas.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  Are you just like pitching Jeffrey Katzenberg right now? Like, is it off chance he's listening?

• 46:06Speaker 06

  Prince of Egypt was DreamWorks' big breakout, right?

• 46:09Speaker 09

  I mean, well, yeah, and then Shrek.

• 46:10Speaker 08

  It was a DreamWorks movie, that's true.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  Oh, Shrek was DreamWorks, too. Who owns Shrek right now?

• 46:16Speaker 09

  I think it's still DreamWorks, so that would go...

• 46:19Speaker 06

  Hope it's Comcast so bad.

• 46:22Speaker 09

  I actually do think it's Comcast. I think it's NBC Universal.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  Julia is correct, DreamWorks is out, Shrek is owned by NBC Universal.

• 46:30Speaker 06

  Do the disclosure.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  I've arrived at this place.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  I must disclose that the Virgin's parent company, Vox Media, NBC Universal's minority investor. There it is, because we talked about Shrek.

• 46:51Nilay Patel?

  It's always the nightmare. So, at the same time this is happening, Julia, Disney Plus hit a big milestone, yeah?

• 46:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, Disney Plus announced, yes, Disney Plus announced, Disney announced yesterday that Disney Plus hit, surpassed 50 million paid subscribers with like a big asterix on it. So like 8 million of those subscribers rolled in from Hotstar in India. A few other subscribers, a few other million subscribers, for some reason, there was like an issue with them, the way that they were counting, because they were like on the precipice of just signing up, so there's like a weird way that they counted it. But yeah, the point being that Disney is telling investors that its Disney Plus streaming service is continuing to grow. A few important parts of that number. One, when Disney first announced Disney Plus, they thought by 2024, they would hit 60 million subscribers.

• 47:41Speaker 09

  It is now six months since Disney Plus launched, and they've hit 50 million subscribers.

• 47:46Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 47:46Speaker 09

  So they are on, they're doing way better than what they thought they were gonna do. However, the common rule of business is you don't announce a number unless you're pretty sure you're gonna hit it, or at least be around the same point that where you are like a year from now. So I think they lowballed that anyways, but it's impressive. 50 million in six months in about 10 countries, I think, approximately, is an impressive number.

• 48:07Speaker 08

  I mean, hitting 50 million in six months, it sounds like they should put the guy in charge of Disney Plus and charge of the whole company, just make him the CEO.

• 48:16Speaker 09

  Oh my god.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  Julia, put that number in context. How big is Netflix?

• 48:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, so Netflix is 167 million subscribers worldwide. For now, it's probably gone past that because it's, we're in a global lockdown and people are watching a lot of Netflix. Those numbers were released the last quarter and Netflix is about to roll into its earnings season, being very, very pleased with what's going on, and I'm sure they have more. But the other thing, which is what ties into Disney, is that Disney, when Disney Plus came out, both Kevin Mayer, who runs Disney's streaming group, and former CEO Bob Iger, said they're not really good to announce numbers outside of earnings calls because otherwise it detracts, otherwise that's all people focus on. The reason that they announced it now is not just because it's 50 million, it's because every other part of Disney's company has taken a massive hit and they're trying to get, they're trying to make investors

• 49:08Speaker 09

  feel okay as they head into their own earnings season, which is going to be terrible. Like, their forward-looking statement is going to be like, "Every part of our company, with the exception of streaming, has hit a monumental loss."

• 49:19Nilay Patel?

  Right, because they operate theme parks and cruise ships and a sports network and film productions, all which are on pause as well.

• 49:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, everything is on pause. So you're seeing Disney make these kind of hail mary plays to get investors to feel okay. They're like releasing random shorts to kind of be like, "We still have content that people like." Bob Iger is doing interviews with Barron's, and not, not their CEO, notably. He's going out and being like, "No, things are fine. We know things are going to be okay." And they're talking about reopening the parks as soon as possible and taking temperature checks. But the point being is they're saying, "Listen, our streaming is doing fine. It's growing. We're really happy with it." And I think you're going to see them move a few more movies over to Disney Plus to keep people there, to keep people signing up, keep people subscribed.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's a big question. I mean, it's a question for Quibi. It's the ongoing question for Disney Plus is... What's gonna make you come back and open this app, right? With Netflix, it's like, okay, Tiger King definitely made me open the app. Like, I just saw enough pictures of Joe Exotic to be like, I need, I just need to know what's going on here, right? Disney, after Mandalorian, has not had the big breakout hit. I will say that I open Disney Plus every day to watch Toy Story 3 with Max, but I'm also like, I could just buy this movie and cancel my Disney Plus subscription, and it would be, it would, it would be effectively the same experience. There's not, I'm never like, looking for new stuff in that app. Are they gonna ramp that library up soon?

• 50:44Speaker 09

  The idea was they were gonna do that, but then all of their big shows that were gonna start hitting in August, August and September, uh, they, they got hit with production delays. They got, they're, they don't know what they're doing. Mandalorian, season two, is supposed to be October, and it looks like they might, they'll probably be able to get that done, because filming's done, post-production seems like they can do it remotely. But like, all the Marvel shows were still, they were still figuring, finishing things up. So we don't know if like Falcon and Winter Soldier and Wandavision, which are their two big ones coming up, will hit on time. I mean, that's the thing, like Netflix is at this point where Netflix, because they film all their, they drop full seasons, so everything is filmed by the time that they do trailers, announce things. Netflix has enough content for the next three months, roughly, and then, then they have to start figuring things out.

• 51:28Speaker 09

  But Netflix is out here dropping new things every single week, and that gives them a huge advantage, because while everyone is struggling, like while Quibi is producing their daily shows, but everything else is kind of taking a step back. Disney's in the same boat, where they are trying to figure it out, but they don't really have any new content. Netflix is the only provider that has new stuff. That said, there are two major streaming services launching in two months. We've got Peacock, which launches for some Comcast subscribers this week, or next week, sorry. Uh, and then we have HBO Max next month.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. You're just gonna be on, you're just gonna be on the show every week. That's, that's what's happening here.

• 52:04Speaker 09

  But HBO Max will do well, because it's, it's got family programming, and it's got HBO, and I think people will wanna watch Friends if they're still quarantined. Uh, and so they'll just buy HBO Max.

• 52:15Nilay Patel?

  Just give in.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Netflix brought back Community, which is a genius move. It's like, what am I watching the most in Netflix's community right now? Okay, so what's, that stuff is upcoming. What's the next thing? Well, I mean, just, let me just ask you straight out. Quibi's free for 90 days, right? People should just check it out?

• 52:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, the mid-tier shows are like not terrible. Like, the reality shows are, they're cute. And if it was free forever, I'd be like, this is an app I could probably use. Like, I've used this, I've said this, and Kevin, our features editor, Kevin and I debated about whether or not we should put this in the story. Because I was like, Kevin, Quibi is like a bathroom companion app. Like, it's, it's the best bathroom companion app in the world. And Kevin was like, oh my God, please stop being you for a minute. But like, it's, it's a free app that like has cute entertainment for seven minutes. For now, it's like, if you sign up now, you get 90 days free. And that's fun to use. The minute that they want to charge you $5 with ads, or $8 without ads, it's like,

• 53:19Speaker 09

  you can just use TikTok. And it's more entertaining, and it's free, and it's like, you don't have to pay attention to it.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Didn't I read that if you, if you sign up and accidentally like choose the ad option for your free trial, that you're just stuck with ads for the free trial?

• 53:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, I've seen some people say that. I meant to, yeah, I meant to actually talk about that. Because I was like, that seems, for a free experience, you don't want to give people ads for a limited time if you're trying to sell them on your app. Yeah, I saw that, too.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  The other thing that was interesting to me is that they, after all that conversation we had last week about Amazon and Apple and in-app purchases and Apple's, like, they're just giving Apple the cut. Like, there's no way to pay for Quibi except in-app purchases. Like, they just do not want you to overthink it. They're like, push this one button, like, Apple can take the money, we just need a recurring subscription, go. Which is certainly interesting.

• 54:07Speaker 08

  If you, if you do sign up with Apple subscriptions, you can just sign up and then immediately cancel, and then it'll get canceled at the end of the three months, but still work until then. So you don't have to set a calendar reminder to cancel later.

• 54:18Speaker 09

  Oh.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that is actually one of the best parts of Apple's subscriptions, for sure. All right, well, we'll see what happens with Quibi. At the end of the day, Julia thinks about Quibi more than almost anyone in the world. So, it's like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Matt Weisman, and Julia, like, top three Quibi thinkers. Julia, thank you so much. We'll see you again from Peacock and HBO Max.

• 54:48Speaker 01

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• 55:17Speaker 02

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• 55:18Speaker 05

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• 55:35Speaker 04

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• 55:42Speaker 02

  Hi, I uh.

• 55:43Speaker 05

  Let's get you a basket.

• 55:48Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 55:49Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Every week in these troubled times, you provide a ray of stability. A ray of stability? A stability ray.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Hold it, hold it together. What's it called?

• 56:03Speaker 06

  I do a segment every week and it's called Pop the Stack. And that's capital P, lowercase o, capital P. And that stands for package on package.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 56:16Speaker 06

  So I got, when I was looking into this Lakefield conspiracy, I got really into reading about Lakefield. And I just missed this news, but Intel announced this in 2019. It's still not out. It's obviously delayed. There was like a leak in March of like a benchmark, which is always like, sometimes I feel like these companies do that on purpose. That's like a little tease, like this is coming soon. But this is a really cool chip because it's got one ice lake core, like the sunny cave, sunny cove core that ice lake uses. And then four small. Tremont cores and those are basically like, like the Atom processor type.

• 57:01Speaker 06

  And so like the Athena Chromebooks that just came out are like 15 watt, the ultra portable type of processors, but these are like five watt, seven watt chips that are like supposed to be truly competitive with mobile. And we don't have them, but oh yeah, that pop the stack. This is like, this is a 3D architecture. So the, the cool thing is how we're not going to lose in Moore's law is Moore's law is about the number of transistors in an area, right? But doesn't have any rules against stacking. So you stack chips on top of each other and they get the substrate that that's what it's package on package.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  You've got 10 nanometer chip on top of like a 22 nanometer substrate. It's so cool. 3D chip design and it's got like RAM built in. So exciting and I just wish we had it.

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 57:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  I promise you.

• 57:59Speaker 06

  Pop the stack.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  Stacks are popping. All right. A little bit of gaming stuff, some Google stuff. We gotta talk about this PS5 controller.

• 58:07Speaker 08

  I love it. I love it so much. It is prettiest controller. I don't care what anybody says. It's two tone, white and black. There's a little blue highlight lighter on the ring that you barely see around the little touchpad thing. Looks like a stormtrooper. It looks like a.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  It looks like an Xbox controller.

• 58:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, that's because like you actually like, it turns out that like hands have a certain shape and like Sony finally admitted it. That's the other reason I love it.

• 58:34Speaker 06

  This is why I don't like it. It looks like they had a shape and then they slowly morphed it to be more like hands. You know what I mean? And so it doesn't feel as designed like, full disclosure, I can't really play games at all on a DualShock. I'm horrible at it. I've like been more of an Xbox person, but I've always admired the design because it's so artificial. And this just, you know, this just looks like a controller that is designed to hold in hand.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  I think it looks like a, I don't remember who on our team said this, but it looks like. BMW i8.

• 59:06Speaker 08

  Yep, for sure.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it looks like everything. The just if you just Twitter search for like PS5 controller, it looks like just the number of things people. It looks like Eve from Wally. It's great. I'm like very, it's, it's a, Heim wrote an entire piece about how it's like Sony's most exciting design in forever. We'll see. I'm excited about the, this console generation. It feels like they're proceeding in like the right. Both of them are proceeding in like the right way. Like they're focused on the right things, which is like playing video games and making playing video games fun.

• 59:37Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  As opposed to like, uh, controlling your cable box over IR.

• 59:41Speaker 08

  I love that Sony's refusing to show us what the box looks like. Like people are real mad. Just show us the box. Like, no, actually don't. Just like up until literally like people go out and buy it and unbox it. And that's when they get to see what it looks like. Everyone's, everyone's PS5 looks a little bit different.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  It's just a pile of chips in a shoebox.

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember that year at CES when Sony announced like their first 4K streaming player? It was like way, way before anything, like anything was available.

• 1:00:12Speaker 08

  No.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  It was like, like five years ago. It was like Sony's very first, they announced their very first 4K TV. And then they announced their like 4K player.

• 1:00:22Speaker 08

  The play, it was like, it was like a subwoofer size type of thing.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  It was a circle. Like it was like a circle that you were supposed to put in your house. And at CES, it didn't work yet. So the circle was just an empty circle with a light in it. And the actual 4K player was a tower PC that was like shoved under the booth.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  And their whole idea was like, you would buy this circle and overnight it would download the movies for you because they were so big.

• 1:00:49Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  And then you, when you bought them, all you really buying was an unlock. I don't really know where I'm going with this, except to say, I really hope the PS5 is a circle. Because I wanted that dumb circle so bad that it was never real.

• 1:01:02Speaker 06

  On the controller, because this is the most we know about any, any PlayStation 5 hardware. USB C, it's kept the touchpad, which is a bold move. Very, I'm very intrigued, but I always hope that developers will do something really cool with novel input schemes. And they do it twice ever and it's fun those times. And the built in mic is really exciting to me. I think that's going to be really useful for like more casual conversations and stuff.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  Headphone jack.

• 1:01:35Speaker 06

  It's got a headphone jack.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  There's a headphone jack, which is, you know, if you want, you know, lag free audio, what do you do? You use a headphone jack.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  And then it's got these like adaptive triggers. It's got new, they're calling it dual sense because it's redesigned haptic. So it should be real subtle and it should feel like you're driving through mud when you drive through mud somehow.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  That's exciting. Dieter, you want to yell about the Xbox game bar?

• 1:02:00Speaker 08

  I actually don't want to yell. I actually want to give Microsoft a little bit of credit for building something that maybe potentially could make them relevant in desktop gaming.

• 1:02:10Speaker 08

  They make Windows, they are super relevant. It's this overlay and then they've, they've basically like opened up, opened it up for other people to integrate into their overlay. So instead of having to like have overlays from other games, there's just like now like a standard bar on Windows that like has the chance to be like the default thing that you use to like have an overlay to like do other stuff outside of the game. That's really smart. It's really overdue, I think. Of course they're going to use it to push like Xbox stuff and so maybe it will completely fail. But it's a, it's a, it's a smart idea and I'm glad they're finally doing it.

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  There's a few, two ways I can see this going. Right now, like if I launch a game on Windows, there's like three random overlays. Like Nvidia gets at me, Steam, Discord, they're all happy to be an overlay and they really want to be my overlay. And I hate that. If they all used Microsoft's API.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  And then Microsoft let me manage overlays better. That would be cool, but I just think this is going to be like the fourth overlay. And they're all pop over at once and it'll be annoying.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  That's great. And Yahoo's gonna have one.

• 1:03:22Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be amazing. Pixel 4A, Dieter?

• 1:03:25Speaker 08

  Uh, so the retail box leaked. And we also, uh, nine to five, uh, Google got like pretty solid specs on it. Looks like there's only going to be one version of it. The screen is gonna be five point eight inches. There it is. And, you know, specs are gonna be the specs. Looks like a, a Snap 730. It'll be, you know, it'll be the same thing as last year, basically. It'll have a headphone jack. The bezels are gonna be a little bit smaller this year. But again, like, unless Google does something shockingly good with the Pixel 5, the Pixel 4A is like the thing to get. And like the Pixel 5A is gonna be the thing to get. Like, they really need to impress us with the 5 because like, this 4A looks like it's gonna be just as, the only difference between it and the 4

• 1:04:09Speaker 08

  that matters to like most people, their day to day experiences, whether or not you want face unlock.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  Can I share some personal news about Pixel? The top glass of the back of the, my Pixel 3 has broken and it's really sad.

• 1:04:23Speaker 08

  Well, Pixel 4A, all plastic, uh, no wireless charging probably, but it does have a headphone jack.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  Is it unapologetically plastic?

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  And then there's just a bunch of Google messaging links here that, quite frankly, as I stare at them, I, I just, waves of exhaustion are.

• 1:04:41Speaker 08

  Like everybody, Google is putting out a bunch of PR about their video conferencing stuff during the pandemic. And in one of their like notes, they just happened to call it, uh, Google Meet. And everyone's like, what the hell is Google Meet? Do you mean Hangouts Meet? And they're like, yeah, that's, that's what we meant. So, uh, Hangouts Meet, which if you remember is the video version of Hangouts, not Duo, but it's the video conferencing there is now called Google Meet. And we're like, well, what about Hangouts Chat, which is their Slack competitor? That, it turns out, we're gonna have a story, is gonna be called Google Chat, which means officially, for the first time in history, there will be a real product called Google Chat. Not Google Talk, Google Talk, by the way, which is what everybody calls G Chat,

• 1:05:26Speaker 08

  is still around in the form of Hangouts, which is still around for consumers. Google's last communication about that was that it would be end of life in 20, in June of 2020. We don't know yet. By the time you read this, we might have an answer.

• 1:05:38Speaker 06

  If I go, if I go to hangouts.google.com, I'm still using Hangout, right? Okay, I have to do something special and intriguing to discover meat.

• 1:05:51Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  The thing about meat, uh, which is hilarious, I've been on a large meat call, but it doesn't tile the video by default. It just puts everybody in a stack on the right and then whoever's talking, it's the big window. There are literally Chrome extensions to just solve this problem. Like just reorganize this window. So it's a, it looks like Zoom or whatever. Like the most obvious thing they need to do, they haven't done it. But I love, I love, there's an ecosystem of third-party Chrome extensions to do it.

• 1:06:24Speaker 08

  Quote, "There will be no changes to the consumer parentheses, classic unparentheses, version of Hangouts."

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  No, but that's the one they need to change. Like is the next one like parentheses, we know, dot, dot, dot.

• 1:06:37Speaker 06

  I've been on so many more Hangouts and it's just, it's so bad. Like you unplug your headphones and then it lowers the volume of everything, but you can't raise the volume back. Like friends who like just can't get it to work on their computer, probably because they're trying it in Safari. But I use it in Safari and it works. It's just like, it's a nightmare and it's an important infrastructure. Oh, well.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  You gotta switch them all, man. It's, this is your time to break the network effect.

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  That's right. We're switching to Matrix.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We've gone a little long. That was good. It was like, see, there's all kinds of stuff going on in this world. Dieter's just looking at me.

• 1:07:14Speaker 08

  No, I just, I just turned on G chat again and Gmail for the first time in like a year. And just like, I'm just looking at it just fondly.

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, no one's going to talk to Dieter again for some time.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  Google Hangouts doesn't integrate with Google Calendar and if I can invite a Google Calendar, it doesn't even show up in Hangouts.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast, everybody.

• 1:07:35Speaker 08

  Thanks so much for listening.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Thanks to Monica Chen, Julia, as always, wonderful. We'll be back on Tuesday. I can't say who it is. I still, I'm, I'm holding out hope for a particular name. I'm excited. Tuesday, we'll have an interview show. We'll be back on Friday. We're not going anywhere, so we're just going to keep making podcasts. Let us know if you like them.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Apologies if you heard the thumping of my daughter running above me today. But it seems to be going well. Let us know about that calibration between virus coverage and tech coverage. It's on my mind. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at FuturePaul. Dieter is at Backlon. We'll see you soon. Rock and roll.

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Paul.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

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